The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Oxford 61639

  76 Sandfield Road

  Headington

  Oxford

  11 September, 1967.

  Dear Mr. White,

  I can give you a brief account of the name Inklings: from memory. The Inklings had no recorder and C. S. Lewis no Boswell. The name was not invented by C.S.L. (nor by me). In origin it was an undergraduate jest, devised as the name of a literary (or writers’) club. The founder was an undergraduate at University College, named Tangye-Lean,—the date I do not remember: probably mid-thirties. He was, I think, more aware than most undergraduates of the impermanence of their clubs and fashions, and had an ambition to found a club that would prove more lasting. Anyway, he asked some ‘dons’ to become members. C.S.L. was an obvious choice, and he was probably at that time Tangye-Lean’s tutor (C.S.L. was a member of University College). In the event both C.S.L. and I became members. The club met in T.-L.’s rooms in University College; its procedure was that at each meeting members should read aloud, unpublished compositions. These were supposed to be open to immediate criticism. Also if the club thought fit a contribution might be voted to be worthy of entry in a Record Book. (I was the scribe and keeper of the book).

  Tangye-Lean proved quite right. The club soon died: the Record Book had very few entries: but C.S.L. and I at least survived. Its name was then transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at that time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.

  I called the name a ‘jest’, because it was a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink. It might have been suggested by C.S.L. to Tangye-Lean (if he was the latter’s tutor); but I never heard him claim to have invented this name. Inkling is, at any rate in this country, in very common use in the sense that you quote from C.S.L.’s writings. (I remember that when I was an undergraduate there was, briefly, an undergraduate club called the Discus, suggesting a round-table conference, and discuss: it was a discussion club.)

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  J. R. R. Tolkien.

  299 To Roger Lancelyn Green

  [Green, an old friend, had reviewed Smith of Wootton Major, which was published in October 1967. He wrote: ‘To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.’]

  12 December 1967

  76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

  My dear Roger,

  Best wishes to you and all your family. Thank you for your most gracious review (esp. for comment on the search for source of bounce!). Though I have been much better treated than I expected. But the little tale was (of course) not intended for children! An old man’s book, already weighted with the presage of ‘bereavement’. (I am sorry that I cannot remember your address. I have rung up Merton.) But Merton comes in. Our present admirable little chef (with a v. tall hat) is, at least pictorially, the original of Alf.

  All graces and cheer at Christmas

  Ronald Tolkien.

  300 From a letter to Walter Hooper

  20 February 1968

  [With reference to C. S. Lewis’s verse ‘We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I / In a Berkshire bar. . . .’ This short poem, first printed in Lewis’s Rehabilitations (1939), p. 122, tells how a workman in the bar claimed to have seen dragons himself.]

  The lines which Jack1 gives as examples are not unfortunately entirely accurate examples of Old English metrical devices. The occasion is entirely fictitious. I have never seen a dragon, nor ever seen a man who said that he has. I don’t wish to see either. A remote source of Jack’s lines may be this: I remember Jack telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar,2 who used to sit quietly in Common Room saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman’s voice was heard to say, ‘I have seen a dragon.’ Silence. ‘Where was that?’ he was asked. ‘On the Mount of Olives,’ he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.

  301 From a letter to Donald Swann

  29 February 1968

  [The BBC made a documentary programme, Tolkien in Oxford, which was filmed in early February and televised on 30 March 1968. Swann, whose musical setting of some of Tolkien’s poems, The Road Goes Ever On, had been published the previous year, had written to Tolkien about the television programme.]

  Thank you for trying to cheer me up. But I am not cheered. You are too optimistic. In any case your kind of performance is quite different from mine – as a writer. I am merely impressed by the complete ‘bogosity’ of the whole performance. The producer, a very nice, very young man and personally equipped with some intelligence and insight, was nonetheless already so muddled and confused by BBCism that the last thing in the world he wished to show was me as I am/or was, let alone ‘human or lifesize’. I was lost in a world of gimmickry and nonsense, as far as it had any design designed it seemed simply to fix the image of a fuddy not to say duddy old fireside hobbitlike boozer. Protests were in vain, so I gave it up, & being tied to the stake stayed the course as best I could. I am told that the picture results were v.g. – at which my blood runs cold: it means they’ve got what they wanted, and that my histrionic temperament (I used to like ‘acting’) betrayed me into playing ball (the ball desired) to my own undoing. I was not lifted up in a helicopter, though I am surprised one was not substituted for an eagle: they appeared completely confused between ME and my story, and I was made to attend a firework show: a thing I have not done since I was a boy. Fireworks have no special relation to me. They appear in the books (and would have done even if I disliked them) because they are part of the representation of Gandalf, bearer of the Ring of Fire, the Kindler: the most childlike aspect shown to the Hobbits being fireworks.

  302 From a letter to Time-Life International Ltd.

  2 May 1968

  Your ideas of the natural and mine are different, since I never in any circumstances do work while being photographed, or talked to, or accompanied by anybody in the room. A photograph of me pretending to be at work would be entirely bogus.

  303 From a letter to Nicholas Thomas

  6 May 1968

  As for knowing Sarehole Mill,1 it dominated my childhood. I lived in a small cottage almost immediately beside it, and the old miller of my day and his son were characters of wonder and terror to a small child.

  304 From a letter to Clyde S. Kilby

  4 June 1968

  My domestic situation came at the end of April and the beginning of May to a point at which something had to be done quickly. I am now leaving Oxford and going to live on the south coast. As things are at present arranged I shall be removing at the end, or very soon after the end, of this month. For my own protection I shall remove my address from all books of reference or other lists. By arrangement with them, my address will be c/o Messrs. Allen & Unwin, and they will not inform enquirers of my actual address. When this is finally settled, I will let a few persons know – those who I can trust not to publish it abroad.

  305 From a letter to Rayner Unwin

  26 June 1968

  [On 17 June, while preparing to move house, Tolkien fell downstairs and injured his leg. This letter was written from hospital in Oxford.]

  I am beginning to come to my senses. I believe I am making a fairly good and quick physical recovery and may hope to be about on crutches about July 8th, but not sooner. My fall has, all the same, proved disastrous for my work and arrangements at this time, and even wit
h good luck I cannot hope to emerge from chaos now till the end of August at the earliest.

  306 From a letter to Michael Tolkien

  [At the top, Tolkien has written: ‘Found among my scattered papers. Not sent or finished for reasons now forgotten. JRRT. 11/Oct/68.’ But the letter was eventually sent to Michael Tolkien. It was begun at 76 Sandfield Road (Tolkien noted) ‘sometime after Aug. 25, 1967’ and was finished at 19 Lakeside Road, the new house, whose postal address was Poole, Dorset, but which was in effect in a suburb of Bournemouth.]

  I am. . . . delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me. The hobbit’s (Bilbo’s) journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911fn120: the annus mirabilis of sunshine in which there was virtually no rain between April and the end of October, except on the eve and morning of George V’s coronation. (Adfuit Omen!)fn121 1

  Our wanderings mainly on foot in a party of 12 are not now clear in sequence, but leave many vivid pictures as clear as yesterday (that is as clear as an old man’s remoter memories become). We went on foot carrying great packs practically all the way from Interlaken, mainly by mountain paths, to Lauterbrunnen and so to Mürren and eventually to the head of the Lauterbrunnenthal in a wilderness of morains. We slept rough – the men-folk – often in hayloft or cowbyre, since we were walking by map and avoided roads and never booked, and after a meagre breakfast fed ourselves in the open: cooking utensils and quantities of ‘spridvin’ (as the one uneducated French-speaking member of the party both called and wrote it, for ‘methylated spirit’). We must then have gone eastward over the two Scheidegge to Grindelwald, with Eiger and Mönch on our right, and eventually reached Meiringen. I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams. We later crossed the Grimsell Pass down on to the dusty highway, beside the Rhône, on which horse ‘diligences’ still plied: but not for us. We reached Brig on foot, a mere memory of noise: then a network of trams that screeched on their rails for it seemed at least 20 hrs of the day. After a night of that we climbed up some thousands of feet to a village at the foot of the Aletsch glacier, and there spent some nights in a chalet inn under a roof and in beds (or rather under them: the bett being a shapeless bag under which you snuggled). I can remember several incidents there! One was going to confession in Latin; others less exemplary were the invention of a method of dealing with your friends the harvestmen spiders, by dropping hot wax from a candle onto their fat bodies (this was not approved of by the servants); also the practice of the beaver-game which had always fascinated me. A wonderful place for the game, plenty of water at that altitude coming down in rills, abundant damming material in loose stones, heather, grass and mud. We soon had a beautiful little ‘pond’ (containing I guess at least 200 gallons). Then the pangs of hunger smote us, and one of the hobbits of the party (he is still alive) shouted ‘lunch’ and wrecked the dam with his alpenstock. The water soared down the hill-side, and we then observed that we had dammed a rill that ran down to feed the tanks and butts behind the inn. At that moment an old dame trotted out with a bucket to fetch some water, and was greeted by a mass of foaming water. She dropped the bucket and fled calling on the saints. We lay more doggo than ‘men of the moss-hags’ for some time, and eventually wound our way round to present ourselves grubby (but we were usually so on that trip) and sweetly innocent at ‘lunch’. One day we went on a long march with guides up the Aletsch glacier – when I came near to perishing. We had guides, but either the effects of the hot summer were beyond their experience, or they did not much care, or we were late in starting. Any way at noon we were strung out in file along a narrow track with a snow-slope on the right going up to the horizon, and on the left a plunge down into a ravine. The summer of that year had melted away much snow, and stones and boulders were exposed that (I suppose) were normally covered. The heat of the day continued the melting and we were alarmed to see many of them starting to roll down the slope at gathering speed: anything from the size of oranges to large footballs, and a few much larger. They were whizzing across our path and plunging into the ravine. ‘Hard pounding,’ ladies and gentlemen. They started slowly, and then usually held a straight line of descent, but the path was rough and one had also to keep an eye on one’s feet. I remember the member of the party just in front of me (an elderly schoolmistress) gave a sudden squeak and jumped forward as a large lump of rock shot between us. About a foot at most before my unmanly knees. After this we went on into Valais, and my memories are less clear; though I remember our arrival, bedraggled, one evening in Zermatt and the lorgnette stares of the French bourgeoises dames. We climbed with guides up to [a] high hut of the Alpine Club, roped (or I should have fallen into a snow-crevasse), and I remember the dazzling whiteness of the tumbled snow-desert between us and the black horn of the Matterhorn some miles away.

  I do not suppose all this is very interesting now. But it was a remarkable experience for me at 19, after a poor boy’s childhood. I went up to Oxford that autumn. . . . .

  ‘Trends’ in the Church are. . . . serious, especially to those accustomed to find in it a solace and a ‘pax’ in times of temporal trouble, and not just another arena of strife and change. But imagine the experience of those born (as I) between the Golden and the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria. Both senses or imaginations of security have been progressively stripped away from us. Now we find ourselves nakedly confronting the will of God, as concerns ourselves and our position in Time (Vide Gandalf I 70 and III 155).3 ‘Back to normal’ – political and Christian predicaments – as a Catholic professor once said to me, when I bemoaned the collapse of all my world that began just after I achieved 21. I know quite well that, to you as to me, the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap. There is nowhere else to go! (I wonder if this desperate feeling, the last state of loyalty hanging on, was not, even more often than is actually recorded in the Gospels, felt by Our Lord’s followers in His earthly life-time?) I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it. There are, of course, various elements in the present situation, which are confused, though in fact distinct (as indeed in the behaviour of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for ‘cavaliers’, and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of fainéance and filth). The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!) Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustardseed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the
keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils. The other motive (now so confused with the primitivist one, even in the mind of any one of the reformers): aggiornamento: bringing up to date: that has its own grave dangers, as has been apparent throughout history. With this ‘ecumenicalness’ has also become confused.

  I find myself in sympathy with those developments that are strictly ‘ecumenical’, that is concerned with other groups or churches that call themselves (and often truly are) ‘Christian’. We have prayed endlessly for Christian re-union, but it is difficult to see, if one reflects, how that could possibly begin to come about except as it has, with all its inevitable minor absurdities. An increase in ‘charity’ is an enormous gain. As Christians those faithful to the Vicar of Christ must put aside the resentments that as mere humans they feel – e.g. at the ‘cockiness’ of our new friends (esp. C[hurch] of E[ngland]). One is now often patted on the back, as a representative of a church that has seen the error of its ways, abandoned its arrogance and hauteur, and its separatism; but I have not yet met a ‘protestant’ who shows or expresses any realization of the reasons in this country for our attitude: ancient or modern: from torture and expropriation down to ‘Robinson’4 and all that. Has it ever been mentioned that R[oman] C[atholic]s still suffer from disabilities not even applicable to Jews? As a man whose childhood was darkened by persecution, I find this hard. But charity must cover a multitude of sins! There are dangers (of course), but a Church militant cannot afford to shut up all its soldiers in a fortress. It had as bad effects on the Maginot Line.