The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  [73] 1. E. R. Eddison [sic], author of The Worm Ouroboros and other romances. This was his second visit to the Inklings (see Inklings p. 190). 2. W. H. Lewis held the rank of Captain in the Royal Army Service Corps until his promotion to Major at the outbreak of the Second World War. 3. The Mezentian Gate, which remained incomplete at Eddison’s death in 1945, though a text was edited by his brother C. R. Eddison and published in 1958.

  [74] 1. After some weeks in the Transvaal, Christopher Tolkien was moved to an air training school at Kroonstad. 2. Michael Tolkien had been judged unfit for further military service as a result of ‘severe shock to nervous system due to prolonged exposure to enemy action’. 3. An edition of The Hobbit was issued by Foyles of London in 1942; see no. 47.

  [75] 1. Tolkien owned a Hammond typewriter with interchangeable typefaces, one of which was very small. 2. American servicemen, who were in the Oxford area in large numbers. 3. The translation by W. H. Kirby, published in the Everyman series in 1907. 4. Classical Honour Moderations; see note 3 to no. 43.

  [76] 1. While on holiday with his family at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall in 1932, Tolkien amused the children by giving the nickname ‘Gaffer Gamgee’ to a local ‘character’. See no. 257. 2. At the Oxford Playhouse.

  [77] 1. News had come of Allied Advances in Normandy; meanwhile von Papen, the German ambassador to Turkey, had cut short his holiday and returned to Ankara following reports that the Turkish government might break off diplomatic relations with Germany. 2. Latin, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ (Plutarch, Life of Cato).

  [79] 1. A nickname for the Eagle & Child pub.

  [81] 1. Another letter to Christopher Tolkien, dated 22 September 1943, refers to Lewis’s ‘new translation in rhymed alexandrines of the Aeneid’. It was not published. 2. Tolkien had promised his translation of Pearl to Blackwell, who wanted to publish it, and had the text set up in type. But Tolkien failed to provide an introduction to the book, and the project was eventually abandoned.

  [83] 1. C. S. Lewis was known to his friends as ‘Jack’; ‘Warnie’ was the nickname of his brother Warren. 2. ‘Trotter’ was the original name of the character Strider in The Lord of the Rings. 3. Sir William Walton (b. 1902). 4. A colleague of Tolkien’s in the English Department at Leeds University, and the author of many books of poetry. 5. Father Martin D’Arcy, S.J., Principal of Campion Hall, Oxford, 1932–45. 6. Old Icelandic, ‘world-doom’.

  [89] 1. Also known as the Forty Hours’ Devotion. The Blessed Sacrament is exposed on a throne in a monstrance and the faithful pray before it, in turns, throughout forty hours; this length of time was probably fixed on as the period during which Christ’s body rested in the tomb. 2. Greek ‘necessity, constraint’. 3. Elizabeth Jennings, later to become well known as a poet; her family were friends of the Tolkiens.

  [91] 1. This ‘final chapter’ was written in the form of an Epilogue to The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien eventually decided not to publish.

  [92] 1. Lewis’s next published novel after That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Tolkien is, however, almost certainly referring to some other book of Lewis’s that was never completed. Tolkien’s ‘dimly projected third’ may have been ‘The Notion Club Papers’: see Biography pp. 171–2. 2. Lewis told Chad Walsh, who visited him in the summer of 1948, that this book was to be called ‘Language and Human Nature’ and was to be published the following year by the Student Christian Movement Press; but this never happened. In 1950, Lewis wrote to a friend: ‘My book with Tolkien – any book in collaboration with that great, but dilatory and unmethodical man – is dated I fear to appear on the Greek Calends’ (Letters of C. S. Lewis, p. 222).

  [94] 1. 22 Northmoor Road, in which Tolkien lived from 1926 to 1930. 2. i.e. Mr Anthony Eden, speaking in the House of Commons.

  [96] 1. Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. 2. i.e. the Merton Professorships of English Language and Literature and of English Literature. 3. A reference to a celebrated poster advertising the ‘bracing’ air of the sea-resort of Skegness, on which there appeared a cheery-looking fisherman clad entirely in oilskins. 4. This was probably the essay ‘Myth became Fact’, first published in World Dominion, September/October 1944, and reprinted in Lewis’s book Undeceptions (American title: God in the Dock). 5. Greek, ‘would that I were’; quoted, as are the words that follow, from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. 6. Latin, ‘singly, separately’.

  [98] 1. A second cousin of Rayner Unwin; his real name was Harold. 2. Christopher Tolkien was never officially a pupil of his father, but he did receive some informal tuition from him during his year as an undergraduate (1942–3) before joining the R.A.F. 3. It is impossible to say what Tolkien had in mind. Perhaps he was alluding to the embryonic story referred to at the end of no. 69. 4. This footnote carries no indication, in the original letter, as to which part of the text it refers to. Its placing here is therefore conjectural.

  5. The Tolkien/d’Ardenne edition of the Western Middle English MS. Katerine, which was never completed. 6. Tolkien’s edition of the MS. Ancrene Wisse, not in fact completed until 1962. 7. British Daylight Saving Time.

  [103] 1. Tolkien wanted to rent a college house, because 20 Northmoor Road was proving too large for his family’s present needs. 2. Hugo Dyson was elected a Fellow of Merton and was admitted to the college at the same time as Tolkien.

  [105] 1. ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’. 2. ‘The Notion Club Papers’: see Biography pp. 171–2.

  [107] 1. Nothing is known of this person’s identity. 2. Tolkien had arranged to rent this house from Merton College.

  [108] 1. C. H. Wilkinson was the English tutor at Worcester College.

  [109] 1. See note 1 to no. 128. 2. The first three people in this list were probably Owen Barfield, R. E. Havard and W. H. Lewis; the others cannot certainly be identified, though the artist may have been Tolkien’s first cousin Marjorie Incledon, who was a painter. 3. An earlier name for Fredegar or Fatty Bolger. 4. ‘“Policemen never come so far, and the map-makers have not reached this country yet. They have seldom even heard of the king round here. . . . . ”’ (The Hobbit, Chapter 2.) This passage was greatly changed in a later revision. 5. These pages contain references to the Necromancer. 6. The Unwins were travelling to Switzerland.

  [111] 1. S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne.

  [112] Transcription (pairs of letters in italics are represented by one character in the runes):

  THRE MANOR ROAD

  SUNDAY NOV[E]MBER

  THE THIRTIETH

  DEAR MRS FARRER: OF COURSE I WILL SIGN YO UR COPY OF THE HOBBIT. I AM HONOURED BY THE RECWEST. IT IS GOOD NEWS THAT THE BOOK IS OBTAIN ABLE AGAIN. THE NEXT BOOK WILL CO[N]TAIN MORE D ETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT RUNES AND OTHER ALFABETS IN RESPO[N]SE TO MANY ENCWIRIES. IN THE MEANTIME WHILE THE GREAT WORK IS BEING FINIS[H] ED I WONDER IF YOU WOULD LIKE A PROPER KEY TO THE SPECIAL DWARVIS[H] ADAPTATION OF THE ENGLIS[H] RUNIC ALFABET ONLY PART OF WHICH APPEARS IN THE HOBBIT INCLUDING THE COVER. WE ENIOYED LAST MONDAY EUENING VERY MU CH AND HOPE FOR A RETURN MATCH SOON.

  YOURS SINCERELY

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  [113] 1. Sir Gawain, line 2363, ‘the most faultless knight’. 2. It appears that Hugo Dyson had been putting it about that Tolkien objected to Lewis’s ‘loud’ manner in the Inklings. 3. Archaic, ‘if’. 4. Bird and Baby, i.e. Eagle and Child pub.

  [114] 1. Hugh Brogan had been a pupil at the school.

  [115] 1. An Elvish sage in Tol Eressëa from whom the mariner Aelfwine heard the legends that make up The Silmarillion; see Biography pp. 90, 169.

  [118] Transcription (in the runic passage, pairs of letters in italics are represented by one character in the runes; the letter ‘Z’ is used for the voiced ‘S’):

  DEAR HUGH THIS [I]Z JUST TO WISH YOU A HAPPY CHRISTMAS IN DWARF RUNEZ.

  dear hugh: this iz just to wish you a very happy christmas in two styles of elvish script: i am sending some explanations, and hope you wont find them
too complicated.

  The third inscription repeats the wording of the second, inserting the word ‘I’ between ‘and’ and ‘hope’.

  [124] 1. Tolkien was overestimating the combined length of the two works by several hundred thousand words. 2. i.e. the planned sequel to Farmer Giles of Ham.

  [126] 1. Another Merton College house, not far from 3 Manor Road, which had proved too small for the Tolkiens’ needs.

  [127] 1. Unwin’s second letter was an acknowledgement of Tolkien’s note of 2 April. 2. Tolkien’s anger with Allen & Unwin is shown by the much more strongly-worded draft for this letter, which is quoted in Biography p. 210, in the passage beginning ‘i.e. that you may be willing to take. . . .’

  [128] 1. In the original version of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, Gollum really does intend to give Bilbo the Ring when the hobbit wins the riddle-game, and is deeply apologetic when he finds that it is missing: ‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only present, if it won the competition.” He even offered to catch Bilbo some nice juicy fish to eat as a consolation.’ Bilbo, who has the Ring in his pocket, persuades Gollum to lead him out of the underground passages, which Gollum does, and the two of them part company in a civil manner.

  [130] 1. The note, which was included in the second edition of The Hobbit, explained the change of text in Chapter 5: ‘There the true story of the ending of the Riddle Game, as it was eventually revealed (under pressure) by Bilbo to Gandalf, is now given according to the Red Book, in place of the version Bilbo first gave to his friends, and actually set down in his diary. This departure from truth on the part of a most honest hobbit was a portent of great significance. It does not, however, concern the present story, and those who in this edition make their first acquaintance with hobbit-lore need not trouble about it. Its explanation lies in the history of the Ring, as set out in the chronicles of the Red Book of Westmarch, and it must await their publication.’

  [131] 1. See introductory note to no. 19. 2. Noumenon, neuter of the present participle of (noein), to apprehend, conceive; introduced by Kant in contrast to ‘phenomenon’, and given the meaning ‘an object of purely intellectual intuition, devoid of all phenomenal attributes’. 3. The text of this letter is taken from a typescript made, at Milton Waldman’s instigation, by a professional typist (there are a number of mis-spellings of names, which Tolkien has corrected); it appears that here the typist has omitted some words from Tolkien’s MS. 4. Tar-Calion (the Quenya name for Ar-Pharazôn) was originally the thirteenth ruler of Niimenor; in later developments of the history of Númenor he became the twenty-fifth (usually recorded as the twenty-fourth, but see Unfinished Tales p. 226, note 11). 5. As earlier letters in this book show, The Lord of the Rings was in fact begun in December 1937.

  [132] 1. C. L. Wrenn succeeded Tolkien as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

  [133] 1. Rayner Unwin’s letter of 29 [sic] November said that he was ‘hoping that I might get the chance of seeing Silmarillion. Believe it or not I am still quite certain that you have something most important for publication in this book and The Lords of the Ring! [sic]’ 2. Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College and, at this time, Vice Chancellor of Oxford University. 3. In a later letter on the subject of the oral transmission of ‘Errantry’, Tolkien noted that ‘a curious feature was the preservation of the word sigaldry, which I got from a thirteenth-century text’. (To Donald Swann, 14 October 1966.) 4. See Inklings p. 57. 5. Sir John Burnett-Stuart [sic] commanded the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade in the Second World War. 6. i.e. ‘Authorised Version’ and ‘Revised Version’. 7. Russell Meiggs, who edited the Oxford Magazine in the 1930s, is uncertain which member of the Nowell Smith family was among his predecessors. 8. It may appear at a first glance that Tolkien did write another poem in this metre, ‘Earendil was a mariner’, which appears in Book II Chapter 1 of The Lord of the Rings. But this poem is arguably a development of ‘Errantry’ rather than a separate composition.

  [134] 1. Michael Tolkien was teaching at the Oratory School in Berkshire and had a cottage nearby. 2. The offices of Allen & Unwin, near the British Museum. 3. For more about these tape-recordings, some of which were issued on gramophone records in 1975, see Biography p. 213.

  [135] 1. Tolkien’s contribution to Essays & Studies was ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son’, which was published in this journal in 1953. 2. The lecture, given in Glasgow on 15 April 1953, consisted of a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with particular attention to Gawain’s temptation to commit adultery with the Lady, and his confession in the chapel at Bercilak’s court before going out to meet the Green Knight. 3. The first British atomic bomb test took place in the Monte Bello Islands, off Australia, on 3 October 1952.

  [136] 1. A list of contents to The Lord of the Rings written by Tolkien and included in the manuscript of that book at Marquette University, Milwaukee, U.S.A., has a different set of titles: Vol. I The First Journey and The Journey of the Nine Companions; Vol. II The Treason of Isengard and The Journey of the Ringbearers; Vol. III The War of the Ring and The End of the Third Age.

  [137] 1. A note on Volume I of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings promised that Volume III would contain ‘some abridged family-trees. . . . an index of names and strange words with some explanations. . . . [and] some brief account. . . . of the languages, alphabets and calendars’. The ‘index of names’ did not, in the event, appear in the first edition of Volume III. 2. The inscription around the West Gate of the Mines of Moria. 3. Tolkien had planned to include facsimiles of the damaged pages of the ‘Book of Mazarbul’, but these had to be omitted because of cost (they were in several colours). They are reproduced as no. 23 in Pictures. 4. The subject of his W. P. Ker Lecture; see note 2 to no. 135 above. 5. Tolkien is here referring to his long letter to Milton Waldman (no. 131).

  [140] 1. In a subsequent letter to Rayner Unwin (no. 143), Tolkien is more definite that the Two Towers are ‘Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol’. On the other hand, in his original design for the jacket of The Two Towers (see no. 151) the Towers are certainly Orthanc and Minas Morgul. Orthanc is shown as a black tower, three-horned (as seen in Pictures no. 27), and with the sign of the White Hand beside it; Minas Morgul is a white tower, with a thin waning moon above it, in reference to its original name, Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Rising Moon (The Fellowship of the Ring p. 257). Between the two towers a Nazgûl flies.

  [143] 1. The Appendices to Volume III.

  [144] 1.’ “Uglúk u bagronk shapushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai.”’ 2. ‘… all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.” ‘3. ‘“My grand-dad, and my uncle Andy after him, … he had a rope-walk over by Tighfield many a year.” ‘ 4. ‘ “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”’ 5. Naomi Mitchison’s house in Scotland.

  [145] 1. Bannister, a Senior Scholar of Merton College, was the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, a record that he achieved at Oxford on 6 May 1954.

  [148] 1. Allen & Unwin wished to publish Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which had been broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in a dramatised version in December 1953, with a repeat (referred to by Tolkien in this letter) in September 1954.

  [149] 1. Peter Green, the biographer of Kenneth Grahame, wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 27 August 1954: ‘I presume it is meant to be taken seriously, and am apprehensive that I can find no really adequate reasons for doing so. . . . . And yet this shapeless work has an undeniable fascination: especially to a reviewer with a cold in his head.’ 2. Edwin Muir wrote in the Observer on 22 August 1954: ‘This remarkable book makes its appearance at a disadvantage. Nothing but a great masterpiece could survive the bombardment of praise directed at it from the blurb. . . . . The Fellowship of the Ring is an extraordinary book Yet for myself I could not resist feeli
ng a certain disappointment. Perhaps this was partly due to the style, which is quite unequal to the theme. . . . . But perhaps it was due more to a lack of the human discrimination and depth which the subject demanded. 3. J. W. Lambert wrote in the Sunday Times on 8 August 1954: ‘Whimsical drivel with a message? No; it sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above that level. A book for bright children? Well, yes and no.’ 4. A. E. Cherryman wrote in Truth on 6 August 1954: ‘It is an amazing piece of work. . . . . He has added something, not only to the world’s literature, but to its history.’ 5. Howard Spring wrote in Country Life on 26 August 1954: ‘This is a work of art. . . . . It has invention, fancy and imagination. . . . . It is a profound parable of man’s everlasting struggle against evil.’ 6. H. l’A. Fawcett wrote in the Manchester Guardian on 20 August 1954: ‘Mr Tolkien is one of those born storytellers who makes his readers as wide-eyed as children for more.’ 7. The Oxford Times review, signed ‘C.H.H.’, was printed on 13 August 1954, and described the book as ‘extraordinary and often beautiful’.

  [150] 1. See note 1 to no. 137 above.

  [151] 1. Tolkien made two finished designs for The Fellowship of the Ring, both of which survive. In that referred to here, the Ruling Ring, surrounded by the fiery letters of its inscription, and the Red Ring (Narya) above it, were represented exactly as in the other design, which was adopted, and which is still seen in enlarged form on the jackets of the three-volume hardback and paperback editions published by Allen & Unwin; but in the design referred to here there appeared below to left and right the White Ring (Nenya) and the Blue Ring (Vilya), with their gems turned towards the Ruling Ring in the centre.

  [153] 1. One would expect ‘three cases’: cf. The Lord of the Rings III 314: ‘There were three unions of the Eldar and the Edain: Lúthien and Beren; Idril and Tuor; Arwen and Aragom. By the last the long-sundered branches of the Half-elven were reunited and their line was restored.’ 2. ‘“Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?”’ 3. i.e. the poem ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ was first published in that magazine in 1934. 4.’ “We look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be. Have you no such custom at meat?”’