Non-Fiction Reviews
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
Revised and Expanded Edition(1981 /2023) J. R. R. Tolkien, Harper Fiction,
£30 / Can$50, hrdbk, xii + 708pp ISBN 978-0-008-62876-5
In 1981, Humphrey Carpenter, with the help of Christopher Tolkien, published The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, which, as noted in the new Foreword here, stand as the closest thing we have to an autobiography. However, in accordance with the publishers’ insistence that the volume be kept manageable and affordable, many letters were edited or excluded altogether. More than one hundred and fifty of these have now been restored and another forty-five expanded in this revised edition which further fleshes out Tolkien’s creative process as well as the ups and downs of his life, his opinions on various matters, from the mechanics of publishing to student protests, and his relationships with friends, colleagues and, of course, his loved ones.
With the original numbering system helpfully retained, the additions are inserted using a, b, c and so on. This does lead to some incongruities. Thus, following letter number 8, from July 1925, to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, announcing his acceptance of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship at Oxford, we find letters 8a, b and c, which are all from a decade later. This is obviously a significant gap, as it spans the family’s move to Oxford and so a major shift in the trajectory of his academic career. These letters to his sons John, Christopher and Michael respectively are tender and family oriented, as one might expect, offering news and birthday money and a request to please write to their mum. But it is in the letter to Christopher written in August 1936 that we find the first mention of The Hobbit, which, Tolkien writes, ‘is now nearly finished and the publishers clamouring for it’ (p. 13). The completed manuscript was sent to Allen and Unwin less than two months later, and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
However, even at this early stage, there were problems. So, in another newly included letter to the publishers (suggested as being sent in March 1937), Tolkien notes that the manuscript contained ‘considerable confusions of narrative and geography’ (p. 18) and, apologising, notes that he has made the corrections as carefully as possible so as not to disrupt the page order of the proofs. As is well known, Tolkien’s attention to the details of the copy- and type-setting of his work was meticulous. So, in a September 1953 letter to publishers regarding the illustrations for Lord of the Rings (LoTR) he even goes so far as to complain that the strokes in the lettering used for the inscription on Balin’s tomb were too heavy and irregular. Such concerns recur repeatedly throughout this volume.
As do the various other worries, both academic and domestic, that ‘plagued’ him. This combination of an inability to accept half-measures when it came to his writing coupled with the obstacles thrown up by life in general (including the little matter of a war) contributed to his equally well-known inability to adhere to a deadline. In a long, previously excluded letter lamenting his being unable to contribute to an edition of his Middle English poem Pearl, he dismisses Oxford’s Clarendon Press as a ‘child-and-adolescents book-shop’ (p. 33) and declares that he is ‘sick of people who want brevity and lucidity’ (ibid.); it is far better, he maintains, to allow the reader to exercise their judgment.
By December 1937 of course, Tolkien had already written the first chapter of ‘a new story about Hobbits’ titled ‘a long expected party’ (p.37) and by 1939 this new tale had itself been given the name by which it now known, with Tolkien noting that it might not ‘prove a very fit sequel’ to the earlier work, being darker and ‘more grown-up’ (p. 53). In another new addition, written to Philip Unwin in the fateful September of that year, he mentions that although he has been silent about that sequel, he reckoned it to be about 3/4 finished, but that, on top of ill-health, far-reaching work will have to be put on hold as he could be ‘summoned’ at any moment. Here he was referring to his earlier training in the cryptography department of the Foreign Office (p. 56 and 611) and although he was told the following month that his services would not be required, this remark does raise the interesting alt-history possibility of Tolkien working alongside Turing!
The significant milestones in the development of LoTR are, of course, very well known, but here, again, there are further flashes of illumination. Thus, letter 131 to Milton Waldman of Collins Publishers, probably written by Tolkien in late 1951, to justify the joint publication of LoTR and The Silmarillion, now has the summary of the former book restored, in which it is made explicit that the Company of Nine was envisaged as the numerological counterpart to the Nine Riders, ‘representing all the chief elements of resistance to the Dark Power’ (p. 223; also now included are the list of items comprising the ‘Tales of the Three Ages’ originally attached to the letter).
We also now have, in letter 200a, written in September 1957, to Rayner Unwin, Tolkien’s initial impression of the visit of Forrest J. Ackerman, acting on behalf of the American company who were interested in making an animated film of the book. Significantly, he describes the specimen drawings of Ron Cobb (who went on to contribute concept artwork to such films as Dark Star, Star Wars and Alien, among others) as ‘admirable’ (p. 376). Ackerman and Cobb are praised again in a further letter to Unwin a couple of months later but Tolkien had become deeply critical of the ‘internal dislocation’ within the project between the scenic aspects, where he felt the talent of the group really lay, and the script itself, where, he felt, the writer seemed to just want ‘feverish action’ (pp. 380-381). We can perhaps speculate that Tolkien might have agreed that a reasonable balance between these two was achieved by Peter Jackson in his now classic cinematic trilogy.
In a later letter to his son Michael, Tolkien notes that United Artists were still paying him for the film rights in instalments but that because the company was ‘broke’ ‘There is no immediate prospect of any Film being made!!! Thank Heaven!!!’ (p. 581). Tolkien anticipated getting the rights back after another fourteen years but in 1976 they were sold to Saul Zaentz, who produced the Ralph Bakshi 1978 animation.
It is in another, long and very personal, letter to Michael, here included for the first time, that some of Tolkien’s more archaic personal views are expressed. Thus, he declares that women tend to be less introspective than men and are ‘part to understand their own motives very little’ (p. 60). And six months later, in January 1941, after admonishing Christopher for missing his mother’s birthday, he states that ‘[v]ery few men but practically all women set great store by dates and anniversaries’ (p. 65). Of course, such attitudes were not atypical for the time but they were also conditioned to a significant degree by Tolkien’s Catholicism, as is evident from another lengthy letter to Michael about seΧ and love, in which Tolkien emphasises that it is women’s ’gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male’ (p. 68). Furthermore, he maintained, although an intelligent woman can grasp the ideas of a man, with few exceptions ‘they can go no further, when they leave his hand’ (ibid.).
Having said that, Tolkien’s own letters to women, such as those to Naomi Mitchinson (a poet and writer herself, of science-fiction among other things, and a left-wing activist), show little sign of such attitudes (pp. 189-190; Mitchinson became good friends with Tolkien and was one of the proof-readers of LoTR). Indeed, in another newly included letter from August 1954, Tolkien describes Katherine Farrer, a mystery writer and neighbour, as ‘the most sensitive and perceptive’ of his ‘prime readers’ (p. 275). He was clearly sensitive to this issue as in a set of notes to his American publishers from 1955, Tolkien remarks that the only criticism that annoyed him was that LoTR contained no religion ‘(and no Women, but that does not matter and is not true anyway)’ (p. 319).
It is also to Michael that the last of the additional letters was sent, dating from autumn 1972, but continued in March 1973, in which Tolkien laments his inability to imitate his late wife Edith’s ‘laconic brevity’ in writing (p. 601). The very final letter, of course, is to his daughter Priscilla, written four days before he died, in which he ends with the retrospectively poignant line, ‘It is stuffy, sticky, and rainy here at present – but forecasts are more favourable’(p. 605).
In line with the volume as a whole, the set of notes is also expanded, but nevertheless a little more context would have been helpful in certain places and inevitably, perhaps, there is a lack of connection to more recent scholarship. It is also, of course, entirely one-sided, being letters from Tolkien and, again and again, I found myself wondering about the prompts and replies – perhaps in the future we might be given access to both sides of the correspondence, insofar as it can be gathered together.
Finally, the crucial question: should you buy this, if you already possess the earlier volume? I would have to say, only if you are seriously interested in the personal and academic context of Tolkien’s work. Or if you’re a completist of course!
Steven French
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