The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (67 page)
Read The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Online
Authors: Humphrey Carpenter
Still the old âego' gets quite a lot of strong boosts now and again, which surprise me as much as ever. I met Burke Trend on September 29th, at the Merton Septcentenary Dinner â he is a recent honorary Fellow: secretary to the Cabinet then and now: and he declared himself as a âfan', and added that most of the Cabinet was with him, and as for the House similar views were widely prevalent on both sides of it. Good enough, if they buy the book and don't merely wear out the House of Commons Library copy! No other kind of reward seems in the offing. But I suppose my greatest surprise was 4 days ago to get a warm fan-letter from Iris Murdoch. And if that name is just an âAva Gardner' to you, it can't be helped. . . . .
When I think of my mother's death (younger than Prisca) worn out
with persecution, poverty, and. largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away [from the Church]. Of course Canaan seems different to those who have come into it out of the desert; and the later inhabitants of Jerusalem may often seem fools or knaves, or worse. But
in hac urbe lux solemnis
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has seemed to me steadily true. I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests âin the course of my peregrinations'; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was â and he was
not.
I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the âliberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about âBloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus â who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.
19 January 1965
I think Shadowfax certainly went with Gandalf [across the Sea], though this is not stated. I feel it is better not to state everything (and indeed it is more realistic, since in chronicles and accounts of âreal' history, many facts that some enquirer would like to know are omitted, and the truth has to be discovered or guessed from such evidence as there is). I should argue so: Shadowfax came of a special race (II 126, 129, III 346)
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being as it were an Elvish equivalent of ordinary horses: his âblood' came from âWest over Sea'. It would not be unfitting for him to âgo West'. Gandalf was not âdying', or going by a special grace to the Western Land, before passing on âbeyond the circles of the world': he was going home, being plainly one of the âimmortals', an angelic emissary of the angelic governors (Valar) of the Earth. He would take or could take what he loved. Gandalf was last seen riding Shadowfax (III 276). He must have ridden to the Havens, and it is inconceivable that he would [have] ridden any beast but Shadowfax; so Shadowfax must have been there. A chronicler winding up a long tale, and for the moment moved principally by the sorrow of those left behind (himself among them!) might omit mention of the horse; but had the great horse also shared in the grief of sundering, he could hardly have been forgotten.
12 May 1965
[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]
With regard to
The Lord of the Rings,
I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190,
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where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable. . . . .
One of my troubles is that I was just sending into press a revision of my translation of
Gawain
together with one of
Pearl
when a desperate problem of U.S.A. copyright fell on me, and I must now devote all the time I have to produce a revision of both
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Hobbit
that can be copyrighted and, it is hoped, defeat the pirates.
[Tolkien had sent Unwin the typescript of his new story
Smith of Wootton Major.
It seemed to Unwin to need the companionship of other stories to make a sufficiently large book. This suggestion came just as Tolkien was revising
The Lord of the Rings,
so as to produce a new edition that would be protected by U.S.A. copyright. The need for this arose because an American publisher had issued an unauthorised paperback edition of the book, without the consent of Tolkien or Allen & Unwin, and (at first) without paying royalties.]
20 May 1965
76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford
Dear Rayner,
Thank you very much for the return of
Smith of Wootton Major.
I am delighted that it pleased you, as I was quite unable to make my own mind up about it without your assistance. I am afraid there is nothing of similar sort or length deep among my papers. There is a lot of unfinished material there, but everything belongs definitely to the
Silmarillion
or all that world. To which I should now be in only a few days returning, if it was not for this infernal copyright business. I shall be sending you the remainder of the text of
Gawain
and my comments on the specimen pages you sent me, to reach you I hope by Monday next. I cannot produce the prefatory note or the commentary until the revision of
The Lord of the Rings
is finished. I shall have to work hard to get it to Boston
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by July 1.
Yours sincerely,
Ronald Tolkien.
PS. I am now inserting in every note of acknowledgement to readers in the U.S.A. a brief note informing them that
Ace Books
is a pirate, and asking them to inform others.
25 May 1965
I am not relishing the task of âre-editing'
The Lord of the Rings.
I think it will prove very difficult if not impossible to make any substantial changes in the general text. Volume I has now been gone through and the number of necessary or desirable corrections is very small. I am bound to say that my admiration for the tightness of the author's construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it. I am hoping that alteration of the introductions, considerable modifications of the appendices and the inclusion of an index may prove sufficient for the purpose. Incidentally, I am making a point of including a note in every answer or acknowledgement of âfan' letters from the U.S.A. to the effect that the paperback edition of Ace Books is piratical and issued without the consent of my publishers or myself and of course without remuneration to us. Do you think that if this were done on a larger scale it might be useful?
20 July 1965
[In a second-hand bookshop in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Zillah Sherring found and bought a copy of
The Fifth Book of Thucydides
which contained a number of strange inscriptions that had been written in it by a previous owner. Finding Tolkien's name among those on the flyleaf, she wrote to him asking if the inscriptions, particularly a long one at the back, had possibly been his work. She sent him a transcript of it. This is a facsimile of the inscription:]
Â
The book certainly once belonged to me. . . . . The writing on the back page is in Gothic, or what I thought was Gothic or might be. I had come across this admirable language a year or two before 1910 in Joseph Wright's
Primer of the Gothic Language
(now replaced by
A Grammar of the Gothic Language
). It was sold to me by a school-friend interested in missionary work, who had thought it a Bible Society product and had no use for what it was. I was fascinated by Gothic in itself: a beautiful language, which reached the eminence of liturgical use, but failed owing to the tragic history of the Goths to become one of the liturgical languages of the West. At the time I had only the Primer with its small vocabulary, but I had learned from it some of the technique necessary for converting the words of other Germanic languages into Gothic script. I often put âGothic' inscriptions in books, sometimes Gothicizing my Norse name and German surname as Ruginwaldus DwalakÅneis. The inscription you cite is at fault (by accident) in HVNDAI which should be HVNDA. It is also bad Gothic in other respects, but was intended to mean:
I read the words of these books
fn104
of Greek history (âyear-writing') in the sixth month of this year: thousand, nine hundreds, ten, of Our Lord: in order to gain the prize given every year to the boy knowing most about Thucydides, and this I inscribed in my books
fn105
on the twelfth of the sixth
(month)
after I had already ? first read through all the words carefully. Frumins
is probably an error for
frumist
âfirst'.
You probably will not be interested in other âerrors'. The inscription
presented some problems to one having only the vocabulary of short specimens of the fragments of the Gothic versions of the New Testament to go upon. The Gothic word for âread' was not
lisan, las, galisans
, which still had only its original meaning âgather' (a sense which its German and Norse equivalents,
lesen
and
lesa,
still retain in addition to the sense âread' imitated from Latin
lego
). The Gothic word was
ussiggwan
ârecite' (sing out). The art of private reading, silent, and with the use only or chiefly of the eyes, was if practised by the âancients' mostly forgotten. I believe it is reported that St Ambrose (in the same century as the Gothic versions were made) astonished observers who saw him reading by only moving his eyes from side to side, without moving his lips or at least murmuring. . . . .
I still feel no compunction in writing in my own books, though I now usually put only notes supposed to be of use â if I can later decipher them.
21 July 1965
[Mrs Scott was a leading campaigner in the battle to keep the pirate edition of
The Lord of the Rings
out of the American bookshops.]
I am extremely grateful for the information that you have sent me, and still more for your great kindness and energy in attempting to combat the pirates on my behalf. . . . . I have been taken off all my other work and driven nearly over the edge by the attempt to get an
authorized
paperback by Ballantine Books produced as soon as possible.
28 July 1965
[Concerning revisions to
The Lord of the Rings
.]
The
small map
âPart of the Shire' is most at fault and much needs correction (and some additions), and has caused a number of questions to be asked. The chief fault is that the ferry at Bucklebury and so Brandy Hall and Crickhollow have shifted about 3 miles too far north (about 4 mm.). This cannot be altered at this time, but it is unfortunate that Brandy Hall clearly on the river-bank is placed so that the main road runs in front of it instead of behind. There is also no trace of the wood described at the top of p. 99.
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4 August 1965
[Auden had invited Tolkien to contribute to a
festschrift
marking the retirement of Nevill Coghill. He also asked if Tolkien knew that a âNew York Tolkien Society' had been formed, and said he feared that most of the members would be lunatics.]
I still feel grieved that I haven't anything for Neville's
[sic]
festschrift. I hope that perhaps an arrangement will be made in the book for people in my position to register their good wishes. The only thing I have ever written about Neville was:
Mr Neville Judson Coghill
Wrote a deal of dangerous doggerill.
Practical, progressive men
Called him Little Poison-pen.
That was at a time when under the name of Judson he was writing what I thought very good and funny verses lampooning forward-looking men like Norwood of St John's.
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Yes, I have heard about the Tolkien Society. Real lunatics don't join them, I think. But still such things fill me too with alarm and despondency.