The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

Last updated

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
Tolkien Letters Cover.jpg
Dust wrapper of UK first edition
Author Humphrey Carpenter (editor), with Christopher Tolkien
LanguageEnglish
Subject
GenreLetters
Publisher George Allen & Unwin, Houghton Mifflin
Publication date
1981
2023 (expanded edition)
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
ISBN 0-04-826005-3
OCLC 8628512
828/.91209 B 19
LC Class PR6039.O32 Z48 1981b
Preceded by Unfinished Tales  
Followed by Mr. Bliss  

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is a selection of the philologist and fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien's letters. It was published in 1981, edited by Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter, who was assisted by Christopher Tolkien. The selection, from a large mass of materials, contains 354 letters. These were written between October 1914, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford, and 29 August 1973, four days before his death. The letters are of interest both for what they show of Tolkien's life and for his interpretations of his Middle-earth writings.

Contents

Contents

The book has a 3-page introduction by its editor, Humphrey Carpenter. He notes that an "enormous quantity of material [had] to be omitted, and that only passages of particular interest could be included." [1] Among the omissions is "the very large body of letters" written between 1913 and 1918 to Edith Bratt, the woman who became his wife. Carpenter notes that few letters from the period between 1918 and 1937 survive, and those "unfortunately" say nothing about the writing of The Silmarillion or of The Hobbit . [2]

The body of the 1981 edition consists of extracts from 354 of J. R. R. Tolkien's many letters. The first, dated October 1914, is to Bratt, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford. The last, dated 29 August 1973, is to Priscilla Tolkien, his youngest child, four days before his death.

The letters are accompanied by detailed notes, and by an index compiled by the Tolkien scholars Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond.

The letters can be roughly divided into four categories:

  1. Personal letters to Tolkien's wife Edith, his son Christopher Tolkien, and his other children
  2. Letters about Tolkien's career as a professor of Anglo-Saxon
  3. Letters to his publishers at Allen & Unwin
  4. Letters about Tolkien's Middle-earth writings

Letters 29 and 30 show that a German translation of The Hobbit was being negotiated in 1938. The German firm enquired whether Tolkien was of Arisch (Aryan) origin. Tolkien was infuriated by the racist implications of this, and wrote two drafts of possible replies for his publisher to choose. [3]

Having fought in the First World War, Tolkien wrote many letters during the Second World War to his son Christopher, including his reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, in which he calls the bombmakers of the Manhattan Project "lunatic" and "Babel builders". [4]

I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the "Downfall of Númenor" as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.

Letters, #163 to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955

In 1951, Tolkien hoped that Collins would publish both The Lord of the Rings and a selection from his legendarium, including material that his son Christopher later edited to form The Silmarillion . To help persuade them that the two were "interdependent and indivisible", [5] Tolkien sent a long letter (#131) to Milton Waldman of Collins, outlining the foundations and ambitions of his writings, and giving a potted history of the whole story from the creation, through the First, Second and Third Ages, and finishing with a reference to The Hobbit and a lengthy outline of The Lord of the Rings. [a] The Tolkien scholar Colin Duriez describes the 10,000-word letter as "one of the best keys to the extraordinary legendarium". [8]

Other letters discuss subjects as widely varied as the location of Middle-earth ("the actual Old World of this planet", p.220, #165), the shape of hobbits' ears ("only slightly pointed", #27) and the source of the "Downfall of Númenor" in Tolkien's recurring dream of Atlantis (#163). [9]

Publication history

The book was published in 1981 by Allen & Unwin in London. [10] They reprinted it in 1990, 1995, and (having been taken over by HarperCollins) 2006. [11] Houghton Mifflin published a paperback edition in Boston in 2000. [12] A "Revised and Expanded Edition", adding materials that had previously been removed to cut down on length, was published in 2023. It contains 154 new letters and additional text that had been cut from 45 of the previously published letters. To preserve the original numbering scheme, new entries have been designated with an alphabetical indicator (e.g. '15a' for the first newly included letter written between numbers 15 and 16). [13]

Reception

1981 edition

Hannu Hiilos, reviewing the book, echoes the editor's remark that the letters had been chosen from "a very large volume of material". He comments that Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien had attempted both to prioritise Tolkien's accounts of his Middle-earth writings, and to give a picture of the breadth of Tolkien's other interests and scholarship. In addition, he writes, Tolkien's views, coloured by his position on religion, morals, and politics, come across clearly in his wartime letters to Christopher. [14]

The Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson states that Carpenter "quietly withdrew from Tolkien scholarship" soon after publishing the Letters. Anderson states that he assisted Carpenter on Letters, "particularly with the headnotes and the annotations". [15] The scholar of religion and of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, Peter Kreeft, comments that the letters are important, since all Tolkien scholars have to start by noting their interpretations of Tolkien's writings, unless they "dare to assume" they know better than Tolkien did what he may have meant. [16]

2023 edition

The Tolkien Collector's Guide notes that the 2023 edition is essentially the text that Carpenter prepared for Allen & Unwin in 1979, only to find that the publishers felt it was too long. The result was that Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien cut it down by some 50,000 words, now restored. 154 letters appear in the 2023 edition for the first time, barring scholarly mentions and excerpts in The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide ; another 45 letters have been revised, usually extended. [17] The same website provides a guide to all the letters, including all those in the 2023 edition, as well as letters to or about Tolkien (which are not in any edition of the published book). [18]

Joseph Loconte in The Wall Street Journal writes that the new edition offers "some revealing gems", but that "enthusiasts may be disappointed by what remains under lock and key." [19]

Notes

  1. ↑ The lengthy outline, omitted from the 1981 edition of Letters, has been published in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion . [6] The letter has this and other omissions restored in the 2023 edition. [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. R. R. Tolkien</span> English writer and philologist (1892–1973)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Tolkien</span> British book editor (1924–2020)

Christopher John Reuel Tolkien was an English and naturalised French academic editor and writer. The son of the author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher edited 24 volumes based on his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and the 12-volume series The History of Middle-Earth, a task that took 45 years. He also drew the original maps for his father's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.

<i>The Return of the King</i> 1955 part of novel by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Return of the King is the third and final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, following The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. It was published in 1955. The story begins in the kingdom of Gondor, which is soon to be attacked by the Dark Lord Sauron.

<i>The Adventures of Tom Bombadil</i> 1962 poetry collection by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is a 1962 collection of poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien. The book contains 16 poems, two of which feature Tom Bombadil, a character encountered by Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. The rest of the poems are an assortment of bestiary verse and fairy tale rhyme. Three of the poems appear in The Lord of the Rings as well. The book is part of Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, the Eagles or Great Eagles, are immense birds that are sapient and can speak. The Great Eagles resemble actual eagles, but are much larger. Thorondor is said to have been the greatest of all birds, with a wingspan of 30 fathoms. Elsewhere, the Eagles have varied in nature and size both within Tolkien's writings and in later adaptations.

The Notion Club Papers is an abandoned novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in 1945 and published posthumously in Sauron Defeated, the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth. It is a time travel story, written while The Lord of the Rings was being developed. The Notion Club is a fictionalization of Tolkien's own such club, the Inklings. Tolkien's mechanism for the exploration of time is through lucid dreams. These allow club members to experience events as far back as the destruction of the Atlantis-like island of Númenor, as narrated in The Silmarillion.

The term Middle-earth canon, also called Tolkien's canon, is used for the published writings of J. R. R. Tolkien regarding Middle-earth as a whole. The term is also used in Tolkien fandom to promote, discuss and debate the idea of a consistent fictional canon within a given subset of Tolkien's writings.

The works of J. R. R. Tolkien have generated a body of research covering many aspects of his fantasy writings. These encompass The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, along with his legendarium that remained unpublished until after his death, and his constructed languages, especially the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Scholars from different disciplines have examined the linguistic and literary origins of Middle-earth, and have explored many aspects of his writings from Christianity to feminism and race.

"Errantry" is a three-page poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in The Oxford Magazine in 1933. It was included in revised and extended form in Tolkien's 1962 collection of short poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Donald Swann set the poem to music in his 1967 song cycle, The Road Goes Ever On.

<i>J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography</i> 1977 biography by Humphrey Carpenter

J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, written by Humphrey Carpenter, was first published in 1977. It is called the "authorized biography" of J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It was first published in London by George Allen & Unwin, then in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company. It has been reprinted many times since.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tolkien's legendarium</span> J. R. R. Tolkiens mythological writings

Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a mythology for England. The earliest story, "The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star", is from 1914; he revised and rewrote the legendarium stories for most of his adult life.

Middle-earth is the setting of much of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy. The term is equivalent to the Miðgarðr of Norse mythology and Middangeard in Old English works, including Beowulf. Middle-earth is the oecumene in Tolkien's imagined mythological past. Tolkien's most widely read works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are set entirely in Middle-earth. "Middle-earth" has also become a short-hand term for Tolkien's legendarium, his large body of fantasy writings, and for the entirety of his fictional world.

<i>The Silmarillion</i> Collection of J. R. R. Tolkiens mythopoeic works

The Silmarillion is a book consisting of a collection of myths and stories in varying styles by the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien. It was edited, partly written, and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977, assisted by Guy Gavriel Kay, who became a fantasy author. It tells of Eä, a fictional universe that includes the Blessed Realm of Valinor, the ill-fated region of Beleriand, the island of Númenor, and the continent of Middle-earth, where Tolkien's most popular works—The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—are set. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien's publisher, Stanley Unwin, requested a sequel, and Tolkien offered a draft of the writings that would later become The Silmarillion. Unwin rejected this proposal, calling the draft obscure and "too Celtic", so Tolkien began working on a new story that eventually became The Lord of the Rings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A Map of Middle-earth</span> Fictional map

"A Map of Middle-earth" is either of two colour posters by different artists, Barbara Remington and Pauline Baynes. Adapted from Tolkien's maps, they depict the north-western region of the fictional continent of Middle-earth. They were published in 1965 and 1970 by the American and British publishers of J. R. R. Tolkien's book The Lord of the Rings. The poster map by Baynes has been described as "iconic".

<i>The Fall of Arthur</i> Unfinished poem by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fall of Arthur is an unfinished poem by J. R. R. Tolkien on the legend of King Arthur. A posthumous first edition of the poem was published by HarperCollins in 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trees in Middle-earth</span> Trees and forests in the fictional works of J. R. R. Tolkien

Trees play multiple roles in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth, some such as Old Man Willow indeed serving as characters in the plot. Both for Tolkien personally, and in his Middle-earth writings, caring about trees really mattered. Indeed, the Tolkien scholar Matthew Dickerson wrote "It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of trees in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tolkien's artwork</span> Artwork by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien's artwork was a key element of his creativity from the time when he began to write fiction. A professional philologist, J. R. R. Tolkien prepared a wide variety of materials to support his fiction, including illustrations for his Middle-earth fantasy books, facsimile artefacts, more or less "picturesque" maps, calligraphy, and sketches and paintings from life. Some of his artworks combined several of these elements.

<i>The Nature of Middle-earth</i> 2021 compilation of material by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Nature of Middle-earth is a 2021 book of previously unpublished materials on Tolkien's legendarium, compiled and edited by the scholar Carl F. Hostetter. Some essays were previously published in the Elvish linguistics journal Vinyar Tengwar, where Hostetter was a long-time editor.

<i>Tolkiens Art: A Mythology for England</i> 1979 book by Jane Chance

Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' is a 1979 book of Tolkien scholarship by Jane Chance, writing then as Jane Chance Nitzsche. The book looks in turn at Tolkien's essays "On Fairy-Stories" and "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"; The Hobbit; the fairy-stories "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major"; the minor works "Lay of Autrou and Itroun", "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth", "Imram", and Farmer Giles of Ham; The Lord of the Rings; and very briefly in the concluding section, The Silmarillion. In 2001, a second edition extended all the chapters but still treated The Silmarillion, that Tolkien worked on throughout his life, as a sort of coda.

In Tolkien's legendarium, ancestry provides a guide to character. The apparently genteel Hobbits of the Baggins family turn out to be worthy protagonists of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo Baggins is seen from his family tree to be both a Baggins and an adventurous Took. Similarly, Frodo Baggins has some relatively outlandish Brandybuck blood. Among the Elves of Middle-earth, as described in The Silmarillion, the highest are the peaceful Vanyar, whose ancestors conformed most closely to the divine will, migrating to Aman and seeing the light of the Two Trees of Valinor; the lowest are the mutable Teleri; and in between are the conflicted Noldor. Scholars have analysed the impact of ancestry on Elves such as the creative but headstrong Fëanor, who makes the Silmarils. Among Men, Aragorn, hero of The Lord of the Rings, is shown by his descent from Kings, Elves, and an immortal Maia to be of royal blood, destined to be the true King who will restore his people. Scholars have commented that in this way, Tolkien was presenting a view of character from Norse mythology, and an Anglo-Saxon view of kingship, though others have called his implied views racist.

References

  1. ↑ Carpenter 2023 , Introduction
  2. ↑ Carpenter 2023 , Introduction
  3. ↑ Carpenter 2023 , Editorial comments at the head of Letter 30
  4. ↑ Carpenter 2023 , #102 to Christopher Tolkien, 9 August 1945
  5. ↑ Carpenter 2023 , letter 131 to Milton Waldman, late 1951
  6. ↑ Hammond, Wayne G.; Scull, Christina (2005). The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion . London: HarperCollins. p. 742. ISBN   0-00-720907-X.
  7. ↑ Edmonds, Jeremy. "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Revised and Expanded Edition - Review". Tolkien Collector's Guide. Retrieved 4 February 2024.
  8. ↑ Duriez, Colin (2012). J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend. Oxford: Lion Books. p. 201. ISBN   978-0-7459-5514-8.
  9. ↑ Patterson, Nancy-Lou (15 April 1982). "Reviews". Mythlore . 9 (1): 27–28.
  10. ↑ Carpenter 2023
  11. ↑ Carpenter, Humphrey; Tolkien, Christopher (2006). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  12. ↑ Carpenter, Humphrey; Tolkien, Christopher (2006). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin.
  13. ↑ Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. (2023). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN   978-0-35-865298-4.
  14. ↑ Hiilos, Hannu (1990). ""Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien" edited by Humphrey Carpenter (Book Review)". Foundation (Summer 1990): 90.
  15. ↑ Anderson, Douglas A. (2005). "Obituary: Humphrey Carpenter (1946-2005)". Tolkien Studies . 2 (1): 217–224. doi:10.1353/tks.2005.0004. S2CID   170396849.
  16. ↑ Kreeft, Peter (1982). "Book Review: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien". Christianity & Literature. 31 (4): 107–109. doi:10.1177/014833318203100434.
  17. ↑ "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Revised and Expanded Edition - Review". Tolkien Collector's Guide. Retrieved 4 February 2024.
  18. ↑ "Guide to Tolkien's Letters". Tolkien Collector's Guide. Retrieved 4 February 2024.
  19. ↑ Loconte, Joseph (22 December 2023). "'The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien' Review: Notes From Middle-earth". The Wall Street Journal .

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.