The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

Did Farmer Giles in the enlarged form meet with any sort of approval? (I received the typescript safely.) Is it worth anything? Are two more stories, or any more stories of the Little Kingdom, worth contemplating? For instance the completion in the same form of the adventures of Prince George (the farmer’s son) and the fat boy Suovetaurilius (vulgarly Suet), and the Battle of Otmoor. I just wonder whether this local family game played in the country just round us is more than silly.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

37 To Stanley Unwin

[Allen & Unwin were publishing a revision by C. L. Wrenn of Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf. Tolkien had agreed to write a foreword, and during the second half of 1939 he received several enquiries from the publishers about the progress of this. He left these enquiries unanswered until December, when Stanley Unwin himself wrote to find out what was happening.]

19 December 1939

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Unwin,

I was greatly comforted to receive your kind note this morning, even though it heaped hot coals of fire on my head. In spite of my troubles I have not really a sufficient excuse for not at least writing or responding to notes and enquiries. My accident just before the outbreak of war

left me very unwell for a long while, and that combined with the anxieties and troubles that all share, and with the lack of any holiday, and with the virtual headship of a department in this bewildered university have made me unpardonably neglectful. I hardly knew how to cope with the further blow of my wife’s illness, threatening to come to a climax all through the summer and autumn.

The worst seems over now. I have her back, an invalid but apparently mending at last, and the fear of cancer which was at first entertained apparently dismissed. I am uncommandeered still myself, and shall now probably remain so, as there is (as yet) far too much to do here, and I have lost both my chief assistant and his understudy.

I will try and collect my weary wits and pen a sufficient foreword to the ‘Beowulf’ translation, at once. . . . .

May I turn now to The Hobbit and kindred affairs. I have never quite ceased work on the sequel. It has reached Chapter XVI. I fear it is growing too large. I am not at all sure that it will please quite the same audience (except in so far as that has grown up too). Will there be any chance of publication, if I can get it done before the Spring? If you would like to try it on anyone as a serial I am willing to send in chapters. But I have only one fair copy. I have had to go back and revise early chapters as the plot and plan took firmer shape and so nothing has yet been sufficiently definitive to type.

I suppose the German edition of The Hobbit will probably never appear now? It was a great disappointment to my son and myself. We had a bet between us on the version of the opening sentence. My son is now in Italy,

whither he has carried The Hobbit, and occasionally sends enquiries for more of the sequel, which he knew and approved as far as it went. But there is no time, or very little even when one steals from other more dutiful claims.

I wish you would publish poor ‘Farmer Giles’ in the interim. He is at least finished, though very slender in bulk. But he amuses the same people, although Mr Furth seemed to think he has no obvious public. He has mouldered in a drawer since he amused H. S. Bennett’s

children when I was in Cambridge last March. Admittedly they are bright children. . . . .

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

38 To Stanley Unwin

[Tolkien had still not delivered the foreword to the Clark Hall Beowulf translation by 27 March, when Allen & Unwin wrote a desperate letter asking what had happened to it, and telling him that ‘a word or two’ would be enough. The text sent by Tolkien with the following letter was, despite its length, used in full when the book was published.]

30 March 1940

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Unwin,

Apologies would be vain in the face of my vexatious and uncivil behaviour. So I felt long ago – that the only possible reply to your repeated enquiry of March 5 was copy. I have got into worse trouble than I need – in spite of the many disasters that have befallen me

– since I have foolishly wasted much labour and time under a misapprehension, which a more careful consideration of the pagination of the page-proofs might have dispelled.

I knew that a ‘word or two’ would suffice (though I could not feel that any words under my name would have any particular value unless they said something worth saying – which takes space). But I believed that more was hoped for. I cannot lay my hand on the relative letter, and in any case I now realise that an earlier stage, before page-proof, was envisaged. I can only regret that I did not get something done at an earlier stage. For a fairly considerable ‘preface’ is really required. The so-called ‘Introduction’ does not exist, being merely an argument:

there is no reference whatever to either a translator’s or a critic’s problems. I advised originally against any attempt to bring the apparatus of the old book up to date – it can be got by students elsewhere. But I did not expect a reduction to 10 lines, while the ‘argument’ (the least useful part) was re-written at length.

That being so I laboured long and hard to compress (and yet enliven) such remarks on translation as might both be useful to students and of interest to those using the book without reference to the original text. But the result ran to 17 of my MSS. pages (of some 300 words each) – not counting the metrical appendix,

the most original part, which is as long again!

I was in this stage early in March, and trying to make up my mind what to jettison, when your letter of March 27th reached me (yesterday). All very foolish. For the pagination indicates clearly my share as a very small one.

All I can do now is to send in what I have done. You might care to consider it (submitting it to Wrenn) for inclusion later, e.g. if a further edition is required. (Retouched it might make a suitable booklet for students. The metrical account, being on a novel plan, and considering the relations of style and metre, might be attractive, as students are usually rather at sea on this subject.)

To meet the immediate emergency – I suggest (with grief, reluctance, and penitence) that the passages marked in red (? 1400 words), or those in blue (750–800?) might serve. If not too long.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

39 From a letter to Michael Tolkien

29 September 1940

[In the late summer of 1940, two women evacuees were billeted for a short time on the Tolkien household.]

Our evacuees went off again this morning, back home to Ashford (they were railway folk), after scenes of comedy and pathos. I have never come across more simple, helpless, gentle and unhappy souls (mother and daughter-in-law). They had been away from their husbands for the first time in their married lives, and found they would prefer to be blown to bits.

40 From a letter to Michael Tolkien

6 October 1940

[In September 1939 Tolkien’s second son, then aged nearly nineteen, volunteered for army service, but was instructed to spend one year at university and then enlist. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, and left it again the following summer to train as an anti-aircraft gunner.]

I am very sorry indeed, dear boy, that your Varsity career has been cut in two. It would have been better, if you had been the elder and could have finished before the army took you. But I still hope you will be able to come back again. And certainly you will learn a lot, first! Though in times of peace we get, perhaps (and naturally and for the purpose rightly), too engrossed in thinking of everything as a preparation or training or a making one fit – for what? At any minute it is what we are and are doing, not what we plan to be and do that counts. But I cannot pretend that I myself found that idea much comfort against the waste of time and militarism of the army. It isn’t the tough stuff one minds so much. I was pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again.

41 From a letter to Michael Tolkien

2 January 1941

I have been clearing up arrears of correspondence, and have at last got as far as getting out my story again; but as soon as I get really started, term will be casting its shadow ahead, and I shall have to think of lectures and committees.

42 To Michael Tolkien

[After taking part with his gun-battery in the defence of aerodromes during the Battle of Britain, Michael was injured in an accident with an army vehicle during night training, and was sent to hospital in Worcester. This is one of several letters his father sent to him there.]

12 January 1941

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford