The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

Pray for me. I need it, sorely. I love you.

Your own Father.

46 From a draft to R. W. Chapman

26 November 1941

[George S. Gordon, who died early in 1942, was Tolkien’s head of department at Leeds University in the early 1920s, before becoming Professor of English Literature at Oxford and then President of Magdalen College. This draft appears to have been written in reply to a request from Chapman, the Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, for reminiscences of Gordon, perhaps to be incorporated into an obituary; Gordon was already known to be terminally ill at the time the letter was written.]

I do not remember dates. Perhaps you know these? I put down some impressions, from which your skill may select a few notes or phrases that may seem appropriate. I associate Leeds with Gordon, although as a matter of fact of my six years there (1920–1925 and one year as a pluralist)

the larger part was spent in the company of Abercrombie.

I remember that (before the last war) Gordon’s departure from Oxford

was viewed with some consternation among the undergraduates of the English School in Oxford; but as a stiff-necked young philologist I did not myself regard the event as important. I first met Gordon at the interview in Leeds (June 1920) for the ‘Readership’ in English Language: established after the death by drowning of Moorman.

I suppose the title (novel in Leeds), and the high salary (as such things go)

were both due to Gordon and his farsighted policy. I was, I believe, only a substitute for Sisam

(not the least of whose kindnesses was his pointing out the chance to me). But Gordon’s kindness and encouragement began at our first meeting. He rescued me from the barren waiting-room, and took me to his house. I remember we spoke of Raleigh

on the tram. As (still) a stiff-necked young philologist, I did not in fact think much of Raleigh – he was not, of course, a good lecturer; but some kind spirit prompted me to say that he was ‘Olympian’. It went well; though I only really meant that he reposed gracefully on a lofty pinnacle above my criticism.

I was extraordinarily fortunate. And if I speak so of myself, instead of directly and impersonally of Gordon, it is because my prime feeling and first thoughts of him are always of personal gratitude, of a friend rather than of an academic figure. It is not often in ‘universities’ that a Professor bothers with the domestic difficulties of a new junior in his twenties; but G. did. He found me rooms himself, and let me share his private room at the University. I do not think that my experience was peculiar. He was the very master of men. Anyone who worked under him could see (or at least suspect) that he neglected some sides of his own work: finding, especially, the sort of half-baked ‘research’, and dreary thesis-writing by the serious minded but semi-educated hunters of the M.A., of which there was far too much, an exceeding weariness, from which he sometimes took refuge in flight. Yet he created not a miserable little ‘department’, but a team. A team fired not only with a departmental esprit de corps, determined to put ‘English’ at the head of the Arts departments, but inspired also with a missionary zeal. . . . .

A personal contribution of his was his doctrine of lightheartedness: dangerous, perhaps, in Oxford, necessary in Yorkshire. No Yorkshireman, or woman, was ever in danger of regarding his class in finals as a matter of indifference (even if it did not have a lifelong effect on his salary as a school teacher): the poet might ‘sit in the third and laugh’, but the Yorkshire student would not. But he could be, and was, encouraged to play a little, to look outside the ‘syllabus’, to regard his studies as something larger and more amusing than a subject for an examination. This note Gordon struck and insisted on, and even expressed in print in the little brochure which he had made for the use of his students. There was very little false solemnity, except rarely and that among the students.

As for my side: the foundations were already securely laid for me, and the lines of development marked out. But, subject always to his unobtrusive control, I had a ‘free hand’. Every encouragement was given to development on the mediæval and linguistic side; and a friendly rivalry grew up between two, nearly equal, divisions. Each had its own ‘seminars’; and there were sometimes combined meetings. Quite the happiest and most balanced ‘School’ I have seen. I think it might be called a ‘School’. Gordon found ‘English’ in Leeds a departmental subject (I rather fancy you could not get a degree in it alone) and left it a school of studies (in bud). When he arrived he shared a box of glazed bricks, mainly furnished with hot water pipes, with the Professor of French, as their private room. Mere assistants possibly had a hat-peg somewhere. When he left we had ‘English House’, where every member had a separate room (not to mention a bathroom!) and a common room for students: and with this centre the growing body of students became a cohesive unit, and derived some of the benefits (or distant reflections of them) that we associate with a university rather than a municipal college. It would not have been difficult to build on this foundation. But I fancy that, after he left, the thing just ‘ran on’, and did not fall into hands of the same quality. In any case numbers fell and finances changed. And Vice-Chancellors. Sir Michael Sadler I imagine was a helpful superior; and he left about the same time.

47 To Stanley Unwin

[Unwin wrote on 4 December to say that Foyle’s bookshop in London were to issue The Hobbit under the imprint of their Children’s Book Club, and that this had enabled Allen & Unwin to reprint the book. This was all the more desirable as the previous stock of copies had been burnt during an air-raid on London.]

7 December 1942

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Unwin,

Thank you for your note, containing two items of hope. I have for some time intended to write and enquire whether in the present situation it was of any use, other than private and family amusement, to endeavour to complete the sequel to The Hobbit. I have worked on it at intervals since 1938, all such intervals in fact as trebled official work, quadrupled domestic work, and ‘Civil Defence’

have left. It is now approaching completion. I hope to get a little free time this vacation, and might hope to finish it off early next year. My heart rather misgives me, all the same. I ought to warn you that it is very long, in places more alarming than ‘The Hobbit’, and in fact not really a ‘juvenile’ at all. It has reached Chapter XXXI

and will require at least six more to finish (these are already sketched); and the chapters are as a rule longer than the chapters of The Hobbit. Is such an ‘epic’ possible to consider in the present circumstances? Would you like to wait, until it is really finished; or would you care to see a considerable portion of it now? It is in type-script (of various amateur hands) up to about Ch. xxiii. I don’t think you will be disappointed with the quality of it. It has had the approval of the original Hobbit audience (my sons and Mr C. S. Lewis), who have read or heard it many times. But it is a question of paper, bulk, and market! It would require two maps.

The burning of The Hobbit was a blow. I am to blame in not writing (as I intended) and expressing to you my sympathy with the grievous damage you must have sustained, of which I shared only a very small part. Is any ‘compensation’ eventually recoverable?. . . .

Would you also consider a volume, containing three or four shorter ‘Fairy’ stories and some verses? ‘Farmer Giles’, which I once submitted to you, has pleased a large number of children and grown-ups. If too short, I could add to it one or two similar tales, and include some verse on similar topics, including ‘Tom Bombadil’. . . .

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

48 To C. S. Lewis

[Lewis kept very few letters, and only two that Tolkien actually sent to him have survived. (For the second, see no. 113.) ‘The U.Q.’ is an abbreviation for ‘Useless Quack’, the nickname given by his fellow Inklings to R. E. Havard, Tolkien and Lewis’s doctor. ‘Ridley’ was M. R. Ridley of Balliol College, who, with Tolkien and Lewis, was involved in teaching forces cadets at the university, on the wartime ‘short courses’. Lewis was, meanwhile, also travelling around England giving talks on the Christian religion to RAF stations.]

20 April 1943

[20 Northmoor Road, Oxford]

My dear Jack,

V: sorry to hear you are laid low – and with no U.Q. to suggest that it may be your last illness! You must be v: disconsolate. I begin to think that for us to meet on Wednesdays is a duty: there seem to be so many obstacles and fiendish devices to prevent it.

I hope to have a good report of you soon. But do not trouble yourself. Ridley was so astounded at the ignorance of all 22 cadets, revealed in his first class, that he has leaped at the chance of another hour, esp. since otherwise there was no ‘Use of E[nglish]’ class next week at all. You can (if you wish) shove in ‘Arthur’

on some other date, when you are recovered fully. The tutorials do not matter.

I fear you are attempting too much. For even if you have merely got ‘flu’, you are prob. tiring yourself into an easy victim. As a mere ‘director’, I shall hope v. much to persuade you to ease off in travel (if poss.), and put some weight into this cadet stuff. I am a bit alarmed by it. My lone machine-gun since it started seems to me to have missed the target, and it needs at least one more gun – to depend on – other than the valuable Ridley.

I lunched at the Air Squadron to-day & got a brief whiff of an atmosphere now all too familiar to you, I expect.

Yours affectionately

T

PS. Ridley’s first question in the test-paper was a group of words to define – apposite, reverend, venal, choric, secular and a few others. Not one cadet got any of the words right.

49 To C. S. Lewis (draft)

[A comment on Lewis’s suggestion, in Christian Behaviour (1943), that ‘there ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage’: Christian marriage, which is binding and lifelong, and marriage-contracts solemnised only by the State, which make no such demands. The draft, apparently written in 1943, was found tucked into Tolkien’s copy of Lewis’s booklet.]

My dear L.,

I have been reading your booklet ‘Christian Behaviour’.

I have never felt happy about your view of Christian ‘policy’ with regard to divorce. I could not before say why – because on the surface your policy seems to be reasonable; and it is at any rate the system under which Roman Catholics already live. For the moment I will not argue whether your policy is in fact right (for today), even an inevitable situation. But I should like to point out that your opinion is in your booklet based on an argument that shows a confusion of thought discoverable from that booklet itself.

p. 34. ‘I’d be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.’ Justly so. Let us consider this point alone, at first. Why? Well, if we try to ascend straightaway to a rational plane, and leave behind mere anger with anyone who interferes with our habits (good or bad), the answer is: because the Mohammedans would be guilty of injustice. They would be injuring us by depriving us of our share in a universal human right, the temperate use of wine, against our will. You made that quite clear in your remarks about Temperance, p. 13.

But look now at pp. 26, 30, 31. There you will observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that Christian marriage – monogamous, permanent,But look now at pp. 26, 30, 31. There you will observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that Christian marriage – monogamous, permanent,

rigidly ‘faithful’ – is in fact the truth about sexual behaviour for all humanity: this is the only road of total health

(including