The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

10 June 1944 (FS 30)

[Written four days after the beginning of the Allied invasion of Normandy.]

I got your airletter at tea-time yesterday A great deal is happening at this end of the world. But I won’t enlarge on that, as doubtless you get the same news as we do, and as quick; and if one knew anything outside that it would be ‘indiscreet’ to mention it. As a matter of fact I don’t. But thank God it really looks like clearing up a bit this evening. It is calmer, warmer, and there are glimpses of sun and blue sky. I fancy weather is of paramount importance. . . . .

I last wrote on D. Day June 6. On Wed. I made special efforts with typing. Of the rest I can only remember that on Thursday I dined lugubriously in Pembroke, and then went to Magdalen, where the Lewises, C. Williams, and Edison (author of Ouroboros)

were assembled. From 9 until after 12.30 the time was occupied by reading. A long chapter from the Captain,

largely on the system of government in the ancien régime of France, which he managed to make very amusing (though it was very long) followed by Edison with a new chapter from an uncompleted romance

– of undiminished power and felicity of expression; myself; and C.S.L. Enjoyable, but no longer amid exams and wars to be taken so lightly as of old – especially as I had arisen at 5 a.m. (or 7 a.m. BDST) to get to Mass for Corpus Christi. . . . .

This morning. . . . was occupied with exams, the afternoon with a mass-meeting at Rhodes House in favour of a local Christian Council. . . . . There was one man. . . . who got up and said that he approved of a C. Council, because he had been Lord Nelson in his previous life, and had much appreciated being in Oxford during part of the present life; but nobody laughed – although he was one of the amiable kind, who would have liked it. He said so. But apparently he has made this speech so often, that it was taken as a matter of course. Just shows how little one can know of one’s own home-town, as I had never seen or heard of him before. . . . .

[11 June] I was very interested in all the descriptions: both of your abode and of the country. Your sharpened memory is I imagine due to 2 things (1) sharpened desire (2) new images which do not correspond to the old, and so do not overlay and blur them. Few inhabitants of a town who have never gone away can recall even the major changes in a street during the past year. My own rather sharp memory is probably due to the dislocation of all my childhood ‘pictures’ between 3 and 4 by leaving Africa: I was engaged in a constant attention and adjustment. Some of my actual visual memories I now recognize as beautiful blends of African and English details. . . . . As for what to try and write: I don’t know. I tried a diary with portraits (some scathing some comic some commendatory) of persons and events seen; but I found it was not my line. So I took to ‘escapism’: or really transforming experience into another form and symbol with Morgoth and Orcs and the Eldalie (representing beauty and grace of life and artefact) and so on; and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since and I still draw on the conceptions then hammered out. But, of course, there was no time except on leave or in hospital. . . . .

I certainly live on your letters, although my circumstances are so very much more easy. In my case weariness, sheer boredom of sameness is the enemy. If I were younger, I should wish to exchange with you, merely to change! I hope you can read some of this. Certainly sixpenn’orth as far as quantity (not quality I fear) goes. More anon.

74 From a letter to Stanley Unwin

29 June 1944

[Unwin wrote on 22 June, enclosing ‘a further substantial cheque’ for royalties earned by The Hobbit, and telling Tolkien that his son Rayner was now reading English at Oxford as a naval cadet: ‘He will be away next week on leave, but after his return I should much like him to meet you some time.’]

First about Rayner. I was both delighted and grieved at your news. Delighted because I shall have a chance of seeing him. I hope he will treat me in the most unprofessorial manner, and as soon as he gets back, will just let me know how we can meet: whether I can roll into his rooms, and whether he would care at any time to wander up here to my house and have tea (meagre) in my garden (untidy). Grieved because it is abominable to think that the passage of time and the prolongation of this misery has swept him up. My youngest boy, also Trinity, was carried off last July – in the midst of typing and revising the Hobbit sequel and doing a lovely map – and is now far away and very wretched, in the Orange Free State:

the fact that it was my native land does not seem to recommend it to him. I have at the moment another son, a much damaged soldier, at Trinity trying to do some work and recover a shadow of his old health.

. . . .

I am afraid I have treated you badly. Fortune has treated me pretty rough since I last wrote – though not rougher than many others, alas! – and I have had barely the energy or the time to get through the menial day. But I should have thanked you for your note about Foyles

and for the two copies of the edition. Also I might have let you know what was happening to the sequel to the Hobbit. Not a line on it was possible for a year. One of the results (until I was drowned in an abyss of exams) of release from work for R.N. and R.A.F. was that I managed to bring this (great) work to within sight of conclusion, and am now about to conclude it, disregarding all other calls, as far as is possible.

I hope you still have some mild interest in it, in spite of paper shortage – at any rate as a possible future. It is frightfully difficult and/or expensive getting anything typed in this town, and when my typewriter broke down nobody would repair it. I have still only one copy, and that needs revision as the thing nears its end. But I hope at last soon to be able to submit a chunk to you. A pity Rayner is now involved with other and more serious matters. In any case, I fear, the story has grown too long and unjuvenile.

Thank you very much for the cheque. Even halved it will be very useful. I still labour under debts, mainly due to trying to complete a family’s education after war had taken most of one’s means: not an uncommon experience.

75 To Christopher Tolkien

7 July 1944 (FS 36)

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

My Dearest: I thought I would try the experiment of an airletter on my midget type.

It is certainly as small, and a lot clearer than I could write. It is only two days since I last wrote, but I have a great desire to talk to you. Not that there is anything but the smallest news to tell. I haven’t had a chance to do any more writing yet. This morning I had shopping and cadets; and when on my way back to town for the second time my back tire blew up with a loud explosion, the inner tube having oozed through a gash in the outer cover. Fortunately this was not far from Denis, and I was able to console myself at The Gardeners’ Arms, not yet discovered by Stars or Stripes,

and where they serve a mixture of College Ale and Bitter. But I had to make a third journey after lunch: and from 5 to 8 was occupied enlarging the house, with bits of old wood and salvaged nails, for the new hen-folk, drat ‘em. I have just heard the news and so goes the day. There is a family of bullfinches, which must have nested in or near our garden, and they are very tame, and have been giving us entertainment lately by their antics feeding their young, often just outside the diningroom window. In sects on the trees and sowthistle seeds seem their chief delight. I had no idea they behaved so much like goldfinches. Old fat father, pink waistcoat and all, hangs absolutely upside down on a thistle-spray, tinking all the while. There are also a few wrens about. Otherwise nothing of note, though all birds are vastly increased in numbers, after the mild winters, and in these relatively catless days. The garden is its usual wilderness self, all deep green again, and still with abundant roses. The bright summer day turned to rain again by night and we have had a lot more, though not without breaks. . . . .

[9 July] A propos of bullfinches, did you know that they had a connexion with the noble art of brewing ale? I was looking at the Kalevala the other day – one of the books which I don’t think you have yet read? Or have you? – and I came across Runo XX, which I used to like: it deals largely with the origin of beer. When the fermentation was first managed, the beer was only in birch tubs and it foamed all over the place, and of course the heroes came and lapped it up, and got mightily drunk. Drunk was Ahti, drunk was Kauko, drunken was the ruddy rascal, with the ale of Osmo’s daughter – Kirby’s translation

is funnier than the original. It was the bullfinch who then suggested to Osmo’s daughter the notion of putting the stuff in oak casks with hoops of copper and storing it in a cellar. Thus was ale at first created … best of drinks for prudent people; Women soon it brings to laughter, Men it warms into good humour, but it brings the fools to raving. Sound sentiments. Poor old Finns, and their queer language, they look like being scuppered. I wish I could have visited the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes before this war. Finnish nearly ruined my Hon. Mods,

and was the original germ of the Silmarillion. . . . .

I wonder how you are getting on with your flying since you first went solo – the last news we had of this. I especially noted your observations on the skimming martins. That touches to the heart of things, doesn’t it? There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam Butler, sticks out so plainly and is so horrifyingly exhibited in our time, with its even worse menace for the future, that it seems almost a world wide mental disease that only a tiny minority perceive it. Even if people have ever heard the legends (which is getting rarer) they have no inkling of their portent. How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually revolving wheel! Well, I have got over 2 thousand words onto this little flimsy airletter; and I will forgive the Mordor-gadgets some of their sins, if they will bring it quickly to you . . .

76 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

28 July 1944 (FS 39)

As to Sam Gamgee. I quite agree with what you say, and I wouldn’t dream of altering his name without your approval; but the object of the alteration was precisely to bring out the comicness, peasantry, and if you will the Englishry of this jewel among the hobbits. Had I thought it out at the beginning, I should have given all the hobbits very English names to match the shire. The Gaffer came first; and Gamgee followed as an echo of old Lamorna jokes.

I doubt if it’s English. I knew of it only through Gamgee (Tissue) as cottonwool was called being invented by a man of that name last century. However, I daresay all your imagination of the character is now bound up with the name. Plain news is on the airgraph; but the only event worth of talk was the performance of Hamlet

which I had been to just before I wrote last. I was full of it then, but the cares of the world have soon wiped away the impression. But it emphasised more strongly than anything I have ever seen the folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study), except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted. It was a very good performance, with a young rather fierce Hamlet; it was played fast without cuts; and came out as a very exciting play. Could one only have seen it without ever having read it or knowing the plot, it would have been terrific. It was well produced except for a bit of bungling over the killing of Polonius. But to my surprise the part that came out as the most moving, almost intolerably so, was the one that in reading I always found a bore: the scene of mad Ophelia singing her snatches.

77 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

31 July 1944 (FS 41)

Neglecting other duties I’ve put in a good many hours typing and am now nearly at the end of the new stuff in the Ring; so soon I may go on and finish; and I hope shortly to send you another batch. . . . . Binney was here on Sat. to tea, in a v. pleasant mood; it cheered P. up, as she too is v. lonely with only a couple of old grousers, and nothing to do but read. She’s just read Out of the S. Planet and Perelandra; and with good taste preferred the latter. But she finds it hard to realise that Ransom is not meant to be a portrait of me (though as a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him). . . . . The news is good today. Things may begin to move fast now, if not quite so fast as some think. I wonder how long von Papen will manage to keep above ground?

But when the burst comes in France, then will be the time to get excited. How long? And what of the red Chrysanthemum in the East? And when it is all over, will ordinary people have any freedom left (or right) or will they have to fight for it, or will they be too tired to resist? The last rather seems the idea of some of the Big Folk. Who have for the most part viewed this war from the vantage point of large motor-cars. Too many are childless. But I suppose the one certain result of it all is a further growth in the great standardised amalgamations with their mass-produced notions and emotions. Music will give place to jiving: which as far as I can make out means holding a ‘jam session’ round a piano (an instrument properly intended to produce the sounds devised by, say, Chopin) and hitting it so hard that it breaks. This delicately cultured amusement is said to be a ‘fever’ in the U.S.A. O God! O Montreal! O Minnesota! O Michigan! What kind of mass manias the Soviets can produce remains for peace and prosperity and the removal of war-hypnotism to show. Not quite so dismal as the Western ones, perhaps (I hope). But one doesn’t altogether wonder at a few smaller states still wanting to be ‘neutral’; they are between the devil and the deep sea all right (and you can stick which D you like on to which side you like). However it’s always been going on in different terms, and you and I belong to the ever-defeated never altogether subdued side. I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians. Delenda est Carthago.

We hear rather a lot of that nowadays. I was actually taught at school that that was a fine saying; and I ‘reacted’ (as they say, in this case with less than the usual misapplication) at once. There lies still some hope that, at least in our beloved land of England, propaganda defeats itself, and even produces the opposite effect. It is said that it is even so in Russia; and I bet it is so in Germany. . . . .

[1 August] I hear that there is just coming out First Whispers of the Wind in the Willows; and the reviews seem favourable. It is published by Kenneth Grahame’s widow, but it is not, I gather, notes for the book, but stories (about Toad and Mole etc.) that he wrote in letters to his son. I must get hold of a copy, if poss. I’m afraid I have made a great mistake in making my sequel too long and complicated and too slow in coming out. It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits!

78 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

12 August 1944 (FS 43)

It is longer than I meant to leave since my airgr. of Aug. 8 … I read your letters carefully, and of course as is quite right you open your rather troubled heart to us; but do not think that any detail of your exterior life, your friends, acquaintance, or the most minor events, are not worth writing or of interest. I am glad that you are finding it (at times) easier to rub along. I shouldn’t worry too much, if the process sometimes seems to be a declension from the highest standards (intellectual and aesthetic, at any rate, not moral). I don’t think you are in the least likely permanently to decline upon the worse; and I should say that you need a little thickening of the outer skin, if only as a protection for the more sensitive interior; and if you acquire it, it will be of permanent value in any walk of later life in this tough world (which shows no signs of softening). And of course, as you already discover, one of the discoveries of the process is the realization of the values that often lurk under dreadful appearances. Urukhai is only a figure of speech. There are no genuine Uruks, that is folk made bad by the intention of their maker; and not many who are so corrupted as to be irredeemable (though I fear it must be admitted that there are human creatures that seem irredeemable short of a special miracle, and that there are probably abnormally many of such creatures in Deutschland and Nippon – but certainly these unhappy countries have no monopoly: I have met them, or thought so, in England’s green and pleasant land). All you say about the dryness, dustiness, and smell of the satan-licked land reminds me of my mother; she hated it (as a land) and was alarmed to see symptoms of my father growing to like it. It used to be said that no English-born woman could ever get over this dislike or be more than an exile, but that Englishmen (under the freer conditions of peace) could and usually did get to love it (as a land; I am saying nothing of any of its inhabitants). Oddly enough all that you say, even to its detriment, only increases the longing I have always felt to see it again. Much though I love and admire little lanes and hedges and rustling trees and the soft rolling contours of a rich champain, the thing that stirs me most and comes nearest to heart’s satisfaction for me is space, and I would be willing to barter barrenness for it; indeed I think I like barrenness itself, whenever I have seen it. My heart still lingers among the high stony wastes among the morains and mountain-wreckage, silent in spite of the sound of thin chill water. Intellectually and aesthetically, of course; man cannot live on stone and sand, but I at any rate cannot live on bread alone; and if there was not bare rock and pathless sand and the unharvested sea, I should grow to hate all green things as a fungoid growth. . . . .

I am absolutely dry of any inspiration for the Ring and am back where I was in the Spring, with all the inertia to overcome again. What a relief it would be to get it done. How I miss you on that count alone! I forgot to make a note of when I sent the MSS. off, but I suppose it must have been about a month ago and you may soon be getting it. I shan’t send any more until I know your next address, though the subsequent chapters are better. I shall be very eager to know what you think of them. This book has come to be more and more addressed to you, so that your opinion matters more than any one else’s.

79 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

22 August 1944 (FS 45)

[A reply to Christopher’s comments on Kroonstad, where he was stationed, and on Johannesburg.]

Kroonstad is the real product of our culture, as it now lives and is; Jo’burg (in its good spots) is what it would like to be, but only can be in special economic circumstances which are quite unstable and impermanent. In England, and there less than in most other European countries, it has up to now been softened and concealed by the relics of a former age (not confined to ruinous buildings). There will be a good many Kroonstads, architecturally, morally, and mentally, in this land in ten to twenty years time, when the Portal Houses, ‘temporary’, are blistered and bent like rotting tin mushrooms but nothing else is forthcoming. As in the former dark age, the Christian Church alone will carry over any considerable tradition (not unaltered, nor, it may be, undamaged) of a higher mental civilization, that is, if it is not driven down into new catacombs. Gloomy thoughts, about things one cannot really know anything [of]; the future is impenetrable especially to the wise; for what is really important is always hid from contemporaries, and the seeds of what is to be are quietly germinating in the dark in some forgotten corner, while everyone is looking at Stalin or Hitler, or reading illustrated articles on Beveridge (‘The Master of University College At Home’) in Picture Post. . . . .

This morning I lectured, and found the Bird and Baby