The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

95 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

18 January 1945 (FS 76)

I read till 11.50, browsing through the packed and to me enthralling pages of Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England. A period mostly filled with most intriguing Question Marks. I’d give a bit for a time-machine. But of course my mind being what it is (and wholly different from Stenton’s) it is the things of racial and linguistic significance that attract me and stick in my memory. Still, I hope one day you’ll be able (if you wish) to delve into this intriguing story of the origins of our peculiar people. And indeed of us in particular. For barring the Tolkien (which must long ago have become a pretty thin strand) you are a Mercian or Hwiccian (of Wychwood) on both sides.

96 To Christopher Tolkien

30 January 1945 (FS 78)

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

My dearest Chris,

. . . . The minor imp of Slubgob’s brood who specially attends to preventing C.S.L. and myself from meeting provided a special attraction in the morning with the leaking of the scullery tap coinciding with the blocking of the sink! It took me until nearly 11 a.m. to get that cleared up. But I got to Magdalen, where after a brief shiver over 2 depressing elm-logs (elm won’t burn) we decided to seek warmth and beer at the Mitre: we got both (pubs manage their business better than bursars: upon my word, I don’t think the latter gentry would even hold down a Kiwi job in the R.A.F.!). A good many things happened then. My rest was rudely broken by a ‘phone call on business from which quite incidentally I learned the startling news that Prof. H. C. Wyld

died on Saturday. God rest his soul. But he leaves me a legacy of terrestrial trouble. For one thing I’ve got to make up mind what to do about the succession. Five years ago I’d have been thinking of how to get the Merton chair myself: my ambition was to get C.S.L. and myself into the 2 Merton Chairs.

It would be marvellous to be both in the same college – and for me to be in a real college and shake off the dust of miserable Pembroke. But I think prob. not – even if there was a chance … To continue the tale. About supper time the glass fell and the therm, rose, and a great downfall of snow with a wind (W to SW) began. It was piled high against the doors before midnight, but was really thawing underneath, so that although it went on, off and on, all night it was nowhere much over ½ a foot except in knee high drifts. All the same coal, coke, and fowls had vanished, and I had a most laborious morning digging things out before going to lecture. I arrived late (after an appalling acrobatic ride) attired like a ‘Skegness’ fisherman,

and my apology for being late on the platform (Taylorian theatre) as I had been catching sardines, was very well received, better indeed than my subsequent disquisition on Offa of Angel, or on the itinerary of Israel from Egypt to the Red Sea. At the subsequent Bird and B. session (thank heaven, no fish arrived in port!) the UQ (alias Honest Humphrey) arrived tricked out in mountaineering kit. When asked why he was out of uniform he replied: ‘I am not in the Swiss Navy. The British Navy does not come out in snow.’ Alas, he’s being transferred to Liverpool soon. Indescribable mixture of ice and slush. I fell off three times, and was, of course, hustled into the gutter and drenched in fountains of filthy squelch by those amiable people who drive ‘private cars’. It took me till nigh 3.30 to finish the clearance of snow and clear drains, and then I settled down to your delightful letters. I hadn’t a moment to look at them when they arrived at breakfast time. But they had their effect by merely arriving, as you can see by my skittishness on the platform and from C.S.L.’s remark at the B & B.: ‘What’s the matter with him this moming, he’s quite above himself?’. . . .

As for Eden. I think most Christians, except the v. simple and uneducated or those protected in other ways, have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they’ve sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don’t you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fideles who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer. In consequence they have indeed (myself as much as any), as you say, forgotten the beauty of the matter even ‘as a story’. Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay (if published I don’t know)

showing of what great value the ‘story-value’ was, as mental nourishment – of the whole Chr. story (NT especially). It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. His point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth. So that the faintheart ‘admirer’ is really still getting something, which even one of the faithful (stupid, insensitive, shamefaced) may be missing. But partly as a development of my own thought on my lines and work (technical and literary), partly in contact with C.S.L., and in various ways not least the firm guiding hand of Alma Mater Ecclesia, I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on the Eden ‘myth’. It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the NT, which are virtually contemporary documents, while Genesis is separated by we do not know how many sad exiled generations from the Fall, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’. If you come to think of it, your (very just) horror at the stupid murder of the hawk, and your obstinate memory of this ‘home’ of yours in an idyllic hour (when often there is an illusion of the stay of time and decay and a sense of gentle peace) –

,

‘stands the clock at ten to three, and is there honey still for tea’ – are derived from Eden. As far as we can go back the nobler part of the human mind is filled with the thoughts of sibb, peace and goodwill, and with the thought of its loss. We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance, which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it, but on a higher plane. Just as (to compare a small thing) the converted urban gets more out of the country than the mere yokel, but he cannot become a real landsman, he is both more and in a way less (less truly earthy anyway). Of course, I suppose that, subject to the permission of God, the whole human race (as each individual) is free not to rise again but to go to perdition and carry out the Fall to its bitter bottom (as each individual can singulariter

). And at certain periods, the present is notably one, that seems not only a likely event but imminent. Still I think there will be a ‘millenium’, the prophesied thousand-year rule of the Saints, i.e. those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit (in modern but not universal terms: mechanism, ‘scientific’ materialism, Socialism in either of its factions now at war).

I am so glad you felt that ‘the Ring’ is keeping up its standard, and (it seems) achieving that difficult thing in a long tale: maintaining a difference of quality and atmosphere in events that might easily become ‘samey’. For myself, I was prob. most moved by Sam’s disquisition on the seamless web of story, and by the scene when Frodo goes to sleep on his breast, and the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance – but for one rough word from Sam. But the ‘moving’ quality of that is on a different plane to Celebrimbor etc. There are two quit diff. emotions: one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty in evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past (best expressed by Gandalf’s words about the Palantir); and the other the more ‘ordinary’ emotion, triumph, pathos, tragedy of the characters. That I am learning to do, as I get to know my people, but it is not really so near my heart, and is forced on me by the fundamental literary dilemma. A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached – or if so only to become ‘near trees’ (unless in Paradise or N’s Parish).

Well my space will soon run out, and also it is 9 p.m., and I have some letters of necessity to write, and 2 lectures tomorrow, so I must be thinking of closing down soon. I read eagerly all details of your life, and the things you see and do – and suffer, Jive and Boogie-Woogie among them. You will have no heart-tug at losing that (for it is essentially vulgar, music corrupted by the mechanism, echoing in dreary unnourished heads), but you’ll remember the other things, even the storms and the dry veld and even the smells of camp, when you return to this other land. I can see clearly now in my mind’s eye the old trenches and the squalid houses and the long roads of Artois, and I would visit them again if I could. . . . .

I have just heard the news. . . . . Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly: destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well – you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Govemment. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move?. . . . All the love of your own father.