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33 To C. A. Furth, Allen & Unwin

31 August 1938

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Furth,

I am not so much pressed, as oppressed (or depressed). Further troubles which I need not detail have occurred, and I collapsed (or bent) under them. I have been unwell, since I saw you – in fact I reached the edge of a breakdown, and was ordered by the doctor to stop short. I have done nothing for a week or two – being in fact quite unable. But I am beginning to feel a good deal better. I am now (tomorrow) going away for a fortnight’s holiday; which I had not planned and cannot afford, though it seems required by my own health and my youngest son’s. . . . .

I did not entirely forget ‘Farmer Giles’: I had it typed. I submit it now, for your consideration in its rather altered scope and tone. A good many folk have found it very diverting (I think that is the right word): but that is as may be! I see that it is not long enough to stand alone probably – at least not as a commercial proposition (if indeed it cd. ever be such a thing). It probably requires more of its kind. I have planned out a sequel¹ (though it does not need one), and have an unfinished pseudo-Celtic fairy-story of a mildly satirical order, which is also amusing as far as it has gone, called the King of the Green Dozen.² These I might finish off if Giles seems to you worthy of print and companionship.

In the last two or three days, after the benefit of idleness and open air, and the sanctioned neglect of duty, I have begun again on the sequel to the ‘Hobbit’ – The Lord of the Ring. It is now flowing along, and getting quite out of hand. It has reached about Chapter VII and progresses towards quite unforeseen goals. I must say I think it is a good deal better in places and some ways than the predecessor; but that does not say that I think it either more suitable or more adapted for its audience. For one thing it is, like my own children (who have the immediate serial rights), rather ‘older’. I can only say that Mr Lewis (my stout backer of the Times and T.L.S.) professes himself more than pleased. If the weather is wet in the next fortnight we may have got still further on. But it is no bed-time story. . . . .

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

34 To Stanley Unwin

13 October 1938

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Unwin,

. . . . I have worked very hard for a month (in the time which my doctors said must be devoted to some distraction!) on a sequel to The Hobbit. It has reached Chapter XI (though in rather an illegible state); I am now thoroughly engrossed in it, and have the threads all in hand – and I have to put it completely aside, till I do not know when. Even the Christmas vacation will be darkened by New Zealand scripts, as my friend Gordon¹ died in the middle of their Honours Exams, and I had to finish setting the papers. But I still live in hopes that I may be able to submit it early next year.

When I spoke, in an earlier letter to Mr Furth, of this sequel getting ‘out of hand’, I did not mean it to be complimentary to the process. I really meant it was running its course, and forgetting ‘children’, and was becoming more terrifying than the Hobbit. It may prove quite unsuitable. It is more ‘adult’ – but my own children who criticize it as it appears are now older. However, you will be the judge of that, I hope, some day! The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it. Though it is not an ‘allegory’. (I have already had one letter from America asking for an authoritative exposition of the allegory of The Hobbit).

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

35 To C. A. Furth, Allen & Unwin

2 February 1939

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Furth,

By the end of last term the new story – The Lord of the Rings – had reached Chapter 12 (and had been re-written several times), running to over 300 MS. pages of the size of this paper and written generally as closely. It will require 200 at least to finish the story that has developed. Could you give me any idea of the latest date by which the completed MSS. ought to reach you? I have worked under difficulties of all kinds, including ill-health. Since the beginning of December I have not been able to touch it. Among many other labours and troubles that the sudden death of my friend Professor Eric Gordon bequeathed to me, I had to clear up the New Zealand examinations, which occupied nearly all last vacation. I then caught influenza, from which I have just recovered. But I have other heavy tasks ahead. I am at the ‘peak’ of my educational financial stress, with a second son clamouring for a university and the youngest wanting to go to school (after a year under heart-specialists), and I am obliged to do exams and lectures and what not. Perhaps you ought to be thinking about Mr Bliss. And what about Farmer Giles? You had the MSS. of the enlarged form in September or October.

I think The Lord of the Rings is in itself a good deal better than The Hobbit, but it may not prove a very fit sequel. It is more grown up – but the audience for which The Hobbit was written has done that also. The readers young and old who clamoured for ‘more about the Necromancer’ are to blame, for the N. is not child’s play.^fn4 My eldest son is enthusiastic, but it would be a relief to me to know that my publishers were satisfied. If the part so far written satisfied you, there need be no fear of the whole. I wonder whether it would not be a wise thing to get what I have done typed and let you see it? I shall certainly finish it eventually whatever you think of it; but if it did not seem to be what you want to follow The Hobbit there would be no desperate pressure. The writing of The Lord of the Rings is laborious, because I have been doing it as well as I know how, and considering every word. The story, too, has (I fondly imagine) some significance. In spare time it would be easier and quicker to write up the plots already composed of the more lighthearted stories of the Little Kingdom to go with Farmer Giles. But I would rather finish the long tale, and not let it go cold.

Let me know what you think. I may get part of the Easter Vac. free. Not all – I shall have some papers to set; and some work in preparation for a possible ‘National Emergency’ (which will take a week out).¹ I have to go to Scotland either in March or April. It is conceivable I could finish by June. And the MSS. would be final (no knocking page-proofs about). But I should have no time or energy for illustration. I never could draw, and the half-baked intimations of it seem wholly to have left me. A map (very necessary) would be all I could do.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

36 To C. A. Furth, Allen & Unwin

[On 8 February, Furth sent a royalty cheque for The Hobbit, and told Tolkien that the middle of June was the latest date by which Allen & Unwin must have the new story if they were going to publish it by Christmas.]

10 February 1939

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Furth,

Thank you very much for your letter – and the enclosed cheque: which was rather a welcome tonic. The influenza has not damaged me much, though it caught me in a state of exam-exhaustion; but my throat seems to be getting worse, and I don’t feel very bright. . . . .

I will get my stuff typed and let you have it; and (if it meets with approval, and does not demand extensive rewriting) I think I shall make a special effort, at the expense of other duties, to finish it off before June 15th. . . . .

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 war¹ 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,² 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’s³ 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^fn5 – 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:² 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,³ 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

My dearest Mick,

It seems a long time since I wrote: and it has been a rather dreary and busy time, with a foul east wind blowing steadily, day after day, and the weather varying from bone-piercing cold to grey damp chill I have had one amusement lately: Dr Havard¹ took me and the Lewis brothers² out to a pub at Appleton on a snowy skiddy night last Tuesday. J.B. had given me a little pot of snuff as a birthday present. So I brought it out of my pocket and read out the ancient label: ‘AS SUPPLIED to THEIR MAJESTIES the KINGS of HANOVER & BELGIUM etc. the DUKE of CUMBERLAND and the DUCHESS of KENT’. ‘Will any one have any?’ I said. Many horny hands of yokels were thrust out. And several caplifting explosions followed! You had better not tell J.B. what I did with (a small portion) of the precious Fribourg and Treyer stuff. Major Lewis – unaware that Blackwell³ lives at Appleton and that the locals were all ears – gave an amusing account of visiting Blackwell’s shop with Hugo Dyson.⁴ When he came to the point at which the assistant returned to Hugo and said: Sorry, sir, we have no second-hand copy, but we have a new copy (and H. replied Well, rub it on the floor and make it second-hand: it’s all the same to me), there was loud applause. Apart from this brief interlude, life has been rather dull, and much too full of committees and legislative business, which has kept me up late several nights. . . . .

Air Raid warnings are frequent here, but (so far) remain just Warnings … I fancy things will ‘blow up’ earlier this year than last – weather permitting – and that we shall have a pretty hectic time in every corner of this island! It is also plain that our dear old friends the U.S.S.R. are up to some mischief.⁵ It is a pretty close race with time. . . . . I don’t suppose mere ‘citizens’ really have any knowledge of what is going on. But plain reasoning seems to show that Hitler must attack this country direct and v. heavily soon, and before the summer. Meanwhile the ‘Daily Worker’⁶ is cried in the streets unmolested. We shall have some lively times after the War even if we win it as far as Germany is concerned.

God bless you, my dear son. I pray for you constantly. Remember me. Do you want anything specially? Very much love from your

Father.

43 From a letter to Michael Tolkien

6–8 March 1941

[On the subject of marriage and relations between the sexes.]

A man’s dealings with women can be purely physical (they cannot really, of course: but I mean he can refuse to take other things into account, to the great damage of his soul (and body) and theirs); or ‘friendly’; or he can be a ‘lover’ (engaging and blending all his affections and powers of mind and body in a complex emotion powerfully coloured and energized by ‘sex’). This is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall. The world has been ‘going to the bad’ all down the ages. The various social forms shift, and each new mode has its special dangers: but the ‘hard spirit of concupiscence’ has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell. We will leave aside the ‘immoral’ results. These you desire not to be dragged into. To renunciation you have no call. ‘Friendship’ then? In this fallen world the ‘friendship’ that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman. The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject. He is as good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones. This ‘friendship’ has often been tried: one side or the other nearly always fails. Later in life when sex cools down, it may be possible. It may happen between saints. To ordinary folk it can only rarely occur: two minds that have really a primarily mental and spiritual affinity may by accident reside in a male and a female body, and yet may desire and achieve a ‘friendship’ quite independent of sex. But no one can count on it. The other partner will let him (or her) down, almost certainly, by ‘falling in love’. But a young man does not really (as a rule) want ‘friendship’, even if he says he does. There are plenty of young men (as a rule). He wants love: innocent, and yet irresponsible perhaps. Allas! Alias! that ever love was sinne! as Chaucer says. Then if he is a Christian and is aware that there is such a thing as sin, he wants to know what to do about it.

There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition still strong, though as a product of Christendom (yet by no means the same as Christian ethics) the times are inimical to it. It idealizes ‘love’ – and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service’, courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity – of the old-fashioned ‘his divinity’ = the woman he loves – the object or reason of noble conduct. This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion (as long ago it was, producing much of that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God’s way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion) it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman. Yet I still think it has dangers. It is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly ‘theocentric’. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. (One result is for observation of the actual to make the young man turn cynical.) To forget their desires, needs and temptations. It inculcates exaggerated notions of ‘true love’, as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose. (One result of that is to make young folk look for a ‘love’ that will keep them always nice and warm in a cold world, without any effort of theirs; and the incurably romantic go on looking even in the squalor of the divorce courts).

Women really have not much part in all this, though they may use the language of romantic love, since it is so entwined in all our idioms. The sexual impulse makes women (naturally when unspoiled more unselfish) very sympathetic and understanding, or specially desirous of being so (or seeming so), and very ready to enter into all the interests, as far as they can, from ties to religion, of the young man they are attracted to. No intent necessarily to deceive: sheer instinct: the servient, helpmeet instinct, generously warmed by desire and young blood. Under this impulse they can in fact often achieve very remarkable insight and understanding, even of things otherwise outside their natural range: for it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male. Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him. But this is their natural avenue to love. Before the young woman knows where she is (and while the romantic young man, when he exists, is still sighing) she may actually ‘fall in love’. Which for her, an unspoiled natural young woman, means that she wants to become the mother of the young man’s children, even if that desire is by no means clear to her or explicit. And then things are going to happen: and they may be very painful and harmful, if things go wrong. Particularly if the young man only wanted a temporary guiding star and divinity (until he hitches his waggon to a brighter one), and was merely enjoying the flattery of sympathy nicely seasoned with a titillation of sex – all quite innocent, of course, and worlds away from ‘seduction’.

You may meet in life (as in literature^fn6) women who are flighty, or even plain wanton – I don’t refer to mere flirtatiousness, the sparring practice for the real combat, but to women who are too silly to take even love seriously, or are actually so depraved as to enjoy ‘conquests’, or even enjoy the giving of pain – but these are abnormalities, even though false teaching, bad upbringing, and corrupt fashions may encourage them. Much though modem conditions have changed feminine circumstances, and the detail of what is considered propriety, they have not changed natural instinct. A man has a life-work, a career, (and male friends), all of which could (and do where he has any guts) survive the shipwreck of ‘love’. A young woman, even one ‘economically independent’, as they say now (it usually really means economic subservience to male commercial employers instead of to a father or a family), begins to think of the ‘bottom drawer’ and dream of a home, almost at once. If she really falls in love, the shipwreck may really end on the rocks. Anyway women are in general much less romantic and more practical. Don’t be misled by the fact that they are more ‘sentimental’ in words – freer with ‘darling’, and all that. They do not want a guiding star. They may idealize a plain young man into a hero; but they don’t really need any such glamour either to fall in love or to remain in it. If they have any delusion it is that they can ‘reform’ men. They will take a rotter open-eyed, and even when the delusion of reforming him fails, go on loving him. They are, of course, much more realistic about the sexual relation. Unless perverted by bad contemporary fashions they do not as a rule talk ‘bawdy’; not because they are purer than men (they are not) but because they don’t find it funny. I have known those who pretended to, but it is a pretence. It may be intriguing, interesting, absorbing (even a great deal too absorbing) to them: but it is just plumb natural, a serious, obvious interest; where is the joke?

They have, of course, still to be more careful in sexual relations, for all the contraceptives. Mistakes are damaging physically and socially (and matrimonially). But they are instinctively, when uncorrupt, monogamous. Men are not. . . . . No good pretending. Men just ain’t, not by their animal nature. Monogamy (although it has long been fundamental to our inherited ideas) is for us men a piece of ‘revealed’ ethic, according to faith and not to the flesh. Each of us could healthily beget, in our 30 odd years of full manhood, a few hundred children, and enjoy the process. Brigham Young (I believe) was a healthy and happy man. It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls.

However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that – even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it. When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only —. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances). It is notorious that in fact happy marriages are more common where the ‘choosing’ by the young persons is even more limited, by parental or family authority, as long as there is a social ethic of plain unromantic responsibility and conjugal fidelity. But even in countries where the romantic tradition has so far affected social arrangements as to make people believe that the choosing of a mate is solely the concern of the young, only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation; as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by ‘failure’ and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will. . . . .