The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (48 page)

But, of course, for most people, ‘accent' as defined above is confused with impressions of different intonation, articulation, and tempo. You will, I suppose, have to use such means to make Orcs sound nasty!

I have no doubt that, if this ‘history' were real, all users of the C[ommon] Speech would reveal themselves by their accent, differing in place, people, and rank, but that cannot be represented when C. S. is turned into English – and is not (I think) necessary. I paid great attention to such linguistic differentiation as was possible: in diction, idiom, and so on; and I doubt if much more can be imported, except in so far as the individual actor represents his feeling for the character in tone and style.

As Minas Tirith is at the source of C. Speech it is to C.S. as London is to modern English, and the standard of comparison! None of its inhabitants should have an ‘accent' in terms of vowels &c.

The Rohirrim no doubt (as our ancient English ancestors in a similar state of culture and society) spoke, at least their own tongue, with a slower tempo and more sonorous articulation, than modern ‘urbans'. But I think it is safe to represent them when using C. S., as they practically always do (for obvious reasons) as speaking the best M[inas] T[irith]. Possibly a little too good, as it would be a learned language, somewhat slower and more careful than a native's. But that is a nicety safely neglected, and not always true:
Théoden
was born in Gondor and C.S. was the domestic language of the Golden Hall in his father's day (
Return of the King
p. 350).
¹

6 November 1956

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Tiller,

Lord of the Rings

I have not had time for more than two rapid readings of the 3 episodes that you sent me; but I suppose it is ‘now or never', if any comment is to be of practical use.

I am not offering any criticism of detail. The objects you had in making this version seem fairly clear, and (granted their value or legitimacy) I do not think that they could have been much better achieved. I wish your efforts all success.

But, as a private conversation between you and me, I could wish you had perhaps time to spare to tell me
why
this sort of treatment is accorded to the book, and what value it has – on Third. For myself, I do not believe that many, if any, listeners who do not know the book will
thread the plot or grasp at all what is going on. And the text is (necessarily in the space) reduced to such simple, even simple-minded, terms that I find it hard to believe it would hold the attention of the Third.

Here is a book very unsuitable for dramatic or semi-dramatic representation. If that is attempted it needs more space, a lot of space. It is sheerly impossible to pot the two books in the allotted time – whether the object be to provide something in itself entertaining in the medium; or to indicate the nature of the original (or both). Why not then turn it down as unsuitable, if more space is not available?

I remain, of course, flattered and pleased that my book should receive this attention; but I still cannot help wondering: why this form? Personally, I think it requires rather the older art of the reading ‘mime', than the more nearly dramatic, which results in too great an emphasis on dialogue (mostly with its setting removed). To take two points: (1) the episode of the corpse-candles is cut down to ineffectiveness; (2) the crucial moment when Gollum nearly repents disappears in a mere ‘
and so Gollum found them. . . &c
.' III/12. In this way both the ‘scenery' and the ‘characters' become flat: without precision and colour; and without motives or conflicts. I cannot help thinking that longer actual passages read, as a necklace upon a thread of narration (in which the narrator might occasionally venture an interpretation of more than mere plotevents) would, or might, prove both more interesting to listeners, and fairer to the author. But, as I have said, I lack experience in the medium, & this is in any case no criticism of your text, but a sighing for something quite different – a moon no doubt. Final query: can a tale not conceived dramatically but (for lack of a more precise term) epically, be dramatized – unless the dramatizer is given or takes liberties, as an independent person? I feel you have had a very hard task.

Yours sincerely

J. R. R. Tolkien.

15 December 1956

One point: Frodo's attitude to weapons was personal. He was not in modern terms a ‘pacifist'. Of course, he was mainly horrified at the prospect of civil war among Hobbits;
¹
but he had (I suppose) also reached the conclusion that physical fighting is actually less ultimately effective than most (good) men think it! Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history' to be anything but a ‘long defeat' – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

21 March 1957

I believe you have been much concerned with the troubles of poor Jack Lewis. Of these I know little beyond the cautious hints of the extremely discreet Havard. When I see Jack he naturally takes refuge in ‘literary' talk (for which no domestic griefs and anxieties have yet dimmed his enthusiasm).

9 May 1957

Your ‘bombshell' arrived at a moment of rush. . . . . Otherwise I would have thanked you for your kind letter sooner.

If I had had any notion of this, I should have thought seriously of retiring at the proper time (this July) and refusing the extra two years, which will not make sufficient difference to my superannuation pittance to be worth bothering about. As it is, I am merely going to be fined for going on ‘working', about to the equivalent of my salary, unless my I[ncome] T[ax] agent is unduly gloomy about this remarkable second instalment. Also it is practically impossible to get any connected time to spend on
The Silmarillion
while I remain in office. I have had to lay it aside since last autumn; though I hope to resume it at the end of next month. I have not been very well lately, and am beginning to be affected by arthritis which often makes long sitting painful.

Aggrieved as I am at being deprived of the fruits of so many years labour (which meant not only the sacrifice of leisure but also of other occupations of immediate annual profit), I must say I am very much enheartened by your sales-report and hopes for the immediate future, not only on my own account, but on yours (and A. & U.'s) too. You have been so kind and patient to me; and without your encouragement, and generous ‘adventure', I expect the
L. of the R.
would still be a heap of MS. I am afraid I cannot help feeling that there is a lot to be said for ‘the grosser forms of literary success' as a sneering critic recently called it (not mine but a ‘grosser' case).

19 June 1957

As far as I am concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization; and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility. I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the B.B.C.

24 June 1957

Though it is a great compliment, I am really rather sorry to find myself the subject of a thesis. I do not feel inclined to go into biographical detail. I doubt its relevance to criticism. Certainly in any form less than a complete biography, interior and exterior, which I alone could write, and which I do not intend to write. The chief biographical fact to me is the completion of
The Lord of the Rings
, which still astonishes me. A notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher, partly through lack of time, partly through lack of single-minded concentration, I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties, and bring it to a conclusion. I suppose, because from the beginning it began to catch up in its narrative folds visions of most of the things that I have most loved or hated.

I did not go to a ‘public' school in the sense of a residential school; but to a great ‘grammar school', of ultimately medieval foundation. My experience had therefore nothing whatever in common with that of Mr. Lewis. I was at the one school from 1900 to 1911, with one short interval. I was as happy or the reverse at school as anywhere else, the faults being my own. I ended up anyway as a perfectly respectable and tolerably successful senior. I did not dislike games. They were not compulsory, fortunately, as I have always found cricket a bore: chiefly, though, because I was not good at it. . . . .

I have not published any other short story but
Leaf by Niggle
. They do not arise in my mind.
Leaf by Niggle
arose suddenly and almost complete. It was written down almost at a sitting, and very nearly in the form in which it now appears. Looking at it myself now from a distance I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called
The Tree
), it arose from my own pre-occupation with
The Lord of the Rings
, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be ‘not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story. . . . .

I read the works of [E.R.] Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him. I heard him in Mr. Lewis's room in Magdalen College read aloud some parts of his own works – from the
Mistress of Mistresses
, as far as I remember.
¹
He did it extremely well. I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit. My opinion of them is almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on p. 104 of the
Essays presented to Charles Williams
.
²
Except that I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw fit to say of himself. Eddison thought what I admire ‘soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly ‘philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of ‘invented worlds' that I have read. But he was certainly not an ‘influence'.

The general idea of the
Lord of the Rings
was certainly in my mind from an early stage: that is from the first draft of Book I Chapter 2, written in the 1930s. From time to time I made rough sketches or synopses of what was to follow, immediately or far ahead; but these were seldom of much use: the story unfolded itself as it were. The tying-up was achieved, so far as it is achieved, by constant re-writing backwards. I had a many-columned calendar with dates and a brief statement of where all the major actors or groups were on each day and what they were doing.

The last volume was naturally the most difficult, since by that time I had accumulated a large number of narrative debts, and set some awkward problems of presentation in drawing together the separated threads. But the problem was not so much ‘what happened?', about which I was only occasionally in doubt – though praised for ‘invention' I have not in fact any conscious memory of sitting down and deliberately thinking out any episode – as how to order the account of it. The solution is imperfect. Inevitably.

Obviously the chief problem of this sort, is how to bring up Aragorn unexpectedly to the raising of the Siege, and yet inform readers of what he had been up to. Told in full in its proper place (Vol III, ch.2), though it would have been better for the episode, it would have destroyed Chapter 6. Told in full, or indeed in part, in retrospect it would be out of date and hold up the action (as it does in Chapter 9).

The solution, imperfect, was to cut down the whole episode (which in full would belong rather to a
Saga of Aragorn Arathorn's son
than to my story) and tell the ending of it briefly during the inevitable pause after the Battle of the Pelennor.

I was in fact longest held up – by exterior circumstances as well as interior – at the point now represented by the last words of Book iii (reached about 1942 or 3). After that Chapter 1 of Book v remained very long as a mere opening (as far as the arrival in Gondor); Chapter 2 did not exist; and Chapter 3, Muster of Rohan, had got no further than the arrival at Harrowdale. Chapter 1 of Book iv had hardly got beyond Sam's opening words (Vol II p. 209). Some parts of the adventures of Frodo and Sam on the confines of Mordor and in it had been written (but were eventually abandoned).

25 June 1957

I note your remarks about Sauron. He was always de-bodied when vanquished. The theory, if one can dignify the modes of the story with such a term, is that he was a spirit, a minor one but still an ‘angelic' spirit. According to the mythology of these things that means that, though of course a creature, he belonged to the race of intelligent beings that were made before the physical world, and were permitted to assist in their measure in the making of it. Those who became most involved in this work of Art, as it was in the first instance, became so engrossed with it, that when the Creator made it real (that is, gave it the secondary reality, subordinate to his own, which we call primary reality, and so in that hierarchy on the same plane with themselves) they desired to enter into it, from the beginning of its ‘realization'.