Book review: The Letters of JRR Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition 

JRR Tolkien in 1967: His politics tended towards a certain kind of anarchism and he abhorred racial stereotyping. Picture: AP/File

• The Letters of JRR Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition 
• Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien 
• Harper Collins,  £30.00

Readers about to plunge into the revised and expanded edition of 'The Letters of JRR Tolkien' would be well advised to block out time in their diaries — days, weeks even — so much is there to consider and absorb. 

Hardcore devotees in particular will risk losing themselves in what the letters contain concerning the immense network of mythological and philological connections upon which Tolkien composed The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. 

Less committed but still ardent admirers (among whom I count myself) may struggle to digest all that is on offer, but will thrill nevertheless to the privileged access to a favourite writer’s mind. 

And many others will find much of interest in what the letters reveal about the political, social, and private hinterland of an author whose work, one way or another, cannot be ignored.

Tolkien’s varying motivations in writing The Lord of the Rings are woven in and out of his correspondence. 

It was an attempt “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own”. But it was also “an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lumenn’ omentielvo” (in one of his invented elvish languages). 

Or to put it another way, Tolkien wanted to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to his “personal aesthetic” might seem real.

But The Lord of the Rings also arose from a simple desire to write an exciting story with the kind of atmosphere that appealed to Tolkien, since no-one else was going to do it. 

The letters open countless windows, large and small, on the how and when pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, sometimes mingling the workings of the heroic imagination and the mundanity of life in mid-century suburban Oxford to comical effect: “Have brought Frodo to the gates of Mordor. Afternoon lawn-mowing.”

From the letters we realise that Tolkien and his publishers had not the faintest inkling of the phenomenon they were about to unleash on the world. 

He feared that The Lord of the Rings, written in his “life-blood”, would end up in “the Limbo of the great unpublishables”. Even the now seemingly unquestionable trilogy format was a matter of sheer expediency, grudgingly acquiesced to.

There is quite a lot of politics in The Lord of the Rings, explicitly or otherwise, and in different guises; and the letters also shed light on how Tolkien would have liked to see the real world ordered. 

His politics tended towards a certain kind of anarchism, meaning “abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs”.

Actors Elijah Wood as Frodo, left, and Sean Astin as Sam in a scene from 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'. Picture: Pierre Vinet, New Line Cinema/AP

Based on his own army experience, he came to think that human stupidity was not mitigated, but always magnified indefinitely by ‘organisation’. 

During the turbulent 60s, he was able to see “in the behaviour of modern youth … admirable motives such as anti-regimentation”. 

In one letter, he describes The Shire as “half republic, half aristocracy”, reflecting perhaps his dislike of absolutism.

We also learn that The Hobbit, first published in 1937, was not translated into German until the 1950s because Tolkien originally refused to confirm to the prospective publishers that he was fully Aryan. 

He railed against their “unscientific race-doctrine” and leapt to a ringing defence of “that gifted people”, the Jews.

In one letter, there is a touching anecdote about staying at a cold, damp army headquarters near Cardiff, where he had been lecturing to cadets, and being woken in time to go to early Mass — as the letters demonstrate, Tolkien was a thoughtful and devout Catholic — by the Jewish historian, Cecil Roth, with whom he had sat up talking until midnight.

When Tolkien lets rip about Hitler, it is memorable indeed: “that ruddy little ignoramus .… Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

He asks a journalist who had interviewed him not to use the term ‘Nordic’ in connection with Middle-earth because of that term’s association with “racialist theories”. 

Of British imperialism in the Far East, he knew nothing that did not fill him with “regret and disgust”.

War disgusted him too. It left “only one thing triumphant: the Machines.” He held fighting aircraft “in particular horror”. 

Having observed a “skywide armada” overhead in October 1944, he wrote to his son Christopher: “by the time that this reaches you somewhere will have ceased to exist and all the world will have known about it and already forgotten about it.”

Tolkien’s letters to his children reveal a deeply affectionate, but also self-critical father, who was very open with his feelings on paper and frank in the exchange of ideas. 

On relations between the sexes, he tells one of his sons to remember that women are “companions in shipwreck, not guiding stars .… Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly … both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.”

This strong streak of realism seems to have had its roots in orphanhood and poverty as a child; in the sufferings his mother endured after her conversion to Catholicism; in the “animal horror” of life in the trenches which resulted in the destruction of his closest group of friends; the unremitting grind of university committees and marking; and frequent illnesses. 

Nevertheless, his letters following the death of his wife are heartbreaking tributes to a youthful love that the vicissitudes of a long life together could never dim.

Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in a scene from the film 'The Hobbit'.

It is always good to have one’s assumptions rattled in a collection of letters, which should, after all, allow us to peer behind the curtain of a reputation. 

We see, for instance, how certain modernist literary giants greatly appreciated his work. 

WH Auden gave a radio talk in 1955 in which he said that if someone dislikes The Lord of the Rings, he would never trust their literary judgement again. 

Although Tolkien deplored Auden’s proposed test of judgement, they became friends and frequent correspondents. 

Tolkien credited Auden with the possession of an ‘open ear’ for Old English poetry (“among the majority of the deaf”) and felt deeply indebted to the younger man for his good reviews, notices and letters “when it was by no means a popular thing to do”.

Tolkien also received fan mail from Iris Murdoch. Indeed, it is noticeable that, even though the readership of fantasy novels has been, fairly notoriously, dominated by adolescent boys, some of the most sensitive and appreciative readers he corresponds with here are women. 

In September 1963, for instance, Tolkien wrote an immensely lengthy letter to Eileen Elgar discoursing on the intricate and providential relationship between Frodo’s failure at the last to throw the Ring into the Cracks of Doom and the mercy he had earlier shown to Gollum. 

But then Tolkien categorised The Lord of the Rings as heroic romance, not fantasy and not even as a novel.

There are some entertaining anecdotes in here too, such as Robert Graves introducing Tolkien to Ava Gardner and neither knowing who the other was but, as you can probably tell, I am only scratching the surface. 

If you any have any curiosity about the life and mind of JRR Tolkien then get your hands on this book.