I suppose there is a tendency to imagine C.S. Lewis as an introspective, brooding sort of fellow. A friend of mine recently pointed out that this image may be because of Anthony Hopkins’ interpretation of Lewis in Shadowlands–a performance that has certainly left an imprint on me fifteen years after seeing it. But I think the image of Lewis captured in David Downing’s, Looking for the King, is far closer to the truth. Downing portrays an approachable, friendly, curious fellow with an affinity for cider and the laughter of close friends.

As much as I appreciate Hopkins’ performance, the more I read of Lewis’ journals and letters–not to mention the humour that laces his fantasy works–the more I’m certain that Lewis loved laughter, and loved friendship.

There is a letter that C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948 that, I think, captures the humour that infiltrated Lewis’ life and the life his friends, the Inklings. It was after WWII, and although rationing had officially ceased, some things were simply impossible to get in England. Lewis’ letters of the period include dozens where he thanks people–usually Americans–for gifts they sent him in those lean days.

One of these generous benefactors was a prominent American doctor, Warfield Firor. Dr. Firor shared an extended correspondence with Lewis, and invited him to visit in the Rocky Mountains, though Lewis could never make it. Throughout this post-WWII period, Dr. Firor sent a number of gifts. These packages of meats and sweats and fortified drinks from Lewis’ fans, friends and supporters were always gratefully acknowledged.

And they were often shared.

One ham sent by Dr. Firor, in particular, has become a ham of note in the history of literature. Here is a letter from Lewis dated March 12, 1948:

My dear Dr. Firor,

Though I have already written to thank you for your grand present of the ham, that letter was written before tasting it: and now having done so, I feel that common decency demands further and heartier thanks.

The fate of the ham was this: we have a small informal literary club which meets in my rooms every Thursday for beer and talk, and–in happier times–for an occasional dinner. And last night, having your ham to dine off, we had a meal which eight members attended. By diligent ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ in various colleges we got two bottles of burgundy and two of port: the college kitchen supplied soup, fish and a savoury: and we had a delightful evening. This by English standards is a banquet rarely met with, and all agreed that they had’nt eaten such a dinner for five years or more.

I enclose a little souvenir of the occasion which may amuse you.

With our very best thanks for all the happiness you gave us,

yours Ham-icably,
C.S. Lewis

Despite the hamhock pun, the reader can immediately see the light tone. This is the second official letter from the Oxford don regarding the ham–the previous one described it as “that magnificent ham.”

But there’s more.

There is also a note attached, a splendid specimen of Inklings humour. Walter Hooper includes a copy of the note in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War (1931-1949). It is a bit difficult to capture in print, but here it is:

The note, dated March 11, 1948, says:

The undersigned, having just partaken of your ham, have drunk your health:

It then lists, in the fashion of great formality, the signatures of the Inklings as they sat at the table, with their titles, their Army roles, and their positions at the University.

Lewis adds this note to the bottom of the letter:

As some have not v. legible signatures, I had better say the list runs; C.S. Lewis, H. V. Dyson, Lord David Cecil, W. H. Lewis, C. Hardie, C. R. Tolkien, R. E. Havard, J. R. R. Tolkien. The order is just as we happened to be sitting. Tolkien père is the senior and T. fils the baby.

Dr. Firor, who has a named chair at John Hopkins, would later go on to donate his Lewis collection to the Bodleian and sponsor important work in Lewis studies. And Lewis would go on to receive more packages from supporters. I read of one, once, that included fresh eggs, bacon, and butter–betraying a confidence in the postal system that I do not have.

I think, though, that this note, written in all its false seriousness, should dispel our image of Lewis or Tolkien as brooding intellectuals or humourless introverts. After all, the great Oxford Don and Cambridge Professor C.S. Lewis, the author of works of literature, critical theory, philosophy, and poetry, was able to sign a letter, “yours Ham-icably.” It seems he was able to ham it up with the best of them.

I had such great fun on Monday drawing out one of C.S. Lewis’ moments on that day in history, I thought I might repeat the project. I am going through J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters, poems, and essays, reading The Lord of the Rings to my eight year old, and getting ready for the second film, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug–coming Dec 11th. So I thought I would dig into Tolkien’s letters to see what today’s date, October 23rd, revealed.

We don’t have a complete collection of Tolkien’s letters, or at least not nearly as complete as Walter Hooper’s 3 volumes of Lewis’ letters. The key resource is Humphrey Carpenter’s The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Allen & Unwin, 1981). The first letter of Oct 23rd is–at least at first glance–unimpressive: a note to the editor of The Hobbit, Stanley Unwin:

Thank you in return for your encouraging letter. I will start something soon, & submit it to your boy at the earliest opportunity.

This note, however, is actually pretty important. Tolkien needed encouragement, and some say that if it wasn’t for the persistence of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien may never have sought publication for The Hobbit, which means that Peter Jackson would be out of work. But it is also important because of what Editor Unwin had written to Tolkien on Oct 19th:

It is seldom that a children’s writer gets firmly established with one book, but that you will do so very rapidly I have not the slightest doubt. …. You are one of those rare  people with genius, and, unlike some publishers, it is a word I have not used half a dozen times in thirty years of publishing.

What Tolkien could not see in his own work but what his editor and C.S. Lewis could, was Tolkien’s genius that we all can now recognize. It is fascinating to read in the first 50 pages or so of Tolkien’s letters the insecurity and faint hope he expresses as The Hobbit goes from pen on paper to an international hit. Later, when Tolkien finally finished The Fellowship of the Ring, Unwin wrote him on Oct 23rd, 1952 with the bad news that such a large book would cost more than £3 to print. In 1952, this was a very high price for a book, and you can see Tolkien’s anxiety in his response on Oct 24th. Indeed, Tolkien half-asks whether the publisher will actually publish it.

As he moves on in the letter, Tolkien lists a litany of tasks that contribute to his busyness and tiredness–tiredness is a theme throughout his letters. In reflection of this “modern life,” Tolkien quips: “Mordor in our midst.” Mordor, indeed.

Beyond letters to his editor, Tolkien also carried on a correspondence with his children. We know Christopher Tolkien best, who is the editor of The Silmarilion and so many other of Tolkien’s posthumously-published books–things we would not see if they were not carefully edited. J.R.R. Tolkien often writes to Christopher, calling him “My dearest man,” and signing, “Your own Father.” Here is a letter of Oct 23rd, 1944. You can sense the WWII context, but also Tolkien’s wit and his bright mind engaged on a question about God:

I have just been out to look up: the noise is terrific: the biggest for a long time, skywide Armada. I suppose it is allright to say so, as 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 it. ….
There seems no time to do anything properly; and I feel tired all the time, or rather bored. I think if a jinn came and gave me a wish – what would you really like? – I should reply: Nothing. Go away!….
With regard to the blasphemy, one can only recall (when applicable) the words Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do – or say. And somehow I fancy that Our Lord actually is more pained by offences we commit against one another than those we commit against himself, esp. his
incarnate person. And linguistically there is not a great deal of difference between a damn you, said without reflection or even knowledge of the terror and majesty of the One Judge, and the things you mention. Both the sexual and the sacred words have ceased to have any content except the ghost of past emotion. I don’t mean that it is not a bad thing, and it is certainly very wearisome, saddening and maddening, but it is at any rate not blasphemy in the full sense.

If I can cheat–since it is almost Oct 24th in the land of Tolkien’s birth and since I have already cheated–I will close with a letter dated Oct 24th, 1955, to Katherine Farrer. Katherine Farrer’s husband was Trinity College theologian Austin Farrar, who formulated a creative, and, I think, quite wrong theory on the relationship of the gospels. Katherine Farrer was in her own right a successful mystery writer. The first letter to her in Carpenter’s collection is actually written in Runes, like you might see in your copy of the Hobbit. The whole letter is in Runic writing, including the signature:

I’ll let true Tolkien fans translate!

Return of the King was published in England on Oct 20th, 1955. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has been plagued with printer errors–read the introduction to the HarperCollins edition or read through Tolkien’s letters. But, beside printing errors, Tolkien is never content with what he has done. LOTR was no exception, and even as it sits on shelves he is working on the next draft.

Since (in spite of being laid up with a throat that made lecturing impossible until last Friday) I have actually managed to deliver the O’Donnell Lecture on English and Welsh (Friday), and am no longer a college official, and the Book is complete – except for an errata slip for the reprint already required for Vol. III, to cover the important errors of the whole: I shall be a great deal freer after this week…..
I am indeed surprised at the reception of the ‘Ring’, and immensely pleased. But I don’t think I have started any tide. I don’t think such a small hobbitlike creature, or even a Man of any size, does that. If there is a tide (I think there is) then I am just lucky enough to have caught it, being just a bit of it. ….
I still feel the picture incomplete without something on Samwise and Elanor, but I could not devise anything that would not have destroyed the ending, more than the hints (possibly sufficient)
in the appendices.

In the end, though, Tolkien is pleased with the popularity of the books. I think he would be astounded by fans in the hundreds of millions as they exist today. Notably, Tolkien does not think he caused a great shift in literature, but was able to be on the front end of that shift. I’m not sure I agree. I think it is difficult to look back on the history of fantasy literature and not see Tolkien’s work as definitive. Leaving aside the Disneyfication of fairyland–“for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing,” Tolkien wrote of Disney to Unwin–almost all contemporary Faerie tales find their way back to Tolkien. From the beginning of his writing career to the end, Tolkien underestimates his value as a writer. Such is the testimony of his October letters.

Dear Readers,

I’m thrilled to announce this exciting new Call for Papers on the Inklings and Arthur. Not only do I have confidence in editor Sørina Higgins’ ability to bring out a challenging, creative, and informative volume, but it really is such a great topic. Whether it’s J.RR. Tolkien’s recent Fall of Arthur or Charles Williams’ complex Avalon-tinged poetry, or C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, it is undeniable that the Inklings were invested in Arthuriana.

Here is the brief Call for Papers, with the full one and Sørina’s bio below.

Call for Papers: Edited Volume

The Inklings and King Arthur

This collection will compare the Arthurian works, especially the mythological geographies, of Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, Barfield, their immediate predecessors, and their contemporaries, using The Fall of Arthur as an important keystone text. Topics may include: Arthur in England during the World Wars, Spiritual Quest in a Scientific Age, On Mythological Geographies, Lancelot as Earendel, Western Isles and and Faerie Land, Perelandra as Avalon, Sarras as Valinor, Williams’ Anatomical Arthur, Williams’ Occult Arthur, and Owen Barfield’s Holy Grail. Proposals should show evidence of rigorous critical engagement and an original approach to the text(s) in question, and must not be previously published. Include contact information and institutional affiliation; a brief introduction to the topic, including scope and texts under consideration; the theoretical framework used; the main conclusions; and the implications of this paper for the overall vision of this volume. In addition, please submit a curriculum vitae. Send abstracts of 500-1000 words to Sørina Higgins at inklings.arthur@gmail.com by 1 January 2014.

This is a great opportunity for Arthur and Inklings scholars to collaborate on a timely volume. It is also a great opportunity for graduate students and emerging scholars to test their mettle. And perhaps it is the opportunity for you! Who knows: you may yet find your way to Avalon.

Cheers,
Brenton

Call for Papers: Edited Volume

The Inklings and King Arthur

edited by Sørina Higgins

OVERVIEW:

The recent publication of The Fall of Arthur, an unfinished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, revealed a startling aspect of the legendarium. The key is found in notes Tolkien left about how he intended the fragmentary Fall of Arthur to continue (included in Christopher Tolkien’s editorial matter). After Arthur was carried away for healing, Lancelot would follow him into the West, never to return.

In other words, Lancelot functions like Eärendel. He sails into the West, seeking a lost paradise. If Tolkien had finished this poem, he could have woven it together with The Silmarillion so that his elvish history mapped onto the legends of Arthur, forming a foundation for “real” English history and language. In addition, he could have collaborated with Lewis, Williams, and Barfield, creating a totalizing myth greater than any they wrote individually.

The publication of this extraordinary poem thus invites an examination of the theological, literary, historical, and linguistic implications of both the actual Arthurian writings by the major Inklings and of an imaginary, composite, Inklings Arthuriad. This collection will compare the Arthurian works, especially the mythological geographies, of Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, Barfield, their predecessors, and their contemporaries.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Survey of Arthurian literature to 1900
• Arthur in England during the World Wars
• Spiritual Quest in a Scientific Age
• On Mythological Geographies
• Tolkien and/or Lewis as Arthurian scholars
• Lancelot as Eärendel? The Fall of Arthur and The Silmarillion
• Western Isles and and Faerie Land: The Geography of The Fall of Arthur
• Perelandra: Avalon in the Heavens?
• That Hideous Strength: Merlin and The Pendragon
• Williams’ Anatomical Arthur or Williams’ Occult Arthur
• Tolkien, Lewis, or Williams as Political Commentator
• George MacDonald and Faerie
• G.K. Chesterton and the Historical Arthur
• James Frazer and Jessie Weston on Romantic Rituals
• Arthur for Kids: Howard Pyle and Roger Lancelyn Green
• Owen Barfield and the Holy Grail
• T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland
• Meta-Malory: T.H. White

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION PROCESS
Submissions are invited from any geographic region, and representing the disciplines of literature, theology, or history. Abstracts should be between 500 and 1000 words and should include:
• Name(s) and contact information, including institutional affiliation and email address(es);
• A brief introduction to the topic, including scope and texts under consideration;
• The theoretical framework used;
• The main conclusions;
• The implications of this paper for the overall vision of this volume.

In addition, please submit a curriculum vitae, including a list of previous publications. However, please note that younger and emergent scholars, including promising graduate students, are especially invited to submit, so a shorter list of publications should not deter applications.

Please note: all submissions must represent previously unpublished work.

Interested authors are invited to submit an abstract for a proposed chapter by 1 January 2014 to the collection editor, Sørina Higgins: inklings.arthur@gmail.com.

Selected authors will be notified by 1 April 2014, and will be invited to contribute a full-length chapter by 1 November 2014. Essays should be between 4,000 and 10,000 words and conform to MLA style. All chapters will be peer-reviewed by the collection editor and at least one other external reviewer before submission to the publishing house Editor.

Please direct inquiries and submissions to inklings.arthur@gmail.com.

EDITOR BIOGRAPHY

Sørina Higgins blogs about Charles Williams at The Oddest Inkling. She is currently editing The Chapel of the Thorn by Williams (forthcoming from Apocryphile). Her article “Double Affirmation: Medievalism as Christian Apologetic in the Arthurian Poetry of Charles Williams” featured in a topical issue of The Journal of Inklings Studies in October 2013, and her chapter “Is a ‘Christian’ Mystery Story Possible? Charles Williams’ War in Heaven as a Generic Case Study” appears in Christianity & the Detective Story (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Sørina serves as Review Editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal, teaches English at Penn State (Lehigh Valley) and Lehigh Carbon Community College, and holds an M.A. from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.

If you are anything like me, a lover of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth who has only slowly explored all the secrets behind The Lord of the Rings, you may have been surprised by Radagast the Brown. I knew he existed, but he explodes onto the screen in The Unexpected Journey–the first Hobbit film by Peter Jackson. Re-watching the first film with my son as we prepared to see the finale of the Trilogy, and I had to ask myself: Is it time, or time again, for Radagast the Brown?

Needless to say, Radagast is a little … distracted. One of Tolkien’s hand-scratched notes, which Christopher Tolkien includes in Unfinished Tales, says of Radagast, that:

“in becoming enamoured of the wild creatures of Middle-earth Radagast neglected the purpose for which he was sent.”

Tolkien’s legendarium is hard on Radagast. Though lovingly named, “tender of beasts,” and though he set about good work in principle, he becomes lost in his task of protector of the forest. While the film tries to redeem Radagast a bit, perhaps to add a little Hobbitish homeliness, Unfinished Tales says he “forsook Elves and Men” (see below).

Yet he still played his role in the Great War of the Ring. He set Gandalf on a path that would lead to his capture, but he also alerted the Eagles, who would be able to aid Gandalf. Radagast is one of those glorious Tolkien inventions that is neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil. Do we have space for this sort of character in our lives?

In our world today, there is always space for Gandalf. In the passage below from Unfinished Tales where we hear about the 5 Wizards, the Istari, Gandalf is called the late-comer. While the Blue Wizards disappeared on an errand, Saruman the White was lost to power, and Radagast the Brown disappeared into his world, Gandalf the Grey alone remained faithful. This faithfulness is not the only trait necessary for our age:

“Warm and eager was his spirit; … his joy, and his swift wrath, were veiled in garments grey as ash, so that only those that knew him well glimpsed the flame that was within.”

Brilliant. Gandalf is a decisive figure who understands good and evil, and lives in joy and friendship despite that shoulder-bending knowledge. We need Gandalf the Grey today.

But do we also need Radagast the Brown today?

I think we do, and I think this is one place that Peter Jackson did well in The Hobbit film.

We live in a time of environmental extremes. On one side, there is an aspect of the environmental movement that treats humans like invasive creatures–as if we were foreign to the rest of creation. On the other side there is a movement invested in resisting human concern for creation care. Either because it doesn’t understand how intimately we are knit into our environment, or because they are invested in conspiracy theory frameworks, this movement rejects Radagastism in all its forms.

But there is darkness creeping into the Woods of our World.

We are at a time when we are understanding more and more how synchronistically the Creator has made this world. All things are connected, and we have some reason to think that humans have failed in some ways in their task as the shepherds of all living things (if we read the Genesis tale aright). Of the three things that broke in humanity’s great fall from Eden–the God-human relationship, the human-human relationship, and the human-creation relationship–it is the latter one that we as a generation know better than any before.

Radagast shows us the value of living synchronous lifestyles, of creating life-melodies in the world that harmonize with that world. He shows us of animal care, because creatures have value. He is also a listener to the world around him, looking for clues of health and illness in the vast garden that he was sent to tend.

I think we can learn from Radagast the Brown.

True, I would avoid bird turd in my hair. And we cannot forget our greater tasks (whatever they may be). We must not neglect the reason we, like the Istari, were sent into the world. The reason the Wizards were sent is not much different than our own. And for those of us whose task is creation care (like Radagast), we must not forget the world around, the battles outside our little woods.

Unfinished Tales IV.2: The Istari

Now the White Messenger in later days became known Elves as Curunír, the Man of Craft, in the tongue of Northern Men Saruman; but that was after he returned from his many journeys and came into the realm of Gondor and there abode. Of the Blue little was known in the West, and they had no names save Ithryn Luin “the Blue Wizards;” for they passed into the East with Curunír, but they never returned, and whether they remained in the East, pursuing there the purposes for which they were sent; or perished; or as some hold were ensnared by Sauron and became his servants, is not now known. 3 But none of these chances were impossible to be; for, strange indeed though this may seem, the Istari, being clad in bodies of Middle-earth, might even as Men and Elves fall away from their purposes. and do evil, forgetting the good in the search for power to effect it.

A separate passage written in the margin no doubt belongs here:

For it is said indeed that being embodied the Istari had needs to learn much anew by slow experience, and though they knew whence they came the memory of the Blessed Realm was to them a vision from afar off, for which (so long as they remained true to their mission) they yearned exceedingly. Thus by enduring of free will the pangs of exile and the deceits of Sauron they might redress the evils of that time.

Indeed, of all the Istari, one only remained faithful, and he was the last-comer. For Radagast, the fourth, became enamoured of the many beasts and birds that dwelt in Middle-earth, and forsook Elves and Men, and spent his days among the wild creatures. Thus he got his name (which is in the tongue of Numenor of old, and signifies, it is said, “tender of beasts”).

And Curunír ‘Lân, Saruman the White, fell from his high errand, and becoming proud and impatient and enamoured of power sought to have his own will by force, and to oust Sauron; but he was ensnared by that dark spirit, mightier than he.

But the last-comer was named among the Elves Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, for he dwelt in no place, and gathered to himself neither wealth nor followers, but ever went to and fro in the Westlands from Gondor to Angmar, and from Lindon to Lórien, befriending all folk in times of need. Warm and eager was his spirit (and it was enhanced by the ring Narya), for he was the enemy of Sauron, opposing the fire that devours and wastes with the fire that kindles, and succours in wanhope and distress; but his joy, and his swift wrath, were veiled in garments grey as ash, so that only those that knew him well glimpsed the flame that was within.

3. In a letter written in 1958 my father said that he knew nothing clearly about “the other two,” since they were not concerned in the history oh the North-west of Middle-earth. “I think,” he wrote, “they went as emissaries to distant regions, East and South, far out of Numenorean range: missionaries to enemy-occupied lands, as it were. What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.”

This post is part of the Battle of the Five Blogs, or six blogs to be precise. It is a throw-down of various Tolkien bloggers who are thinking about the release of the final installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy,  The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Other bloggers in this series are Kat Sas, James Moffett, Sørina Higgins, Crystal Hurd, and Matthew Rettino. Follow the links to check out their reviews, recaps, and rants. We encourage comments and links to your own reviews, recaps, and rants.

The Hobbit as Living Text

There is a curious thing that happens to C.S. Lewis’ writing: He made friends.

I think that most true J.R.R. Tolkien fans are going to hate The Hobbit: The Battle of 5 Armies, the newest and last installment of Peter Jackson’s series. Some of those fans detested the Lord of the Rings trilogy on film, while I loved them. I lack the technical, absolutely precise knowledge of the massive myth project that are the books that make up The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and the dozen or so other books that tell us about the History of Middle Earth. The second language in my home is not Quenya or Entish, and I haven’t tracked the number of new moons that pass in Frodo’s long journey to Mordor.

I loved the LOTR films. And though there are moments that make you wince in The Hobbit trilogy—poor computer imaging, characters bent out of narrative shape, unclear lusts and motivations, uneven storytelling, genre confusion, and a general lack of Hobbitishness—I have quite enjoyed the films, as films. I went last night to The Battle of 5 Armies and had a great night out with friends.

But even I, who am willing to throw myself into the adaptation projected on screen, felt uncomfortable at times with how Jackson seems to bend what is to me a pretty straight story.

And yet…. And yet… I want to suggest that Jackson’s bending of Tolkien, and my discomfort with it, and the 100s of angry reviews online are all part of the tale.

Let me explain why.

In the 1930s, Tolkien and Lewis were good friends and literary allies on campus. Dissatisfied with the adventure stories of contemporary fiction, they dared each other to write a story they’d privately love. Tolkien drew the “Time Travel” straw and never finished the tale. Lewis drew “Space Travel” and very quickly had a Science Fiction novel in print (with Tolkien’s help). Lewis followed this original H.G. Wells-like space journey with his own failed Time Travel novel and the rest of the Ransom Cycle.

Though Tolkien had never completed a Time Travel story, he did publish The Hobbit (with Lewis’ help), and became an international superstar. He quickly began working on “the New Hobbit,” hoping he’d have more hobbits for the public in a year or two. Seventeen years later The Fellowship of the Ring was published. During that time the world of The Hobbit grew into the complex Middle Earth legendarium we all know and love.

Anyone who reads the last Ransom book, That Hideous Strength (1945), is surprised by the discovery of Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the Preface of Lewis’ contemporary apocalyptic SciFi novel:

“Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien.”

Lewis and Tolkien both thought that LOTR was on its way to completion at this time. Although it was a still a decade more until publication, Tolkien was reading chapters at meetings of the Inklings, which explains why Lewis spelled Númenor wrong—he had only ever heard it aloud. Over the years, Tolkien’s Middle Earth universe become more and more complex and intricate, and Lewis recognized that it formed a new mythology for England, one set in pre-civilizational ages.

Some Tolkien fans may dislike Lewis’ handling of Núminor in That Hideous Strength. But Lewis’ instinctive use of the “New Hobbit” mythic framework shows us what is true about The Hobbit and all of Tolkien’s subcreated world: it is a living text.

Even though it was published almost 80 years ago, The Hobbit is not a sealed text, closed and unified and segmented off from all other literature. It is still alive and moving in key ways.

For example, when Tolkien discovered the depth of the world behind The Hobbit, he edited the actual text of his little fairy tale. What you and I typically read is not what was first published. As far as I can tell, Tolkien never really saw The Hobbit as finished. It is especially so with The Silmarillion. There is not just one Silmarillion, but several editions that were never finished in Tolkien’s mind. The edition edited by Christopher Tolkien (with help from Guy Gavriel Kay) is the one he selected to be most helpful and complete. In fact, Christopher Tolkien’s work on dozens of incomplete manuscripts shows the living and adaptive nature of the text. J.R.R. Tolkien is not the only author of his books.

As Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us, Tolkien relied on feedback and even editing from his friends in the Inklings, including C.S. Lewis. The idea of “authorship” grows wider and wider, doesn’t it? Publishers shaped the text, and Tolkien added drawings and maps to aid the reader. Eventually Tolkien would publish prefaces and appendices to go with LOTR—a book for which there was never a fully definitive text.

The text grows even more as Tolkien gave interviews and answered letters, augmenting our understanding of his mythology. There were audiobook recordings—dramatizations that offered a new interpretation—music written for the poetry, and artistic impressions. Clubs formed, societies of Tolkien fans and experts developed, and newsletters transformed into conferences and blogs.

And then there is the Middle Earth Effect: a generation of writers who, for better or worse, make their way along the fantasy wood-path that Tolkien struck in the wilderness. C.S. Lewis was among the first to do so, but there is little high fantasy that does not owe its imaginative possibilities to Tolkien. Add role playing games, and screenplays in the dustbin or top drawers of aspiring writers, and off-broadway performances, and ComicCon rap battles, and late night games of Golfimbul at MythCon….

These are all part of the living “text” of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.

So, now to Jackson.

It is clear that Jackson has diverged greatly from the little fairy tale called The Hobbit. For one, he has brought in other elements from the History and The Silmarillion, adding new storytelling possibilities that I quite liked. For another, Jackson loops together the LOTR Film Trilogy with The Hobbit Trilogy by bookending the three Hobbit films with references back (ahead) to LOTR film #1. Jackson supressed some aspects—friends of mine have noted how Beorn is minimized in the battle, and the chapters after the Battle of 5 or 6 Armies are left behind—and he draws out new themes.

No matter how greatly Jackson has diverged, the reality is that the 6 Middle Earth films by New Line Cinema are part of the story, part of the “text.” The music, the characters, the landscapes, the rabbit trails and frayed threads of Jackson’s films have changed forever the way that I read.

They are part of the living text.

And so is this blog, and the other bloggers that make up this magnanimous and self-effacing Battle of 5 (or 6) Blogs. We are shaping the text as we speak.

So, no, I don’t think Peter Jackson created a particularly faithful Hobbit. I wish he called me and floated some of his ideas. But he made good films—films that I will watch over and over again, films that I will show my son as I pass The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on to him.

Because that’s part of the living text too: reading books aloud in a warm chair, sitting on the couch with the screen flickering before us, and lining up at Christmas time this one last time to see how the unending tale that is The Hobbit finally ends.

What a find! At a recent yard sale a good friend (@RhonDawg) found a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters and she was good enough to give it to me. Published by his daughter-in-law in 1976 on the 3rd anniversary of Tolkien’s death, this is a stunning collection of art and humorous writing. I decided that this was such a neat find that I couldn’t wait until real Christmas came around to share it. Besides, there are multiple editions around now that would make wonderful Christmas gifts for older children or Tolkien fans, and waiting until Christmas would make it too late.

The premise is simple: from his first child’s toddlerhood to the end of his last child’s innocence, Tolkien wrote letters from Father Christmas each year. These letters were carefully delivered to the Tolkien family mantel each year. They include beautiful art, hand-drawn stamps, the hilarious antics of a polar bear, and personal notes in Father Christmas’ shaky handwriting. The children received these letters each year with delight and wonder, finding themselves lost in the myth as long as they could.

Rather than doing a real review–I am thrilled to own this book and wish I had: a) thought of it myself; and b) the skill to do it–I will let the work speak for itself, posting a few examples of the artwork.

On this page, Father Christmas writes to 3 year old John in 1920:

Dear John,

I heard you ask today what I was like & where I lived. I have drawn ME & My House for you. Take care of the picture. I am just off now for Oxford with my bundle of toys–some for you. Hope I shall arrive in time: the snow is very thick at the North Pole tonight:

Yr loving Fr. Chr.

The polar bear is a fan favourite. Here he has tumbled down the stairs. The note from Father Christmas began: “What do you think the poor dear bear has been and done this time? Nothing as bad as letting off all the lights.”

The reference to “letting off all the lights” was 1926, where the Polar Bear set off “the biggest bang in the world, and the most monstrous firework there has ever been.” Chaos ensued in the North Pole. The beautiful cover image is of the Aurora Borealis fireworks that only Santa Claus could keep in his basement.

While most of the book is typescript, there are a couple of examples of copies of the original letters. Here is one in the introduction, a letter of 1933. It tells of peril, where Christmas was almost lost to Goblin attack. The Tolkien Christmas has more elements of violence than the average!

There is another letter in a later edition (2001) that is a neat read. The transcript is in this 1976 edition:

Cliff House
Top of the World
Near the North Pole

Xmas 1925

My dear boys,

I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both. It all happened like this: one very windy day last November my hood blew off and went and stuck on the top of the North Pole. I told him not to, but the N.P.Bear climbed up to the thin top to get it down — and he did. The pole broke in the middle and fell on the roof of my house, and the N.P.Bear fell through the hole it made into the dining room with my hood over his nose, and all the snow fell off the roof into the house and melted and put out all the fires and ran down into the cellars where I was collecting this year’s presents, and the N.P.Bear’s leg got broken. He is well again now, but I was so cross with him that he says he won’t try to help me again. I expect his temper is hurt, and will be mended by next Christmas. I send you a picture of the accident, and of my new house on the cliffs above the N.P. (with beautiful cellars in the cliffs). If John can’t read my old shaky writing (1925 years old) he must get his father to. When is Michael going to learn to read, and write his own letters to me? Lots of love to you both and Christopher, whose name is rather like mine.

That’s all. Goodbye.

Father Christmas

Thanks to Letters of Note for the transcription. Here is a picture of the original letter:

Also included in this letter are these pictures:

I hope you will find a copy of this book for yourselves. They really are a delightful read and a wonderful Christmas project idea. Thanks @RhonDawg for this gift! I’ll leave you all with just a few more pictures:

J.R.R. Tolkien was a notoriously difficult writer to get to print. That The Hobbit found its way to store shelves was something of a publishing miracle, and it took Tolkien 15 years to write part two, “the new Hobbit,” which we know of as The Lord of the Rings.

With shelves full of Middle Earth material and a global appetite for more, why was it so hard for Tolkien to hand completed manuscripts to publishers?

For one, the universe Tolkien was subcreating was expansive; really, the “world Bible” behind the Middle Earth legendarium was never complete. We have 15 or so books that supplement The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, representing two lifetimes of work–that of the Oxford Elf himself as well as that of his son, Christopher Tolkien. It will probably take a third lifetime before it all goes to the public, and by then it will be a lifetime of reading for the committed fan.

Creating a sufficiently sophisticated and well calibrated universe is a big task, granted. But it was far more than that for Tolkien. As one of my readers has pointed out, Tolkien was a fanatical perfectionist, looking for a kind of lyrical quality and worldview precision that few have been able to emulate. While C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams could dash off tight little books, you can sense that Tolkien was never satisfied with his work. An admirable quality, but frustrating for fans and publishers waiting for the next story.

Beyond complexity and perfectionism, Tolkien at times felt besieged by other factors. In “12 Reasons not to Write Lord of the Rings” I used a Tolkien letter to capture the various ways he tried to explain why his “new Hobbit” wasn’t even close to being complete. Based on the letters Tolkien writes at the outbreak of WWII, we see that: the timing of his mood was wrong; The Hobbit did not set up a sequel very well; most of what he wanted to say about hobbits was in the first Hobbit; his taste for hobbits and readers’ tastes didn’t seem to match; he, his wife, and one of his sons had been very ill for various periods; he was broke; his stories were becoming darker and more adult; and he was short on time because of work and family commitments.

It is a list that any writer will recognize as a crisis of heart for which each legitimate excuse represents an obstacle in a most necessary pathway. The excuses are all real, and yet Tolkien should have been moving forward anyway.

We know this because it is true of us too.

We have the books now, so what pushed Tolkien out of his LOTR entrenchment?

Let’s turn to another piligrm in Narnia for the answer. One of the blessings of Diana Pavlac Glyer’s work is that she calls the bluff on those who see Tolkien as this independent, solitary genius drawing together this huge world all by himself. Lewis himself had this idea:

“No-one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch” (letter to Charles Moorman, May 15, 1959).

In The Company They Keep, Glyer very carefully shows the intricate connections between Tolkien, Lewis, Williams and the other Inklings. They were collaborators, encouragers, critics, and editors in their mythopoeic work. It was at this critical juncture that Lewis offered support to Tolkien, helping the “new Hobbit” to transform into the The Lord of the Rings (see The Company They Keep, 103-107).*

In the cheekily titled Bandersnatch, Glyer presses in even further on the fellowship of the Inklings, linking it back to our own work as writers and world-builders. She is right, I think, about the power of Lewis and Tolkien’s support for and criticism of one another. As WWII would continue, so would all of Tolkien’s obstacles–including the fear of his sons at war in Europe. A review of the early chapters of the “new Hobbit” in 1938 wouldn’t be the last time that Lewis was an imaginative catalyst for Tolkien as he struggled to produce The Lord of the Rings.

This support was absolutely essential. But I want to suggest that a surprising, heretofore unknown factor contributed to Tolkien’s tipping point–and a factor not just shocking to us these decades later, lost as we are in the whir of our worlds’ engines. This factor would have been just as shocking to any of Tolkien’s hardworking colleagues in his own day.

On Jul 24, 1938 he was listing off excuses in an apologetic letter, stuck without hope on the 3rd chapter. By Aug 31, 1938–just 5 weeks later–Tolkien is well into chapter 7. 6 weeks later, on Oct 13, 1938, Tolkien has reached chapter 11 and is “thoroughly engrossed in it.” This despite the threat of exam grading, the necessities of home and teaching, illness upon illness, and the death of a friend.

Tolkien finally found his (famously furry) feet.

Not only is Tolkien working steadily in the summer and autumn of 1938, but he is enjoying it:

“I must say I think it is a good deal better in places and some ways than the predecessor….”

Beyond the friendship of Lewis, what was this factor that set Tolkien a wandering in epic lands again? The uncomfortable, subversive, counter-intuitive factor was this:

Tolkien took a few days off.

This is what Tolkien wrote as August 1938 came to a close:

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.

That’s right. The secret ingredient to Tolkien’s turning point is rest. How often are our lives filled with noise, activity, movement, deadlines, illnesses, drives here and there, screens flashing in front of our eyes as phones buzz on the desks before us–lives so filled that there are no blank spaces, no lost moments? Long before phones and email and after school activities, Tolkien was pressed to the wall and brought to the point of exhaustion. Actually, he says,

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.

No wonder Tolkien couldn’t get his hobbits past Hobbiton. He couldn’t move his story from fairy tale to epic because all of his imaginative energy was dedicated to carrying his frame around from place to place, doing all the things a teacher-writer-academic-father-husband-church layman is supposed to do.

“The Inklings Gathering,” frontpiece to ch. 8 of Bandersnatch; all of the illustrations in this book were by James A. Owen

I hope you will forgive the clickbaitish title, but I think this point is far more shocking than most of the clickbait that tempts on our social media boundaries. We need rest in order for creativity to grow. We are an exhausted generation, and those of us who try to squeeze a few minutes a day aside to make beautiful things are not protected from the web of the world’s expectations.

I do not speak as one who has attained this silence and space and sabbath of the spirit. I have filled my life up too, and yearn for empty space, quiet hours, time with books and friends and family and a blank page in front of me. Yet the testimony of Tolkien shows us that he moved past his fear and indecision when he took a few minutes to breathe.

*Thanks to reader “Hannah” for the reminder of the reference to this lovely little section in Glyer’s work. My own copy of the book is marked up here. If you have Bandersnatch, see pp. 76-80 for something of this discussion.

And check out this lovely quote-photo with a pic by Lancia Smith and quote from the book. To see Smith’s work in photography and writer, check out her blog.

What a find! At a yard sale a good friend scored a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters and she was good enough to give it to me. Published by his daughter-in-law in 1976 on the 3rd anniversary of Tolkien’s death, this is a stunning collection of art and humorous writing. If you haven’t completed all your Christmas shopping yet, there are multiple editions around that would make wonderful Christmas gifts for older children or Tolkien fans–though you might need express shipping or the hopsitality of a used bookstore.

It is a great story. From his first child’s toddlerhood to the end of his last child’s Christmas innocence, Tolkien wrote letters from Father Christmas each year. These letters were carefully delivered to the Tolkien family mantel each year. They include beautiful art, hand-drawn stamps, the hilarious antics of a polar bear, and personal notes in Father Christmas’ shaky handwriting. The children received these letters each year with delight and wonder, finding themselves lost in the myth as long as they could.

I am thrilled to own this book and wish I had: a) thought of it myself; and b) the skill to do it. So I will let the work speak for itself, posting a few examples of the artwork and some transcripts.

On this page, Father Christmas writes to 3 year old John in 1920:

Dear John,

I heard you ask today what I was like & where I lived. I have drawn ME & My House for you. Take care of the picture. I am just off now for Oxford with my bundle of toys–some for you. Hope I shall arrive in time: the snow is very thick at the North Pole tonight:

Yr loving Fr. Chr.

The polar bear is a fan favourite. Here he has tumbled down the stairs. The note from Father Christmas began: “What do you think the poor dear bear has been and done this time? Nothing as bad as letting off all the lights.”

The reference to “letting off all the lights” was 1926, where the Polar Bear set off “the biggest bang in the world, and the most monstrous firework there has ever been.” Chaos ensued in the North Pole. The beautiful cover image is of the Aurora Borealis fireworks that only Santa Claus could keep in his basement.

While most of the book is typescript, there are a couple of examples of copies of the original letters. Here is one in the introduction, a letter of 1933. It tells of peril, where Christmas was almost lost to Goblin attack. The Tolkien Christmas has more elements of violence than the average!

There is another letter in a later edition (2001) that is a neat read. The transcript is in this 1976 edition:

Cliff House
Top of the World
Near the North Pole

Xmas 1925

My dear boys,

I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both. It all happened like this: one very windy day last November my hood blew off and went and stuck on the top of the North Pole. I told him not to, but the N.P.Bear climbed up to the thin top to get it down — and he did. The pole broke in the middle and fell on the roof of my house, and the N.P.Bear fell through the hole it made into the dining room with my hood over his nose, and all the snow fell off the roof into the house and melted and put out all the fires and ran down into the cellars where I was collecting this year’s presents, and the N.P.Bear’s leg got broken. He is well again now, but I was so cross with him that he says he won’t try to help me again. I expect his temper is hurt, and will be mended by next Christmas. I send you a picture of the accident, and of my new house on the cliffs above the N.P. (with beautiful cellars in the cliffs). If John can’t read my old shaky writing (1925 years old) he must get his father to. When is Michael going to learn to read, and write his own letters to me? Lots of love to you both and Christopher, whose name is rather like mine.

That’s all. Goodbye.

Father Christmas

Thanks to Letters of Note for the transcription. Here is a picture of the original letter:

Also included in this letter are these pictures:

I hope you will find a copy of this book for yourselves. They really are a delightful read and a wonderful Christmas project idea. I’ll leave you all with just a few more pictures:

It is sort of a trick, isn’t it? Any true Tolkien fan will say that every page in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien is essential. However, not everyone enjoys letters as much as I do. Some might absolutely love The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but don’t find great joy peeking into the lives of authors by reading their mail. I may well be the odd man out.

However, embedded in the bits and pieces of correspondence that remain are some absolute gems. It is in these letters that we discover that Tolkien supported C.S. Lewis in his first foray into fiction. We see the heart-crushing weight of work that Tolkien was faced with, and the struggles that he had to complete The Lord of the Rings. And we have the moments, finally, when he finished his work and made it ready for publication. The letters of Tolkien to his friends, family, and publishers are the heart and joy behind the mythic worlds of Middle Earth.

For the true lovers of Tolkien’s subcreated world, there are also moments where he explains bits and pieces of Middle Earth and The Silmarillion that we may not know except by a scientific reading of the texts or by archival work that is limited to very few scholars. And even then, some of the points of myth, language, geography, and character development only existed in Tolkien’s brain. So the letters are priceless resources for the Tolkien reader hungry for more.

One of these essential pieces is a 9,500-word letter–really an essay–written to Milton Waldman, a publisher at Collins. Tolkien was trying to win Waldman to the idea of publishing both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion–a project that the publishers of The Hobbit were unable to commit to at the stage the manuscripts were in at that time (1951). According to the editor of Tolkien’s Letters, Humphrey Carpenter, Waldman was so impressed by Tolkien’s letter he had a typed copy made for posterity. This detailed letter lays out most clearly the relationship between the various complex parts of Tolkien’s legendarium. It is such an important piece that editor Christopher Tolkien included it as prolegomena to The Silmarillion.

There is a second letter, though, that gives a great deal of background to The Lord of the Rings. Naomi Mitchison, a prolific novelist and memoirist–and sister of J.B.S. Haldane–read proofs of LOTR as it was being prepared for publication in early 1954. She wrote to Tolkien with a number of perceptive questions. In reading Tolkien’s response, he is obviously delighted with the depth of her interest in and knowledge of the world that exists in and behind the text. Included in the letter are links between LOTR and the great wealth of myth, legend, history, and story behind it. He takes some time to talk about the different kinds of characters in Middle Earth, including relationships between Elves, Dwarves, and humans, but also the fallen creatures and the ones that do not have a full explanation in the text-world, like Tom Bombadil, the Ents (and missing Entwives), Hobbits, Shelob, and dragons.

And, of course, Tolkien explains about the languages–his absolute favourite part of the creative process. This letter is particularly interesting because he does not just explain the links between the languages of Middle Earth, but explains how they developed with relationship to other European languages and Tolkien’s own “phonaesthetic pleasure,” as he puts it.

If you would like to deepen your experience of The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps help transition to the difficult text of The Silmarillion, this letter is a great resource for knowing Tolkien’s mind and the world he made.

25 April 1954                                                                76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Mrs. Mitchison,

It has been both rude and ungrateful of me not to have acknowledged, or to have thanked you for past letters, gifts, and remembrances – all the more so, since your interest has, in fact, been a great comfort to me, and encouragement in the despondency that not unnaturally accompanies the labours of actually publishing such a work as The Lord of the Rings.

But it is most unfortunate that this has coincided with a period of exceptionally heavy labours and duties in other functions, so that I have been at times almost distracted.

I will try and answer your questions. I may say that they are very welcome. I like things worked out in detail myself, and answers provided to all reasonable questions. Your letter will, I hope, guide me in choosing the kind of information to be provided (as promised) in an appendix, and strengthen my hand with the publishers. Since the third volume will be rather slimmer than the second (events move quicker, and less explanations are needed), there will, I believe be a certain amount of room for such matter. My problem is not the difficulty of providing it, but of choosing from the mass of material I have already composed.

There is of course a clash between ‘literary’ technique, and the fascination of elaborating in detail an imaginary mythical Age (mythical, not allegorical: my mind does not work allegorically). As a story, I think it is good that there should be a lot of things unexplained (especially if an explanation actually exists); and I have perhaps from this point of view erred in trying to explain too much, and give too much past history. Many readers have, for instance, rather stuck at the Council of Elrond. And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).

But as much further history (backwards) as anyone could desire actually exists in the Silmarillion and related stories and poems, composing the History of the Eldar (Elves). I believe that in the event (which seems much to hope) of sufficient people being interested in the Lord of the Rings to pay for the cost of its publication, the gallant publishers may consider printing some of that. It was actually written first, and I wished to have the matter issued in historical order, which would have saved a lot of allusion and explanation in the present book. But I could not get it accepted.

The third volume was of course completed years ago, as far as the tale goes. I have finished such revision, as seemed necessary, and it will go to be set up almost at once. In the meanwhile I am giving what fragments of time I have to making compressed versions of such historical, ethnographical, and linguistic matter as can go in the Appendix. If it will interest you, I will send you a copy (rather rough) of the matter dealing with Languages (and Writing), Peoples and Translation.

The latter has given me much thought. It seems seldom regarded by other creators of imaginary worlds, however gifted as narrators (such as Eddison). But then I am a philologist, and much though I should like to be more precise on other cultural aspects and features, that is not within my competence. Anyway ‘language’ is the most important, for the story has to be told, and the dialogue conducted in a language; but English cannot have been the language of any people at that time. What I have, in fact done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in the Westron into English terms, with some differentiation of style to represent dialectal differences. Languages quite alien to the C.S. have been left alone. Except for a few scraps in the Black Speech of Mordor, and a few names and a battle-cry in Dwarvish, these are almost entirely Elvish (Eldarin).

Languages, however, that were related to the Westron presented a special problem. I turned them into forms of speech related to English. Since the Rohirrim are represented as recent comers out of the North, and users of an archaic Mannish language relatively untouched by the influence of Eldarin, I have turned their names into forms like (but not identical with) Old English. The language of Dale and the Long Lake would, if it appeared, be represented as more or less Scandinavian in character; but it is only represented by a few names, especially those of the Dwarves that came from that region. These are all Old Norse Dwarf-names.

(Dwarves are represented as keeping their own native tongue more or less secret, and using for all ‘outer’ purposes the language of the people they dwelt near; they never reveal their own ‘true’ personal names in their own tongue.)

The Westron or C.S. is supposed to be derived from the Mannish Adunaic language of the Númenóreans, spreading from the Númenórean Kingdoms in the days of the Kings, and especially from Gondor, where it remains spoken in nobler and rather more antique style (a style also usually adopted by the Elves when they use this language). But all the names in Gondor, except for a few of supposedly prehistoric origin, are of Elvish form, since the Númenórean nobility still used an Elvish language, or could. This was because they had been allies of the Elves in the First Age, and had for that reason been granted the Atlantis isle of Númenor.

Two of the Elvish tongues appear in this book. They have some sort of existence, since I have composed them in some completeness, as well as their history and account of their relationship. They are intended (a) to be definitely of a European kind in style and structure (not in detail); and (b) to be specially pleasant. The former is not difficult to achieve; but the latter is more difficult, since individuals’ personal predilections, especially in the phonetic structure of languages, varies widely, even when modified by the imposed languages (including their so-called ‘native’ tongue).

I have therefore pleased myself. The archaic language of lore is meant to be a kind of ‘Elven-latin’, and by transcribing it into a spelling closely resembling that of Latin (except that y is only used as a consonant, as y in E. Yes) the similarity to Latin has been increased ocularly. Actually it might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me ‘phonaesthetic’ pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any of the three. This language is High-elven or in its own terms Quenya (Elvish).

The living language of the Western Elves (Sindarin or Grey-elven) is the one usually met, especially in names. This is derived from an origin common to it and Quenya; but the changes have been deliberately devised to give it a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh: because that character is one that I find, in some linguistic moods, very attractive; and because it seems to fit the rather ‘Celtic’ type of legends and stories told of its speakers.

‘Elves’ is a translation, not perhaps now very suitable, but originally good enough, of Quendi. They are represented as a race similar in appearance (and more so the further back) to Men, and in former days of the same stature. I will not here go into their differences from Men! But I suppose that the Quendi are in fact in these histories very little akin to the Elves and Fairies of Europe; and if I were pressed to rationalize, I should say that they represent really Men with greatly enhanced aesthetic and creative faculties, greater beauty and longer life, and nobility – the Elder Children, doomed to fade before the Followers (Men), and to live ultimately only by the thin line of their blood that was mingled with that of Men, among whom it was the only real claim to ‘nobility’.

They are represented as having become early divided in to two, or three, varieties. 1. The Eldar who heard the summons of the Valar or Powers to pass from Middle-earth over the Sea to the West; and 2. the Lesser Elves who did not answer it. Most of the Eldar after a great march reached the Western Shores and passed over Sea; these were the High Elves, who became immensely enhanced in powers and knowledge. But part of them in the event remained in the coast-lands of the North-west: these were the Sindar or Grey-elves. The lesser Elves hardly appear, except as part of the people of The Elf-realm; of Northern Mirkwood, and of Lorien, ruled by Eldar; their languages do not appear.

The High Elves met in this book are Exiles, returned back over Sea to Middle-earth, after events which are the main matter of the Silmarillion, part of one of the main kindreds of the Eldar: the Noldor[1] (Masters of Lore). Or rather a last remnant of these. For the Silmarillion proper and the First Age ended with the destruction of the primeval Dark Power (of whom Sauron was a mere lieutenant), and the rehabilitation of the Exiles, who returned again over Sea. Those who lingered were those who were enamoured of Middle-earth and yet desired the unchanging beauty of the Land of the Valar. Hence the making of the Rings; for the Three Rings were precisely endowed with the power of preservation, not of birth. Though unsullied, because they were not made by Sauron nor touched by him, they were nonetheless partly products of his instruction, and ultimately under the control of the One. Thus, as you will see, when the One goes, the last defenders of High-elven lore and beauty are shorn of power to hold back time, and depart.

I am sorry about the Geography. It must have been dreadfully difficult without a map or maps. There will be in volume I a map of part of the Shire, and a small-scale general map of the whole scene of action and reference (of which the map at the end of The Hobbit is the N.E. corner). These have been drawn from my less elegant maps by my son Christopher, who is learned in this lore. But I have only had one proof and that had to go back. I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story — as I fear you have found.

I cannot send you my own working maps; but perhaps these very rough and not entirely accurate drafts, made hurriedly at various times for readers, would be of some assistance. …. Perhaps when you have done with these MS. maps or made some notes you would not mind sending them back. I shall find them useful in making some more; but I cannot get to that yet. I may say that my son’s maps are beautifully clear, as far as reduction in reproduction allows; but they do not contain everything, alas!

Some stray answers. Dragons. They had not stopped; since they were active in far later times, close to our own. Have I said anything to suggest the final ending of dragons? If so it should be altered. The only passage I can think of is Vol. I p. 70 : ‘there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough’. But that implies, I think, that there are still dragons, if not of full primeval stature. I have a long historical table of events from the Beginning to the End of the Third Age. It is rather full; but I agree that a short form, containing events important for this tale would be useful. If you would care for typed copies of some of this material: eg. The Rings of Power; The Downfall of Númenor; the Lists of the Heirs of Elendil; the House of Eorl (Genealogy); Genealogy of Durin and the Dwarf-lords of Moria; and The Tale of the Years (esp. those of the Second and Third Ages), I will try and get copies made soon. ….

Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc ‘demon’, but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions’. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.

The Black Speech was only used in Mordor; it only occurs in the Ring inscription, and a sentence uttered by the Orcs of Barad-dûr (Vol. II p. 48) and in the word Nazgûl (cf. nazg in the Ring inscription). It was never used willingly by any other people, and consequently even the names of places in Mordor are in English (for the C.S.) or Elvish. Morannon is just the Elvish for Black Gate; cf. Mordor Black Land, Mor-ia Black Chasm, Mor-thond Black-root (river-name). Rohir-rim is the Elvish (Gondorian) name for the people that called themselves Riders of the Mark or Eorlings. The formation is not meant to resemble Hebrew. The Eldarin languages distinguish in forms and use between a ‘partitive’ or ‘particular’ plural, and the general or total plural. Thus yrch ‘orcs, some orcs, des orques’ occurs in vol I pp. 359,402; the Orcs, as a race, or the whole of a group previously mentioned would have been orchoth. In Grey-elven the general plurals were very frequently made by adding to a name (or a place-name) some word meaning ‘tribe, host, horde, people’. So Haradrim the Southrons: Q. rimbe, S. rim, host; Onod-rim the Ents. The Rohirrim is derived from roch (Q. rokko) horse, and the Elvish stem kher- ‘possess’; whence Sindarin Rochir ‘horse-lord’, and Rochir-rim ‘the host of the Horse-lords’. In the pronunciation of Gondor the ch (as in German, Welsh, etc) had been softened to a sounded h; so in Rochann ‘Hippia’ to Rohan.

Beorn is dead; see vol. I p. 241. He appeared in The Hobbit. It was then the year Third Age 2940 (Shire-reckoning 1340). We are now in the years 3018-19 (1418-19). Though a skin-changer and no doubt a bit of a magician, Beorn was a Man.

Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.

He has no connexion in my mind with the Entwives. What had happened to them is not resolved in this book. He is in a way the answer to them in the sense that he is almost the opposite, being say, Botany and Zoology (as sciences) and Poetry as opposed to Cattle-breeding and Agriculture and practicality.

I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429-3441) when Sauron pursued a scorched earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the Anduin (vol. II p. 79 refers to it). They survived only in the ‘agriculture’ transmitted to Men (and Hobbits). Some, of course, may have fled east, or even have become enslaved: tyrants even in such tales must have an economic and agricultural background to their soldiers and metal-workers. If any survived so, they would indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapprochement would be difficult – unless experience of industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don’t know.

Hobbit-children were delightful, but I am afraid that the only glimpses of them in this book are found at the beginning of vol. I. An epilogue giving a further glimpse (though of a rather exceptional family) has been so universally condemned that I shall not insert it. One must stop somewhere.

Yes, Sam Gamgee is in a sense a relation of Dr. Gamgee, in that his name would not have taken that form, if I had not heard of ‘Gamgee tissue’; there was I believe a Dr. Gamgee (no doubt of the kin) in Birmingham when I was a child. The name was any way always familiar to me. Gaffer Gamgee arose first: he was a legendary character to my children (based on a real-life gaffer, not of that name). But, as you will find explained, in this tale the name is a ‘translation’ of the real Hobbit name, derived from a village (devoted to rope-making) anglicized as Gamwich (pron. Gammidge), near Tighfield (see vol. II p. 217). Since Sam was close friends of the family of Cotton (another village-name), I was led astray into the Hobbit-like joke of spelling Gamwichy Gamgee, though I do not think that in actual Hobbit-dialect the joke really arose.

There are no precise opposites to the Wizards – a translation (perhaps not suitable, but throughout distinguished from other ‘magician’ terms) of Q. Elvish Istari. Their origin was not known to any but a few (such as Elrond and Galadriel) in the Third Age. They are said to have first appeared about the year 1000 of the Third Age, when the shadow of Sauron began first to grow again to new shape. They always appeared old, but grew older with their labours, slowly, and disappeared with the end of the Rings. They were thought to be Emissaries (in the terms of this tale from the Far West beyond the Sea), and their proper function, maintained by Gandalf, and perverted by Saruman, was to encourage and bring out the native powers of the Enemies of Sauron. Gandalf’s opposite was, strictly, Sauron, in one part of Sauron’s operations; as Aragorn was in another.

The Balrog is a survivor from the Silmarillion and the legends of the First Age. So is Shelob. The Balrogs, of whom the whips were the chief weapons, were primeval spirits of destroying fire, chief servants of the primeval Dark Power of the First Age. They were supposed to have been all destroyed in the overthrow of Thangorodrim, his fortress in the North. But it is here found (there is usually a hang-over especially of evil from one age to another) that one had escaped and taken refuge under the mountains of Hithaeglin (the Misty Mountains). It is observable that only the Elf knows what the thing is – and doubtless Gandalf.

Shelob (English representing C.S ‘she-lob’ = female spider) is a translation of Elvish Ungol ‘spider’. She is represented in vol. II p. 332 as descendant of the giant spiders of the glens of Nandungorthin, which come into the legends of the First Age, especially into the chief of them, the tale of Beren and Lúthien. This is constantly referred to, since as Sam points out (vol. II p. 321) this history is in a sense only a further continuation of it. Both Elrond (and his daughter Arwen Undómiel, who resembles Lúthien closely in looks and fate) are descendants of Beren and Lúthien; and so at very many more removes is Aragorn. The giant spiders were themselves only the offspring of Ungoliante the primeval devourer of light, that in spider-form assisted the Dark Power, but ultimately quarrelled with him. There is thus no alliance between Shelob and Sauron, the Dark Power’s deputy; only a common hatred.

Galadriel is as old, or older than Shelob. She is the last remaining of the Great among the High Elves, and ‘awoke’ in Eldamar beyond the Sea, long before Ungoliante came to Middle-earth and produced her broods there. ….

Well, after a long silence you have evoked a fairly long reply. Not too long, I hope, even for such delightful and encouraging interest. I am deeply grateful for it; and I hope all staying at Carradale will accept my thanks.

Yours sincerely,
J. R. R. Tolkien.

[1] N = ng as in ding.

Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

I don’t think I have ever read anything better than the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

It is a bold statement, so allow me to give some context.

One of the things that readers love about The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is that they are tales drawn from a weighty world. A lot of the Tolkienesque high fiction of the past 50 years has failed not because of poor writing–though sometimes that is the case–and not even because it is derivative. Often fantasy fails because the fictional world is thin.

In fantastic realms, the greatest examples of adventure, romance, heroic quest, or self-sacrifice in the face of evil are placed within the context of a subcreated world that is both vast and expansive in terms of scope and imagination, as well as rooted in the depths of history, myth, and legend. In high fantasy, the story only resonates when it is set within a speculative universe created by the skillful hands of a true myth-maker. Stripped of fictional worlds that are both deep and wide, and the stories might as well be soap operas or Hollywood copy-and-print CGI blockbusters.

The reason we read and reread great fantasy literature is the reason we keep going back to the same mythological sources: there is a resonant authenticity to the secondary world, for true myth always carries with it core truth that is relevant to our primary world.

As Tolkien reminds us again and again in his letters, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are not truly stories on their own. Instead, they are drawn from a vast library of materials that encode the history, mythology, legends, songs, and other source materials that are the literary remains of three great ages of the prehistoric past. Even when we read The Hobbit, whimsical and humorous and in the pattern of a fairy tale, as the tale slowly transforms before our eyes into an epic, we feel that Middle Earth has no edges in time or space. Even in that children’s tale, we can feel the weight that is the Legendarium–even though it is almost entirely hidden from us.

Which is why nothing is random in the Legendarium. Nothing is careless–not even is the appearance of the great eagles. They are not a deus ex machina, for the god in the machine of Tolkien’s world is the internal logic of the thousands of pages and millions of words that are an entire universe in outline form.

After The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, readers turn to The Silmarillion. Tolkien had originally wanted to publish The Silmarillion with LOTR, for he feared his epic would make no sense without the myth and history behind it. Forty years ago, less than four years after his father’s death, Christopher Tolkien prepared a novel-length version of The Silmarillion, with the help of fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay.

Though filled to the brim with technical languages, etymologies, chronologies, geographies, and complex relationships between characters and their evolving place names, the success of The Silmarillion is a testimony to the insatiable appetite of Tolkien readers. In the decades that followed, Christopher Tolkien, aided by only a few trusted editors, has published the twelve-volume History of Middle Earth, as well as a number of one-off volumes, including The Children of Húrin from the Legendarium, as well as a number of books that are linked to Tolkien’s oeuvre in more sophisticated ways, such as The Legend of Sigurn and Gudrún, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, The Story of Kullervo, Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf and his incomplete version of The Fall of Arthur.

Truthfully, I have been one of the victims of The Silmarillion. I have read all of the auxiliary books and various parts of the History of Middle Earth. And though I have read much of The Silmarillion, each time I try to read it through in earnest, I fail. My PhD supervisor, a published Tolkien scholar, called The Silmarillion “the Bible for Tolkien geeks,” and I struggle in reading it in the same way that I struggle in reading the Bible: I love mythology, but I get lost in the complex interweaving of genealogy and geography.

In the end, it was rugged discipline that helped me come to a working knowledge of the Bible, and the same can be true of The Silmarillion. With extensive use of reading resources (lists, maps, etc.), I am now two-thirds of the way through. I am fairly confident I will finish in earnest, so I will no longer be a Silmarillion cherry-picker.

Right at the centre of my second edition paperback is the tale of Beren and Lúthien. This is the prose version of the tale, and complete in its telling. There are other versions, including the “Song of Beren and Lúthien” as Aragorn tells it in chapter 11 of The Fellowship of the Ring. I’ve attached Tolkien’s reading of the song below, but the beginning of the poem captures both the premise and the flavour of the story:

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinúviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering.

There Beren came from mountains cold,
And lost he wandered under leaves,
And where the Elven-river rolled
He walked alone and sorrowing.
He peered between the hemlock-leaves
And saw in wonder flowers of gold
Upon her mantle and her sleeves,
And her hair like shadow following.

Enchantment healed his weary feet
That over hills were doomed to roam; …

Here the man is caught by the beauty of an elf-maiden, enchanted and drawn into a world filled with curses, mythology, and the pride of men. Shaun Gunner at the Tolkien Society Blog has given an excellent background to the Beren and Lúthien cycle, which I won’t retell. It is, however, no mere trifle of a Romeo and Juliet tale. Beren is a great hero who dared to test the strenght and cunning of Morgoth himself. Lúthien is one of the most powerful women in Tolkien’s work, and in this tale it is her critical interventions of power to win fidelity and cast shadows of doubt and sloth over evil that make success possible.

Beyond the evocative and beautifully written tale itself, both the mortal, Beren, and the immortal, Lúthien, are essential to The Lord of the Rings. Historically, Lúthien is the cousin of Galadriel, oldest–and, according to Gimli the Dwarf–fairest of elf-maidens in Middle Earth. The children of Beren and Lúthien are the first creatures to live on the knife’s edge between the immortal life and the fate of all men, death. The Númenoreans and the great kings of old choose mortality. Their legacies, both good and ill, sit in the breast of Aragorn. Elrond, Lúthien and Beren’s great-grandson, chooses immortality and shepherds Middle Earth through each of its subsequent ages. Arwen, in her love for Aragorn, much choose her path, and in their tales they echo the story of Beren and Lúthien.

Aragorn is not merely recounting history or providing the hobbits with a campfire tale. In his song he is evoking myth’s great power to inform the actions of the wise. In the Beren and Lúthien cycle, the question of doom resounds. While myth can inform and the resounding echoes of narrative are portents for the future, these tales can never work as prophecy. Arwen and Aragorn must reckon with fate themselves, and their choices are critical to the destiny of Middle Earth.

This evocative tale that occupied a half-century of Tolkien’s life is now being published with other material from the Beren and Lúthien archive. Alan Lee illustrates the volume, and although I do not know how much new material is included, if any, any chance to get more of this greatest of tales is welcome by me. Be sure to reserve your copy for July 1st.

From the Publisher:

The tale of Beren and Lúthien was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year.

Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal elf. Her father, a great elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.

In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father’s own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.

Published on the tenth anniversary of the last Middle-earth book, the international bestseller The Children of Húrin, this new volume will similarly include drawings and color plates by Alan Lee, who also illustrated The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and went on to win Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

I have just finished reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1982), which is fitting given that this is the 45th anniversary of his death (2 Sep 1973). With help from Christopher Tolkien, noted writer, broadcaster, and biographer Humphrey Carpenter collected the letters in that energetic period between the publication of The Silmarillion (1977) and the beginning of The History of Middle-earth in the two-volume Book of Lost Tales (1983-4).

Though I was not yet awake to the world, I can imagine that these were heady days for Tolkien fans. The Maker of Middle-earth passed in 1973, no doubt leading to the great disappointment of throngs of avid readers hoping (since 1955) for more. Then, with the help of Guy Gavriel Kay, Christopher Tolkien is able to publish The Silmarillion–something his father was never able to do. Carpenter published his Tolkien biography the same year, followed by a biography of the Inklings in 1978 and the letters in 1981. I can imagine the energy of Tolkien and fantasy societies in these days, long before the internet, when hope for more was fueled by hearsay, rumour, and happy self-delusion. And yet, in the 45 years since his father’s death, Christopher Tolkien has published 23 major volumes. My copy of The Fall of Gondolin (2018) arrived on Friday at suppertime.

Tolkien’s Letters was my most recent “occasional book,” meaning that I read about a letter a day, taking a break last winter to read L.M. Montgomery’s diary. Of the 400 pages of letters, unfortunately only a handful are pre–Hobbit, leaving us with a great gap in that incredibly fertile period of the pre-narrative production of the legendarium. I suppose that gives plenty of space for fans to speculate, for students to explore, and for scholars to make their living. After all, in Carpenter’s collection there are dozens of critical letters concerning Middle-earth (including this one). There are also critical moments in the history of the Inklings (see here and here), letters about the inspiration of his work (like this one), letters to, from, and about fans (like this and this), and–especially in the last decade–many letters about critical details of language development and what we might call Middle-earth theory (like this one–though the ignorance in the post title is mine, not Tolkien’s).

For me, the most profound moments among Tolkien’s letters were when he shared his deeply personal and painful struggle to complete his work. No doubt Tolkien was a publisher’s nightmare even if, when the work was done, he was a dream. In either his academic or his popular work, I’m not sure he ever hit a deadline (at least after the 1930s). I talk here about how the first quarter of The Letters are filled with “insecurity and faint hope.” The brief and light post, “12 Reasons not to Write Lord of the Rings, or an Ode Against the Muses” shows Tolkien at his procrastinating best. But it is not all sheer perfectionism and the self-delusion of “I’ll do it tomorrow.” As I blogged occasionally about the Letters, I often mixed these moving moments in Tolkien’s life. In particular, “Battling a Mountain of Neglects with J.R.R. Tolkien” is about the weight of neglected tasks when desire to tackle them is deep–and yet, there is no time. And in “The Shocking Reason Tolkien Finished The Lord of the Rings” we finally get to look toward the end of that 20-year journey.

I am a little sad now that I have finished The Letters. It was moving to see the end of his life come. Though it was 45 years ago–and the anniversary is only a coincidence–I have joined thousands that have no doubt bowed their heads for a brief moment on closing the last page of this book.

How did The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien end? In the last few pages there are letters about proper Middle-earth names for cattle, detailed letters about philology and Elvin tongues, reflections on his status as a “cult figure,” a reunion with Christopher Wiseman of the TCBS, and notes of grief at the death of his wife, the distance of his family, the debilitations of old age, and his disappearing set of friends. In this collection filled with information about the man and his work that we would have in no other way, what is the last letter about?

Actually, it’s a prattling, familial note to his daughter, Priscilla, while on vacation in Bournemouth at his friends, the Tolhursts. While there are a hundred great notes we would wish to have from J.R.R. Tolkien on his deathbed, I kind of like that this collection ends with the phrase, “… but forecasts are more favourable.” We don’t–or I don’t, in any case–actually know the last thing that Tolkien wrote. We do not have a definitive “Collected Letters” as we do with Dorothy L. Sayers (edited by Barbara Reynolds) or C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper). Until then, here is the last post of J.R.R. Tolkien, on the 45th anniversary of his death.

Wed. Aug. 29th. 1973                                               at 22 Little Forest Road, Bournemouth.

Dearest Prisca,

I arrived in B’th. about 3.15 yesterday, after a successful drive with most traffic going north not seawards, & a curry-lunch shared by Causier [the driver], Mrs C. and David. It was v. v. hot here & crowded. The Cs. then went off to find ‘accommodation’ for 2 nights, and departed necessarily with all my luggage on what looked like a hopeless quest. They dropped me on the East Overcliff by the Miramar which nostalgically attracted me; but I went into the town & did some shopping, including having a hair trim. I then walked back to the Miramar at 4.45 – and things then began to go wrong. I was told Causier had called to find me about 4 p.m. which made me afraid that he was in difficulties. I also found that I had lost my Bank Card &: some money. ‘Reception’ were surprised but welcoming, comforted me with a good tea. Also assuming that I had been looking for something more than a tea, they told me they could have done nothing at all for me, but for a cancellation which would allow them to take me in on Tuesday Sep. 4 – but I said I would see. I took a taxi to 22 L.F.R. (which promptly lost its way) and arrived late to find the house crowded & lively — only the Dr. was away till evening. (Happy go-lucky folk.) Then I waited anxiously for Causier. It was nearly 7 before he (and Mrs C. & D) turned up – I suspect he too had lost his way – and said it had only taken him 15 mins to find v. g. rooms for 2 nights! In the meanwhile Martin Tolhurst (formerly of N[ew] College), now grown to an immensely tall, charming, and efficient man, had by telephone located my Bank Card etc. at The Red Lion Salisbury. So all was well, for the present. But I have accepted the Miramar offer, and shall not return to Oxford till Sep. 11. For various reasons: the chief being I wish to give Carr plenty of time to clean my rooms [at Merton College], which, and I too, were much neglected latterly; I wish v. much to visit various people here, also Chris Wiseman at Milford, and I am old enough to much prefer familiar surroundings.

My dearest love to you.

Daddy.

It is stuffy, sticky, and rainy here at present – but forecasts are more favourable.

Last year I introduced an occasional feature I call “Throwback Thursday.” This is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own blog-hoard or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie” that I think needs a bit of spin time.

I keep coming back in my thinking to the Inklings and writing groups. I remain impressed by how important writing supports were for two of the biggest fantasy writers of the 20th century: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Last summer I talked about how in an age of literary groups, some writers were alone. I was talking about L.M. Montgomery, but J.K. Rowling was certainly another who did her work by herself. When people talk to me online or in the street about Tolkien and Lewis, they love to hear stories about how their friendship encouraged there work. I remain sad about how their friendship faded, but here is a fun post from six years ago about the height of their collaboration. I hope once again that this highlights the value of writing friends and brings a smile to your face.

I suppose there is a tendency to imagine C.S. Lewis as an introspective, brooding sort of fellow. A friend of mine recently pointed out that this image may be because of Anthony Hopkins’ interpretation of Lewis in Shadowlands–a performance that has certainly left an imprint on me twenty years after last seeing it. But I think the image of Lewis captured in David Downing’s, Looking for the King, is far closer to the truth. Downing portrays an approachable, friendly, curious fellow with an affinity for cider and the laughter of close friends.

As much as I appreciate Hopkins’ performance, or did when I saw it, the more I read of Lewis’ journals and letters–not to mention the humour that laces his writing–the more I’m certain that Lewis loved laughter, and loved friendship.

There is a letter that C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948 that, I think, captures the humour that infiltrated Lewis’ life and the life his friends, the Inklings. It was after WWII, and although rationing had officially ceased, some things were simply impossible to get in England. Lewis’ letters of the period include dozens where he thanks people–usually Americans–for gifts they sent him in those lean days.

One of these generous benefactors was a prominent American doctor, Warfield Firor. Dr Firor shared an extended correspondence with Lewis. Firor even invited him to visit his cottage in the Rocky Mountains, though Lewis could never make it. Throughout this post-WWII period, Dr Firor sent a number of gifts. These packages of meats and sweats and fortified drinks from Lewis’ fans, friends and supporters were always gratefully acknowledged.

And they were often shared.

One ham sent by Dr Firor, in particular, has become a ham of note in the history of literature. Here is a letter from Lewis dated March 12, 1948:

My dear Dr. Firor,

Though I have already written to thank you for your grand present of the ham, that letter was written before tasting it: and now having done so, I feel that common decency demands further and heartier thanks.

The fate of the ham was this: we have a small informal literary club which meets in my rooms every Thursday for beer and talk, and–in happier times–for an occasional dinner. And last night, having your ham to dine off, we had a meal which eight members attended. By diligent ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ in various colleges we got two bottles of burgundy and two of port: the college kitchen supplied soup, fish and a savoury: and we had a delightful evening. This by English standards is a banquet rarely met with, and all agreed that they had’nt eaten such a dinner for five years or more.

I enclose a little souvenir of the occasion which may amuse you.

With our very best thanks for all the happiness you gave us,

yours Ham-icably,
C.S. Lewis

Despite the hamhock pun, the reader can immediately see the light tone. This is the second official letter from the Oxford don regarding the ham–the previous one described it as “that magnificent ham.”

But there’s more.

There is also a note attached, a splendid specimen of Inklings humour. Walter Hooper includes a copy of the note in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War (1931-1949). It is a bit difficult to capture in print, but here it is:

The note, dated March 11, 1948, says:

The undersigned, having just partaken of your ham, have drunk your health:

It then lists, in the fashion of great formality, the signatures of the Inklings as they sat at the table, with their titles, their Army roles, and their positions at the University.

Lewis adds this note to the bottom of the letter:

As some have not v. legible signatures, I had better say the list runs; C.S. Lewis, H. V. Dyson, Lord David Cecil, W. H. Lewis, C. Hardie, C. R. Tolkien, R. E. Havard, J. R. R. Tolkien. The order is just as we happened to be sitting. Tolkien père is the senior and T. fils the baby.

Dr Firor, who has a named chair at John Hopkins, would later go on to donate his Lewis collection to the Bodleian and sponsor important work in Lewis studies. And Lewis would go on to receive more packages from supporters. I read of one, once, that included fresh eggs, bacon, and butter–betraying a confidence in the postal system that I do not have.

I think, though, that this note, written in all its false seriousness, should dispel our image of Lewis or Tolkien as brooding intellectuals or humourless introverts. After all, the great Oxford Don and Cambridge Professor C.S. Lewis, the author of works of literature, critical theory, philosophy, and poetry, was able to sign a letter, “yours Ham-icably.”

It seems that C.S. Lewis was able to ham it up with the best of them.

As last evening tilted towards nighttime in my part of the world, my social media feeds began filling with the news that Christopher Tolkien had died. The last living Inkling, Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 Nov 1924 to 15 Jan 2020), may well have been merely an interesting historical note, a minor scholar or writer always overshadowed by his father, J.R.R. Tolkien. And while it is true that his father was the subcreative genius of a vast, sweeping legendarium associated with the bestselling Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien grew to become the literary curator of that world.

For this gift to us, the lovers of Middle-earth and fans of Tolkien’s linguistically rooted mythic worlds, we are ever grateful. Whereas many estates would have been content to leave the bulk of the author’s “unfinished tales” incomplete, Christopher Tolkien left behind a world of medieval scholarship to prepare his father’s papers for the world. This began with some translation work and The Silmarillion in the mid-1970s–with some help from Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay–and continued at the pace of about a book every year or two (though a pace that slackened in the last half of this period. This list is not complete, leaving out indices, alternate editions, and the like. But it gives a sense of Christopher Tolkien’s work:

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation, with E.V. Gordon, 1975)
• The Silmarillion (1977)
• Unfinished Tales (1980)
• The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, assisting Humphrey Carpenter (1981)
• The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays (1983)
• The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. 1, part 1 (1983)
• The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. 2, part 2 (1984)
• The Lays of Beleriand, Vol. 3 (1985)
• The Shaping of Middle-earth, Vol. 4 (1986)
• The Lost Road and Other Writings, Vol. 5 (1987)
• The Return of the Shadow, Vol. 6 (1988)
• The Treason of Isengard, Vol. 7 (1989)
• The War of the Ring, Vol. 8 (1990)
• Sauron Defeated, Vol. 9 (1992)
• Morgoth’s Ring, Vol. 10 (1993)
• The War of the Jewels, Vol. 11 (1994)
• The Peoples of Middle-earth, Vol. 12 (1996)
• The Children of Húrin (2007)
• The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009)
• The Fall of Arthur (2013)
• Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014)
• Beren and Lúthien (2017)
• The Fall of Gondolin (2018)

There is more archival work tucked away in theses and other published papers, as well as major works by folks like Verlyn Flieger, Dimitra Vice and Andrew Higgins, and Michael Drout. But our debt is greatest to Christopher, who worked tirelessly from his father’s death until his mid-90s to bring this material to the world. I suppose Christopher Tolkien’s work began long before the 1970s, starting with his first job as an editor–a young man looking for errors in The Hobbit for a bit of pocket money! After that, there were maps to draw (see below) and discussions with the Inklings (see below) or at home or through letters. It is not often that we can speak of a lifetime of work with such fine results.

I have not read all of this material yet, but I will do so if the Lord tarries. And at 95 years old, lovers of Tolkien’s worlds have benefited from the long life, sharp eye, and steady hand of Christopher Tolkien–the custodian, guardian, conservator, gift-giver, and curator of Middle-earth. I don’t know who will follow, if anyone can, or what there is to come. But my life is richer for Christopher Tolkien’s work.

Given that one of the last edited volumes was the much anticipated Beren and Lúthien, I thought it would be nice to include the “Lúthien letter”–a note that J.R.R. Tolkien sent to his son, Christopher, about a year before he died. It is a mix of melancholic nostalgia and fond memories with some hint of boyish glee that The Lord of the Rings continues to delight readers, and a little bit of regret.

I have at last got busy about Mummy’s grave. …. The inscription I should like is:

EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889-1971
Lúthien

: brief and jejune, except for Lúthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.*

July 13. Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion & regret – and in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement. I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy. It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief pan of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths — someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.

15 July. I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead. A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and book-stores of Allen & Unwin. To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Despatch) was dealing with my works. I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from board-room downwards. ‘Accountancy’ told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights. Also a large single order for copies of The L.R. had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000.

*She knew the earliest form of the legend (written in hospital), and also the poem eventually printed as Aragorn’s song in LR.

I am for the first time teaching J.R.R. Tolkien‘s “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” the “Debate between Finrod and Andreth”–though I wonder if “Dialogue” is a better term for “Athrabeth.” Finrod was the son of Finarfin, great Elven King of the Noldor, brother to Galadriel and Aegnor, and a friend of the race of Men. Andreth was a Man, a wisdom speaker of the House of Bëor, a woman who fell in love with Finrod’s brother–a love that was requited, but forbidden as Elves are forbidden to wed during times of war. Nearly half a century after the “Athrabeth,” Andreth died alone and childless.

As Andreth was one of the Lore Masters of Bëor, Finrod relished in spending long evenings at her fireside, One of their conversations was recorded and ultimately published in Morgoth’s Ring, the 10th volume of the History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien.

The Athrabeth is a gorgeous and troubling piece of work. Its beauty lies in its ability to capture a lore-rooted theological debate that still evokes the relational depth of two friends. The text combines the great and bitter longing of Andreth for her lost lover Aegnor and a delicate blend of fear and daring hope as Elves and Men consider their fates.

It is troubling because the Athrabeth challenges one of the critical concepts of Middle-earth, that the gift of Men is mortality (Tolkien letter #131, to Milton Waldman; see the Quenta Silmarillion). According to Andreth, though, wisdom says that death for Men is a wrong–an unnatural breaking of body (hröa) and soul (fëa):

“dying we die, and we go out to no return. Death is an uttermost end, a loss irremediable. And it is abominable; for it is also a wrong that is done to us” (Morgoth’s Ring, 311).

It is unlike anything I have read in Tolkien’s papers.

Besides the questions of mortality and the gifts of Eru, the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” brings us more deeply into the Sindarin idea of estel, hope, one of the names of Aragorn the hope-for king. “Hope” is perhaps too thin of a concept we discover in the Athrabeth. As the word “longsuffering” was invented to capture a concept in St. Paul, perhaps “hopetrust” or “longhope” is the right way to translate estel.

Though it was a rich discovery, my reading of the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” was for a purpose, to guide a discussion of Signum University students. I was reading with pencil in hand, so to speak, so I also had some other volumes open as I hunted down some of the many links that J.R.R. Tolkien makes in his interwoven works and that Christopher Tolkien draws our attention to in the footnotes and commentaries. As I was writing a note in my copy of Tolkien’s letters–sent there from an endnote Christopher wrote to one of his father’s own self-commentaries–I realized how ridiculously implicated these stories are!

After all, when I think of it, I am writing a blog post about marginal notes I wrote next to a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to a Lord of the Rings fan, which I found in Christopher Tolkien’s endnote to an author’s note his father wrote to an inserted episode from the 12-volume History of Middle-earth, which is the Legendarium, that is both the foundation of and the prequel to the published story, The Lord of the Rings.

And so the circle goes. As they have come to us through eight decades of publication by father, son, and scholars, Tolkien’s works are deeply implicated with one another–layered to an almost infinite degree in language, poetry, story, history, legend, and myth. My circular experience of reading is not unique to me, I think.

But although Tolkien’s works are like circle, and layered in complex ways, the works are also “rhizomatic”–a word some of my favourite teachers have been using lately, but that we see the idea of in the Inklings‘ own work. Like a wild tree or creeping vine, Tolkien’s writings are like send out roots and shoots as they move out into the world. And Tolkien was not just the writer of his work, but a kind of discoverer–a gardener who plants and watches what grows. C.S. Lewis describes this kind of rhizomatic project in his commentary on fellow-Inkling Charles Williams’ poetry, where writing

is more a dove-like brooding, a watching and waiting as if he watched a living thing, now and then putting out a cautious finger to disentangle two tendrils or to train one a little further toward the support which it had almost reached, but for the most part simply waiting (Arthurian Torso, 279).

There, in the past, Tolkien is watching the roots of ideas shoot out across the garden wall, while he trains the vine, disentangling some tendrils and bringing others together. Tolkien himself used a similar metaphor in “Leaf by Niggle,” an allegorical tale about life as a subcreator. Niggle is a painter, but as his life goes on he cannot feel any real interest in any of his paintings except this one tree:

It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. Niggle lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture (Tales from the Perilous Realm, 286).

And so the tree grows, such an elegant metaphor for Tolkien’s own work. Trees, Leaves, Vines, Circles, the loom–I suppose our metaphors for the work could spread out from here in their own branches. But it strikes me at such a time as this how deeply layered Tolkien’s works are, and how we are invited into the intricate patterns of his interwoven worlds.

“Leaf by Niggle” by Emily Austin. Adding to the layers of our reading experience, you can find Emily’s Inklings-inspired art here.

Hi folks. This event is past, but The Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis and Friends at Taylor University are having a digital Inklings “tea” on Friday’s at 4pm. They are an archive, a host of strong Inklings-informed study program that includes student and faculty research, and host the biannual Taylor Lewis & Friends conference. If you would like to join in on future “digital teas,” get on their mailing list by emailing: cslewiscenter@taylor.edu.

I have once before made this bold declaration:

“I don’t think I have ever read anything better than the tale of Beren and Lúthien.”

I still love it, having read it through for class preparation this spring. And now the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University in Upland, IN is having a digital “tea” with the Beren and Lúthien at the core of it. We will take turns doing some readings in a Zoom gathering, sharing from Tolkien’s letters, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and “The Lay of Leithian.” 

This is a free, online event. Check out the Facebook page here, and email the Center for a Zoom link (cslewiscenter@taylor.edu).

In related news, Audible is showing the 2017 Beren and Lúthien text–published 100 years after it was begun–as being released for audio on April 30th. You can see my write-ups about Beren and Lúthien here.

And though it is not what I’m reading, here is a little bit I like:

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinúviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering.

There Beren came from mountains cold,
And lost he wandered under leaves,
And where the Elven-river rolled
He walked alone and sorrowing.
He peered between the hemlock-leaves
And saw in wonder flowers of gold
Upon her mantle and her sleeves,
And her hair like shadow following.

Enchantment healed his weary feet
That over hills were doomed to roam; …

From the Publisher:

The tale of Beren and Lúthien was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year.

Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal elf. Her father, a great elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.

In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father’s own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.

Published on the tenth anniversary of the last Middle-earth book, the international bestseller The Children of Húrin, this new volume will similarly include drawings and color plates by Alan Lee, who also illustrated The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and went on to win Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

2020 was the busiest year ever on A Pilgrim in Narnia! And by a pretty big margin. In 2020, we topped 1,000 posts, blew past our 1,000,000th page view, and passed 200,000 hits in a single year for the first time. It was a busy autumn, with November breaking the all-time monthly hit record, which was then broken again in December. All but one of the busiest months in the website’s history were in 2020–this despite there not being a single “hot post” like my nerdy “How to Read All of C.S. Lewis’ Essays” 2017 piece, my 2015 article, “The Tolkien Letters that Changed C.S. Lewis’ Life,” or Kat Coffin’ “How do you Solve a Problem like Susan Pevensie?” in 2019 and the follow-up articles (like this one and this one). Kat’s piece is actually one of the top 5 most popular Lewis & Inklings posts ever.

Blog activity continues to grow, despite having reduced weekly content a little over the last couple of years (to about two posts per week, including announcements). The one metric where activity was down a bit was in network connections (likes and comments). I think that has to do with normal trends in blogging, an increased use of Facebook and Twitter for conversations, and the lack of a “hot post.” However, I did lose my cool with a commenter early in 2019 and stepped back from website conversations a bit, which I think is also a factor.

Overall, what the statistical story tells is that A Pilgrim in Narnia is now simply one of the trusted resources on the Internet for resources on the intersection of faith, fantasy, and fiction in conversation with writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, the Inklings, L.M. Montgomery, and contemporary fantasy and SF writers. Older, substantial pieces of writing continue to be read over and over again by visitors to A Pilgrim in Narnia, including “The Deeper Meaning of The Great Divorce,” “Harold Bloom’s Canon: The Essential List,” “The Planets” in C.S. Lewis’ Writing,” and Narnia posts, like “The Real Order to Read Narnia: A Third Way,” “A Timeline for the Creation of Narnia,” “Good Political Leadership According to Narnia” (worth revisiting given 2020), and the one more scholars should read, “Is Narnia an Allegory?“

Those are the old posts that keep respinning. This year’s top posts are very event connected, capturing COVID-19, some focal points in my scholarship, and the loss of key figures in 2020, like Walter Hooper and Christopher Tolkien. Here is my list of the top 6 newly written articles of 2020, with some honourable mentions. Many thanks to all you great readers and sharers of material in 2020. I receive absolutely no pay or support for this website, so reaching readers is the main reward. Best wishes in 2021!

#6. The World as a “Vale of Soul-Making”: A Brief Note on John Keats, C.S. Lewis, and L.M. Montgomery click here

As I describe in this year-end post, 2020 was a big period for me in my work with Prince Edward Island writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery. In 2020, after years of writing and editing, my first Montgomery studies peer-reviewed paper was published. This was my literary-critical piece, “Rainbow Valley as Embodied Heaven: Initial Explorations into L.M. Montgomery’s Spirituality in Fiction,” published in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies (see here). A second piece, “Making Friends with the Darkness: L.M. Montgomery’s Popular Theodicy in Anne’s House of Dreams,” won the 2020 Elizabeth R. Epperly Award for Outstanding Early Career Paper (see here, including the description of my piece)–and I have the draft open now for revisions for a 2021 publication in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. And 2020 also saw the launch of the MaudCast, the official Podcast of the L.M. Montgomery Institute, which I produce and host. It was a big Montgomery year, and I have plans for more.

As I postponed my spring 2020 L.M. Montogmery series, I published fewer Montgomery articles on A Pilgrim in Narnia in the past year. Most of my writing on Montgomery still exists as abstracts for unwritten papers and scattered notes. But I did work up this 6th most popular Pilgrim piece, “The World as a ‘Vale of Soul-Making,'” where I take a great moment from Rainbow Valley and show its possible ur-text in John Keats. Like young Faith Meredith in Rainbow Valley, it seems that C.S. Lewis’ philosophy of joy wants to challenge the idea that life is a “vale of tears.” However, Lewis does think that, whether Keats understood it or not, the world is a valley fit for soulcraft. My work argues that Montgomery’s fiction is built in that way, and this little piece gives a hint of that possibility.

#5. My Paper, “A Cosmic Shift in The Screwtape Letters,” Published in Mythlore click here

It is unusual for academic posts to get much traction–much less, a post that points the reader to a long peer-reviewed paper. However, this post represents 8 years of archival and literary-critical work on The Screwtape Letters and its place within what I call The Ransom Cycle–C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era experiment in speculative fiction. Mythcon was where I first launched my discovery that it was Dr. Ransom of the aptly misnamed “Space Trilogy” who was the discoverer and translator of the tutorial (and anti-tutelary) epistles by the senior demon, Screwtape. So it was with great pleasure that my most substantial piece, “A Cosmic Shift in The Screwtape Letters,” was published in Mythlore in autumn 2020. This post celebrates the publication, provides a summary of my findings, and makes links to the resources you will need to follow the story. 

Not completely disconnected, 2020 also saw the publication of “The Archangel Fragment and C.S. Lewis’s World-Building Project,” which I co-wrote with Lewis handwriting specialist, teacher, novelist, and all-around good guy, Charlie W. Starr.

#4. The Legacy of Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis’ Better Than Boswell click here

In early December, following a credible social media announcement and news that he had been sick, I announced on my blog that Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis’ Literary Secretary, Has Died (1931-2020). Like Christopher Tolkien of his father’s work, Walter Hooper has been a critical resource for Lewis readers. While there have been many hands at the task, no other figure has been as important to the Narnian’s literary legacy as Walter Hooper. Through the curation and editing of letters, essays, stories, and pieces nearly lost to time, we have a wealth of inexpensive and constantly-in-print materials. Readers and fans of C.S. Lewis are deeply in debt to Walter Hooper for nearly six decades of literary work.

It took me a few days to write the piece, but I was finally able to publish “The Legacy of Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis’ Better Than Boswell.” As I had only met Walter a couple of times and there have been plenty of great tributes, I wanted to do something different. In this longer article, I assess Walter Hooper’s positive legacy for C.S. Lewis studies. In this resource-rich piece with select bibliography, I consider Hooper as a Compiler, Archivist, Anthologist, Editor, Publisher, Preface-writer, and Mentor. While it would have been interesting to have someone who was an intimate biographer of C.S. Lewis’ life and letters, like Boswell of Johnson, what we got–what Walter Hooper developed into–was a resource more helpful for a broad community of readers. There is more to say about Walter Hooper’s legacy, but this is the piece I worked the hardest on in late 2020, and within 2 weeks it became one of the top posts of the year. 

#3. It is Easy to Teach C.S. Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces,” but It’s Hard to Blog About It click here

Before the most recent end of the world, I began 2020 with a series on Till We Have Faces. This was original work that came out of a winter semester where I was teaching the text twice. I used this opportunity to do some writing about Till We Have Faces–the first time I had done anything substantial with the text in eight years of writing about Lewis.

Though I am always nudging readers to see The Great Divorce as C.S. Lewis’ most genius work of fiction, Till We Have Faces truly is a remarkable novel. It is the dying-days journal of Orual, Queen of Glome, who sues her capricious gods for their unfair treatment of her. The writing is elegant, the portrait is intimate, the transformational element is intricately tied to the psychological development in Orual’s tale, and the fictional world is complete. I know of many people who resist Lewis’ work but who admit that Till We Have Faces is among the 20th century’s important novels.

Perhaps because of its honesty about my hesitation to write about such a complex and layered novel, but most likely because it works as a front-page to my other articles, this series introduction piece was the 3rd most popular new post of 2020. Here are the others in the series:

• Orual and the King of Glome–also one of the top 10 new posts of 2020
• A Peasant Pagan Prayer in Till We Have Faces
• Superinfection, COVID-19, and C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces
• The “Pints with Jack” Podcast on Till We Have Faces 
• Guest Spot on the Pints With Jack Podcast, Talking About C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces
• Dance, Long, Leap, Speak, Conquer, Break: The Heart in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces
• Naturally Holy: Some Thoughts on Till We Have Faces, A Guest Post by Katie Stevenson

#2. Christopher Tolkien, Curator of Middle-earth, Has Died, and a Letter from His Father click here

In January 2020, the last living Inkling passed away. In terms of literary creativity and scholarship, Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 Nov 1924 to 15 Jan 2020) may well have been overshadowed by his father, J.R.R. Tolkien. While it is true that his father was the subcreative genius of a vast, sweeping legendarium associated with the bestselling Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien grew to become the literary curator of that world. At a rate of a book every year or two, Christopher Tolkien provided us two dozen collections of incomplete works, background materials, archival pieces, and translations–writing from the Professor that most of us would never have seen otherwise. 

I have tried other words for Tolkien’s sharp editorial eye and tireless work: custodian, guardian, conservator, gift-giver. In the end, “curator” stuck for me. For this gift to the lovers of Middle-earth and fans of Tolkien’s linguistically rooted mythic worlds, we are forever grateful.

#1. Superinfection, COVID-19, and C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces click here

Perhaps it is not a huge surprise that in 2020, a COVID-related post was #1. How often have we heard the word “unprecedented” in those pandemic-stricken months? 

What I particularly liked about this post, however, is its core literary-critical argument and the way that context helped me read in new ways. While I did push back against COVID deniers in the piece (see here and here as well), it was reading Till We Have Faces while learning about the social and historical realities of plagues that triggered a new discovery for me. Never before did I see how Lewis used the plague as the structural event to trigger the critical moments in Orual’s story. While there are a series of key events that are the critical supports of the story–like pillars in a temple–none is more important than the pestilence that inhabits the land of Glome. COVID-19 helped me see this social moment in the text and ask new questions–including some about Lewis’ own experiences.

Thus, however terrible COVID-19, lockdowns, and 2020 has been in general, I am constantly reminded of how our contexts can help us become better readers.

Some Honourable Mentions

The Top Guest Post, hands down, belongs to Justin Keena, and his detailed and interesting paper on “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Friendship, True Myth, And Platonism.” This is the first time a detailed academic piece received much traffic, so I congratulate Justin on his work!

The Top Post on a Classic Piece was “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” by Virginia Woolf, a nice discovery for me in 2020 and a great urban read at any time.

The Top Shared Resource was, again without much competition, “Neil Gaiman on Discovering the Author in Narnia (and a note on beards).” Of my “Friday Feature” notes, Throwback Thursdays, and occasional other discoveries and announcements, this personal video by Neil Gaiman was the most popular among fans. Someday I’m going to have to sit down and have a chat with this fellow.

The Top Video of 2020 was “A Canticle for Leibowitz: A 10 Minute Book Talk with Brenton Dickieson,” which I share with you here.

As I have been chest-deep in academic works about C.S. Lewis and at least knee-deep in the same kinds of J.R.R. Tolkien books and articles, I conceived of a thought experiment. Without even glancing at my bookshelf, I can name a dozen essential scholarly volumes treating Lewis’ thought, writing, and impact, and some other creative, beautiful, and transformational projects. However, there is just something that invites Tolkien scholarship that is a step above in quality–both in individual examples and in the weight of the work as a whole.

Thus, as a thought experiment, I began a series where I consider factors that could explain a difference, if there is one. My goal wasn’t to set Lewis scholarship as a whole next to Tolkien scholarship, or to create a thunder dome atmosphere where I set scholarly works against each other–though some of that happened as I thought and wrote and engaged with others. In Part 1 of this series entitled, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?,” I talked about four moments in Tolkien readership that resulted in bursts of creative scholarly energy, including the early audiences of Tolkien and Lewis readers, Tolkien and Lewis as literary scholars, the fight for “literary” recognition, and the impact of Peter Jackson’s adaptations for inspiring scholarship. In Part 2, I took the daring approach of comparing and contrasting the work of Lewis and Tolkien. While Lewis excels in a playfulness of genre, quick output, and a broad range of topics in his work, Tolkien was a master of literary and imaginative depth. There is a factor in Lewis scholarship that I call the “Piggyback” effect, where journalists and scholars mistake Lewis’ accessibility for a lack of depth, but there is also the internal reality that Tolkien produced an epic, while Lewis wrote fairy tales and romances.

Of the internal, literary reasons I provide in JRRT vs. CSL Part 2, I think there is a good case to be made about why Tolkien scholarship might invite more depth as it mirrors the depth of its master. But a reason is not a necessity–and in terms of critical approach, literary care, or the adventurous nature of the work, it cannot explain why the culture of Tolkien scholarship has simply been more effective. In Part 3, I develop thoughts from the first two articles by turning to other factors, such as the tools and techniques that Lewis and Tolkien scholars are comfortable in using in their work.

This series of articles is simply here to create a start to the conversation–though I hope to inspire Lewis scholars to dig in and take greater risks. Feel free to critique my reasons or enhance my understanding of Inklings studies with your own insights. Use the comment section or social media to challenge me or develop an idea further. If you want to write an essay in response proving me wrong or right, and if you can write it well enough, I’ll even give you space here to publish it. I think someone is taking me up on this for next week. And I will conclude when this conversation is done with some lessons learned.

8. Other Features of the Field: Christopher Tolkien vs. Walter Hooper

Among the other pieces of news in 2020, it was that year that saw the passing of both Christopher Tolkien–whom I called the “Curator of Middle-earth“–and Walter Hooper, one-time literary secretary and lifelong editor of Lewis’ works.

There is no doubt that Christopher Tolkien was an irreplaceable feature in Tolkien studies. With the help of others, he brought together a readable version of The Silmarillion before going on to edit the 12-volume History of Middle-earth, as well as a number of other highly edited and prefaced archival publications. Christopher Tolkien focussed so heavily on giving us as many literary, historical, and linguistic layers as possible in the legendarium that he has succeeded in moving The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from the bedroom shelf to the study (though my paperback copies are still in the bedroom, of course!). It was scholarship that bred scholarship, modelling good practices (many that he had to make up as he went along) while giving ample space for future readers and researchers to come along after him.

While Christopher Tolkien naturally took up his father’s unfinished work, Lewis’ literary estate was in a far different condition when the Narnian died a decade earlier in 1963. Within a half-decade of Lewis’ life, it was clear that there was not a natural successor to Lewis in his family–either of Lewis’ stepsons or his brother, Warren–or his closest friends. Warren gave it a strong beginning with his collection of letters and an attempt at a biography. However, he lacked various capacities for continuing the work. Owen Barfield could very well have curated Lewis’ materials and did a great deal over the decades, but he was beginning a renewed career as a lecturer and public thinker and he excelled in matters other than archival research. Through the decade after Lewis’ death, a role evolved for Walter Hooper to edit Lewis materials, bring poems, letters, stories, and essays together over the next four decades.

Without offering a critique of Hooper’s work, it is no surprise that he naturally reflected Lewis’ diversity of writing in his approach to curating Lewis materials. Hooper gathered letters and poems and short pieces from locations far and wide, and then published them in thematically linked or comprehensive collections. There are a few archival pieces, but unlike Tolkien, most of this material came from magazine indices and collected volumes. Lewis published many of his poems pseudonymously, so there was a bit of trick to the trade. But the overall result reflects Lewis’ own approach to writing: eclectic collections that are thematically linked but could feel distant from the whole. The Weight of Glory is quite different from either God in the Dock or Collected Poems.

And then there is what I argue is Hooper’s most important contribution: the Collected Letters. What a profound resource these letters are–and a personal encouragement in my own writing and faith. While we have some of Tolkien’s letters–many of the more important ones–it is a project that was not at the centre of Christopher Tolkien’s skillset or vision for his father’s legacy.

Ultimately, then, Lewis and Tolkien scholarship followed the resources that were available to them. Oversimplifying the matter, Tolkien scholars followed the material into greater and greater depth, while Lewis scholars followed him out into various areas of study. These are not really “better” and “worse” categories–and I believe that Lewis and Tolkien scholars are equally adept at biographical criticism–but could be a factor in the difference between the scholarship.

9. The Bugbear of Literary Theory

In my first post in this series, I invited readers to look at academic book catalogues or award finalists and compare Lewis and Tolkien scholarship. One trend is clear in three important Tolkien books from Palgrave MacMillan:

• Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Mythopoeic Award winner in Inklings Studies
• Jane Chance, Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Mythopoeic Award nominee in Inklings Studies
• C. Vaccaro and Y. Kisor, eds, Tolkien and Alterity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Each of these strong volumes represents theoretical approaches to literary criticism in this generation. There are many great Tolkien volumes that are not driven by literary theory particular to the last century, such as (for the most part) Amy Amendt-Raduege’s 2020 Inklings Studies award-winning volume, “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (The Kent State University Press, 2018). However, with exceptional strength in linguistic theory and medieval studies, Tolkien scholarship is often able to walk with literary theory in fruitful ways.

Without a doubt, I have discovered a real resistance in many strands of Lewis scholarship to using literary theoretical tools. That there is a broad and energetic conversation about “Queering Tolkien” is telling: there really isn’t anything like that in Lewis studies, though I think Lewis’ fiction invites such a reading. Lewis’ work begs for a discussion on “alterity”–or “the taste for the other” in Lewis’ own words. What can linguistic theory, in-depth political science questions, or speculative world-building scholarship teach us about Lewis’ fiction? We don’t know–or don’t know fully–because of an anxiety in the field about literary theory.

I think this resistance to lit theory comes from four main points of resistance, I think: 1) following Lewis in resisting certain kinds of reading approaches (like psychological approaches or the conversation in The Personal Heresy that actually helped stimulate the “New Criticism” theory movement); 2) a conservative resistance to identity studies among some Lewis scholars; 3) the elitist nature of the literary theory conversation itself; and 4) theoretical conversations about Lewis’ work that have not always read Lewis well or that aren’t evidentially based.

However, I think it is a missed opportunity if we follow this rule of thumb: literary theory is only as good as the readings it produces. A lot of terrible work in psychological criticism comes from the fact that the critics were not great readers. Gender and feminist critics of Lewis–and they abound–have not always read carefully in their haste to bring up concerns or save Lewis from criticism.

Frederick Crews’ The Perplex and Postmodern Pooh are pretty great volumes for showing the silliness that tempts some “cutting-edge” literary theorists. But these books also show the potential–a potential worked out in some daring scholars. A great case is Monika B. Hilder’s Mythopoeic Award-nominated C.S. Lewis and gender series, consisting of The Feminine Ethos in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (Peter Lang, 2012); The Gender Dance: Ironic Subversion in C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy (Peter Lang, 2013); and Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C.S. Lewis and Gender (Peter Lang, 2013). This is solid, engaging work that invites me more deeply into Lewis’ writings. I hope that others look for opportunities to expand their literary toolkit in the years ahead.

10. Literary Societies

My first academic paper in Lewis studies was at the C.S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium at Taylor University, co-sponsored by the C.S. Lewis and Inklings Society. It was a brilliant conference, and I found myself drawn into a world of great reading and writing. In 2018, I spoke at the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, a society approaching four decades of scholarship and conversation. These are two great societies, and I hope to one day get to the The New York C.S. Lewis Society, founded in 1969, six years after Lewis passed away. These groups and a dozen others have their own niche, producing and giving space to scholarship and popular writing in various kinds of modes. I have nothing but good will for these folks who have taught me so much.

However, none of these societies has the kind of energy and productivity of the Tolkien Society. The Oxford Lewis society produces occasional volumes and has a partnership of some kind with The Journal of Inklings Studies. The NY CSL Society’s journal is a great history of Lewis reading for more than 50 years with sparks of brilliance and good solid work. But before Tolkien had passed away, the Tolkien Society was already on the move. Today, programs like Oxonmoot, the Birthday Toast, Tolkien Reading Day, and various meetings create a unique global readerly and scholarly energy. More than that, though, various scholarly journals and publications combine with The Tolkien Society Awards to encourage scholarship in a way that Lewis societies cannot match. The Mythopoeic Society does this well for both Lewis and Tolkien, but the Tolkien Society with its local smials have energized rooted scholarship for decades.

11. The Beautiful Problem of Scholarly Friends

It is odd, perhaps, to end with a positive-negative, but it is worth doing. Part of the story I have told of my journey into Lewis studies has been the support and encouragement of other scholars. There have been times that the community has split, such as the “Lindskoog Affair.” But part of the reason that rift in Lewis scholarship was so painful was because there has always been a desire to engender fellowship among Lewis scholars. I think this comes from a desire to reflect the Inklings’ ability to inspire some of the more important books and stories of the 20th-century from within a small collective. But we also must admit that there is some sense in which Lewis scholarship is endeavouring to be Christian scholarship and fellowship in a way that Tolkien scholarship as a whole is not.

There is a lot that is beautiful about this community of scholarly Lewis friends, but there is a downside. Pick up a volume of one of the Lewis scholarly journals–I just picked up the 2020 Sehnsucht, a critical Lewis scholarship journal–and you will find warm, glowing reviews nearly across the board. They are well written and respectful, offering a point or two of rebuttal or correction, but they are rarely reviews that really challenge the work at its core or in detail. When they do, it is sometimes because the author under review has been tempted to co-opt or misinterpret Lewis–so the reviewer is operating on an instinct to protect Lewis.

I am not saying that these are bad critics, that they missed things in the books under review in this recent journal, or that protecting an author is totally bad. My review writing is usually pretty glowing, I admit. I want to read good books I want collaboration–and this same volume of Sehnsucht has a correction by Joe Ricke of something that Charlie Starr and I did together. It is a great example of how a good challenge is an opportunity for growth. But there is little in Lewis scholarship and almost nothing in the reviews like the Lewis-Barfield belief that “opposition is true friendship.” The iron-sharpens-iron approach is just too rare in Lewis studies.

And frankly, for me anyway, oppositional friendship is exhausting. I don’t want to spend time reviewing bad books, and I don’t want to critique my friends publicly. Indeed, if I had enemies–or even a nemesis–I wouldn’t want to critique them either! I just completed a largely negative review for an academic journal and wish that I had never heard of the book rather than have to spend my time that way. Indeed, I have mostly given up academic reviewing because I cannot seem to balance the negative and positive well. And as someone who does all this for free, I can make that choice.

Moreover, when I have endeavoured to make this sort of public challenge–as I did of Michael Ward’s generative Planet Narnia thesis–some caring scholars reached out to me to make sure that I walked carefully. Many Lewis readers have really invested in the Planet Narnia approach and I might cause some harm to myself or others. Michael Ward himself seemed pleased rather than otherwise to find I was challenging him–though I have not spoken to him since it was published. But there is a whiff of bad faith about those who step out of the fellowship of scholars and challenge too much.

The reader will see that I am naming my weakness here as much as anyone’s, but it is an intriguing problem. I have compensated for this weakness that is also a strength by cultivating scholarly connections in Lewis studies that will, I am afraid, leave me no quarter when I am not at my best.

And I want to caution readers that I am saying nothing bad about Tolkien scholars communities. As much as my small forays into the Tolkien studies field have been so positive and encouraging, their dynamic is more critical. Indeed, I have suggested that there such a thing as a Tolkien Expertise Anxiety Syndrome (TEAS). I am certain that whenever I talk about Tolkien in lectures and writing, two Tolkienists are in the back of the room mocking me in Quenya. So it goes! But most of my experiences have been both thoughtful and positive.

12. No More Lewis Studies, Please

Lastly, and just as a brief note, there is an odd phenomenon in Lewis scholarship. Because of a perception of too much published content in the mid-2000s with the release of the Disney Narnian adaptations and the 50th anniversary of Lewis’ death in 2013. There has been some resistance among publishers to take new Lewis studies into their catalogues. This is enhanced, I think, by the piggyback phenomenon I talked about last week, what others call Jacksploitation or “the Lewis industry.” “No more Lewis studies, please” was what I was told just as I began my PhD a few years ago–a pretty discouraging thing to hear as a new scholar!

It is true that there is a challenging sales dynamic for in-depth literary studies. In order to make a book or series affordable to a hungry Lewis-reading audience, the book has to be written and designed to meet that smart but not always academically trained readership. It is a delicate balance of research, writing, editing, and book production that challenges scholars and may make some editors hesitant. I know that there are some strong academic Lewis studies books where the scholar has struggled to find a publishing home. But I also know that there are some small- and medium-sized presses wanting to extend their Inklings line–as well as some large presses like Peter Lang or Oxford that will consider a Lewis book of exceptional value.

So I end with a note of hope. Perhaps a publishing industry hesitancy has existed at times, but there is still room for a great book to come along–including yours, perhaps?

I just spent the weekend at Mythcon–a short, digital version of the normally weird and wonderful long weekend of scholarship and fan fun. Many of the parts of Mythcon that I love were still featured, including thoughtful and engaging panels, longer feature paper sessions to work out more complex ideas, and a bright and eclectic symposium of true lovers of imaginative literature and film. It was at Mythcon where I have met so many life-long nerd friends–and where I first launched my archival work that suggests that Lewis conceived of The Screwtape Letters as a part of the same fantasy universe as The Ransom Cycle (see here). I really love this community.

And I enjoyed the mini-con–though for this particular conference, I long to be there in person. Just as Mythcon has a tendency to encourage its participants to dust off dusty lyres and return again to fallow manuscripts when they return home, one never thinks the same again about the game of golf after Mythcon.

Honestly, I was just pleased to be able to connect at all. At this year’s online mini-conference there was a good deal of buzz about the Mythopoeic Awards. With four categories of awards (Adult lit, Children’s lit, and a Scholarship Award each for Inklings Studies and Myth and Fantasy Studies), and with five finalists in each category, the Mythopoeic Awards have a tendency to fill my TBR pile to overflowing–especially as it was a very strong slate of finalists.

While the fantasy awards are great, it’s the scholarship awards that I’m always paying attention to, especially in the Inklings Studies category (whose shortlist will, one day, contain a book with my name on the cover). Past winners include many of the scholars that we have mentioned here, including Clyde Kilby, Walter Hooper, Kathryn Lindskoog, Humphrey Carpenter, Paul Ford, Tom Shippey, Peter Schakel, Joe Christopher, Christopher Tolkien, Doug Anderson, George Sayer, Charles Huttar, David Downing, Verlyn Flieger, Michael Drout, John Garth, Janet Brennan Croft, Diana Glyer, Dimitra Fimi, Michael Ward, and Grevel Lindop, with his recent biography of Charles Williams.

Lately, these awards have been pretty hot.

In 2018, I had a chapter in a book edited by Sørina Higgins, The Inklings and King Arthur, which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies–shockingly edging out Jane Chance’s resourceful, Tolkien, Self and other: This Queer Creature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Lisa Coutras’ pace-setting Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty: Majesty, Splendor, and Transcendence in Middle-earth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and two masters in the field: Verlyn Flieger’s There Would Always Be a Fairy Tale: More Essays on Tolkien (Kent State University Press, 2017) and Christopher Tolkien’s beautifully designed and edited volume of one of his father’s greatest tales, Beren and Luthien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). In 2019, Verlyn Flieger’s book took the category, deservedly so (with respect to Catherine McIlwaine’s gorgeous exhibition book, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth and Jonathan S. McIntosh’s Thomistic theology of Tolkien, The Flame Imperishable). In 2019, Inklings scholar Dimitra Fimi took the fantasy award with Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology.

Because there wasn’t a Mythcon in 2020, the 2020 finalists and winners were sort of bundled together with expectations about 2021. For the 2020 awards, it is not clear to me how they may have chosen out of these five excellent Inklings studies books:

• Amy Amendt-Raduege, “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Kent State University Press)
• Dimitra Fimi & Thomas M. Honegger, eds., Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work, its Precursors and its Legacies (Walking Tree)
• Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson & Michael Partridge, Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy (Winged Lion)
• Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (Bodleian Library)
• John Rateliff, ed., A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger (Gabbro Head)

Of that group, The Sweet and the Bitter won out, and it is a resourceful and deep study. The Fantasy Studies award category was equally strong:

• James Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (ELS)
• Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press)
• C. Palmer-Patel, The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy (Routledge)
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (New York University Press)
• Mark J.P. Wolf, ed., The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (Routledge)

Gifford won that category. My vote was for Thomas’ The Dark Fantastic–and I would place it at the top of my list of Fantasy Studies volumes of the decade–and I am enjoying C. Palmer-Patel’s structuralist study. So it pleased me to see the shortlist of awards come out this weekend and include both C. Palmer-Patel and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas for a second run:

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth & Fantasy Studies

• The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 by Kathryn Hume.
• Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor
• The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy by C. Palmer-Patel
• The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
• Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien by Anna Vaninskaya

I have heard that Vaninshkaya’s study is great, and Kathryn Hume is always thoughtful, so we’ll see how that category goes.

But it is the Inklings Studies award shortlist that I find the most telling:

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

• John M. Bowers, Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (OUP)
• Oronzo Cilli, Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist (Luna)
• John Garth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth (Princeton UP)
• Catherine McIlwaine, ed. Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (Bodleian)
• John Rateliff, ed. A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger (Gabbro Head)

Five strong books with striking individual identities that also work as a collective resource kit for Tolkien scholars and fans alike.

I have never picked the winner in these photo-finish races, so I will not begin prognosticating now. I will note the link. “Inklings Studies,” narrowly conceived, includes Tolkien father and son, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, the Lewis brothers, and a handful of more minor writers. Given the way the Inklings grew as writers and how we have grown as a fan community, we would not be surprised to find scholarly material about George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Joy Davidman, or Dorothy Sayers in that list. Strikingly, though, every book on the list is a Tolkien studies volume–though the Verlyn Flieger festschrift could have included a Lewis study or two, given her lifetime of work. It did not, however, and the list stands as a testimony to the strength of recent Tolkien studies.

However, we must admit that it is not a terribly recent phenomenon. As I argued in my series, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?“, Tolkien studies strength over Lewis studies–not to mention the degree to which Williams and Barfield are under-studied–goes back for some years. There are exceptions in the last decade, but they simply prove the rule–and it has been a thin decade at that.

I made a quip at the mini-Mythcon that I hope one day a Lewis studies volume would be strong enough to warrant a nomination. Historically, there have been noted Lewis studies by Doris T. Myers, Walter Hooper, Kathryn Lindskoog, Lionel Adey, Don King, Peter Schakel, Diana Pavlac Glyer, Michael Ward, Sanford Schwarts, Robert Boenig, John Bremer, and Monika Hilder, as well as good biographies by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Alistair McGrath, Alan Jacobs, and George Sayer. So, worried that I was being overly facetious, I clarified that there were some good recent Lewis studies books, just not ones of exceptional argument, depth, or contribution to the field. It is still a tough admission to make. The publication of this award shortlist is just another confirmation that Tolkien scholarship continues to shine in ways that Lewis scholarship simply does not.

Why is this? I have offered three articles composed of a dozen reasons why I think that Lewis scholarship (as a whole) is not as strong as Tolkien scholarship (as a whole):

• Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship? Part 1: Creative Breaks that Inspired Tolkien Readers
• Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship? Part 2: Literary Breadth and Depth
• Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship? Part 3: Other Factors

There is very little shade thrown on my field in those pieces, and I still struggle to fully understand the difference. I followed that up by editing a piece by Connor Salter (see “Lewis and Tolkien among American Evangelicals“), and a resource pack to make all readers into better scholars (if they want to make their field stronger: “5 Ways to Find Open Source Academic Research on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.” Perhaps these resources will help.

However, really the best thing I should do is write a study of C.S. Lewis that warrants a Mythopoeic scholarship award nomination. And then I have no one to blame but myself when the 2024 shortlist appears!

Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer is a book about a book that was doomed from the start.

As I have been preparing for a Canterbury Tales section in a class I’m teaching, I have been using this recent winner of the Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies for some time—allowing glosses on texts and conversation points to help me think about bringing Chaucer’s work into our world today. A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to settle down and read Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer by medievalist and Tolkien lover, John M. Bowers.

A Chaucer specialist, Bowers has also written about Langland, the Gawain and Pearl poet, “Piers Plowman,” and Chaucer echoed in later writers, like Shakespeare and Tolkien. As someone who has gotten to play a bit in the archives, I was attracted to Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer because it uncovers the story of an unpublished Tolkien book. Through much of the 1920s, as Tolkien is working as a Reader and then Professor at Leeds University, followed by his appointment as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and as he first meets C.S. Lewis and is writing “The Nameless Land” and the Lay of Leithian and is sketching out what will be his mythology—in the midst of all these scholarly and imaginative moments, and as his family is steadily growing—J.R.R. Tolkien, it turns out, was working on a Clarendon edition of Chaucer.

When I first saw the book release a couple of years ago, Tolkien’s decision to produce an inexpensive, accessible Chaucer reader came as a surprise. I don’t think I was alone in having this gap in my mental Tolkien timeline. Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose was to be a student edition for Clarendon editor Kenneth Sisam, and was meant to be a partnership with superstar medievalist George S. Gordon. Bowers’ publication brings to light hundreds of pages of archival material—commentary, outlines, glossaries, editorial notes, teaching notes, and other bits of Tolkienist Chaucerania. It also reveals a constellation of critical moments that have seemed (to me, at least) to be only individual points of light.

The idea of a Clarendon Chaucer makes sense. In 1922, Tolkien had just completed A Middle English Vocabulary for Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, published a few months earlier (most of us would have that bound together as A Middle English Reader and Vocabulary). At that time, a different Gordon (E.V., V for Valentine) and Tolkien began working on an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which they successfully published in 1925. The shared Clarendon Chaucer makes sense of Tolkien’s election over Sisam to an Oxford chair, despite the fact that Tolkien had a very short academic CV. It also makes sense of Tolkien’s ground-breaking Chaucer paper, “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” in 1934 or his various stage performances of Chaucer (like the Nun’s Priest’s Tale in 1938 and the Reeve’s Tale in 1939, the latter including edited his text as a hand-out). Tolkien lectured with some frequency on Chaucer, included Chaucer in his “Valedictory Address,” and Chaucer was the subject of his last academic publication (an etymological sketch of “losenger”—which is, awesomely, not a cough drop, but a loser, a cad, a lying rascal).

What I did not realize, but what philologists and Tolkien scholars are able to attest, no doubt, is Bowers’ grand claim of Tolkien as a hidden Chaucerian: “Chaucer was part of Tolkien’s mental furniture, so to speak, that he spent a lifetime rearranging” (3).

Tolkien spent much of a decade concentrated on the project of bringing out a Chaucer reader—and, indeed, it occupied part of his mind for nearly three decades. Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer tells the story of Bowers’ unlikely discovery of a cache of Tolkien materials in the Oxford University Press Chaucer archive. Blessedly, Bowers provides far too much detail in the background contexts of people, place, and text—things that Tolkien lovers will revel in and non-specialists need for context. Bowers provides a suitably boring and tight text critical chapter, and then 80 pages of conversation about notes, walking through Tolkien’s various concentrations on Chaucer’s work: extracts from The Romaunt of the Rose; The Compleynte unto Pite; extracts from The Book of the Duchesse; The Parlement of Foules; the Boethian lyric, The Former Age; Merciles Beaute; To Rosemounde; Truth; Gentilesse; Lak of Stedfastnesse; Compleint to his Empty Purse; Boethius de Consolatione Philosophie; The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women; The Legend of Cleopatra; an extract from the introduction to The Astrolabe; and the selections of The Canterbury Tales (The Prologue and extracts from The Reeve’s Tale, The Monk’s Tale, and The Nonne Preestes Tale. The book ends with a long chapter, “Chaucer in Middle-earth,” and then a coda on “Fathers and Sons”—two chapters primarily dedicated to parallels between the works and lives of Chaucer and Tolkien.

The book ends by focussing on these parallels. However, the entire book is really about how the fertile imagination and poetry of Chaucer provides an unceasingly rich bed for Tolkien’s scholarship and mythopoeic work. Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer really does reveal Tolkien’s thinking about words, accents, language development, regional dialects, poetic beauty, storytelling, character development, and moral and creative rooting. It is also an excellent book for showing Tolkien’s process as a thinker and editor. Readers of the Middle-earth histories and other Tolkien archival collections (like Christopher Tolkien’s publication of Beowulf) will recognize the patterns of intensive work, attention to detail, harried productivity, and chronic procrastination endemic to Tolkien’s lifetime at the desk.

When I mention “parallels” between Chaucer and Tolkien, I really mean that this is what the book is about. These parallels are often striking, sometimes surprising, and almost always thoughtful (even when they are peculiar). I wish, as I always do of writers about intertextual influence, that Bowers would have better distinguished the different kinds of probability of influence on a case-by-case basis. Usually, though, the reader can make that decision, deciding if this is a Chaucerian moment in Tolkien or merely a striking coincidence.

Moving in on this study of text parallels, biographical creativity, and intertextual influence, Bowers’ approach is going to strike some readers as strange and unexpected. In the study on Walter W. Skeat in the “Four Chaucerians” chapter (including not just Skeat the great Chaucer text editor, but the aforementioned Kenneth Sisam, George S. Gordon, and C. S. Lewis), I am quite struck by the psychological criticism Bowers applies:

“Tolkien would surely have recoiled at this suggestion since he heaped scorn upon ‘so-called psychologists’. He disdained psychological analyses of his works and wrote mockingly about identifying personally with his character Faramir: ‘let the psychoanalysts note!’” (46, quoting Letters, 232 and 288, and Henry Resnick, ‘An Interview with Tolkien’, Niekas 18 (1967), 37–47 at p. 38).

Yet, Bowers goes ahead and does this precise thing anyway:

As much as he would have objected to Freudian interpretations of his fiction, Tolkien would surely have objected to the impertinence of having his editorial efforts psychoanalysed in terms of some Oedipal contest with his scholarly father-figure Skeat—yet this is exactly what I venture to do in the paragraphs that follow.

“Old-fashioned but not entirely outmoded, Harold Bloom’s 1973 Anxiety of Influence described an agonistic struggle between the literary newcomer and his powerful precursor which can readily be translated into the generational rivalries between scholars. Tolkien’s lectures routinely enacted this pattern of establishing his own authority by first dispatching his father-figures. ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ began with a dismissive anecdote about Joseph Bosworth, for example, before mocking wrong-headed critics like Archibald Strong and even expressing dissatisfaction with those he admired like W. P. Ker.²⁹ Derek Brewer recalled the 1946 lectures on Gawain in which Tolkien confined himself to ‘doing obscure (to me) battle with some mysterious entity, prophetically as it may now seem, called something like “Gollancz” ’.³⁰ This was Sir Israel Gollancz (1863–1930) whose editorial work on the Gawain Poet provided Tolkien with many opportunities for finding fault with a distinguished predecessor.

“Bloom provides six models useful for assessing Tolkien’s struggles with Skeat’s enormous scholarly presence, especially his 420 pages of annotations distributed over four volumes of his Oxford Chaucer, even if those struggles never assumed the drama of ‘major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’” (46-47).

This initial essay is actually pretty engaging and, overall, restrained and well done. In particular, Bowers doesn’t strike me as reductionistic, which can sometimes be the case in this sort of head-shrinking study. Tolkien, for Bowers, is never just striking out against the pressure of those that have gone before, never just his instincts and fears and intense hopes. Where I don’t think Bower has finished the job is with relation to the dozens (probably hundreds) of Chaucer-Tolkien parallels, in life and in fiction. It is good to test what Bowers calls “subliminal influence” (216) by simply looking at the data, the texts in comparison. However, I am not sure that this statement is supported by evidence:

“only gradually and in some sense grudgingly did [Tolkien] come to appreciate how these Chaucerian tale-tellers influenced the creation of his own characters and storylines” (249).

Did Tolkien ever see that he was taking up Chaucer, his tales, and his frameworks in his own fiction and poetry? Perhaps the evidence is there and I have missed it, but I have a sense that Bowers was lost in his own Anxiety of Influence-matrix and has overdetermined Tolkien’s self-understanding on this point. Thus, it strikes me that interpreting Chaucer through the “Anxiety of Influence” lens in Tolkien’s “Valedictory Address” is more cute than helpful.

I have other points of concern, though far fewer than a sharp Tolkien medievalist would want to draw out.

There are times when I am concerned about the conclusions of absence that he draws from lack of evidence. For example, Bowers quite rightly says that,

“Lewis even pressed his friend to complete The Silmarillion.”

It is the next step that we are missing evidence for:

“and yet—this is the key point—the same encouragement was not apparently invited for Tolkien’s academic writings” (75).

Is it really true that

“Tolkien did not apparently seek his advice before delivering ‘The Monsters and the Critics’ where he had so many nasty things to say about literary critics—such as Lewis was” (75).

Perhaps because we have Lewis’ handwriting on the Beowulf translation and not the lecture drafts, that’s an indication that they never talked about Tolkien’s theories about Beowulf (text, character, or criticism). And maybe Bowers is correct that it takes Lewis’ conversion in the early ‘30s to really cause Tolkien to trust him on a creative level. However, this seems to push far past what we can know.

And, frankly, I am more in the Diana Glyer camp of the rich interconnectivity of their work (in The Company They Keep and Bandersnatch) than Humphrey Carpenter’s vision of the artist-creator as the lone, original genius, working in isolation. Glyer’s project is actually far closer to what Bowers is doing, though Glyer is only footnoted (and after Carpenter. This is perhaps a generational, cultural point more than anything. Bowers as a Rhodes Scholar and medievalist and Chaucerian who landed at Oxford in the moments after Tolkien’s death brings much to us that is now lost in time. He is bright and critical and generative in thought. On this point, however, I think he is swayed by a Carpenter image of the creator rather than a Glyer one.

Of course, I am open to looking at the evidence, when it appears. The problem with assertions from an absence of evidence is that I don’t know how to test this idea out. On the smell test—as someone deeply interested in the mental mapping of Tolkien and Lewis in the ‘20s and ‘30s—I don’t think it sounds right.

While I quite enjoyed this book, there is one absolutely critical downside: We do not get the full text transcription (or a reasonable edition) of what Tolkien may have produced of a Clarendon Chaucer (incomplete as it might be). The problems with this book are myriad, as the edition Tolkien would produce is based upon a Chaucer critical text that we would no longer follow as the best and fullest representative of Chaucer’s work. It also excludes what Bowers calls elsewhere “the naughty bits,” which we as teachers and readers today are not as bothered by (and may even delight in).

Granted all of these barriers for reproducing the entire archival find, why not just the Glossary and Notes? Bowers does include an appendix with the potential outline of a Clarendon Chaucer, and another appendix with an incomplete but interesting mini-essay, “An Introduction on Language.” Indeed, readers should go there first before reading the rest of the book. However, though I can glean much from Bowers’ extensive essays as he uses the glossaries, introductions, notes, and paratextual materials, and though I get some material from the few archival photographs, I do not have these resources myself.

The photographic inserts are very welcome, providing us with ten photocopies of manuscripts and typescripts (with notes) related to the archival discovery. Knowing how photographic figures are expensive to produce, it makes me even more grateful to see Tolkien’s (fairly clear) handwriting for introductions, as well as the editorial process. For example, the reproduction of Tolkien’s headnote to his commentary on the Canterbury Tales begins, “It is easier to plan a big book than to write it.” Bowers is right to note the prophetic value of such a declaration. Still, I want the glossary, the introductions, the explanatory—the book (even without Chaucer’s poetry) that Tolkien failed to write but that would both enrich my reading of Chaucer and inform my understanding of Tolkien as a scholar, writer, editor, and creator.

I particularly love the story of the manuscript discovery, the “fact and fiction” convergence that is itself a surprising moment of history. The combination of historical curiosity, linguistic interest, and literary links provides a tone that is, for the most part, readable and forward-moving. However, Bowers is an academic, and this is a University press book, and it reads as such. After all, there is a great deal of information on various kinds of levels, so it is a sophisticated book.

However, there are moments where I wish the academic tone was lost—or, specifically, that Bowers would lose academic habits of tone that we tend to collect. Readers can skip this paragraph if they like. Given his expertise, the degree of serious care Bowers put into this book, and the importance of his discoveries, I wish he would reduce writing that distances the reader from his work. For example, there is a tendency to use passive voice constructs and circumlocutionary writing: “His Chaucerian expertise was most fully displayed in…” (3); “his Clarendon Chaucer was not mentioned in … was entirely unknown … was known about” (13) “… was mailed … was typed … was allowed … was presumed … was rendered impossible by…” (20-22); “Only one title on Gordon’s trimmed-down 1922 list was dropped” (23); “Carpenter guessed the election’s outcome was the doing of George Gordon” (28), “some batches had been sorted into…” (36), and so on. All throughout are phrases like “was redacted,” “was forced,” “was restricted,” “was assigned,” and the like, as well as phrases that hide the action, like “came to light” and uses of “discovery.” This tucked-in speech even happens with active movements, lessoning the impact of great work: “Scull and Hammond provided tantalizing hints that made discovering what materials he surrendered in 1951 into a worthwhile quest” (14); “what awaited discovery” (20); “A mystery surrounds the Text’s proofs discovered in the grey box in OUP’s basement” (80); “Other discoveries included” (132); the “remains had been discovered” (133); “the discovery of a work” (214); “In his fine essay on The Lord of the Rings, W.H. Auden observed that a quest typically leads to some unexpected outcome discovered only when the quester has come to the end” (18, referring to Auden’s “The Quest Hero”); and “Discovery of the Clarendon Chaucer alerts us to a whole new collection of ingredients previously unrecognized in Tolkien’s great Cauldron of Story” (242). Besides the fact that it produces sentences that make my eyes swim (within the prose of a pretty smart and vivid writer), this perambulatory writing softens the responsibility at points where it is critical. What an emphatic difference it would make to our understanding of Tolkien’s psychology if we tried to make a sentence like these in the active voice: “Tolkien was easily distracted by side projects” (14) or Tolkien’s “own lack of prejudice was forcefully voiced” (23).

Setting aside my “Lessons for Effective Writing,” Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer is a great resource that is, at most points, a lot of fun to read. In the end, it is the story of a book that Tolkien failed to complete. This is not a new story for Tolkien. Bowers captures some of Tolkien’s perfectionism and procrastination in projects pretty well by comparing Skeat—Tolkien’s predecessor as a Chaucer scholar—with Tolkien as a writer:

“Famous even during his lifetime for the prodigious number of publications, Skeat attributed this productivity to rigorous self-discipline: ‘It is astonishing how much can be done by steady work at the same subject for many hours every day.’ The preface to his Etymological Dictionary of the English Language went farther in explaining how he adhered to strict constraints of time: ‘my usual rule has been not to spend more than three hours over one word.’ He admitted that this discipline left him unhappy with many results, but at least he finished one project and moved along to the next without allowing himself to be hobbled by the fastidiousness that plagued other scholars like Tolkien. Sisam made a point of emphasizing Skeat’s virtue in this regard, working always with a time-limit rather than aiming at perfection, with the result that his Student’s Pastime could list seventy-three books in print by 1896” (43).

Tolkien, however, described himself as a “pedant,” who was “devoted to accuracy even in what may appear to others unimportant matters” (16; see Letters 372). Instead of 28-page Glossary and Notes, Tolkien produced a far greater and more detailed section. Even when Sisam suggested an expanded 44-page section, Tolkien was not able to meet these expectations. What Bowers discovered in the library was a 160-page batch of annotations in typescript and manuscript (along with a number of essays and introductory pieces, some of which were not his responsibility but Gordon’s). Tolkien had grandly overshot the mark. Even when he produced tighter, shorter notes for SIsam, Tolkien greatly exceeded the needs of an undergraduate Chaucer companion and was unable to complete other aspects of the text.

Perhaps Bowers shows understanding when he makes this claim:

“With this sense of living in some historical aftermath, he also embodied the pessimism of the philologist who surveyed ancient achievements and saw only the long defeat” (240).

After all, Chaucer himself began late and never finished his work—indeed, did Chaucer ever finish anything of substantial length? Tolkien complicated the task of what was supposed to be an easy, breezy volume for student readers by intricate detail, but also by continually offering corrections on the core Chaucer text—a text that Clarendon had intended to simply reproduce. Even under pressure, Tolkien kept redoing the work over and over again:

“These pages contain some further alterations by Tolkien, always the niggler” (81).

Pessimism may be warranted at times. I would argue, though, that the real problem is not simply Tolkien’s inability to do the job that was actually assigned. It is that, of course—but the simple statement does not capture the complexity of the situation. This project was doomed from the beginning—not because Tolkien could not do the job, for he did so with E.V. Gordon and Gawain. Rather, this failed Chaucer volume is the result of three linked factors: 1) the wrong timing; 2) the wrong partner; and 3) the wrong kind of project.

Tolkien took on this partnership with George Gordon in a synchronicity of timing that probably enhanced (or maybe ensured) his success in securing an Oxford Professorship. Gordon was influential in academic appointments and would have had the potential for this Chaucer partnership front of mind. However, Tolkien and his young family were, at the same time, trying to balance their lives while he took two successive promotions—including a move to Oxford. Tolkien committed to the Chaucer project just as he was completing his vocabulary for Sisam, and while he was working on the Gawain project (which would not be complete until 1925).

And in going to Oxford, Tolkien made two critical shifts. He must begin lecturing a new set of curriculum as Anglo-Saxon Professor, requiring a great deal of (pleasurable) time. He also moves from an editorial situation where, at Leeds, he is working quite near his editorial partner, E.V. Gordon. Bowers helps us imagine how Gordon frequently leans against Tolkien’s office door until they get the job done—late, but done well and in a reasonable time. G.S. Gordon as a partner is distant: there are months and years that go by as Tolkien and Gordon let letters and work sit unattended in the in-between times. George Gordon is a media darling and a strong public figure, but it isn’t clear he ever completed anything of substance on this project, leaving Tolkien largely on his own, adrift in a sea of possibilities.

Thus, with those situational moments colliding, we are driven to realize that this just wasn’t the project for Tolkien—at least not at this time. Tolkien wanted to live deeply in the poetry and the words. He wanted to produce a masterful Glossary and Notes, based on a revised text that brings the reader the most intricate possible benefits. He wanted to discover the text—both in the older and newer senses of the word. The project Sisam gave him was a quick, popular, useful companion volume based on a set text, cheap to produce, and meant to enhance Chaucer literacy and simultaneously raise the profiles of Tolkien, Gordon, and the press. In the end, Bowers recognizes what was in Tolkien’s heart as a scholar:

“Looking back over his career in 1959, Tolkien reckoned that he was singularly equipped for the job: ‘I would always rather try to wring the juice out of a single sentence, or explore the implications of one word, than try to sum up a period in a lecture, or pot a poet in a paragraph’ (Essays, 224). He had anticipated this claim allegorically in Leaf by Niggle when describing his hero: ‘He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges.’ (108)

Thus, I do not think it is just philologist pessimism or Tolkien’s long defeat. In the end, Tolkien produced more pages of material than the volume was designed to hold—not including Gordon’s contributions or the Chaucer texts. As the war broke in autumn of 1939, the glossary’s printing trays were broken up, the metal was melted down, and Clarendon received a war credit for the materials that had been the plates for part of the project. The Clarendon Chaucer was set adrift. Though Sisam and a subsequent editor tried to wrangle, maneuver, cajole, or bribe a text from Tolkien, they were unsuccessful. They ultimately had to hire a car to collect the paperwork from Tolkien in 1951, who seemed personally hurt at having to part with his papers.

So the project was doomed from the start.

Bowers writes that

“J.R.R. Tolkien would have become Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous editor if he had completed his Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose” (13).

I have no doubt. Clarendon was not able to use anything from Tolkien or Gordon, even after 30 years of patient waiting. But if he had been given a project like the Riverside Chaucer and a strong editorial team to guide him, Tolkien may have completed something of substantial value.

Doomed, yes. But any reader of Tolkien’s legendarium will remind us that “doom” has more nuance than inexorable ruin. As fate would have it, Tolkien was still able to produce thoughtful work in Chaucer even after losing his papers in the 1950s. And six decades after their seizure, Bowers and the OUP archivists—in partnership with the Bodleian—were able to discover and pull together a substantial and rich treasury of material. While Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer is not yet that full book, it is a good book. We cannot know how fate will treat Tolkien’s Chaucerian achievement. As Chaucer writes in his translation of Boethius, the destiny of a reason-bound universe (as I read it when combined with the sense of “doom” and near-providential destiny in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit):

… haþ doom by whiche it discerniþ and demiþ euery þing.