Tolkien in his own words

Reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition (William Morrow 2023), I wondered whether such a volume could exist for writers from our day. It’s hard to envision The Collected Emails and Text Messages of J.K. Rowling, featuring the author of the Harry Potter series. Yet Letters serves an important function for fans, as the brief foreword to this edition points out, because “Letters has become the closest thing we can ever have to J.R.R. Tolkien’s autobiography.”

Tolkien left us, according to the list on the inside cover, nine published works from his lifetime, plus 20 published posthumously, and an additional dozen volumes of his notes and drafts. It is a monumental corpus. Yet I doubt the idea of a memoir ever crossed his mind. He saw himself as a hobbit, one of the little people of the world, yet confident in his belief that “the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world,’ are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak—owing to the secret life in ­creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One.”

Plus, autobiographies tend to give the “approved” version of a life, and sometimes leave out the interesting ­tidbits and colorful details that a ­collection of letters would not. Here we learn the hardships of Tolkien’s life, including his many illnesses and the even greater number of ailments facing his wife Edith. We hear him complain of the drudgery of grading papers and sitting through departmental meetings as a professor, but also witness his joy at sharing beers and book drafts with the Inklings.

Chief among that incredible literary club was the equally famed Oxford professor C.S. Lewis, “a very old friend and colleague of mine, and indeed I owe to his encouragement and the fact that in spite of obstacles (including the 1939 war!) I persevered and eventually finished The Lord of the Rings.” Letters acts almost as a diary, recording his dislike of Disney, his affection for alcohol, and his deep Catholic faith.

Of course, Tolkien’s life will be interesting to many because of his ­legendarium, his history of Middle Earth. Several essay-length letters ­provide color, background, and explanation for his books, for example, explaining the penultimate scene of Frodo’s struggle with Gollum over the ring inside Mount Doom by reference to the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The letters also weave Tolkien’s own life together with his fiction. For instance: “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed, as you say, a reflection of the English Soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as far superior to myself.”

Letters is best enjoyed by true lovers of Tolkien. As Humphrey Carpenter explains in the original preface, “It is assumed that the reader will have a fairly thorough knowledge of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” (I would add The Silmarillion as well.) More casual fans looking for an epistolary holiday gift should start with Tolkien’s entertaining collection for children: Letters From Father Christmas.

This “revised and expanded edition” contains over 150 new letters, and 45 of the original letters are published at an expanded length compared with the 1981 original. Recall, though, that the letters were originally dashed off, not honed through multiple rounds of editing, so one must sometimes sift dross to grab the golden nuggets—like telling his editor he need not include his academic address, for “professor” is “a title one has rather to live down than to insist on,” or to the same friend as World War II drew to a close, “one is still hesitant to ask news of sons.”

But the work is worth it, because Tolkien explains, inspires, and encourages, for as one letter closes: “Up with the Ents! Down with the Ruffians! And may the King return!”