The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien by J.R.R. Tolkien;Humphrey Carpenter;

Author:J.R.R. Tolkien;Humphrey Carpenter; [Carpenter, Humphrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

182 From a letter to Anne Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Co.

[Not dated; 1956]

I shall certainly now, if I am allowed, publish the parts of the great history that was written first – and rejected. But the (to me v. surprising) success of The Lord of the Rings will probably cause that rejection to be reconsidered. Though I do not think it would have the appeal of the L.R. – no hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that ‘heigh stile’ (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the taste of many reviewers. But I am not allowed to get at it. I am not only submerged (sans secretary) under business of the L.R., but also under professional business – one of the ways of making us professors ‘go quietly’ with practically no pension, is to make our last two or three years of office intolerably laborious – ; while the appearance of the L.R. has landed me in the pincers. Most of my philological colleaguesfn50 are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’. So the screw is on for many things of a more professional kind long overdue. Alas! I like them both, but have only one man’s time. Also I am getting rather ripe, if not actually decrepit! With the retirement this summer of Sir John Beasly, and Lord Cherwell, I am left the senior professor of this ancient institution, having sat in a chair here since 1925 – or 31 years, though no one seems to observe the fact. Except for one or two who cry: ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’, yearning for the padded seat (actually stuffed with thistle, as one of them will discover).

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