The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien by J.R.R. Tolkien

Author:J.R.R. Tolkien [Tolkien, J.R.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0100-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

* The cats of Queen Berúthiel and the names and adventures of the other 2 wizards2 (5 minus Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast) are all that I recollect.

† I am not Gandalf, being a transcendent Sub-creator in this little world. As far as any character is 'like me' it is Faramir – except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.

nowadays buys a book that they can borrow: I have not yet received a farthing – of The Lord of the

Rings that the ugly duckling has become a publisher's swan, and I am being positively bullied to put The Silmarillion into form, and anything else!

[The draft is incomplete.]

181 To Michael Straight [drafts]

[Before writing a review of The Lord of the Rings, Michael Straight, the editor of New Republic, wrote to Tolkien asking a number of questions: first, whether there was a 'meaning' in Gollum's rôle in the story and in Frodo's moral failure at the climax; second, whether the 'Scouring of the Shire' chapter was directed

especially to contemporary England; and third, why the other voyagers should depart from the Grey Havens

with Frodo at the end of the book – 'Is it for the same reason that there are those who gain in the victory but cannot enjoy it?']

[Not dated; probably January or February 1956.]

Dear Mr Straight,

Thank you for your letter. I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is the

key-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable. There is no 'allegory', moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all.

It is a 'fairy-story', but one written – according to the belief I once expressed in an extended

essay 'On Fairy-stories' that they are the proper audience – for adults. Because I think that fairy

story has its own mode of reflecting 'truth', different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or 'realism', and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and

even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief. To

succeed in that was my primary object.

But, of course, if one sets out to address 'adults' (mentally adult people anyway), they will not

be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents, seem to be about something worth

considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the 'human

situation' (of all periods). So something of the teller's own reflections and 'values' will inevitably get worked in. This is not the same as allegory. We all, in groups or as individuals, exemplify general principles; but we do not represent them. The Hobbits are no more an 'allegory' than are (say) the pygmies of the African forest. Gollum is to me just a 'character' – an imagined person – who

granted the situation acted so and so under opposing strains, as it appears to he probable that he would (there is always an incalculable element in any individual real or imagined: otherwise he/she

would not be an individual but a 'type'.

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