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

Author:J.R.R. Tolkien
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2000-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

J. R. R. Tolkien.

[Mr Gamgee replied on 30 March with more information about his family. He expressed himself delighted at Tolkien’s offer of signed volumes. Tolkien sent them, and Mr Gamgee acknowledged their arrival, adding: ‘I can assure you that I have every intention of reading them.’]

185 From a letter to Christopher and Faith Tolkien

19 March 1956

I have had a letter from a real Sam Gamgee, from Tooting! He could not have chosen a more Hobbit-sounding place, could he? – though un-hirelike, I fear, in reality.

Also A. & Unwin send extremely good news or prophecies of probable financial results to come later.

186 From a letter to Joanna de Bortadano (drafts)

[Not dated; April 1956]

Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation. When you say A[tomic] P[ower] is ‘here to stay’ you remind me that Chesterton said that whenever he heard that, he knew that whatever it referred to would soon be replaced, and thought pitifully shabby and old-fashioned. So-called ‘atomic’ power is rather bigger than anything he was thinking of (I have heard it of trams, gas-light, steam-trains). But it surely is clear that there will have to be some ‘abnegation’ in its use, a deliberate refusal to do some of the things it is possible to do with it, or nothing will stay! However, that is simple stuff, a contemporary & possibly passing and ephemeral problem. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story. It provides the theme of a War, about something dark and threatening enough to seem at that time of supreme importance, but that is mainly ‘a setting’ for characters to show themselves. The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete. But if you have now read Vol. III and the story of Aragorn, you will have perceived that. (This story is placed in an appendix, because I have told the whole tale more or less through ‘hobbits’; and that is because another main point in the story for me is the remark of Elrond in Vol. I: ‘Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

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