intro

Monday, August 06, 2012

3:10 PM

David Fagerberg
9.4.2012 Center for Ethics & Culture

Hugo Dyson

Dyson was not a prolific writer, but the good quality and voluminous
quantity of his lectures and general conversation had quite an
effect on people. He much preferred talk at Inklings meetings to
readings and is recorded by fellow Inkling Christopher Tolkien as
"lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, 'Oh God,
not another elf!'" during The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien "On Fairy-Stories"

On delivering the Lang
lecture at St. Andrews 1938

To be invited to lecture in St. Andrews is a high compliment to any

man; to be allowed to speak about Barry-stories is (for an
Englishman in Scotland) a perilous honor. I felt like a conjurer who
finds himself, by some mistake, called upon to give a display of
magic before the court of an elf-King. After producing his rabbit,
such a clumsy performer may consider himself lucky, if he is
allowed to go home in its proper shape, or indeed to go home at all.
There are dungeons in fairyland for the overbold.

The biography by Humphrey Carpenter notices that a life can be told from the outside or the inside.
Here is a summary of Tolkien from the outside:
Tolkien came to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Prof. of Anglo-Saxon for 20 years, was then
elected Merton professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional
Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, move to a nondescript seaside
resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of 81.
It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance,
certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest laymen. And
that would be that apart from the strange fact that during these years when 'nothing happened'
he wrote two books which you become world bestsellers, books that have captured the
imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers.
.I will not give a biography of Tolkien, but I will let him introduce himself from The Letters of J.R.R.
Tolkien:

Tolkien Page 1

Letters p. 288
I do not like giving 'facts' about myself other than 'dry' ones (which
anyway are quite as relevant to my books as any other more juicy
details ). There are a few basic facts, which however dryly
expressed, are really significant. For instance I was born in 1892
and lived for my early years in 'the Shire' in a pre-mechanical age.
For more important, I am a Christian (which can be deduced from
my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter 'fact' perhaps
cannot be deduced; though one critic asserted that the invocations
of Elbereth, and the character of Galadriel as directly described
were clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary. Another saw in
waybread (lembas) = viaticum and the reference to its feeding the
will, and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the
Eucharist. (That is: far greater things may color the mind in dealing
with the lesser things of a fairy-story.
I am in fact a Hobbit friends in all but size). I like a gardens, trees
and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and I like good plain
food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even
dare to wear in these old days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of
mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor
(which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late
and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.
Biography p. 176
And as if to emphasize the personal parallel, Tolkien chose for the
hobbits house the name 'Bag End' which was what the local people
called his Aunt Jane's Worcestershire Farm. Tolkien wrote of the
Wests Midland counties: "any corner of that County is in an
indefinable way 'home' to me, as no other part of the world is.' But the
village of Hobbiton itself with its male and River Is still identifiable as
the Sarehole where Ronald Tolkien spent four formative years.

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Closing quote, biography 191

"the Christian," he said, "may now perceive that all his
pents and faculties have a purpose, which can be
redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has
been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to
guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the
effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.

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Inklings
Monday, August 06, 2012
2:34 PM

Humphrey Carpenter The Inklings

Lewis, preface to Williams

Williams' All Hallows' Eve, and my own Perelandra, as well as Prof. Tolkien's
unfinished sequel to the Hobbit, had all been read aloud, each chapter as it was
written. They owe a good deal to the hard-hitting criticism of the circle.

Tolkien letter (387)

I can give you a brief account of the name Inklings: from memory. The Inklings
had no recorder and C. S. Lewis no Boswell. The name was not invented by CSL
(nor by me). In origin it was an undergraduate jest, devised as the name of a
literary (or writers') club. The founder was an undergraduate at University College,
named Tangye-Lean - the date I do not remember: probably mid-thirties. ...He
asked some dons to become members and CSL was an obvious choice. [Tolkien
joined, too] The club soon died: the Record Book had very few entries: but CLS
and I at least survived. Its name was then transferred to the undetermined and
unelected circle of friends who gathered about CSL and met in his rooms at
Magdalen. [O]ur habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and
lengths!), CSL had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory
for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of
which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by
his friends.

Tolkien's account from a letter I reached the Miter at 8 where I was joined by C. W. [Charles Williams] C. S. L.
(194 )
was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. [Owen Barfield] is
the only man who can tackle C. S. L. making him define everything, and
interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo's. The
result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which had an
outsider dropped he would've thought that a meeting of fellow enemies hurling
deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form.
On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on
and define "Chance", Jack said: "very well, some other time, but if you die tonight
you'd be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have."
Warnie: "that only illustrates what I've always said: every cloud has a silver
lining." But there was some quite interesting stuff. A short play on Jason and
Medea by Barfield, two excellent sonnets sent by a young poet to C. S. L. ; and
some illuminating discussion of "ghosts", and of the special nature of Hymns (C.
S. L. has been on the Committee revising Ancient and Modern). I did not leave
until 12. 30, and reached my bed about 1 a.m.

71

By now Tolkien had read much of The Silmarillion to Lewis, and when at the end of
1937 he began to write a sequel to The Hobbit he passed his new chapters to Lewis.
By the time that Lewis began to read Tolkien's still untitled new story, he himself
had turned his hand to fiction again [The space trilogy] His new book began as a
joint project, a kind of bargain or wager with Tolkien, who recalled of it: "Lewis said
to me one day: 'Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am
afraid we shall have to write some ourselves.'" What they had in mind was stories
that were mythopoeic

Letters of Tolkien, 47

I have had one amusement lately: Dr Havard took me and the Lewis brothers out
to a pub. J.B. had given me a little part of snuff as a birthday present. So I
brought it out of my pocket. "Will anyone have any?" I said. Many horny hands of
yokels were thrust out. And several caplifting explosions followed!
Maj. Lewis [brother Warnie] even amusing account of visiting Blackwell's
bookshop with Hugo Dyson. When he came to the point at which the assistant
returned to Hugo and said: sorry, sir, we have no second-hand copy, but we have
a new copy ( and Hugo replied Well, rub it on the floor and make it second-hand:
it's all the same to me) there was loud applause.

147
An account of Tolkien reading
at the Inklings

Carpenter composed an imaginary meeting of the Inklings, but based on

references in letters and books.
Tolkien began to read from his manuscript. It is the chapter which describes the
arrival of the hobbits and their companions at the doors of the Mines of Moria,
and which recounts the beginning of their journey through the darkness. Tolkien
reads fluently. Occasionally he hesitates or stumbles, for the chapter is only in a
rough draft, and he has some difficulty in making out a word here and there. The
pages are closely covered he has written it on the back of old examination
scripts. One or two details are still uncertain: he explains that he has not yet
worked out and Elvish version of the inscription over Moria gate, and he reads it
in English; he is uncertain whether the word of power with which Gandalf opens
the doors should be Mellyn or Meldir; and here and there he points out that he
has got the details of distance or time of the day wrong, and will have to correct
them. But such small details do not interfere with the concentration of his
listeners, for though he reads fast and does not enunciate very clearly, the story
quickly takes charge. It is more than an hour before he is finished.

J.R.R.
Tolkien Ab...

"I don't know how you think of these things," says Havard, who does not
actually find it easy to appreciate The Lord of the Rings but who certainly
admires the fertility of Tolkien's imagination.
"How does any author think of anything?" answers Jack Lewis, quick as usual
to turn the particular into the general. "I don't think that conscious invention
plays a very great part in it. For example, I find that in many respects I can't
direct my imagination: I can only follow the lead it gives me. I, more and more

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http://cslewisjrrtolkien.classicalautographs.com/inklings/index.html
This website includes information and resources on the informal Oxford literary group,
the Inklings. The Inklings included two of the most important writers of the twentieth
century, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, the authors of The Chronicles of Narnia and The
Lord of the Rings, respectively. Other key members of the Inklings were
Charles Williams,
Owen Barfield,
Christopher Tolkien (J. R. R. Tolkien's son),
Warren "Warnie" Lewis (C. S. Lewis's brother),
Adam Fox,
Hugo Dyson,
R. A. "Humphrey" Havard,
J. A. W. Bennett,
Lord David Cecil,
Nevill Coghill,
Charles Leslie Wrenn,
Colin Hardie,
James Dundas-Grant,
John Wain,
R. B. McCallum,
Gervase Mathew,
Percy Bates, and
C. E. Stevens.
C. S. Lewis's friends, Roger Lancelyn Green and Dorothy Sayers, are often also
associated with the Inklings.

direct my imagination: I can only follow the lead it gives me. I, more and more
to the conclusion that all stories are waiting, somewhere, and are slowly being
recovered in fragments by different human minds according to their abilities. Do
you agree?" He turned to Tolkien
"of course, of course. Although you may feel that your story is profoundly 'true',
all the details may not have that 'truth' about them."
"What about the new hobbit book? How much of it would you say was true?
Tolkien sighs. "I don't know. One hopes But you mean, I take it, how much of
it came ready-made, and how much was conscious invention. It's very difficult to
say. One it doesn't, perhaps, identified the two elements in one's mind as it's
happening. As I recall, I knew from the beginning that it had to be some kind of
quest, involving hobbits I got hobbits on my hands, hadn't I? I thought I'd
choose the Ring as the key to the next story though that was the mere germ, of
course. But I want to make a big story out of it, so it had got to be the Ring, not
just any magic ring."
"Didn't you find when you actually began to write that things appeared largely
of their own accord?" said Lewis.
"Of course. I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. The Black
Riders were completely unpremeditated I remember the first one, the one that
Frodo and the hobbits hide from on the road, just turned up without any
forethought. I knew all about Tom Bombadil already, but I'd never been to Bree.
And then in the Inn at Bree, Trotter sitting in the corner of the bar parlor was a
real shock totally unexpected and I had no more idea who he was than had
Frodo.

The theme that holds the inklings together, I am going to propose, is "romance".
CS Lewis's review "this book is like lightning from a clear sky. To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous,
of The Lord of the eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in
Rings
its anti-romanticism, is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return and
the sheer relief of it is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance
itself a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond it makes not a
return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory."
in another review: "the book is to original and two opulent for any final judgment on a
first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the
same man."

Tolkien Page 5

Barfield
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
1:26 PM

The book which established C. S. Lewis's professional academic reputation; The Allegory of
Love, contained the dedication
"To Owen Barfield, wisest and best of my unofficial teachers."
Poetic Diction by Barfield is dedicated: "To C. S. Lewis 'Opposition is true friendship' "

Owen Barfield was not an academic, although he gained a first-class honors degree in English
Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and was a fellow undergraduate with C. S.
Lewis. His Poetic Diction was originally begun as a thesis for his B.Litt., degree in 1922, and was
published in 1928, following a work on parallel lines, History in English Words in 1926. This was at
a time when Barfield was striving to make a name and living as a writer but he was eventually
obliged to take up the practice of law, and for most of his life as a working solicitor he wrote no
more books, although some of his occasional articles and lectures were published in 1944 under
the title Romanticism Comes of Age (revised and expanded in 1966).
His principal books did not therefore appear until some time after those of the other Inklings -Saving the Appearances, the first of them, in 1957, a year after Lewis's last novel, Till We Have
Faces, three years after Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; and twelve years after Williams's death. This
was to be followed by three other important works, two largely in the form of Socratic dialogues or
symposia, Worlds Apart and Unancestral Voice in 1963 and 1965, and What Coleridge Thought in
1971. During this period he was "discovered" and encouraged by American academe ...

Poetic Diction: a 28 science deals with the world which it perceives but, seeking more and more to
Study in Meaning penetrate the veil of nave perception, progresses only towards the goal of nothing,
because it still does not accept in practice that the mind first creates what it perceives as
objects, including the instruments which Science uses for that very penetration. It insists on
dealing with "data", but there shall no data be given, save the bare percept. The rest is
imagination. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is,
not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be
constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own
creative activity. The difficulty lies in the fact that, outside poetry and the arts, that activity
proceeds at an unconscious level. It has to be dug for.
31 logic can make us more precisely aware of the meaning already implicit in words. But
the meaning must first of all be there and, if it is there, it will always be found to have been
deposited or imparted by the poetic activity. , The poetic, as such, does not handle terms;
it makes them.
34 there are two important functions which poetry is there to perform.
(a) One of them is the one I have stressed throughout this book, namely the making of
meaning, which gives life to language and makes true knowledge possible. And if it does
inasmuch as it is the vehicle of imagination.
(b) The other, lying much nearer the surface of life, is to mirror, not necessarily by
approving, the characteristic response of the age in which it is written.
41 When words are selected and arranged in such a way that their meaning either
arouses, or is obviously intended to arouse, aesthetic imagination, the results may be
described as poetic diction. Imagination is recognizable as aesthetic, when it produces
pleasure merely by its proper activity.
48 When I tried to describe in more detail than by the phrase "aesthetic imagination" what
experience it is to which at some time or other I have been led I find myself obliged to
define it as a "felt change of consciousness", where "consciousness" embraces all my
awareness of my surroundings at any given moment, and "surroundings" includes my own
feelings. By "felt" I mean to signify that the change itself is noticed, or attended to.

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50 the poet is obliged to work with words, and words, unlike marble or pigment or
vibrations in the air, oh their very substance ("meaning") to the generations of human
beings who have previously used them. No poet, therefore, can be the creator of all the
meaning of his poem.
58 "Poetry", said Coleridge, "is the best words in the best order."
[Barfield notices a contradiction: the critics sometimes say that the older the speech is the
more poetic it is, and sometimes say the older speech is nothing but monosyllabic
perceptual references. Is ancient speech metaphorical or not? Max Muller characterized
myth as a kind of disease of language. Barfield is credited with thoroughly repudiating this]
Chapter 7 Barfield does a case study on the evolving meaning of the word "ruin" and how it
has been used. At the end 126
in this chapter, I have taken only one English word, and one no richer in itself than a
thousand others. Yet it serves well enough to show how the man of today, overburdened
with self-consciousness, lonely, insulated from Reality by his shadowy, abstract thoughts,
and ever on the verge of the awful maelstrom of his own fantastic dreams, has among his
other compensations these lovely ancestral words, involving the souls of many poets dead
and gone and the souls of many common men. He has his four magical black squiggles,
wherein the past is bottled, like an Arabian genie, in the dark. Let him only find the secret,
and there, lying on the page, their printed silence will be green with Moss; it'll crumble
slowly even while it whispers with the thunder of primeval avalanches.
[Tolkien's love of the sound and antiquity of words]
Saving the
Appearances: a
Study in Idolatry

Look at a rainbow. While it lasts, it is, or appears to be, a great arc of many colors
occupying a position out there in space. and now, before it fades, recollect all you have
ever been told about the rainbow and its causes, and ask yourself the question Is it really
there? When I ask of an intangible appearance or representation, Is it really there? I
usually mean, Is it there independently of my vision? Would it still be there, for instance, if I
shut my eyes if I moved towards or away from it. If this is what you also mean by 'really
there', you will be tempted to add that the raindrops and the sun are really there, but the
rainbow is not. But you are not the only one to see the rainbow. You had a friend with
you. It is a shared or collective representation.
A representation is something I perceive to be there. Perception takes place by
means of sense-organs. I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone, but with
a great part of my whole human being. Thus, I may say, loosely, that I 'hear a thrush
singing'. But in strict truth all that I ever merely 'hear' all that I ever hear simply by virtue
of having ears is sound. When I 'hear a thrush singing', I am hearing, not with my ears
alone, but with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling
and (to the extent at least that they active attention involves it) will.
Tolkien's essay on fairy-stories:
[it is false to say there was first the idea of thunder who was then personalized as Thor
It is also false to say there was story about a red-bearded farmer, strong, who was
abstracted as Thor]
It is more reasonable to suppose that the farmer popped up in the very moment when
Thunder got a voice and face; that there was a distant growl of thunder in the hills every
time a story-teller heard a farmer in a rage. if we could go backwards in time, the fairystory might be found to changing details, or to give way to other tales. But there was
always be a 'fairy-tale' as long as there was any Thor. When the fairy-tale ceased, there
would just be thunder, which no human ear had yet heard.
[In his poem Mythopoeia, describing the way myth works, Tolkien writes:
You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are 'trees', and growing is 'to grow');
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star's a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
[And in Voyage of the Dawn Treader Lewis includes a scene with Ramandu]
"Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fireberry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that
was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and
once more tread the great dance."
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.
Barfield spoke about the medieval world
Chapter 11 the medieval environment

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Chapter 11 the medieval environment

we can only reconstruct the collective re-presentations of another age obliquely. Let us make the attempt for a
moment. Let us try to place ourselves inside the skin of a medieval man in the street
to begin with, we will look at the sky. We do not see it as empty space, for we know very well that a vacuum is
something that nature does not allow, any more than she allows bodies to fall upwards. If it is daytime, we see
the air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood proceeding from
the living heart. If it is night time, we do not merely see a plane, homogenous bolt pricked with separate point
of light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different sections of the great zodiacal belt,
and secondly the planets and moons (each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) our rating
down their complex influences upon the earth, its metals, its plants, its animals and its men and women,
including ourselves. We take it for granted that those invisible spheres are giving forth and inaudible music
the spheres, not the individual stars. As to the planets themselves, without being especially interested in
astrology, we know very well that growing things are specially beholden to the moon, that the gold and silver
draw their virtue from Sun and Moon respectively, copper from Venus, iron from Mars, lead from Saturn. And
that our own health and temperament are joined by invisible threads to these heavenly bodies we are looking
at. We probably do not spend any time thinking about these extra-sensory links between ourselves and the
phenomena. We take them for granted.
We turn our eyes on the C and once we are aware that we are looking at one of the four elements, of which
all things on earth are composed, including our own bodies. We take it for granted that these elements have
invisible constituents, for, as to that part of them which is incorporated in our own bodies, we experience them
inwardly as the four humors which go to make up our temperament. . Earth, Water, Air and Fire are part of
ourselves, and we of them.
The stone falls to the ground we see it seeking the center of the earth, moved by something much more like
desire than what we today call gravity I shall not go on. The background picture then was of man as a
microcosm within the macrocosm. It is clear that he did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world
outside him to quite to the extent as we do.

R. J. Reilly - Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien

16

In Romanticism Comes of Age Barfield speaks of to early discovery that he had made for
himself about literature. The first was that there is something "magic" about certain
combinations of words, that they have a power not easily explained. "It seemed there was
some magic in it; and a magic which not only gave me pleasure, but also reacted upon and
expanded the meanings of the individual words concerned."
The second discovery was connected with the first; it was "the way in which any intense
experience of poetry reacted on my apprehension of the outer world. I found I new things
about them which I had not known before."

33

Modern consciousness began roughly about the time of the Reformation and became
fairly widespread only in the 17th century.
36 Barfield see the romantic movement as essentially a triumph because, utilizing the end
product of the long evolution of consciousness (the end product is, of course, self consciousness), the romantic poets saw the totality of the dead world moving in a void, a
world drained of its imminent life by the very evolution which enabled them to perceive its
deadness. But they also saw the necessity of somehow revitalizing it, of bringing it back
to some kind of life.
It was left to the Romantics and their theories of the power of the imagination really to
resuscitate the lifeless world. Coleridge in his distinction between the Fancy and the
Imagination, is largely responsible for their success. For Wordsworth and Coleridge,
Nature is not only what we perceive but also what we half-create.

Tolkien Page 8

Williams
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
1:20 PM

Lewis's
preface to
the essays
presented to
Williams

He was a novelist, a poet, a dramatist, a biographer, a critic, and a theologian: a "romantic

theologian" in the technical sense which he himself invented for those words. A romantic
theologian does not mean one who is romantic about theology but one who is theological about
romance, one who considers the theological implications of those experiences which are called
romantic. The belief that the most serious and ecstatic experiences either of human love or of
imaginative literature have such theological implications, and that they can be healthy and fruitful
only if the implications are diligently thought out and severely lived, is the root principle of all his
work.

The effects of Romantic Love

This is the second demand of Purgatory that love, being humble, should
be open to include; that is, that the emotions aroused by the salutation of
Beatrice should become a principal of life. This is the definition of the true
romantic way. [Outlines of Romantic Theology, 103]
Sayers tells the story of Williams having his hair cut and hearing the
barber say that when his sweetheart was with him he felt he had not an
enemy in the world and could forgive anyone for anything. Whereupon
Williams jumped from the chair and shouted, "my dear man, that's exactly
what Dante said!" [Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology]
Dante says: "I say that when she appeared from anyplace, there was room
I hope of her admirable salutation, no enemy remaining to me, but a
flame of Caritas possessed me, which made me pardon anyone who
offended me; and if anyone had then asked me concerning anything, my
answer would have been only Love, with the faith clothed in humility. I
was friends with everyone, and utterly full of goodwill, and I was ready to
forgive anyone who had offended me." [He Came Down from Heaven, 72]

Essential Writings in
Spirituality and
Theology

Williams: "Romantic love between the sexes is but one kind of romantic love, which is
but a particular habit of Romanticism as a whole, which is itself but a particular method
of the Affirmation of Images."

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Theology

but a particular habit of Romanticism as a whole, which is itself but a particular method
of the Affirmation of Images."

He Came Down from

Heaven

65 The preeminent moment of romantic love is not, of course, confined to the moment
of romantic sex love. There are other moments of intense experience combined with
potentiality of further experience. Great art has it and politics and nature and (it is said)
maturity. But few of these have had the same universality and you, owing to the chance
of genius, have undergone the same analysis.

ch 5 "The Theology of
Romantic Love"

70 Hell has made three principal attacks on the Way of Romantic Love. The dangerous
assumptions produced are: [1] the assumption that it will naturally be everlasting; [2] the
assumption that it is personal; [3] the assumption that it is sufficient
81 The use of the word (so spoilt has it become) in some sense colors it with the horrid
tent of a false adoration and a pseudo-piety. But grace remains grace whatever fruits are
grown from it. The experience of communicated humility and goodwill is the experience
of the grace of reality and of the kingdom. The kingdom came down from heaven and
was incarnate; since then and perhaps (because of it) before then, it is beheld through
and in a carnality of joy. The beloved person or thing becomes the Mother of Love;
Love is born in the soul; it may have its passion there; it may have its resurrection. It has
its own divine in nature United with God on divine nature.
The Descent of the
Dove: a Short History of
the Holy Spirit in the
Church

57 if the whole of Christendom had taken to the desert and lived among the lions, it
remains true that the authority of the colored pontiffs would have been compelled to
assert that marriage and meet and wine were valde bona [Gen 1:31, very good].
Rejection was to be rejection but not denial, as reception was to be reception but not
subservience. Both methods, the Affirmative Way and the Negative Way, were to coexist;
one might almost say, to co-inhere, since each was to be the key of the other: in intellect
as in motion, in morals as in doctrine.
58 the Way of Affirmation was to develop great art and romantic love and marriage and
philosophy and social justice; the Way of Rejection was to break out continually in the
profound mystical documents of the soul, the records of the great psychological Masters
of Christendom. All was involved in Christendom, and between them, as it were, comes
the web of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, laboring, ordering, expressing, confirming, and
often misunderstanding, but necessary to any organization in time and particularly
necessary at that time in the recently expanded space.

The Figure of Beatrice

157 The angel of the gate is clad in the colour of ashes or dry earth; he holds two keys.
The angel says of them: When one of these keys does not turn rightly, the passage does
not open. One is more dear; but the other requires art and ingenuity before it will unlock,
for it is this which undoes the lock. I hold them from Peter, who made me err in opening
rather than in shutting, if only the souls fall at my feet (IX, 121-9).
All this is asserted to be the sacrament of penance, and so, no doubt, it is. But it has
another allusiveness. The keys are also the method of Rejection and Affirmation.
Rejection is a silver key, which is more dear; Affirmation is a golden key, more difficult
to use. Yet both are necessary, for any life. The order of purging is according to the seven
sins of the formal tradition of the Church. The Church is not a way for the soul to escape
hell but to become heaven; it is virtues rather than sins which we must remember.
9 it is an accepted fact that there have, on the whole, been to achieve ways of approach
to God defined in Christian thought.
One, which is most familiar in the
records of sanctity, has been known as
the Way of Rejection.

The other Way is the Way of

Affirmation, the approach to God
through these images.

It consists, generally speaking, in the

renunciation of all images except the
final one of God himself

The maximum this Way is in the creed

of St. Athanasius: "not by conversion of
the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of
the Manhood into God." That clause
was primarily a definition of the
Incarnation, but it's necessarily
involved much beside.

The great intellectual teacher of that

Other epigrams of this sort are
Way was Dionysius the Areopagite: "it is scattered to the history of the Church.
Tolkien Page 10

Way was Dionysius the Areopagite: "it is scattered to the history of the Church.
not soul, or mind, or reason, or
But for any full expression of it, the
understanding "
Church had to wait for Dante. It may be
that that Way could not be too quickly
shown to the world in which the young
Church lived. It was necessary first to
establish the awful difference between
God and the world before we could be
permitted to see the awful likeness.
Neither of these two Ways indeed he is, or can be, exclusive.
Outlines of Romantic
Theology

Alice Mary Hadfield, Intro: "he meant, I think, by 'romance' what John Buchan once
called 'strangeness flowering from the commonplace,' or, if you like, making the ordinary
extraordinary. For sex, love, and marriage are commonplace an ordinary; they can also
and at the same time be strange and extraordinary. Romance, he felt, does not stand by
itself; it is an aspect of the multiform relationship of men, women, and God, the study of
which is theology business. Romantic theology is, therefore, the working out of ways in
which an ordinary relationship between two people can become one that is
extraordinary, one that grants us glimpses, visions of perfection.
14 the principles of Romantic Theology can be reduced to a single formula: which is, the
identification of love with Jesus Christ, and of marriage with His life. This again may be
reduced to a single word Immanuel. Everything else is modification and illustration of
this. Romantic Theology, like the rest, is therefore first of all a Christology.
Every Mass was said once on Calvary, and we do not so much repeat as in the Mass
absorbed into that eternal offering. So each marriage was lived in His life, though in
terms of time it waited its due time in the order of the universe to become manifest.
34 the watchword then for all lovers, in whatever state of marriage they may find
themselves, is simply the old phrase, upon which so much scorn has been cast, to be "in
love with Love" [perhaps Augustine Confessions, book III, ch 1 "in love with loving."] But
this is not to be taken sentimentally or over-solemnly. It means in effect that they should
carry themselves always as if in the presence of this Stranger, desiring to learn more of
him, accepting anything that happens as a necessary result of His life in a perverted
world.

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Lewis
Monday, August 06, 2012
2:07 PM

Lewis said about

MacDonald's
Phantastes that it
took him up into
something new.

I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright
shadow . I do now. It was Holiness. Up till now each visitation of Joy had left the
common world momentarily a desert But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of
the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet
itself unchanged. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest
of me, not unnaturally, took longer.
Lewis was troubled if the Church said that all religious myth is false except only this
one, theirs! It bothered him to privilege the Christian myth over all the others. "I came far
nearer to feeling [worship and awe] about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I
had ever done about the true God while I believed.
That riddle would have to be solved if he was to go forward, and help came from G. K.
Chesterton. He argued, If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the
human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God? If we are so made
that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that Patagonians should dream of a Son of
God?
Lewis writes, I had not long finished [Chestertons] The Everlasting Man when something
far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I
ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for
the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. Rum thing, he went on. All
that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really
happened once."

They Stand Together:

The Letters of C.S.
Lewis to Arthur
Greeves:

" September 1931 [Hugo Dyson] stayed the night with me in College... Tolkien came too,
and did not leave till 3 in the morning... We began (in Addison's Walk just after dinner) on
metaphor and myth - interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still
warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining....
We continued on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot....
October 1931 Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of
sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: and again, that if I met the idea of god
sacrificing himself to himself.... I liked it very much... provided I met it anywhere except in
the Gospels... Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the
same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened....
Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain that this
Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths; that it is
the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly sure that it happened.... "

Tolkien Page 12

same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened....
Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain that this
Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths; that it is
the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly sure that it happened.... "
Tokens letters 338 It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really
'happened', and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded of him so
incapable of being 'invented' by anyone in the world at that time .

Lewis on story-writing

Narnia

Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something
about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then
collected information about child-psychology and decided what age group Id write
for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out allegories to
embody them. This is all pure moonshine.

I couldnt write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an
umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.
Dear Mr. Higgins:
<snip>
2. The Narnian books are not as much allegory as supposal. Suppose there were a
Narnian world and it, like ours, needed redemption. What kind of incarnation and
Passion might Christ be supposed to undergo there?
3. Only after Aslan came into the story on His own; I never called Him did I
remember the scriptural Lion of Judah.
"On Stories"

1. One sort of person gets upset with fairytales because they are scary, but Lewis
dismisses this by saying that none of his fears as a child came from fairytales.

2. A second sort of person thinks fairytales are just childish, and we should outgrow
them. To which Lewis responds, A childrens story which is enjoyed only by children
is a bad childrens story.
3. A third sort of person is worried that children will confuse fact and fancy; they will
begin to wish that real life was more like the fairytale. Lewis disagrees. Does anyone
suppose that [a child] really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and
discomforts of a fairy tale? really wants dragons in contemporary England?
4. And a fourth sort of person frets that the fantastic castle in the clouds will make the
ordinary home in the suburbs seem very boring; that fairytales will make the real
world seem dull. Lewis thinks the current in fact flows in the opposite direction:
paradoxically enough, it strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the
preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual [The child]
does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the
reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. Far from dulling the world, the
excursion into fairyland gives the world a new dimension of depth. It would be much
truer, he concludes, to say that fairy land arouses [in the child] a longing for he
knows not what.

Tolkien Page 13

Why write fairytales?

I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on
description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis,
digression, reflections and gas. I was now enamored of it. Its very limitations
of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the
sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.

So why Narnia after all?

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had
paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel
as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I
thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel
can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated
with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by
casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass
and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in
their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought
one could.

The Weight of Glory

Worldliness believes the world is under our command; there is nothing more than what
we can sensibly detect and rationally understand; there is no Landlord to whom we must
submit. Lewis thinks our divine lover must steal in, undetected, and break this cramped
worldliness, and I think Lewis proposes to help him. He writes,
Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy
tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And
you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil
enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.
Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner
voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the
good of man is to be found on this earth.
What if, instead of this world, we were really made for a far-off country? If that were the
case, then no lesser good would ever satisfy us, and fastening our desires on them would
only disappoint us. In fact, it would be actually wrong. To put a finite thing in the
Infinites place would be an act of idolatry. It would substitute a creature for the Creator.
In a moment of candor, we admit this.

"What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring,"
"These things the beauty, the memory of our own past are good images of what
we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb
idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they
are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not
heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

A life's task

Paul Holmer on
C.S. Lewis

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most
probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly
pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly
pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real
thing. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not
find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must
make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to
do the same.

20 In brief, then, Lewis's literature shows us something without quite arguing it.
Lewis would have it that literature actually creates thoughts in us; it is not only about
thoughts, it causes them to exist. It is as if literature is not a description of emotions;
rather, it so describes states of affairs that the ordinate emotions are invested in us.
Literature is not about existence so much as it is an addition to it. It gives us
experiences, feelings, moral pangs, wishes, hopes that we have never had
[Literature] communicates in such a way that, when successful, it creates new
capabilities and capacities, powers and a kind of roominess in the human personality.

Tolkien Page 14

thoughts, it causes them to exist. It is as if literature is not a description of emotions;

rather, it so describes states of affairs that the ordinate emotions are invested in us.
Literature is not about existence so much as it is an addition to it. It gives us
experiences, feelings, moral pangs, wishes, hopes that we have never had
[Literature] communicates in such a way that, when successful, it creates new
capabilities and capacities, powers and a kind of roominess in the human personality.
One becomes susceptible to new competencies, new functions, new pathos and
possibilities.

C.S. Lewis: The

Shape of his Faith 90 We are not then tabula rasa at all. We are active knowers, not passive. What we
know depends upon the kind of person we have made of ourselves. The world's infinite
and Thought
riches, its values and worths, its pleasures and depths can be found only if we are
qualified subjects.

Pilgrim's Regress

People take the word Romantic to mean:

1. stories about dangerous adventure, particularly in the past or remote places
2. The marvelous, provided it does not make part of the believed religion.
(magicians, ghosts, fairies, witches, Greek gods)
3. The art dealing with Titanic characters, emotions strained beyond the common
pitch, high-flown sentiments or codes of honor
4. the indulgence in abnormal and finally anti-natural moods. The macabre, interest
in torture, love of death
5. Egoism and subjectivism (Rousseau, Byron, Proust)
6. Every revolt against existing civilization and conventions whether it looks
forward to revolution or backward to the primitive (Lawrence, Whitman, Wagner)
7. Sensibility to natural objects when solemn and enthusiastic
"What I meant by Romanticism when I wrote Pilgrims Regress is not any one of these
seven."
What I meant was a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and
adolescence and which I hastily called Romantic because inanimate nature and
marvelous literature were among the things that evoked it.
The experience is one of intense longing.
Different from other longings by two things:
Though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt
to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is
expected in the near future ... But this desire continues to be prized even when
theres no hope of satisfaction. If the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired,
and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire.
There is a peculiar mystery about the object of this desire. People think they
know what they are desiring
Children looks at hillside and wishes if only I were there
Erotic suggestions makes one believe he is desiring the perfect beloved
Literature speaks of spirits and wishes for real magic
In studies in history or science may confuse it with craving for knowledge
Every one of these impressions is wrong. The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is
written by one who has proved them all to be wrong. By going to the far hillside you
will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desires that sent you there.
"When allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the
imagination, not with the intellect."

John and the Island

"I know now what I want."

Longing now not for the island, but for the moment when he had longed for it.

Tolkien Page 15

John and the Island

"I know now what I want."

Longing now not for the island, but for the moment when he had longed for it.
"If it's what I wanted, why am I so disappointed when I get it?"
"How can you say the island is all bad when longing for the Island has brought me
this far?"
What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.
The deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world.
the vision of the Island comes from the Landlord: nothing leads back to him which
did not at first proceed from him.
Most part of men are pagans; their first step will always be the desire born of the
pictures. Though this desires hides a thousand false trails, it also hides the only true
one for them. Pictures are of different kinds, what is universal is the arrival of some
message which wakes this desire and sets men longing for something East or West
of the world. It is lost so quickly that the craving itself becomes craved.

Picture people and

rule people

Lewis's heading to book 8, ch 8: "There was a really Divine element in John's

Romanticism for Morality is by no means God's only witness in the sub-Christian
world even Pagan mythology contained a Divine call but the Jews, instead of a
mythology, had the Law Conscience and Sweet Desire must come together to
make a Whole Man
[Father history says there were two kinds of people
the pagans receive pictures, and the Jews received rules to the road
The Shepherd People could read; they were given the rules. They had their feet set a
right road. Yes, they were narrow; because the thing they had charge of was narrow

About the pagans, he says this:]

"The Landlord succeeded in getting a lot of messages through. Mostly pictures.
You see, the Pagans couldn't read, because the Enemy shut up the schools as soon
as he took over Pagus. But they had pictures. The moment you mentioned your Island
I knew what you were asked. I have seen that Island dozens of times in those
pictures."
"And what happened then?"
"Almost certainly the same thing as happened to you. These pictures woke desire.
You understand me?"
"Very well."
"And then the Pagans made mistakes. They would keep on trying to get the same
pitcher again: and if it didn't come, they would make copies of it for themselves.
There was no absurdity and no indecency they did not commit. But however far they
went, the Landlord was too many for them. Just when their own stories seemed to
have completely overgrown the original messages and hidden them beyond recovery,
suddenly the Landlord would send them a new message and all their stories would
look stale."
"Surely some of the Pagans did get somewhere."
"They did. They got to Mother Kirk. That is the definition of the Pagan a man so
traveling that if all goes well he arrives at Mother Kirk's chair and is carried over this
gorge [the Fall of Adam]."
"The most part of men are always Pagans. Their first step will always be the desire
born of the pictures: and though that desire hides a thousand false trails it also hides
the only true one for them "
"Then there is always need for the Island?"
"It does not always take the form of an Island. The Landlord sends pictures of many
different kinds. What is universal is not the particular picture, but the arrival of some
message, not perfectly intelligible, which wakes this desire and sets men longing for
something East or West of the world: something possessed, if at all, only in active
desiring it, and lost so quickly that the craving itself becomes craved "
[what sort of pictures? To the Middle Ages he sent the picture of a Lady, and one of
the tenants carried to this form of desire to its natural conclusion and wrote it down
Tolkien Page 16

the tenants carried to this form of desire to its natural conclusion and wrote it down
in what he called a Comedy [Dante].
"At another time the landlord did a curious thing: he sent them pictures of the
country they were actually living in as if he had sent them a number of mirrors.
And just as the pictures of the Lady in Medium Aevum had made the real women
look different, so when men looked at these pictures of the country and then turned
to the real landscape, it was all changed. They saw something, as it were hiding in
every wood and stream and under every field. [Romanticism]

"This stroke of policy was in a way one of the greatest. All the previous pictures had
been of something that was not there in the world around you. This gave the Enemy
the chance of making people believe that you had it in the picture, and lacked
elsewhere But this weapon was knocked out of the Enemies hand when once the
thing in the picture was the very same thing that you saw all around you. Even the
stupidest tenant could see that you had the landscape, in the only sense in which it
could be had, already: and still you wanted: therefore the landscape was not what you
wanted. Idolatry became impossible"
Planet Narnia Michael Ward

Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the
whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind
of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be 'cryptic, significant, full
of voices and the mystery of life.' Lovers of romance go back and back to such stories in the
same way that we go "back to a fruit for its taste; to an air for what? for itself; to a region for
its whole atmosphere to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londoness. It is
notoriously difficult to put these tastes into words."

17 If we attempt not to Enjoy, but rather to Contemplate, the deathliness of Hamlet or the
'redskinnery' of The Last of the Mohicans (which is the opening example of kappa provided in
"On Stories") we will find the quality going dead and cold in our hands because we will have
stopped "living the story." If we are to properly Enjoy it, we must "surrender ourselves with
childlike attention to the mood of the story."
15 Lewis actually declared himself to be interested in imaginative 'hiddenness'; it is a major
element in his
thinking as a literary critic.
In 1940 he gave an address to the Martlets, the literary society of University College, Oxford,
entitled "The Kappa Element in Romance." 'Kappa' he took from the initial letter of the
Greek word krupton, meaning 'hidden' or 'cryptic.' Lewis later reworked the talk as the
essay "On Stories," published in 1947. [He dropped the term 'kappa' and] by this stage of
his career he tended to call it by a number of different terms, of which 'atmosphere' is the
most common. Atmosphere is a somewhat inadequate word to describe what Lewis was
concerned with, but then he came to complain how his critical interests 'have no
vocabulary.'
From "On Stories": To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be

understood that the series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a net whereby to
catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something
that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a
state or quality. Giantship, otherness, the desolation of space are examples we have
come across We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which
the state is never quite embodied. Other grand ideas - homecoming, reunion with
a beloved - similarly elude our grasp.
summary

I stumbled upon this secret theme when I was researching C.S. Lewiss writings as part of
my work at the University of St Andrews. It was easily the most exciting thing that has
happened to me while holding a book in my hands. This unifying scheme reveals that the
Chronicles are not the hodge-podge that Tolkien thought them to be, but very carefully
imagined stories. The Narnia books are built out of the seven symbols which Lewis had
studied throughout his professional career, those spiritual symbols of permanent value
which he considered to be especially worth while in our own generation.
72 In each book, Aslan is the embodiment of the presiding planetary personality.

Tolkien Page 17

Tolkien Page 18

Tolkien Fairy Stories

Wednesday, August 08, 2012
12:55 PM

Letters of
Tolkien
297

When I published The Hobbit hurriedly and without due consideration I was still
influenced by the convention that 'fairy-stories' are naturally directed to children. And
I had children of my own. But the desire to address children, as such, had nothing to
do with the story as such in itself or the urge to write it. But it had some unfortunate
effects on the mode of expression and narrative method
I had given a great deal more thought to the matter before beginning the
composition of The Lord of the Rings; and that work was not specially addressed to
children or to any other class of people.
I write things that might be classified as fairy-stories not because I wish to address
children (who qua children I do not believe to be specially interested in this kind of
fiction) but because I wish to write this kind of story and no other.

On fairy stories
[1] What is a Fairy Story?
The OED records the phrase since the year 1750 as:
(a) a tale about fairies, or generally of fairy legend
(b) an unreal or incredible story
(c) a falsehood

And the OED's definition of fairies =

"supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to possess magical powers
and have great influence for good or evil over the affairs of man"
Tolkien's points of disagreement
It is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural
Diminutive size is a modern notion, but smallness was not characteristic of that people as a whole.
Where did it come from? Perhaps the English love of the delicate and fine transformed the glamour of
Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or behind a blade of
grass.
Fairy, as a noun equivalent to elf, is a relatively modern word hardly used until the Tudor period.
The first quotation in the OED is from a poet Gower, but they got the quote wrong
He did not say

as he were a faierie

He said

as he were of faierie

Tolkien's
definitions

42 So fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but
stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being.
Faerie contains many things besides elves and fairies, and besides towards, which is,
trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and
all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves,
mortal men, when we are enchanted.
The definition of a fairy-story does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account
of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faerie; the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that
blows in that country. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its
qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.
43 For the moment I will say only this: a fairy-story is one which touches on or uses
Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie
itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic but it is magic of a peculiar mood
and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific,
magician. There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in detail, one thing must not
be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither
laughed at nor explained away.
44 the magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, it's virtue is in its operations: among these
are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires.
- One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time.
- Another is to hold communion with other living things.

Do not confuse
fairy tales with

Merely the small

The use of dreams
simply a beast fable with talking animals

(2) What is the Origin of the Fairy Element? 47

Tolkien Page 19

Not

Found by folklorist or anthropologists

Discovered by comparing parallel stories

Rather It is precisely the coloring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of the story, and
above all the general purport that informs with life the him dissect the bones of the plot, that really
count.
Fairy stories are very ancient indeed.
They are found universally, wherever there is language.
All three things have played their part in producing the web of Story:
(a) independent invention (b) inheritance from a common ancestry (c) diffusion
50 Mythology and metaphor
Wrong View of metaphor
(agreeing with Barfield)

Max Mller's view of mythology as "a disease of language" can be abandoned

without regret. [Barfield aided in this]
Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become
diseased.

The miracle of language

The human mind, endowed with powers of generalization and abstraction, sees
not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to
look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful,
how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the
adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not
surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of
adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of
light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make
heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and still ponds
into swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both.
When we can take a green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood,
we have already and enchanter's power
Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator

51 Personalized nature
Old, false theory

At one time it was the dominant view that all such matter was derived from naturemyths. The Olympians were personifications of son, Dawn, night, and so on

Tolkien

That would seem to be the truth almost upside down.

The nearer it is to nature-myth, the less interesting it is, and the less able to illuminate
the world

An example: the
Norse god Thor

He has a very marked character, or personality, which cannot be found in thunder or

enlightening: his red beard, loud voice, violent temper, blundering and smashing
strength
Do not ask
Nature allegories about personalized under
which came first Or stories about an irascible, red-bearded farmer
Rather is the
case

It is much more reasonable to suppose that the farmer popped up

in the very moment when Thunder got a voice and face; that there
was a distant growl of thunder in the hills every time a story-tell her
heard a farmer in a rage.

If we could go backwards in time, the ferry-story might be found to change in details, or

to give way to other tales. But there would always be a fairy-tale as long as there was
any Thor. When the fairy-tale ceased, there would be just thunder, which no human ear
had yet heard.
53 fairy story
and religion

something higher is occasionally glimpsed in mythology divinity, the right to power (as
distinct from its possession), the due of worship; in fact religion.
Fairy-stories as a whole have three faces:
The Mystical towards the Supernatural
The Magical towards Nature
And the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man
The essential face of Faerie is the middle one, the Magical. But the degree in which
the others appear (if at all) is variable, and may be decided by the individual story teller

54 how
stories
grow

The Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to get have continually
been added new bits, dainty and undainty.
it seems very plain that Arthur, once historical, was also put into the Pot. There he was boiled for
a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faerie, and
even some other stray bones of history until he emerged as a King of Faerie.
In the background of the ancient feud looms the figure that god whom the Norsemen called
Frey and the Angles called Ing. The enmity of the royal houses was connected with the sacred
site of the cult of that religion. does this prove that Ingeld and Freawaru, or their love, are
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site of the cult of that religion. does this prove that Ingeld and Freawaru, or their love, are
"merely mythical"? I think not. History often resembles "Myth", because they are both ultimately
of the same stuff. If indeed Ingeld and Freawaru never lived, Ortiz never loved, then it is
ultimately from nameless man and woman that they get their tale, or rather into whose tale
they have entered.
There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the legal quite blindly. Their
selection is important.

(3) What is the Effect Produced? 56

Are children the Is there any essential connection between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for
intended
comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies
audience? 58
them as curios.
Tolkien rejects

The common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connection between the minds of
children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connection between children's bodies
and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is
therefore most often made by those who tend to think of children is a special kind of
creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a
particular family, and of the human family at large.

Tolkien believes Actually, the Association of children and faerie-stories is an accident of our domestic
history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the "nursery", as
shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the plate-room, primarily because the
adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children
which decides this.
The value of fairy-stories is thus not, in my opinion, to be found by considering children in
particular

Telling fairyIt is true that in recent times fairy-stories had usually been written or "adapted" for
tales to children children. But so may music be, or verse, or novels, or history, or scientific manuals.
60 I suspect that belief and appetite for marvels are radically different, though the
appetite for marvels is not had once or at first differentiated by a growing human mind
from its general appetite.
If this were true, it would imply the teller of marvelous tales trades on children's credulity,
on the lack of experience which makes it less easy for children to distinguish fact from
fiction
Suspension of
disbelief

60 Children are capable, of course of literary beliefs, when the story-maker's art is good
enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief".
But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is
that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator". He makes a Secondary World
which our mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of
that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief
arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.
61 I fancy it is often the state of adults in the presence of a fairy-story. They are held there
and supported by sentiment (memories of childhood, or notions of what childhood ought
to be like); they think they ought to like the tail. But if they really liked it, for itself, they
would not have to suspend disbelief: they would believe in this sense.

Is it true?

Lang thinks the great question children ask is "Is it true?"

They do ask that question, I know; and it is not one to be rationally or idly answered.
[FN: Far more often they have asked me: "was he good? Was he wicked? That is, they
Were more concerned to get the Or right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a
Question equally important in History and in Faerie.]
That question is hardly evidence of "unrelenting belief", or even of the desire for it. Most
often it proceeds from the child's desire to know which kind of literature he is faced with.
Children's knowledge of the world is often so small that they cannot judge, off-hand and
without help, between the fantastic, the strange, the nonsensical, and the merely grownup things of their parents' world. But they recognize the different classes, and may like all
of them at times. Of course the borders between them are often fluctuating or confused;
but that is not only true for children

62 Tolkien's own
experience

Andrew Lang said that for children fairy-stories were the equivalent of the adult novel.
Now I was one of the children whom Andrew Lang was addressing. and as for
children of the present day, Lang's description does not fit my own memories, or my
experience of children.
I had no special childish "wish to believe". I wanted to know

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At no time can I remember that the enjoyment of the story was dependent on belief
that such things could happen, or had happened, in "real life". Fairy-stories were
plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they are
awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.
I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates, and Treasure Island
left me cool. Red Indians were better: there are bows and arrows, and strange
languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and forests. But the land of Merlin
and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd.

63 Fantasy

Such lands were preeminently desirable. I never imagined that the dragon was of the
same order as the horse. That was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never
even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trademark Of Faerie written plain
upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the
making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired
dragons with the profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have
them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world but the world that
contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever
cost of peril.

Summary

- in my opinion fairy-stories should not be specially associated with children

- This sentiment has produced some delightful books, but also a dreadful
undergrowth of stories written or adapted to what is conceived to be the measure of
children's minds
- If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by
adults.

(4) Values and Functions of Fairy-stories: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation

Fairy-stories offer these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation
( as a rule, children it needed these less than older people )
66 Fantasy

The human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present.
The faculty of conceiving the images is called Imagination
The sub-creative art is the expression; the achievement of the expression gives the inner
consistency of reality
Art is the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation.
For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-creative Art in
itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image:
a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose to use Fantasy for this purpose
Fantasy = images of things not in the primary world
Fantastic = things not to be found in our primary world at all
To make images of things not in the primary world is a virtue and not a vice.
Fantasy in this sense is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art
fantasy starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness.
Many people dislike being arrested. They dislike any meddling with the Primary World
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible demands a
special skill, a kind of elvish craft. When it is accomplished we have a rare achievement
of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode
This is best left to literature. In painting, the visible presentation of the fantastic image
tends to out run the mind, even overthrow it. It is a misfortune that Drama, and art
fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with
it, or as a branch of it.
Men dressed up as talking animals achieve buffoonery or mimicry, they do not achieve
Fantasy
The inadequacy of stage-effects is this: Drama = the visible and audible presentation of
imaginary men in the story. To add fantasy or magic is to demand a tertiary world. It is a
world too much
We need a word for this Elvish craft. Not magic Not art I will call it Enchantment.
Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can
enter to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside.
To the Elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires, and when it is successful of all forms of
human art most nearly approaches. There is a desire for a living, realized sub-creative art
which is entirely different from the greed which is the Mark of the mere Magician.
Of this desire the elves are largely made; and it is from them that we may learn what is
the central desire and aspiration of human Fantasy: Uncorrupted it does not seek
delusion, nor be which meant and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in
making and delight, not slaves.

Tolkien Page 22

Creative Fantasy is founded on the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it
appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure in our derivative mode, because
we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

Recovery 73

The analytic study of fairy-stories is a bad preparation for the enjoying or writing of them
it is easy for the students to feel that with all his labor he is collecting only a few leaves
from the Tree of Tales. It seems vain to add to the latter. Who can design a new leaf?
But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one
so smoke-ridden as that of England. each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique
embodiment of the pattern, and for some eye this very year may be the embodiment, the
first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless
generations of men.
It remains true that we must not in our day be too curious, too anxious to be original.
recovery is a regaining regaining of a clear view. We need to clean our windows; so that
the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity
Fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is
enough. And there is Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic
word it is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by
Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of
things that have become trite, when there seen suddenly from a new angle.
Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material and
has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone, and wood which only the art of making can
give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses
were ennobled;

75 Escape

I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which "escape" is now so often used. In what
the misusers of Escape are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very
practical, and may even be heroic. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in
prison, he tries to get out and go home?
the critics of chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing the Escape of
the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
To take a trifling instance: not to mention electric streetlamps is Escape. These lamps
may be excluded from the tale simply because they are bad lamps [they combine
elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness and inferiority of result].
But out comes the big stick: "Electric lamps have come to stay."
Chesterton truly remarked that as soon as he heard that anything had "come to stay" he
knew it would be very soon replaced.
Fairy-stories, at any rate, have more permanent and fundamental things to talk about.
Lightning, for example.

The notion that motorcars are more "alive" than, say, since cars are dragons is curious;
that they are more "real" than, say, forces is pathetically absurd
We need not be ashamed of the "escape" of archaism: of preferring not dragons but
horses, castles, sailing ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and
priests.
We are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and other evil. So that to us
evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and
beauty together. Even more alarming: goodness is itself bereft of its proper beauty. In
Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous is a
nightmare, but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose and in, a
hostel for travelers, the whole of a virtuous and noble king that is sickeningly ugly.
There are profound or wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things. On
this desire, as ancient as the Fall, is largely founded the talking of beasts and creatures in
fairy-tales, and especially the magical understanding of their proper speech.
A vivid sense of man's separation from the beasts is very ancient: but also a sense that it
was a severance: strange fate any guilt lies on us. Other creatures are like other realms
with which Man has broken off relations, and sees now only from the outside at a
distance, being at war with them
And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from
Death. Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this. Fairy stories are made by
man not by fairies. The human stories of the elves are doubtless full of Escape from
Deathlessness
81 Consolation

More than the satisfaction of ancient desires, fairy stories possess the Consolation of the
Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy stories must have
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Lewis:
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God
knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something
else which can hardly be put into words to be united
with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into
ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is
why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods
and goddesses and nymphs and elves that, though we
cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves
that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the
image.

strophe "stanza," originally "a turning," in reference

Death. Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this. Fairy stories are made by
man not by fairies. The human stories of the elves are doubtless full of Escape from
Deathlessness
81 Consolation
eucatrasophe

More than the satisfaction of ancient desires, fairy stories possess the Consolation of the
Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy stories must have
it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the
opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses
this opposite I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy
tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good
catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn: this joy, which is one of the things which fairy tales
can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist" nor "fugitive." In its fairytale
setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to return

It is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher more complete kind, that however wild
its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that
hears it, when the "turn" comes, a catch of the breath, it began lifting of the heart, near to
(or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and
having a peculiar quality. it is not an easy thing to do; it depends on the whole story
which is the setting of the turn, and yet it reflected glory backwards.
In such stories when the sudden "turn" comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and hearts
desire, that for moment passes outside the frame, wrens indeed the very web of story,
and let a gleam come through

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strophe "stanza," originally "a turning," in reference

to the section of an ode sung by the chorus while
turning in one direction, from strephein "to turn,"
from strebh- "to wind, turn" (cf. Gk. strophaligs
"whirl, whirlwind," streblos "twisted").
apo- "from" (see apo-) + strephein "to turn"
katastrephein "to overturn, turn down, trample on;
to come to an end," from kata "down" (see cata-) +
strephein "
affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to
catastrophe

Tolkien Letters
Friday, August 24, 2012
1:33 PM

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien : The Authorized Biography

215 Anyway I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of "romance", and in
providing subjects for "ennoblement" and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals.

this genre

209 I had great difficulty (it took several years) to get my story published, and it is not easy
to say who was most surprised at the result: myself or the publishers! But it remains an
unfailing delight to me to find my own belief justified: that the "fairy-story" is really an
adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists. I said so, more or less, in my
essay on the fairy-story But it was a mere proposition which awaited proof. As CS
Lewis said to me long ago, more or less (I do not suppose my memory of his dicta is
anymore precisely accurate than his of mine: I often find strange things attributed to me in
his works) "if they won't write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write
them ourselves; but it is very laborious". Being a man of immense power and industry, his
trilogy was finished much sooner amidst other work; but at last my slower and more
meticulous (as well as more indolent and less organized) machine has produced its effort.
The labor! I have typed myself nearly all of it twice, and parts more often; not to mention
the written stages. But I am amply rewarded and encouraged to find that the labor was not
wasted. One such letter as yours is sufficient and "furnishes more than any author ought
to ask".
232 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 satire,
or 'realism', and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as the
tale, excite, please, and even on occasion, and within its own imagine world be accorded
(literary) belief. To succeed in that was my primary object

27
Love of
language

He was now learning Greek. Of his first contact with this language later wrote: "the fluidity of
Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter captivated me. But part of the
attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness (from me): it did not touch home."
34 It was one thing to know Latin, Greek, French and German; it was another to understand
why they were what they were. Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that
were common to them all: he had begun, in fact, to study philology.

135 The first thing to understand is why he liked languages. We know a good deal about this
from the account of his childhood. The fact that he was excited by the Welsh names on coaltrucks, by the 'surface glitter' of Greek, by the strange forms of the Gothic words in the book he
acquired by accident, and by the Finnish of the Kalevala, shows that he had a most unusual
sensitivity to the sound and appearance of words. They feel for him the place that music has in
many people's lives. Indeed the response that words awakened in him was almost entirely
emotional.
( 132) he once wrote to WH Auden, "I am a West-midlander by blood, and took early Westmidland Middle English as to unknown tongue as soon as I set eyes on it." A known tongue:
something that already seemed familiar to them. One might dismiss this as a ludicrous
exaggeration, for how could he recognize a language that was 750 years old? Yet this was what
he really believed, that he had inherited some faint ancestral memory of the tongue spoken by
distant generations of Suffields.
CS Lewis says of Tolkien "Strange as it may seem, it was undoubtedly the source of that
unparalleled richness and concreteness which later distinguished him from all other
philologists. He had been inside language."
His tutor lent him an Anglo-Saxon primer
Opening its covers, Tolkien found himself face-to-face with the language that was spoken by
the English before the first Normans set foot in their land. Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English,
was familiar and recognizable to him as an antecedent of his own language, and at the same

Tolkien Page 25

was familiar and recognizable to him as an antecedent of his own language, and at the same
time was remote and obscure.
35 philology: 'the love of words'. That was what motivated him. It was not an area of interest in
the scientific principles of language; it was a deep love for the look and sound of words,
springing from the days when his mother had given him his first Latin lessons. And as a result of
this love of words, he started to invent his own languages. Certainly it seemed worth trying:
if he had been interested in music he would very likely have wanted to compose melodies, so
why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be as it were a private
symphony?
64 as a student at Oxford, examples of his essays:
- "Problems of the dissemination of phonetic change"
- "The lengthening of vowels in Old and Middle English times"
- "the Anglo-Norman element in English"
75 By 1915 he had developed [his imaginary language] to a degree of some complexity. He felt
that it was "a mad hobby", and he scarcely expected to find an audience for it. But he
sometimes wrote poems in it, and the more he worked at it the more he felt that it needed a
"history" to support it. In other words, you cannot have a language without a race of people to
speak it. He was perfecting the language; now he had to decide to whom it belonged.
during 1915 the picture became clear in Tolkien's mind. This, he decided, was the language
spoken by the fairies or else whom Earendel saw during his strange voyage.
Origins of
LOTR

30 Sir I need no persuasion: I am as susceptible as a dragon to flattery, and would gladly

show off my diamond waistcoats, and even discuss its sources. However, with regard to
the principal question there is no danger: I do not remember anything about the name and
inception of the hero.
At about this time [age 18] he discovered the Finish Kalevala or Land of Heroes the collection of
poems which is the principal repository of Finland's mythology. He wrote, "the more I read of
it, the more I felt at home and enjoyed myself."
He and friends took a hiking trip in Switzerland
before setting off on the return journey to England, token boxing picture postcards. Among
them was a reproduction of a painting by a German artist, J. Madlener. It is called Der
Berggeist, the mountain spirit, and it shows an old man sitting in a rock under a pine tree.
Token preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in
which he kept it: "origin of Gandalf."

211 [to W H Auden] I do not really think that I am frightfully important. I wrote the Trilogy
as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort I wanted to
read. I was not thinking much of the profit or delight of others; though no one can really
write or make anything purely privately. I had very little particular, conscious,
intellectual, intention in mind at any point.
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember
nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but
pointed out that one could not say "a green great dragon", but had to say "a great green
dragon". I wondered why, and still do. ...
I mentioned Finnish because that set the the rocket off in story. I was immensely
attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala [a 19th-century publication of Finnish
folklore] The beginning of the legendarium, of which the Trilogy is part (the conclusion),
was an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, specially the tale of Kullervo the
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was an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, specially the tale of Kullervo the
hapless, into a form of my own.
All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate
papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics
with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." I did
not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got
no further than the production of Thror's Map. [Footnote 219: I once scribbled "hobbit" on a
blank page of some boring school exam paper in the early 1930s. It was some time before
I discovered what it referred to!] But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s, and was
eventually published not because of my own children's enthusiasm (though they like it well
enough), but because I lent it to the then Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge when she had flu,
and it was seen by a former student who was at that time in the office of Allen and Unwin.
It was I believe tried out on Rayner Unwin; but for whom when grown-up I think I should
never gotten the Trilogy published.
Biography 189 usually he worked at night, as was his habit, warmed by the idiosyncratic stove
in his study great at Northmoor Road, and writing with his dip-10 on the backs of old
examination answers so that much of The Lord of the Rings is interspersed with fragments of
long-forgotten essays by undergraduates. Each chapter would begin with a scribbled and often
illegible draft; then would come a rewriting in a fairer hand; and finally a typescript done on the
Hammond machine.

216 [why a ring?] If you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would
be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at
once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did,
unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest
started at once.
219 the invention of languages is the foundation. The "stories" were made rather to
provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the
story follows. I should have preferred to write in Elvish.

Biography 126 "one rights such a story not out of the leaves and trees still to be observed, nor
by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seat in the dark out of the leaf-mould of
the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten,
descending into the geeks. No doubt there is much selection, as with the gardener: what one
throws on one's personal compost-keep; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic
matter."
on a sequel

24 I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits. Mr. Baggins seems to have
exhibited so fully both the Took and the Baggins side of their nature. But I have only too
much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.
One reader wants fuller details about Gandalf. But that is too dark. I am afraid that snake
appears in everything; though actually the presence (even if only on the borders) of the
terrible is, I believe, what gives this imagined world its verisimilitude. A safe fairyland is
untrue all worlds.
38 The pressure of work as a research fellow has taken all my time, and also dried up
invention. The sequel to the Hobbit has remained where it stopped. It has lost my favor,
and I have no idea what to do with it. For one thing the original Hobbit was never intended
to have the sequel Bilbo "remained very happy to the end of his days and those were
extraordinarily long": a sentence I find it almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.
For another nearly all the Motives that I can use were packed into the original book, so that
a sequel will appear either "inner" or merely repetitional. For third: I am personally
immensely amused by hobbits as such, one can contemplate them eating and making
their rather fatuous jokes indefinitely; but I find that this is not the case with even my most
devoted fans. Mr. Lewis says hobbits are only amusing when in unhobbitlike situations.

It wrote itself

41 I spoke in an earlier letter of this sequel getting "out of hand", I did not mean it to be
complementary to the process. I really meant it was running its course, and forgetting
"children", and was becoming more terrifying than the Hobbit. It may prove quite
unsuitable. It is more adults The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.
Though it is not an allegory.
The biography 94 as the years went by became more and more to regard his own invented
languages and stories as 'real' languages and historical chronicles that needed to be elucidated.
In other words, when in this mood he did not say of an apparent contradiction in the narrative
or an unsatisfactory name: "this is not as I wish it to be; I must change it." Instead he would
approach the problem with the attitude: "what does this mean? I must find out."

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76 it is growing and sprouting again (I did a whole day added yesterday to the neglect of
many matters) and opening out in unexpected ways. So far in the new chapters Frodo and
Sam have traversed Sarn Gebir, climbed down the cliff, encountered and temporarily
tamed Gollum. it will turn out to be a deadly Kirith Ungol and Gollum will play false. But
at the moment they are in Ithilien ( which is proving a lovely land); there's been a lot of
bother about stewed rabbit
79 a new character has come on the scene (I'm sure I did not invent him, I did not even
want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir,
the brother of Boromir - and he is holding up the catastrophe by a lot of stuff about the
history of Gondor and Rohan: but if he goes on much more a lot of them will have to be
removed to the appendices were already some fascinating material on the hobbit
Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone.
216 But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew
already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner in the inn was a shock,
and I had no more idea who he was then had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere
name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal years till I came there. Far away I
knew there were the Force-Lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Man, but
Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. Most disquieting of all, Sarumen had
never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear
on September 22.

231 But I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher
introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even 'sleeping'. I
have long ceased to invent: I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes
itself. Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere
far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the
point, and wrote the Treebeard chapter without any recollection of any previous thought:
just as it is now. And then I saw that, of course, it had not happened to Frodo at all.
413 [a woman wrote asking questions like how and why] I think I can now guess what
Gandalf would reply. A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man his name I have
forgotten. He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seem
to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before it's time.
When it became obvious that I had never seen the pictures before and was not well
acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at
me. Suddenly he said: "of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book
yourself?"
an English
epic

143 In order of time, growth and composition, this stuff began with me though I do not
suppose that that is of much interest to anyone but myself. I mean, I do not remember a
time when I was not building it. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary
languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped, and of course, as
a professional philologist I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in
craft. Behind my stories is now a nexus of languages.
But an equally basic passion of mine was for myth (not allegory!) And for fairy-story, and
above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too
little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite. I am not "learned" in the matters of
myth and fairy-story I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved
country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality
that I sought, and found as an ingredient in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and
Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me);
but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.
Of course, such as overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories
were the thing. They arose in my mind as "given" things and as they came, separately, so
to the links group. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labor: it always I had the
sense of recording what was already "there", somewhere: not of "inventing".
230 thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter. Having set myself the task,
the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the
English and epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful
thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still be on darkened
heart and mind. ...

89 In college there was a tight discussion group which call themselves the T.C.B.S. They
separated in the war. It was trench warfare, and on the first day of battle 20,000 allied troops
have been killed. Tolkien's battalion was sent forward to the line, where he served until he
contracted trench fever. He returned to the hospital in England, and before his best friend G. B.
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contracted trench fever. He returned to the hospital in England, and before his best friend G. B.
Smith died he sent a letter to Tolkien that concluded with this sentence:
"May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long
after I am not there to save them, if such be my lot."
Smith's words were clear call to Ronald Tolkien to begin the great work that he had been
meditating for some time, a grand an astonishing project with few parallels in the history of
literature. He was going to create an entire mythology.
The idea had its origins in his taste for inventing languages. He had discovered that to carry
out such inventions to any degree of complexity he must create for the language is a history in
which they could develop.
There is another force at work: his desire to express his most profound feelings and poetry
And there was a third element playing a part: his desire to create a mythology for England. .
This idea grew until it reached grand proportions. Here is how Tolkien expressed it, when
recollecting it many years later:
Biography, 89 - "Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a
mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic
to the level of romantic fairy-story the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth,
the lesser drawing splendor from the vast backcloths which I could dedicate simply: to
England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool
and clear, be redolent of our 'air' it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more
adult mind of a land long steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales and fullness,
and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a
majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and
drama. Absurd."
his own view
of LOTR

136 As the estimate for typing a fair copy was in the neighborhood of 100 (which I have
not despair), I was obliged to do nearly all myself. And now I look at it, the magnitude of
the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced
a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite
unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit but to The
Silmarillion. My estimate is that it contains, even without certain necessary adjuncts, about
600,000 words. One type is to put it higher. I can see only too clearly how impracticable
this is. But I'm tired. It is off my chest. Ridiculous and tiresome as you may think me, I
want to publish them both The Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings in conjunction or
in connection. That is what I should like. Or I will let it all be. I cannot contemplate any
drastic rewriting or compression.
221 I came eventually and by slow degrees to right Of the Lord of the Rings to satisfy
myself: of course without success, at any rate not above 75%. But now (when the work is
no longer hot, immediate, or so personal) certain features of it, and especially certain
places, still move me very powerfully.

his constant
editing

74 I have struggled with a recalcitrant passage in "The Ring". At this point I required to
know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a
rabbit.
Biography 195 Tolkien had been making rough sketch-maps since beginning work on the book;
he once said: "if you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise
you'll never make a map of it afterwards." But the map in itself is not enough, and he made
endless calculations of time and distance, drawing up elaborate charts concerning events in the
story, showing dates, the days of the week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the
wind and the phase of the moon. This was partly his habitual insistence on perfection, partly
sheer reveling in the fun of sub-creation, but most of all a concern to provide a totally
convincing picture. Long afterwards he said: "I wanted people simply to get inside this story
and take it (in the sense) as actual history."
80 The trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found minds in the crucial days
between Frodo's flight in the present situation were doing impossible things, rising in one
part of the country and set simultaneously in another. Rewriting bits of black chapters took
all afternoon!
81 tried to write but struck a sticky patch. All that I had sketched a written before proved
of little use, as times, motives, etc., have all changed. Now I must go back to the other folk
and try to bring things to a final crash with some speed. . [Next day] the climax

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and try to bring things to a final crash with some speed. . [Next day] the climax
approaches and one has to keep the pitch up: no easy level will do; there are all sorts of
minor problems of plot and mechanism. I wrote and tore up and rewrote most of it a good
many times; but I was rewarded this morning, as both C.S.L. and C.W. thought is an
admirable performance, and the latest chapters the best so far. Gollum continues to
develop into a most intriguing character.
88 had I thought it out at the beginning, I should've given all the hobbits very English
names to match the Shire.
113 "Leaf by Niggle" was the only thing I have ever done which cost the absolutely no pain
at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one
morning (more than two years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It
took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out. I am not aware of ever "thinking" of
the story or composing it in the ordinary sense.

160 it was begun in 1936, and every part has been written many times. Hardly a word in
its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution
to the whole of all the features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered. I
do not say this in recommendation. It is, I feel, only to likely that I am deluded, lost in the
web vain imaginings of not much value to others in spite of the fact that a few readers
have found it good, on the whole. What I intend to say is this: I cannot substantially alter
the thing. I have finished it.
258 The general idea of the Lord of the Rings was certainly in my mind from an early stage
[the first draft of Bk 1, Ch 2 bridging in the 1930s]. From time to time I made rough
sketches or synopses of what was to follow, immediately or far ahead; but these are
seldom of much use: the story unfolded itself as it were. The tying-up was achieved, so far
as it is achieved, by constant re-writing backwards. I have a mini-Colin calendar with dates
in a brief statement of where all the major actors or groups were on each day and what
they were doing.
Biography 138 Lewis, well aware of this difference between them, wrote of Tolkien: "His
standard of self-criticism was high and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon
a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends
had hoped for the final text of an old work actually got the first draft of a new one."
on characters 176 ff a description of elves, Orcs, Sam, etc
186 Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly unkin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror broken
down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out
of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn't. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or
Gamgee).
189 Elves and Men are represented as biologically akin in this "history", because Elves are
certain aspects of Men and their talents and desires, incarnated in my little world.
197 hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age.
They, as all peoples and their situations, or an historical accident as the Elves put out
Frodo and then in permanent one in the long view.

202 but Gandalf is not, of course, a human being (Man or Hobbit). There are naturally no
precise modern terms to say what he was. I would venture to say that he was an incarnate
angel strictly and aggelos; that is, with the other Istari, wizards, "those who know", an
emissary from the Lords of the West, since to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron
loomed on the horizon. By "incarnate" I mean they were embodied in physical bodies
capable of pain, and weariness, and of afflicting the spirit with physical fear, and of being
"killed", though supported by the angelic spirit they might endure long, and only show
slowly the wearing of care and labor.
Biography 176 Tolkien once told an interviewer: "the Hobbits are just rustic English people,
made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination not the
small reach of their courage or latent power." To put it another way, the hobbits represent the
combination of small imagination with great courage which (as Tolkien had seen in the
trenches during the First World War) often lead to survival against all chances. "I've always
been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small
people against impossible odds."

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Biography 188 Tolkien scribbled on a spare sheet: "too many hobbits. Also Bingo BolgerBaggins a bad name. Let Bingo = Frodo." but below this he wrote: "no I am now too used to
Bingo."
105 on Sam

Certainly Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book,
the genuine hobbit. Frodo is not so interesting, because he has to be high-minded, and has
(as it were) a vocation. The book will probably end up with Sam. Frodo will naturally
become too ennobled and rarefied by the achievement of the great Quest, and will pass
West with all the great figures; but Sam will settle down to the Shire and gardens and
ends. C. Williams who is reading it all says the great thing is that its center is not in strife
and war and hero is him (though they are understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace,
ordinary life and good liking.
From the biography 81 "my Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the
privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself."
110 for myself, I was probably most moved by Sam's disquisition on the seamless web of
story, and by the scene when Frodo goes to sleep on his breast, and the tragedy of Gollum
who at that moment came within a hair of repentance but for one rough word from Sam.
161 I think the simple "rustic" love of Sam and his Rosie (no are elaborated) is absolutely
essential to the study of his apprentices the chief heroes) character, and to the theme of
the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice,
causes, and the longing for elves, and sheer beauty.
329 Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable. Some readers he irritates and even
infuriates. I can well understand it. All hobbits at times affect me in the same way, though
I remain very fond of them. But Sam can be very 'trying'. He is a more representative
hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he has consequently a stronger
ingredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a
vulgarity by which I do not mean a mere 'down-to-earthiness' a mental myopia which is
proud of itself, a smugness and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all
things from a limited experience. Sam was cocksure, and deep down a little conceited;
but his conceit had been transformed by his devotion to Frodo.

252 On Frodo

No, Frodo 'failed'. one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally
resistible by incarnate creatures, however 'good'; and the Writer of the Story is not one of
us.
326 Frodo indeed 'failed' as a hero, as conceived by simple minds: he did not endure to
the end; he gave in, ratted. I do not say 'simple minds' with contempt: we often see with
clarity the simple truth in the absolute ideal to which effort must be directed, even if it is
unattainable. Their weakness, however is twofold. They do not perceive the complexity of
any given situation Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that
strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute
requirement in moral judgment (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest
exercise it belongs to God. For financial judges of imperfect knowledge it must leads to the
use of two different scales of 'morality'.
- To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise
- To others, we must apply scale tempered by mercy
I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring
would reach its maximum impossible, I should have said, for anyone to resist, certainly
after long possession Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as
an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest
to be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded
by the highest honor; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum into Mercy:
his failure was redressed.
We are finite creatures with absolute limitations upon the powers of our soul-body
structure in either action or endurance. Moral failure can only be asserted, I think, when a
man's effort or endurance fall short of his limits, and the blame decreases is that limit is
closer approached nonetheless, I think it can be observed in history and experience that
some individuals seem to be placed in 'sacrificial' positions: situations or tasks that for
perfection of solution demand powers beyond their utmost limits
327 he saw himself and all that he had done as a broken failure. "Though I may come to
the Shyer, it will not seem the same, for I shall not be the same." That was actually a
temptation out of the Dark, a last flicker of pride: desire to have returned as a 'hero', not
content with being a mere instrument of good. And it was mixed with another temptation,
blacker and get more merited, for however that may be explained, he had not in fact cast
away the Ring by a voluntary act: he was tempted to regret its destruction, and still to
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away the Ring by a voluntary act: he was tempted to regret its destruction, and still to
desire it. "It is gone forever, and now all is dark and empty", he said as he wakened from
his sickness in 1420. "Alas! There are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured", said
Gandalf not in Middle-earth. Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him if
that could be done, before he died.
religion

172 I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your
references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty
and simplicity is founded. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and
Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have
not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or
practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and
the symbolism.

The biography 91 some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien's stories and his
Christianity, and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write
with such conviction about a world where God is not worshiped. But there is no mystery. The
Silmarilion is the work of a profoundly religious man. It does not contradict Christianity but
complements it. There is in the legends no worship of God, yet God is indeed there Tolkien's
universe is ruled over by God, 'The One'. Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he
wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie. He wanted the
mythology and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as a
Christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshiped. At the
same time, to set his stories 'realistically' in the known world, where religious beliefs were
explicitly Christian, would deprive them of imaginative color. So while God is present in
Tolkien's universe, He remains unseen.
355 [reply to WH Auden] with regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a
sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under
any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually
intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted
somewhere where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil and origin.
144 [problems with the stories of King Arthur] it's "faerie" is too lavish, and fantastical,
incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and
explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems
to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of
moral and religious truth in parenthesis or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of
the primary "real" world.

205 But the point of view of the myth [the Silmarillion] is that Death the mere shortness
of human life-span is not a punishment for the Fall, but a biologically (and therefore also
spiritually, since body and spirit are integrated) inherent part of Man's nature. The attempt
to escape his wicked because "unnatural", and silly because Death in that sense is the Gift
of God (indeed by the Elves), release from the weariness of Time. Death, in the penal
sense, is viewed as a change in attitude to it: fear, reluctance. A good Numenorean died of
free will when he felt it to be time to do so.
243 in my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that
is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any 'rational being' is wholly evil. Satan fell. In my
myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world. In my story Sauron represents as
near an approach to behold evil will as possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants:
beginning well But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for
domination, being in origin and immortal spirit. In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not
basically about 'freedom', though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole
rights to divine honor. The Eldar and the Numenoreans believed in The One, the true God,
and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desire to be a God-King, and
was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would've demanded divine
honor from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world. ...
246 if there is any contemporary reference in my story at all is to it seems to me the most
widespread assumption of our time: that everything can be done, it must be done. This
seems to me wholly false. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real
center 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 than difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world 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 volume III and the story of Aragorn, you will have perceived that.
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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 than difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world 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 volume III and the story of Aragorn, you will have perceived that.
252if you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that
not only was quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act were will, especially at
its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was
honored because he had accepted the burden voluntarily I think rather of the mysterious
last petitions of the Lord's prayer: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. A
petition against something that cannot happen is unmeaning. There exists the possibility
of being placed in positions beyond one's power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from
ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility
and mercy) of the sacrificial person. I did not 'arrange' the deliverance in this case: it again
follows from the logic of the story.
262 I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets
the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more
than to say it is a tale written by a Man!
267 As for 'message': I have not really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing
The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth specially
revealed to me! I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and
backgrounds such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one's own
taste, ideas, and beliefs get taken up. Though it is only in reading the work myself that I
become aware of the dominance of the theme of Death. But certainly Death is not an
Enemy! I said, or meant to say, that the 'message' was the hideous peril of confusing true
'immortality' with limitless serial longevity. Freedom from Time, and clinging to Time. The
confusion is the work of the Enemy, and one of the chief causes of human disaster.
Compare the death of Aragorn with a Ringwraith. The Elves call 'death' the Gift of God (to
Men). Their temptations different: towards a fainant melancholy, burdened with Memory,
leading to an attempt to halt Time.
279 You cannot press the One Ring too hard, for it is of course a mythical feature, even
though the world of the tales is conceived in more or less historical terms. If I were to
'philosophize' this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it was a mythical way
of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather potentiality) if it is to be exercised,
and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or less
degree, out of one's direct control. A man who wishes to exert 'power' must have subjects,
who are not himself. But then he depends on them.
284 But I might say that if the tale is 'about' anything (other than itself), it is not as seems
widely supposed about open 'power'. Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets
events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and
Immortality; and the 'escapes': serial longevity, and hoarding memory.
413 you speak of 'a sanity and sanctity' in the L.R. 'which is a power in itself'. I was deeply
moved. Nothing of the kind had been said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I
was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as 'an unbeliever,
or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling But you', he said,
'create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible
source, like light from an invisible lamp'.

Eucatastrophe 285 This is therefore an 'Elvish' view, and does not necessarily have anything to say for or
against such beliefs as the Christian that 'death' is not part of human nature, but it
punishment for sin (rebellion), a result of the 'Fall'. It should be regarded as an Elvish
perception of what death - not being tied to the 'circles of the world' - should now become
for Man, however it arose. The divine 'punishment' is also a divine 'gift' if accepted, since
it's object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make
'punishments' (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained: a
'mortal' Man has probably (and Elf would say) a higher if unrevealed destiny than a
longeval one. To attempt by device or 'magic' to recover longevity is thus a supreme folly
and wickedness of 'mortals'. Longevity or counterfeit 'immortality' (true immortality is
beyond Ea) is the chief date of Sauron it leads the small to a Gollum and the great to a
Ringwraith.
100 At the story of the little boy [a story of miracle healing] with its apparent sad ending
and then it's sudden on hoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar
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Ringwraith.
100 At the story of the little boy [a story of miracle healing] with its apparent sad ending
and then it's sudden on hoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar
emotion we all have though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation. All of a
sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and
explain in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you could read that I think I shall
send it to you. For it I coined the word "eucatastrophe": the sudden happy turn in the story
which pierces you with the joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of
fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect
because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole major change in material cause and
effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly
snapped back. It perceives the story has literary "truth" on the second plane that this is
indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I
concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest "eucatastrophe" possible in
the greatest Fairy Story and produces that essentially emotion: Christian joy which
produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those
places where Joy and Sorrow are one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in
Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean
very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to
be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. To descend to
lesser things: I knew I had written the story of worth in The Hobbit when reading it (after it
was old enough to be detached from me) I had suddenly in a fairly strong measure the
eucatastrophic emotion at the Bilbo's exclamation: "the Eagles! The Eagles are coming!"

war

78 We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed.
But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves
into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear-cut as in the story, and we started out with
a great many Orcs on our side. Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep
up your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you're in them. You
are inside a very great story. [to his son in war]
94 you can't fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy; but
unfortunately Gandalf's wisdom seems long ago to have passed with him into the True
West

115 [his son served in the R.A.F.] it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And
nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connection with it.
My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some
Hobbits learning to ride Nazgul-birds "for the liberation of the Shire". Though in this case,
as I know nothing about the British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not
fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of
patriotism in this remaining war.
116 the news today about atomic bombs is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of
these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the
destruction of the world! Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on
Babel-builders.
middle earth

186 Middle-earth is just archaic English for oikonmene, the inhabited world of men. It lay
then as it does. In fact just as it does, around an inescapable. That is partly the point.

283 I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own motherearth for place. I prefer that to the contemporary mode of seeking remote globes in space.
Middle-earth is not my own invention. It is a modernization or alteration (New English
Dictionary 'a perversion') of an old word for the inhabited world of Men, the oikoumene:
middle because thought of vaguely is set amidst the encircling Seas and (in the northernimagination) between the ice of the North and the fire of the South. Old English middangeard, medieval English midden-erd, middle-erd. Many reviewers seem to assume that
Middle-earth is another planet!
on

228 I think the book quite unsuitable for dramatization, and if not enjoy the broadcasts
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on
dramatizing
the book

228 I think the book quite unsuitable for dramatization, and if not enjoy the broadcasts
[It was broadcast on the BBC during 1955 in 1956]
257 [an American film maker had inquired about the possibility of making a cartoon film]
as far as I'm concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion
picture, with all the risk of vulgarization; and that quite apart from the glint of money,
though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility, I think I should find
vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the BBC

22
Beginnings of
fairy

In childhood he liked Read Indian stories, the Curdie books of George MacDonald, Arthurian
legends, the faerie books of Andrew Lang especially the Red one which contained This was the tale of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a strange and powerful tale set in the
nameless North. Whenever he read it Ronald founded absorbing." I desired dragons with the
profound desire," he said long afterwards. "Of course, in my timid body I did not wish to have
them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was
richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril."

59 Finnish

He had read the Kalevala in English translation, and now with the aid of a Finnish grammar
book he began it in the original language. "It was like discovering a wine-seller filled with
bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavor never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."
He read a paper on the Kalevala to the college society, and said
"These mythological ballads are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of
Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different
and earlier completeness among different people. I would that we had more but left
something of the same sort that belongs to the English.

fairytales and 109 As for Eden. I think most Christians [have] sort of tucked Genesis into a lumberEden
room of their mind is not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the
house, don't you know, In consequence they have indeed, as you say, forgotten the
beauty of the matter even "as a story". Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay
showing of what greater value the "story-value" was, as mental nourishment. It was a
defense of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith,
but clings at least to the beauty of "the story" as having some permanent value. His point
was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the
sap life: for the beauty of the story well not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a
concomitant of it, and a fideles is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as
the truth. but partly as a development of my own thought on my lines and work, partly in
contact with CSL, and in various ways not least the firm guiding hand of Alma Mater
Ecclesia, I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on the Eden "myth". It has not, of
course, historicity of the same kind as the New Testament But certainly there was an
even on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our
whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked
with a sense of "exile". .
allegory

145 I dislike Allegory conscious and intentional allegory yet any attempt to explain the
purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.
262 there is no symbolism or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort 'five
wizards = five senses' foreign to my way of thinking. To ask if the Orcs are Communists
is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs

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Tolkien Mythopoeia
Monday, August 27, 2012
12:44 PM

Humphrey Carpenter's summary of the argument in this poem,

biography 147
To one [C.S. Lewis] who said that myths were lies and
therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver'.
Philomythus to Misomythus
You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are 'trees', and growing is 'to grow');
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star's a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.
At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o'er-written without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
an endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees,
tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these
homuncular men, who walk upon the ground
with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound.
The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs,
green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,
thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry,
slime crawling up from mud to live and die,
these each are duly registered and print
the brain's contortions with a separate dint.
Yet trees are not 'trees', until so named and seen
and never were so named, tifi those had been
who speech's involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgement, and a laugh
response of those that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves
and looking backward they beheld the elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind,
and light and dark on secret looms entwined.
He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers bencath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-pattemed; and no earth,
unless the mother's womb whence all have birth.
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

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But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed
through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
And, indicating the great trees of Magdalen Grove as their
branches bent in the wind, he struck out a different line of
argument.
You: tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the
word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You
call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a
mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so
naming things and describing them you are only inventing your
own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about
objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the
myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a
splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with
God. Indeed only by mid-making, only by becoming a sub-creator
and inventing stories, can Man ascribed to the state of perfection
that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but
they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while
materialistic 'progress' leads only to the yawning abyss and the
Iron Crown of the power of evil.
In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology,
Tolkien had laid bare the center of his philosophy as a writer, the
creed that is at the heart of The Silmarilion.

and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.
Yes! 'wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?
All wishes are not idle, nor in vain
fulfilment we devise -- for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is deadly certain: Evil is.
Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
though small and bate, upon a clumsy loom
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow's sway.
Blessed are the men of Noah's race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).
Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have tuned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.
I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes

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erect and sapient. Before them gapes

the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God's mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker's art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see
that all is as it is, and yet made free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden nor gardener, children nor their toys.
Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God's picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in malicious choice,
and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.

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