University Bookman, Winter 1975 (Full Issue)
A seminal issue of the Bookman. Every article deals with a book Kirk considered to be one of the most important of the 1970s: William T. Couch’s THE HUMAN POTENTIAL.
Lester del Rey, “A Report About J.R.R. Tolkien,” Worlds of Fantasy (1968).
Source: Lester del Ray, “A Report on J.R.R. Tolkien,” Worlds of Fantasy 1 (1968): 84-85.
Nothing could seem less revolutionary than being a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, with a chief interest in such works as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original. Yet Professor J. R.R. Tolkien is well on the way toward creating the major literary revolution of our generation.
The man not only writes about magic, but he seems capable of working spells in real life. No dictum of publishing or tradition of literature can withstand his quiet assault, as a simple listing of his achievements demonstrates.
The modern tradition is against fairy stories, even for children. But The Hobbit by Professor Tolkien had become a classic, and the publishers wanted a sequel. They got one — one based on the same characters, background and magic as the original, but for adults! Not only that, but it was to be in three volumes, with no false endings to make each volume stand as a complete book. The reader would have to get it like a serial. And where long novels were selling for a few dollars, this one would come to fifteen dollars! No sane publisher should have risked such a venture, but George Allen & Unwin couldn’t resist the book.
Nobody expected it to do well, and the American copyright on The Lord of the Rings was not protected, with the result that the work became public domain. It did quite well, however, with little but word-of-mouth advertising; my 1963 copy of the first book lists thirteen hardcover printings. The work refused to die.
Everyone knows that a copyright is the author’s only protection. But when the soft-cover volumes were issued, Tolkien was able to exercise control, even without legal protection. His simple request that only the authorized Ballantine edition be purchased was enough to make readers pay the extra twenty cents per volume and to force the other publisher to come to terms with him. This created a major furor in publishing circles and established a tradition for which every writer must give perpetual and incredulous thanks.
Soft-cover books don’t get serious reviews, normally. The Lord of the Rings received unusually full reviews. And for over a year, the books led the soft-cover bestseller list. They are still selling excellently, though there isn’t a hint of “daring” words or events in them.
The new editions were published during the great youth revolt, when the young were supposed to be cynical about all values and turning to the literature of protest. Yet millions turned at once to these books, filled with such things as the love of beauty, the dignity of ordinary people, and the conflict of good and evil. They bore no resemblance to anything being read before — but they outsold everything else.
The Tale of Wonder passed from 1 the literary scene about three hundred years ago. Its demise was ‘noted by many and seemingly mourned by few. Yet today, as the result of one man’s work, it is back with us. And it is causing excitement in the most serious academic circles, under the new name of mythopoetic literature.
This year Belknap College, in ‘Center Harbor, N. H., will hold a serious conference on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien over the weekend of October 18-20, with joint sponsorship by the Tolkien Society of America. Many of the papers, to be published later, will deal with scholarly aspects of mythopoetic literature. It took science fiction forty years to accomplish what Tolkien has achieved in three.
The revolution has had a major impact on all fantasy publishing. Five years ago, there was little market for fantasy; today, a great many publishers are actively seeking such fiction. Fantasy has suddenly become a “hot” item in soft-cover publishing.
Meantime, Professor Tolkien is working on another project that violates all normal publishing sense. Despite the fact that even serious books shouldn’t have too many pages of notes and references, Tolkien finished his work of fiction with over a hundred pages of appendices and the world developed there has been so fascinating that readers have insisted he give them still more.
He is now doing so — as he probably intended all along. He is working on what may be another three-volume novel about the age before that of the first novel — to be called The Silmarillion. After that, there is still an earlier age to provide a work now known as The Akallabeth.
Sometimes his publishers despair of ever having the final manuscripts, already long delayed by Professor Tolkien’s tendency toward perfectionism. He is now 76, and the work of correlating all his notes and making countless revisions is seemingly endless.
But when a man consistently works miracles, nothing should be considered impossible.
— Lester del Rey
Harvey Breit interviews J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955 (Short!)
Source: Harvey Breit, “Oxford Calling,” New York Times Book Review (June 5, 1955), pg. 8.
“How does it happen that a writer of children’s books (who began that way, if we may believe his critics) can end by producing a somber and brilliantly bizarre trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings’—part two of which (‘The Two Towers’) was reviewed here recently and labeled definitely for adults? The author of that Gothic masterpiece, J.R.R. Tolkien, was asked how it all came about. What, we asked Dr. Tolkien makes you tick? Dr. T., who teaches at Oxford when he isn’t writing novels, has this brisk reply: “I don’t tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.)
“My work did not ‘evolve’ into a serious work. It started like that. The so-called ‘children’s story’ was a fragment, torn out of an already existing mythology. In so far as it was dressed up ‘for children, in style or manner,’ I regret it. So do the children.
“I am a philologist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. I am affable, but unsociable. I only work for private amusement, since I find my duties privately amusing.”
Hobbits in Kentucky?
Excerpts from Davenport, Guy. “Hobbits in Kentucky.” New York Times (February 23 1979), A27.
“The first professor [Tolkien] to harrow me with the syntax and morphology of Old English had a speech impediment, wandered in his remarks, and seemed to think that we, his baffled scholars, were well up in Gothic, Erse and Welsh, the grammar of which he freely alluded to.”
“Even when I came to read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ I had trouble, as I still do, realizing it was written by the mumbling and pedantic Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien”
“Nor have I had much luck in blending the professor and the author in my mind. I’ve spent a delicious afternoon in Tolkien’s rose garden talking with his son, and from this conversation there kept emerging a fond father who never quite noticed that his children had grown up, and who, as I gathered, came and went between the real world and a world of his own invention. I remembered that Sir Walter Scott’s son grew up in ignorance that his father was a novelist, and remarked as a lad in his teens when he was among men discussing Scott’s genius, ‘Aye, it’s commonly him is first to see the hare.’”
“Nor, talking with his bosom friend, H.V.G. (“Hugo”) Dyson, could I get any sense of the Tolkien who invented Hobbits and the most wonderful adventures since Ariosto and [ ]. ‘Dear Ronald,’ Dyson said, ‘writing all those silly books with three introductions and 10 appendixes. His was not a true imagination, you know: He made it all up.’”
Allen Barnett, an American Oxford classmate of Tolkien’s: “‘Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.’”
The New York Times Update on Tolkien, 1977
Excerpts from Mitgang, Herbert. “Behind the Best Sellers: J.R.R. Tolkien.” New York Times (October 2 1977), 48.
“After Professor Tolkien’s death at 81, international readers hoped that Middle-earth would somehow continue to live. The author’s son, Christopher, a World War II R.A.F. pilot, resigned his fellowship in Old English at Oxford and devoted himself to his father’s works. From a vast amount of writing, Christopher Tolkien relates, ‘I set myself to work out a single text, by selection and arrangement. Here and there I had to develop the narrative out of notes and rough drafts. I had to make many choices between competing versions. Essentially, it was a job of organization, not of completion, and the result was ‘The Silmarillion.’”
“‘If you imagine the archetype of the Oxford don, you have him,’ said Rayner Unwin. ‘He was a little offputting and at a distance, until you go to know him, and then he became immensely warm. Fame puzzled him. He was not pretentious. He lived in a very simple way, wrapped up in his family and own internal world. He laughed a lot and smoked his pipe a lot.’”
Unwin: “‘He took criticism in one of two ways–ignore it completely or go back to Square One and do it all over again.’”
Unwin: “‘He was a great philologist, and he knew precisely the way he wanted to say things. In a sense, I was more his correspondent than his editor during ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ His spellings could be eccentric–his plural of dwarf was dwarves, for example. Once a printer corrected all his so-called misspellings. Tolkien was furious. The printer then quoted as his authority the Oxford English Dictionary. And Tolkien responded, ‘Why, I wrote the O.E.D.!’ As a matter of fact, he had worked on it early in his career.’”
The New York Times Obituary of J.R.R. Tolkien
Excerpts from “J.R.R. Tolkien Dead at 81; Wrote ‘Lord of the Rings’.” New York Times (September 3 1973), 18.
“It did anything but [flop]. It was just four years later [1965], printed in paperback in this country by Ballantine and Ace Books, that a quarter of a million copies of the trilogy were sold in 10 months. In the late sixties all over American fan clubs sprouted, such as the Tolkien Society of America, and members of the cult–many of them students–decorated their walls with the maps of Middle-earth. The trilogy was also published in hard cover by Houghton Mifflin and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.”
Tolkien usually rode a bike–but bought a “stylish car with the success of his books”
“‘I don’t like allegories. I never liked Hans Christian Anderson because I knew he was always getting at me,’ he said.”
“The trilogy was written, he recalled, to illustrate a 1938 lecture of his at the University of Glasgow on fairy stories. He admitted that fairy stories were something of an escape, but didn’t see why there should not be an escape form the world of factories, machine guns, and bombs.”
“‘If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth,” Tolkien once said. His trilogy was filled with his knowledge of geology and botany.”
“His students remember him taking endless pains to interest them. One recalled that there was something of the hobbit about him. He walked, she said, ‘as if on furry feet,’ and had an appealing jollity.”
“But World War I had begun, and, at 23, he began service in the Lancashire Fusiliers. A year later [1916] he married Edith Bratt.”
“The war was said by his friends to have profoundly affected him. The writer C.S. Lewis insisted that it was reflected in some of the more sinister aspects of his writing and in his heroes’ joy in comradeship. Tolkien’s regiment suffered heavy casualties and when the war ended, only one of his close friends was still alive.”
“It [The Hobbit] was accepted [because of Lewis’s prodding with the publisher] and the American edition won the Herald Tribune prize as best children’s book.”
“The author always insisted, however, that neither ‘The Hobbit’ nor ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was intended for children. ‘It’s not even very good for children,’ he said of ‘The Hobbit,’ which he illustrated himself. ‘I wrote some of it in a style for children, but that’s what they loathe. If I hadn’t done that, though, people would have thought I was loony. If you’re a youngish man,’ he told a London reporter, ‘and you don’t want to be made fun of, you say you’re writing for children.’”
“After retirement, he lived on in the Oxford suburb of Headington, ‘working like hell,’ he said, goaded to resume his writing on a myth fo the Creation and Fall called ‘The Silmarillion,’ which he had begun even before his trilogy. As he said in an interview a few years ago, ‘A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.’”
Antony Curtis Remembers Tolkien and Lewis
Excerpts from: Curtis, Antony. “Remembering Tolkien and Lewis.” British Book News (June 1977), 429-30.
“Another time I arrived [as a student to a class with C.S. Lewis] before the others and he was staring out of the window at the deer. ‘A deer has only two concepts,’ he told me, ‘the concept of food which they approach and the concept of danger from which they retreat. Now what interests me is how a deer would react to the idea of poison. . . . which is both food and dangerous.” (Pg. 429)“At the end of the hour with Lewis I always felt a complete ignoramus; no doubt an accurate impression but also a rather painful one; and if you did venture to challenge one of his theories the ground was cut away from beneath your feet with lightening speed. It was a fool’s mate in three moves with Lewis smiling at you from the other side of the board in unmalicious glee at his victory. By contrast Tolkien was the soul of affability. He did all the talking, but he made you feel you were his intellectual equal. Yet his views beneath the deep paternal charm were passionately held.” (Pg. 429)
“At the first of these classes he handed round some sample passages of medieval English he had had typed out. One of them was an English translation of the first verses of the Gospel according to John. ‘You see,’ he said triumphantly, ‘English was a language that could move easily in abstract concepts when French was a still a vulgar Norman patois . . .’” (429)
“One day as the class was breaking up and we were talking in general about myth and story he [Tolkien] said, ‘You know if you want to find out about me read a little piece of mine, that has just been published in the Dublin Review [Leaf by Niggle].” (429)
“Tolkien is dans le vrai; his world is sunlit, normal, frightening but not morbid or eccentric. Among Niggle’s judges there is a kindly examiner, a Second Voice, who speaks up for Niggle. This Voice does not sentimentalize or ‘go soft’ on him; far from it, but he does put forward his positive virtues and secures him has pass degree to heaven. It is a characteristically Tolkienian voice” (430).
“I told him I had read the tale [Leaf by Niggle] and he was delighted. If he was reluctant to publish he was not disinclined to enjoy the fact of publication once it had occurred or to talk about the things of his that had been published.” (430)
“He already had a local reputation as a storyteller through the publication of The Hobbit in 1937. It was the done thing in certain North Oxford circles to have read that book and to talk knowingly about hobbits. But this avocation of Tolkien’s was regarded as something of a joke. His main reputation was as a don, a professor, an authority on Beowulf and Sir Orfeo , a mainstay of the controversial much disliked ‘Anglo-Saxon’ element in the English Honours Degree.” (430)
“I returned to Oxford in 1948 wearing my new ‘civvy suit’ and began to read English in earnest. Tolkien and Lewis were both still there, still lecturing and medievalizing, but their academic influence had already past its peak. By now Leavis had begun to penetrate even Oxford; once he appeared in person at the invitation of some undergraduates declaring ‘If I had my way the word ‘aesthetic[‘] would be banished from the English language. . .’ Occasionally I met Tolkien by chance in a pub and had a drink with him. He was as affable as ever but I cannot remember anything of great moment that he said.” (430)
“By the time The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954 I had gone down to experience the Limbo of London literary journalism in which I have been wandering ever since. I observed Tolkien’s popular success and growing fame with a kind of proprietorial pride.” (430).
“Tolkien, who had retired from his professorship in 1959, was already enjoying the first fruits of being a bestseller. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings had by now sold 156,000 copies, he said then. Today the figure is twelve million in America alone! ‘You know,’ he smiled puffing away at his pipe, ‘nothing helps so much as a bad review. Philip Toynbee has done me a power of good.’” (430)
“He was working on the Silmarillion and spoke about it a little: ‘The Hobbits don’t come into this,’ he explained, ‘they of course represented the simple farming people I was brought up amongst–I just couldn’t go on with that story. It would have become too grim. This deals with an earlier period and concerns a more rational humanoid type of creature and the powers of evil. The problem is to get across a whole mythology which I’ve invented before you get down to the stories. For instance you can’t expect people to believe in a flat earth any more. Half way through the elves discover the earth is round. There is a great armada and kind of Atlantis theme. I’ve always been fascinated by the lost continent. There is also a lot about immortality. You see both the idea of death and the thought of immortality on earth (Swift’s struldbugs) are equally intolerable. The whole thing will be dominated by three jewels, symbols of beauty rather than power. . . . But I mustn’t give too much away.’” (430)
“He spoke without any self-consciousness of a set of events which in his mind seemed to exist with as much reality as the French Revolution or the Second World War.” (430)
William Cater Interviews J.R.R. Tolkien, 1972
Excerpts from: Cater, William. “More and More People are Getting the J.R.R. Tolkien Habit.” Los Angeles Times (April 9, 1972), 14, 18.
And “future students of Norse legend or early English poetry (the subjects of Tolkien’s academic life) will exclaim that they are ‘full of Tolkien,’ like the man who complained that Shakespeare was all quotations. Tolkien once told me he had been distressed that the English had few myths of their own and had to live on foreign borrowings, ‘so I thought I’d make one myself.’” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
“He also declares he has given enough interviews for a lifetime, for one thing they add to the interruptions which have delayed completion of his next work, ‘The Silmarillion.’” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
“At a time when it was distinctly unfashionable for undergraduates to be enthusiastic about anything, a Tolkien lecture received a standing ovation; as one student said, with Tolkien you were in the meadhall; he was the bard you were the drinking, listening guests.” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
“The pernicketyness means there are few loose ends to his plots; when people march in his books they do so not on some random heroic scale but according to Field Service Regulation distances. Genealogies, summarized histories, designs for the invented languages overflow Tolkien’s files. ‘Of course,’ he once said, ‘the elfish language is deliberately made to follow to some extent the same type of changes that turned primitive Celtic into Welsh.’” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
“He is as spry as most of us could wish to be on our 80th birthday, with the most humourous eye I’ve ever seen on mortal man.” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
“The temptations of climate and tax-relief which lure successful authors to the Mediterranean pass him by because, he asks, what pleasure could there be in living in a foreign country where you couldn’t make jokes or understand other peoples?” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
“For the rest, he can only be described through his own creatures: There’s a considerable amount of the gentleness, love of strange tongues and veiled lightning of Gandalf the wizard; a touch of the Ents–he loves trees; a little of the hidden imperiousness of Aragorn. And more than a little Hobbit.” (Cater, Tolkien Interview, 1972, p. 14)
William Foster Interviews J.R.R. Tolkien, 1972
Excerpts from Foster, William. “An Early History of the Hobbits.” Edinburgh Scotsman (February 5, 1972).
“It [Allen and Unwin] is almost monopolised by Tolkien, running a Tolkien light industry from its faded, dusty premises in Museum Street, sending an endless flow of messages to the great man and warding off persistent admirers who clamour for his address.” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
“‘I was doing the dull work of correcting exam papers when I came upon a blank page someone had turned in–a boon to all exam markers. I turned it over and wrong on the back, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I’d never heard or used the word before.’” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
“The Shire, ‘inspired,’ says Tolkien, ‘by a few cherished square miles of actual countryside at Sarehole, near Birmingham.’” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
“‘I loved it. There was an old mill that really did grind corn, with two millers that I used for ‘Farmer Giles of Ham,’ a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and a stream with another mill.’” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
“‘As for hobbits, they’re just what I should like to have been but never was–an entirely unmilitary people who always come up to scratch in an emergency. I always knew the book would go and it did.’” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
“But, yes, he did start inventing new languages such as Elvish from the age of 13. ‘You start with p, t and k, then you introduce b, d and g followed by the nasals. I still remember seeing the name ‘Ebbw’ on a railway journey to Wales as a small child and never quite getting over the fascination of the name.’” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
“He is still working on a companion volume to the Ring saga, ‘The Silmarillion,’ a collection of epic poems and stories covering the origins and early history of many of the same characters. But to write it, he must fight against the many admirers who demand a strand of his hair, a piece of his blotting paper, a free lesson in Elvish, a page of his manuscript, anything, professor, anything.” (Foster, 1972 interview with Tolkien)
Stormfields 