The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ May 1944 (FS 22)

      I sent off to you yesterday an airgraph, FS 21 (written Thursday), and there was not room to tell you that that morn. (Friday) your airletter (Z) had arrived; now your airletter (Y) has come, and I have 2 to answer. We don’t mind your grousing at all – you have no one else, and I expect it relieves the strain. I used to write in just the same way or worse to poor old Fr. Vincent Reade,¹ I remember. Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as ‘planners’ refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by ‘organization’. But England in 1917, 1918 was in a poor way, and it is a bit thicker that in a land of relative plenty, you shd. have such conditions. And the taxpayers would like to know where are all the millions going, if the pick of their sons are so treated. However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion) is not to have wars – nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation. Your service is, of course, as anybody with any intelligence and ears and eyes knows, a very bad one, living on the repute of a few gallant men, and you are probably in a particularly bad corner of it. But all Big Things planned in a big way feel like that to the toad under the harrow, though on a general view they do function and do their job. An ultimately evil job. For 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 a 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 are in them. You are inside a very great story! I think also that you are suffering from suppressed ‘writing’. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes. Lots of the early parts of which (and the languages) – discarded or absorbed – were done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire. It did not make for efficiency and present-mindedness, of course, and I was not a good officer. . . . .

      Nothing much has happened here since I wrote on Thursday. Weather foul. Cold, windy; roads littered with torn leaves, and broken blossom. It has veered from SW > W > NW > NE. Buchan is at it (as usual).² I wrote in the morning, wasted an afternoon in footling Board Meetings, and wrote again. P. and Mummy went to the Playhouse at 6. I had some brief peace; a late supper with them (about 9). A new character has come on the scene (I am 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 (with some very sound reflections no doubt on martial glory and true glory): but if he goes on much more a lot of him will have to be removed to the appendices – where already some fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone. There has been a battle – with a monstrous Oliphaunt (the Mâmuk of Harad) included – and after a short while in a cave behind a waterfall, I think I shall get Sam and Frodo at last into Kirith Ungol and the webs of the Spiders. Then the Great Offensive will burst out. And so with the death of Theoden (by a Nazgûl) and the arrival of the hosts of the White Rider before the Gates of Mordor we shall reach the denouement and the swift unravelling. As soon as I can get the new matter written legibly, I will have it typed and sent to you.

      67 From an airgraph to Christopher Tolkien

      11 May 1944 (FS 23)

      I completed my fourth new chapter (‘Faramir’), which rec’d fullest approbation from C.S.L. and C.W. on Monday morning. I visited church on your behalf. Lunched with Mummy in town. Saw C.S.L. on Tuesday morning. Dined at Pembroke (Rice-Oxley¹ as guest): boring. McCallum seems to think well of Mick’s work.² Rest of time filled with lectures, house, garden (very exigent just now: lawns, hedges, marrow-beds, weeding) & what can be spared for ‘Ring’. Another chapter proceeding, leading to disaster at Kirith Ungol where Frodo is captured. Story then switches back to Gondor, & runs fairly swiftly (I hope) to denouement. Ithilien (you may remember its situation on the map you made) is revealed as rather a lovely land. I wish I had you here, doing something useful and pleasant, completing the maps and typing.

      68 From an airgraph to Christopher Tolkien

      12 May 1944 (FS 24)

      Spent a morning writing and we are now in sight of Minas Morghul. Gardening in sultry (and properly midday) heat this afternoon. . . . . I have done nothing about getting new copies typed to send to you of fresh chapters, as I am pushing on while there is a chance and cannot wait to make fair copy. . . . . Very much love to you, and all my thoughts and prayers. How much I wish to know! ‘When you return to the lands of the living, and we re-tell our tales, sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at old grief, you shall tell me then’ (Faramir to Frodo).

      69 To Christopher Tolkien

      14 May 1944 (FS 25)

      20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

      Well my dearest, here goes to begin a proper letter again … I did a certain amount of writing yesterday but was hindered by two things: the need to clear up the study (which had got into the chaos that always indicates literary or philological preoccupation) and attend to business; and trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons in the crucial days between Frodo’s flight and the present situation (arrival at Minas Morghul) were doing impossible things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in another. Rewriting bits of back chapters took all afternoon!. . . . Fr C.¹ gave a pretty stirring little sermon, based on Rogation Days (next Mon – Wed) in which he suggested we were all a lot of untutored robots for not saying Grace; and did not suggest but categorically pronounced Oxford to deserve to be wiped out with fire and blood in the wrath of God for the abominations and wickedness there perpetrated. We all woke up. I am afraid it is all too horribly true. But I wonder if it is specially true now? A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men – sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face – not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit – we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!. . . .

      Monday 4 p.m. . . . . I saw C.S.L. from 10.45 to 12.30 this morning: heard 2 chapters of his ‘Who Goes Home?’² – a new allegory on Heaven and Hell; and I read my 6th new chapter ‘Journey to the Cross Roads’ with complete approval. So far it has gone well: but I am now coming to the nub, when the threads must be gathered and the times synchronized and the narrative interwoven; while the whole thing has grown so large in significance that the sketches of concluding chapters (written ages ago) are quite inadequate, being on a more ‘juvenile’ level. . . . .

      I suddenly got an idea for a new story (of about length of Niggle³) – in church yesterday, I fear. A man sitting СКАЧАТЬ