Recording what was already ‘there’ (Letter 131, pt.1)

In preparation for rereading The Silmarillion this summer, I reread Tolkien’s Letter 131, most of which is included in the front matter of my copy of the book. It has been many, many years since I read this letter—often called the most important of his letters, certainly the longest, to understand Tolkien’s thinking. When I first read it, I was but a fresh reader of Tolkien. I have since read The Silmarillion three times, Lord of the Rings five or six times, and The Hobbit ten (though, depending on how one counts teaching a novel, this may be as high as twenty). 

With all that experience now under my belt, I have a much greater appreciation for this letter—which Tolkien wrote after having lived with these stories for many decades. It is the letter of a man who knows exactly what he likes and doesn’t like, what he is trying to achieve with his art, and with the eloquence of an Oxford Don to help him put all that into words. Rather than just encourage folks to read the letter—copies of which are available online too—I want to take a few posts on this blog to work through some of Tolkien’s ideas expressed therein. 

There are two broad schools of thought when it comes to dealing with the Author in contemporary literary studies. One is to largely disregard the Author altogether; the other is to understand the Author in his or her environment. The former is usually necessitated by anonymous texts, but it is helpful as a learning approach for younger readers. Where it falls apart is when the reader begins reading too many of their own concerns into the text. This is how we end up with some rather bizarre readings from the Environmentalists, Feminists, Marxists, and so on. This is not to say that there isn’t value in these approaches, but they can strike the average reader as misguided and too-much driven by personal agendas.

The latter approach is helpful to remember that all writers are essentially writers of their time. Even a writer who is, as they say, “ahead of his time” is still a writer of his time in all aspects save those in which he seems advanced to latter-day readers. This approach, however, can make a text seem cold and distant, too other and less alive. If all we do is remember that a medieval text—say, Beowulf—is a product of its time, we can easily lose sight of why we bother to read it now. This approach, which is currently most popular in universities, is in my opinion partly to blame for the lack of interest in classics. Indeed, as a teacher under the guidance of the Common Core State Standards, I do not think it too much of a stretch to say that the Standards suggest reading The Hobbit is more important than Beowulf, on account of The Hobbit’s being a 20th-century text, and thus of a closer time with our own—and, thus, but extension supposedly easier for students to relate to. In other words, the universality of great literature is lost to the “more important” questions of current cultural relevance.

I think this is nonsense, and CS Lewis seemed to think so too—though I daresay I do not know what Tolkien thought other than that his essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” seems to suggest a balance of the two extremes is in order. And, to be fair, most actual readers—be they private persons or PhD-wielding Ivory-Tower sorts—blend these two approaches in their day-to-day reading experiences. We want to know what an Author thought he or she was accomplishing as much as we want to be free to decide for ourselves what a text means.

With that long preface out of the way, I find Letter 131 fascinating as a window into Tolkien’s mind. The way some people speak about these stories, it is clear that they either haven’t read this letter or they have and choose entirely to disregard it because they fall too much into the trap of the first approach to literary studies mentioned above. There is always a risk when reading an Author’s own thoughts on his writing that this will lock the reader into only viewing that one interpretation as legitimate. This needn’t be the case, but it does at the same time place borders within which our own imagination and interpretations can (and should) play. That “should” is contentious in academia (and judging by Amazon’s behaviour, Hollywood too), but it is worth remembering. There is such a thing as a “wrong interpretation,” and that interpretation can be wrong not only one the basis of lack of textual support but also on the basis of the stated goals and methods of the Author.

Perhaps more than any writer to have ever worked, we know about Tolkien’s process, values, beliefs, intentions, and goals. This is a mixed blessing, but it is not something we can ignore if we want to treat his works seriously. That Lord of the Rings quickly found a home with the 60s counter-culture movements is undeniable; that it found that home on entirely mistaken ideas about what the text meant is, likewise, undeniable. What we now know is that Tolkien’s very core was antithetical to just about everything the counter-culture moments stood for. We cannot blame people for their interpretations when an Author is silent; but since the 60s, so much of Tolkien’s material has been published that it is hard to imagine it suddenly taking off these days with the counter-cultural sort. Indeed, much contemporary Tolkien media proves that rather than give us what Tolkien actually wrote, the stories need to be “updated” for modern audiences.

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Now with that secondary preface out of the way, the text of the letter itself. Tolkien wrote this letter to an editor friend at a point when he was struggling to get Lord of the Rings printed because of his stubborn maintenance that LotR and The Silmarillion had to be published together as one saga of the Jewels and the Rings. He obviously lost that battle, but the letter lays out in great detail (some 10,000 words of it) his reasons why he believed one could not fully appreciate Lord of the Rings without first reading The Silmarillion. Again, hindsight suggests Tolkien may have been a bit too precious about this idea, but there is no doubt that reading The Silmarillion is immensely enriching as a companion to LotR—which seems otherwise like an isolated action story (albeit slow-paced) rather than the end of an age-old cosmic myth and drama.

Tolkien begins his letter by outlining how he came to write these stories and the high-level goals that drove him. He tells us that like many children, he would make up imaginary languages but that, unlike most children, he continued to do so into adulthood, especially as his interest in languages grew. I love this because I have very clear memories from my own childhood of making up languages with my sisters, talking nonsense that sounded vaguely like the various tongues we heard around us in South Africa. But I also know that not only did I stop doing so, I also lost all interest in languages not my own and have remained loathe to put in the required effort to learn a new one. The only two languages that ever ‘stuck’ for a bit were Latin and Old English, learned at university at a time when I was so intensely driven by medieval studies that I couldn’t not learn them. And then, much as Tolkien here suggests for himself, I began to try my hand again at constructing languages as I began writing fiction. So this passage rings very true to me based on my own experiences.

Tolkien then discusses his love of myth, fairy-story, and heroic legend. Here is the first time in the letter that he mentions allegory, but as that is such a key concept to understanding Tolkien’s work, I will leave that discussion to the next post. He then writes, “I have always been seeking material, things of a certain tone and air, and not simple knowledge.” It is not enough to just know about the stories, to know their contents. I teach a Mythology elective to high schoolers, and this has often been my default approach. Cultural knowledge is important, but for Tolkien these stories are more than just content. There is a “certain tone and air” that he is searching for. I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what he means by that other than, perhaps, that he tried to grasp the myths from the inside, to feel what they were like to those who first told them and, in some sense, believed in them. He wanted to understand what myths feel like not just what they are. And I think his writings, especially The Silmarillion, suggest that he achieved that goal. These stories feel mythic in the lived sense, not just a mere collection of short stories.

He then comes to Arthur. Oh, how I loved Arthurian tales as a boy. What boy of English blood doesn’t? But Tolkien here makes a point that I have long lamented too: “powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalised, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English.” To many, Arthur is the English hero, and yet the great irony is that in the stories, Arthur’s enemies are the Anglo-Saxons, the English. Arthur’s is an intimately British tale, but it is not English. Neither, for that matter, is Beowulf, which survives in English but doesn’t belong to England, being set far away and concerning people who had never heard of Britain. 

Here Tolkien is beginning to build towards his youthful plan to supply a mythology for England that was distinctly English. But he says two very interesting things about the failure of Arthurian legend to supply this: (1) “it’s ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive” and (2) “it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.

I’m going to come to this second point in my next post on allegory, but the first point is somewhat curious to me as a critique from a writer who did much to revive the notion of ‘faerie’ in modern literature, especially in restoring it from the fanciful children’s nonsense of Disney into something serious and dangerous as in the old tales. It is curious that Tolkien, in the second paragraph of this letter, says that he has “in English […] misleadingly” called his creature “Elves,” suggesting that he was at once aware of continuity and discontinuity. Perhaps he meant nothing more than that using the word “Elf” would bring with it all the Victorian baggage of little people making shoes (and, later, cookies), rather than the fae of earlier legend.

But Arthurian stories have no “elves” proper. There is plenty of magic and Perilous Realm stuff, true, and witches and sorcerers and monsters and all that sort of thing. It is too lavish, meaning I think that the ‘faerie’ of Arthur is too neatly drawn and too central, rather than being something hovering at the dangerous edges of the stories. It is too fantastical, meaning that it is rather unbelievable at times. It is too incoherent, meaning I think that there are no clear rules as to how the magic works and that—rather like Superman—there is always and suddenly a magic just for that! It is too repetitive, meaning that too many of the tropes in the Arthurian stories are repeated again and again, as things seem not to happen just once but echo throughout the legends. 

I do not necessarily think that all of these things are a weakness, but Tolkien is suggesting that they make for stories that are less effective mythically than they could be. I do think it is true that it is hard to willingly suspend disbelief through much of the Arthurian stories, especially since they present themselves self-consciously as history rather than as legend. 

This then is what Tolkien is getting at when he writes of his own project: yet always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. He strove for something at once more real and more mythical than Arthur, but his sense was of a person discovering rather than inventing. There is a clear connexion here to his two aborted time-travel novels, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers, which approach his Middle-earth stories precisely in this way, “mythologising” his own experience as a writer through characters who discover (through dreams initially) a true history of the world that has lain hid. 

Tolkien’s judgement of this grand project is interesting. One word: Absurd. In some sense, I think he has succeeded, but he came to realise that such a project is not the task of a single storyteller but of an entire culture. In our day and age in which intellectual property makes every story into its Author’s baby, this kind of cultural storytelling is less and less likely to happen. At least, it won’t happen organically but is—as we see with Tolkien’s own works—being driven by big corporations with money to impose new stories on fans.

Right, I will leave it there. If you have not read Letter 131 before, I highly recommend it. Most of the letter (though not the parts relating to Lord of the Rings) is printed these days in editions of The Silmarillion. Next time, I will dive into Tolkien’s controversial hot-take on allegory.

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Continue reading in Part 2.