Read The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Online
Authors: Humphrey Carpenter
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (12 page)
The last Christian marriage I attended was held under your system: the bridal pair were âmarried' twice. They married one another before the Church's witness (a priest), using one set of formulas, and making a vow of lifelong fidelity (and the woman of obedience); they then married again before the State's witness (a registrar, and in this case â adding in my view to the impropriety â a woman) using another set of formulas and making no vow of fidelity or obedience. I felt it was an abominable proceeding â and also ridiculous, since the first set of formulas and vows included the latter as the lesser. In fact it was only not ridiculous on the assumption that the State was in fact saying by implication: I do not recognize the existence of your church; you may have taken certain vows in your meeting-place but they are just foolishness, private taboos, a burden you take on yourself: a limited and impermanent contract is all that is really necessary for citizens. In other words this âsharp division' is a piece of propaganda, a counter-homily delivered to young Christians fresh from the solemn words of the Christian minister.
[The draft ends here.]
25 October 1943
The poplars are now leafless except for one top spray; but it is still a green and leafy October-end down here. At no time do birches look so beautiful: their skin snow-white in the pale yellow sun, and their remaining leaves shining fallow-gold. I have to sleep at Area H.Q.
1
on Friday. Tomorrow night I am going to hobnob, chez Lewis, with â Joad of Joad Hall!
27 October 1943
[C. E. M. Joad, well known from his broadcasts on the BBC
Brains Trust
, had just published
The Recovery of Belief,
an indication that he had returned from agnosticism to Christianity. He had been invited to dine with C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College.]
At 9 I went to Magdalen and saw the Joad. He is (except in face) not only very like a toad, but is in character v. like Mr Toad of Toad Hall, & I now perceive that the author of the jest was more subtle than I knew. Still he is intelligent, kindly, and we agreed on many fundamental points. He has the advantage of having been in Russia â and loathing it. He says the ânew towns' do not rise above Willesden level, and the country does not rise at all. He said if you got into a train and looked out of the window, and then read a book for a few hours, and looked out again â there would be nothing outside to see to show that the train had moved at all!
29 November 1943
[In the summer of 1943, Christopher, then aged eighteen, was called up into the Royal Air Force. When this letter was written, he was at a training camp in Manchester.]
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) â or to âunconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to âKing George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.
Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know
who
their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking
nolo episcopari
1
as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And soon down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that â after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world â is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch â and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as âpatriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal.
Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not
know,
or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still small swords to use. âI will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.'
2
Have at the Ores, with winged words, hildenasddran (war-adders), biting darts â but make sure of the mark, before shooting.
9 December 1943
20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
My dearest,
I believe it is a week or more since I wrote to you? I can't really remember, as life has been such a rush I haven't seen C.S.L. for weeks or Williams.
1
. . . . The daily round(s) and the common task + + which furnish so much more than one actually asks. No great fun, no amusements; no bright new idea; not even a thin small joke. Nothing to read â and even the papers with nothing but Teheran Ballyhoo.
2
Though I must admit that I smiled a kind of sickly smile and ânearly curled up on the floor, and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more', when I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny & intolerance! But I must also admit that in the photograph our little cherub W. S. C.
3
actually
looked
the biggest ruffian present. Humph, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Col. Knox
4
says 1/8 of the world's population speaks âEnglish', and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame â say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say âbaa baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.
But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. Qua mind and spirit, and neglecting the piddling fears of timid flesh which does not want to be shot or chopped by brutal and licentious soldiery (German or other), I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much the better for the world as a whole and in the long run than the victory of ââ.
5
I don't suppose letters
in
are censored. But if they are, or not, I need to you hardly add that them's the sentiments of a good many folk â and no indication of lack of patriotism. For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)), and if I was of military age, I should, I fancy, be grousing away in a fighting service, and willing to go on to the bitter end â always hoping that things may turn out better for England than they look like doing.
Somehow I cannot really imagine the fantastic luck (or blessing, one would call it, if one could dimly see why we should be blessed â implying God) that has attended England is running out yet. Chi vincerà ? said the Italians (before they got involved poor devils), and answered Stalin. Not altogether right perhaps. Our Cherub above referred to can play a wily hand â one guesses, one hopes, one does not know. . . . .
Your own father.
8 January 1944
Remember your guardian angel. Not a plump lady with swan-wings! But â at least this is my notion and feeling â: as souls with free-will we are, as it were, so placed as to face (or to be able to face) God. But God is (so to speak) also behind us, supporting, nourishing us (as being creatures). The bright point of power where that life-line, that spiritual umbilical cord touches: there is our Angel, facing two ways to God behind us in the direction we cannot see, and to us. But of course do not grow weary of facing God, in your free right and strength (both provided âfrom behind' as I say). If you cannot achieve inward peace, and it is given to few to do so (least of all to me) in tribulation, do not forget that the aspiration for it is not a vanity, but a concrete act. I am sorry to talk like this, and so haltingly. But I can do no more for you dearest. . . . .
If you don't do so already, make a habit of the âpraises'. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate Pueri Dominum (of which I am specially fond), one of the Sunday psalms; and the Magnificat; also the Litany of Loretto (with the prayer Sub tuum praesidium). If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy. It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass. So endeth Fæder lar his suna.
1
With very much love.
Longaoð þonne þy lǽs þe him con léoþa worn,
oþþe mid hondum con hearpan grétan;
hafaþ him his glÃwes giefe, þe him God sealde.
From the Exeter Book. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of âglee' (= music and/or verse) which God gave him.
How these old words smite one out of the dark antiquity! âLongaoð'! All down the ages men (of our kind, most awarely) have felt it: not necessarily caused by sorrow, or the hard world, but sharpened by it.
[Christopher had now left for South Africa, where he was to train as a pilot. This is the first of a long series of letters to him, which were numbered, for reasons which Tolkien gives here.]
18 January 1944
20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
Fæder his þriddan suna (1)
1
My dearest,
I am afraid it is a very long time (or it seems so: actually it is about 8 days) since I wrote; but I did not quite know what to do, until we got your letter yesterday. . . . . I am glad my last long letter caught you before you went! We don't know yet, of course, just when that was, or whither. . . . .
I gave 2 lectures yesterday, and then conferred with Gabriel Turville-Petre
2
about Cardiff. . . . . I managed just to catch the last post with my Cardiff report. Then I had to go and sleep (???) at C. HeadQ.
3
I did not â not much. I was in the small C33 room: very cold and damp. But an incident occurred which moved me and made the occasion memorable. My companion in misfortune was Cecil Roth (the learned Jew historian).
4
I found him charming, full of gentleness (in every sense); and we sat up till after 12 talking. He lent me his watch as there were no going clocks in the place: â and nonetheless himself came and called me at 10 to 7: so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world. Actually I was awake, and just (as one does) discovering a number of reasons (other than tiredness and having no chance to shave or even wash), such as the desirability of getting home in good time to open up and un-black and all that, why I should not go. But the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his sombre glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. I was down at St Aloysius at 7.15 just in time to go to Confession before Mass; and I came home just before the end of Mass. . . . . I lectured at 11 a.m. (after collecting fish);
5
and managed to have a colloguing with the brothers Lewis and C. Williams (at the White Horse).
6
And that is about all the top off the news as far as I am concerned! Except that the
fouls
7
do not lay, but I have still to clean out their den. . . . .
I start to-day
numbering
each letter, and
each page
, so that if any go awry you will know â and the bare news of importance can be made up. This is (No. 1) of Pater ad Filium Natu (sed haud alioquin) minimum:
8
Fæder suna his ágnum, þám gingstan nalles unléofestan.
9
(I suppose a professor of Old English may be permitted to use that language to a former pupil?: query for ref. to censor, if any). I can't write Russian and find Polish rather sticky yet. I expect poor old Poptawski
10
will be wondering how I am getting on, soon. It will be a long time before I can
be of any assistance to him in devising a new technical vocabulary!!! The vocab. will just happen along anyway (if there are any Poles and Poland left). . . .
