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

any case, I fear, the story has grown too long and unjuvenile.

      Thank you very much for the cheque. Even halved it will be very useful. I still labour under debts, mainly due to trying to complete a family’s education after war had taken most of one’s means: not an uncommon experience.

      75 To Christopher Tolkien

      7 July 1944 (FS 36)

      20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

      My Dearest: I thought I would try the experiment of an airletter on my midget type.¹ It is certainly as small, and a lot clearer than I could write. It is only two days since I last wrote, but I have a great desire to talk to you. Not that there is anything but the smallest news to tell. I haven’t had a chance to do any more writing yet. This morning I had shopping and cadets; and when on my way back to town for the second time my back tire blew up with a loud explosion, the inner tube having oozed through a gash in the outer cover. Fortunately this was not far from Denis, and I was able to console myself at The Gardeners’ Arms, not yet discovered by Stars or Stripes,² and where they serve a mixture of College Ale and Bitter. But I had to make a third journey after lunch: and from 5 to 8 was occupied enlarging the house, with bits of old wood and salvaged nails, for the new hen-folk, drat ‘em. I have just heard the news and so goes the day. There is a family of bullfinches, which must have nested in or near our garden, and they are very tame, and have been giving us entertainment lately by their antics feeding their young, often just outside the diningroom window. In sects on the trees and sowthistle seeds seem their chief delight. I had no idea they behaved so much like goldfinches. Old fat father, pink waistcoat and all, hangs absolutely upside down on a thistle-spray, tinking all the while. There are also a few wrens about. Otherwise nothing of note, though all birds are vastly increased in numbers, after the mild winters, and in these relatively catless days. The garden is its usual wilderness self, all deep green again, and still with abundant roses. The bright summer day turned to rain again by night and we have had a lot more, though not without breaks. . . . .

      [9 July] A propos of bullfinches, did you know that they had a connexion with the noble art of brewing ale? I was looking at the Kalevala the other day – one of the books which I don’t think you have yet read? Or have you? – and I came across Runo XX, which I used to like: it deals largely with the origin of beer. When the fermentation was first managed, the beer was only in birch tubs and it foamed all over the place, and of course the heroes came and lapped it up, and got mightily drunk. Drunk was Ahti, drunk was Kauko, drunken was the ruddy rascal, with the ale of Osmo’s daughter – Kirby’s translation³ is funnier than the original. It was the bullfinch who then suggested to Osmo’s daughter the notion of putting the stuff in oak casks with hoops of copper and storing it in a cellar. Thus was ale at first created … best of drinks for prudent people; Women soon it brings to laughter, Men it warms into good humour, but it brings the fools to raving. Sound sentiments. Poor old Finns, and their queer language, they look like being scuppered. I wish I could have visited the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes before this war. Finnish nearly ruined my Hon. Mods,⁴ and was the original germ of the Silmarillion. . . . .

      I wonder how you are getting on with your flying since you first went solo – the last news we had of this. I especially noted your observations on the skimming martins. That touches to the heart of things, doesn’t it? There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam Butler, sticks out so plainly and is so horrifyingly exhibited in our time, with its even worse menace for the future, that it seems almost a world wide mental disease that only a tiny minority perceive it. Even if people have ever heard the legends (which is getting rarer) they have no inkling of their portent. How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually revolving wheel! Well, I have got over 2 thousand words onto this little flimsy airletter; and I will forgive the Mordor-gadgets some of their sins, if they will bring it quickly to you . . .

      76 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

      28 July 1944 (FS 39)

      As to Sam Gamgee. I quite agree with what you say, and I wouldn’t dream of altering his name without your approval; but the object of the alteration was precisely to bring out the comicness, peasantry, and if you will the Englishry of this jewel among the hobbits. Had I thought it out at the beginning, I should have given all the hobbits very English names to match the shire. The Gaffer came first; and Gamgee followed as an echo of old Lamorna jokes.¹ I doubt if it’s English. I knew of it only through Gamgee (Tissue) as cottonwool was called being invented by a man of that name last century. However, I daresay all your imagination of the character is now bound up with the name. Plain news is on the airgraph; but the only event worth of talk was the performance of Hamlet² which I had been to just before I wrote last. I was full of it then, but the cares of the world have soon wiped away the impression. But it emphasised more strongly than anything I have ever seen the folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study), except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted. It was a very good performance, with a young rather fierce Hamlet; it was played fast without cuts; and came out as a very exciting play. Could one only have seen it without ever having read it or knowing the plot, it would have been terrific. It was well produced except for a bit of bungling over the killing of Polonius. But to my surprise the part that came out as the most moving, almost intolerably so, was the one that in reading I always found a bore: the scene of mad Ophelia singing her snatches.

      77 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

      31 July 1944 (FS 41)

      Neglecting other duties I’ve put in a good many hours typing and am now nearly at the end of the new stuff in the Ring; so soon I may go on and finish; and I hope shortly to send you another batch. . . . . Binney was here on Sat. to tea, in a v. pleasant mood; it cheered P. up, as she too is v. lonely with only a couple of old grousers, and nothing to do but read. She’s just read Out of the S. Planet and Perelandra; and with good taste preferred the latter. But she finds it hard to realise that Ransom is not meant to be a portrait of me (though as a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him). . . . . The news is good today. Things may begin to move fast now, if not quite so fast as some think. I wonder how long von Papen will manage to keep above ground?¹ But when the burst comes in France, then will be the time to get excited. How long? And what of the red Chrysanthemum in the East? And when it is all over, will ordinary people have any freedom left (or right) or will they have to fight for it, or will they be too tired to resist? The last rather seems the idea of some of the Big Folk. Who have for the most part viewed this war from the vantage point of large motor-cars. Too many are childless. But I suppose the one certain result of it all is a further growth in the great standardised amalgamations with their mass-produced notions and emotions. Music will give place to jiving: which as far as I can make out means holding a ‘jam session’ round a piano (an instrument properly intended to produce the sounds devised by, say, Chopin) and hitting it so hard that it breaks. This delicately cultured amusement is said to be a ‘fever’ in the U.S.A. O God! O Montreal! O Minnesota! O Michigan! What kind of mass manias the Soviets can produce remains for peace and prosperity and the removal of war-hypnotism to show. Not quite so dismal as the Western ones, perhaps (I hope). But one doesn’t altogether wonder at a few smaller states still wanting to be ‘neutral’; they are between the devil and the deep sea all right (and you can stick which D you like on to which side you like). However it’s always been going on in different terms, and you and I belong to the ever-defeated never altogether subdued side. I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring