Rustics, the Ring, and the Lure of Immortality: Understanding Tolkien through His Letters
Tolkien’s letters give us glimpses of the writer’s life, his inspirations, and the basis of his hopes for a world he saw steadily slipping away.
By Michael Toscano
Sir Stanley Unwin, head of George Allen & Unwin, took a risk publishing The Hobbit in September 1937, after a strong review by his young son. Sir Stanley was rewarded with high sales and readers looking for more information on hobbits. He wanted a sequel brought to market quickly. J.R.R. Tolkien, an Oxford philologist shocked by the reception of his little book, replied by letter, “I will start something soon, & submit to your boy at the earliest opportunity.”
Start something soon, Tolkien did; but it was not until October 1948, eleven years later, that he wrote to a friend: “I succeeded at last in bringing the ‘Lord of the Rings’ to a successful conclusion.”
As we find in the 1981 edition of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, compiled and published after his death by his biographer Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, his son and literary executor, Tolkien’s hopes of a quick go at it snagged on a thicket of interruptions—professional busyness, family obligations, bouts of melancholy. But nothing delayed him more than the story itself, which shifted in his hands. It forced backwards revisions repeatedly as ideas dimly grasped at the outset became understood. Even the nature of the Ring and the quest to destroy it—that is, the plot—was not discovered until far into the writing.
It wasn’t until 1954, another six years later, that Sir Stanley got the book to readers. Tolkien’s correspondences over these seventeen years form the heart of The Letters, which span the period from 1914 to Tolkien’s death in 1973; and they show that the book, to quote Lady Galadriel, stood “upon the edge of a knife.” Be it a work of Heaven or just a million happy accidents along the way (Tolkien, near the end of his life, appears to have concluded the former), a masterpiece was delivered. The Letters peer into his struggle to give form to the matter in his mind. The thing inside him that got it done, the compressing force within that made a unity of the sundry deposits of taste, learning, and experience, The Letters show, was his intense desire to make art that elevated the parochial—quite literally the country bumpkin—to the height of world history. At a time, such as ours, when all men, like it or not, are drawn into politics and the struggle for civilization, for the smaller among us Tolkien expresses hope for a good ending to the story of our age—and The Letters tell the story behind the story.
Over the course of his 81 years, Tolkien witnessed old worlds pass away and new worlds replace them.
They also show that Tolkien was a credible witness to the times. Over the course of his 81 years (1892 to 1973), Tolkien witnessed old worlds pass away and new worlds replace them. He spent his formative childhood years in Sarehole, a small hamlet just south of Birmingham. It was the inspiration for the Shire, home of Bag End. In a 1955 letter to Allen & Unwin, Tolkien writes, “[The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee.” It was green and full of life, and the works of its people touched nature lightly there. If Tolkien was nostalgic for a lost world, it was his own, and it disappeared within his lifetime. He wrote in 1958, “I… lived my early years in ‘the Shire’ in a pre-mechanical age.”
He was there at the Somme (1916), one of the deadliest battles in human history, where the weary old European order sent its young men to be crushed under the wheels of the first machine war. In the carnage of almost a million casualties, Tolkien lost two of his dearest friends, G.B. Smith and Robert Gilson, who shared his love of poetry, languages, and art, and whose companionship elevated Tolkien intellectually. In Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth recounts:
From Tolkien’s school [King Edward’s], 243 died; from his college [Exeter], 141. From Oxford University as a whole, nearly one in five servicemen was killed, considerably more than the national average…
Tolkien wrote later, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
No man on earth could have been prepared for such a blow, but if one ever was, it was Tolkien. At the age of four “Daddy” died in faraway Bloemfontein, South Africa. “Mother” died eight years later in a diabetic coma, cut off from financial support by both sides of the family because she became Catholic. As he wrote to his son Michael in 1965, “When I think of my mother’s death… worn out with persecution, poverty, and… disease, in an effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith… I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away [from the Church].”
Tolkien knew grief, but he held to the promise of final victory. “Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic,” he wrote to an inquiring fan in 1956, “so that I don’t expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’—though it contains… some samples or glimpses of final victory.”
In Mabel Tolkien’s final maternal act in 1904, with “Ronald,” as she called him, aged twelve and Hilary ten, she entrusted her sons to Mother Church, placing them in the kindly hands of Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory, which had been founded by Saint John Henry Newman less than 60 years prior. Fr. Francis was there at Mabel’s bedside in her final hours, but she was too weak to be administered viaticum. Her sons passed to him as wards.
The Oratorian was pious and true to his word. He demanded that Ronald take his education at King Edward’s seriously, and the young man excelled in classics and extra curriculars. Ronald developed a refined taste for words. As much as he loved Latin, Greek, French, and German, he took up as a hobby more specialized languages, such as Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, and the recently-reconstructed Gothic. He became interested in philology, the study of the evolution of languages through literature, and could be pleased by the simple phonetics of speech the way others might be moved by a melody or verse. Tolkien began to play at making his own (elegant and basically real) languages, out of a desire to hear words spoken in a delightful way.
Fr. Francis was a spiritual father, too, drawing the boys deeply into the life of the Oratory, requiring that they serve Mass (almost) daily before hurrying off to school. Looking back, Tolkien thought the life “strict,” but he was grateful for it and referred lovingly to his guardian as his “second father.” Years later (in 1965), Tolkien’s son Michael wrote to him seeking counsel, his faith teetering, it appears, because of scandalous priests. “[I’ve known] snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests,” Tolkien replied. But no matter, because Fr. Francis “outweighs them all.”
He added: “The only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion.… Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.” His love for the Holy Mass is a recurring theme in The Letters, as in this rhapsodic note of 1941: “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth:
the Blessed Sacrament…. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, by the taste… of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.
Of the “glimpses of final victory” Tolkien caught sight of, Holy Communion was the chief.
The wisdom of Tolkien’s hobbit stories is his grasp that, in this late hour in history, the great and cosmopolitan fail as stand-ins for “mankind.”
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” That much we know. But what are hobbits and where do they come from?
After years of futile search into the question of hobbits, in 1970 no less than the Oxford English Dictionary asked Tolkien directly, confident he was drawing on some obscure text as their origin. Having worked on the letter ‘W’ in the 1928 edition, Tolkien was personally familiar with the OED’s methods. He didn’t give them what they wanted. Hobbits:
One of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal Men.
A credible source for hobbits beyond Tolkien’s mind has never been found. They are something new; entirely his own. Yet we accept them instantly as if they were quite familiar. Tom Shippey, a scholar of Middle and Old English literature and a Tolkien expert, put it this way: “[Tolkien] was able to imagine and to make real things which nobody had ever thought about before… [such as] hobbits. ‘Hobbit’ even sounds like a proper English word, but it isn’t. He made it up.”
Tolkien recalls the moment they came to him. When grading student papers, to his delight he found a blank sheet. He scrawled:
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
He adds, “Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like.”
Stories really did arrive in his mind like that, not whole, not refined; but real and demanding further attention. He didn’t pre-select a moral to teach, and only vaguely understood the thematic implications of them during the writing. As we can see in The Letters, this makes him an odd commentator on his own stories. He wants readers to receive them the same way he did: as real. Which also makes him, in the long run, an illuminating guide, because he has something like an outsider’s perspective on his own works.
Tolkien did, in time, discover that hobbits had an inspiration. The origin was quite plain: “Hobbits are just rustic English people.” They are “made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination—not the small reach of their courage or latent power.” The smallness of their imagination Tolkien knew from his childhood in Sarehole. Their courage and power he encountered in the Great War, where it “went over the top” time and again to meet its end. The wisdom of Tolkien’s hobbit stories is his grasp that, in this late hour in history, the great and cosmopolitan fail as stand-ins for “mankind.” The parochial and, well, ignorant are the era’s universal. The mass of readership evidently agrees with Tolkien on this point. They see themselves reflected in these small persons, swept up into world-defining events, weak things—but important things—called to do great things in an age of Great Powers.
The dramatic value of the hobbits is that they must reach for higher things and become subjects for “ennoblement” (Letters 163 and 181). Without the burden of the quest, which can be borne only by progress in humility (or a magnification of spirit, depending on their role), the hobbits would be mere props. Instead, they grow in moral stature as they journey on. Some quite literally grow taller.
And as for the Great Ones, the hobbits force them to grow, too—to grow in their appreciation of the small. As Thorin put it on his deathbed: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
In The Lord of the Rings, Gondor and the Shire complete each other. They are parts—one great, one small—of an imperial whole that has been severed by decline. The Shire became backwards in its detachment from the higher concerns of Gondor, and Gondor governs emptily without the Shire, decaying from continuation without purpose. Without the Shires’ simplicity and gentleness calling the eyes of the great downward, the ruling elite become unmoored from the people. This is what happened to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who became trapped in the opulent confines of his lofty tower and fell into despair; unlike Théoden, who rose from his spiritual tomb by taking up arms with the people in their struggle against the enemy and leading the final charge, even unto death.
Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake; fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!
Théoden dies on the battlefield among his people. Denethor burns in the tower above, a useless suicide at a desperate hour.
There is a hidden dream of Tolkien’s working in the background here, giving shape to the story. The “tale ends in what is… like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome,” Tolkien writes. If the Shire is England, and Gondor is Rome, then victory brings nothing less than the restoration of Christendom and the reunion of Merry Old England with the See of Peter.
In one of the most interesting letters in the collection, Tolkien imagines a new conclusion to The Lord of the Rings. In it, Gollum steals the Precious back from his master, and out of love for both the Ring and Frodo, he casts himself into the fire, destroying and possessing his heart’s desire in one sublime act. He saves Middle-earth, his liberator, and his soul, while never relinquishing that which he craved most. Gollum would have been a tragic hero, and the maker of a vastly different story.
But it was not meant to be. Why so? Well, Samwise—in whose “mental myopia,” his “smugness,” “cocksureness, and a readiness to… sum up all things from a limited experience,” has convinced himself that Smeagol is irredeemable. So when Frodo, by pity, works the unearthing of Smeagol from within the mental abyss of Gollum, setting him—quite possibly!—down the path of redemption, Sam botches it. He cannot grasp the potential for Smeagol’s repentance, so he attacks him; Gollum, in self-defense, reasserts himself. As Tolkien writes,
For me perhaps the most tragic moment in the Tale comes… when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum’s tone and aspect… His repentance is blighted and all of Frodo’s pity is (in a sense) wasted. Shelob’s lair becomes inevitable.
Sam, “the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit,” and arguably the hero of the tale, also secures the damnation of one turning from darkness to the light.
In sum, Tolkien might delight in these “rustics,” but he has no illusion as to their natural perfection, nor that of their homeland, however much he might love it.
Tolkien was inside the tradition in a way that his literary heirs are simply not.
When I was a boy, nine or ten years old (I can’t remember exactly), I was reading The Fellowship of the Ring. This next part I remember vividly. The fellowship was winding its way through the darks of Moria, seeking passage to the other side of the mountain. Frodo hears a faint patter of feet behind him. Something follows. After a long march, the fellowship stops to rest.
A deep silence fell…. Frodo was on guard. As if it were a breath that came in through unseen doors out of deep places, dread came over him… His watch was nearly over, when… he fancied that he could see two pale points of light, almost like luminous eyes. He started.
Just then, I gasped aloud and pulled the book from my face. I was in the real world again. But I had seen those eyes. For some time, I had stopped perceiving the written words and was watching the story as if present there.
I’m told by Men of Taste that Tolkien is a bad writer. I disagree. But I must admit, the craft didn’t come as easily to him as it did to, say, Newman, Waugh, and even his pal C.S. Lewis, some contemporaries and near contemporaries of his whose work I enjoy. Those writers’ prose has an easy beauty and subtle magic in every sentence. Tolkien was, by comparison, dwarvish: working at it and working at it, taking a hammer and chisel to hard rock, turning up rare stones, and with finer hews shaping them into elegant jewels.
Critics also snigger at his use of the high style. His elevated tone, we are told, is as serious as boys playing with plastic swords in the yard. Rubbish. Perhaps no one writing at the time knew better than Tolkien—who served as both the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature—the broad evolution of the English tongue, from Old to Middle to modern, how it all relates and how best to adapt archaic speech to contemporary use.
Across The Letters, Tolkien enters the lists with well-meaning copy editors who, out of ignorance, were ‘correcting’ his deliberate choices to break with modern standardized English. They repeatedly opposed his “dwarves” and preferred the accepted “dwarfs,” for instance, and his manuscripts were ‘improved’ more than once to reflect it. But dwarves, Tolkien conjectured, was likely to be an older form of the word which conveyed something different from the dwarfish dwarfs of modern day. He preferred it, as Shippey explains,
because the –ves ending is a sign of a word’s antiquity, and so its authenticity. Even in modern English, old words ending in –f make their plural with –ves, as long as they have remained in constant use: so hoof/hooves, life/lives, sheaf/sheaves, loaf/loaves. Dwarf/dwarves might have developed the same way [Tolkien speculated], but clearly fell out of general use, and so was assimilated (probably by literates, schoolteachers, and printers) to the similar pattern of tiff(s), rebuff(s), and so on.
Tolkien was unearthing old usages with which they were unfamiliar and which he thought still conceptually valuable to his story. They are. We know immediately that we are dealing with something other than diminutive “dwarfs” when the thirteen cross the threshold of Bilbo’s door.
The Letters are a dream for those interested in English and other languages (including those Tolkien invented), as Tolkien is often called to explain the linguistic root of things in his works. Inevitably, this leads him to texts that only the utmost expert has ever heard of—this fragment, that scrap, this legend, that tale. He is well versed in the Greek and Latin literature but unparalleled on the Northern mythologies. Tolkien was inside the tradition in a way that his literary heirs are simply not.
That we can compel nature to give us whatever we want, whenever we want, is the foundational promise of modernity. Tolkien gives this power to the Ring, a specifically modern power.
When Bilbo and the Ring found each other, Gandalf guessed, knowing a thing or two about the world, that it was one of many magic rings, the kind that could be found beyond count on adventures like this one. The ring was to be treated with seriousness and care. It is “dangerous for mortals,” as Gandalf put it, but not “perilous.”
Gandalf was wrong. It was the One Ring:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Its maker, its Lord, was none other than Sauron, a fallen angel who, Tolkien writes, was a leader in a “Satanic rebellion” against God.
“In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero…. [Even] Satan fell,” says Tolkien, sounding like St. Augustine in The Confessions, who points out that, because of creation ex nihilo, not even the devil is essentially evil. On the other hand, “In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible.”
Being an angel, “[Sauron] went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination.” This is, plainly, the Augustinian understanding of the libido dominandi (i.e., the “lust of domination”), which, in The City of God, is defined as the chief aim of the City of Man: to dominate others by power. The peoples of the Earthly City are yoked by a threefold domination, by their own sins, the power of others, and the pride of demons. Demons feed the lust for the getting of riches and glory, and in return they exact the “divine honours and religious services… due to the true God.” Outside of the City of God, the mass of men is enslaved by false worship to satisfy the pride of devils. Tolkien speaks like Augustine again when he says, “Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants.” His aim was to capture the worship of all mankind, and to render it enslaved.
When The Lord of the Rings was released, fans searched for its deeper meaning, and their minds naturally moved to the atomic bomb. The Ring was atomic power, it was said. Tolkien disabused readers of this theory through his letters. The impulse was too limited. As Tom Shippey remarks in Author of the Century, the Ring is clearly something from our time—a Ring of Power is not found in the ancient literature, though magic rings certainly are. In that sense at least, it is a modern device, though in an antique setting.
But what is the Ring? It is the “Machine,” Tolkien writes,
By [which] I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.
There are two parts to this, one of which we are already familiar: it is a tool used for the “motive of dominating” to “coerc[e] other wills,” to empower the lust for domination. The second part is new to this analysis, but it won’t be new to the readers of Fare Forward. It is the Baconian connection of science and power, which Tolkien describes sharply. As Bacon famously said,
[Science] must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.
That we can compel nature to give us whatever we want, whenever we want, is the foundational promise of modernity. Tolkien gives this power to the Ring, a specifically modern power. It is not in the ancient literature because only modernity and its machine power could produce it.
It is the power that plants seeds that produce fruit year-round, beyond the limits of the natural potency of the soil; the power that contracepts and aborts to feed ‘the economy’ with ‘productive’ workers, so that consumption need never stop; the power that binds all persons into a single, worldwide ‘social’ web, promising to crystallize their individuality but instead absorbing them into the hivemind; the power that will realize the dream of Silicon Valley to go beyond the human, to conquer our flesh and death by becoming the transhuman. This, and so much else, is the power of the Ring.
In The Hobbit, Sauron went by the name “Necromancer,” and that is no accident: conquering death unnaturally is the quintessence of the Ring. Tolkien calls it the main theme of his mythos in several letters: “Death and the desire for deathlessness,” “Death, and immortality,” and “the hideous peril of confusing true ‘immortality’ with limitless serial longevity.” For, in the world of Middle-earth, God grants deathlessness to elves, and he grants the “gift of death” to men, and with it the hope of an afterlife. Sauron exploits these gifts differently. The false promise of “Longevity or counterfeit ‘immortality,’” Tolkien says, “is the chief bait of Sauron.” Sauron tempts the elves to craft Great Rings of their own, the Three, to arrest change and stop time. As the burden of years grew heavier, where once they would take up arms to defend Middle-earth, they retreated into the shadows and became conservative “embalmers”—using Sauronic power to freeze the natural world and halt the decline of their works. The temptation of men is simpler. The Ring will overthrow human nature itself. You will not die, it says, and essentially, “you will become like gods.” In Newsweek’s recent headline, “Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will,” Tolkien would have seen the workings of Lucifer and the Ring.
The power of the Ring is contrasted with the power of just rule, and especially that of the king. After all, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Treebeard, Théoden, Faramir, and Aragorn, just to start with, have awesome power and use it violently for justice. This is a power that respects the natural ends of things, loves them as they are, and uses the might of warfare and the throne to help them accomplish their natural potential. Imperial rule is reestablished under Aragorn’s seat, and with it, freedom and happiness reign. The Shire flourishes under the government of Elessar. But there is a spiritual dimension, too: the curse on the Dead Men of Dunharrow is lifted by the king’s return. While Sauron enslaves the dead, the true king lifts their bonds.
Still, there are evils against which kingly power and the strength of arms are no match. The tyranny of the demonic Ring could only be unmade by a priestly sacrifice, which, even though it failed under the fallible hands of Frodo, will not under the pierced hands of the High Priest of which he was a mere type. In this dark hour, the Kingly and the Priestly must take up the Two Swords to defeat Sauron, as Tolkien shows. But the Ring cannot be used. It must be cast into the fire from whence it came. For a Christian—if Tolkien is right about its diabolism—there is no other option, lest one becomes a demoniac by its use.
In the end, I recommend The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien to any priest or king who would strive against the Spirit of the Age. And let me not forget the small folk for whom Tolkien principally wrote. With the armies of darkness on the move, we need them to reach now for nobler and higher things. They would do well to enter the thought of one who, having witnessed some of the bleakest hours of this “long defeat,” never lost hope, but instead gave the world a shining glimpse of “final victory”; a victory which will be ultimately theirs, if only they hold fast.
Michael Toscano is a husband and father. He writes from Charlottesville, Virginia.