All the questions asked here have been put by our readers. Thank-you to all those who submitted a question, we regret that not all of them could be answered but we hope you will enjoy Tom's thoughtful and informative answers.
Question from Dennis Trinkle:
Will you please give your opinions of the Tolkien biographies available such as Carpenter's Tolkien, Kocher's Master of Middle-Earth, Pearce's Man & Myth and Celebration, etc.? Also, would you comment on the works about Tolkien's works themselves such as Martinez's Visualizing Middle-earth, Tyler's Companion, etc.?
Well, they aren't all really biographies. I think Carpenter's is the fullest actual biography, though it was written quite a long time ago (1977), before the long sequence of works published posthumously as "The History of Middle-earth." These give us a much clearer idea of what was going on in Tolkien's head - something many biographers prefer not to explore. Kocher's Master of Middle-earth is even older (1972), and is a critical study. I learned a good deal from Joseph Pearce's books, especially Man and Myth, which is more of a biography. Pearce however wants to stress Tolkien's Catholicism, and was I thought rather hard, for instance, on Lewis, as a Protestant. I don't think Tolkien would ever have finished Lord of the Rings without Lewis's encouragement.
The book with most actual information in it is Wayne Hammond and Douglas Anderson's JRRT: a Descriptive Bibliography. It's exactly what it says it is, a bibliography, but it does set down all that is known about what Tolkien wrote - there is a surprising number of poems and detached pieces - and when he wrote it. I also like the recent collections by Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, Tolkien's Legendarium (about "The history of Middle-earth"), and George Clark and Dan Timmons, JRRT and his Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth (not a good title, I admit, but good essays in it).
Question from Karen Sylvester: Out of all JRR Tolkien's works do you have a favourite and why is it your favourite?
Well, I think everyone likes The Lord of the Rings best, because there's so much more of it. But of the shorter works I am especially fond of Farmer Giles of Ham. It's full of slyly-observed minor characters, like the parson, and Chrysophlax the dragon, and Garm the dog, and the grey mare, and the proud tyrant Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus. I also like it because you can - if you follow all Tolkien's clues - work out where everything happens on the real map of England.
Question from Alan Clamp:
Who was JRR Tolkien's favourite character from his and other people's books?
Well, that beats me. He certainly had a soft spot for Galadriel, about whose fate and history he continued to worry long after he had finished Lord of the Rings. In other people's books, he admired the poem Beowulf, but did not seem to feel quite the same about the character Beowulf. I think I'd suggest Sir Orfeo, in the medieval poem of that name which Tolkien translated. He was a sort of male Luthien, who went down into the dangerous land of the fairies to rescue his wife, who had been taken and somehow frozen; and like Luthien, he did it by the power of music. The story has the generosity and good-heartedness which Tolkien admired as much as pure courage.
Tolkien's creation and use of languages is a cornerstone of the books' "reality". As a non-linguist, I am completely convinced of their validity. However, do his invented languages stand up to the test of other linguists? In other words, are the languages as convincing to others of similar skill and training to the Professor as they are to a layman like myself?
There are whole journals now devoted to working out Tolkien's linguistics, like Carl Hostetter's Vinyar Tengwar (email address Aelfwine@elvish.org) or Lisa Star's Tyalie Tyelellieva (email LisaStar@earthling.net). It is true the articles in them are not written by professional linguists, but they contain careful and serious work just the same. My overall impression, though, is this: because Tolkien worked at his languages over a very long period (close on 60 years) and naturally changed his mind and developed his ideas during that time, it's not possible to put together a consistent account or description of his invented languages which will also take in all the now-available material. You either have to accept inconsistency, or leave out some of the material that won't fit the rest. But Tolkien did think carefully and deeply about the elvish languages, and while you could argue about whether he was the "author of the century," it would be much easier to make the case that he was the best (English-speaking) philologist of the century. I recommend Bill Welden's article "Negation in Quenya" in the latest Vinyar Tengwar as a good short example of Tolkien's thinking.
Question from Angela Keenan: I was just wondering if you could give some assistance in ''getting into'' and understanding the Silmarilion. It is the only one of Tolkien's books that I cannot seem to fully grasp, and in turn, cannot complete. I am not alone in this, as I have discovered friends and colleagues who find it similarly frustrating. Can you offer any advice?
Well, you're not alone in that. I think there are two things I can suggest. One, don't start at the beginning. The first few chapters are highly mythical: I would start at about page 50. Two, keep careful notes on some scrap paper, especially of who everyone is. It's essential for the story to be able to sort out which branch of the elves each character belongs to, and their seniority, and their marriages - one way of describing the story is to say it's all about half-brothers and half-sisters, or as the Norsemen would put it, "same-mothers" against "sunder-mothers." One of the things Tolkien was imitating was Icelandic sagas, which are always full of complicated genealogies. Now if you're brought up to it, like Icelanders, you can remember whether someone is someone else's second cousin once removed without thinking about it, but most of us can't. And to follow the Silmarillion, you need to.
Having said that, I would also say that you have to remember exactly what people say. Every word is weighted, with irony, or prophecy, or fate. There's no chit-chat in the Silmarillion (unlike works with hobbits in them). In fact it's a very high-protein diet, which often makes you wish for a piece of just plain old bread and butter. As you get into it, you start to realise that every action has unexpected consequences, and the whole thing is genuinely a web, all the sections fitting together to create the tragedy of Arda. And perhaps the last thing I'd say about it is that it is extremely sad - no Hollywood happy endings at all. Some people like and admire that, but it's certainly not what we're brought up to.
Question from James Ugray:
Would our world today allow for someone to create a tale as imaginary and as influential as Tolkien's?
Well, I felt like saying, "sure, all it would take is genius and the patience to spend 40 years working it up," but you know, maybe things have indeed changed. I don't think anyone could get the language training that Tolkien had any more - the schools and the universities just don't do it. Nor do we get quite the same range of eccentrics, people like Tolkien (whom Lewis called "as easy to influence as a bandersnatch"), or T.H. White, with his enormous range of strange and rather anti-social hobbies. So perhaps it isn't possible, though I hope I'm wrong.
Did Tolkien significantly revise The Hobbit beyond any edition available now, and, if so, shall we be seeing this new version in print?
I don't think he did. There is an edition planned of The Hobbit with all its variants and alterations, to be done by John Rateliff, who has looked at Tolkien's manuscripts and corrected proofs, but I don't think it's due any time soon. It is amazing that The Hobbit has gone on for more than seventy years now, with all kinds of proof-reading errors still being reprinted - like the discrepancy between the two accounts of Durin's Day, in most editions, at the end of chapter 3 and the start of chapter 4. There may be a few more mistakes to be combed out of the text (printers always try to normalise non-standard speakers like Gollum and the trolls), but I think recent editions of The Hobbit, including Douglas Anderson's revised The Annotated Hobbit, have got pretty much to what Tolkien intended. He would, I'm sure, have liked to revise it some more to bring it more into line with The Lord of the Rings, but I don't myself see that as necessary.
Question from Libby Kershaw:
Will the ''sudden'' popularity which will now occur on the issue of the film mean a dumbing down of the public perception of the story and the ideas behind the story. Very few of those who will see the film will ever read the word regardless of how many books are sold. Will subsequent generations only see the stories in terms of the film images and not the book descriptions....a little like TH Whites Sword in the Stone. Your opinion of the impact that film versions have on the written word and the perception of books subsequent to film interpretations with particular reference to the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings please.
One thing I do know, from the US publishers of The Lord of the Rings, is that sales of the book have doubled this year just on the rumour of the appearance of the movie. I would expect many more people to buy the book, having seen the movie - and I think many of them will realise right away that there is more in the book than could ever be filmed. I don't blame the movie-makers for this. It's just that films are a relatively SLOW way of conveying information, so we are sure a good deal will have to be left out.
In the case of The Sword in the Stone, apart from the cartoon version, it had substantial impact on both the movie Camelot and the John Boorman movie Excalibur, and these in their turn had a sort of knock-on effect on later written retellings of the Arthurian story. Books are like seeds (this is like what Legolas says to Gimli in Minas Tirith); you don't know when or where they're going to come to flower, or how the seeds are going to be dispersed. I don't think one medium necessarily destroys another. They may stimulate each other. After all, The Lord of the Rings has had a considerable effect both on visual art, and on music, and I'm sure people have been drawn into reading the books from, for instance, buying the calendars. So I'm really quite hopeful about the effect of the movie, though I admit the early attempt at a cartoon version was terrible.
Question from Chris Kay:
Was Gandalf the wizard related to Merlin of Brittany?
Not closely. Merlin seems less human to me, without Gandalf's entirely human short temper, impatience with fatheads, and liking for ordinary pleasures (like blowing smoke rings, which would get him into serious trouble in present-day America, though I am sure he would know how to deal with it). There is an interesting image of Merlin in C.S.Lewis's That Hideous Strength - try to get the full version, not the abbreviated one - which was certainly written very much under Tolkien's influence, as it even mentions Numinor (which Lewis characteristically spelled wrong). So maybe Lewis and Tolkien discussed the question you're asking, and decided, as they did with other things, to each write their own version and see how they compared.
At the end of The Return of the King the ring bearers crossed the sea from the Grey Havens, why did they need to leave?
As I see it, they didn't exactly need to leave. It was given to them as a reward, and also so they could be healed of the physical and (more important) psychic damage which they had suffered as Ring-bearers. Frodo especially is at the end a bit withered, as if he's starting to fade, which we're told is the start of the process that turns you into a Ring-wraith. This isn't going to happen now the Ring is destroyed, but he needs what we could call counseling, rest and rehabilitation, trauma therapy. I do not think that he can be given immortality, even in the Undying Lands, but he needs to be returned to what the medievals called "soul's heal" before he is allowed to die.
Question from Bill Rea:
Was the Lord of the Rings a metaphor for England and the Second World War - and if it was why did Tolkien write about it in this way?
Tolkien said it wasn't, in the "Foreword" to the second edition of Lord of the Rings, so I think we have to believe him. But lots of people have seen a general similarity, me included. It's just that it doesn't work in every detail (as Tolkien pointed out very clearly in the "Foreword" just mentioned). I think Tolkien would have said that he couldn't help it if events tended to follow a certain pattern, of evil building up, people being reluctant to confront it and preferring to look the other way, but eventually being forced into resistance, which for a time looks hopeless because of the delay and uncertainty in the beginning. But Tolkien might have said that's because human nature tends to stay the same deep down, at all periods, and i'ts this which causes the repetitiveness and the similarity.
Question from Susan Campbell:
Which character in your book would YOU choose to be and why?
In my book? You mean in Tolkien's book. In Tolkien's book, I think I'd like to be Eomer. I described him in The Road to Middle-earth as "a nice young man," meaning that he was perhaps not a deep thinker. But what he's got is panache: that's the old word for the plume he wears in his helmet, and the modern word for dash, impetus, style.
Sometimes, on the other hand, especially when I had to run a department of university academics, I felt I'd like to be Ugluk the orc. There's a fellow with some good ideas on maintaining discipline among a disorderly rabble! Cut their heads off while they're still arguing... Nowadays, of course, he'd have to set up a committee to discuss what to do next, and Eomer's Riders would mop them up by the time they'd settled the agenda for their first meeting.
Question from Claire Prendergast:
I am 11 years old and have read the Hobbit but not the Lord of the Rings. I know just by reading The Hobbit that by my opinion JRR Tolkien is the best author in the world. Was he acclaimed to be so fantastic in his day or has he been more popular since he passed away?
The Hobbit was very popular right from the start, and I know that people very much wanted Professor Tolkien to write a sequel to it, in fact several sequels, like the "Harry Potter" books. But he wrote The Lord of the Rings instead. This was fairly popular when it first came out, but it seemed to get more and more so. Certainly Tolkien lived long enough to be very pleased by its success, which was more than he had dared to hope. What is really surprising is that instead of fading away gently, the books have found more and more and more readers as time has gone by, like you. And you're lucky, you still have The Lord of the Rings to go.
Knowing that evil usually turns on itself sooner or later, what do you think was in Sauron's heart as he saw Morgoth slowly being drained of his might and vitality over the eons, while Sauron's didn't diminish?
Morgoth might have been the most powerful being on Arda, but from all the battles and dark creations he forged (Carcharoth, the dragons, raising mountains, bearing the Simarils for centuries and losing his foot, etc.) his vitality and inherent power was being drained (this being illustrated in the forms Morgoth could or could not form for himself).
I know Sauron and the other captains of Angband were commanded by Morgoth, but do you think he (Sauron) would eventually (in some distant future) have tried to supplant Morgoth as his strength was depleted (that is to say only if the War of Wrath never occurred).
Yes, I think you have a point there. Tolkien presents the forces of evil as continually in competition with each other, because they are essentially selfish. They co-operate only for some immediate advantage. So the orcs make a show of good fellowship, now and then, but fight each other at any time, and keep on dividing into smaller and smaller factions. Saruman will stab Sauron in the back any time, and Wormtongue will do the same for Saruman. So it is in the nature of things that Sauron would make a grab for supreme power if he thought he could get away with it. Did you ever read C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, addressed by a senior devil to a junior one, as uncle to nephew? They seem very friendly, but what the nephew wants is to betray his uncle so he can get his job, and what Screwtape actually wants is his nephew - or at least a piece of him. That's friendship down there in the Lowerarchy, and I think Sauron and Morgoth would be the same.
Question from Russell Rennie:
Are the colors of wizards a sign of rank/status? Because Gandalf became the White instead of the Grey after he banished Saruman. Please clarify.
I don't think there is a rank order among wizards, except that the Head of the order, or of the White Council, wears white to show perhaps that he is neutral, or perhaps that he includes the whole spectrum. It's interesting that Saruman tries to change this by becoming "Saruman of Many Colours" - he's not all things at once, but continually flashing from one to the other "so that the eye [is] bewildered." It does indeed look as if Gandalf gets a promotion once Saruman has deserted his proper role; and also that Radagast is rather on the sidelines. However, it's notorious that one should not meddle in the affairs of wizards, so I'd rather not speculate any further.
Some readers insist that there are racist undercurrents in Tolkien's portrayal of the Southrons and Easterlings as "dark-skinned" minions of Sauron. Did Tolkien intend these races to resemble Indians and Africans, or are they a mixed breed of men that are predominately dark skinned? In the same vein, are there any occurrences of dark-skinned men mentioned about in the Western lands?
The Haradrim seem to be connected with the Corsairs of Umbar, and "corsair" is the word that used to be used for the pirates of North Africa. So maybe the Haradrim in Tolkien's mind were more like modern Algerians or Moroccans than Indians. The mention in "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields" of "black men like half-trolls" certainly sounds racist. I think I would say here that Tolkien at this point is trying to write like a medieval chronicler, and when medieval Europeans first encountered sub-Saharan Africans, they were genuinely confused about them, and rather frightened. As Tolkien pointed out in his early scholarly works, the ancient English seemed to have a belief in fire-demons, who naturally enough had skin like soot - their word for them, ‘harwan1, is related to Latin ‘carbo1, "soot," or carbon. An Anglo-Saxon meeting an African for the first time might then really wonder (for a moment, from a distance) whether this was a demon from his own mythology. This doesn't mean that Tolkien shared the mythology, or the mistake.
My edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates from 1971, incidentally has no entry for the word "racism," though it aims to cover every word in the language. It just was not something that people of Tolkien's generation were aware of. That's maybe a fault in them, but I don't think we have any right to feel superior. We just grew up under different circumstances. The one time Tolkien was confronted by a real racial issue - German laws against Jews before World War II - he reacted angrily and without regard to the cost to himself, see his ‘Letters1, pages 37-8, where he rejects "the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine." Few writers of his time were as straightforward as that.
Question from Matthew Shuster:
When Tolkien wrote the stories that were eventually compiled in Unfinished Tales, did he ever intend to get them published, or did he just write them for his own enjoyment? It seems that he could have had these updated versions of the stories of Tuor and Turin put into publication, yet he just abandoned them, was there any known reason for this?
I think he started by writing the tales of Tuor and Turin (etc.) for his own enjoyment, or perhaps as a kind of therapy - they were begun during the years of World War I, at which point you have to admit that Tolkien, then in his mid-twenties, had had a pretty hard life so far. He certainly very much wanted to get them into publication later on, but his publisher, Sir Stanley Unwin, rejected them in the form that Tolkien offered them in 1937. Later on, when Tolkien was successful enough to have his own way, I think he wanted to make all his early writing consistent both with itself and with what he had by now published, a very complicated task which he never finished. I don't think he abandoned them any more than Chaucer abandoned The Canterbury Tales. They just genuinely remained "unfinished." The whole immensely complicated story is there in the 12 volumes of "The History of Middle-earth," but it's hard to follow. The best guide to it all is Charles Noad's essay in the recent collection edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, Tolkien's Legendarium.
The fantasy genre is now huge with many authors regularly topping the bestseller lists. What debt do these authors owe JRR Tolkien? Is it fair to say that he virtually invented - all be it unknown - the modern concept of the fantasy novel?
Quite a number of the popular contemporary fantasy authors owe an obvious debt to Tolkien - for instance Terry Brooks's "Shannara" series, which began as if Mr Brooks was so disappointed at not having a sequel to The Lord of the Rings that he decided to write one himself. Terry Pratchett also started off by writing what is clearly an affectionate parody of Tolkien (along with several other fantasy authors), and makes little Tolkien-fan jokes here and there even in the latest novels. But if you look at the first "Diskworld" novel, The Colour of Magic, you can see that Pratchett is also parodying early American authors of fantasy, like Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard (who began the "Conan" series), and L. Sprague de Camp. So there was heroic fantasy before and independent of Tolkien: there are selections from these authors, and a brief guide to the development of fantasy as a modern genre, in my collection The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories.
Just the same, fantasy might well have remained very much a minority taste if it had not been for the huge and continuing success of Tolkien. I would say that there are now several popular and successful authors, like Stephen Donaldson, George R.R. Martin, and Robert Jordan, who have succeeded in getting out from under Tolkien's mantle, so to speak. But it is impossible for them not to be aware of it. I don't think Tolkien exactly invented the modern fantasy novel, but he showed what could be done with it. One thing this did was to make fantasy authors much more ambitious, and of course to make publishers much more receptive. They don't mind printing complicated maps and appendices any more, though they did once! It was a very brave decision by Sir Stanley Unwin to go ahead with The Lord of the Rings back in the early 1950s, when no- one had seen anything on that scale.
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