Tolkien Day!
Happy Tolkien Day~ ;)
"I am so glad you felt that the Ring is keeping up its standard, and (it seems) achieving that difficult thing in a long tale: maintaining a difference of quality and atmosphere in events that might easily become ‘samey’. For myself, I was probably most moved by Sam’s disquisition on the seamless web of story, and by the scene when Frodo goes to sleep on his breast, and the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance-but for one rough word from Sam. But the ‘moving’ quality of that is on a different plane to Celebrimbor etc. There are two quite different emotions: one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty in evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past ( best expressed by Gandalf’s words about the Palantir); and the other the more ‘ordinary emotion, triumph, pathos, tragedy of the characters. That I am learning to do, as I get to know my people, but it is not really so near my heart, and is forced on me by the fundamental literary dilemma. A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s neer to be approached -or if so only to become ‘near trees’.”
~Letter 96 to Christopher Tolkien, dated Jan. 30 1945
Italics are for his own emphasis.
...
Untold stories? That’s like talking to fanfic authors directly telling us to fill in his gaps… I was reading this for the part about which moment moved him most in the story -(Sam’s words to Gollum at a moment in which Gollum might’ve repented) and then was pretty stricken by the “untold stories” part. :D Wow… yeah…and I think Tolkien likes Celebrimbor-he’s a pretty important/history-changing/influential elf with his Rings…
"I am so glad you felt that the Ring is keeping up its standard, and (it seems) achieving that difficult thing in a long tale: maintaining a difference of quality and atmosphere in events that might easily become ‘samey’. For myself, I was probably most moved by Sam’s disquisition on the seamless web of story, and by the scene when Frodo goes to sleep on his breast, and the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance-but for one rough word from Sam. But the ‘moving’ quality of that is on a different plane to Celebrimbor etc. There are two quite different emotions: one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty in evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past ( best expressed by Gandalf’s words about the Palantir); and the other the more ‘ordinary emotion, triumph, pathos, tragedy of the characters. That I am learning to do, as I get to know my people, but it is not really so near my heart, and is forced on me by the fundamental literary dilemma. A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s neer to be approached -or if so only to become ‘near trees’.”
~Letter 96 to Christopher Tolkien, dated Jan. 30 1945
Italics are for his own emphasis.
...
Untold stories? That’s like talking to fanfic authors directly telling us to fill in his gaps… I was reading this for the part about which moment moved him most in the story -(Sam’s words to Gollum at a moment in which Gollum might’ve repented) and then was pretty stricken by the “untold stories” part. :D Wow… yeah…and I think Tolkien likes Celebrimbor-he’s a pretty important/history-changing/influential elf with his Rings…