About the significance of the Great Wave

Letter #163:

I say this about the 'heart', for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, [note: Tolkien' ( Read more... )

Tolkien Day fell on Thanksgiving last week and i was busy and out and about that day so didn't get to post.

Will post today though and in subsequent weeks. :)

Letter 163 to WH Auden in 1955 about LotR critique

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"The Lord of the Rings as a story was finished so long ago now that I can take a largely impersonal view of it, and find ‘interpretations’ quite amusing; even those that I might make myself, which are mostly post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point. Except for a few deliberately ( Read more... )

From Letter 163 to W.H Auden.

“Linguistic taste changes like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. … All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. The are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of ( Read more... )

This one's a classic quote...it's found in the back cover of the Letters but i just like it so much so i'll post it in here too. :)

”If you wanted to go on from the end of ‘The Hobbit’ I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord ( Read more... )

Letter 163 to W.H. Auden in June 7, 1955:

"If you wanted to go from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that ( Read more... )