[davem]

Well, I don’t know how relevant this will be, but as we’re starting with the Foreword, I thought it might be interesting to look at Tolkien in the period just prior to, & just after publication of LotR, & his feelings about the work.

This is an excerpt from a talk given at the 1992 Centenary conference in Oxford, published in the Proceedings of the Conference, & published jointly by The Tolkien Society in the UK & the Mythopoeic Society in the US.

The speaker was George Sayer. He tells about the time he spent walking with Tolkien & the Lewis brothers in the Malvern Hills.

“Though he (Tolkien) was generally interested in birds & insects, his greatest love seemed to be for trees. He had loved trees ever since childhood. He would often place his hand on the trunks of ones we passed. He felt their wanton or unnecessary felling almost as murder. The first time I heard him say ‘’ORCS’ was when we heard not far off the savage sound of a petrol driven chainsaw. ‘’That machine,’ he said, ‘is one of the great horrors of our age.’ He said that he had sometimes imagined an uprising of trees against their human tormentors. ‘Think of the power of a forest on the march. Of what it would be like if Birnam Wood really came to Dunsinane.’....


‘Except at Inklings mettings I saw nothing of Tolkien for perhaps two years after this. Lewis gave me bulletins about him, & talked quite a lot about the Lord of the Rings, its greatness & the difficulty oof getting it published. He thought this was largely Tolkien’s fault because he insisted that it should be published with a lengthy appendix of largely philological interest. In negotiation with Colllins he had even gone so far as o insist that it should be published with the earlier work, The Silmarillion, a book that Lewis had tried to read in typescript, but found very heavy going. The two together would make a volume of over a million words. Even alone The Lord of the rings would. Lewis thought, be the better for pruning. there was a large section that in his opinion weakened the book.

Of course Lewis’s enthusiasm made my wife & me mnost eager to read the book. Lewis said that he would try & get a copy for us, but he did not see how. Then on one of my visits to Magdalen he told me that Tolkien had given up hope of ever having it published. This was a real calamity, but it brought great good to me. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘at what I have here for you!’ There on his table was the typescript of The Lord of the Rings. Of course i must take the greatest care of it, read it in a month or less, & return it personally to the author, ‘phoning him first to mmake sure that he would be there to recieve it. It was far too precious to be entrusted even to the more reliable post of forty years ago.

Of course my wife & I had the thrilling experience that all of you remember vividly. Well before the month was up, I turned up with iit at Tolkien’s house, then in Holywell. I found him obviously unhappy & dishevelled. He explained that his wife had gone to Bournemouth & that all his friends were out of Oxford. He eagerly accepted my invitation to come to Malvern for a few days. ‘But what about the other book? I can’t leave it here.’ So i drove Tolkien to Malvern with the typpescripts of The Lord of the Rings & The Silmarillion on the back seat. What a precious cargo!

His talk now was mainly of his books. He had worked for fourteen years on The Lord of the Rings & before that for many years on The Silmarillion. They really were is life work. He had in a sense planned them before he went to school, & actually written one or two of the poems while he was still at school, I think the Tom Bombadil poems. He had now nothing to look forward to except a life of broken health, making do on an inadequate pension. He was so miserable & so littlle interested in anything except his own troubles that we were seriously worried. What could we do to alleviate his depression? i could walk with him & drive him around during the day, but how were we to get through the evenings? Then I had an idea. I would take the risk of introducing him to a new machine I had in the house & was trying out because it seemed that it should have some valuable educational applications. It was a large black box, a ferrograph, an early model tape recorder. To confront him with iit was a risk because he had made it clear that he disliked all machinery. He might curse it & curse me with iit, but there was a chance that he would be interested in recording on it, in hearing his own voice.

He was certainly interested. First he recorded the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic to cast out the devil that was sure to be in iit since it was a machine. This was not just whimsey. All of life for him was part of a cosmic conflict between the forces of good & evil, God & the devil. I played it back to him. He was surprised & very pleased. He sounded much better than he had expected. He went on to recoord some of the poems in The Lord of the Rings. Some he sang to the tunes that were in his head when writing them. He was delighted with the resullt. It was striking how much better his voice sounded recorded & amplified. the more he recorded, & the more often he played back the recordings, the more his confidence grew. He asked to record the great riddle scene from the Hobbit. He read it magnificently & was especially pleased with his imppersonation oof Gollum. Then I suggested he should read one or two of the best prose passages from The Lord of the Rings, say, the ‘Ride of the Rohirrim’, & part of the account of the events on Mount Doom. He listened carefullly &, I thought, nervously, to the playback. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘they are all wrong. The publishers are wrong, & I am wrong to have lost my faith in my oown work. i am sure this is good, really good. But how am I to get it published?’

Of course I had no idea. But i had to say something, so I said, ‘Haven’t you an old pupil in the publishing business?’ After a pause he said:’There’s only Rayner. ‘Then send it to him & ask him to help.....

He doubted if many people would buy the book at the high price of 25 shillings a volume. He feared too that the few people who read it would treat it as an allegory oor morality tale about the nuclear bomb or the horrors of the machine age. He insiisted over & over again that his boook was essentially a story, without any further meaning. 'Tales of Faerie,' he said, 'should be told only for their own sake.'

At long last, after the three volumes were successfully launched, he became ‘cock-a-hoop’ & talked with great enthusiasm of the fate of the pirated paperback version & the astonishing growth of the tolkien cult. He enjoyed recieving letters in Elvish from boys at Winchester & from knowing that they were using it as a secret language. He was overwhelmed by his fan mail & would be visitors. It was wonderful to have at long last plenty of money, more than he knew what to do with. He once began a meeting with me by saying: ‘I’ve been a pooor man all my life, but now for the first time I’ve a lot of money. Would you like some?’

Sorry for such a long quote, but I think its fascinating to get that insight into Tolkien's state of mind & his feelings about the book, as we set off.