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Concept
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
Summary
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is a selection of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters published in 1981, edited by Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter assisted by Christopher Tolkien. The selection from a large mass of materials contains 354 letters, dating between October 1914, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford, and 29 August 1973, four days before his death. The letters are of interest both for what they show of Tolkien's life and for his interpretations of his Middle-earth writings.
The book has a 3-page introduction by its editor, Humphrey Carpenter. It notes that an "enormous quantity of material [had] to be omitted, and that only passages of particular interest could be included." The omissions include "the very large body of letters" written between 1913 and 1918 to Edith Bratt, the woman who became his wife. Carpenter notes that few letters from the period between 1918 and 1937 survive, and those "unfortunately" say nothing about the writing of The Silmarillion or of The Hobbit.
The body of the book consists of extracts from 354 of J. R. R. Tolkien's many letters. The first, dated October 1914, is to Bratt, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford. The last, dated 29 August 1973, is to Priscilla Tolkien, his youngest child, four days before his death.
The letters are accompanied by detailed notes, and by an index compiled by the Tolkien scholars Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond.
The letters can be roughly divided in four categories:
Personal letters to Tolkien's wife Edith, his son Christopher Tolkien, and his other children
Letters about Tolkien's career as a professor of Anglo-Saxon
Letters to his publishers at Allen & Unwin
Letters about Tolkien's Middle-earth writings
Letters 29 and 30 show that a German translation of The Hobbit was being negotiated in 1938. The German firm enquired whether Tolkien was of Arisch (Aryan) origin. Tolkien was infuriated by the racist implications of this, and wrote two drafts of possible replies for his publisher to choose.
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