Q: Did J.R.R. Tolkien Think The Lord of The Rings was “English”?
ANSWER: The Book of Lost Tales was J.R.R. Tolkien’s self-styled “mythology for England”, but years of passionate propaganda and misinformation spread by dedicated revisionists have convinced virtually the entire world that he meant The Lord of the Rings was his purported mythology. The “mythology for England” mythology is rooted in a misreading of (the undated) Letter No. 131, which Tolkien wrote to publisher Milton Waldman (“probably in late 1951”), where he wrote:
“Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.
Here this poor man was, trying to sell the recently (almost) completed Lord of the Rings to another publisher because George Allen and Unwin had elected to pass on the book. They instead published a (somewhat) unauthorized 2nd edition of The Hobbit (incorporating speculative changes Tolkien had sent to them a couple of years previously with no expectation of seeing them in print).
On the basis of this paragraph, which doesn’t even use the word “mythology”, many people argue Tolkien was speaking of The Lord of the Rings. If so, he was making a terrible sales pitch, equivalent to “well, I (almost) wrote this book that no one wants to read and I’ve given up on it – oh, by the way, here’s a synopsis of a completely unrelated book I’d like to publish.” It’s all rather contradictory to the idea that he was still trying to get The Lord of the Rings into print.
But this is all a clever digression on my part. I’m not going to offer my interpretation of anything. I’ll just leave the following quote from an obscure Tolkien letter for your consideration. It’s dated 26 October 1958 — so 2 years after the publication of The Return of the King — and is addressed to Mrs. L.M. Cutts. She had apparently asked where he had got it all from, and this portion of the letter addresses that (uncited, inferred) question:
…I did no study or research for my tale. It is an ‘invention’ from beginning to end… If it is ‘English’ — (not British, please) — that is because I am English… no one of us can really invent or ‘create’ in a void, we can only reconstruct and perhaps impress a personal pattern on ‘ancestral’ material. The origin of the names and fragments of languages in the books could, of course, be discovered by anyone of similar linguistic experience as my own; but that would not reveal much. I invented the word hobbit, and can say no more about it than it seemed to me to fit the creatures that I had already in mind.* Elves is an English word, but the nature and history of the peoples so-called in my books has little or nothing to do with the European traditions about Elves or Fairies. Ent is also an ancient English word (for a giant); but the Ents of my world are I suppose an entirely original ‘creatures’ — so far as that can be said of any human work. If you like, they are a ‘mythological’ form taken by my lifelong love of trees, with perhaps some remote influence from George MacDonald’s Phantastes (a work I do not actually much like), and certainly a strong [twist?] given by my deep disappointment with Shakespeare’s Macbeth…
I won’t keep you in suspense. The footnote (denoted by the asterisk, * ) reads: “Or rather it generated them: they grew to fit it.”
So, he implies the book is (only accidentally) “English” in nature – solely due to being the product of an Englishman’s imagination. He doesn’t say it’s dedicated to England or intended to be “more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths…” That was all about The Book of Lost Tales, from which The Silmarillion evolved (they are not the same works).
Now, I’m not positioning all that against Tom Shippey’s brilliant ripping back of the veneer of non-Englishness in Tolkien’s words to reveal a literary world deeply rooted in English geography, history, and linguistics. Those roots are the very things Tolkien admits to in this letter to dear Mrs. Cutts. But he specifically denies that the book itself (or, rather, its worldscape) is intended to be English.
So, either J.R.R. Tolkien was an immense, bald-faced liar (an accusation oft leveled at him by scholars and educators around the world) — or maybe he just saw things differently from the way (many of) his readers saw them, and he patiently tried to explain the fiction was an act of (sub-)creation, nothing more, springing from the imagination of an Englishman…who happened to incorporate Greek, Scandinavian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Slav, Persian, and possibly even Chinese mythology and folklore (along with Americanisms and too many other non-Englander things to list) into his fictional world.
So, there you have it, another letter for people to dissect, think about, and (dare I say it?) revise to their hearts’ content.
See Also
Did Tolkien Ever Use the Phrase “Mythology for England”?
How Much Was Tolkien Influenced by Irish Mythology?
How Many Greek Myths Did Tolkien Borrow for Middle-earth?
How Did J.R.R. Tolkien Create Middle-earth?
Is The Book of Lost Tales an Early Version of The Silmarillion?
What Is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium?
Classic essay: The Other Way Round
Classic essay: Tolkien’s Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide
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Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
That very simple, one-sentence question begs an alternate interpretation. (Which is not to say I have any issues with the answer given; no quibbles whatsoever.)
Did JRRT think LoTR was “English?” We can’t really know someone’s mind, we can only know their expressed statements and opinions. All we can do is infer and speculate about an author’s hidden motivations and unstated thoughts. I’m going to speculate that the questioner wanted to know, “Did JRRT think LoTR was intended for the English reader?” I think the answer to that question would be an unqualified, “Yes.”
The L.M. Cutts letter makes it clear that JRRT understood that he was writing as an Englishman, steeped most strongly in his native culture. By extension, his books would be most likely to resonate with people of the same, shared culture. This translates to commercial considerations as well as artistic. An author may write solely to satisfy him/herself, but we know LoTR was written with an expectation of publication. Did the author hope that his new work would help ensure a more comfortable retirement? Even without a citation from his personal letters, I think this is a safe bet.
As much as authors and publishers hope that a book will be marketable beyond local boundaries, the first and foremost concern is that the book appeal to the local audience. If it doesn’t succeed there it stands little commercial chance in far-off lands where, even when read in the original language, cultural differences begin to morph meaning and “voice.” If a book is unsuccessful locally, few foreign publishers are likely to pay for the rights to publish editions in their respective markets. (Of course the U.S. has a nearly insatiable appetite for things British, but even U.S. publishers/record labels/producers want to see a warm British reception for a book, band, or TV series before introducing it to the U.S. market.)
So yes, Tolkien would have written with the English reader very much in mind.
I do love Tolkien’s dislike of the term “British!” So pointless, so him.
In your intro you explain the famous Milton Waldman letter and its so-called ‘mythology for England’ construction by writing,
“Here this poor man was, trying to sell the recently (almost) completed Lord of the Rings to another publisher because George Allen and Unwin had elected to pass on the book.”
But that’s not what was going on, as far as I can recall. Tolkien, having finished The Lord of the Rings after years of work, and knowing it had an audience due to its being a sequel of sorts to The Hobbit, decided that he wanted LotR and The Silmarillion published simultaneously. The idea would be that the Silmarillion, though less readable and popular, would be bought by his readers due to being associated with the ‘New Hobbit’; and of course the The Silmarillion tells the stories of the ‘Elder Days’ which are referred to throughout The Lord of the Rings. To him, LotR was doing double duty: being published for the masterwork he knew it was, and acting as a mule that would pull his beloved but previously-rejected Silmarillion into print as well.
Allen & Unwin, his Hobbit publishers, would have none of it. They knew The Silmarillion was a difficult read; that it wasn’t really ready for publication and Tolkien might take a few more years to whip it into shape; and that in post-war England with its paper shortages there was no sense in buying into one large unsellable book just to publish another very large, possibly sellable book.
Miffed, Tolkien went to the Collins publishing group, specifically Milton Waldman, and tried to make a double-book deal with them. Thus the famous letter, which spends as much time explaining the origins and meaning of The Silmarillion as it does The Lord of the Rings to a man who had no idea of what either book really was.
Allen & Unwin, in turn, were offended. They had really, really wanted to publish The Lord of the Rings; they’d been waiting for it since 1939, and having read it they judged it a ‘work of genius’. They hadn’t elected to pass on it at all; they’d been forced to by Tolkien’s insisting they do the Silm as well. When Collins finally elected to pass on the double book deal as well, Tolkien crawled back to Allen & Unwin and begged forgiveness, hoping they would take him back and publish The Lord of the Rings, by itself. And they did.
Your comments on the ‘Englishness’ of The Lord of the Rings are clever and beg to be expanded a bit more. Thanks for posting them.
I was being a little facetious in recapping the purpose of the letter because I didn’t want to go through the entire history of Tolkien’s negotiations with the publishers.
But thank you for recapping. I’m sure new readers will appreciate the background. One of the popular articles on this site is How Long Did It Take J.R.R. Tolkien to Write The Lord of the Rings?
There are Americanisms in Lord of the Rings? I didn’t know that.
Potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco (off the top of my head). There was something about a family name, too, that supposedly Tolkien got from one of his students. I don’t remember that off the top of my head. Not sure if anything else is well-documented.
thanks!
Quite a few of the hobbit surnames can be found in phone books from the Lexington, Kentucky area. Apparently, according to an old article in the Lexington newspaper, Tolkien was acquainted with a student from that area, and liked the names. I have seen Underhill in Charleston, WV, and Baggins from central Kentucky, on checks when I worked in bank data processing.
To this British (sorry, Professor T) reader, the hobbits of the opening chapters were as English as it’s possible to be. It’s probably still possible to go into a village pub in say Oxfordshire and find the customers pontificating about local events and families in very similar ways to the hobbits of the Green Dragon. Mixing up the real and the fantastic was a big part of Tolkien’s literary technique, and why not? It’s often helpful to a reader to envisage a scene by reference to something familiar. Even alien planets in science fiction works often turn out to be based on terrestrial landscapes – many a Doctor Who episode was filmed in and around stone quarries in Bedfordshire. So, yes, Tolkien certainly included a lot of the England he knew in LOTR, chopped it up and blended in myths from earlier cultures, stirred in some imaginary ingredients of his own, and baked a toothsome dish for generations of feasters.
As a total aside, from the letter quoted towards the end of the article, what was Tolkien’s disappointment with Macbeth?
Here is a footnote from Letter no. 163, which Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden in 1955:
“Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called ‘Treebeard’, from Treebeard’s first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading some one else’s work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I daresay something had been going on in the ‘unconscious’ for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till ‘what really happened’ came through. But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon, and their connexion with stone. Their pan in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill’: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war. And into this has crept a mere piece of experience, the difference of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ attitude to wild things, the difference between unpossessive love and gardening”
Many thanks.