The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

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Mar 21

Tolkien’s collected correspondence was first published in 1981; a new edition was released in late 2023, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition, which adds more letters to the previous correspondence collection. We are lucky that letter writing was still a valued habit in a pre-email age, and that Tolkien was willing to leave his letters to posterity—although not all have been made public. Nonetheless, Tolkien’s letters serve as a partial guide to his fiction, especially The Lord of the Rings, as well as containing Tolkien’s keen insights on politics, culture, and religion. The three-volume novel, published in 1954-1955, brought in more cash than any other single book of the 20th century.

In terms of the number of books published, that record seems to belong to The Quotations of Chairman Mao (“Mao’s Little Red Book”). It helps when you control all the publishers. Mao had his own interpretation of “publish or perish.”

Tolkien’s three volumes, which followed the success of his The Hobbit, are “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers,” and “Return of the King.” From the Letters, in addition to literary and philosophical insights into his work and his times, we learn that Tolkien, like the rest of us, was utterly human. His was a life imbued with a love of family, endowed with a boundless imagination, and driven by an indefatigable work ethic. It was also a life agitated by publishing frustrations, made anxious with two of his sons serving in WWII, and rendered difficult because of his occasional physical maladies and his wife Edith’s more frequent health challenges.

Many of the new letters are to Tolkien’s son Christopher, who later became his father’s literary executor and the editor of certain of Tolkien’s works that were published posthumously. There are fewer letters to his son Michael, but those letters, about romance and the Catholic religion, are thoughtful, and, at times, profound. There are still only a handful of letters to his son John, who was to become a Catholic priest; and, an equally small number of letters to his youngest, his daughter Priscilla. Those hoping to see more correspondence between Tolkien and his fiancé Edith, later to become his wife, will be disappointed. At some point, privacy trumps all.

In addition to the sheer pleasure of reading Tolkien’s fiction, and the satisfaction derived from perusing his correspondence, there are a number of areas of Tolkien’s thought that are well worth investigating. Combining his letters with his mythology, moreover, enriches the appreciation of both. These areas of interest include the reality of evil, the nature of moral struggle, a balanced view of the environment, everyday heroic leadership, and the abuse of power. Anyone looking for genuine Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) will find it here in the friendship and cooperation among human beings, hobbits, wizards, dwarves, ents, and several different species of elves.

Those wishing to label Tolkien’s political persuasions, however, will have a hard time of it. Tolkien opposed literary or political labels of any kind, not only because they are invariably ill-conceived, but because he asserted that they were produced by lazy intellects. That said, taking note of Tolkien’s occasional insights into governance are rewarding in these difficult times. Though he offers no systematic political philosophy in the first edition of his correspondence nor in the second, his political views, at least in his correspondence, usually come as complaints about the government, policies, and citizens of his time. He had a talent for recognizing the benefits of different forms of government as well as perceiving the difficulties that accompany each.

Tolkien was by no means a monarchist, despite the title of the third volume, Return of the King. Aragorn’s coronation and the beginning of his rule are given precious little space, only about eleven pages, before the attention turns back to the Hobbits, the everyday heroes of Middle-earth. Tolkien, however, might agree with Aristotle’s suggestion that a monarchy may be the best form of government if one could be assured that the right monarch is consistently on the throne, an aspiration better satisfied in theory than in practice, given the danger that a monarchy might descend into a tyranny.

It is true that Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher in late 1943 that “his political opinions” increasingly leaned more and more to philosophical “anarchy,” or, alternately, on the other end of the spectrum, to “ ‘unconstitutional Monarchy.’ ” To characterize Tolkien as a philosophical anarchist or a monarchist, however, is an overstatement. By that year, the world was in the throes of WWII and the horrid nature of the Axis powers was on full display. Besides, Tolkien had far too much common sense to think a government guided by anarchy was possible, and far too much realism to hope for any kind of stable benevolent monarchy, unconstitutional or constitutional.

This particular letter, moreover, is fairly ironic. Tolkien writes of “wicked Fascists who eat babies;” and he points to a political “bright spot”: the “growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations.” This, he mused, with tongue in cheek, might stop the industrialization of his beloved pastoral England. Perhaps Tolkien’s most serious moment in the letter is when he warns of a “frightful slide into Theyocracy,” by which he means the tendency of even the best people, not to mention the worst, of “bossing other men.” This is consonant with a major theme of the Lord of the Rings, namely, the tendency of those in authority—in any form of government—to exercise power by unlawfully and immorally dominating others.

At times, Tolkien was equally disturbed by the Allied Powers: A year and a half later, in 1945, he wrote Christopher again,

The news today about “Atomic bombs” is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world!

But then Tolkien’s pragmatism re-surfaced as he conceded that “one good thing may arise out of it,” namely, the surrender of Japan.

Tolkien offered a cautious but favorable view of “natural aristocracy,” understood as government by the “best people,” though they may be few in number. This occurs in his important Lord of the Rings chapter, “The Council of Elrond,” where the best minds of Middle Earth acknowledge the threat of Sauron and develop a strategy to destroy the One Ring. An approving view of aristocratic wisdom is evident much later in the book, if to a lesser extent, in the chapter “The Last Debate,” where members of the fellowship of the ring devise a scheme to give Frodo and Sam the best chance of destroying the One Ring.

In both of those instances, aristocracy must be distinguished from “oligarchy,” or the self-serving rule of the few. Aristotle is helpful in making this distinction since for him, “aristocracy,” formed by the word ἀρετή (arete), is the rule of the excellent or the virtuous. In this latter instance, an elite group hold a war council and plan a diversion that might give Frodo and Sam the best chance to reach Mordor and destroy the Ring. The problem, however, similar to that of a monarchy, is preventing an aristocracy from devolving into an oligarchy.

Apropos to the 21st century, Tolkien’s occasional remarks about democratic governance typically emerge as explicit or implicit warnings. He grumbled about the excessive amounts “HM [Her Majesty’s] Customs and Revenue” took of the income from his novels. He wrote to his son Michael of “the claws of the Taxgatherers” and of “the appalling tax-tyranny by which we are crushed.” Tolkien, importantly, had little hope for a thoroughly secularized democracy: He observed on more than one occasion, “What a rot is democracy without religion!” In another letter he expanded his pejoratives when he exclaimed, “What a rot and a stink is democracy without religion!” By this Tolkien seems to have in mind the role that religion—properly understood and practiced—may have in moderating human passion and behavior. In an autocratic form of government, passion and behavior may be controlled from without; in a democracy, the control must come from within.

In 1956, Tolkien expressed alarm that the citizens of the United Kingdom were far more agitated about England’s and France’s clumsy attempt to stop Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, than they were concerned about the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution in which thousands were killed or injured and a quarter of a million terrorized Hungarians fled the country. He worried that the “frenzy” in England might impel his countrymen toward “mob rule.” Likewise, he went so far as to write his son Christopher that democracy is “nearly equivalent to ‘mob-rule’ ” and that “Greece, the home of philosophy—did not approve of it” because it too often slipped into “dictatorships.” In this, Tolkien echoes the concerns of the architects of the 1787 U.S. Constitution who explained in Federalist Papers #10 and #14 that the new Constitution did not form a democracy but a republic. Like Tolkien, “Publius,” the pseudonym for James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, recalls the “turbulent democracies of ancient Greece.” Both Publius and Tolkien worried about the emergence of demagogues. Tolkien’s masterful chapter “The Voice of Saruman” is a warning of the alarming power of those skilled in rhetorical manipulation.

Though Tolkien articulated all of these concerns in the middle of the 20th century, it would be hard to find keener insights into political life in the first quarter of the 21st century—all the more reason to immerse oneself in Tolkien’s correspondence and fiction. As biographer Tom Shippey asserts, Tolkien was the “Author of the Century.”

Discussion Questions:

1. Tolkien commented on governance and politics over 70 years ago. Have those insights aged well? Are they still relevant?

2. In one particular letter (not discussed here), Tolkien wondered if he had been “inspired” to write Lord of the Rings—that it was not just a wildly successful book but that it had some kind of transcendent quality. If you have read LOTR, do you agree?

3. Tolkien warns against “labeling” others, whether such designations are literary, philosophical, or political. Is this a useful admonition today? Does such labeling encourage a lazy intellect as Tolkien warned.