Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

I came eventually and by slow degrees to write The Lord of the Rings to satisfy myself: of course without success, at any rate not above 75 But now (when the work is no longer hot, immediate, or so personal) certain features of it, and espec. certain places still move me very powerfully. The heart remains in the description of Cerin Amroth (end of Vol. I, Bk ii ch. 6), but I am most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow; and most grieved by Gollum’s failure (just) to repent when interrupted by Sam: this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy; and the good are often stumbling blocks.

The business began so far back that it might be said to have begun at birth. Somewhere about 8 years old I tried to write some verses on a dragon – about which I now remember nothing except that it contained the expression a green great dragon. But the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914-18 War. The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Earendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the “Battle of the Somme” in 1916. The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel & Beren arose from a small woodland glade filled with “hemlocks” (or other white umbellifers) near Roos in the Holderness peninsular – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1919.

Nothing has astonished me more (and I think my publishers) than the welcome given to the L.R. But it is, of course, a constant source of consolation and pleasure to me. And, I may say, a piece of singular good fortune, much envied by some of my contemporaries. Wonderful people still buy the books, and to a man “retired” that is both grateful & comforting.

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http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Nancy_Smith_(Christmas_1963)
The article in Diplomat
Tolkien in East Yorkshire
Timeline
Tolkien in Leeds
Father Christmas Letters
The Clerke’s Compleinte – The Gryphon – December 1922

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Original

I came eventually and by slow degrees to write The Lord of the Rings to satisfy myself: of course without success, at any rate not above 75 But now (when the work is no longer hot, immediate, or so personal) certain features of it, and espec. certain places still move me very powerfully. The heart remains in the description of Cerin Amroth (end of Vol. I, Bk ii ch. 6), but I am most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow; and most grieved by Gollum’s failure (just) to repent when interrupted by Sam: this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy; and the good are often stumbling blocks.

The business began so far back that it might be said to have begun at birth. Somewhere about 8 years old I tried to write some verses on a dragon – about which I now remember nothing except that it contained the expression a green great dragon. But the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914-18 War. The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Earendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the “Battle of the Somme” in 1916. The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel & Beren arose from a small woodland glade filled with “hemlocks” (or other white umbellifers) near Roos in the Holderness peninsular – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1919.

Nothing has astonished me more (and I think my publishers) than the welcome given to the L.R. But it is, of course, a constant source of consolation and pleasure to me. And, I may say, a piece of singular good fortune, much envied by some of my contemporaries. Wonderful people still buy the books, and to a man “retired” that is both grateful & comforting.

344 words.

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• Anthriscus sylvestris (1) ·
• British Army (18) ·
• Conium (1) ·
• Dragon (2) ·
• East Riding of Yorkshire (66) ·
• Edith Tolkien (1) ·
• Fantasy (1) ·
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• 📌Kingston upon Hull (65) ·
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• Lúthien and Beren (1) ·
• The Lord of the Rings (2) ·
• Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1892-1973) (4), writer and philologist, Reader in English at Leeds University (1920-26) ·
• World War I (1914-19) (21) ·

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