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„The Hobbit Habit” – Time Magazine – юли 15, 1996
Holden Caulfield is a moldy fig; the Lord of the Flies is swatted. This year, the unquestioned literary god on college campuses is a three-foot-high creature with long curly hair on his feet, a passion for six vast meals a day, and the improbable name of Frodo Baggins.

„An Unexpected Party” – Christianity Today – Spring 2003
Perhaps the reason The Lord of the Rings has been popular with so many of such different backgrounds is as simple as this: it is, first and last, a great story. Its themes—friendship, choice, power, nature, machines, loss, salvation—are not of one time, but for all time.

Orson Scott Card
„The closest thing to true communication between two human beings is story-telling, for despite his best efforts at concealment, a writer will inevitably reveal in his story the world he believes he lives in, and the participatory reader will forever after carry around in himself and as himself a memory that was partly controlled by that other human being. Such memories are not neatly sorted into fiction and real life in our minds. I know, of course, that I never stood at the Cracks of Doom and watched Gollum die. But that faith in the distinction between my own actions and the actions of fictional characters is merely another story I tell myself. In fact, my memory of that event is much clearer and more powerful than my memory of my fifth birthday.”

Phillip Yancey in „The Jesus I Never Knew”
„J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps this century’s greatest creator of fairy tales, often faced the charge that fantasy is an 'escapist' way of shifting attention away from the pressures of the 'real world.' His reply was simple: Everything depends on that from which one is escaping. We view the flight of a deserter and the escape of a prisoner very differently. 'Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?'„

Donald Barr – New York Times review of The Two Towers – май 1, 1955
„Now, in a trilogy called 'The Lord of the Rings,' Mr. Tolkien continues somewhat differently his story of the third age of Middle Earth, a world inhabited by wizards, men, hobbits (courteous little oddities, like English householders three feet high with long hairy feet), elves and dwarves; and by the gorging orcs and blind Black Riders and their lord. It is a scrubbed morning world, and a ringing nightmare world. It seems, as any very distant age does, to be especially sunlit, and to be shadowed by perils very fundamental, of a peculiarly uncompounded darkness.”

Donald Barr – New York Times review of The Two Towers – май 1, 1955
„After the first World War serious fiction tended toward literary Platonism or Berkeleyism. With a kind of brilliant tedium (called „sensitivity”) novels refined on mental states. The authors assumed that the thought was the real act, of which the action was only a dubious copy. Plots gave way to insights. The clashing of multifarious big rhetorics, which had made Dickens and Scott, was replaced by the inner voice, very small but not still. Never had the distance between the popular appetite and serious art been so great as it then inevitably became. Many people, of what we might call the middle taste, turned to detective stories, which at least had plot; recently they have been reading science fiction, which has strong action. That „The Lord of the Rings” should appeal to readers of the most austere tastes suggests that they too now long for the old, forthright, virile kind of narrative.”

Donald Barr – New York Times Book Review of The Two Towers – май 1, 1955
„Mr. Tolkien is a distinguished British philologist, and the language of his narrative reminds us that a philologist is a man who loves language. His names are brilliantly appropriate; the tongues he has devised for the elves and orcs perfectly express, just by their rhythms and phonemic systems, the natures of these races; his style is full of joy, the joy that follows the making of a perfect gesture. But more than this, the author has had intimate access to an epic tradition stretching back and back and disappearing in the mists of Germanic history, so that his story has a kind of echoing depth behind it, wherein we hear Snorri Sturluson and Beowulf, the sagas and the Nibelungenlied, but civilized by the gentler genius of modern England.”

newtimesla.com – Elf Discovery
„And you should keep in mind that the humans who study Elvish do not resemble those you might expect to speak Klingon. They will not wear prosthetic foreheads and salute William Shatner. They are more likely to know Native American words for orange juice and read Beowulf in the original Old English. They are, like the professor who started it all, serious people. „

J.R.R. Tolkien Mythopoeia
I will not walk with your progressive apes erect and sapient. Before them gapes The dark abyss to which their progress tends-- if by God’s mercy progress ever ends, and does not ceaselessly revolve the same unfruitful course with changing of a name.

Lester del Rey
I suppose that the death of J.R.R. Tolkien was something we all knew to be imminent -- but the news of it is still a cause for deep sadness. Something of joy and delight has gone from us. Another different (and oh, how wonderfully different!) drummer is stilled. Tolkien gave us an epic, a new body of myth, a world of heroes and periods. He gave the beauty of magic back to us. It is a richer world for millions because of him. But fortunately for us, his universe survives and will continue to survive for millions more to discover. The singer is gone, but the song is a Kadish Hymn and a promise of joy in a never ending morning.

Roger Zelazny
I came to J.R.R Tolkien’s books at a very unusal time in my life. But then I guess that everyone who has read them and been moved by them has felt the same way. Perhaps it is because they helped to make it an unusual time. He enriched the entire field of fantastic literature with his great story. He changed many of us who passed through his world. And is the true mark of true power -- to make oneself felt so intensely and so pervasively and with such affection. While I was saddened to hear of his passing, it is good to know that his life was long, long enough for him to feel our appreciation of his work and long enough to realize that so many of us are grateful.

Terry Pratchett in The Washington Post – юни 18, 2000
Tolkien was, in the truest sense of the word, an enchanter.

W.H. Auden on The Lord of the Rings
„If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again.”

C.S. Lewis to J.R.R. Tolkien
„If they won't write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious.”

H. l'A Fawcett on The Fellowship of the Ring – Manchester Guardian – август 20, 1954
„Mr. Tolkien is one of those born storytellers who makes his readers as wide-eyed as children for more.”

Howard Spring on The Fellowship of the Ring – Country Life – август 26, 1954
„This is a work of art… It has invention, fancy, and imagination… It is a profound parable of man’s everlasting struggle against evil.”

A.E. Cherryman on The Fellowship of the Ring – Truth – август 6, 1954
„It is an amazing piece of work… He has added something, not only to the world’s literature, but to its history.”

J.W. Lambert on The Fellowship of the Ring – Sunday Times – август 8, 1954
„Whimsical drivel with a message? No; it sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above that level. A book for bright children? Well, yes and no.”

Edwin Muir on The Fellowship of the Ring – Observer – август 22, 1954
„This remarkable book makes its appearance at a disadvantage. Nothing but a great masterpiece could survive the bombardment of praise directed at it from the blurb… The Fellowship of the Ring is an extraordinary book… Yet for myself I could not resist feeling a certain disappointment. Perhaps it was due more to a lack of the human discrimination and depth which the subject demanded.”

Peter Green on The Lord of the Rings- Daily Telegraph – август 27, 1954
„I presume it is meant to be taken seriously, and am apprehensive that I can find no really adequate reason for doing so… And yet this shapeless work has an undeniable fascination: especially to a reviewer with a cold in his head.”

Christopher Tolkien on „The Tale of the Sun and Moon” – The Book of Lost Tales: Part One
„As the mythology evolved and changed, the Making of the Sun and Moon became the element of greatest difficulty; and in the published Silmarillion this chapter does not seem of a piece with much of the rest of the work, and could not be made to be so. Towards the end of his life my father was indeed prepared to dismantle much of what he had built, in the attempt to solve what he undoubtedly felt to be a fundamental problem.”

The Tale of the Sun and Moon – The Book of Lost Tales: Part One
„Then sorrowfully Yavanna stood upon the plain and her form trembled and her face was very pale for the greatness of the effort that her being put forth, striving against fate. The phial of gold she held in her right hand and the silver in her left, and standing between the Trees she lifted them on high, and flames of red and of white arose from each like flowers and the ground shook, and the earth opened, and a growth of flowers and plants leapt up there from about her feet, white and blue about her left side and red and gold about her right, and the Gods sat still and in amaze.”

Peter Jackson
There seems to be a slight feeling of turning away from science fiction, of people preferring fantasy. Of course, science fiction is a form of fantasy. It’s just a technological form of fantasy. But it seems people are preferring stories more based in the real world. You know, still with the magic and still with a little bit of fantasy but not quite so artificial. I've always thought of science fiction being relatively artificial. I've never quite liked science fiction, to tell you the truth. I've always preferred fantasy. Because fantasy feels more historical to me.

Peter Jackson
[Tolkien] also had a great pessimism, or rather, a melancholy about him and a lack of confidence in mankind. Which is really part of what he was venting about. He was aware of and frustrated with how flawed we are. He created the Elvish race as his perfect ideal beings. They were wise, they were artistic, they were noble, they were sensible, basically. They were full of common sense, if you want to describe the Elves in the other direction. They embody basic common sense. The world was ok as long as the Elves were in charge, but of course, The Lord of the Rings is about the time when the Elves were departing.

Peter Jackson
We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put any of our own politics, our own messages or our own themes into these movies. What we were trying to do was to analyze what was important to Tolkien and to try to honor that. In a way, we were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves.

Stephen King, „On Writing”
Sometimes it’s beautiful and we fall in love with all that story, more than any film or TV program could ever hope to provide. Even after a thousand pages we don’t want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there. You wouldn’t leave after two thousand pages, if there were two thousand. The Rings trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien is a perfect example of this. A thousand pages of hobbits hasn’t been enough for three generations of post–World War II fantasy fans; even when you add in that clumsy, galumphing dirigible of an epilogue, The Silmarillion, it hasn’t been enough. Hence Terry Brooks, Piers Anthony, Robert Jordan, the questing rabbits of Watership Down, and half a hundred others. The writers of these books are creating the hobbits they still love and pine for; they are trying to bring Frodo and Sam back from the Grey Havens because Tolkien is no longer around to do it for them.

ОТ ТОЛКИН

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.

Little by little, one travels far.

Still round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate.

The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination.

в писмо до Michael Tolkien, – март 1941
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

във „The Lost Road”
'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'

в писмо до Forrest J. Ackerman – юни 1958
„I have spent some time on this passage, as an example of what I find too frequent to give me 'pleasure or satisfaction': deliberate alteration of the story, in fact and significance, without any practical or artistic object (that I can see); and of the flattening effect that assimilation of one incident to another must have.” [on reviewing a film script by Morton Grady Zimmerman]

в писмо до Forrest J. Ackerman – юни 1958
„Why has my account been entirely rewritten here, with disregard for the rest of the tale?” [in reviewing the film script by Morton Grady Zimmerman]

към Arthur C. Clarke over lunch, pointing at his diminutive editor.
„THAT’s where I got the idea for the Hobbit…

в писмо до Sterling Lanier – ноември 21, 1972
„I am glad to know that you were awarded a prize, but not surprised that it proved useless. I had a similar disappointment when a drinking goblet arrived (from a fan) which proved to be of steel engraved with the terrible words seen on the Ring. I of course have never drunk from it, but use it for tobacco ash.”

в писмо до Christopher Tolkien – юли 11, 1972
„I have at last got busy about Mummy’s grave… The inscription I should like is:
EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889-1971
Luthien
:brief and jejune, except for Luthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Luthien.”

в писмо до Fr. Douglas Carter – юни 6, 1972
„But I think in Vol. II pp. 80-81 it is plain that there would be for Ents no re-union in 'history'--but ents and their wives being rational creature would find some 'earthly paradise' until the end of this world: beyond which the wisdom neither of Elves nor Ents could see. Though maybe they shared the hope of Aragorn that they were 'not bound for ever to the circles of the world and beyond them is more than memory'.”

в писмо до Michael Salmon – май 18, 1972
„Thank you for your most kind letter and for your general interest in my work. I am however now an old man struggling to finish some of his work. Every extra task however small diminishes my chance of ever publishing The Silmarillion. So I hope you will understand why I feel it impossible to spend time making any comments on myself or my works.”

в писмо до William Cater – ноември 29, 1971
„I am grieved to tell you that my wife died this morning. Her courage and determination (of which you speak truly) carried her through to what seemed the brink of recovery, but a sudden relapse occurred which she fought for nearly three days in vain. She died at last in peace.”

в писмо до Peter Szabo Szentmihalyi – октовмри 1971
„But I cannot understand how I should be labelled 'a believer in moral didacticism'. Who by? It is in any case the exact opposite of my procedure in The Lord of the Rings. I neither preach nor teach.”

в писмо до Peter Szabo Szentmihalyi – октовмри 1971
„I have very little interest in serial literary history, and no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English 'novel'. My work is not a 'novel', but an 'heroic romance' a much older and quite different variety of literature.”

в писмо до Carole Batten-Phelps – Autumn 1971
„But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as 'an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling… but you', he said, 'create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.'

в писмо до Carole Batten-Phelps – Autumn 1971
„Of course the book was written to please myself (at different levels), and as an experiment in the arts of long narrative, and of inducing ’secondary Belief'. It was written slowly and with great care for detail, & finally emerged as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight as it were, on a brief episode in History, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space.”

в писмо до Carole Batten-Phelps – Autumn 1971
„The horrors of the American scene I will pass over, though they have given me great distress and labour. (They arise in an entirely different mental climate and soil, polluted and impoverished to a degree only paralleled by the lunatic destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit)…”

в писмо до Amy Ronald – ноември 16, 1969
„What a dreadful, fear-darkened, sorrow-laden world we live in--especially for those who have also the burden of age, whose friends and all they especially care for are afflicted in the same way.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – юли 31, 1969
„But life is not easy. The Parke has gone sick. Mummy is ailing, and I fear slowly 'declining'. Also I feel very cut off…”

в писмо до Camilla Unwin – май 20, 1969
„So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.”

в писмо до Camilla Unwin – май 20, 1969
„If you do not believe in a personal God the question: 'What is the purpose of life?' is unaskable and unanswerable. To whom or what would you address the question?”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – октовмри 11, 1968
„I find myself in sympathy with those developments that are strictly 'ecumenical', that is concerned with other groups or churches that call themselves (and often truly are) 'Christian'. We have prayed endlessly for Christian re-union, but it is difficult to see, if one reflects, how that could possibly begin to come about except as it has, with all its ineveitable minor absurdities.”

в писмо до Time-Life International Ltd. – май 2, 1968
„Your ideas of the natural and mine are different, since I never in any circumstances do work while being photographed, or talked to, or accompanied by anybody in the room. A photograph of me pretending to be at work would be entirely bogus.”

в писмо до Donald Swann – февруари 29, 1968
„I am merely impressed by the complete 'bogosity' of the whole performance. The producer, a very nice, very young man and personally equipped with some intelligence and insight, was nonetheless already so muddled and confused by BBCism that the last thing in the world he wished to show was me as I am/or was, let alone 'human or lifesize'.”

в писмо до William Luther White – септември 11, 1967
„The Inklings had no recorder and C.S. Lewis no Boswell. The name was not invented by C.S.L. (nor by me). In origin it was an undergraduate jest, devised as the name of a literary (or writers') club.”

в писмо до 'Mr. Rang' – август 1967
„It should be obvious that if it is possible to compose fragments of verse in Quenya and Sindarin, those languages (and their relations one to another) must have reached a fairly high degree of organization--though of course, far from completeness, either in vocabulary, or in idiom.”

в писмо до 'Mr. Rang' – август 1967
„It must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my person linguistic '?sthetic' or taste and its fluctuations.”

в писмо до 'Mr. Rang' – август 1967
„But I remain puzzled, and indeed sometime irritated, by many of the guesses at the ’sources' of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings. These seem to me no more than private amusements, and as such I have no right or power to object to them, though they are, I think, valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction.”

в писмо до Charlotte and Denis Plimmer – февруари 8, 1967
„I read quite a lot--or more truly, try to read many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy). But I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention.”

в писмо до Charlotte and Denis Plimmer – февруари 8, 1967
„I am informed that the Weekend Telegraph wishes to have your article illustrated by a series of pictures taken of me at work and at home. In no circumstances will I agree to being photographed again for such a purpose. I regard all such intrusions into my privacy as impertinence, and I can no longer afford the time for it. The irritation it causes me spreads its influence over a far greater time than the actual intrusion occupies. My work needs concentration and peace of mind.”

в писмо до Walter Hooper – ноември 22, 1966
„I noticed, for the first time consciously, how dualistic [C.S.] Lewis' mind and imagination [were], though as a philosopher his reason entirely rejected this. So the pun Hierarchy/Lowerarchy. And of course the 'Miserific Vision' is rationally nonsense, not to say theologically blasphemous.'

в писмо до Michael George Tolkien – октовмри 28, 1966
„I am myself and always have been sceptical about 'research ' of any kind as part of the occupation or training of younger people in the language-literature schools. There is such a lot to learn first. It is often forced on students after schools because of the desire to climb on to the great band-waggon of Science (or at least onto a little trailer in tow) and so capture a little of the prestige and money which 'The Sovereignties and Powers and the rulers of this world' shower upon the Sacred Cow (as one writer, a scientist, has named it) and its acolytes.”

в писмо до Michael George Tolkien – юли 29, 1966
Mirkwood is not an invention of mine, but a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations. It was probably the Primitive Germanic name for the great mountainous forest regions that anciently formed a barrier to the south of the lands of Germanic expansion. In some traditions it became used especially of the boundary between Goths and Huns.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin on preparations for a British paperback edition of The Hobbit – декември 15, 1965
„I am in your hands, but I am still not very happy about the use of this scrawl as a cover. It seems too much in the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it. But perhaps there is a distinction between their productions and one by a man who obviously cannot draw what he sees.”

в писмо до Dick Plotz, 'Thain' of the Tolkien Society of America – септември 12, 1965
„But Lewis is a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship. The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not 'influence' as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ’stuff' could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

в писмо до W.H. Auden – май 12, 1965
„I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable…”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – януари 9-10, 1965
„I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cyncial, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests 'in the course of my peregrinations'; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upperclass Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – януари 9-10, 1965
„It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: 'it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before'. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her…”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – януари 9-10, 1965
„An amusing incident occured in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetyr: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.)”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – януари 9-10, 1965
„I am neither disturbed (nor surprised) at the limitations of my 'fame'. There are lots of people in Oxford who have never heard of me, let alone of my books. But I can repay many of them with equal ignorance: neither wilful nor contemptuous, simply accidental.”

в писмо до Anne Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Co. – август 30, 1964
„C.S. [Lewis] of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him.”

в писмо до Anne Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Co. – август 7, 1964
„I am a man of limited sympathies (but well aware of it), and [Charles] Williams lies almost completely outside of them. I came into fairly close contact with him from the end of 1939 to his death--I was in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of All Hallows Eve, read aloud to us as it was composed, but the very great changes made in it were I think mainly due to C.S. [Lewis]--and much enjoyed his company; but our minds remained poles apart.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – август 2, 1964
„I wish that 'Copyright' could protect names, as well as extracts. It is a form of invention that I take a great deal of trouble over, and pleasure in; and really it is quite as difficult (often more so) as, say, lines of verse. I must say I was piqued by the 'christening' of that monstrous 'hydrofoil' Shadowfax--without so much as 'by your leave'--to which several correspondents drew my attention (some with indignation). I am getting used to Rivendells, Loriens, Imladris, etc. as house-names--though maybe they are more frequent than the letters which say 'by your leave'.”

в писмо до Christopher Bretherton – юли 16, 1964
„Yes C.S. [Lewis] was my closest friend from about 1927 to 1940, and remained very dear to me. His death was a grievous blow. But in fact we saw less and less of one another after he came under the dominant influence of Charles Williams, and still less after his very strange marriage… I read The Pilgrim’s Regress in MS. I have never been able to enjoy Pickwick. I now find The Lord of the Rings 'good in parts'.”

в писмо до Christopher Bretherton – юли 16, 1964
„The magic ring was the one obvious thing in The Hobbit that could be connected with my mythology. To be the burden of a large story it had to be of supreme importance. I then linked it with the (originally) quite casual reference to the Necromancer, end of Ch. vii and Ch. xix, whose function was hardly more than to provide a reason for Gandalf going away and leaving Bilbo and Dwarves to fend for themselves, which was necessary for the tale.”

в писмо до Christopher Bretherton – юли 16, 1964
„The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion), though as 'The Children of Hurin' it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending. The second point was the writing, 'out of my head', of the 'Fall of Gondolin', the story of Idril and Earendel (III 314), during sickleave from the army in 1917; and by the original version of the 'Tale of Luthien Tinuviel and Beren' later in the same year. That was founded on a small wood with a great undergrowth of 'hemlock' (no doubt many other related plants were also there) near Roos in Holderness, where I was for a while on the Humber Garrison.”

в писмо до Christopher Bretherton – юли 16, 1964
„My interests were, and remain, largely scientific. But I was also interested in traditional tales (especially those concerning dragons); and writing (not reading) verse and metrical devices. These things began to flow together when I was an undergraduate to the despair of my tutors and near-wrecking of my career. For when officially engaged on 'Classics' I made the acquaintance of languages not usually studied by the modern English, each with a powerfully individual phonetic aesthetic: Welsh, Finnish, and the remnants of fourth-century Gothic. Finnish also provided a glimpse of an entirely different mythological world.”

в писмо до Colin Bailey – май 13, 1964
„I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless--while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors--like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and tis discovery and overthrow--but it would be just that. Not worth doing.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – ноември 1963
„Also I was wryly amused to be told (D. Telegraph) that 'Lewis himself was never very fond of The Screwtape Letters'--his best-seller (250,000). He dedicated it to me. I wondered why. Now I know--says they.”

в писмо до Priscilla Tolkien four days after the death of C.S. Lewis – ноември 26, 1963
„So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age--like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have been so separated in the last years; but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – ноември 1, 1963
„This is rather an alarming and rambling disquisition to write! It is not meant to be a sermon! I have no doubt that you know as much and more. I am an ignorant man, but also a lonely one. And I take the opportunity of a talk, which I am sure I should now never take by word of mouth. But, of course, I live in anxiety concerning my children: who in this harder and crueller and more mocking world into which I have survived must suffer more assaults than I have.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – ноември 1, 1963
„Make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children--from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn--open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand--after which [Our] Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – ноември 1, 1963
„For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.”

в писмо до Colonel Worskett – септември 20, 1963
„I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Numenor and the flight of Elendil.”

в писмо до Mrs. Eileen Elgar – септември 1963
„Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained 'righteous', but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for 'good' and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great).”

в писмо до Mrs. Eileen Elgar – септември 1963
„Of the others only Gandalf might be expected to master [Sauron]--being an emissary of the Powers and a creature of the same order, an immortal spirit taking a visible physical form.”

в писмо до Mrs. Eileen Elgar – септември 1963
„[Sam] is a more representative hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he has consequently a stronger ingredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity--by which I do not mean a mere 'down-to-earthiness'--a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional 'wisdom'.”

в писмо до Mrs. Eileen Elgar – септември 1963
„Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable. Some readers he irritates and even infuriates. I can well understand it. All hobbits at times affect me in the same way, though I remain very fond of them.”

в писмо до Mrs. Eileen Elgar – септември 1963
„Frodo indeed 'failed' as a hero, as conceived by simple minds: he did not endure to the end; he gave in, ratted.”

в писмо до a reader of The Lord of the Rings – 1963
„Criticism of the speed of the relationship or 'love' of Faramir and Eowyn. In my experience feelings and decisions ripen very quickly (as measured by mere 'clock-time', which is actually not justly applicable) in periods of great stress, and especially under the expectation of imminent death. And I do not think that persons of high estate and breeding need all the petty fencing and approaches in matters of 'love'. This tale does not deal with a period of 'Courtly Love' and its pretences; but with a culture more primitive (sc. less corrupt) and nobler.”

в писмо до Michael Tolkien – декември 19, 1962
„Well here comes Christmas! That astonishing thing that no 'commercialism' can in fact defile--unless you let it.”

в писмо до Sir Stanley Unwin – ноември 28, 1962
„I have so far seen two reviews of 'Tom Bombadil': T. Litt. Suppl. and Listener: I was agreeably surprised: I expected remarks far more snooty and patronizing. Also I was rather pleased, since it seemed that the reviewers had both started out not wanting to be amused, but had failed to maintain their Victorian dignity intact.”

в писмо до Jane Neave – ноември 22, 1961
„I was of course given Hans Andersen when quite young. At one time I listened with attention which may have looked like rapture to his stories when read to me. I read them myself often. Actually I disliked him intensely; and the vividness of that distaste is the chief thing that I carried down the years in connexion with his name.”

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to the commentary on the Swedish introduction to The Lord of the Rings – февруари 23, 1961
Commentary: The Ring is in a certain way 'der Nibelungen Ring'…
Tolkien: Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases.

писмо до Mrs E.C. Ossen Drijver – януари 5, 1961
„But there are, I fear, no hobbits in The Silmarillion (or history of the Three Jewels), little fun or earthiness but mostly grief and disaster.”

в писмо до Mrs E.C. Ossen Drijver – януари 5, 1961
„C.S. Lewis is a very old friend and colleague of mine, and indeed I owe to his encouragement the fact that in spite of obstacles (including the 1939 war!) I persevered and eventually finished The Lord of the Rings.”

в писмо до Christopher Tolkien – септември 12, 1960
„I have just received a copy of C.S.L.’s latest: Studies in Words. Alas! His ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner. I am deeply relieved to find I am not mentioned.”

в писмо до Allen & Unwin – октовмри 14, 1959
„My only comment is that of Puck upon mortals. I fear that to me Siamese cats belong to the fauna of Mordor, but you need not tell the cat breeder that.”

в писмо до Walter Allen, New Statesman – април 1959
„But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in a right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one’s age group. It comes from reading books above one.”

в писмо до Walter Allen, New Statesman – април 1959
„Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life.”

в писмо до Walter Allen, New Statesman – април 1959
„Children’s tastes and talents differ as widely as those of adults, as soon as they are old enough to be differentiated clearly, and therefore to be the target of any thing that can bear the name of literature. It would be useless to offer to many children of 14 or even of 12 the trash that is good enough for many respectable adults of twice or three times the age, but less gifts natural.”

в писмо до Walter Allen, New Statesman – април 1959
„I think that The Hobbit can be seen to begin in what might be called a more 'whimsy' mode, and in places even more facetious, and move steadily to a more serious or significant, and more consistent and historical… But I regret much of it all the same…”

в писмо до Walter Allen, New Statesman – април 1959
„I write things that might be classified as fairy-stories not because I wish to address children (who qua children I do not believe to be specially interested in this kind of fiction) but because I wish to write this kind of story and no other.”

в писмо до Walter Allen, New Statesman – април 1959
„I had given a great deal more thought to the matter before beginning the composition of The Lord of the Rings; and that work was not specially addressed to children or to any other class of people. But to any one who enjoyed a long exciting story, of the sort that I myself naturally enjoy…”

в писмо до Deborah Webster – октовмри 25, 1958
„I do not like giving 'facts' about myself other than 'dry' ones (which anyway are quite as relevant to my books as any other more juicy details). Not simply for personal reasons; but also because I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author’s works (if the works are in fact worthy of attention), and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest.”

в писмо до Rhona Beare – октовмри 14, 1958
„The uncorrupted Valar, therefore, yearned for the Children before they came and loved them afterwards, as creatures 'other' than themselves, independent of them and their artistry, 'children' as being weaker and more ignorant than the Valar, but of equal lineage (deriving being direct from the One); even though under their authority as rulers of Arda.”

в писмо до Rhona Beare – октовмри, 14 1958
„But I might say that if the tale is 'about' anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about 'power'. Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the 'escapes': serial longevity, and hoarding memory.”

в писмо до Rhona Beare – октовмри, 14 1958
„In the cosmogonic myth Manwe is said to be 'brother' of Melkor, that is they were coeval and equipotent in the mind of the Creator. Melkor became the rebel, and the Diabolos of these tales, who disputed the kingdom of Arda with Manwe.”

в писмо до Rhona Beare – октовмри, 14 1958
„Since the Valar had no language of their own, not needing one, they had no 'true' names, only identities, and their names were conferred on them by the Elves, being in origin therefore all, as it were, 'nicknames', referring to some striking peculiarity, function, or deed.”

в писмо до Rhona Beare – октовмри, 14 1958
„I did not intend the steed of the Witch-King to be what is now called a 'pterodactyl', and often is drawn (with rather less shadowy evidence than lies behind many monsters of the new and fascinating semi-scientific mythology of the 'Prehistoric'). But obviously it is pterodactylic and owes much to the new mythology, and its description even provides a sort of way in which it could be a last survivor of older geologic eras.”

в писмо до Forrest J. Ackerman – юни 1958
„The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.”

в писмо до C. Ouboter, Voorhoeve en Dietrich, Rotterdam – април 10, 1958
„The Elves call 'death' the Gift of God (to Men). Their temptation is different: towards a faineant melancholy, burdened with Memory, leading to an attempt to halt Time.”

в писмо до Herbert Schiro – ноември 17, 1957
„But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!”

в писмо до Herbert Schiro – ноември 17, 1957
„There is no ’symbolism' or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort 'five wizards = five senses' is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. There were five wizards and that is just a unique part of history. To ask if the Orcs 'are' Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs.”

в писмо до Christopher and Faith Tolkien – септември 11, 1957
„But this Mr. Ackerman brought some really astonishingly good pictures (Rackham rather than Disney) and some remarkable colour photographs. They have apparently toured America shooting mountain and desert scenes that seem to fit the story. The Story Line or Scenario, was however, on a lower level. In fact bad. But it looks as if business might be done. Stanley U. & I have agreed on our policy: Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – юни 19, 1957
„As far as I am concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization; and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility. I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the B.B.C.”

в писмо до Amy Ronald – декември 15, 1956
„Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'--though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory”

в писмо до Amy Ronald- юли 27, 1956
„In this case the cause (not the 'hero') was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted.”

в писмо до Miss J. Burn – юли 26, 1956
„No, Frodo 'failed'. It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But on must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however 'good'; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us.”

в писмо до Mrs. M. Wilson – април 11, 1956
„I find that many children become interested, even engrossed in The Lord of the Rings, from about 10 onwards. I think it rather a pity, really. It was not written for them. But then I am a very 'unvoracious' reader, and since I can seldom bring myself to read a work twice I think of the many things that I read--too soon! nothing, not even a (possible) deeper appreciation, for me replaces the bloom on a book, the freshness of the unread. Still what we read and when goes, like the people we meet, by 'fate.'„

в писмо до H. Cotton Minchin – април 1956
„Musicians want tunes, and musical notation; archaeologists want ceramics and metallurgy. Botanists want a more accurate description of the mallorn, of elanor, niphredil, alfirin, mallos, and symbelmyne; and historians want more details about the social and political structure of Gondor; general enquirers want information about the Wainriders, the Harad, Dwarvish origins, the Dead Men, the Beornings, and the missing two wizards (out of five). It will be a big volume, even if I attend only to the things revealed to my limited understanding!”

в писмо до Joanna de Bortadano – април 1956
„The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it; until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.”

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King
Some critics seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a With-the-flag-to-Pretoria spirit, and wilfully distort what is said in my tale. I have not that spirit and it does not appear in the story.

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King
The Eldar and the Numenoreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King
I do not think that at any rate any 'rational being' is wholly evil. Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before the Creation of the physical world. In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as possible.

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King
For if there is anything in a journey of any length, for me it is this: a deliverance from the plantlike state of helpless passive sufferer, an exercise however small of will, and mobility--and of curiosity, without which a rational mind becomes stultified.

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King
The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary.

J.R.R. Tolkien responding to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King
The story is not about JRRT at all, and is at no point an attempt to allegorize his experience of life--for that is what the objectifying of his subjective experience in a tale must mean, if anything.

в писмо до Michael Straight, New Republic editor – януари 1956
„…I regard Arwen and Aragorn as the most important of the Appendices; it is part of the essential story, and is only placed so, because it could not be worked into the main narrative without destroying its structure: which is planned to be 'hobbito-centric', that is, primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble.”

в писмо до Michael Straight, New Republic editor – януари 1956
„Thus Gandalf faced and suffered death; and came back or was sent back, as he says, with enhanced power. But though one may be in this remeinded of the Gospels, it is not really the same thing at all. The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write. Here I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees.”

в писмо до Michael Straight, New Republic editor – януари 1956
„Gandalf is a 'created' person; though possibly a spirit that existed before in the physical world. His function as a 'wizard' is an angelos or messenger from the Valar or Rulers: to assist the rational creatures of Middle-earth to resist Sauron, a power too great for them unaided.”

в писмо до Michael Straight, New Republic editor – януари 1956
„The Elves represent, as it were, the artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men.”

в писмо до Michael Straight, New Republic editor – януари 1956
„It is a 'fairy-story' but one written--according to the belief I once expressed in an extended essay 'On Fairy-stories' that they are the proper audience--for adults. Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting 'truth', different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or 'realism', and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief. To succeed in that was my primary object.”

в писмо до 'Mr. Thompson' – януари 14, 1956
„I love the vulgar and simple as dearly as the noble, and nothing moves my heart (beyond all the passions and heartbreaks of the world) so much as 'ennoblement' (from the Ugly Duckling to Frodo).”

в писмо до 'Mr. Thompson' – януари 14, 1956
„…'Legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition.”

в писмо до the Houghton Mifflin Co. – юни 1955
„The kernel of mythology, the matter of Luthien Tinuviel and Beren, arose from a small woodland glade filled with 'hemlocks' (or other white umbellifers) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula--to which I occasionally went when free from regimented duties while in Humber Garrison in 1918.”

в писмо до the Houghton Mifflin Co. – юни 1955
„I think the so-called 'fairy story' one of the highest forms of literature, and quite erroneously associated with children (as such).”

в писмо до the Houghton Mifflin Co. – юни 1955
„There are of course certain things and themes that move me specially. The inter-relations between the 'noble' and the ’simple' (or common, vulgar) for instance. The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving. I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.”

в писмо до the Houghton Mifflin Co. – юни 1955
„And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this 'history' is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.”

в писмо до the Houghton Mifflin Co. – юни 1955
„If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration.”

response to The New York Times Book Review, asking him, „What…makes you tick?”
„I don't tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.) My work did not 'evolve' into a serious work. It started like that. The so-called 'children’s story' [The Hobbit] was a fragment torn out of an already existing mythology. In so far as it was dressed up as 'for children', in style or manner, I regret it. So do the children. I am a philologist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person, and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. I am affable, but unsociable. I only work for private amusement, since I find my duties privately amusing.”

в писмо до W.H. Auden – юни 7, 1955
„…So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure.”

в писмо до W.H. Auden – юни 7, 1955
„All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why.”

в писмо до W.H. Auden – юни 7, 1955
„I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say ' a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do.”

в писмо до W.H. Auden – юни 7, 1955
„Most important perhaps, after Gothic was the discovery in Exeter of a Finnish Grammar. It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic langauge, and my 'own language' – or series of invented language – became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure.”

в писмо до W.H. Auden – юни 7, 1955
„I am afraid this is becoming a dreadful bore, and going on too long, at any rate longer than 'this contemptible person before you' merits. But it is difficult to stop once roused on such an absorbing topic to oneself as oneself.”

в писмо до Dora Marshall – март 3, 1955
„I had great difficulty (it took several years) to get my story published, and it is not easy to say who is most surprised at the result: myself or the publishers! But it remains an unfailing delight to me to find my own belief justified: that the 'fairy-story' is really an adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – декември 2, 1954
„I have only just had time to glance at the H.M. [Houghton Mifflin] 'jacket' stuff… This account must have been written by someone who has not read the book, but relied on hearsay inaccurately remembered. The 'giving away of the plot' is, of course, a silly (and unnecessary) procedure; but at least the plot given away might be that of the book described. Or is that part of the game?”

в писмо до Naomi Mitchison – септември 25, 1954
„The chief way in which Hobbits differ from experience is that they are not cruel, and have no blood-sports, and have by implication a feeling for 'wild creatures' that are not alas! very commonly found among the nearest contemporary parallels.”

в писмо до Peter Hastings – септември 1954
„But if they 'fell', as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things 'for himself, to be their Lord', these would 'be', even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other 'rational' creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least 'be' real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth’s greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad.”

в писмо до Peter Hastings – септември 1954
„There are thus no temples or 'churches' or fanes in this 'world' among 'good' peoples. They had little or no 'religion' in the sense of worship. For help they may call on a Vala (as Elbereth), as a Catholic might on a Saint, though no doubt knowing in theory as well as he that the power of the Vala was limited and derivative… I do not think Hobbits practised any form of worship or prayer (unless through exceptional contact with Elves).”

в писмо до Peter Hastings – септември 1954
„I don't think Tom [Bombadil] needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already 'invented' him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an 'adventure' on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out.”

в писмо до Peter Hastings – септември 1954
„The particular branch of the High-Elves concerned, the Noldor or Loremasters, were always on the side of ’science and technology', as we should call it: they wanted to have the knowledge that Sauron genuinely had, and those of Eregion refused the warnings of Gilgalad and Elrond. The particular 'desire' of the Eregion Elves – an 'allegory' if you like of a love of machinery, and technical devices – is also symbolised by their special friendship with the Dwarves of Moria.”

в писмо до Hugh Brogan – септември 18, 1954
„Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror – broken down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn't. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or Gamgee).”

в писмо до Hugh Brogan – септември 18, 1954
„Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.”

в писмо до Naomi Mitchison – април 25, 1954
„The Balrogs, of whom the whips were the chief weapons, were primeval spirits of destroying fire, chief servants of the primeval Dark Power of the First Age. They were supposed to have been all destroyed in the overthrow of Thangorodrim, his fortress in the North. But it is here found (there is usually a hang-over especially of evil from one age to another) that one had escaped and taken refuge under the mountains of Hithaeglin (the Misty Mountains). Is is observable that only the Elf knows what the thing is – and doubtless Gandalf.”

в писмо до Naomi Mitchison – април 25, 1954
„Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment'. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely.”

в писмо до Naomi Mitchison – април 25, 1954
„What I have, in fact done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in the Westron into English terms, with some differentiaition of style to represent dialectal differences.”

в писмо до Naomi Mitchison – април 25, 1954
„And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – януари 22, 1954
„I am not at all happy about the title 'the Two Towers'. It must if there is any real reference in it to Vol II refer to Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. But since there is so much made of the basic opposition of the Dark Tower and Minas Tirith, that seems very misleading. There is, of course, actually no real connecting link between Books III and IV, when cut off and presented separately as a volume.”

в писмо до Robert Murray – декември 2, 1953
„I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.”

в писмо до Robert Murray – декември 2, 1953
„The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults and practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – август 17, 1953
„The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 and 4; and can be left ambiguous – it might refer to Isengard and Barad-dur, or to Minas Tirith and B; or Isengard and Cirith Ungol.”

в писмо до Sir Patrick Browne – май 23, 1972
„Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant. However I do not find that it that it tends to puff one up; in my case at any rate it makes me feel extremely small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – август 8, 1953
„I am, however, opposed to having separate titles for each of the volumes, and no over-all title. The Lord of the Rings is a good over-all title, I think, but it is not applicable specially to Volume I, indeed it is probably least suited to that volume.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – април 11, 1953
„I am comforted in the thought that the verses are up to standard, and are (as I think) adequate and in place; though C.S. Lewis regards them as on the whole poor, regrettable, and out of place.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – октовмри 24, 1952
„Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst. And I regret to note that the billowing cloud recently pictured did not mark the fall of Barad-Dur, but was produced by its allies – or at least by persons who have decided to use the Ring for their own (of course most excellent) purposes.”

в писмо до Rayner Unwin – август 29, 1952
„I have recently made some tape-recordings of parts of the Hobbit and The Lord (notable the Gollum-passages and some pieces of 'Elvish') and was much surprised to discover their effectiveness as recitations, and (if I may say so) my own effectiveness as a narrator, I do a very pretty Gollum and Treebeard.

в писмо до Edith Bratt – март 2, 1916
„This miserable drizzling afternoon I have been reading up old military lecture-notes again:--and getting bored with them after an hour and a half. I have done some touches to my nonsense fairy language--to its improvement.
„I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!”

в писмо до Allen Unwin
„But if it is true that The Hobbit has come to stay and more will be wanted, I will start the process of thought, and try to get some idea of a them drawn from this material for treatment in a similar style and for a similar audience--possibly including actual hobbits. My daughter would like something on the Took family. One reader wants fuller details about Gandalf and the Necromancer. But that is too dark…”

в писмо до Christopher Tolkien – септември 23-25, 1944
„There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. Their article was answered, and the answer printed.”

в писмо до Christopher Tolkien – януари 30, 1945
„Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter--leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously powerful. What’s their next move?”

в писмо до Christopher Tolkien – май 29, 1945
But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgul-birds, 'for the liberation of the Shire'.

в писмо до Milton Waldman – края на 1951
„The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves)--hence the two kinds can dwell together (as at Bree), and are called just the Big Folk and Little Folk… They are made small (little more than half human stature, but dwindling as the years pass) partly to exhibit the pettiness of man, plain unimaginative parochial man--though not with either the smallness or the savageness of Swift, and mostly to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men 'at a pinch'.”

из „Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics”

Yet it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal--until the dragon comes.

There is not much poetry in the world like this; and though Beowulf may not be among the very greatest poems of our western world and its tradition, it has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity; it would still have power had it been written in some time or place unknown and without posterity, if it contained no name that could now be recognized or identified by research.

At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts--lixte se leoma ofer landra fela--and there is a sound of music; but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps.

There is, I think, no criticism more beside the mark than that which some have made, complaining that it is monsters in both halves that is so disgusting; one they could have stomached more easily. That is nonsense.

Beowulf is not an 'epic', not even a magnified 'lay'. No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose rather 'elegy'.

For Beowulf was not designed to tell the tale of Hygelac’s fall, or for that matter to give the whole biography of Beowulf, still less to write the history of the Geatish kingdom and its downfall. But it used knowledge of these things for its own purpose--to give that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind. These things are mainly on the outer edges or in the background because they belong there, if they are to function in this way. But in the centre we have an heroic figure of enlarged proportions.

We have none the less in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition, not a tune.

The criticism that the important matters are put on the outer edges misses this point of artistry, and indeed fails to see why the old things have in Beowulf such an appeal; it is the poet himself who made antiquity so appealing. His poem has more value in consequence, and is a greater contribution to early mediaeval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil. We may be thankful that the product of so noble a temper has been preserved by chance (if such it be) from the dragon of destruction.

The undoubtedly scriptural Cain is connected with eotenas and ylfe, which are the jotnar and alfar of Norse. But this is not due to mere confusion--it is an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was kindled. At this point new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited.

But we may remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death.

But if the specifically Christian was suppressed, so also were the old gods. Partly because they had not really existed, and had been always, in the Christian view, only delusions or lies fabricated by the evil one, the gastbona, to whom the hopeless turned especially in times of need.

But it is the mood of the author, the essential cast of his imaginative apprehension of the world, that is my concern, not history for its own sake; I am interested in that time of fusion only as it may help us to understand the poem. And in the poem I think we may observe not confusion, a half-hearted or a muddled business, but a fusion that has occurred at a given point of contact between old and new, a product of thought and deep emotion.

I would suggest, then, that the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness. The key to the fusion-point of imagination that produced this poem lies, therefore, in those very references to Cain which have often been used as a stick to beat an ass--taken as an evident sign (were any needed) of the muddled heads of early Anglo-Saxons.

Beowulf is not, then the hero of an heroic lay, precisely. He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy.

For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. It is possible, I think, to be moved by the power of myth and yet to misunderstand the sensation, to ascribe it wholly to something else that is also present: to metrical art, style, or verbal skill.

The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.

Folk-tales in being, as told--for the 'typical folk-tale', of course, is merely an abstract conception of research nowhere existing--do often contain elements that are thin and cheap, with little even potential virtue; but they also contain much that is far more powerful, and that cannot be sharply separated from myth, being derived from it, or capable in poetic hands of turning into it: that is of becoming largely significant--as a whole, accepted unanalysed.

For, in fact, if there were a real discrepancy between theme and style, that style would not be felt as beautiful but as incongruous or false. And that incongruity is present in some measure in all the long Old English poems, save one--Beowulf. The paradoxical contrast that has been drawn between matter and manner in Beowulf has thus an inherent literary improbability.

Yet this poetic talent, we are to understand, has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse. Even if Milton had done this (and he might have done worse), we should perhaps pause to consider whether his poetic handling had not had some effect upon the trivial theme; what alchemy had been performed upon the base metal; whether indeed it remained base or trivial when he had finished with it.

We are told again that the main story of Beowulf is a wild folk-tale. Quite true, of course. It is true of the main story of King Lear, unless in that case you would prefer to substitue silly for wild.

But it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held. For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short.

За превода на Беоулф

The imagination of the author of Beowulf moved upon the threshold of Christian chivalry, if indeed it had not already passed within. If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made. Perhaps the most important function of any translation used by a student is to provide not a model for imitation, but an exercise for correction. The publisher of a translation cannot often hedge, or show all the variations that have occurred to him; but the presentation of one solution should suggest other and (perhaps) better ones. The primary poetic object of the use of compounds was compression, the force of brevity, the packing of the pictorial and emotional colour tight within a slow sonorous metre made of short balanced word-groups.Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) is not a very difficult language, though it is neglected by many of those concerned with the long period of our history during which it was spoken and written. But this is an age of potted criticism and pre-digested literary opinion; and in the making of these cheap substitues for food translations unfortunately are too often used. On the strength of a nodding acquaintance of this sort (it may be supposed), one famous critic informed his public that Beowulf was 'only small beer'. Yet if beer at all, it is a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death.

Из „За приказките”

For the moment I will say only this: a 'fairy-story' is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.

Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

In that realm a man may, perhaps count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is a dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beast and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.

I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted, for though Ihave been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them profesionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.

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