Fordim,
And there's another letter even eerier than that one....the draft for Carole Batten-Phelps in 1971.
This is the story where Tolkien was visited by a famous MP who had been "struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time". Tolkien politely declined knowing these pictures at which point this happened:
Quote:
When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly he said, "Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?"
Poor Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said, "No, I don't suppose so any longer." I have never been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the imperfections of "chosen instruments", and indeed what sometimes see their lamentable unfitness for their purpose.
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The words "Christian" and "Christianity" never appear in this quote. Yet it's hard to read this and not get the feeling that Tolkien is no longer talking about Eru--he is talking about God and his own relationship with him, and God's use of his talents. We've come a ways from the earliest days of the Legendarium when Tolkien and his friends spoke mainly in terms of moral regeneration of the English. This is setting things on a whole different plane. I would love to know how and when this occurred. I do think it's why we can argue endlessly about whether the Legendarium has any explicit Christian or Catholic elements. It seems to me that what we start out with --the emphasis on universal myth--is a lot different than where we finally end up. Some people love this shift, while others including Christopher Tolkien are not especially happy with it.
That leaves another question unsolved. Were Tolkien's "revisions" (and I mean revisions in the widest sense involving everything from symbolic references to Mary or the host and essays like the Finrod/Andreth debate) so drastic that they completely changed the nature of the Legendarium by making it more Christian and geared to men? Or were these just surface gloss with the basic story and its emphasis on elves and universal myth still lying intact at the heart of things?