For fans of Tolkien's fiction, this book contains his most interesting reflections on the mythology and the religious underpinnings of Middle-Earth, certainly more insightful than everything published in the cash-grab 12-volume History of Middle Earth.

For fans of literary non-fiction, this book also happens to be an incredibly moving and well-written series of letters by a man whose life spanned the twentieth century . . . the letter from Tolkien (a WW1 veteran) to his son before he's shipped off to fight in WW2 is legitimately among the most poignant letters of all time. In other words, even if you removed the Middle-Earth material, Letters is still easily 5/5.

What a ride!

I really enjoyed this. This book is for ppl really interested in Tolkien and his masterpieces chiefly those on Middle Earth.

I came to know a lot more about the man behind the books and also about Middle Earth and it's myths. There are answers for very interesting matters, like hobbits, ents and the Elvish tongues.

It was such a pity that he couldn't publish the Silmarillion during his life time as I can feel that through out his letters this was in his mind all the time and he did work long and hard to achieve it.

Probably boring to most people but fascinating for me.

What a brilliant, brilliant man.

“Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.” (To Christopher Tolkien, 1943)

What better way to enter the mind of a mentor you'll never get to meet than to read his letters?

There are so many facets I gleaned about the man by reading these letters--his humor, sadness, fear & humility.

OK.

This is a lengthy collection of many of the most interesting and relevant letters J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, spanning basically from when he was a young man to shortly before he died. They cover all manner of topics, and whether or not you enjoy this book is going to depend on how interested you are in the Lord of the Rings and the man who created it. I am extremely interested in this, so I loved it.

One of the reasons I found these letters so interesting is because I got a real insight into who Tolkien was as an individual and as a writer. This is germane to a lot of discussions today--you'll constantly see people arguing about what Tolkien would have wanted wrt new adaptations, etc. But I think sometimes when you ask "What would [historical figure] have been like today?", it's a little bit like asking what Paris would be like if it was in Texas--people and places are formed by the cultures they exist in, and just wanting to transmute something from the past into today can obscure more than it reveals. A better question might be "What kind of man was Tolkien in the time that he lived in"? Regardless, the temptation to bring him into our time is great, and I can't help myself--forgive me if I digress occasionally in this summary of what I learned while reading this book.

Women and Men

One thing that comes out right away when Tolkien writes about women is that he was profoundly religious in a way you basically don't see today. His understanding of what women and men are are is derived from a literal reading of Christian tradition, where women were both created from and meant to be subordinate to men. He views men and women as different not simply in physical ways or surface-level preferences, but fundamentally not the same in a way that almost seems to treat women as a different species. Here's probably the single most objectionable passage from the entire book, from a letter to his son Christopher:

Under this impulse (a mentor relationship with a man), [women] can in fact often achieve very remarkable insight and understanding, even of things otherwise outside their natural range: for it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male. Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him.

This is unfortunately quite foul, and I wasn't happy to read it (indeed, who could have imagined that a conservative man born in 1892 might have some questionable opinions?). However, I do think that these letters and Tolkien's biography reveal some important context for the kind of conservative Tolkien was. When you encounter American conservatism (and specifically sexism), it's often intensely angry or spiteful, incels venting fury at the sluts who won't give them the time of day or smearing women in tech for supposed inferior abilities. While I can't say that this never happens in Tory conservatism, it does feel like a notably different strain--one that is less mean-spirited, more deeply rooted in a kind of genteel affect.

These are not the letters of a man who hates women. I was often impressed by Tolkien's comments to his adult son--in multiple letters, he cautions Christopher against seeing women as "guiding stars or divinities", urging him instead to understand women as "fallen human beings with souls in peril" or as "companions in shipwreck"--an outlook I'm not sure many men took a century ago. He defends the sheild-maiden character Eowyn, saying that she "like many brave women was capable of great military gallantry at a crisis". We know that later in life, at great personal cost, Tolkien spent his last years away from his beloved Oxford, moving to a smaller community by the sea where his wife Edith could fulfill a lifelong dream and play a society wife. His letters after her death are touching:

I do not feel quite ‘real’ or whole, and in a sense there is no one to talk to. (You share this, of course, especially in the matter of letters.) Since I came of age, and our 3 years separation was ended, we had shared all joys and griefs, and all opinions (in agreement or otherwise), so that I still often find myself thinking ‘I must tell E. about this’ – and then suddenly I feel like a castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky after the loss of a great ship.

So while most people today wouldn't heartily endorse Tolkien's views, I do think that both because of the origins of his antiquated ideas about women (deeply considered religious beliefs) and his fairly solid track record of taking women in his life seriously and treating them well, I am tempted to identify it as a fairly benign form of sexism. Also, I do find myself wondering what he would have thought about When Harry Met Sally:

In this fallen world the ‘friendship’ that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman. The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject. He is as good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones. This ‘friendship’ has often been tried: one side or the other nearly always fails.

Race

There's a reasonable-sounding take that Tolkien's Middle-Earth represents a racist worldview and ideology. The noble white heroes, often descended from nobility, must fight off hordes of dirty, dark-skinned humanoids who have no culture and are threatening to take over the pure, pastoral lands in the West/North. Occasional allusions are made to "swarthy" (brown) evil men who come from distant lands and worship a foreign god. Right-wing groups (specifically thinking of Italy here) have even from time to time used The Lord of the Rings as a touchstone in their messaging.

So, what do these letters suggest about how Tolkien viewed race? With the caveat that these letters were gathered and collected with the help of his family and estate, there's fairly little to suggest that Tolkien was racist in the sense most people mean--holding dislike or hatred towards members of another race. He famously wrote to German censors inquiring about potential Jewish background that "I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people", and he goes on record multiple times talking about his hatred of the "wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine". To Christopher (currently serving in the army), he writes "I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust". I mean, this is honestly fairly impressive--for reference, this is how Winston Churchill was talking at the time:

I do not admit ... for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

For the time, I actually think Tolkien had a fairly enlightened view, one that rejected race science or hierarchies and mostly felt people should be left alone.

The parts we would take issue with today are his racial and cultural separatism. He basically seems to believe that people should stay where they are and keep to their own culture and people, sometimes to a ridiculous extent--he writes at one point that he "loves England but not Great Britain, and certainly not the British Commonwealth"! And the charge that the evil enemies are all located in the southeast? Fairly easily fended off, given that in The Silmarillion, which contains the more overarching story of Middle-Earth, the ultimate evil of Morgoth is actually located in the far north--however, he is destroyed before the events of LotR, and his apprentice Sauron is forced to flee somewhere far from the seafaring Numenoreans in the west, so there really was no place to go for him but the east. Simple as.

Americans

There is one group Tolkien did repeatedly talk about hating, and I've got some bad news about who it is: it's us. Here are some of the greatest hits:

It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)...perhaps you could tell me how long there is before I must produce samples that might hope to satisfy Transatlantic juvenile taste

The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it, though without much more hope of effect than in the case of the appalling jacket they produced for The Hobbit.

I am sorry about The Pied Piper,2 I loathe it. God help the children! I would as soon give them crude and vulgar plastic toys. Which of course they will play with, to the ruin of their taste. Terrible presage of the most vulgar elements in Disney.

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.).

Really didn't hold back a lot. I think part of the dislike is due to an aesthetic difference in the kinds of media Americans tend to enjoy--fast, dramatic, explosive, sexual, violent, and not at all the reserved, austere, contemplative work that Tolkien was interested in. The other source of his dislike is that even at this time, American culture was taking over the world. One of the man's deepest beliefs is that a beautiful world is not one where we all speak the same language, consume the same media, and believe the same things, but is instead one where every small community or group has its own traditions and ways of being. Given this, it's not terribly surprising that he had a deep distaste for American media, probably the most powerful homogenizing cultural force the world has ever seen. One more quote to see us out:

It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be.

Politics

The other group that Tolkien seems to dislike nearly as much as Americans is bureaucrats. Running through these letters is a deep skepticism of power and of planning, largely because he is distrustful of anyone who ends up being able to wield power. Tolkien identifies more than once in his letters as an anarchist, writing "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy". This seems a little surprising, given that the man very clearly behaved and presented as a kind of upper-crust Tory, but maybe we shouldn't be startled that this very weird man had kind of unusual politics. His ideal political setup basically involves nobody bothering anybody else, a kind of libertarianish world where at very least you can be expected to be left in peace, outside the domain of meddling planners who think they know what's best for you.

He also has an extreme distaste for development/modernity. His entire ouvre can be read as a screed against technology--after all, the rings of power are a form of invention that allow the wearer to wield more power than they otherwise could, and Sauron/Saruman are both industrializing powers. In the Second Age, he has the elven kingdom of Eregion destroyed by evil forces specifically because they partnered with the dwarves to research and develop new technology, in some sense 'digging too deep'. He often comes across as comically curmudgeonly, in one letter writing "I wish the 'infernal combustion' engine had never been invented". He goes beyond simply griping at points, writing to his son, who is actively fighting Hitler by flying in the RAF, that "nothing can amend his grief that he has any connection to [airplanes]", and that using modern planes and weapons is like "trying to conquer Sauron with the ring". Think about what kind of father would say that to their deployed child! He is still affectionate always, describing Christopher as "a hobbit among orcs" (not a high opinion of his countrymen!), but his strong rebuke of his son's work took me aback. But it shouldn't be surprising--as mentioned before, he is sincerely Catholic, so in some sense, winning the war against Nazis (or anyone) is completely unimportant when compared to the task of keeping one's eternal soul pure and doing right by God.

We're entering highly speculative mode, but were he to exist in America today, I think Tolkien would be happiest among the Amish in Pennsylvania, or maybe living in a liberatrianish commune somewhere in New Hampshire or the Mountain West. I think he would have genuine appreciation for Joe Biden, both because he's a fellow devout Catholic, and he represents a kind of older and more respectful mode of politics. I can say with 100% certainty that he would have disliked Trump, perhaps because Trump is such a uniquely American figure. He would unfortunately be a huge NIMBY, writing strongly worded letters any time anyone wanted to cut down a tree to build apartments for 200 people. Always interested in ideas of immortality and aging, I think he would regard the Thiel-world of technobillionaires injecting themselves with the blood of the young or trying to upload their brains to the cloud as genuinely Satanic.

General Thoughts on Tolkien's Work

This is swiftly becoming unwieldy, so I'm going to pick up the pace of this review a tiny bit. A classic 110 IQ interpretation of Tolkien is to say "he hated allegory, so nothing in Lord of the Rings represents anything"--this is totally wrong. There are many quotes where he talks about disliking allegory, but when he says "allegory", he's thinking of Animal-Farm-esque writing, where there's a 1:1 comparison between characters and reality, where the book can really only be interpreted in one way. He points out that this kind of book becomes uninteresting as soon as the exact situation has ceased to exist--instead, he's very interested in what he calls "applicability", which is basically how we think of allegory or meaning today. Nothing in Lord of the Rings is realy a direct comparison (with the exception of Galadriel and Mother Mary), but he very much acknowledges that his own ideas, values, and understandings are incorporated into the story, and he is A-OK with readers saying "hobbits represent X, elves represent Y".

What does he think his stories are about? He gives a few answers throughout, including (but not limited to) man and the machine, Catholicism, industrialism, mortality, "the fall", technology, "hoarding memory" and "who has the right to divine honor", but NOT really about power. I think the best take is it doesn't actually matter what he thinks it's about--authors are much more like conduits than gods, and while he did the hard work of combining various influences present at the time, the art stands on its own. It can be about whatever we think it's about.

I often see haters writing that Tolkien is rolling in his grave at the Rings of Power adaptations, or whatever. I think it's mixed--he almost definitely wouldn't have liked them, but he would have absolutely loved the money that came along with them. He is constantly complaining in his letters that he has no money, even at the end of his life after a long and successful career. Here he is talking about a translation of his work that he wasn't in love with:

My chief interest in being translated is pecuniary, as long as the basic text is treated with respect; so that even if the touchiness of parenthood is outraged, I should wish to refrain from doing or saying anything that may damage the good business of being published in other countries.

At one point, he mentions that he's feeling very good about being able to get his wife a wheelchair when she's sick. This is, again, AFTER he published the most important English-language work in a century and spent thirty years being a professor at Oxford. I don't think he was necessarily bad with money, but then as now, publishing books was not a cash faucet.

Overall, a good book, but not entirely necessary unless you're a bit of a fanatic. With that said, I had a great time reading. 5 stars.

I’m still going to fight him.

Fascinating collection of letters. I only got about halfway before I had to move on, but that half took him through the war years and the publication of LOTR. Politically and socially he was half curmudgeon, instinctually conservative, suspicious of progress (particularly airplanes)--a lot like Chesterton in his traditionalism and his Catholicism. Tolkien and Lewis were much better friends than I had realized. It appears that every book either man wrote in this period, he read out loud in its entirety to the other. They were quite poor and, in this period, very unsure that they would ever write anything of note. Quite inspiring, actually/

A far better way of understanding Tolkien's life, beliefs and motivations than any secondary biography. Here, you get the man in his own words, holding forth on topics as varied as the publishing industry, the economics of the automobile, and the Catholic view of the soul. The copious stacks of letters are arranged chronologically and span the majority of his life from the early 1910s to the 1970s, and I would highly recommend reading them all from start to finish so that you can glean a clear sense of his progression as a writer over the course of his lifetime.

The more I got to know him through his letters, the less I *liked* him for his conservative Tory beliefs. However, I *admire* him all the more for sticking to his guns and pursuing his writing in the face of an unsympathetic publishing and academic industry.

This is a must-read for any Tolkien fan.

I'm really glad I re-read this after reading Humphrey Carpenter and John Garth's biographies. These three books do really make a "trilogy" of sorts, and it presents a very well-realized portrait of Tolkien, imo.
Update: I just listened to the (expanded) version read by Samuel West on Audible. He does a terrific job (as usual), and I do recommend it if you have 30 hours to spare!

This is SO good. Tolkien is Wonderfull.

The closest we'll get to an autobiography and jam packed with insight on everything from theology, fatherhood, linguistics, philology, and of course, his own legendarium. A must read for any fan of Tolkien's work.