Reading the 1981 book of Tolkien's Letters I have formed a view of Tolkien as a narrow minded and tiresome know-it-all, which is disappointing. I have always considered him an imaginative writer, not one with poetic or literary skill, but someone who had absorbed enough of Wordsworth to write a pastoral, who loved life enough for the reader to relish his descriptions of everyday things and with an imagination deep enough to keep bright the wonder in a fairy story for a very long span. I will resist this new insight into his character affecting my opinion of his work but from past experience it might do.
From the letters, as a reminder for those who have read the collection and not as an argument, some examples are his condescending, almost sneering, remarks about 'jive music' and 'jam sessions' which he must have picked up overhearing US troops in a pub. A piano is for playing Chopin on, he says. I am quite sure he knew as much about Chopin as Duke Ellington. He loves England but not Great Britain or, shudder, the wider Commonwealth. He hates Celtic myth. He also reveals a remarkable ignorance when it comes to ancient Greece from which I infer his Anglo-Saxon world of study was looked down on (in the manner of Oxford profs) but which doesn't excuse his distaste for and schoolboy understanding of Greek culture. He is always right, I have never met a deeply religious person who was not
always right, Chaucer is
not the father of English Literature because, again, JRRT is studying Anglo-Saxon authors who preceded Chaucer.
He is not a bad person; snobs are more usually daft. There is an interesting letter to the German publishing firm, about to translate the Hobbit in 1938, who have asked him if he is of 'Aryan extraction', and to which 'impertinent and irrelevant inquiry' he replies with perception, explicitly praising the 'gifted' Jewish race.
In contrast and as an antidote, here is a
1 hr interview with GRR Martin, an author whose prose I can't digest, where he comes across as a down to earth, not particularly learned, old guy I would love to hang out with in a bar. Not so Tolkien. If I heard him chatting with his cronies in a tucked away English pub I would not enjoy my beer until the moment in the evening I had him trembling in rage.
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