199 From a letter to Caroline Everett 

24 June 1957

Though it is a great compliment, I am really rather sorry to find myself the subject of a thesis. I do not feel inclined to go into biographical detail. I doubt its relevance to criticism. Certainly in any form less than a complete biography, interior and exterior, which I alone could write, and which I do not intend to write. The chief biographical fact to me is the completion of The Lord of the Rings, which still astonishes me. A notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher, partly through lack of time, partly through lack of single-minded concentration, I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties, and bring it to a conclusion. I suppose, because from the beginning it began to catch up in its narrative folds visions of most of the things that I have most loved or hated.

I did not go to a 'public' school in the sense of a residential school; but to a great 'grammar school', of ultimately medieval foundation. My experience had therefore nothing whatever in common with that of Mr. Lewis. I was at the one school from 1900 to 1911, with one short interval. I was as happy or the reverse at school as anywhere else, the faults being my own. I ended up anyway as a perfectly respectable and tolerably successful senior. I did not dislike games. They were not compulsory, fortunately, as I have always found cricket a bore: chiefly, though, because I was not good at it. ....

I have not published any other short story but Leaf by Niggle. They do not arise in my mind. Leaf by Niggle arose suddenly and almost complete. It was written down almost at a sitting, and very nearly in the form in which it now appears. Looking at it myself now from a distance I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with The Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story.....

I read the works of [E.R.J Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him. I heard him in Mr. Lewis's room in Magdalen College read aloud some parts of his own works – from the Mistress of Mistresses, as far as I remember. He did it extremely well. I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit. My opinion of them is almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on p. 104 of the Essays presented to Charles Williams. Except that I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw fit to say of himself. Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read. But he was certainly not an 'influence'.

The general idea of the Lord of the Rings was certainly in my mind from an early stage: that is from the first draft of Book I Chapter 2, written in the 1930s. From time to time I made rough sketches or synopses of what was to follow, immediately or far ahead; but these were seldom of much use: the story unfolded itself as it were. The tying-up was achieved, so far as it is achieved, by constant re-writing backwards. I had a many-columned calendar with dates and a brief statement of where all the major actors or groups were on each day and what they were doing.

The last volume was naturally the most difficult, since by that time I had accumulated a large number of narrative debts, and set some awkward problems of presentation in drawing together the separated threads. But the problem was not so much 'what happened?', about which I was only occasionally in doubt – though praised for 'invention' I have not in fact any conscious memory of sitting down and deliberately thinking out any episode – as how to order the account of it. The solution is imperfect. Inevitably.

Obviously the chief problem of this son, is how to bring up Aragorn unexpectedly to the raising of the Siege, and yet inform readers of what he had been up to. Told in full in its proper place (Vol III, ch.2), though it would have been better for the episode, it would have destroyed Chapter 6. Told in full, or indeed in part, in retrospect it would be out of date and hold up the action (as it does in Chapter 9).

The solution, imperfect, was to cut down the whole episode (which in full would belong rather to a Saga of Aragorn Arathorn's son than to my story) and tell the ending of it briefly during the inevitable pause after the Battle of the Pelennor.

I was in fact longest held up – by exterior circumstances as well as interior – at the point now represented by the last words of Book iii (reached about 1942 or 3). After that Chapter 1 of Book v remained very long as a mere opening (as far as the arrival in Gondor); Chapter 2 did not exist; and Chapter 3, Muster of Rohan, had got no further than the arrival at Harrowdale. Chapter 1 of Book iv had hardly got beyond Sam's opening words (Vol II p. 209). Some pans of the adventures of Frodo and Sam on the confines of Mordor and in it had been written (but were eventually abandoned).