238 From a letter to Jane Neave

[Tolkien's aunt appears to have suggested that she return a cheque he had sent her, so that the money could be spent on buying a wheelchair for Tolkien's wife Edith, who was suffering from arthritis.]

18 July l962

As for your noble and self-sacrificing suggestion. Cash the cheque, please! And spend it. One cannot attach conditions to a gift; but I should be best pleased, if it was spent soon, and on yourself. It is a very small sum. Taken only from my present abundance, over and above the needs of Edith and myself, and of my children. Edith happily does not need a chair; and I could give her one if she did. (It is an astonishing situation, and I hope I am sufficiently grateful to God. Only a little while ago I was wondering if we should be able to go on living here, on my inadequate pension. I have never been able to give before, and I have received unrepayable gifts in the past. .... I receive as a septuagenarian a retirement pension, of which I feel it proper to give away at least what the Tax collectors leave in my hands (a National one, I mean: I refused the University pension, and took the lump sum and invested it in a trust managed by my bank). All this, simply to assure you that the little gift was a personal pleasure, hardly worthy of much thanks; also to assure you that I can help more if needed. Saving universal catastrophe, I am not likely to be hard up again in my time. This is the advice of a very shrewd old publisher. Also I gather that he told Edmund Fuller that my books were the most important, and also the most profitable thing that he had published in a long life, and that they would certainly remain so after his time and his sons' time. (This is just for you: it is unwise to advertise still more to boast of good fortune, as all Fairy-stories teach. So say nout. I do not want to wake up one morning and find it all

a dream!)....

I am glad to say that we are both rather better this year. .... I had some treatment last September, and have been more or less free and easy on the legs since, though my usual lumbago afflicted me in June. Edith is markedly better this year; and we managed a train journey to Bournemouth in July (2nd to 9th). Diet has done much good. We should have to reorganize life altogether if she was reduced to a chair! She does all the cooking, most of the housework, and some of the gardening. I am afraid that this often means rather heroic effort; but of course, within limits, that is beneficial. Still it is hard being attacked in two different ways at once – or three. Great increase in weight due to operations. Arthritis, which is made more painful and acute by the weight; and an internal complaint, small internal lesions (I gather), which cause pain, often incalculably, either by strain, or vibration, or by digestive irritations. Still we accepted this verdict more or less gratefully, after she had spent some time in a nursing home 'for observation' (ominous words).

We lost our 'help', because of ill health, that we had had for about eight years, last autumn. If ever you pray for temporal blessings for us, my dear, ask for the near-miracle of finding some help. Oxford is probably one of the hardest places even in this England, to find such a thing.

The book of poems is going along. Pauline Baynes has accepted the contract and is now beginning on the illustration. The publishers certainly intend it for Christmas. I have done my part.

At the moment I am engaged on putting into order, with notes and brief preface, my translation of Sir Gawain and of Pearl, before returning to my major work the Silmarillion. The Pearl is another poem in the same MS as Sir Gawain. Neither has any author's name attached; but I believe (as do most others) that they are by the same person. The Pearl is much the more difficult to translate, largely for metrical reasons ; but being attracted by apparently insoluble metrical problems, I started to render it years ago. Some stanzas were actually broadcast, in the late 1920s. I finished it, more or less, before the war; and it disappeared under the weight of the War, and of The Lord of the Rings. The poem is very well-known to mediævalists; but I never agreed to the view of scholars that the metrical form was almost impossibly difficult to write in, and quite impossible to render in modern English. NO scholars (or, nowadays, poets) have any experience in composing themselves in exacting metres. I made up a few stanzas in the metre to show that composition in it was not at any rate 'impossible' (though the result might today be thought bad). The original Pearl was more difficult: a translator is not free, and this text is very hard in itself, often obscure, partly from the thought and style, and partly from the corruptions of the only surviving MS.

As these things interest you, I send you the original stanzas of my own – related inevitably as everything was at one time with my own mythology. I will send you a copy of the Pearl, as soon as I can get a carbon copy made. It has 101 twelve-line stanzas. It is (I think) evidently inspired by the loss in infancy of a little daughter. It is thus in a sense an elegy; but the author uses the then fashionable (it was contemporary with Chaucer) dream-framework, and uses the occasion to discuss his own theological views about salvation. Though not all acceptable to modern taste, it has moments of poignancy; and though it may in our view be absurdly complex in technical form, the poet surmounts his own obstacles on the whole with success. The stanzas have twelve lines, with only three rhymes: an octet of four couplets rhyming a b, and a quartet rhyming b c. In addition each line has internal alliteration (it occasionally but rarely fails in the original; the version is inevitably less rich). And if that is not enough, the poem is divided into fives. Within a five-stanza group the chief word of the last line must be echoed in the first line of the following stanza; the last line of the five-group is echoed at the beginning of the next; and the first line of all is to wind up echoed in the last line of all. But oddly enough there are not 100 stanzas, but 101. In group XV there are six stanzas. It has long been supposed that one of these was an uncancelled revision. But there are also 101 stanzas in Sir Gawain. The number was evidently aimed at, though what its significance was for the author has not been discovered. The grouping by fives also connects the poem with Gawain, where the poet elaborates the significance: the Five Wounds, the Five Joys, the Five virtues, and the Five wits.

Enough of that. I hope you are not bored. I enclose on a separate sheet the opening stanza in the original, and in my version, as a specimen.