245 To Rhona Beare

[Answers to the following questions: (1) In the 'English runes' used for Anglo-Saxon inscriptions, the rune  does not stand for G as it does in The Lord of the Rings. Why not? (2) What happened to Elves when they died in battle?]

25 June 1963

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Miss Beare,

The 'cirth' or runes in the 'L.R.' were invented for that story and, within it, have no supposed historical connexion with the Germanic Runic alphabet, to which the English gave its most elaborate development. There is thus nothing to be surprised at if similar signs have different values. The similarity of shapes is inevitable in alphabets devised primarily for cut[ting] or scratching on wood and so made of lines directly or diagonally across the grain. The signs used in the cirth are nearly [all] to be extracted from the basic pattern  ;the possibilities being decreased by the avoidance of the juncture of a diagonal with the bottom of an upright (the exceptions are few and limited to cases where as in  there is also juncture at the top). They are increased by the repetition on the opposite side of an upright of any diagonal appendage, & by repeating half the basic pattern:  hence  etc.

As for the Elves. Even in these legends we see the Elves mainly through the eyes of Men. It is in any case clear that neither side was fully informed about the ultimate destiny of the other. The Elves were sufficiently longeval to be called by Man 'immortal'. But they were not unageing or unwearying. Their own tradition was that they were confined to the limits of this world (in space and time), even if they died, and would continue in some form to exist in it until 'the end of the world'. But what 'the end of the world' portended for it or for themselves they did not know (though they no doubt had theories). Neither had they of course any special information concerning what 'death' portended for Men. They believed that it meant 'liberation from the circles of the world', and was in that respect to them enviable. And they would point out to Men who envied them that a dread of ultimate loss, though it may be indefinitely remote, is not necessarily the easier to bear if it is in the end ineluctably certain : a burden may become heavier the longer it is borne.

I hope you will forgive pencil and a crabbed and not too legible hand. I am (temporarily, I hope) deprived of the use of my right hand and arm, and I am in the early stages of teaching my left hand. Right-handed pens increase the crabbedness, but a pencil accommodates itself.

Yours sincerely
J. R. R. Tolkien.