260 From a letter to Carey Biyton

[Blyton had asked Tolkien's permission to compose a Hobbit Overture.]

16 August 1964

You certainly have my permission to compose any work that you wished based on The Hobbit. .... As an author I am honoured to hear that I have inspired a composer. I have long hoped to do so, and hoped also that I might perhaps find the result intelligible to me, or feel that it was akin to my own inspiration – as much as are, say, some (but not all) of Pauline Baynes' illustrations. ....

I have little musical knowledge. Though I come of a musical family, owing to defects of education and opportunity as an orphan, such music as was in me was submerged (until I married a musician), or transformed into linguistic terms. Music gives me great pleasure and sometimes inspiration, but I remain in the position in reverse of one who likes to read or hear poetry but knows little of its technique or tradition, or of linguistic structure.