The Other Way 'Round - Page 5
© Michael Martinez
In a draft for a letter to one of his readers, Tolkien wrote in January 1956: "It was just as the 1914 War burst upon me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend upon the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa...)." (Letter 180)
Middle-earth still lay decades ahead of Tolkien, a distant glimmer on the horizon of his future, when he made his innocent discovery in 1914. There were stories which would soon burst from his hand, imaginative tales he hoped might one day constitute a mythology for England. In 1951, Tolkien confessed to the publisher Milton Waldman (of Collins, to whom he was hoping to sell the as-yet unpublished Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion books):
But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio [tr: from the beginning] was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite. I was an undergraduate before thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests -- opposite poles of science and romance -- but integrally related. I am not 'learned' [Footnote: Though I have thought about them a good deal.] in the matters of myth and fairy-story, however, for in such things (as far as is known to me) I have always been seeking material, things of a certain tone and air, and not simple knowledge. Also -- and here I hope I shall not sound absurd -- I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff....(Letter 131)In December 1953, Tolkien noted to his friend Father Robert Murray: "Certainly I have not been nurtured by English Literature....I was bought up on the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer. Also being a philologist, getting a large part of any aesthetic pleasure that I am capable of from the form of words (and especially from the fresh association of word-form with word-sense), I have always best enjoyed things in a foreign language, or one so remote as to feel like it (such as Anglo-Saxon)...." (Letter 142)
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