The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
the 1981 collection, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien — the authorial gloss on the legendarium
Nature
The 1981 collection of selected correspondence, chosen and edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the collaboration of Christopher Tolkien: roughly 350 letters spanning 1914 to 1973. For the vault it is the authorial gloss and annotation source — Tolkien’s own commentary on his mythology, set down at leisure in reply to readers, publishers, and his children, and free of editorial mediation.
Contents
The long letter of 1951 to Milton Waldman is the fullest single account of the whole legendarium: there Tolkien describes the Silmarillion as the ancient body of legend from which the “great tales” of The Lord of the Rings are drawn — his phrase is of “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the vast and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story” — and he calls the whole “the Silmarillion” and “my legendarium”. Elsewhere he comments on the nature of the Valar and the Gift of Men, on the Downfall of Númenor and its Atlantis-meaning (the “Atlantist” dream descending from his own), on the origin of the Elves’ fading, and on Galadriel, the Istari, and the shape of evil — so the letters gloss the very passages whose texts this vault records.
Composition
The correspondence was preserved by Tolkien’s heirs; Carpenter selected and annotated it, and Christopher Tolkien supplied identifications and notes. A revised and expanded edition appeared in 2023 with additional letters and the shorter pieces. The single most-cited letter for the Silmarillion is the Waldman letter, the author’s own “draft” of an introduction to the mythology.