LotR - Foreword

[Bêthberry]

Hearsay, davem, hearsay! Not allowable in court.

Perhaps this is the time to note another piece of reported comment from Tolkien. My HarperCollins paperback includes a "Note on The Text" by Douglas A. Anderson, dated April 1933 from Ithaca, N.Y., which is placed before the (Second) Foreword. Here is what Anderson says about Tolkien's decision to write a second foreword:

In addition to revisions within the text itself, Tolkien replaced his original foreword with a new one. He was pleased to remove the original foreword; in his check copy, he wrote of it: "confusing (as it does) real personal matters with the 'machinery' of the Tale, is a serious mistake."

A very quick review of the Letters found no reference to the Forewords, but perhaps someone who knows them better than I can find one.

I did, however, find a passage in a Letter which speaks to an issue we have discussed here, why Tolkien would refrain from directly addressing his 'religious' meaning. This is from Letter 281, written to Rayner Unwin, 15 December 1965, so it is written around the same time as the Second Foreword. He is discussing one of the publisher's 'Blurbs' for TH; he objected to the blub as he felt it destroyed the 'magic' of the tale. Bolding mine.

Bilbo was specially selected by the authority and insight of Gandalf as abnormal: he had a good share of hobbit virtues: shrewd sense, generosity, patience and fortitude, and also a strong 'spark' yet unkindled. The story and its sequelare not about 'types' or the cure of bourgeois smugness by wider experience, but about the achievements of specially graced and gifted individuals. I would say, if saying such things did not spoil what it tries to make explicit, 'by ordained individuals, inspired and guided by an Emissary to ends beyond their individual education and enlargement'. This is clear in The Lord of the Rings;but it is present, if veiled, in The Hobbite from the beginning, and is allueded to in Gandalf's last words.

My own personal interpretation of this is that for Tolkien, story-telling is preferable to explict statements because it requires a more active form of participation in the generation of meaning than the passive receiving of information from direct statement.