*FROM HIS CHILDHOOD*
"I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and beautiful at whatever cost of peril."
"I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language." ~Commenting on his own story about a dragon
*LANGUAGES*
"Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent." ~On the appearance and sounds of words
"I am a West-Midlander by blood, and took to early West-midland Middle English as to a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it."
"It is not a language long relegated to the 'uplands' struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into 'lewdness', and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech--a soil somewhere in England." ~On the West Midland dialect as a whole
*INSPERATIONS FOR MIDDLE-EARTH*
"One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter." ~On the creation of LotR
"There was a curious local character, an old man who used to go about swapping gossip and weather-wisdom and such like. To amuse my boys I named him Gaffer Gamgee, and the name became part of family lore to fix on old chaps of the kind. The choice of Gamgee was primarily directed by alliteration; but I did not invent it. It was in fact the name when I saw small (in Birmingham) for 'cotton-wool'."
"A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, but there he came walking through the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir."
"Do you think Shelob is a good name for a monstrous spider creature? It is of course only "She+lob" (=spider), but written as one, it seems to be quite noisome." ~On the origins of Shelob's name (from a letter to Christopher Tolkien)
*WRITING*
"Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it."
"We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer 'striking' and 'smiting'; talk and chat and prefer 'speech' and 'discourse'; well-bred, brilliant, or polite noblemen (visions of snobbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the 'worthy, brave and courteous men' of long ago." ~On justification of a high style of writing
"If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards."
"It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other." ~On the writing of LotR
*EXPLANING MIDDLE-EARTH*
"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical." ~On the meaning of LotR
"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."
"Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different."
"They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire." ~On the nature of Elves
"The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination--not the small reach of their courage or latent power."
"Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased." ~On LotR being compared to Wagner's Ring Opera
"Do not let Rayner suspect 'Allegory'. There is a 'moral', I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phrase of history, one example of its patterns, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals--they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such." ~On Rayner Unwin (son of Allen and Unwin Publishers' chairman Stanley Unwin) saying he thought LotR was an allegory
