J.R.R. Tolkien’s books provided inestimable foundations for my later acceptance of all that the Catholic Church taught and that in conjunction with its most powerful conveyer of doctrine, sacred liturgical worship. In fact, at the behest of a wise grandmother, who saw I was really into this author, suggested that I write to him. I did. He wrote back. I wrote again, his letter arrived after he died. There is a line in it that people were waiting in the car for him and he had to be brief, for they were going “on holiday”. He died that night. Maybe… the last thing he wrote?
Still in my teens, a close friend and I, also formed by JRRT in many ways – the story of how we found each other in that metropolis is worthy – took a trip together to Milwaukee, specifically to Marquette University. Little did I know of the spiritual peril we were going into, like… into Jesuit Mordor. The Professor’s papers, manuscripts and original artwork of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are there. Yes, you read that right. We spent a couple of days in there, reading and copying and being amazed.
One of the things we read was the unpublished epilogue “ending” of the Lord of the Rings which didn’t make it. Tolkien’s choice to end it. My friend and I knew about this in … 1975?
It was a beautiful piece about Sam, 14 years of married life after the departure of Frodo to the Undying Lands. Sam was working on the Red Book. He has a conversation with his daughter and wife. At the end, Sam is outside and hears the call of the sea.
I remember how the two of us sat there and took this in, surrounded by the boxes that had that papers and drawings. It was awesome. We, as everyone in those days, were hungry for more about… everything and everyone, about the Silmarillion about… anything. And here was the call of the sea to Sam, who had been a Ringbearer.
It was a formative moment in my life, shared with one of my bestest of friends, and that’s no mistake.
Okay… the video which brought this up.
I find this whole argument to be…specious. Fr. Z.: I am about the same age as you, and have been reading Tolkien for about the same length of time. I have ALWAYS known about Sam and his trip to the Havens because that information has ALWAYS been in the Appendices of “The Return of the King.” Would it have been better to have the last chapter be the one Tolkien wrote? Perhaps. But the information it contains has never been hidden. Therefore, I think the creator of this video is making a case for something that is a moot point. I think the heirs of Tolkien and their publishers have done a disservice by publishing all these hitherto-unpublished works–they only add confusion (and provide grist for wretched Amazon adaptations). What has been published has been published. I favor a “small canon” of Tolkien’s Middle Earth: “The Hobbit,” “LOTR,” and “The Silmarillion.”
I think you know understand nothing of what I wrote or what it means. My post is my post.]
Jesuit Mordor…. Isn’t that pleonastic in these modern times?
I encountered Tolkien in high school; I had been reading sci-fi and fantasy novels for a while, but I saw my religion teacher, a priest (Catholic high school), reading one of Tolkien’s books, talked to him about it, and then became curious. I became “hooked” on his works.
After many conversations with other fans, we all had a similar experience: when someone read his works, they either loved it or disliked it. It seemed that no one was ever lukewarm to his works.
It has been a while since I read his books, I guess this is a sign to reread them for the nth time again! :)
Wow! Save those letters – and, perhaps, send scans to someone reliable (maybe Holly Ordway, among others)!* Happily (as the ‘First Timer’ points out in the first 14 seconds) a published version of that ending is now available to all – with a lot of other wonderful things (here, I disagree with Quodscripsi61 – thinking of ‘abusus usum non tollit’ – an expression I first encountered in one of Tolkien’s works)!
Indeed, I had just been thinking in light of your Feast of Pope St. Leo IX post of Tolkien’s 25 May 1944 wartime “airgraph” to his son (Letter 71 of the published selection) where he writes, with reference to The Lord of the Rings as he was working on it, “‘romance’ has grown out of ‘allegory’, and its wars are still derived from the ‘inner war’ of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels. […] It is even in this world possible to be (more or less) in the wrong or in the right.”
*I note from their website that the Marion E. Wade Center is part of an “Initiative to Gather all of C.S. Lewis’s Unpublished Letters” – maybe someone reliable will attempt the same for Tolkien, someday!
As it turns out, I’m reading my way through the Fellowship of the Ring with a student, and so this is a very timely post. Thank you.
My experience with Tolkien’s opus is different from yours, Fr. Z, because I didn’t appreciate it nearly as much as a teenager. I tried reading The Hobbit at about age 13, and couldn’t get around the physics problem of round hallways and round doors and round windows underground… and figured I must not be understanding…and gave up. When I came back to it later, and read chapters as bed-time stories to my boys, I came to see the whole corpus which I encountered for the treasure it is. I had been warned off the Silmarilion when I was younger — -too hard, I was told — but when I finally took the task in hand, I found it an easy and enjoyable read.
Gott in Himmel! i had been impressed when an undergrad roomie got a reply from Robert Bolt, but this – well this makes that look like nearly nothing. i set several of the songs from LOTR to music in the 70s. “the road goes ever on and on, and whither then i cannot say”
I am totally in accord with the young man in the video.
I first read The Hobbit and the LOTR when I was fourteen, in 1966, and when I came to the end I was sad, because I didn’t want it to end. Then, a quarter century or more later, when I plonked myself down in a bookstore to peruse the then newly-published Sauron Defeated I was overwhelmed and entranced by the deleted ending, and felt a pang of bitter regret that it had been deleted, a sentiment that rests with me still.
It was one of the great pleasures of my life, that staying in Oxforf for a few days in 2017 in a spare bedroom of the Presbytery of the Catholic Church of SS Gregory & Augustine in Oxford, the Tolkien family’s parish church, and attending Mass there every morning, I was able to meet Priscilla Tolkien, a daily Mass-goer, and speak to her of my appreciation of and affection for her father’s writings.
I read the Hobbit in Junior High (76) and then the LOTR in High School in 78. I couldn’t put it down and reread it many times. Until I couldn’t find my paperback copies of the three books!
I used some Christmas money this year to buy a hardcover edition with Tolkien’s artwork in the book, along with two maps – on of Middle Earth and one of the Shire. I picked it up in early January and didn’t realize HOW THICK it was! The paperbacks make it seem small as a series.
Re-reading it for the umpteenth time, I felt again like I was in High School. I appreciate more now as a stronger Catholic than when I read it the first time.
Yes, the Sam and Elanor (and Rose) ending is a proper ending, both to LOTR and to the duology of that book and The Hobbit.
Although the current ending is good. Not knocking it.
We all owe your grandmother a prayer of thanksgiving!
Amazing.
I never heard of LOTR until I was in college and a boyfriend told me about them.
I introduced my homeschooled kids to them. One of them basically taught herself to read at 8 skipping age/grade appropriate “easy readers”. She 1st read all the Little House
books then LOTR that she borrowed from her older siblings.
That letter from Tolkien is a real treasure. Thanks for sharing. Letter writing is fast becoming a lost art, I fear. It is a different experience than sending emails or texts.
I’ve never given much thought to the alternative ending with Samwise, but will do so now that I’ve read this thread.
I enjoy reading the various versions of Tolkien’s tales. Some are quite different, eg, the portrayal of King Thingol in the Silmarillion and Lost Tales.
There is a solution to the sadness one feels when approaching the end of LOTR – – take a break and read it again!
Same here. Read them all several times in 9th and 10 th grades! My mother could not get through the Hobbit because in her words, ” It was too fantastic and unrealistic.” She only read the first part of the Hobbit as a result and quit. We children thought she was crazy. But to each his own. Still love them. The movies were disappointing in many ways because they differed from the books. Tom Bombadill was not even mentioned. Also, the actors depicting the characters were ugly and many time offensive. Aragorn looked like a hobo with his morning stubble and stringy hair even after coming into the kingdom.
The letter from Tolkien is strikingly reminiscent of “Leaf by Niggle” (which is really a meditation on death). The Driver arrives and tells him that it’s time to go:
“‘The carriage was ordered long ago. It has come at last. It’s waiting. You start today on your journey, you know.’”
I wonder if that’s what he was referencing?
Read the Hobbit a few years ago and am just now reading LOTR, almost through the Fellowship of the Ring. I enjoy it more the more I read.
I imagine coming to the end of it must be like the way I felt when I finished Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series.
[Which it’s a hard, that is.]
I like the ending as it is.
It stops, rather than ends.
Sam has just said farewell to his friend, master, and fellow ringbearer. A farewell that is likely to be of long duration. He has also returned to his beloved Rosie and to family life in the Shire, to which he is deeply attached.
In my opinion “Well, I’m back.” is vague enough to capture Sam’s enthusiasm for his life in the Shire and his loss of Frodo and even a touch of his scarring from the Ring. He is back, but not all of him wishes to be.
Whether intentional or not, with these words, Tolkien returns the reader back to the world, with its comforts and imperfections, though part of us desires to remain in Middle Earth.
As Tolkien himself admits in his introduction, “The book is too short.” We seek for something more – letters, lost chapters, anecdotes. With Sam’s short phrase, Tolkien seems to understand, as a Catholic, that nothing that ends can fully satisfy the human heart.
Quodscripsi61: “I favor a “small canon” of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.”
Nothing is opposing your having a “small canon.” Freedom.
Allow the rest of us to enjoy Middle Earth.