LotR - Foreword

[Orofaniel]

Orofaniel, you suggest, if I have understood your post correctly, that Tolkien, when faced with some of the 'fallow' periods in the writing, would have turned to his own life's experience for inspiration. This is, I think, tempting, but two points make me hesitate to accept such a possibility for a writer like Tolkien. This first is how he talked about 'what gets into the cauldron of story' in his essay "On Fairy Stories". I know we should limit our main discussion here to the text of the Forewards, but I think it is valuable to recognise that for Tolkien, story or narrative had a life or purpose or MO of its own, separate from any private personal experience. (Think of his funny line about the bishop and the banana peel.) If anything from his private life, which, as Child says, he treated modestly and reticently, did get into the stew, he would, I am sure, include it only if it made sense in terms of the story, not in terms of personal self-expression. Certainly the way Tolkien defended the poem Beowulf as a unified work of art in his "Monsters and the Critics" essay suggests that he valued narrative as artistic expression rather than as personal expression. I think it is us in our post-Freud, post-psychoanalytical age that wants to reduce everything to an author's psyche, but this perspective is only a recent one of the last hundred years and does not represent the kind of understanding of philology or of ancient literature with which a scholar like Tolkien would be familiar.

About his own life, I think that, perhaps when he was "stuck" he used his own life as an inspiration. I'm not saying that he directly "used" his life in the tale, just that he used it as a source. I think your point Bethberry is very reasonable and good. I also think that Tolkien is such a writer that would look beyond most of his personal experiences when he writes. I don't think that LotR would have turned out like the LotR we know if Tolkien had surely just written about his own personal experiences. He had a story he wanted to convey, I'm sure of that, but it doesn't mean that his life hasn't inflicted him during the writing process. However, I think the valuable and the importance of that personal experience that the writers put in their work is very different from each and everyone. Maybe Tolkien felt that his story was so strong in itself that he didn't need much inspiration from his own life?