Tolkien's Letters

[MICHKA]

merci pour ce rappel, ce sont de belles lettres et le travail d'écriture du Seigneur des anneaux fut vraiment de longue haleine, titanesque, on comprend le découragement parfois, mais heureusement il en est venu à bout.

[Merry]

I continue to make my way throught the letters again. I don't think I caught before that his writing hand was so overworked that he was unable to use it by the time LOTR was published, and he had to use a small typewriter for all his correspondence. What a difficult creation it was! He also pushed very hard for The Sil to be published before or at the same time as LOTR which, in my opinion, would have been a disaster.

Anyway, I'm reading letters from around 1955 (the year I was born!), when ROTK was published. The reviews are starting to come in and Tolkien is responding to many of them. It's so obvious that he has put his whole heart and soul into these books, and so this is personal.