J. R. R. Tolkien (post 5) on Writing: “I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, not of ‘inventing’…I had very little conscious, intellectual, intention”

Writers have often said such things about their writing process, but literary criticism mostly remains at the stage that I was before starting this blog: it thinks writers are joking. For if literary criticism thought that writers were not joking, it would be looking for a theory that explains what writers say. That is, if writers’ regular selves are not conscious of inventing it, who or what within the writers is conscious of inventing it?

In letters, J. R. R. Tolkien said the following:

1951

    “You asked for a brief sketch of my stuff that is connected with my imaginary world…

     I do not remember a time when I was not building it. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped…

     But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all heroic legend…

     [Stories] arose in my mind as ‘given’ things…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’ ” (1, pp. 143-145).

18 April 1955

     “The Lord of the Rings [published 1954-55] as a story was finished so long ago now that I can take a largely impersonal view of it, and find ‘interpretations’ quite amusing; even those that I might make myself, which are mostly post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point.*

*Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called ‘Treebeard’, from Treebeard’s first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading some one else’s work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me…I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till ‘what really happened’ came through…” (1, pp. 211-212).

1. Humphrey Carpenter (Editor), Christopher Tolkien (Assistant). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.