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in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings’ to which Professor Shippey refers. This has even produced a sense of outrage—in one case formulated to me in the words ‘It’s like the Old Testament!’: a dire condemnation against which, clearly, there can be no appeal (though this reader cannot have got very far before being overcome by the comparison). Of course, ‘The Silmarillion’ was intended to move the heart and the imagination, directly, and without peculiar effort or the possession of unusual faculties; but its mode is inherent, and it may be doubted whether any ‘approach’ to it can greatly aid those who find it unapproachable.

There is a third consideration (which Professor Shippey does not indeed advance in the same context):

One quality which [The Lord of the Rings] has in abundance is the Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’, created just as in the old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn’s lay of Tinúviel, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more. This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be more sensitive than any man alive. As he wrote in a revealing letter dated 20 September 1963:

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to write The Silmarillion]. Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)

To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of ‘new unattainable vistas’, the problem there—as Tolkien must have thought many times—was that in The Lord of the Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form, was bound to begin at the beginning. How could ‘depth’ be created when you had nothing to reach further back to?

The letter quoted here certainly shows that my father felt this, or perhaps rather one should say, at times felt this, to be a problem. Nor was it a new thought: while he was writing The Lord of the Rings, in 1945, he said in a letter to me (Letters, p. 110):

A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached—or if so only to become ‘near trees’…

This matter is perfectly illustrated for me by Gimli’s song in Moria, where great names out of the ancient world appear utterly remote:

The world was fair, the mountains tall,

In Elder Days before the fall

Of mighty kings in Nargothrond

And Gondolin, who now beyond

The Western Seas have passed away…

‘I like that!’ said Sam. ‘I should like to learn it. In Moria, in Khazad-dûm. But it makes the darkness seem heavier, thinking of all those lamps.’ By his enthusiastic ‘I like that!’ Sam not only ‘mediates’ (and engagingly ‘Gamgifies’) the ‘high’, the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin, Durin on his carven throne, but places them at once at an even remoter distance, a magical distance that it might well seem (at that moment) destructive to traverse.

Professor Shippey says that ‘to tell [the stories that are only alluded to in The Lord of the Rings] in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error’. The ‘error’ presumably lies in the holding of such an expectation, if the stories were told, not in the telling of the stories at all; and it is apparent that Professor Shippey sees my father as wondering, in 1963, whether he should or should not put pen to paper, for he expands the words of the letter,