The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien by J.R.R. Tolkien

  • But I know only too sadly from efforts to find anything to read even with an 'on demand' subscription at a library that my taste is not normal. -The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg 34, letter 26
  • Letter 43
    • is a long letter to his son about sexuality and marriage. Pg 51 starts a beautiful discourse on marriage fidelity
    • Bottom of 52 talks about he had trouble studying the classics because he got distracted studying something else
    • "Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament...There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires. (53-54) ^c6e230
  • "You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil" #45, 55
  • "We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love" #52, 64
  • "Eucastrophe" #89, 100
  • “But if literature teaches us anything at all, it is this: that we have in us an eternal element, free from care and fear, which can survey the things that in ‘life' we call evil with serenity (that is not without appreciating their quality, but without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium)." -The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #94, pg 106-107
  • “This university business of earning one’s living by teaching, delivering philological lectures, and daily attendance at ‘boards’ and other talk-meetings, interferes sadly with serious work.” #117, 131
  • #141 is an awesome history of Middle-Earth
  • "~The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision." #142, 172

Created: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2022-04-03-Sun