[239] . Two words are in question : (1) Greek gnm, 'thought, intelligence' (and in the plural 'maxims, sayings', whence the English word gnome, a maxim or aphorism, and adjective gnomic) and (2) the word gnome used by the 16th-century writer Paracelsus as a synonym of pygmaeus. Paracelsus 'says that the beings so called have the earth as their element.... through which they move unobstructed as fish do through water, or birds and land animals through air' (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Gnome2). The O.E.D. suggests that whether Paracelsus invented the word himself or not it was intended to mean 'earth-dweller', and it discounts any connection with the other word Gnome.
[240] . 'suddenly .... there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band'. . 'He made no secret that he owed his recent knowledge to Farmer Maggot, whom he seemed to regard as a person of more importance than they had imagined.' . Sir Thomas Browne, Vulgar Errors, III Chapter 10: 'That a Kingfisher, hanged by the bill, showeth where the wind lay.' . See note 1 to no. 237. . See note 2 to no. 237.
[241] . On p. 3 of 'English and Welsh' Tolkien writes: '[A] story .... which I first met in the pages of Andrew Boord [sic], physician of Henry VIII.... tells how the language of Heaven was changed. St Peter, instructed to find a cure for the din and chatter which disturbed the celestial mansions, went outside the Gates and cried caws bobi, and slammed the Gates to again before the Welshmen that had surged out discovered that this was a trap without cheese.' . 'My college .... was shocked when the only prize I ever won .... the Skeat Prize for English at Exeter College, was spent on Welsh.' ('English and Welsh', p. 38.) . '.... not presuming to enter the litigious lists of the accredited Celtic scholars....' . Lady Agnew, a resident of Northmoor Road. . But in the foreword to Tree and Leaf (1964), Tolkien wrote: 'It was suddenly lopped and mutilated. .... It is cut down now.'
[242] . The book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 November 1962 (p. 892) and in the Listener on 22 November 1962 (p. 831). The latter review was very enthusiastic, and talked of Tolkien's 'superb technical skill.... something close to genius'.
[244] . 'Faramir .... held out a white rod; but Aragorn took the rod and gave it back, saying: "That office is not ended, and it shall be thine and thy heirs' as long as my line shall last."'
[246] . 'And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again ; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain of will nor madness, nor any fear. .... "The Quest is achieved, and now all is over," [said Frodo].' . Paragraphs 3 and 4 of the first page of the chapter 'Many Partings' (Book VI Chapter 6); and this passage: 'We can't go any quicker, if we are going to see Bilbo. I am going to Rivendell first, whatever happens.' . Elrond's blessing to Frodo at the end of Book VI Chapter 6. . 'His mind was hot with wrath..... It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature. .... But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched.' . 'Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dr. '
[247] . This account, 'The Quest of Erebor', is printed in Unfinished Tales.
[248] . The pagination is that of Essays Presented to Charles Williams, and the passage cited is: 'It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted.' . 'The Christian .... may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.'
[249] . Sir James Murray (1837-1915) founded the Oxford English Dictionary.
[250] . Possibly a reference to Pius X's recommendation of daily communion and children's communion. . The Second Vatican Council (1962-6). . Tolkien's guardian, Fr Francis Morgan. . Tolkien's home from 1926 until 1930. . Latin, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.' (From the Communion service.) . The general practitioner who attended Tolkien during his visits to (and, later, residence in) Bournemouth. . Tolkien's grandson, Michael's son, then at St Andrews University studying English. . See note 5 to no. 19, which gives details about this broadcast. . James Callaghan, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour opposition party at this time. The Labour Party came to power in 1964. . i.e. before 1931, implying that The Hobbit was written in this year. (But see Biography p. 177.) [251] . James Dundas-Grant, one of the Inklings. . Lewis's stepson. . Professor of English at Keele University and a former pupil of Lewis.
[252] . The words 'We were separated.... long after the event' are struck through in the draft. . See note 3 to no. 24.
[253] . See Tolkien's drawing The Tree of Amalion', no. 41 in Pictures.
[254] . R. W. ('Dickie') Reynolds; see Biography p.47. . Wiseman became headmaster of Queen's College, Taunton. . Headmaster of King Edward's.
[257] . 'Light as Leaf on Lindentree', The Gryphon, new series VI no. 6 (June 1925), p. 217. . '.... to be the bride-price of Lthien to Thingol her father.' (Misprinted as 'bride-piece' in all editions for many years, and only recently corrected.) For an account of this poem, see Inklings pp. 29-30. . See introductory note to no. 9. . In Cornwall, on the coast not far from Penzance. This holiday was in the summer of 1932. . Tolkien lived in Duchess Road from 1908 until 1910. . Brummagem is the local (and very old) form of the name of Birmingham.
[261] . Bailey wrote: 'From the very first tutorial, Lewis consistently mistook me for Geoff Dutton, an Australian and an excellent student, and Dutton for me.'
[267] . Latin, 'in this city the solemn light. '
[268] ."'In him one of the mighty steeds of old has returned."' '"Were the West Wind to take a body visible, even so would it appear."' 'These were the mearas..... Men said of them that Bema (whom the Eldar call Orom) must have brought their sires from West over Sea.'
[269] . '"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs: it only ruined them and twisted them."'
[270] . The offices of the Houghton Mifflin Co. are in Boston, Mass.
[274] . 'They waded the stream, and hurried over a wide open space, rush-grown and treeless, on the further side. Beyond that they came again to a belt of trees: tall oaks, for the most part, with here and there an elm tree or an ash.'
[275] . Sir Cyril Norwood (1875-1956), President of St John's College, Oxford, and author of the Norwood Report on education.
[276] . In fact at least three people beside C. S. Lewis had read the mythology: Christopher Tolkien, Rayner Unwin, and Lord Halsbury.
[278] . Tolkien's remark is certainly enigmatic, because in Light on C. S. Lewis (Bles, 1965), Owen Barfield makes a number of comments on Lewis's personality. Possibly Tolkien was referring to Barfield's puzzlement about 'the great change, that took place in [Lewis] between the years 1930 and 1940 a change that roughly coincided with his conversion...but which did not appear, and does not appear in retrospect, to be inevitably or even naturally connected with it' (p. ix). Barfield continued: 'Was there something, at least in his impressive, indeed splendid, literary personality, which was somehow - and with no taint of insincerity - voulu?.... some touch of a more than merely ad hoc pastiche?' (p. xi). Alternatively, Tolkien may have been alluding to Barfield's remark (p. xvi) about Lewis's 'distinctive combination of an almost supreme intellectual and "phantastic" maturity, laced with moral energy, on the other hand, with .... a certain psychic or spiritual immaturity on the other'.
[281] . This drawing is reproduced as no. 19 in Pictures. . '"You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?" ' (Gandalf to Bilbo).
[293] . Tolkien apparently relented, for Foster's interview with him was published in The Scotsman on 25 March 1967.
[294] . W. H. Auden; see no. 284. . See introductory note to no. 9. . According to Tolkien's friend Elaine Griffiths, the MS. was in fact lent by Tolkien to Susan Dagnall, who had heard about it from Miss Griffiths. . For Tolkien's correspondence with Jane Neave, the aunt here mentioned, see nos. 231, 234, 238 and 241. . See no. 202. . By John Christopher, first published in 1956. . See also no. 24 for an account of this.
[295] . It is not known to what letter Tolkien was referring. . Auden had sent Tolkien a typescript of the translation he and Paul B. Taylor had made of the Vlusp or 'Song of the Sibyl'. It was eventually published in a collection of their translations from the Edda, under the title The Elder Edda: A Selection (Faber & Faber, 1969); this book was dedicated to Tolkien. . A long unpublished poem entitled 'Volsungakvia En Nyja', probably written in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Tolkien described it, in a letter to Auden dated 29 January 1968, as 'written in fomyr8islag 8-line stanzas in English: an attempt to organise the Edda material dealing with Sigurd and Gunnar'. Fornyrislag is the Old Norse stanzaic metre, very closely resembling in its lines those of Old English poetry, in which most of the narrative poems of the Edda were composed.
[297] . This commentary was published, after Tolkien's death, in Jared Lobdell (ed.), A Tolkien Compass (La Salle, Illinois, Open Court, 1975), pp. 153-201.
[300] . Nickname for C. S. Lewis. . F. E. Brightman (1856-1932), Fellow of Magdalen College.
[303] . Tolkien lived with his mother and younger brother in a cottage opposite this mill, in a hamlet outside Birmingham, during his early childhood.
[306] . Latin, 'that was an omen'. . Officers' Training Corps. . '"You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have."' '"It is not our pan to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set."' . Bishop J. A. T. Robinson, Author of Honest to God (1963). . Tolkien's younger brother (1894-1976). . The lecture, delivered on 5 June 1959, was eventually published in J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, ed. M. B. Salu & R. T. Farrell (Cornell University Press, 1979).
[307] . 'Old age has stolen upon me... I am older than I was both in winters [i.e. years] and in learning [i.e. wisdom].'
[309] . J. B. Tolkien (1807-96) was in fact 89 when he died. . But see no. 334, one of many letters signed 'Ronald' (never 'John' except to his wife in the days of their courtship), and in which he asks Rayner Unwin to call him this.
[311] . Mrs Parke, who acted as driver and general help to the Tolkiens for several hours a week.
[312] . Wild Flowers of the Cape Peninsula by Mary Maytham Kidd (Oxford University Press, 1950).
[315] . Tolkien had made over the greater pan of his literary income to his sons and daughter; if he survived for seven years after doing so, the gift would be free of death duties.
[316] . This letter was never received by the Dictionary Department, and was probably never sent. . This definition was used, prefaced by the words 'In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)', in the 1976 Supplement to the Dictionary. . See no. 25.
[318] . See note 3 to no. 1; also no. 308. . See note 4 to no. 1.
[319] . See no. 25. . Green informed Tolkien that the author was E. H. Knatchbull Hugessen and the book was Stories For My Children (1869).
[323] . The Morris car which the Tolkiens owned in the 1930s bore a registration plate which began with the letters JO.
[328] . Fellow of Balliol College.
[332] . Tolkien was staying with his son Christopher and family in the village near Oxford where they then lived. . Tolkien's first cousin.
[336] . Idols in a story by Lord Dunsany; see no. 294.
[338] . The song of the Ent and Entwife in the chapter 'Treebeard'. . German philosopher and writer on Kierkegaard; 1879-1945.
[351] . W. H. Lewis. . T. P. Dunning, C.M., of University College, Dublin; scholar in Anglo-Saxon. . Rosfrith Murray, daughter of Sir James Murray. See no. 249.
[354] . The driver of the hired car by which Tolkien travelled to Bournemouth. . The Bournemouth hotel where Tolkien and his wife had often stayed.
1Is the presence if 'conundrums' in Alice a parallel to echoes of Northern myth in The Hobbit?
2 Not that 'examining' is very profitable. Quite small sales would surpass it. 100 requires nearly as much labour as a full-sized novel.
3Not quite. I should like, if possible, to learn more about the fairy-tale collection, c. 1904.
4Still there are more hobbits, far more of them and about them, in the new story. Gollum reappears, and Gandalf is to the fore: 'dwarves' come in; and though there is no dragon (so far) there is going to be a Giant; and the new and (very alarming) Ringwraiths are a feature. There ought to be things that people who liked the old mixture will find to have a similar taste.
5It may mitigate your just wrath, if I say that since I wrote in December my wife's health became much worse. I spent most of last term in an attic in a hotel, with my house derelict and damaged.1 I have been ill myself, and hardly able to cope with university work, which for me has trebled.
6Literature has been (until the modern novel) mainly a masculine business, and in it there is a great deal about the 'fair and false'. That is on the whole a slander. Women are humans and therefore capable of perfidy. But within the human family, as contrasted with men they are not generally or naturally the more perfidious. Very much the reverse. Except only that women are apt to break down if asked to 'wait' for a man, too long, and while youth (so precious and necessary to a would-be mother) is swiftly passing. They should, in fact, not be asked to wait.
7Christian marriage is not a prohibition of sexual intercourse, but the correct way of sexual temperance in fact probably the best way of getting the most satisfying sexual pleasure, as alcoholic temperance is the best way of enjoying beer and wine.
8Since clifian = 'cleave, stick', it is plain that foxes clife and clifwyrt originally = burdock. clfa is prob. an MS error for glfa through mixing the names.
9Especially as I find allusions and references to it creeping into Mr Lewis' work, such as his latest novel.4 10'I think 'criticism' however valid or intellectually engaging tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off). Indeed (if I dare yet venture on any criticism again) I should say that I think it gets in your way, as a writer. You read too much, and too much of that analytically. But then you are also a born critic. I am not. You are also a born reader.
11Intending the word to be understood in its ancient meanings, which continued as late as Spenser - a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs.
12Though I have thought about them a good deal.
13It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of An (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality.
14Not in the Beginner of Evil: his was a sub-creative Fall, and hence the Elves (the representatives of sub-creation par excellence) were peculiarly his enemies, and the special object of his desire and hate and open to his deceits. Their Fall is into possessiveness and (to a less degree) into perversion of their art to power.
15As far as all this has symbolical or allegorical significance. Light is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed. The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of an undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and says that they are good' as beautiful. The Light of Sun (or Moon) is derived from the Trees only after they were sullied by Evil.
16Of course in reality this only means that my 'elves' are only a representation or an apprehension of a part of human nature, but that is not the legendary mode of talking.
17It exists indeed as a poem of considerable length, of which the prose version in The Silmarillion is only a reduced version.1 18His name is in actual origin Anglo-Saxon: earendel "ray of light' applied sometimes to the morning-star, a name of ramified mythological connexions (now largely obscure). But that is a mere 'learned note'. In fact his name is Elvish signifying the Great Mariner or Sea-lover.
19A name that Lewis derives from me and cannot be restrained from using, and mis-spelling as Numinor. Nmenre means in 'Elvish' simply Westernesse or Land in the West, and is not related to numen numinous, or !2 20Elrond symbolises throughout the ancient wisdom, and his House represents Lore the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful. It is not a scene of action but of reflection. Thus it is a place visited on the way to all deeds, or 'adventures'. It may prove to be on the direct road (as in The Hobbit); but it may be necessary to go from there in a totally unexpected course. So necessarily in The Lord of the Rings, having escaped to Elrond from the imminent pursuit of present evil, the hero departs in a wholly new direction: to go and face it at its source.
21The view is taken (as clearly reappears later in the case of the Hobbits that have the Ring for a while) that each 'Kind' has a natural span, integral to its biological and spiritual nature. This cannot really be increased qualitatively or quantitatively; so that prolongation in time is like stretching a wire out ever tauter, or 'spreading butter ever thinner' it becomes an intolerable torment.
22It is only in the time between The Hobbit and its sequel that it is discovered that the Necromancer is Sauron Redivivus, growing swiftly to visible shape and power again. He escapes the vigilance and re-enters Mordor and the Dark Tower.
23The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves) hence the two kinds can dwell together (as at Bree), and are called just the Big Folk and Little Folk. They are entirely without non-human powers, but are represented as being more in touch with 'nature' (the soil and other living things, plants and animals), and abnormally, for humans, free from ambition or greed of wealth. They are made small (little more than half human stature, but dwindling as the years pass) partly to exhibit the pettiness of man, plain unimaginative parochial man though not with either the smallness or the savageness of Swift, and mostly to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men 'at a pinch'.
24Nowhere is the place or nature of 'the Wizards' made fully explicit. Their name, as related to Wise, is an Englishing of their Elvish name, and is used throughout as utterly distinct from Sorcerer or Magician. It appears finally that they were as one might say the near equivalent in the mode of these tales of Angels, guardian Angels. Their powers are directed primarily to the encouragement of the enemies of evil, to cause them to use their own wits and valour, to unite and endure. They appear always as old men and sages, and though (sent by the powers of the True West) in the world they suffer themselves, their age and grey hairs increase only slowly. Gandalf whose function is especially to watch human affairs (Men and Hobbits) goes on through all the tales.
25The hostility of (even good) Dwarves and Elves, a motive that often appears, derives from the legends of the First Age; the Mines of Moria, the wars of Dwarves and Orcs (goblins, soldiery of the Dark Lord) refer to the Second Age and early Third.
26'But as each has disliked this or that, I should (if I took all the criticisms together and obeyed them) find little left, and am forced to the conclusion that so great a work (in size) cannot be perfect, nor even if perfect, be liked entirely by any one reader.
27'That is, I will draw it as much better as my little skill allows, in black. But it should of course properly appear in white line on a black background, since it represents a silver line in the darkness. How does that appeal to the Production Department?
28N = ng as in ding.
29It nearly has, even in hasty sketch!
30Since 'mortality' is thus represented as a special gift of God to the Second Race of the Children (the Eruhni, the Children of the One God) and not a punishment for a Fall, you may call that 'bad theology'. So it may be, in the primary world, but it is an imagination capable of elucidating truth, and a legitimate basis of legends.
31Inside this mythical history (as its metaphysic is, not necessarily as a metaphysic of the real World) Creation, the act of Will of Eru the One that gives Reality to conceptions, is distinguished from Making, which is permissive.
32Only the first person (of worlds or anything) can be unique. If you say he is there must be more than one, and created (sub) existence is implied. I can say 'he is' of Winston Churchill as well as of Tom Bombadil, surely?
33There are thus no temples or 'churches' or fanes in this 'world' among 'good' peoples. They had little or no'religion'in the sense of worship. For help they may call on a Vala(as Elbereth), as a Catholic might on a Saint, though no doubt knowing in theory as well as he that the power of the Vala was limited and derivative. But this is a 'primitive age': and these folk may be said to view the Valar as children view their parents or immediate adult superiors, and though they know they are subjects of the King he does not live in their country nor have there any dwelling. I do not think Hobbits practised any form of worship or prayer (unless through exceptional contact with Elves). The Nmenreans (and others of that branch of Humanity, that fought against Morgoth, even if they elected to remain in Middle-earth and did not go to Nmenor: such as the Rohirrim) were pure monotheists. But there was no temple in Nmenor (until Sauron introduced the cult of Morgoth). The top of the Mountain, the Meneltarma or Pillar of Heaven, was dedicated to Eru, the One, and there at any time privately, and at certain times publicly, God was invoked, praised, and adored: an imitation of the Valar and the Mountain of Aman. But Numenor fell and was destroyed and the Mountain engulfed, and there was no substitute. Among the exiles, remnants of the Faithful who had not adopted the false religion nor taken pan in the rebellion, religion as divine worship (though perhaps not as philosophy and metaphysics) seems to have played a small part; though a glimpse of it is caught in Faramir's remark on 'grace at meat'. Vol. II p. 285.4 34The chief way in which Hobbits differ from experience is that they are not cruel, and have no blood-sports, and have by implication a feeling for 'wild creatures' that are not alas! very commonly found among the nearest contemporary parallels.
35'gods' is the nearest equivalent, but not strictly accurate.
36The story of Beren and Lthien is the one great exception, as it is the way by which 'Elvishness' becomes wound in as a thread in human history.
37'There is only one 'god': God, Eru Ilvatar. There are the first creations, angelic beings, or which those most concerned in the Cosmogony reside (of love and choice) inside the World, as Valar or gods, or governors; and there are incarnate rational creatures. Elves and Men, of similar but different status and natures.
38This was a delusion of course, a Satanic lie. For as emissaries from the Valar clearly inform him, the Blessed Realm does not confer immortality. The land is blessed because the Blessed dwell there, not vice versa, and the Valar are immortal by right and nature, while Men are mortal by right and nature. But cozened by Sauron he dismisses all this as a diplomatic argument to ward off the power of the King of Kings. It might or might not be 'heretical', if these myths were regarded as statements about the actual nature of Man in the real world : I do not know. But the view of the myth is that Death - the mere shortness of human life-span is not a punishment for the Fall, but a biologically (and therefore also spiritually, since body and spirit are integrated) inherent part of Man's nature. The attempt to escape it is wicked because 'unnatural', and silly because Death in that sense is the Gift of God (envied by the Elves), release from the weariness of Time. Death, in the penal sense, is viewed as a change in attitude to it: fear, reluctance. A good Nmenrean died of free will when he felt it to be time to do so.
39There were evil Nmenreans: Sauronians, but they do not come into this story, except remotely; as the wicked Kings who had become Nazgl or Ringwraiths.
40The Elves often called on Varda-Elbereth, the Queen of the Blessed Realm, their especial friend; and so does Frodo.
41Take 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 daresay something had been going on in the 'unconscious' for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till 'what really happened' came through. But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc2 of Anglo-Saxon, and their connexion with stone. Their pan in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war. And into this has crept a mere piece of experience, the difference of the 'male' and 'female' attitude to wild things, the difference between unpossessive love and gardening.
42Not any better I think than The Marvellous Land of Snergs, Wyke-Smith, Ernest Benn 1927. Seeing the date, I should say that this was probably an unconscious source-book!for the Hobbits, not of anything else.
43The name, spelt this way, also entered the United States, 2 or 3 generations ago, from Canada. I recently had some correspondence with a family in Texas.
44The 'Sindarin', a Grey-elven language, is in fact constructed deliberately to resemble welsh phonologically and to have a relation to High-elven similar to that existing between British (properly so-called, sc. the Celtic languages spoken in this island at the time of the Roman Invasion) and Latin. All the names in the book, and the languages, are of course constructed, and not at random.
45I once scribbled 'hobbit' on a blank page of some boring school exam. paper in the early 1930's. It was some time before I discovered what it referred to!
46The cats of Queen Berthiel and the names and adventures of the other 2 wizards2 (5 minus Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast) are all that I recollect.
47I am not Gandalf, being a transcendent Sub-creator in this little world. As far as any character is 'like me' it is Faramir except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.
48'Not quite 'certainly'. The clumsiness in fidelity of Sam was what finally pushed Gollum over the brink, when about to repent.
49'They shared in its 'making' - but only on the same terms as we 'make' a work of art or story. The realization of it, the gift to it of a created reality of the same grade as their own, was the act of the One God.
50Notably C. L. Wrenn who succeeded me as professor of Anglo-Saxon and who is, I believe, coming to the U.S.A. this autumn for a year, if you (i.e. U.S.A. officials) let him in.
51 humane: this (being in a fairy-story) includes of course Elves, and indeed all 'speaking creatures'.
52 chiefly interested: that is as themes of 'literature', as an amusement. Actually most of them were primarily interested in the acquisition of land and the use of marriage-alliances in furthering their aims.
53 Not unless 'political' is narrowed (or enlarged), so that we are considering imaginatively only one centre or fortress of order and grace surrounded by enemies: the unfilled woods and mountains, hostile and barbarous men, wild beasts and monsters, and the Unknown. The defence of the realm may then indeed become symbolic of the human situation.
54 Of the same kind as Gandalf and Saruman, but of a far higher order.