Letter 38

Letter 38 is the thirty-eighth letter written by J.R.R. Tolkien and published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Summary
Allen and Unwin had sent a letter on 27 March frantically requesting the guaranteed forward to Clark Hall's Beowulf, regardless of the fact that it was only "a word or two". An abashed Tolkien called his own particular conduct vexatious and uncivil. He reported that he had gotten into inconvenience, squandering time and work, under a misunderstanding of the pagination of the page-proofs. In a reference he additionally said that his wife's disease had turn out to be more terrible, he had been living in a storage room because of harm to his home [note 1], and that he had been sick.

Despite the fact that Tolkien recognized that "a word or two" would suffice, he felt that a genuinely extensive introduction was vital. Since there was no reference to the issues confronted by an interpreter or faultfinder, Tolkien attempted to give helpful comments. This developed into an original copy of 17 pages, with every page around 300 words in length, in addition to a metrical index which was pretty much as long. It was right now that the 27 March letter arrived and Tolkien sent in what he had created.