Letter 69

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Letter 69
Date	May 14, 1944
Recipient	Christopher Tolkien

Letter 69 is the sixty-ninth letter written by J.R.R. Tolkien and published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Summary

Tolkien had composed a certain measure of The Lord of the Rings the day preceding; however, he had been blocked by expecting to clean up his study and managing the moon. Due to inadequate timing, it was behaving unrealistically: ascending in one piece of Middle-earth and setting all the while in another, and the fixes had lasted throughout the evening.

Fr. Douglas Carter had given a sermon recommending that his group were untutored robots for not saying Grace and professed Oxford meriting to be wiped out with flame and blood in the fierceness of God for the detestation and mischievousness there executed. Tolkien concurred with his appraisal and thought about whether it were particularly genuine at this point. Tolkien felt the mass of everlasting human wrongdoing: old, terrible, perpetual monotonous constant hopeless evil. He expected that in every individual experience the equalization was charge.

Tolkien saw C.S. Lewis and heard two sections of his "Who Goes Home?" and Tolkien read his new section, "Excursion to the Cross-Roads". Presently the stub was advancing, he said, when strings must be accumulated, times synchronized, and the account joined. The story had developed so much that before portrayals of the closing parts were very lacking.

The day before, Tolkien had gotten an idea for a short story while in church:

"A man sitting at a high window and seeing not the fortunes of a man or of people, but of one small piece of land (about the size of a garden) all down the ages. He just sees it illumined, in borders of mist, and things, animals and men just walk on and off, and the plants and trees grow and die and change. One of the points would be that plants and animals change from one fantastic shape to another but men (in spite of different dress) don’t change at all. At intervals all down the ages from Palaeolithic to Today a couple of women (or men) would stroll across scene saying exactly the same thing (e.g. It oughtn’t to be allowed. They ought to stop it. Or, I said to her, I’m not one to make a fuss, I said, but...)...."

—Final paragraph of Letter 69