The Realms of Tolkien
In the years before he became a cult, Professor Tolkien was very approachable and was extremely kind to me, for instance, as a young writer (I got the same courtesy and help from T.H. White and, of course, from Mervyn Peake, who became a friend). There was a time before corporate hype, when like-minded people could communicate quite easily, irrespective of their relative fame. Happily the Internet has restored many of those conditions. Most writers are solitary souls who tend to retreat from the avalanche of enthusiasm their books create. It’s an unhappy irony. By 1966, however, he had given several interviews to enthusiasts and was beginning to refuse to give more. As you will read here, he relented in one case.
As it happened one of our regular contributors to New Worlds was the late, much missed, Daphne Castell. She was one of the first new women writers we published (“Emancipation,” “Rumpelstilskin,” etc.). She still lived in Oxford and had studied under Tolkien, remaining an acquaintance. It seemed a good idea, therefore, when talking to Daphne that we should ask Professor T. if he liked the idea of a short interview which she could incorporate into an introduction to his work.
We would illustrate it with the work of Tolkien enthusiast and one of my oldest friends, James Cawthorn, who was already working on a portfolio of LOTR drawings. I believe these were the first drawings of Tolkien’s characters to be published. Fewer readers in those days were familiar with his work,which however was beginning to sell very well. What you read here has not, to my knowledge, been published in the thirty five years since I first ran it and I am delighted to present it again here, in memory of Daphne Castell, writer, scholar, sailor and supermum, who died far too young and was one of my favourite contributors.
—Michael Moorcock
Daphne Castell’s interview with J.R.R. Tolkien, published in the November 1966 issue of New Worlds, holds a special place for me, because that was where and when I first heard of Tolkien. I’d probably heard Tolkien’s name—vaguely—before that time, but I didn’t really know who he was until I read Castell’s piece (probably in late October 1966, when that November issue of New Worlds reached my hands).
It may surprise some people that Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings were still so relatively unknown at that date. After all, the books had been published over a decade earlier, in 1954-1955. However, during their first dozen years of existence they were available only in hardcover, and—although they sold very well for hardcovers, going through a number of (probably small) reprintings in the Allen & Unwin edition—they were known to only a privileged minority of readers, most of whom were adults.
The Lord of the Rings eventually became famous among young people in Britain in the year of Castell’s interview, 1966, as a “backwash” phenomenon from the USA (where it had become wildly popular among campus readers in 1965-1966 as a result of the Ace and Ballantine mass-market paperback editions). Obviously some people had read The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit) in hardcover before that date, but my recollection is that Tolkien didn’t become anything like a household name—in reading households!—until 1966. I was born in 1950, and I had never heard of him, or of the titles of his books, throughout my childhood. No teacher or librarian, no parent or aunt or uncle, ever recommended Tolkien to me. Nor do I remember any of my schoolmates ever reading him—not until the latter half of the 1960s.
So the Daphne Castell interview with Tolkien in New Worlds came as quite a surprise to the 16-year-old me, and probably to many other young readers of the magazine at that time.
—David Pringle
