From letter 97b, of the 2023, expanded, edition of Letters by JRR Tolkien*:
Mother discovered her small daughter drawing.
"What are you drawing, darling" said she.
"I am drawing God."
"Oh, but you can't draw God, dear. Nobody knows what he's like."
"Well they will now."
*I got this for my birthday recently, and am avidly reading it; but - because it is so dense and interesting - only at a rate of 30-40 pages per day. With a total of more than 600 pages (not including index), it'll be a couple of weeks before I can write a review of the whole thing...
Delightful! And it reminds me of "Mythopoeia"...
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to read this new edition in chronological order, but get tempted to check the Index and then spring around following up things I find as soon as I've found them.
Happily the Tolkien Guide website has been keeping track of restorations of cuts to Letters which were included in the original edition as well as handily listing the interpolated restored selections with their small-letter designations of which numbered Letter they follow.
It is probably wise that the folks at HarperCollins did not try thoroughly to update the endnotes: now readers can easily know them as they originally appeared, but it is also an odd time-machine experience since this means that there is no indication that all sorts of works mentioned (and more) have been edited and published by Christopher and others since 1981, or of the excellent selections from other related letters and documents included in Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond's 2017 Companion and Guide (and elsewhere, for aught I know!).
Still, what a great time to be alive, Tolkien-letter-wise!
David Llewellyn Dodds