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HarperCollins to publish revised and expanded edition of Tolkien's Letters, 'as originally intended'
HarperCollins is publishing a revised and expanded edition of The Letters of J R R Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, containing an additional 150 letters.
HarperCollins holds world rights in all languages for Tolkien’s works. The new edition will publish in November 2023.
Carpenter’s widow, Mari Prichard, said: “Humphrey Carpenter’s connection with Tolkien began at an early age. He was born into academic Oxford where Tolkien was known for his scholarship, and for The Hobbit, long before the fame of The Lord of the Rings. As a boy, he devoured the book, writing his own list of key characters on the front cover, together with small drawings of them.
“Humphrey read English at Oxford, with Tolkien’s son Christopher as one of his lecturers in Old and Middle English. Together with a friend, composer Paul Drayton, then teaching at New College’s choir school, he came up with the idea of The Hobbit as a musical, to be performed by the pupils. This was the first ever adaptation, and it would need the author’s permission. So a meeting was arranged and they spent a long afternoon in Tolkien’s home-office, hearing about revisions to The Lord of the Rings, elvish philology and much else, until Tolkien, wreathed in pipe smoke, heard what they proposed and answered that a school production would be perfectly all right.
“In December 1967 Tolkien came with Edith, his wife, to see a performance. He was reported to have looked happy when Humphrey’s script exactly followed his words, a bit bemused when it didn’t! Humphrey returned to Oxford as a producer/presenter for the new BBC local radio station. His breakfast show included biographies of Oxford characters, and Tolkien naturally became a subject. This led to him writing the first, and still only, fully authorised biography and then working closely with Christopher Tolkien to edit the letters.
“I am so pleased that, with this new edition of The Letters of J R R Tolkien, Humphrey and Christopher’s painstaking work can finally be appreciated as it was originally intended.”
Chris Smith, publishing director, added: “Since it was first published in 1981, Letters has become the closest thing we can ever have to J R R Tolkien’s autobiography. Within its selection of just over 350 letters, edited by Tolkien’s official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, and his son and literary executor, Christopher, Tolkien is revealed in all his colours: storyteller, academic, friend, husband, father and grandfather. They are intimate, heartfelt, wise, funny, fascinating; they brilliantly showcase the lost art of letter-writing and are a time-machine transporting us into the life of one of the 20th century’s literary greats.
“But this was not the book envisaged by Humphrey and Christopher. At the publisher’s request, they were required to reduce the original selection to what was then deemed a publishable extent. By going back to the editors’ original typescripts and notes, it has finally been possible for us to reinstate the 150 letters they excised purely for length – an additional 50,000 words – and publish the book as originally intended.”
