I am at last turning to my own affairs. The situation is this: I am anxious to publish The Lord of the Rings as soon as possible. I believe it to be a great (though not flawless) work. Let other things follow as they may. But as the expense of typing proved prohibitive, I had to do it all myself, and there is only one (more or less) fair copy in existence. I dare not consign that to the post, and in any case I am now going to devote some days to correcting it finally. […]

I have recently made some tape-recordings of pans of the Hobbit and The Lord (notably the Gollum-passages and some pieces of ‘Elvish’) and was much surprised to discover their effectiveness as recitations, and (if I may say so) my own effectiveness as a narrator, I do a very pretty Gollum and Treebeard. Could not the BBC be interested? The tape-reel is in the possession of George Sayer (English Master at Malvern) and I am sure he would forward it for your or anyone else’s trial. It was unrehearsed and impromptu and could be improved.

… we talked a little about his health. Tolkien was gloomy about the terrible strains and anxieties Jack was suffering: Warren’s drunkenness, two rather difficult boys, and ‘a strange marriage’ to ‘a sick and domineering woman’. It turned out that what worried him most was that she was a divorcee. He did not accept my argument that she could not have been divorced, since as a Christian she had never been married. However, the reappearance of Jack forestalled a discussion of this question.

I have (I hope) resisted the inclination to ‘improve’ The Hobbit – except for removing the ‘author-to-reader’ asides, in some places: very irritating to intelligent children (as some have said). There are some corrections due to the actual errors and discrepancies in the tale itself; some that try to make things clearer. But since in order to spot these things – including printer’s errors that still survive! – one has to read the whole with line-to-line care, it seemed to me a pity not to get rid of a few happy-go-lucky passages that are quite out of joint. The Hobbit is taken as a prologue to The [Lord of the Rings] and though no one expects consistency between the two to be exact, it is a pity that some passages in The [Hobbit] should be completely impossible in The [Lord of the Rings]. I hope you will agree, for instance, that the alterations in Ch. II provide that the journey as far as the first troll-adventure though suitably rapid and understated now could be a quick glance at the same country that is described in the long work.