IN THE POST:For 23 years, JRR Tolkien sent a series of beautifully illustrated messages from 'Father Nicholas Christmas' to his four children
AT CHRISTMAS 1920, a curious letter arrived at the home of three-year-old John Tolkien. It was dusted with "snow", carried a North Pole postage stamp, and described in words and pictures the life and times of Father Nicholas Christmas, his house, his friends and the things that happened to him, hilarious and alarming by turns. For the next 23 years the letters came, for John and then for his brothers and sister Michael, Christopher and Priscilla.
As the years went by, their prolific father JRR Tolkien brought new characters into the Christmas household: first the Great North Polar bear - the original walking disaster area - then Snow Elves, Red Gnomes, Snow Men, Cave Bears, and the Polar Bear's plump and playful nephews Paksu and Valkotukka, who "came on a visit and never went away".
The letters were in a great variety of writing styles, and the drawings were copious: there is one beauty which has the reindeer-drawn sleigh over the sleeping steeples, towers and domes of Oxford, where Tolkien was variously professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature until his death in 1973 at the age of 81.
A new edition of the collected letters, Letters from Father Christmas, edited by Baillie Tolkien, is in bookshops now.
The Polar Bear began to add notes in execrable spelling to the letters, then Father Christmas took on as his secretary an elf named Ilbereth, and in later letters elves play a major role in defence of Father Christmas's house and cellars against attacks by malicious, thieving goblins. An oddly grating tone appeared one year: the goblins "set part of the stores on fire and captured several gnomes, who sleep down there on guard, before Polar Bear and some more gnomes came in - and killed 100 before I arrived". Killed 100? For a Christmas story? Perhaps the wars of the Ring saga were getting to the genial Tolkien.
Twenty-three years of letters and illustrations make a charming book, with Tolkien's scripts given their printed "translations" on facing pages. His delight in script styles and ancient symbols bring their own pleasure - a page of "cave art" is masterly - and proof of his friend Cecil Day-Lewis's observation: "The inexhaustible fertility of the man's imagination amazes me."
The final letter will evoke a painful memory for many a parent - it did for me. It is to his daughter Priscilla that he (or rather, Father Christmas) writes: "I suppose you will be hanging up your stocking just once more . . . after this I shall have to say 'goodbye' , more or less. I mean I shall not forget you. We always keep the old numbers of our old friends, and their letters, and later on we hope to come back when they are grown up and have houses of their own and children." Sob, sniff.
Mention of those stalwarts of The Lord of the Rings, the elves, and of C Day-Lewis, reminds me of a favourite Tolkien anecdote. The two friends were prominent in an Oxford group who called themselves the "Inklings", and they met to read aloud selections from work in progress. They were often highly caustic about each other's efforts, and Tolkien was regularly critical of Day-Lewis's Narnia. Tolkien was one evening deep in the doings of Middle Earth when an anguished cry went up from Hugo Dyson, an English don: "Oh no, not another f***ing elf . . .".
Letters from Father Christmasis published by Harper Collins (€17.50)