Tolkien maintained his reputation as a master of lore-craft and details even in his personal correspondence. There’s a surprising amount of thought, lore and consistent character writing that went into the writing. Some of the letters are brief and others are quite excessive. Sometimes his assistant Polar Bear injects commentary into the letters. Sometimes Santa is so busy that he is forced to hand off the correspondence to his secretary. He’s constantly scurrying to prepare each year’s stock of Christmas toys for his flight across Europe. The misadventures of Father Christmas and his minions seems to have no end.
In each letter, we learn about the course of events that has transpired this year at the North Pole. The stories are extremely light hearted and undramatic fair. It’s hard to imagine the letters being depersonalized from the context of being letters specifically between this family. It’s a deeply intimate series of letters that were clearly crafted by a very loving father to his beloved children. The letters were compiled by his children three years after his passing and released as a stand-alone children’s book. From 1920 to 1943, Tolkien wrote correspondence between his children and “Father Christmas” complete with long stories, handmade drawings and postage that talked about life at the North Pole. It was a Christmas tradition in the Tolkien house. Letters from Father Christmas didn’t start out as a book at all. This relationship lived on in the work of his son Christopher Tolkien who dedicated his entire life to sorting out the paperwork of his father’s estate and seeing to it that his books like The Silmarillion and his translations of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight saw the light of day.Īmong these heavy works of literature was one of his lighter books. His works like The Hobbit were initially written as children’s stories that he read to his four children. A huge aspect of the life of JRR Tolkien was the relationship between his work and his children.
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