Guide to Tolkien's Letters
This Guide documents and indexes known letters to, from and about J. R. R. Tolkien. The corpus of Tolkien's letters is vast, but references have previously been spread across hundreds of books, catalogues and archives. New information and new features are being added regularly to continually improve this Guide.
The Guide is meant to help answer questions such as - which archive or reference holds the original letter? What is the letter about? Where has the letter been quoted or reproduced?
This Guide does not publish the contents or photographs of the letters as they are all under copyright by the author(s). In the case of letters written by J.R.R. Tolkien, the copyright belongs with the Tolkien Estate, and they must be contacted for permission to quote from or reproduce Tolkien's letters. For more information, see www.tolkienestate.com/frequently-asked-questions-and-links/
Do you have information about a letter or own an unpublished letter that should be in this Guide? Please Contact Us, we would love to hear from you.
Additional Links relating to this Guide
With the recent release of the revised and expanded Letters, we have put together this quick pdf documenting the changes made between the original edition and the new revised edition.
Brought to you by onthetrail, Urulókë, Trotter and Mr. Underhill.
To get started, click one of the green buttons below to see a filtered set of letters, or type in any search query to find exactly what you are looking for.
The revised and expanded edition of Carpenter's Letters was released in 2023 in the UK (store link) and USA (store link). We have collected a list of errata for the revised and expanded edition of Letters here.
(5 letters match)
Letters Sent On This Day
Tolkien writes about Victorian Warwickshire as an inspiration for the Shire. Additional quotes from this letter appear in Chronology. The original is he...
The Return of the King was published 20 October 1955. Irritated by the Times Literary Supplement review of 25 November 1955, Mr. Masson, a librarian at ...
Tolkien sends Roberts's letter about serializing The Hobbit in Princess magazine to his publisher. He is in principle ok with the idea as the fee seems ...
Tolkien had been sent details of a proposed ‘sequel’ to The Lord of the Rings that a ‘fan’ was going to write himself.
Tolkien thanks Green for his review of Smith of Wootton Major.