Professor Tolkien's Desk © 2024 Miriam Ellis, exclusively for TolkienGuide.com^{Miriam and Urulókë spent a few months collecting exhibition and photographic evidence of materiel that Tolkien owned or used - everything in this illustration (barring the flowers) is accurate, though they likely never were arranged exactly in this manner.[1]}

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Do you have information about a letter or own an unpublished letter that you feel should be in this Guide?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.