TCG Letter #106

Arthur Ransome, best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of childrens books wrote to Tolkien in 1937 after The Hobbit had been published, firstly to declare himself a "hobbit-fancier", one certain of The Hobbit's future success, Ransome admired the book. But also with critique, "may I complain that on page 27, when Gandalf calls Bilbo an excitable little hobbit, the scribe (human no doubt) has written ‘man’ by mistake? On page 112 Gandalf calls the goblins ‘little boys’, but he means it as an insult so that is no doubt right." He continues "Didn’t he [Thorin] say ‘More of us’, thinking of dwarves, elves, goblins and dragons and not of a species which to him must have been very unimportant. The error, if it is an error, is a natural one, due again to the humanity of the scribe to whom we must all be grateful for the chronicle." Tolkien would respond in admiration just two days later, coining one of the most famous of Tolkien's lines from any of his letters, "You tempt me grievously to a mythological essay".^{See Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Arthur Ransome • 15 December 1937 (#105) for details of Tolkien's reply. See references below for more details of this letter, Tolkien's reply and their wider correspondence. See also Carpenter #19: Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Stanley Unwin • 16 December 1937 (#22) for more information on this exchange.[1]}

This letter is held at the Bodleian Library's archives among its Tolkien Papers.^{MS. Tolkien 21, fol. 91[2]}