TCG Letter #657 / Carpenter Letter #284

Auden told Tolkien that he had agreed to write a short book about him, in collaboration with Peter H. Salus, for a seres entitled Christian Perspectives; he hoped this did not meet with Tolkien’s disapproval. He also mentioned that he and Salus had attended a meeting of the New York Tolkien Society. The meeting, on 27 December 1965, was reported in the New Yorker on 15 January 1966, and a quotation from this report was published in the London Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that Tolkien read every morning, on 20 January. According to the Telegraph, Auden had told the Society: ‘He [Tolkien] lives in a hideous house – I can’t tell you how awful it is – with hideous pictures on the walls.’