In The Father Christmas Letters, which Tolkien wrote for his children, Red Gnomes are helpful creatures who come from Norway to the North Pole to assist Father Christmas and his Elves in fighting the wicked Goblins.

He wrote, in Letter 131 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, " I dislike Allegory.

Tolkien wrote that myths held " fundamental things ".

As Tolkien wrote, "... The episode of the theft arose naturally ( and almost inevitably ) from the circumstances.

Tolkien wrote the later story in much less humorous tones and infused it with more complex moral and philosophical themes.

Many of the thematic and stylistic differences arose because Tolkien wrote The Hobbit as a story for children, and The Lord of the Rings for the same audience, who had subsequently grown up since its publication.

Tolkien wrote in his essay " On Fairy Stories " that the terms " fantasy " and " enchantment " are connected to not only "... the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires ..." but also "... the origin of language and of the mind.

Humphrey Carpenter in his 1977 biography relates that Tolkien owned a postcard entitled Der Berggeist (), and on the paper cover in which he kept it, he wrote " the origin of Gandalf ".

Tolkien wrote in one of his letters: " what I think is a primary ‘ fact ’ about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration.

" Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that The Marvellous Land of Snergs " was probably an unconscious source-book for the Hobbits " and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit " might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt " ( like hobbits, George Babbitt enjoys the comforts of his home ).

Frodo becomes in some ways the symbolic representation of the conscience of Hobbits, a point made explicitly in the story " Leaf by Niggle " which Tolkien wrote at the same time as the first nine chapters of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien once wrote that he " did not intend the steed of the Witch-king to be what is now called a ' pterodactyl '", while acknowledging that it was " obviously ... pterodactylic and owes much " to the " new ... mythology of the ' Prehistoric '", and might even be " a last survivor of older geological eras.

( Tolkien wrote of Boromir's journey that " the courage and hardihood required is not fully recognized in the narrative ".

Tolkien describes Boromir's appearance as reflecting his Númenórean descent: tall ( Tolkien wrote he was 6 ' 4 " or 193 cm ), fair, dark-haired, and grey-eyed.

In a 1951 letter, Tolkien himself wrote about " the Byzantine City of Minas Tirith.

Tolkien wrote in a private letter:

Tolkien wrote that he gave up his mission as one of the Wizards by becoming too obsessed with animals and plants.

Sometime before 1969 Tolkien wrote the essay Of Dwarves and Men, in which detailed consideration was given to the Dwarves ' use of language, that the names given in the stories were of Northern Mannish origin, and Khuzdûl being their own secret tongue and the naming of the Seven Houses of the Dwarves.

In response to a query about clothing styles in Middle-earth, Tolkien wrote:

In 1914 when he was studying at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien wrote a poem The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star which was inspired by the " Crist " poem of Cynewulf.

Eldamar is " Elvenhome ", the " coastal region of Aman, settled by the Elves ", wrote Tolkien.

Tolkien wrote at least four versions of the oath itself, as found in The History of Middle-earth.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote that Mithril is found only in Khazad-dûm ( Moria ) in Middle-earth, where it is mined by the Dwarves.

Like Niggle, Tolkien faced many chores and duties that kept him from the work he loved ; and like Niggle, Tolkien was a horrible procrastinator.

In many ways the Smaug episode reflects and references the dragon of Beowulf, and Tolkien uses the episode to put into practice some of the ground-breaking literary theories he had developed about the Anglo-Saxon poem and its early medieval portrayal of the dragon as having bestial intelligence.

The more regular members of the Inklings, many of them academics at the University, included J. R. R. " Tollers " Tolkien, C. S. " Jack " Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Tolkien's son Christopher, Lewis ' elder brother Warren or " Warnie ", Roger Lancelyn Green, Adam Fox, Hugo Dyson, R. A.

The sarati, described in Parma Eldalamberon 13, a script developed by J. R. R. Tolkien in the late 1910s, anticipates many features of the tengwar, especially the vowel representation by diacritics ( which is found in many tengwar varieties ), different tengwar shapes and a few correspondences between sound features and letter shape features ( though inconsistent ).

J. R. R. Tolkien is one of many scholars who have studied and promoted the Mercian dialect of Old English, and introduced various Mercian terms into his legendarium – especially in relation to the Kingdom of Rohan, otherwise known as the Mark ( a name cognate with Mercia ).

In his essay " On Fairy-Stories ", J. R. R. Tolkien agreed with the exclusion of " fairies " from the definition, defining fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men in Faërie, the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only other magical species but many other marvels.

J. R. R. Tolkien constructed many Elvish languages.

Tolkien never ceased to experiment on his constructed languages, and they were subjected to many revisions.

The exact number of languages constructed by Tolkien is unknown, for many of his linguistic papers are still unpublished.

* The languages of Men of Middle-earth were many, but most were only alluded to by Tolkien.

Tolkien not only invented many languages but also scripts.

Original drafts for the account of the rulers of South-kingdom are not preserved, and in the earliest extant manuscript, ascribed by Christopher Tolkien to 1949 – 50, many events of the final history are already present.

They take many of the names of their models from Tolkien.

When writing The Lord of the Rings Tolkien continued many of the themes he had set up in The Hobbit.

In the last interview before his death, Tolkien, after discussing the nature of Elves, briefly says of his Dwarves: " The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?

The names and many details of their culture are in fact based on Germanic-derived cultures, particularly that of the Anglo-Saxons and their Old English language, towards which Tolkien felt a strong affinity.

Tolkien writes that the Elves made many lesser rings as essays in the craft, but eventually with Sauron's assistance they forged the Seven and the Nine.

However, Tolkien frequently disliked the idea that his works were allegorical, saying in the foreword to the 2nd edition of The Lord of the Rings, " But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations ..." and " I think that many confuse ' applicability ' with ' allegory '; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Tolkien gave the same forest many different names:

Depending on the choice of conversion factors ( among many that Tolkien used at different times ), this translates to a period anywhere from 4, 902 to 65, 390 solar years.

:" Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful ... Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names.