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.

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.

Tolkien wrote, many years later: " it was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.

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.

Tolkien greatly prefers this motif over the later medieval trend of using the dragon as a symbolic or allegorical figure, such as in the legend of St. George.

C. S. Lewis, friend of Tolkien ( and later author of The Chronicles of Narnia between 1949 – 1964 ), writing in The Times reports:

Auden was later to correspond with Tolkien, and they became friends.

On the association between the two ' Inklings ' societies, Tolkien later said " although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds ( and lengths!

* The following samples presumably predate the Lord of the Rings, but they were not explicitly dated: DTS 16, DTS 17, DTS 18 – Elvish Script Sample I, II, III, with parts of the English poems Errantry and Bombadil, first published in the Silmarillion Calendar 1978, later in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, as well as DTS 23 – So Lúthien, a page of the English Lay of Leithan text facsimiled in The Lays of Beleriand: 299.

When writing The Hobbit in the early 1930s Tolkien gave the name Gandalf to the leader of the Dwarves, the character later called Thorin Oakenshield.

Tolkien later assigned this name to an ancient king who had ordered some spears from the dwarves.

Tolkien explicitly links Gandalf to the element Fire later in the same essay:

There he learnt a lot about writing and editing, and later admitted of Tolkien's influence, " to be successful in fantasy, you have to take the measure of Tolkien — work with his strengths and away from his weaknesses ".

Textual history was traced by Christopher Tolkien in the volumes of The History of Middle-earth, and the overall subject has gained attention among later researchers and fans.

The word tarlang means " stiff neck " in Sindarin, and was stated by Tolkien to have originally been the name of the mountain ridge, later interpreted by folk as a personal name .</ div >

As he later recalled, Tolkien thought about " adventures " that the Company would meet on their way to Mordor and considered employing " Stone-Men " as one of them ; other preserved notes mention a " city of stone and civilized men ", its siege and a " Land of Ond ".

By the time Tolkien began rewriting " The Council of Elrond " a year later, he had developed a story that Aragorn's ancestors were in past Kings in Boromir's hometown.

While working upon the " Homeric catalogue ", as he called it, of the reinforcements coming to Minas Tirith, Tolkien devised the names Lossarnach, Anfalas, Lamedon and Pinnath Gelin, all of which appear on a new version of the map in final locations with the exception of Lamedon, first placed in northern Lebennin and later moved westward.

The appendices to The Lord of the Rings were brought to a finished state in 1953 – 54, but a decade later, during preparations for the release of the Second Edition, Tolkien elaborated the events that had led to the Kin-strife and introduced the regency of Rómendacil II.

Along with a few words in Khuzdul, Tolkien also developed runes of his own invention ( the Cirth ), said to have been invented by Elves and later adopted by the Dwarves.

The most Dwarf-centric story from The Book of Lost Tales, " The Nauglafring ", was not redrafted to fit with the later positive portrayal of the dwarves from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, nor other events in the Silmarillion, leading Christopher Tolkien significantly to rewrite it with input from Guy Gavriel Kay in preparation for publication.

While studying at Oxford, Tolkien developed a constructed language that later became known as Quenya.

It may be that Tolkien conceived the Elvish word Arda as the fictional prehistoric source of such words in later Mannish languages.

However, it is unclear if this is the case, and it appears that Tolkien may have dropped the use of " vanya " as a verb in his later conceptions of Quenya.

Dragons will be still present but they will not interfere until later ages according to letter 144 of Tolkien.

While Tolkien originally described Middle-earth as a fictional early history of the real Earth he later adjusted this slightly to describe it as a mythical time within the history of Earth.

But this is not borne out in any of the later genealogies that Tolkien left behind.