Letters from Father Christmas by JRR Tolkien

Ruadhán Jones explores a little-known Christmas treasure by JRR Tolkien

JRR Tolkien exists in the minds of many as the creator the 20th century’s great epic, The Lord of the Rings. Epic in the breadth of its world building, epic also in the span of its action and, finally, epic in the scope of its moral vision, Tolkien’s work has enchanted the world – to use his own language – for decades.

As a result of his fame and the interest in his works, a number of treasures that would otherwise have gone unnoticed have been unearthed and published. Among these is his delightful, whimsical collection of Letters from Father Christmas.

Beginning in 1920 with a letter to his first child, John, and concluding in 1943 with a final, poignant letter to his youngest daughter, Priscilla, Tolkien’s letters became a part of his children’s Christmases. They even took to sending letters to Santa, enquiring as to his health and furnishing him with their Christmas lists.

The letters, enjoyable in themselves, also provide invaluable insight into Tolkien’s seemingly irrepressible creative energy. Each letter and the accompanying drawings and sketches serve to create the world and character of Father Nicholas Christmas, his clumsy and endearing Polar Bear and the goblins, elves and other beasts that inhabit Tolkien’s North Pole.

Tolkien the father

The immediate impression you get in reading this collection is of Tolkien, the devoted father. For the near-25-year span of his four children’s childhood, he continued writing the letters and creating many beautiful drawings to accompany them, through some of the busiest times of his academic career. As his children grew older, the letters became more complex and playful, as he continued to develop them.

Tolkien’s marriage to his beloved Edith was not without its issues, as his biographer Humphrey Carpenter notes. Their interests differed greatly and Edith struggled to adjust to the life of an Oxford don’s wife. But where they were wholly united was in their love for their children.

“A principal source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family,” Carpenter wrote in JRR Tolkien: A Biography. “This bound them together until the end of their lives and it was perhaps the strongest force in their marriage. They delighted to discuss and mull over every detail of the lives of their children and later their grandchildren.

“Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.”

Storyteller

One of the ways Tolkien expressed this love was through telling stories to his children. As so often happens, it began quite simply – John, his eldest son, often found difficulty getting to sleep. So, Tolkien began to tell him stories about Carrots, a boy with red hair who climbed into a cuckoo clock and went off on a series of strange adventures.

Later, Michael was troubled with nightmares as a young boy and Tolkien created the character Bill Stickers for him. In fact, the famous Tom Bobadil of The Lord of the Rings originated in one of the many childhood stories Tolkien created. It was within the context of this storytelling habit that the letters from Father Nicholas Christmas developed, Carpenter tells us.

“Every Christmas, often at the last minute, Tolkien would write out an account of recent events at the North Pole in the shaky handwriting of Father Christmas, the rune-like capitals used by the Polar Bear, or the flowing script of Ilbereth [his elf-secretary],” Carpenter writes.

“Then he would add drawings, write the address on the envelope (labelling it with such superscriptions as ‘By gnome-carrier. Immediate haste!’) and paint and cut out a highly realistic North Polar postage stamp.”

Carpenter then describes the great lengths Tolkien went to in order to maintain the illusion that the letters were from Father Christmas. In fact the children kept on believing until they reached adolescence and discovered by accident – or were told – of the true origin.

“Finally he would deliver the letter,” Carpenter writes. “This was done in a variety of ways. The simplest was to leave it in the fireplace as if it had been brought down the chimney, and to cause strange noises to be heard in the early morning, which together with a snowy footprint on the carpet indicated that Father Christmas himself had called. Later the local postman became an accomplice and used to deliver the letters himself, so how could the children not believe in them?”

Artist

The length’s Tolkien went to please his children is deeply endearing. As Carpenter notes, his attention to detail went right down to designing the charming ‘North Pole’ postage stamps. Tolkien’s skill as an artist can be easily overlooked, particularly in the Father Christmas collection – the paintings and sketches are often intended to be humorous, but that doesn’t detract from Tolkien’s skill.

His interest in drawing and painting began as a childhood hobby, and he illustrated his own poems when studying as an undergraduate. He experimented with a number of different materials, including watercolours, coloured inks or pencils. Carpenter describes his style as being indebted to an affection for Japanese prints, but it’s also clear that he developed a style of his own.

In the Fr Christmas letters, his talents as a storyteller and illustrator were combined. From the very first letter, which was accompanied by a colourful image of Fr Christmas dressed in red and marching through the snow, they combine painted works, pencil sketches and even the occasional runic script.

What stands out in all the paintings is their vibrancy, appealing colours and variety of style. The more ornate are a mix of watercolours and pencil drawings, such as an image of the multicoloured sun setting over the North Pole. A later example most obviously highlights the debt he owes to Japanese print – it’s like a postcard for the North Pole, created by transplanting a symbol from the Land of the Rising sun.

My favourite depicts Fr Christmas and his reindeer riding above the winds of the earth, over the sea, with the curling waves beneath them and clouds scudding across the sky. Though rudimentary, it’s not hard to imagine the effect this little painting might have had on a child – magic.

Playful humour

Another aspect of Tolkien’s personality which makes these letters such an enjoyable read is his quirky humour. It easily gels with the sensibility of a child, being silly and melodramatic. Carpenter quotes Tolkien’s own verdict on his sense of humour in his biography: “‘I have,’ he [Tolkien] once wrote, ‘a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome.’”

Carpenter furnishes us with two examples of this humour at work: “At a New Year’s Eve party in the nineteen-thirties he would don an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug and paint his face white to impersonate a polar bear, or he would dress up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe and chase an astonished neighbour down the road.”

Tiresome and anarchic though it may have been in real life, on the page it makes for colourful reading. Father Christmas’ many misadventures – aided and abetted by the clumsy, danger prone Polar Bear – enliven the pages and become increasingly convoluted. Much of the humour resides in the interplay between Father Christmas and Polar Bear, whom he blames for most delays.

Tolkien dramatises this cleverly – Polar Bear’s angular, clumsy script intersperses the erratic, spindly scrawl of Father Christmas, commenting “Cheek!” when he feels his honour besmirched. One of the humorous happenings described by Father Christmas is reminiscent of the firework scene in Peter Jackson’s adaption of The Fellowship of the Ring.

“I am more shaky than usual this year,” writes Father Christmas in his 1926 letter. “The North Polar Bear’s fault! It was the biggest bang in the world, and the most monstruous firework there ever has been. It turned the North Pole BLACK and shook all the stars out of place, broke the moon into four – and the Man in it fell into my back garden… Then I found out that the reindeer had broken loose. They were running all over the country, breaking reins and ropes and tossing presents up in the air.”

Polar Bear annotates the story, with his own cheery version of events: “Father Christmas had to hurry away and leave me to finish. He is old and gets worried when funny things happen. You would have laughed too! I think it is good of me laughing. It was a lovely firework. The reindeer will run quick to England this year. They are still frightened!”

It’s just the kind of story children love, and one in keeping with Tolkien’s anarchic humour.

Irrepressible imagination

For those who have read The Lord of the Rings, it may seem hard to reconcile the serious tone and material with the flippancy of the Father Christmas letters. Carpenter muses on the self-same concern in Tolkien’s biography. Carpenter diagnoses an initial divide between Tolkien’s ‘serious’ works, such as his long poem ‘The Gest of Beren and Luthien’ (which Tolkien buffs may recognise from The Silmarillion), and his lighter children’s stories.

During the 20s and 30s, Carpenter suggests, there were two sides to Tolkien’s storytelling, the one epic, medieval and deeply serious, the other light and childish. “Something was lacking, something that would bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same time tuned to the popular imagination.” This only came to fruition with Tolkien’s fateful ‘discovery’ of a hole in the ground in which there lived a hobbit.

However, there is one clear connection between these fledgling works and his later mature ones – Tolkien’s active and irrepressible imagination, and his love of world building. As the children grew older and were able to comprehend more, the letters became more dramatic and varied.

New characters were introduced: snow-elves, red gnomes, snow-men, cave-bears and the Polar Bear’s nephews, Paksu and Valkotukka. He began to create a history for the world, one infused with goblins and ancient caves, battles of history and the present.

Father Christmas letter to his daughter Priscilla, his youngest child, is a vivid and dramatic account of a battle in the North Pole. Hordes of goblins descend on Father Christmas’ home while he and Polar Bear are sleeping for the summer, surrounding them and blocking them in.

“I have not time to tell you all the story,” Father Christmas explains. “I had to blow three blasts on the great Horn (Windbeam). It hangs over the fireplace in the hall, and if I have not told you about it before it is because I have not had to blow it for over four hundred years: its sound carries as far as the North Wind blows…

“There was a big battle down in the plain near the North Pole in November, in which the Goblins brought hundreds of new companies out of their tunnels. We were driven back to the Cliff, and it was no until Polar Bear and a party of his younger relatives crept out by night, and blew up the entrance to the new tunnels with 1001lbs of gunpowder that we got the better of them – for the present.”

Myth-making

For Catholics, there can be a sense of unease about Santa Claus and his increasing commercialisation. What is the focus of Christmas, a mythical figure and presents, or Christ? Santa can become an exploitative figure, as with the Elf on the Shelf who spies on children in order to report back. Children are taught to believe that good behaviour equals gifts. Equally, sceptical theorists argue about that it clouds logical reasoning and is merely an effort to prolong magical thinking.

However, I think Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters highlights the more positive possibilities of Father Christmas. In fact, it ties into Tolkien’s own belief in the importance of storytelling and myths.

“Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall,” Carpenter writes, paraphrasing a conversation Tolkien had with C.S. Lewis. “Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

While Santa Claus or Father Christmas is not a myth in the way that Tolkien meant, he playfully creates a myth, extending the story of Father Christmas and fuelling his children’s imaginations, enchanting them. In other words, he is preparing their minds for the “true harbour”, a true myth or story about ourselves, a true gift given to the world on Christmas – Jesus Christ.

“You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened?” Yes, is the simple answer. The pagans told myths about spiritual warfare between good and chaos, or about the dead returning to visit them, or about brave men who sacrificed themselves for man or God. Christianity does not reject these because they are myths, but because they are not true.

So, when reading these stories, either to yourself or to your children, consider how the myth of Father Christmas might fuel the minds of our children. The issue is not that we tell the story of Father Christmas, but that we often tell it badly – Tolkien’s work, enjoyable in its own right, is an example of the story told well.