letters – arquerociego

This book collects the letters that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his children every year in December for Christmas. In them he pretended to be Father Christmas or The North Polar Bear.

Thus, this book can be classified within the didactic genre under the form of memoirs and subclassified among those in the form of letters.

This is a limited and deluxe edition released by Ediciones Minotauro in 2020, which is a Spanish publishing house founded in 1955 and which is a reference in the publication of literary works of science fiction, horror and fantasy in Spanish. It also organises the annual Premio Minotauro. This book is published in English too.

Publication date: 1976
Country: United Kingdom
Pages: 208
Reading date: December 2022
Rating: 4/5

The author is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, 1892-Bournemouth, United Kingdom, 1973). He was a British writer, poet, philologist, linguist and university professor born in The Orange Free State, now part of South Africa. For some years he held a chair at Oxford University teaching Anglo-Saxon and later became Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton. He was a member of the literary discussion group known as the Inklings. He died at the age of 81 of peptic ulcer.

Some of his best known books are:

The Hobbit (1937)
The Lord of the Rings (1954)
The Silmarillion (1977) (posthumous publication)

Within the list of other books published by the same author, those for which there is already a post in this blog are highlighted.

Click on it to read it!

I have always been fascinated by the imaginary and fantastic world created by Tolkien, although I admit that it was only recently that I ventured into reading his works. So far I had only read the best known ones, but one day I saw an announcement about the publication of this limited deluxe edition of Letters from Father Christmas. After doing some research on what the book was about, my curiosity was piqued and I wanted to buy it to get to know the more familiar and intimate side of Tolkien.

I’ll start by explaining why this is a limited, deluxe edition. For years, Tolkien wrote letters at Christmas, in which he pretended to be Father Christmas or The North Polar Bear, and sent them to his children. These letters were published after the writer’s death, but in 2020 Ediciones Minotauro wanted to bring out some special limited units (as a celebration of the centenary of the first letter’s writing), of which I got my hands on a copy. This special edition of the book collects all the letters mentioned in full with their respective drawings, envelopes, stamps, paintings (from the first in 1920 to the last in 1943), some of them for the first time in colour. It also includes an expanded introduction, the definitive version of the text, an illustrated slipcase for the book and a hardback binding, with silver embossing and illustrations by Tolkien himself.

«Well, Christmas is here! A holiday so amazing, it cannot be tainted by commercial interests – as long as we don’t allow them to do so».
J.R.R. Tolkien

«It is very cold today, and my hand is shaking very much – on Christmas Day I shall be nineteen hundred and twenty-four, no! nineteen hundred and twenty-seven years old. I am much older than your great-grandfather, so I cannot help dancing my pen a little, but I am told that you read so well already that I am sure you will be able to read my letter».
J.R.R. Tolkien as Father Christmas

Throughout the reading of this work I have been able to discover a side of the author that I did not know. I found it very touching to get to know him and to discover him in a more intimate way through a look at his paternal role with his children, to whom he wrote these letters.

As I read each one, Father Christmas told more and more stories of adventures or worries at his North Pole home, and introduced other beings such as The North Polar Bear and his nephews, snow elves, red gnomes, snowmen, cave bears, penguins, goblins, the Moon Man…. This extension of the world of the North Pole, home of Father Christmas, surely enriched the imagination of Tolkien’s children in their childhood and filled them with illusion.

Moreover, it is clear that Tolkien put a great deal of care into the writing of these letters, as they show a highly polished handwriting, multiple drawings and illustrations, as well as a continuity of the events recounted in them from year to year.

«The Moon Man came to see me the other day – a fortnight ago, to be exact – he usually comes at this time of year as he gets very lonely on the moon, and we made him a nice little Christmas pudding».
J.R.R. Tolkien as The North Polar Bear

There are many curious facts that I found magical and amusing. One of them is that he himself made the North Pole postage stamps and it was never known what deal he struck with the post office so that they would accept his letters with these stamps. Also, in many letters he wrote in a different handwriting, thicker and in capital letters, pretending to be The North Polar Bear. On the other hand, his children often found the envelopes dusted with snow, and if one year they did not receive the presents they had asked for, Father Christmas explained in the letter that it was due to the attacks of the goblins.

With regard to the letters dated from 1939 onwards, Tolkien takes an anti-war stance on the Second World War and helps his children to reflect on world events and the news of the war with empathy and pacifism.

«The number of children who are still in contact with me seems to have decreased: I suppose it’s because of this horrible war, and things will get better again when it’s over, and I’m as busy as ever. But at the moment there are an awful lot of people who have lost their homes, or have abandoned them; it seems that half the whole world is in the wrong place».
J.R.R. Tolkien as Father Christmas (during the Second World War)

In conclusion, this reading has helped me to get to know Tolkien as a person and, in particular, his more paternal and personal side. The making of these letters pretending to be Father Christmas or The North Polar Bear was an effort he did not hesitate to make in order to bring magic, illusion and imagination to his children’s childhood. This is very touching and beautiful. I recommend it to those interested in learning more about Tolkien, as well as to those who love Christmas and this time of the year. So… Merry Christmas! 🙂

«Merry Christmas! I suppose you will hang up your sock one last time: I hope so, for I still have a few little things for you. After this I shall say ‘good-bye’ to you, more or less: I mean I shall not forget you. We always keep the numbers of our old friends, together with their letters; and hereafter we hope to come back when you are grown up and have your own houses, and children».
J.R.R. Tolkien as Father Christmas (excerpt from his last letter)

Some reflections:

What do you think of this side of Tolkien, and did you know about it?
Do you think that Father Christmas and similar traditions help children’s emotional and symbolic development in childhood?
How do you experience Christmas, what do you think about it, would you change anything?

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