Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further
To me there seems almost an anticorrelation between being a diligent student and going further. It's not gender specific, I've noticed it in musicians in general, and it puzzles and frustrates me. It seems the more diligent they are about learning technique and proper ways and so on, the less willing they are to write their own music. I've known conservatory folks who are literally scared of it. While the messy amateurish folks often do compose, and it's occasionally good. Maybe you have to be a little bit independent-minded to go further than others.
There's a little bit of contradiction in there, in that it's not enough to be independent - you also need some amount of good technique. But you almost need to luck into it, acquire it in your own way. If you get it by being too much of a good student, then that mindset in itself will limit you.
Feels connected to his distrust of "quick, bright, standardized, mental processes", and the obsession with language. It's like his mind is relentlessly orienting to the territory, refusing to accept anyone else's map. Which makes it harder to be a student but easier to discover something new. Reminds me of Geoff Hinton's advice to not read the literature before engaging with the problem yourself.
Possibly perfectionism? I experience this form of creative paralysis a lot - as soon as I get enough into the weeds of one creative form I start seeing the endless ramifications of the tiniest decision and basically can just not move a step without trying to achieve endlessly deep optimisation over the whole. Meanwhile people who can just not give a fuck and let the creative juices flow get shit done.
Thank you so much for compiling these quotes; they are impactful and I might never have read them if you hadn't posted them here.
I love these quotes too, but while reading them a funny thought struck me. Fantasy terms like "elves" and "orcs" seem normal to us now, but Tolkien basically invented their modern usage. At the time he was writing to his son they would have been very new and only used that way by Tolkien himself.
Substituting Tolkien's terms with equivalents from Starcraft makes one of these passages sound ridiculous:
An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Kerrigan with the Hivemind. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Kerrigans, and slowly turn Terrans and Protoss into Zerg. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Zerg on our side … Well, there you are: an SCV amongst the Hydralisks.
Why is this, and would the passage have sounded just as goofy back in the 1940s?
Is it just because the Starcraft terms are less mainstream? Perhaps sci-fi terms are generally less graceful than fantasy ones? Or maybe Tolkien had a special sense for phrasing and names like "Sauron" and "Urukhai" would have sounded just as profound then as they do now?
Tolkien invented their exact usage, but he didn't invent the words. "Elf", obviously, goes way back, but "orc" also goes way back, with meanings similar to the Tolkien usage.
"Zerg", "Protoss", & "SCV", are all neologisms; notably, the least weird ones, "Kerrigan" and "Terran", are quite ordinary words. ('Hydralisk' is a bit in between. 'Hydra' as a prefix is familiar, albeit increasingly hopelessly overloaded with SF/comic connotations, but 'lisk' as a suffix is a very unfamiliar one: 'obelisk' is the only one that comes to mind, and that appears to get 'lisk' as a butchering of Greek and then French.)
An interesting comparison here would be Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which does something similar: it uses old words in place of neologisms, and for that reason, despite being stuffed with weird terms (so much so you can publish a dictionary of it), words like 'pelagic argosy' or 'fuligin' or 'capote' nevertheless worked as well in the 1980s as they do now, despite not having achieved the cultural currency of 'elves' or 'orcs', and so demonstrating that the 'use old words' trick works in its own right and not simply by mere familiarity.
(But conversely, writing old-timey is no surefire solution. Wolfe's dying-earth fiction was influenced by Hodgson's The Night Land, which is imaginative and influential... and the style is almost ludicrously unreadable, whether in 1912 or 2025.)
Now, why is that? I suspect that it's a mix of unrealized familiarity (you may not have seen 'destrier' often enough to consciously recognize it as a real word, much less define or use it*, but unconsciously you do) and linguistic 'dark knowledge' in recognizing that somehow, the word 'autarch' is valid and a plausible word which could exist, in a way that 'Zerg' or 'Protoss' could not exist. It somehow respects the laws of languages and etymology and spelling, and you recognize that by not immediately rejecting it like most neologisms. (And to some extent, Tolkien's own conlangs, by having their long fictional history to justify various twists & turns, gain a hidden realism that a tidy rationalized hobbyist conlang will not. Something something greebles fractal dimension worldbuilding pattern language something something.)
* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words 'stick' will reflect your intelligence's efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy
but 'lisk' as a suffix is a very unfamiliar one
I think in case of hydralisks it's analogous to basilisks, "basileus" (king) + diminitive, but with shift of meaning implying similarity to reptile.
"* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words 'stick' will reflect your intelligence's efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy"
It's still a weird efficiency, especially b/c it can be "gamed" by studying for SATs or by midwit infovoreautists who don't have high working memory.
And yet, despite the SAT being so studied for, it remains a pretty good IQ test overall, and SAT-V or the GRE verbal parts OK. I think that's because there are so many words (500k+ in English, and the GRE-V has no compunction about mining the obscurest just to f--- with you), and you would have to study so many in order to meaningful inflate your scores (because after all, while there may be only a hundred 'vocab words' on any given SAT test, you don't know which hundred). Let's see... Here's an interesting-looking reference: "How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age", Brysbaert et al 2016
an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days.
So, if you wanted to boost your score from the mean to the 95th percentile, that seems to imply that you'd have to memorize 10,000 'lemmas' ("Uninflected word from which all inflected words are derived"). That's a big number, and then you have to ask how much work that would be.
If you did this in the optimal way with spaced repetition (ignoring the time it takes to figure out the 10k you want to memorize in the first place or the time to construct the flashcards or any penalty from needing to inefficiently cram them for an upcoming SAT instead of life-long efficient review), which of course still few students do, as spaced repetition systems remain a niche outside of medical school & foreign language study, the SuperMemo rough estimate is a long-term investment of 5 minutes per flashcard, and we'll assume 1 lemma = 1 flashcard. That means you have to invest 10,00 * 5 = 50,000 minutes or 833 hours of studying! Meanwhile, hardly anyone is doing more than 8 hours of studying for the SAT as a whole (among the kids I knew at a prep high school, many didn't even do a weekend course, which would entail about 8 hours of classwork & study). 833 hours for vocab alone would be insane.
That's why people generally learn vocab from passive exposure rather than targeted study. Because no one, not even the most teacher's-pet student, wants to do that. And so vocab measures keep working.
It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times.
How could you possibly know something like that?
How could you possibly know something like that?
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all…
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)
I would assume that his children in particular would be quite familiar with their usage, though, and that seems to be who a lot of the legendarium-heavy letters are written to.
I also think that it sounds at least slightly less ridiculous to rewrite that passage in the language of Star Wars rather than Starcraft. Conquer the Emperor with the Dark Side. Turn Jedi into Sith. An X-Wing among the TIE fighters. Probably because it's more culturally established, with a more deeply developed mythos.
Edit to add: Just thinking about the converse, you could also make it sound more ridiculous by rewriting it with more obscure parts of the legendarium, too.
Conquer Morgoth with Ungoliant. Turn Maiar into balrogs. Glamdring among the morgul-blades.
Or maybe Tolkien had a special sense for phrasing and names like "Sauron" and "Urukhai" would have sounded just as profound then as they do now?
This is probably a larger part of the explanation, given his background in philology
Presumably the 'Orcs on our side' refers to the Soviet Union.
I think that, if that's what he meant, he would not have referred to his son as "amongst the Urukhai." - he wouldn't have been among soviet troops. I think it is referring back to turning men and elves into orcs - the orcs are people who have a mindset he doesn't like, presumably to do with violence.
I can't remember where it was, but he somewhere talks about the goblin mindset being common. Orcs here is not a specific "team", it's people that act and think like orcs, where they delight in destruction, havoc and greed
The older I get, and the more I learn about Tolkien, the more he disgusts me.
He is the inverse of all I value and all I find good in the world.
I find that surprising, do you care to elaborate? I don't think his worldview is complete, but he cares deeply about a lot of things I value too, which modern society seems not to value. I would certainly be glad to have him in my moral parliament.
Yeah, that's how I feel about Tolkien, Mateusz. I take the good bits, the parts I love, and recognize that I would never vote for him in an election. His observations are beautiful, and his solutions are terrible.
There is poetry in the way he describes the natural world, and human relationships, that deeply touches things in me and helps me see the world in a better light. He points out criticisms of human nature in respect to technology that do in fact highlight patterns of weakness in our psychology.
That he is wrong to be anti-progress, and wrong to be pro-feudalism class structure, doesn't invalidate the good he highlights.
I, personally, find it quite compatible to be an progress-loving transhumanist extropian who is excited by the grand changes humanity might experience and the new forms of intelligence we might invent... and yet still love the way Tolkien writes about trees.
I think that's a bit too extreme. Are all machines bad? No, obviously better to have mechanised agriculture than be all peasants. But he is grasping something here which we are now dealing with more directly. It's the classic Moloch trap of "if you have enough power to optimise hard enough then all slack is destroyed and eventually life itself". If you thought that was an inevitable end of all technological development (and we haven't proven it isn't yet), you may end up thinking being peasants is better too.
As someone who agrees with ~90% of the content of these letters, and has all my life viewed Tolkien as a moral role model, I am curious to hear an elaboration of this opinion.
These quotes show how anti-progress and reactionary Tolkien was. He hated machines, he hated housing construction, he hated innovation. He would condemn humanity to be tenant farmers ruled by a warrior aristocracy at a medieval tech level, forever. If you want to live in Tolkien's utopia, move to Zambia.
Basically, Tolkien is very much like the Unabomber. He saw real problems, but his proposed solutions are destructive. He was a master of using the bouba–kiki effect to incept his worldview in the minds of millions, so he did far more to stop progress than the Unabomber ever did. He bears significant responsibility for the productivity slowdown, and for your rent being too damn high.
I mean, I think you are right about him being anti-progress and fantasy-proposing terrible 'solutions' to real problems. I don't think you are correct to give him so much credit for productivity slowdown. I think his effect is quite a bit more minor than that. I think the productivity slowdown is mostly due to weird unanticipated long term downstream effects of our government structure, land use rules, tax structures, and a tendency towards veto-ochracy.
Wait what?
He was a master of using the bouba–kiki effect to incept his worldview in the minds of millions, so he did far more to stop progress than the Unabomber ever did. He bears significant responsibility for the productivity slowdown, and for your rent being too damn high.
Can you elaborate on this?
I have curated this (i.e. sent it out on our mailing list to ~30k subscribers). Thank you very much for putting these quotes together. While his perspective on the world has some flaws, I have still found wisdom in Tolkien's writings, which helped me find strength at one of the weakest points of my life.
I also liked Owen CB's post on AI, centralization, and the One Ring, which is a perspective on our situation I've found quite fruitful.
I haven't read all of the quotes, but here's a few thoughts I jotted down while reading through.
"I think the Fall is not true historically".
While all men must die and all civilizations must collapse, the end of all things is merely the counterpart of the beginning of all things. Creation, the birth of men, and the rise of civilizations are also great patterns and memorable events, both in myths and in history. However, the feeling does not respect symmetry, perhaps due to loss aversion and the peak-end rule, the Fall - and tragedy in general -carries a uniquely strong poetic resonance. Fatum represents the story's inevitable conclusion. There is something epic in the Fall, something existential, even more than in the beginning of things. I believe there is something deeply rooted, hardwired, in most of us that makes this so. Perhaps it is tied to our consciousness of finitude and our fear of the future, of death. Even if it represents a traditional and biased interpretation of history, I cannot help but feel moved. Tolkien has an unmatched ability to evoke and magnify this feeling, especially in the Silmarillion and other unfinished works, I think naturally to The Fall of Valinor and the Fall of Gondolin among other things.
This is a great—thanks for sharing. I especially enjoyed Tolkien's letter to his son on parental debt:
As for your gratitude to me, and your sense of unworthiness: God bless you. You do (from your point of view) owe me a lot. I have many talents that might from a worldly point of view have been better used than in ‘examining’. You can repay me, as much as I could possibly ask, by adhering to your faith, and keeping yourself pure and sober, and by giving me your confidence. Every good father deserves the fraternal friendship of his sons when they grow up. But of course from my point of view I have done nothing but my plain duty, and that not too well. I have spoken far too little to you, and not made it as easy as I should for you to find my friendship. As for your upbringing: it is my simple duty to try and bring you up in my own status and class; and in working for and supporting my son I merely repay the debt I owe to God, and to my parents and benefactors. Life is like that. We cannot repay our debts to those whom we owe: we have to go forward. If you have sons, you will have to sweat for them.
It's fascinating and tragic that children only realize the debt they owe to their parents later in life. It took me 25+ years, and I'm still learning every day about my parents' sacrifices. Hopefully, as Tolkien suggests, we can at least pay it forward.
It read like a comprehensive list of things that would make one like Tolkien less. Aside from his condemnation of Hitler (which Tolkien condemns for absurdly unimportant reasons largely irrelevant to Hitler's monstrosity), all of his opinions range from thoughtless conservatism, "exceptional times" fallacy, old-man's nagging and toxic nostalgia, and down to simple scientific and worse historical (!) ignorance.
I always had a nagging suspicion that there was something fishy about Tolkien while reading LOTR. But in light of this it becomes pretty obvious that LOTR was a blatant propaganda piece, no better than Atlas Shrugged, but simply disguised with an ornate pile of Elves glued to it.
Thank you for highlighting philosophical position!
I take it that Tolkien [early on] thought human thinking is often malign to their desires and corrupts the latter when given enough power; and power without cognition improvement often comes with machines and other tools for doing something new; so people should be truer to their desires and prefer to use things without much relying on them.
This position is clearly in contrast with uplifting, which suggests giving everyone more power to lead fulfilling lives - as much power as possible - and backing the supply with full force of humanity. I would actually try uplifting, however little the stable solution zone would be, because I feel that to be cool!
Philology is philosophy, because it lets you escape the trap of the language you were born with. Much like mathematics, humanity's most ambitious such escape attempt, still very much in its infancy.
True...
If you really want to express the truth about what you feel and see, you need to be inventing new languages. And if you want to preserve a culture, you must not lose its language.
I think this is a mistake, made by many. It's a retreat and an abdication. We are in our native language, so we should work from there.
We are in our native language, so we should work from there.
And begin by stepping outside it.
At this point, looking up to Tolkien seems like a likely result of the Halo Effect. His quotes make him seem way too overconfident in his philosophically dubious worldviews. I think I have a lot more respect for any random rationalist blogger than one who is that sure of himself but obviously wrong in some examples that are clear to us.
I think writing one of the best selling books of your century is extraordinary evidence you’ve understood something deep about human nature, which is more than most random rationalist bloggers can claim. but yes doesn’t imply you have a coherent philosophy or benevolent political program
Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained ‘righteous’, but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for ‘good’, and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great). [The draft ends here. In the margin Tolkien wrote: ‘Thus while Sauron multiplied [illegible word] evil, he left “good” clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil.’]
So Tolkien anticipated the rise of woke!
All quotes, unless otherwise marked, are Tolkien's words as printed in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. All emphases mine.
Machinery is Power is Evil
Writing to his son Michael in the RAF:
The Sam Butler reference is to Samuel Butler's Erewhon, a science fiction novel which is the first known work to warn about self-replicating machines and the possibility of machine consciousness. The 'Butlerian Jihad' from Dune is another famous reference to Butler. A quote from Erewhon:
Tolkien again, writing to his son Christopher during the war:
And as the war seems to be ending, he writes:
On Atomic Bombs
On Magic and Machines
Again from his letter to Milton Waldman, the one place Tolkien deigns to explain, or perhaps to 'rationalize', the underlying theory behind his work:
elsewhere he says, of the Lord of the Rings in particular
The Ring as externalized power
Impatience as the root of evil
Altruism as the root of evil
And as an extreme case:
Sauron as metaphor for the evil of 'reformers' and 'science'
On Language
The straightjacket of Modern English
This next passage, from a letter to a reader critiquing the archaic English spoken by the Riders of Rohan, really helped me understand Tolkien's obsession with language. It vividly shows how he felt the chains of modern English, how constrained it is and how little it can express:
It reminds me of the feeling I had when I started to read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in English translation when he was assigned me for a literature course. I had never read him in Russian; but I could just feel the words were wrong. I dug up a Russian copy at the university library, and wrote my term essay on Dostoyevsky's use of the word podlost, a word without translation in English but crucial to understanding Raskolnikov's self-image; and I've been much more skeptical of translations ever since.
Philology is philosophy, because it lets you escape the trap of the language you were born with. Much like mathematics, humanity's most ambitious such escape attempt, still very much in its infancy.
If you really want to express the truth about what you feel and see, you need to be inventing new languages. And if you want to preserve a culture, you must not lose its language.
Argent and Silver
On being criticized for using the word 'argent' in place of 'silver' in a book of poems:
A Fallen World
His worldview is suffused, more than any writer I know, with the sense of the The Fall. All problems blamed on the fall. Again,
almost like a tic, a way of excusing it. if you say a bad thing the narrative demands you explain it somehow, otherwise it would be blaspheme God's good name - so you say it is because we are fallen, put the blame back on humanity, or perhaps on the Serpent that tempted us.
Elaborating on his theology of Eden and the Fall in a letter to his son Christopher:
He continues by constrasting this sense of the Fall with more ordinary human tragedy:
hearing it described this way makes me realize this heart-racking was the emotion that first drew me to Tolkien's works. Not the ordinary tragedy of the hobbits, but the sense of deep sad memory, a vanished past, a world of yesterday.
"Gandalf's words about the Palantír" refers to this passage, Gandalf speaking to Pippin as they ride to Gondor:
but to me this feeling is best evoked by the words of Galadriel as the Fellowship departs Lorién:
Yet this attitude of nostalgia and sadness can go too far even for Tolkien:
All stories are about the Fall
From Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman:
On his mother
Love, Marriage, and Sexuality
Courtly Love
Dante's love for Beatrice is of this form. In one of his last letters, Tolkien gives an anti-example:
Women's exceptional attunement
Men are polygamous; Christian marriage is self-denial
'Soulmates' are exceedingly rare:
although later he does refer to his wife as his Luthién, and writes this hauntingly beautiful passage about their relationship:
Sex as source of disorder
Honesty is best
On the Second World War
On Hitler
Tolkien feels a special hatred of Hitler, precisely because they agree on the uniqueness of the 'noble northern spirit':
On aerial bombardment
Writing to his son, a pilot in the Royal Air Force:
Presumably the 'Orcs on our side' refers to the Soviet Union.
On British communist-sympathizers, and the U.S.A as Saruman
Why he wrote the Legendarium
To express his feelings about the first World War
Writing to his son during the Second World War:
Because nobody else was writing the kinds of stories he wanted to read
On receiving a letter from a young fan:
I thought these extracts from a letter I got yesterday would amuse you. I find these letters which I still occasionally get (apart from the smell of incense which fallen man can never quite fail to savour) make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop.
And in one of his last letters:
To give England an epic of its own
To share a feeling of eucatastrophe
Against IQ tests
On Religion
Two interpretations of Tom Bombadil
Bombadil as Pacifist
Bombadil as Scientist
Note the contrast of "real" natural science with the power-hungry, machine-loving "scientists" Tolkien criticizes elsewhere.
On Hobbies
On Journeys
Though Tolkien set out to write a legendarium, the stories he is most famous for are journeys. The sense of adventure in Bilbo's walking song has stayed with me longer than any other song from the Lord of the Rings:
So I was glad to see him pontificate on the effects of journeys in his letters:
On Torture
Against the State-God
Against America
In all the letters he doesn't seem to have a single positive thing to say about America. From criticizing Disney to calling America "Saruman" to snide remarks about his American publishers... this is perhaps his most damning indictment:
Against Democracy
On Money, Art, and Duty
Something I didn't expect from the letters is a constant sense of financial pressure, a tenseness. A resentment of 'examination' - the task he spent 17 years of vacations on, in order to make a bit of extra money for medical care and his children's education. And a consequent willingness to trade off the purity of his vision.
An excerpt from a letter sent on receiving the script of an American Lord of the Rings adaptation:
And several years later:
Writing to his son:
On Death
Despite the emphasis on power and domination and machines early on, in later letters Tolkien starts to emphasize a different theme:
On Children's Literature
Tolkien is viscerally against it; deeply hates Disney and dislikes Hans Christian Andersen; and regretted compromising with its tropes in his writing of The Hobbit.
In Reluctant Support of Universities
Against being Photographed
(from a letter to Time-Life International)