The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is a selection of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters published in 1981, edited by Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter assisted by Christopher Tolkien. The selection contains 354 letters, dating between October 1914, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford, and 29 August 1973, four days before his death. The letters can be roughly divided in four categories: The last category is especially of interest to Tolkien fans, as it provides a lot of information about Middle-earth which cannot be found anywhere in the works published by Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings the 'good' characters have darker sides that feature in the story, and likewise some of the villains have "good impulses". Therefore the categorization of characters as either 'protagonists' or 'antagonists' below indicates their "general" role in the story. "The Lord of the Rings" started as a sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien's work "The Hobbit," published in 1937. The popularity of "The Hobbit" had led George Allen & Unwin, the publishers, to request a sequel. Tolkien warned them that he wrote quite slowly, and responded with several stories he had already developed. Having rejected his contemporary drafts for "The Silmarillion",