Becca Tarnas

“Tolkien would describe his process of writing stories as one of uncovering something that already had, to a certain degree, an objective existence. In speaking about his stories, he once said: „I have long ceased to invent … I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.“ He claimed that the stories „arose in my mind as „given“ things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. … Always I had the sense of recording what was already „there“, somewhere: not of inventing.“ Both the separate stories, and the larger narrative whole of the legendarium, came to Tolkien as given – a gift bestowed somewhere from beyond his own individual being. Tolkien once stated in a letter to his son Christopher, „the thing seems to write itself once I get going, as if the truth comes out then, only imperfectly glimpsed in the preliminary sketch.“ When Tolkien discussed the Lord of the Rings, or his other stories of Middle Earth, he spoke about it not as a work of fiction but rather as a chronicle of actual events. He considered himself not as the author of his stories, but rather a historian and a translator of a record already in existence.”
― Becca Tarnas, Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader's Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings