JRR Tolkien, who famously wrote the first line of The Hobbit while marking exam papers, told a fellow teacher that "all teaching is exhausting and depressing" in a previously unknown letter which has just come to light.
The Lord of the Rings author wrote the letter on 17 January 1964 in response to Anne Mountfield, a newly qualified teacher who was working at Eltham Green School in London. Mountfield had written to Tolkien that her "rather restless" class had been spellbound when she read them The Hobbit. Tolkien typed her a reply, saying that the story of Bilbo Baggins's adventures "seems to go down well at school".
He then added a handwritten note to the bottom of the letter, telling Mountfield that "All teaching is exhausting, and depressing and one is seldom comforted by knowing when one has had some effect. I wish I could now tell some of mine (of long ago) how I remember them and things they said, though I was (only, as it appeared) looking out of the window or giggling at my neighbour".
Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, and would mark School Certificate exams in the summers to add to his salary. In a letter to WH Auden, he wrote: "All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On the blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why."
Mountfield said she had forgotten about her own letter from the author until it fell out of a copy of Tolkien's book Tree and Leaf last year, shortly after she herself had received a letter from a former pupil about the influence she had been on him. "I like to attribute the coincidence to a little touch of Gandalf magic," she said. "How right Tolkien was that teachers are seldom 'comforted by knowing that one has had some effect' and how very nice when, 50 years after the event, it happens."
The letter will be auctioned by Bonhams in London on 18 June, when it is expected to fetch up to £2,000.
