Item 70: J.R.R. Tolkien. Letter to J.G. Riewald (August 20, 1948)

One person’s celebrity could be another’s nonentity. J.G. Riewald (1910–2006), the author and editor of several books on Beerbohm, began collecting information on his idol in the 1940s by contacting those likely to have personal stories about him. His query to J.R.R. Tolkien, who was later the author of The Lord of the Rings, did more than draw a blank; it produced a rebuff from the distinguished fantasy novelist. Tolkien held a professorship at Merton College, Oxford, where Beerbohm had been an undergraduate. He claimed to know little about Beerbohm, who was made an honorary Fellow there—only that Beerbohm’s “published cartoons ... amuse me[,]” while his literary work “usually fails to amuse me.”