The unlikely pen pal who helped Tolkien improve Middle-earth

The author befriended a deaf fan, Eileen Elgar, after she critiqued his work. Now their letters are to be auctioned

- Lily Isaacs

When Eileen Elgar was in her 50s, she told her daughter she thought she could improve the work of JRR Tolkien.

“Well, if you're so insistent, why don’t you just write to him?” her daughter said. So Elgar did — starting a decade-long correspondence in the 1960s that lit up Elgar's life and informed Tolkien's writing. This week a collection of five letters and six books exchanged between the pair will go on sale at Sotheby’s in London.

Tolkien was inundated with letters from fans — including the former Crown Princess of Denmark and the author Iris Murdoch — but Elgar stood out. Her original letter, and suggestion for improvement, has been lost, but the pair continued to write to each other not only about Tolkien’s work but also their personal lives, including Tolkien’s anxieties and his grief following the death in 1963 of his close friend CS Lewis.

“[Elgar] had the balls to actually say what could be better” in the author's work, said Pieter Collier, a Tolkien expert and book collector. “I believe she was one of the very few people he could think of as a peer... she should get much more credit and respect for her communications with him.”