Lately, I've spent a fair amount of time reading, outlining, and thinking about Tolkien's famous letter (# 131) to Milton Waldman of Collins Publishing. For a letter it's huge, much larger than we've been led to believe. It's always spoken of as being "some ten thousand words long" as the introduction to it in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien has it, but in truth it's over 14,000 words. That's quite a difference. It's also huge in a much more important way because it really represents the fir...
