Merry Christmas, friends, and welcome to Chronicles. Today we're going to be talking all about

Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien,

because you've all been such wonderful fans of the show.

You've been so well behaved in the comments section this year.

And so I thought that giving you some Tolkien would be a very genuine Christmas present from myself to you and I hope

that you really enjoy it. Now the letters from Father Christmas are a really, really beautiful

book. It couldn't strictly be called a novel, nor could it really be called a novel by letters,

even though that's what they are. Really, what you have here with letters from Father Christmas

is private letters written by Tolkien posing as Father Christmas to his four children, to John, Michael, Christopher, and the youngest, Priscilla,

over the space of about 23 years.

Now, these are very, very sweet, and I actually think as well there is something in there

for both children and adults as well.

It's a really, really beautiful book. It's graced with some of Tolkien's drawings as well,

because as well as being master of languages and having one of the great imaginations,

Tolkien was also a wonderful drawer.

And so when you actually look at the images from these letters as they came in the envelopes

and with the drawings inside, these are absolutely spectacular.

But even if it isn't in a technical sense an epistillary novel, it does still have a through line.

There is a great deal of continuity in it, and very much you can tell in the way that Tolkien is writing it,

much as he did with Middle Earth as well. Middle Earth, like the land of the North Pole, as we'll see here,

is actually something that already exists. And Tolkien is not in the business of creating a new world,

so much as he is discovering a new world, as if the thing were real in and of itself, and it's already here waiting to be discovered,

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