From the north pole to Middle-earth: Tolkien's Christmas letters to his children

Bodleian library to exhibit illustrated letters from Hobbit author, masquerading as Father Christmas

In December 1920 Father Christmas wrote a letter to a modest house in the Oxford suburbs, enclosing a watercolour sketch of his own rather more exotic domed snow house, approached by a flight of steps lit by ice lanterns. “I heard you ask Daddy what I was like and where I lived,” he wrote to three-year-old John Tolkien, and as the family grew to four children, he continued to write every Christmas for 23 years, until the youngest, Priscilla, was 14.

The letters followed the children to several addresses in Leeds where their father, JRR Tolkien, took up a university post, and then back to Oxford when he became became professor of Anglo-Saxon. They were eventually delivered to a much larger house, which has now been listed, despite its scant architectural interest, as the birthplace of the books that spawned a publishing and movie empire, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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