THE 1932 LETTER
Summer and autumn in this year had many moments of strange noises being heard from underground, leading Father Christmas to be concerned earthquake-level pressure was building up below the North Pole. North Polar Bear decides he knows what the noises REALLY portend, and leaves Father Christmas' house to go for a walk in late November, and doesn't return. About ten nights later the eldest of the few remaining Cave-bears shows up at FC's house and says, "Do you want your North Polar Bear? If you do, you had better come and get him!"
It seems the NPB got lost in the vast network of caves that this old Cave-Bear says is his territory. NPB ducked into a hole to avoid a snowstorm, slipped down a long slope, had rocks fall on him, and he couldn't get out or limb up from where he was underground. He smelled Goblin, and set off after the smell, and the Goblins shut off all lights in the cave system and got NPB lost.
These Goblins are not described in the same way as are the Orcs of Middle-earth in the text, and are painted as small dark thin creatures.
Goblins are to us very much what rats are to you, only worse, because they are very clever, and only better because there are, in these parts, very few. We thought there were none left. Long ago we had great trouble with them, that was about 1453, I believe, but we got the help of the Gnomes, who are their greatest enemies, and cleared them out. Anyway there was poor old Polar Bear lost in the dark all among them, and alone until he met Cave-Bear, who lives there. Cave-Bear can see pretty well in the dark, and he offered to take Polar Bear to his private back door. So they set off together, but the Goblins were very excited and angry (Polar Bear had boxed one or two flat that came and poked him in the dark, and had said some very nasty things to them all), and they enticed him away by imitating Cave-Bear's voice, which of course they know very well. So Polar Bear got into a frightful dark part, all full of different passages, and he lost Cave-Bear, and Cave-Bear lost him.
"Light is what we need," said Cave-Bear to me. So I got some of my special sparkling torches--which I sometimes use in my deepest cellars--and we set off that night The caves are wonderful. I knew they were there, but not how many or how big they were. Of course the Goblins went off into the deepest holes and corners, and we soon found Polar Bear. He was getting quite long and thin with hunger, as he had been in the caves about a fortnight. He said, "I should soon have been able to squeeze through a Goblin crack."
The three of them notice all the pictures drawn on the walls of the caves here, and Cave-Bear says his family for 90 generations has passed on the belief that these drawings were made by men back at a time when the North Pole was somewhere else in the world. The figures Father Christmas identifies include dragons, mammoths, humans, a hairy rhinoceros, and Goblins astride creatures called
drasils which are dwarf & dachshund-shaped horse-like creatures. They all admire the cave drawings, and Tolkien provided paintings of the moment (nice, as I was liking those colored-pencil drawings of the last three Christmases). The distant shot of them looking at the caves walls has a nice depth effect, and the close up of the caves drawings show Tolkien is competent at pictograph illustrations.
After rescuing North Polar Bear and taking him back to his house, Father Christmas has a week or so of quiet while he prepares his presents. Then when FC and NPB are going into the cellars the week before Christmas to get supplies for rewarding the good English children, they discover the cellars rearranged and much inventory missing. They find a large hole leading to a tunnel, and FC realizes the noises they heard earlier in the year were the Goblins burrowing to these cellars under where the FC house used to be next to the North Pole, and stealing many presents, and had been slowly but surely doing it for generations. They increased there theft rate more recently, the evidence shows FC.
In response, FC blows green luminous smoke down the Goblin tunnel and Polar Bear blows it down further using the enormous bellows they have in FC's kitchen. The Goblins shriek, run out the other end of their caves, and are caught by Red Gnomes FC had brought in from Norway.
Father Christmas says the Gnomes captured many Goblins while running off the rest into the snow, which Goblins hate being in. The Gnomes made the surrendering Goblins show where they hid all the presents, and Christmas preparations near the North Pole are underway once again, as the Gnomes continue to chase the Goblins away from the area. The Gnomes promise FC that the Goblins will now be scarce for years, but FC isn't so sure.
A photo of the envelope Tolkien used for this letter is shown in the book, and it has written on one side with a stamp cancellation mark and a seal of dark red wax the words, "By
gnome-carrier *Immediate haste!" JRRT continues to make it look like Father Christmas' letters actually came through the British mail service for the fun of his children. But of course the man is well-known for his attention to detail in many if not all things.