Daily Inspiration Quote by J. R. R. Tolkien

A lesser writer would call this self-deprecation. Tolkien makes it a miniature theory of his own mind. “I am told” immediately shifts the sentence into the passive voice of social feedback: this isn’t a proud confession, it’s a report from the long-suffering reader, colleague, or correspondent who has to decode him. The joke lands because it’s precise. “Shorthand” isn’t just “brief.” It’s a private system: compressed, idiosyncratic, efficient for the person who writes it and punishing for everyone else. Then he “smudge[s] it,” sabotaging even that imperfect legibility. The punchline is that he’s not merely cryptic; he’s cryptic with extra weather.

The subtext is a writer who knows his own habits as a scholar and letter-writer: piling meaning into dense reference, assuming shared context, then muddying it with haste, revision, or over-elaboration. Tolkien was famously meticulous about languages, etymologies, and internal consistency. That meticulousness can read, from the outside, like overcompressed information: a mind drafting in runes and expecting you to keep up.

Context matters: Tolkien spent his life toggling between academic precision and mythic storytelling. The line winks at that tension. He’s an author capable of building entire philological histories, yet here he frames himself as someone whose thoughts arrive in a code he can’t quite keep clean. It’s charming, but it’s also a warning label: the work may be luminous, but the path to it will involve deciphering, patience, and the occasional blur where meaning was always meant to be partly off the page.