1925-1949(i): ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’
And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon for twenty years, was then elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one. It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that - apart from the strange fact that during these years when
‘nothing happened’ he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.
Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that a man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-class watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?
Perhaps in his years of middle age and old age we can do no more than observe, and puzzle; or perhaps, slowly, we shall see a pattern emerge.
Until the late nineteenth century the holders of most college fellowships at Oxford, that is the majority of teachers in the University, had to take holy orders and were not permitted to marry while they remained in office. The reformers of that era introduced non-clerical fellowships and abolished the requirement of celibacy. In so doing they changed the face of Oxford, and changed it visibly; for in the years that followed a tide of brick flowed steadily northwards from the old boundary of the city, covering the fields along the Banbury and Woodstock Roads as the speculators erected hundreds of homes for the new married dons. By the beginning of the twentieth century North Oxford was a concentrated colony of academics, their wives, their children and their servants, its inhabitants occupying a variety of mansions ranging from the gothic and palatial (complete with turrets and stained glass) to the frankly suburban villa. Churches, schools, and clusters of shops were erected to serve the needs of this strange community, and soon few acres were left unoccupied. There was, however, a small amount of building still in progress during the nineteen-twenties; and in one of the North Oxford streets Tolkien found and bought a modest new house, L-shaped and of pale brick, with one wing running towards the road. The family travelled down from Leeds at the beginning of 1926 and moved in. Here, in Northmoor Road, they remained for twenty-one years. Later in 1929 a larger neighbouring house was vacated by Basil Black-well the bookseller and publisher, and the Tolkiens decided to buy it, moving from number twenty-two to number twenty early in the next year. This second house was broad and grey, more imposing than its neighbour, with small leaded windows and a high Slate roof. Shortly before the move a fourth and last child was born, the daughter that Edith had long hoped for, and was christened Priscilla Mary Reuel.
Apart from these two incidents, the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the change of houses in 1930, life at Northmoor Road was without major event; or rather it was a life of pattern, almost of routine, in which there were minor interruptions but no significant change. So perhaps the best way to describe it is to follow Tolkien through a typical (though entirely imaginary) day in the early nineteen-thirties. It is a saint’s day, so it begins early. The alarm rings at seven in Tolkien’s bedroom, a back room that looks east over the garden. It is really a bathroom-cum-dressing-room, and there is a bath in one comer of it, but he sleeps here because Edith finds his snoring tiresome, and because he keeps late hours that do not harmonise with her habits. So they have their own rooms and do not disturb one another. He gets up unwillingly (he has never been an early riser by nature), decides to shave after mass, and goes in his dressing-gown along the passage to the boys’ bedrooms to wake Michael and Christopher. John, the eldest boy, is now aged fourteen and away at a Catholic boarding-school in Berkshire, but the two younger sons, aged eleven and seven respectively, are still living at home.
Going into Michael’s bedroom, Tolkien nearly trips over a model railway engine that has been left in the middle of the floor. He curses to himself. Michael and Christopher have a passion for railways at the moment, and they have devoted a complete upstairs room to a track layout. They also go to watch engines, and draw (with impressive precision) pictures of Great Western Railway locomotives. Tolkien does not understand or really approve of what he calls their ‘railway-mania’; to him railways only mean noise and dirt, and the despoiling of the countryside. But he tolerates the hobby, and can even be persuaded on occasions to take them on expeditions to a distant station to watch the Cheltenham Flyer pass through. When he has woken the boys, he gets dressed in his usual weekday outfit of flannel trousers and tweed jacket. Then he and his sons, who are wearing their dark blue Dragon School jackets and shorts, get their bicycles out of the garage and set off along the silent North-moor Road, where the bedroom curtains are still drawn in other houses, up Linton Road, and into the broad Banbury Road where the occasional car or bus passes them on its way into the city. It is a spring morning and there is a fine display of blossom on the cherry-trees that hang over the pavements from the front gardens.
They bicycle three-quarters of a mile into the town, to St Aloysius’ Catholic Church, an unlovely edifice next to the hospital in the Wood-stock Road. Mass is at seven-thirty, so by the time they get home they are just a few minutes late for breakfast. This is always served punctually at eight - strictly speaking at seven fifty-five, since Edith likes to keep the clocks in the house five minutes fast. Phoebe Coles, the daily help, has just arrived in the kitchen and is clattering about with dishes. Phoebe, who wears a housemaid’s cap and works in the house all day, has been with the family for a couple of years and shows every sign of staying for many more; which is a great blessing, since before her arrival there were endless difficulties over servants. During breakfast, Tolkien glances at the newspaper, but only in the most cursory fashion. He, like his friend C. S. Lewis, regards ‘news’ as on the whole trivial and fit to be ignored, and they both argue (to the annoyance of many of their friends) that the only ‘truth’ is to be found in literature. However, both men enjoy the crossword. When breakfast is over, Tolkien goes into his study to light the stove. It is not a warm day and the house (like most middle-class English houses at this time) has no central heating, so he will need to get a good blaze going to make the room habitable. He is in a hurry, for he has a pupil coming at nine and he wants to check his lecture notes for the morning, so he clears out the ashes from the previous night’s fire rather hastily; they are still warm, for he did not finish work and go to bed until after two o’clock. When he has lit the fire he throws a good deal of coal on to it, shuts the doors of the stove, and opens the draught regulator to full. Then he hurries upstairs to shave. The boys go off to school.
He has not finished shaving when the front door bell rings. Edith answers it, but she calls him and he comes downstairs with half his face still covered in lather. It is only the postman, but he says that there is a great deal of smoke coming out of the study chimney, and ought Mr Tolkien to see if everything is all right? Tolkien rushes into the study and finds that, as so often happens, the fire has blazed up in the stove and is about to set the chimney alight. He damps it down, thanks the postman, and exchanges some remarks I with him about the growing of spring vegetables. Then he begins to open the post, remembers that he has not finished shaving, and only makes himself presentable just in time for the arrival of his pupil. This is a young woman graduate who is studying Middle English. By ten past nine she and Tolkien are hard at work in the study discussing the significance of an awkward word in the Ancrene Wisse. If you were to put your head around the study door you would not be able to see them, for inside the door is a tunnel of books formed by a double row of bookcases, and it is not until the visitor emerges from this that the rest of the room becomes visible. There are windows on two sides, so that the room looks southwards towards a neighbouring garden and west towards the road. Tolkien’s desk is in the south-facing window, but he is not sitting at it; he is standing by the fireplace waving his pipe in the air while he talks. The pupil frowns slightly as she puzzles over the complexities of what he is saying, and the difficulty of hearing all of it clearly, for he is talking very fast and sometimes indistinctly. But she begins to see the shape of his argument and the point to which he is leading, and scribbles enthusiastically in her notebook. By the time her ‘hour’ of supervision finishes, late, at twenty to eleven, she feels that she has been given a new insight into the way in which a medieval author chose his words. She leaves on her bicycle, reflecting that if all Oxford philologists could teach in this fashion, the English School would be a livelier place.
When he has seen her to the gate, Tolkien hurries back to his study and gathers up his lecture notes. He did not have time to check through them after all, and he hopes that everything he needs is there. He also takes a copy of the text that he is to lecture on, the Old English poem Exodus, knowing that if the worst happens and his notes do fail him, he can always expound directly from it extempore. Then, with his briefcase and his M.A. gown in the basket of his bicycle, he rides down to the town.
Sometimes he lectures in his own college, Pembroke, but this morning (as is more often the case) his destination is the Examination Schools, an oppressively grandiose late Victorian building in the High Street. Lectures on popular subjects are allocated a large hall, such as the East School, where today C. S. Lewis will be drawing a large audience for his series on medieval studies. Tolkien himself gets a good attendance for his general lectures on Beowulf, which are intended for the non-specialist undergraduates; but today he is talking about a text that is required reading only for those few men and women in the English School who have opted for the philological course, and consequently he goes along the passage to a small dark ground-floor room where a mere eight or ten undergraduates, knowing his punctual habits, are already waiting for him in their gowns. He puts on his own gown and begins to lecture exactly as the deep bell of Merton clock a quarter of a mile away strikes eleven.
He lectures fluently, chiefly from his notes, but with occasional impromptu additions. He works through the text line by line, discussing the significance of certain words and expressions, and the problems raised by them. The undergraduates in the audience know him well and are faithful followers of his lectures, not only because he provides an illuminating interpretation of the texts but also because they like him: they enjoy his jokes, are used to his quick-fire manner of speaking, and find him thoroughly humane, certainly more humane than some of his colleagues, who lecture with a total disregard for their audience. He need not have worried that his notes will run out. The chimes for twelve o’clock and the noise of people in the passage bring him to a halt long before he can finish his prepared material. Indeed for the last ten minutes he has departed entirely from his notes, and has been talking about a particular point of relation between Gothic and Old English that was suggested by a word in the text. Now he gathers up his papers, converses briefly with one of the undergraduates, and then departs to make way for the next lecturer. In the passage he catches up for a moment with C. S. Lewis, and has a brief conversation with him. He wishes it were a Monday, on which day he regularly has a pint of beer with Lewis and talks for an hour or so, but neither man has time today, and Tolkien has to do some shopping before going home for lunch. He leaves Lewis and bicycles up the High Street to the busy arcade known as the Covered Market, where he has to collect sausages from Lindsey the butcher; Edith forgot to include them in the week’s order that was delivered the day before. He exchanges a joke with Mr Lindsey, and also calls in at the stationer on the corner of Market Street to buy some pen nibs. Then he bicycles home up the Banbury Road, and manages to fit in fifteen minutes at a long-overdue letter to E. V. Gordon about their plans to collaborate on an edition of Pearl. He begins to type the letter on his Hammond typewriter, a big machine with interchangeable typefaces on a revolving disc; his model has italics and the Anglo-Saxon letters p, o, and ae. Edith rings the handbell for lunch before he can finish.
Lunch, at which all the family is present, is chiefly taken up with a discussion about Michael’s dislike of swimming lessons at school, and whether or not a septic toe should be allowed to prevent the boy from bathing. After the meal, Tolkien goes into the garden to see how the broad beans are coming along. Edith brings Priscilla out to play on the lawn, and discusses with him whether they should dig up the remainder of the old tennis court, to increase the size of the vegetable plot. Then, leaving Edith to feed the canaries and budgerigars in her aviary at the side of the house, he gets on his bicycle once more and pedals down to the town, this time for a meeting of the English Faculty.
The meeting is in Merton College, for the Faculty has no premises of its own other than a cramped library in the attic of the Examination Schools, and Merton is the college most closely associated with it Tolkien himself is a Fellow of Pembroke, but he is not much involved with his college, and like all professors his first responsibility is towards his Faculty. The meeting begins at half past two. Besides the other professors Wyld, who holds the chair of English Language and Literature, and Nichol Smith, the professor of English Literature - there are about a dozen dons present, several of them women. Sometimes these meetings can be acrimonious, and Tolkien himself has attended many when, while trying to initiate reforms of the syllabus, he has been the target for bitter attacks from the ‘literature’ camp. But those days are passed, and his reforms have been accepted and put into practice. Today’s meeting is mostly concerned with routine business such as the dates of examinations, minor details of the syllabus, and the question of funds for the Faculty library. It all takes time, and the meeting does not break up until nearly four, which just gives Tolkien a few minutes to call in at the Bodleian Library and look up something in a book that he ordered from the stack the previous day. Then he rides home again in time for the children’s tea at half past four. After tea he manages to put in an hour and a half at his desk, finishing the letter to E. V. Gordon and beginning to arrange his lecture notes for the next day. When life goes according to plan he manages to prepare an entire course of lectures before the beginning of term, but too often pressure of time forces him to leave the work until the last minute. Even now he does not get very much done, for Michael wants help with his Latin prose homework, and this occupies twenty minutes. All too soon it is half past six and he must change into a dinner-jacket. He does not dine out more than once or twice a week, but tonight there is a guest night at his college, Pembroke, and he has promised to be there to meet a friend’s guest. He ties his black tie hastily and again mounts his bicycle, leaving Edith to an early supper at home. He reaches college in time for sherry in the Senior Common Room. His position at Pembroke is somewhat anomalous, thanks to the confused and confusing administrative practices of Oxford. It could almost be said that the colleges are the University, for the majority of the teaching staff hold college fellowships, and their primary responsibility is to instruct undergraduates in their own college. But professors are in a different position. They are primarily outside the collegiate system, for they teach on a faculty basis, irrespective of what college their pupils may belong to. However, so that a professor shall not be deprived of the social facilities and other conveniences of college life, he is allocated to a college and given a fellowship in it ex officio. This sometimes leads to bad feeling, for in all other circumstances colleges elect their own fellows, whereas ‘Professorial Fellows’ such as Tolkien are to some extent wished upon them. Tolkien thinks that Pembroke resents him a little; certainly the atmosphere in the common room is unfriendly and austere. Fortunately there is a junior fellow, R. B. McCallum, a lively man several years younger than Tolkien, who is an ally; and he is waiting now to introduce his guest. Dinner proves to be enjoyable - and edible, since the food is plain without any suggestion of that tiresome French cooking which (Tolkien reflects with disgust) is beginning to invade the high tables of several colleges.
After dinner he makes his excuses and leaves early, crossing the town to Balliol College where there is to be a meeting of the Coal-biters in John Bryson’s rooms. The Kolbitar, to give it the Icelandic title (meaning those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they ‘bite the coal’), is an informal reading club founded by Tolkien somewhat on the model of the Viking Club in Leeds, except that its members are all dons. They meet for an evening several times each term to read Icelandic sagas. Tonight there is a good turn-out: George Gordon, now the President of Magdalen, Nevill Coghill of Exeter, C. T. Onions from the Dictionary, Dawkins the Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek, Bryson himself, and - Tolkien is glad to note - C. S. Lewis, who chides him noisily for being late. They are currently reading the Grettis Saga, and Tolkien himself begins, which is customary as he is easily the best Norse scholar of anyone in the club. He resumes at the point where they left off last time, improvising a fluent translation from the text that is spread open on his knees. After he has done a couple of pages Dawkins takes over. He too is fluent, though not quite as fluent as Tolkien, but when the others take their turn they proceed much more slowly, each of them translating no more than half a page, for none of them professes to be more than a beginner at the language. This however is the whole purpose of the Coalbiters, for Tolkien started the club to persuade his friends that Icelandic literature is worth reading in the original language; and he encourages their somewhat halting steps and applauds their efforts.
After an hour or so they reach a good stopping-place, and the whisky bottle is opened while they discuss the saga. Then they listen to a scurrilous and very funny poem that Tolkien has just written about another member of the English Faculty. It is after eleven when they break up. Tolkien walks with Lewis to the end of Broad Street, and then they go their separate ways, Lewis down Holywell Street towards Magdalen (for he is a bachelor and usually sleeps in college in term-time) and Tolkien on his bicycle back to Northmoor Road. Edith has gone to bed and the house is in darkness when he gets home. He builds up the fire in the study stove and fills his pipe. He ought, he knows, to do some more work on his lecture notes for the next morning, but he cannot resist taking from a drawer the half-finished manuscript of a story that he is writing to amuse himself and his children. It is probably, he suspects, a waste of time; certainly if he is going to devote any attention to this sort of thing it ought to be to The Silmarillion. But something draws him back night after night to this amusing little tale - at least it seems to amuse the boys. He sits down at the desk, fits a new relief nib to his dip pen (which he prefers to a fountain pen), unscrews the ink bottle, takes a sheet of old examination paper (which still has a candidate’s essay on the Battle of Maldon on the back of it), and begins to write:
‘When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! ...”
We will leave him now. He will be at his desk until hah* past one, or two o’clock, or perhaps even later, with only the scratching of his pen to disturb the silence, while around him Northmoor Road sleeps. These, then, were some of the externals of his life: domestic routine, teaching, preparation for teaching, correspondence, an occasional evening with friends - and it would in truth be a rare evening that included both a dinner in college and a meeting of the Coalbiters; these and other irregular events such as the Faculty meeting are here put under the umbrella of the same imaginary day simply as an indication of the range of his activities. A truly average day would be more dull.
Or perhaps to the reader the events here described are all dull, unredeemed by a flicker of excitement: the trivial activities of a man enclosed in a narrow way of life that holds no interest for anyone outside it. All this, says the reader, this account of lighting the stove and bicycling to lectures and feeling unwelcome in a college common room, all this says nothing about the man who wrote The Silmarillion and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, does nothing to explain the nature of his mind and the way in which his imagination responded to his surroundings. Certainly Tolkien himself would have agreed with this. It was one of his strongest-held opinions that the investigation of an author’s life reveals very little of the workings of his mind. Maybe; but before we abandon our task as utterly hopeless, we could perhaps move in a little closer than the viewpoint we adopted for the imaginary day, move in and observe, or at least hazard a few guesses about some of the more obvious aspects of his personality. And if after this we may not have any better idea why he wrote his books, then at least we should know a little more about the man who did write them. Perhaps we could start with photographs. There are plenty of them, for the Tolkiens took and kept endless snapshots. At first we get nowhere. Photographs of Tolkien in middle age reveal virtually nothing. Facing the camera is an ordinary middle-class Englishman of light build and moderate height. He is mildly handsome, with a long face; and that is about all that can be said. Admittedly there is a keenness in the eyes which suggests a lively mind, but nothing else reveals itself - nothing except his clothes, which are exceptionally ordinary.
His manner of dressing was of course partly the result of circumstances, the necessity of bringing up a large family on a relatively small income that left nothing over for personal extravagances. Later, when he became a wealthy man, he did indulge in coloured waistcoats. But his choice of clothes in middle age was also the sign of a dislike of dandyism. This he shared with C. S. Lewis. Neither could abide any manner of affectation in dress, which seemed to them to smack of the unmasculine and hence of the objectionable. Lewis took this to extremes, not only buying indifferent clothes but wearing them indifferently; Tolkien, always the more fastidious, at least kept his trousers pressed. But fundamentally both men had the same attitude to their appearance, an attitude that was shared by many of their contemporaries. This preference for plain masculine clothing was in part perhaps a reaction to the excessive dandyism and implied homosexuality of the
‘aesthetes’, who had first made their mark on Oxford in the age of Wilde and whose successors lingered on in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, affecting delicate shades of garment and ambiguous nuances of manner. Theirs was a way of life of which Tolkien and the majority of his friends would have none; hence their almost exaggerated preference for tweed jackets, flannel trousers, nondescript ties, solid brown shoes that were built for country walks, dull-coloured raincoats and hats, and short hair. Tolkien’s manner of dress also reflected some of his positive values, his love of everything that was moderate and sensible and unflorid and English. But beyond that his clothes gave no idea of the delicate and complex inner nature of the man who wore them.
What else can we discover from photographs of him? There is in most of them something so obvious that we are likely to miss it: the almost unvarying ordinariness of the backgrounds. In one picture he is sitting in his garden having tea; in another, standing in the sunlight in the angle of his house; in another, digging with his children in the sands at some coastal resort. One begins to get the idea that he was entirely conventional in the places that he lived in, even in the places that he visited.
And this is true. He occupied a North Oxford house that was both inside and outside almost indistinguishable from many hundreds of others in that district - it was less flamboyant, indeed, than many of its neighbours. He took his family on holiday to ordinary places. During the central years of his life, the richest period of creativity, he made no journeys outside the British Isles. Again this was partly the product of circumstances, of limited means; nor did he entirely lack the desire to travel: for instance he would have liked to follow E. V. Gordon’s example and visit Iceland. Later in life when he had more money and fewer family ties he did make a few journeys abroad. But travel never played a large part in his life - simply because his imagination did not need to be stimulated by unfamiliar landscapes and cultures. What is more surprising is that he also denied himself many of the stimuli of familiar and loved places nearer home. It is true that during the years when he owned and drove a car (from 1932 to the beginning of the Second World War) he loved to explore the villages of Oxfordshire, particularly those in the east of the county; but he was not by habit a long-distance walker, and only once or twice did he join C. S. Lewis for the cross-country walking tours that were such an important part of his friend’s life. He knew the Welsh mountains, but he rarely visited them; he loved the sea, but his only expeditions to it took the form of conventional English family holidays at ordinary resorts. Here again pressure of domestic responsibility is one explanation, and here again it does not provide the whole answer. Gradually one forms the idea that he did not altogether care very much where he was. In one sense this is not true, and in another sense it is. Certainly he was not indifferent to his surroundings, for man’s destruction of the landscape moved him to profound anger. Here, from his diary, is his anguished description of a return to his childhood landscape of Sarehole Mill in 1933, when he was driving his family to visit relatives in Birmingham:
‘I pass over the pangs to me of passing through Hall Green - become a huge tram-ridden meaningless suburb, where I actually lost my way - and eventually down what is left of beloved lanes of childhood, and past the very gate of our cottage, now in the midst of a sea of new red-brick. The old mill still stands, and Mrs Hunt’s still sticks out into the road as it turns uphill; but the crossing beyond the now fenced-in pool, where the bluebell lane ran down into the mill lane, is now a dangerous crossing alive with motors and red lights. The White Ogre’s house (which the children were excited to see) is become a petrol station, and most of Short Avenue and the elms between it and the crossing have gone. How I envy those whose precious early scenery has not been exposed to such violent and peculiarly hideous change.’
He was similarly sensitive to the damage that was inflicted on the Oxfordshire countryside by the construction of wartime aerodromes and the ‘improvement’ of roads. Later in life, when his strongest-held opinions began to become obsessions, he would see a new road that had been driven across the comer of a field and cry, ‘There goes the last of England’s arable!’ By this time of his life he would maintain that there was not one unspoilt wood or hillside left in the land, and if there was, then he would refuse to visit it for fear of finding it contaminated by litter. The converse of this is that he chose to live in almost excessively man-made surroundings, in the suburbs of Oxford and later of Bournemouth, themselves almost as
‘meaningless’ as the red-brick wilderness that had once been Sarehole. How can we reconcile these viewpoints?
Again, part of the answer lies in circumstance. The places where he lived were not really chosen by him at all: they were simply the places where, for a number of reasons, he found himself. Maybe, but in this case why did not his soul cry out against them? To which th6 reply comes, sometimes it did, aloud to a few close friends or privately in his diary. But for much of the time it did not, and the explanation for this would seem to lie in his belief that we live in a fallen world. If the world were unfallen and man were not sinful, he himself would have spent an undisturbed childhood with his mother in a paradise such as Sarehole had in memory become to him. But his mother had been taken from him by the wickedness of the world (for he believed ultimately that she had died through the cruelty and neglect of her family), and now even the Sarehole landscape itself had been wantonly destroyed. In such a world, where perfection and true happiness were impossible, did it really matter in what surroundings one lived, any more than it really mattered what clothes one wore or what food one ate (providing it was plain food)? They were all temporary imperfections, and though imperfect were merely transient. It was in this sense a profoundly Christian and ascetic attitude to life. There is another explanation for his apparently careless approach to the externals of existence. By the tune he reached middle age his imagination no longer needed to be stimulated by experience; or rather, it had received all the stimulus it required in the early years of his life, the years of event and changing landscapes; now it could nourish itself upon these accumulated memories. Here is how he himself explained this process, when describing the creation of The Lord of the Rings:
‘One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.’
Vegetable matter has to decompose for a long time before it has broken down sufficiently to be used to enrich the soil, and Tolkien is saying here that it was almost exclusively upon early experience, sufficiently broken down by time, that he nourished the seeds of his imagination. Further experience was not necessary, and it was not sought.
We seem to have found out a little about him as a result of looking at old photographs; so perhaps it might be worth our while to pass on from regarding his appearance and his surroundings to considering another external characteristic, his voice and his manner of speaking. From adolescence to the end of his life he was notable, almost notorious, for the speed and indistinctness of his way of talking. Actually it is easy to exaggerate this, to make him into a caricature of the comic professor muttering inaudibly to himself. In reality it was not much like that. He did speak fast and not very clearly, but once the listener was used to the mannerism there was little difficulty in understanding most of what he said. Or rather, the difficulty was not physical but intellectual. He moved on so fast from idea to idea and spoke so allusively, assuming an equal knowledge in his listener, that all but those with a comparable range of learning were left behind. Not that to speak too cleverly is necessarily more defensible than to speak too fast, and Tolkien can be justly accused of overestimating the intellectual powers of his listeners. Alternatively one can say that he did not bother to make himself clear because he was really speaking to himself, airing his own ideas without any attempt at real conversation. Certainly this was often true of his later years, when he lived a life that was for the most part devoid of intellectual companionship; the result was that he was simply not used to conversation, and he tended to talk in monologues. But even in those days one could challenge him verbally, could engage him in real discourse, and he would listen and respond with enthusiasm.
Indeed he never bore the hallmark of the truly selfish man, the man who will not listen to anyone else. Tolkien always listened, always had a deep concern for the joys and sorrows of others. In consequence, though in many respects a shy man, he made friends easily. He liked to strike up a conversation with a Central European refugee on a train, a waiter in a favourite restaurant, or a hall porter in a hotel. In such company he was always entirely happy. He reported of a railway journey in 1953, when he was returning after lecturing on Sir Gawain at Glasgow: ‘I travelled all the way from Motherwell to Wolverhampton with a Scotch mother and a wee lassie, whom I rescued from standing in the corridor of a packed train, and they were allowed to go “first”
without payment since I told the inspector I welcomed their company. My reward was to be informed ere we parted that (while I was at lunch) the wee lassie had declared: “I like him but I canna understand a word he says.” To which I could only lamely reply that the latter was universal but the former not so usual.’
During his later years he formed friendships with the taxi-drivers whose cars he used to hire, with the policeman who patrolled the streets around his Bournemouth bungalow, and with the college scout and his wife who looked after him at the end of his Life. There was no element of condescension in these friendships; it was simply that he liked company, and these were the people nearest at hand. Nor was he without consciousness of class: the very opposite was true. But it was precisely because of his certainty of his own station in life that there was about him nothing of intellectual or social conceit. His view of the world, in which each man belonged or ought to belong to a specific ‘estate’, whether high or low, meant that in one sense he was an old-fashioned conservative. But in another sense it made him highly sympathetic to his fellow-men, for it is those who are unsure of their status in the world, who feel they have to prove themselves and if necessary put down other men to do so, who are the truly ruthless. Tolkien was, in modern jargon,
‘right-wing’ in that he honoured his monarch and his country and did not believe in the rule of the people; but he opposed democracy simply because he believed that in the end his fellow-men would not benefit from it. He once wrote: ‘I am not a “democrat”, if only because “humility” and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Ore gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery.’ As to the virtues of an old-fashioned feudal society, this is what he once said about respect for one’s superiors: ‘Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire but it’s damn good for you.’
What else can we observe? Perhaps the imaginary account of a typical day tells us something in that it starts with a journey to mass at St Aloysius’; and any close scrutiny of his life must take account of the importance of his religion. His commitment to Christianity and in particular to the Catholic Church was total. This is not to say that the practice of his faith was always a source of consolation to him: he set himself a rigorous code of behaviour, especially in the matter of making his confession before receiving communion, and when (as often happened) he could not bring himself to go to confession he would deny himself communion and live in a pathetic state of spiritual depression. Another source of unhappiness in his last years was the introduction of the vernacular mass, for the use of English in the liturgy rather than the Latin he had known and loved since boyhood pained him deeply. But even during an English mass in the bare modern church in Headington that he attended during his retirement, where he was sometimes irritated by the singing of the children’s choir and the wailing of babies, he would, when receiving communion, experience a profound spiritual joy, a state of contentment that he could reach in no other way. His religion was therefore one of the deepest and strongest elements in his personality.
On one level his devotion to Catholicism is explicable solely as a spiritual matter; on another, it was bound up very closely with his love for the mother who had made him a Catholic and who had died (he believed) for her Catholicism. Indeed one can see his love for her memory as a governing motive throughout his life and writings. Her death made him a pessimist; or rather, it made him capable of violent shifts of emotion. Once he had lost her, there was no security, and his natural optimism was balanced by deep uncertainty. Perhaps as a result, he was never moderate: love, intellectual enthusiasm, distaste, anger, self-doubt, guilt, laughter, each was in his mind exclusively and in full force when he experienced it; and at that moment no other emotion was permitted to modify it. He was thus a man of extreme contrasts. When in a black mood he would feel that there was no hope, either for himself or the world; and since this was often the very mood that drove him to record his feelings on paper, his diaries tend to show only the sad side of his nature. But five minutes later in the company of a friend he would forget this black gloom and be in the best of humour. Someone so strongly guided by his emotions is unlikely to be a cynic, and Tolkien was never cynical, for he cared too deeply about everything to adopt an intellectual detachment. He could, indeed, hold no opinion half-heartedly, could not be uncommitted about any topic that interested him. This sometimes led to strange attitudes. For example, his Gallophobia (itself almost inexplicable) made him angry not only about what he considered to be the pernicious influence of French cooking in England but about the Norman Conquest itself, which pained him as much as if it had happened in his lifetime. This strength of emotion was also reflected in his passion for perfection in any kind of written work, and in his inability to shrug off a domestic disaster philosophically. Again, he cared too much.
If he had been a proud man, his strong emotions would probably have made him unbearable. But he was in fact very humble. This is not to say that he was unaware of his own talents, for he had a perfectly accurate idea of what he could do, and a firm belief in his ability both as a scholar and a writer. But he did not consider that these talents were particularly important (with the result that in later years fame greatly puzzled bun), and he certainly had no personal pride in his own character. Far from it: he took an almost tragic view of himself as a weak man - which was another cause of his deep troughs of pessimism. But there was a different result of his humility: a deep sense of comedy that sprang from his picture of himself as yet another feeble member of the human race.
He could laugh at anybody, but most of all at himself, and his complete lack of any sense of dignity could and often did make him behave like a riotous schoolboy. At a New Year’s Eve party in the nineteen-thirties he would don an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug and paint his face white to impersonate a polar bear, or he would dress up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe and chase an astonished neighbour down the road. Later in life he delighted to offer inattentive shopkeepers his false teeth among a handful of change. ‘I have,*
he once wrote, *a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome.’
A strange and complex man, and this attempt to study his personality has not taught us very much. But as C. S. Lewis makes a character say in one of his novels, ‘I happen to believe that you can’t study men, you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing.’
If you are primarily interested in Tolkien as the author of The Lord of the Rings, you may take fright at the prospect of a chapter that discusses ‘Tolkien the scholar and the teacher’. Expressed in that fashion, it certainly sounds very dull. So the first thing to be said is that it is not dull. There were not two Tolkiens, one an academic and the other a writer. They were the same man, and the two sides of him overlapped so that they were indistinguishable-or rather they were not; two sides at all, but different expressions of the same mind, the same imagination. So if we are going to understand anything about his work as a writer we had better spend a short time examining his scholarship.
The first thing to understand is why he liked languages. We know [. a good deal about this from the account of his childhood. The fact I that he was excited by the Welsh names on coal-trucks, by the ‘surface glitter’ of Greek, by the strange forms of the Gothic words in the book he acquired by accident, and by the Finnish of the Kalevala, shows that he had a most unusual sensitivity to the sound and appearance of words. They filled for him the place that music has in many people’s lives. Indeed the response that words awakened in him was almost entirely emotional.
But why should he choose to specialise in early English? Someone so fond of strange words would be more likely to have concentrated his attention on foreign languages. The answer is again to be found in his capacity for excitement. We know already of his emotional response to Finnish, Welsh, and Gothic, and we ought to understand that something equally exciting happened when he first realised that a large proportion of the poetry and prose of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England was written in the dialect that had been spoken by his mother’s ancestors. In other words it was remote, but at the same time intensely personal to him. We already know that he was deeply attached to the West Midlands because of their associations with his mother. Her family had come from the town of Evesham, and he believed that this West Midland borough and its surrounding county of Worcestershire had been the home of that family, the Suffields, for countless generations. He himself had also spent much of his childhood at Sarehole, a West Midland hamlet. That part of the English countryside had in consequence a strong emotional attraction for him; and as a result so did its language.
He once wrote to W. H. Auden: T am a West-midlander by blood, and took to early West-midland Middle English as to a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it.’ A known tongue: something that already seemed familiar to him. One might dismiss this as a ludicrous exaggeration, for how could he ‘recognise’ a language that was seven hundred and fifty years old? Yet this was what he really believed, that he had inherited some faint ancestral memory of the tongue spoken by distant generations of Suffields. And once this idea had occurred to him, it was inevitable that he should study the language closely and make it the centre of his life’s work as a scholar.
This is not to say that he only studied the early English of the West Midlands. He became well versed in all dialects of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and (as we have seen) he also read widely in Icelandic. Moreover during 1919 and 1920 when he was working on the Oxford Dictionary he made himself acquainted with a number of other early Germanic languages. In consequence by the time he began work at Leeds University in 1920 he had a remarkably wide range of linguistic knowledge.
At Leeds and later at Oxford he proved to be a good teacher. He was not at his best in the lecture room, where his quick speech and indistinct articulation meant that pupils had to concentrate hard in order to hear him. Nor was he always very good at explaining himself in the clearest terms, for he found it difficult to scale down his own knowledge of the subject so that his pupils could understand everything he was saying. But he invariably brought the subject alive and showed that it mattered to him. The most celebrated example of this, remembered by everyone who was taught by him, was the opening of his series of lectures on Beowulf. He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of ‘Hwaet!’ (the first word of this and several other Old English poems), which some undergraduates took to be ‘Quiet!’ It was not so much a recitation as a dramatic performance, an impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it impressed generations of students because it brought home to them that Beowulf was not just a set text to be read for the purposes of an examination but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry. As one former pupil, the writer J. I. M. Stewart, expressed it: ‘He could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.’
Another who sat in the audience at these lectures was W. H. Auden, who wrote to Tolkien many years later:
‘I don’t think I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.’
One reason for Tolkien’s effectiveness as a teacher was that besides being a philologist he was a writer and poet, a man who not only studied words but who used them for poetic means. He could find poetry in the sound of the words themselves, as he had done since childhood; but he also had a poet’s understanding of how language is used. This was expressed in a memorable phrase in The Times obituary of him (undoubtedly written by C. S. Lewis long before Tolkien’s death) which talks of his ‘unique insight at once into the language of poetry and into the poetry of language’. In practical terms this meant that he could show a pupil not just what the words meant, but why the author had chosen that particular form of expression and how it fitted into his scheme of imagery. He thus encouraged students of early texts to treat them not as mere exemplars of a developing language but as literature deserving serious appreciation and criticism. Even when dealing solely with the technical matters of language, Tolkien was a vivid teacher. Lewis suggests in the obituary that this was in part the product of the long attention to private languages, the fact that he had been not merely a student of languages but a linguistic inventor: ‘Strange as it may seem, it was undoubtedly the source of that unparalleled richness and concreteness which later distinguished him from all other philologists. He had been inside language.’
‘Distinguished him from all other philologists’ sounds like a sweeping statement, but it is entirely true. Comparative philology grew up in nineteenth-century Germany, and although its practitioners were painstaking in their accuracy their writing was almost unredeemed in its dullness. Tolkien’s own mentor Joseph Wright had been trained in Germany, and while his books are invaluable for their contribution to the science of language they reflect almost nothing of Wright’s vigorous personality. Much as he loved his old teacher, Tolkien was perhaps thinking partly of Wright when he wrote of ‘the bespectacled philologist, English but trained in Germany, where he lost his literary soul’.
Tolkien never lost his literary soul. His philological writings invariably reflect the richness of his mind. He brought to even the most intricate aspects of his subject a grace of expression and a sense of the larger significance of the matter. Nowhere is this demonstrated to better advantage than in his article (published in 1929) on the Ancrene Wisse, a medieval book of instruction for a group of anchorites, which probably originated in the West Midlands. By a remarkable and subtle piece of scholarship, Tolkien showed that the language of two important manuscripts of the text (one in a Cambridge college, the other in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) was no mere unpolished dialect, but a literary language, with an unbroken literary tradition going back to before the Conquest. He expressed this conclusion in vivid terms - and it should be appreciated that he is here really talking about his beloved West Midland dialect as a whole:
‘It is not a language long relegated to the “uplands” struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into
“lewdness”, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech - a soil somewhere in England.’
This kind of writing, forceful in its imagery, characterised all his articles and lectures, however abstruse or unpromising the subject might seem. In this respect he almost founded a new school of philology; certainly there had been no one before him who brought such humanity, one might say such emotion, to the subject; and it was an approach which influenced many of his most able pupils who themselves became philologists of distinction.
It ought also to be said that he was immensely painstaking. Broad and powerful statements such as that quoted above may have characterised his work, yet they were no mere assertions, but the product of countless hours of research into the minutiae of the subject Even by the usual scrupulous standards of comparative philology, Tolkien was extraordinary in this respect. His concern for accuracy cannot be overemphasised, and it was doubly valuable because it was coupled with a flair for detecting patterns and relations. ‘Detecting’ is a good word, for it is not too great a flight of fancy to picture him as a linguistic Sherlock Holmes, presenting himself with an apparently disconnected series of facts and deducing from them the truth about some major matter. He also demonstrated his ability to ‘detect’ on a simpler level, for when discussing a word or phrase with a pupil he would cite a wide range of comparable forms and expressions in other languages. Similarly in casual conversation he delighted in producing unexpected remarks about names, such as his observation that the name ‘Waugh’ is historically the singular of ‘Wales’. But probably all this sounds like the scholar in his ivory tower. What did he do! What, in practical terms, did it mean to be the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford? The simplest answer is that it meant a good deal of hard work. The statutes called upon Tolkien to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or classes a year, but he did not consider this to be sufficient to cover the subject, and in the second year after being elected Professor he gave one hundred and thirty-six lectures and classes. This was partly because there were comparatively few other people to lecture on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. Later he managed to get another philologist, an excellent if intimidating teacher named Charles Wrenn, appointed to assist him, and then he was able to set himself a slightly less strenuous programme. But throughout the nineteen-thirties he continued to give at least twice the statutory number of lectures and classes each year, considerably more than most of his colleagues undertook.
So lectures, and the preparation for them, took up a very large proportion of his time. In fact this heavy teaching load was sometimes more than he could manage efficiently, and occasionally he would abandon a course of lectures because of insufficient time to prepare it Oxford seized gleefully on this sin and bestowed upon him the reputation of not preparing his lectures properly, whereas the truth was that he prepared them too thoroughly. His deep commitment to the subject prevented bun from tackling it in anything less than an exhaustive manner, with the result that he often sidetracked himself into the consideration of subsidiary details, and never managed to finish the treatment of the main topic. His job also required him to supervise post-graduate students, and to examine within the University. In addition he undertook a good deal of ‘freelance’ work as an external examiner to other universities, for with four children to bring up he needed to augment his income. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties he made frequent visits to many of the British universities as an examiner, and spent countless hours marking papers. After the Second World War he restricted this activity to examining regularly for various colleges in Ireland, touring Eire and making many friends there in the process. This was much to his taste. Less attractive, indeed an unredeemed chore, was the marking of School Certificate (the examination then set for British secondary schools) which he undertook annually in the prewar years to earn extra money. His time would have been better devoted to research or writing, but his concern for the family income made him spend many hours in the summer at this irritating task.
A good deal of his attention was also taken up by administration. It should be understood that an Oxford professor, unlike those in many other universities, is not by virtue of his office necessarily in a position of power in his faculty. He has no authority over the college tutors who in all probability make up the majority of the faculty staff, for they are appointed by their colleges and are not answerable to him. So if he wishes to initiate some major change of policy he must adopt persuasive rather than authoritarian tactics. And, on his return to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien did wish to make a major change: he wanted to reform certain aspects of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature.
The years since the First World War had widened the old rift between Language and Literature, and each faction in the English School - and they really were factions, with personal as well as academic animosities delighted to interfere with the syllabus of the other. The ‘Lang.’ side made sure that the ‘Lit’ students had to spend a good deal of their time studying the obscurer branches of English philology, while the ‘Lit.’ camp insisted that the ‘Lang.’ undergraduates must set aside many hours from their specialisation (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English) to study the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Tolkien believed that this should be remedied. What was even more regrettable to him was that the linguistic courses laid considerable emphasis on the study of theoretical philology without suggesting that undergraduates should read widely in early and medieval literature. His own love of philology had always been based firmly on a knowledge of literature, and he determined that this state of affairs should be changed. He also proposed that Icelandic should be given more prominence in the syllabus; this latter hope was one reason for the formation of the Coalbiters. His proposals required the consent of the whole faculty, and at first he met with a good deal of opposition. Even C. S. Lewis, not yet a personal friend, was among those who originally voted against him. But as the terms passed, Lewis and many others came over to Tolkien’s side and gave him their active support. By 1931
he had managed (‘beyond my wildest hopes’, he wrote in his diary) to obtain general approval for the majority of his proposals. The revised syllabus was put into operation, and for the first time in the history of the Oxford English School something like a real rapprochement was achieved between ‘Lang.’ and ‘Lit.’. Besides being responsible for teaching and administration, professors at Oxford as elsewhere are expected to devote much of their time to original research. Tolkien’s contemporaries had high hopes of him in this respect, for his glossary to Sisam’s book, his edition with E. V. Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and his article on the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts demonstrated that he had an unrivalled mastery of the early Middle English of the West Midlands; and it was expected that he would continue to contribute important work in this field. He himself had every intention of doing so: he promised an edition of the Cambridge manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse to the Early English Text Society, and he did a great deal of research into this branch of early medieval English, this language ‘with the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman’ which he loved so much. But the edition was not completed for many years, while the greater part of his research work never reached print.
Lack of time was one cause. He had chosen to devote the major part of his working life at Oxford to teaching, and this in itself limited what he could do in the matter of original research. The marking of examination papers in order to provide necessary money also ate into his time. But besides this there was the matter of his perfectionism.
Tolkien had a passion for perfection in written work of any kind, whether it be philology or stories. This grew from his emotional commitment to his work, which did not permit him to treat it in any manner other than the deeply serious. Nothing was allowed to reach the printer until it had been revised, reconsidered, and polished
– in which respect he was the opposite of C. S. Lewis, who sent manuscripts off for publication with scarcely a second glance at them. Lewis, well aware of this difference between them, wrote of Tolkien: ‘His standard of self-criticism was high and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old work they actually got the first draft of a new one.’
This is the main reason why Tolkien only allowed a small proportion of his work to reach the printed page. But what he did publish during the nineteen-thirties was a major contribution to scholarship. His paper on the dialects of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the regional variations of fourteenth-century English. (It was read to the Philological Society in 1931 but not published until 1934, and then with a typical Tolkien apology for the lack of what the author considered to be a necessary amount of revision and improvement.) And his lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, delivered to the British Academy on 25 November 1936 and published in the following year, is a landmark in the history of criticism of this great Western Anglo-Saxon poem.
Beowulf, said Tolkien in the lecture, is a poem and not (as other commentators had often suggested) merely a jumble of confused literary traditions, or a text for scholarly examination. And he described, in characteristically imaginative terms, the way that earlier critics had treated the Beowulf poet’s work: ‘A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: “This tower is most interesting.” But they also said (after pushing it over): “What a muddle it is in!” And even the man’s descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: “He is such an odd fellow!
Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house?
He had no sense of proportion.” But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.’
In his lecture Tolkien pleaded for the rebuilding of that tower. He declared that although Beowulf is about monsters and a dragon, that does not make it negligible as heroic poetry. ‘A dragon is no idle fancy,’ he told his audience. ‘Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who have yet been caught by the fascination of the worm.’
This was Tolkien talking not primarily as a philologist or even a literary critic, but as a storyteller. Just as Lewis said of his philology, ‘He had been inside language’, so it might be remarked that when he talked of the Beowulf dragon he was speaking as the author of The Silmarillion and - by this time - of The Hobbit. He had been into the dragon’s lair.
Since the lecture was first published, many readers of Beowulf have dissented from Tolkien’s view of the poem’s structure. But even one of the severest critics of his interpretation, his old tutor Kenneth Sisam, admitted that the lecture has a ‘fineness of perception and elegance of expression’ which distinguish it from so much else in this field.
The Beowulf lecture and the paper on the Reeve’s Tale were the only major pieces of philological work published by Tolkien in the nineteen-thirties. He planned to do much more: besides his work on the Ancrene Wisse he intended to produce an edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem Exodus, and indeed he nearly completed this task, but it was never finished to his satisfaction. He also planned further joint editions with E. V. Gordon, in particular of Pearl (a natural companion-piece to their Gawain) and of the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer. But Gordon and Tolkien were now geographically far apart. In 1931 Gordon, who had been appointed Tolkien’s successor as professor at Leeds, moved from there to take up a chair at Manchester University, and though the two men met and corresponded frequently, collaboration proved technically less easy than when they had been in the same place. Gordon did a great deal of work on all three projects, using Tolkien as a consultant rather than as a full collaborator, but nothing had reached print by 1938.
In the summer of that year, Gordon went into hospital for an operation for gall-stones. It seemed to be successful, but his condition suddenly deteriorated, and he died from a previously unsuspected kidney disorder, at the age of forty-two.
Gordon’s death robbed Tolkien not only of a close friend but also of the ideal professional collaborator; and by now it was clear that he needed a collaborator, if only to make him surrender any material to the printer.1 As it happened, he had made the acquaintance of another philologist who proved to be a good working partner. This was Simonne d’Ardenne, a Belgian graduate who studied Middle English with him for an Oxford B.Litt. early in the nineteen-thirties. Tolkien contributed much to her edition of The Life and Passion of St Juliene, a medieval religious work written in the Ancrene Wisse dialect. Indeed the d’Ardenne Juliene paradoxically contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he ever published under his own name. Mile d’Ardenne became a professor at Liege, and she and Tolkien planned to collaborate on an edition of Katerine, another Western Middle English text of the same group. But the war intervened and made communication between them impossible for many years, and after 1945 nothing was achieved by them beyond a couple of short articles on topics concerned with the manuscript of the text. Although Tolkien was able to work with Mile d’Ardenne when he was in Belgium to attend a philological congress in 1951, she realised sadly that collaboration with him was now impossible, for his mind was entirely on his stories. But even if one is to regard his failure to publish more in his professional field as a matter for regret, one should not fail to take account of his wide influence, for his theories and deductions have been quoted (with or without due acknowledgement) wherever English philology is studied.
Nor should one forget the translations he made of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo. The Pearl translation was begun at Leeds in the nineteen-twenties; Tolkien was attracted to the task by the challenge of the poem’s complex metrical and verbal structure. He had finished it by 1926, but he did nothing about publishing it until Basil Blackwell offered to put it into print in the 1 Tolkien intended to complete the Pearl edition, but he found himself unable to do so (by this time he was absorbed in writing The Lord of the Rings). It was eventually revised and completed for publication by Ida Gordon, the widow of E. V. Gordon, and herself a professional philologist nineteen-forties, in return for a sum to be credited to Tolkien’s heavily overdue account at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. The translation was set into type, but Blackwell waited in vain for Tolkien to write the introduction to the volume, and eventually the project was abandoned. The translation of Gawain, probably begun during the nineteen-thirties or forties, was finished in time for it to be broadcast in dramatised form by the BBC in 1953, Tolkien himself recording a short introduction and a longer concluding talk. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings his publishers Alien & Unwin determined to issue the Gawain and Pearl translations in one volume. With this in view, Tolkien made extensive revisions of both translations, but once again an introduction was required, and he found it extremely difficult to write one, being uncertain as to what ought to be explained to the non-scholarly reader for whom the book was intended. Again the project lapsed, and it was not until after his death that the two translations were published, together with a modern English rendering of a third poem of the same period, Sir Orjeo, which Tolkien had originally translated for a wartime cadets’ course at Oxford. The introduction to the volume was assembled by Christopher Tolkien out of such materials as could be found among his father’s papers.
These translations were in effect Tolkien’s last published philological work, for although they are accompanied by no notes or commentary they are the result of sixty years’ minute study of the poems, and in many places they provide an informed and illuminating interpretation of hard and ambiguous passages in the originals. Most important of all, they bring these poems to an audience that could not have read them in Middle English. For this reason they are a fitting conclusion to the work of a man who believed that the prime function of a linguist is to interpret literature, and that the prime function of literature is to be enjoyed. When Tolkien returned to Oxford in 1925 there was an element missing from his life. It had disappeared with the breaking of the T.C.B.S. in the Battle of the Somme, for not since those days had he enjoyed friendship to the same degree of emotional and intellectual commitment. He had continued to see something of the other surviving T.C.B.S. member, Christopher Wiseman, but Wiseman was now heavily involved with his duties as the headmaster of a Methodist public school,1 and when the two men did meet they now found very little in common.
On 11 May 1926 Tolkien attended a meeting of the English Faculty at Merton College. Among the familiar faces a new arrival stood out, a heavily-built man of twenty-seven in baggy clothes who had recently been elected Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. This was Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as ‘Jack’.
At first the two men circled warily around one another. Tolkien knew that Lewis, though a medievalist, was in the ‘Lit.’ camp and thus a potential adversary, while Lewis wrote in his diary that Tolkien was ‘a smooth, pale, fluent little chap’, adding ‘No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’ But soon Lewis came to have a firm affection for this long-faced keen-eyed man who liked good talk and laughter and beer, while Tolkien warmed to Lewis’s quick mind and the generous spirit that was as huge as Lewis’s shapeless flannel trousers. By May 1927 Tolkien had enrolled Lewis into the Coal-biters to join in the reading of Icelandic sagas, and a long and complex friendship had begun.
Anyone who wants to know something of what Tolkien and Lewis contributed to each other’s lives should read Lewis’s essay on Friendship in his book The Four Loves. Here it all is, the account of how Queen’s College Taunton, which Tolkien’s grandfather John Suffield had attended as one of its earliest pupils. The two companions become friends when they discover a shared insight, how their friendship is not jealous but seeks out the company of others, how such friendships are almost of necessity between men, how the greatest pleasure of all is for a group of friends to come to an inn after a hard day’s walking: ‘Those are the golden sessions,’ writes Lewis, ‘when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim or responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life - natural life has no better gift to give.’1
This is what it was about, those years of companionship, the walking tours, the friends gathered in Lewis’s rooms on Thursday nights. It was partly the spirit of the tunes - you may find something of the same sense of male companionship in the writings of Chesterton; and it was a feeling shared, though with less self-awareness, by many men of the day. It has precedents in ancient civilizations, and closer at hand it was in part the result of the First World War, in which so many friends had been killed that the survivors felt the need to stay close together. Friendship of this kind was remarkable, and at the same time entirely natural and inevitable. It was not homosexual (Lewis dismisses that suggestion with deserved ridicule), yet it excluded women. It is the great mystery of Tolkien’s life, and we shall understand little of it if we try to analyse it. At the same time if we have ever enjoyed a friendship of that sort we shall know exactly what it was about. And even if that fails us, we can find something of it expressed in The Lord of the Rings. How did it begin? Perhaps ‘Northernness’ was the shared insight that started it. Since early adolescence Lewis had been captivated by Norse mythology, and when he found in Tolkien another who delighted in the mysteries of the Edda and the complexities of the V61-sung legend it was clear that they would have a lot to share. They began to meet regularly in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, sometimes sitting far into the night while they talked of the gods and giants of Asgard or discussed the politics of the English School. They also commented on each other’s poetry. Tolkien lent Lewis the typescript of his long poem’ The Gest of Beren and Luthien’, and after reading it Lewis wrote to him: ‘I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it -1
should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author.’ He sent Tolkien detailed criticisms of the poem, which he jestingly couched in the form of a mock textual criticism, complete with the names of fictitious scholars (‘Pumpernickel’, Peabody’, and ‘Schick’) who suggested that weak lines in Tolkien’s poem were simply the result of scribal inaccuracies in the manuscript, and could not be the authentic work of the original poet. Tolkien was amused by this, but he accepted few of Lewis’s suggested emendations. On the other hand he did rewrite almost every passage that Lewis had criticised, rewrote so extensively, in fact, that the revised ‘Gest of Beren and Luthien’ was scarcely the same poem. Lewis soon discovered this to be characteristic of his friend. ‘He has only two reactions to criticism,’ he remarked. ‘Either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.’
By this time - the end of 1929 - Lewis was supporting Tolkien’s plans for changes within the English School. The two men intrigued and discussed. Lewis wrote conspiratorially to Tolkien: ‘Forgive me if I remind you that there are disguised orcs behind every tree.’ Together they waged a skilful campaign, and it was partly thanks to Lewis’s support on the Faculty Board that Tolkien managed to get his reformed syllabus accepted in 1931. In Surprised by Joy Lewis wrote that friendship with Tolkien ‘marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both’. Soon after the second prejudice had been overcome, the friendship moved into the area of the first Lewis, the son of a Belfast solicitor, had been brought up as an Ulster protestant. During adolescence he had professed agnosticism; or rather he had discovered that for him the greatest delight was to be found not in Christianity but in pagan mythologies. Yet already he had receded a little from this standpoint. During the middle nineteen-twenties, after taking a First Class in the English School (and earlier a double First in Classics) and while making a precarious living as a tutor, he had arrived at what he called his ‘New Look’, the belief that the Christian ‘myth’ conveys as much truth as most men can comprehend. By 1926 he had moved further and had come to the conclusion that in effect his search for the source of what he called Joy was a search for God. Soon it became apparent to him that he must accept or reject God. At this juncture he became friends with Tolkien.
In Tolkien he found a person of wit and intellectual verve who was nevertheless a devout Christian. During the early years of their friendship there were many hours when Tolkien would lounge in one of Lewis’s plain armchairs in the centre of the big sitting-room in Magdalen New Buildings while Lewis, his heavy fist grasping the bowl of his pipe and his eyebrows raised behind a cloud of smoke, would pace up and down, talking or listening, suddenly swinging round and exclaiming ‘Distinguo, Tollers! Distinguo!’ as the other man, similarly wreathed in pipe smoke, made too sweeping an assertion. Lewis argued, but more and more in the matter of belief he was coming to admit that Tolkien was right. By the summer of 1929 he had come to profess theism, a simple faith in God. But he was not yet a Christian.
Usually his discussions with Tolkien took place on Monday mornings, when they would talk for an hour or two and then conclude with beer at the Eastgate, a nearby pub. But on Saturday 19 September 1931 they met in the evening. Lewis had invited Tolkien to dine at Magdalen, and he had another guest, Hugo Dyson, whom Tolkien had first known at Exeter College in 1919. Dyson was now Lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, and he paid frequent visits to Oxford. He was a Christian, and a man of feline wit. After dinner, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson went out for air. It was a blustery night, but they strolled along Addison’s Walk discussing the purpose of myth. Lewis, though now a believer in God, could not yet understand the function of Christ in Christianity, could not perceive the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. He declared that he had to understand the purpose of these events - as he later expressed it in a letter to a friend, ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now - except in so far as his example could help us’.
As the night wore on, Tolkien and Dyson showed him that he was here making a totally unnecessary demand. When he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination since he had read the story of the Norse god Balder. But from the Gospels (they said) he was requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?
But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not. And, indicating the great trees of Magdalen Grove as their branches bent in the wind, he struck out a different line of argument.
You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology, Tolkien had laid bare the centre of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion.
Lewis listened as Dyson affirmed in his own way what Tolkien had said. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened! In that case, he said, I begin to understand.
At last the wind drove them inside, and they talked in Lewis’s rooms until three a.m., when Tolkien went home. After seeing him out into the High Street, Lewis and Dyson walked up and down the cloister of New Buildings, still talking, until the sky grew light.
Twelve days later Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ - in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.’
Meanwhile Tolkien, invigilating in the Examination Schools, was composing a long poem recording what he had said to Lewis. He called it ‘Mythopoeia’, the making of myths. And he wrote in his diary: ‘Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual - a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher - and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.’
Lewis and Tolkien continued to see much of each other. Tolkien read aloud to Lewis from The Silmarillion, and Lewis urged him to press on and finish writing it. Tolkien later said of this: ‘The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby.’
Lewis’s conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of a new stage in his friendship with Tolkien. From the early nineteen-thirties onwards the two men depended less exclusively on each other’s company and more on that of other men. In The Four Loves Lewis states that ‘two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best’, and he suggests that each friend added to a group brings out some special characteristic in the others. Tolkien had experienced this in the T.C.B.S.; and the knot of friends which now began to come together was the ultimate expression of the T.C.B.S. principle, the ‘clubbable’ urge which Tolkien had felt since those adolescent days. This group was known as The Inklings. It began to form itself at about the tune (in the early nineteen-thirties) when the Coalbiters ceased to meet, having fulfilled their aim of reading all the principal Icelandic sagas and finally the Elder Edda. ‘The Inklings’
was originally the name of a literary society founded in about 1931 by a University College undergraduate named Tangye Lean. Lewis and Tolkien both attended its meetings, at which unpublished compositions were read and criticised. After Lean left Oxford the club lived on; or rather its name was transferred half jestingly to the circle of friends who gathered at regular intervals around Lewis. The Inklings have now entered literary history, and a good deal has been written about them, much of it over-solemn. They were no more (and no less) than a number of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature. Numbers of people have been stated to have been ‘members’
at this or that period, whereas in truth there was no system of membership. Some men attended more or less regularly at various periods, while others were only occasional visitors. Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable. A list of other names gives little idea of what the Inklings really were; but if names matter, besides Lewis and Tolkien (who was almost invariably present) among those who attended in the years before and during the war were Major Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis’s brother, known as ‘Warnie’), R. E. Havard (an Oxford doctor who attended the Lewis and Tolkien households), Lewis’s long-standing friend Owen Barfield (although, being a London solicitor, Barfield rarely came to meetings), and Hugo Dyson.
It was a thoroughly casual business. One should not imagine that the same people turned up week after week, or sent apologies if they were to be absent. Nevertheless there were certain invariable elements. The group, or various members of it, would meet on a weekday morning in a pub, generally on Tuesdays in the Eagle and Child (known familiarly as ‘The Bird and Baby’); though during the war when beer was short and pubs crowded with servicemen their habits were more flexible. On Thursday nights they would meet in Lewis’s big Magdalen sitting-room, congregating some time after nine o’clock. Tea would be made and pipes lit, and then Lewis would boom out: ‘Well, has nobody got anything to read us?’ Someone would produce a manuscript and begin to read it aloud - it might be a poem, or a story, or a chapter. Then would come criticism: sometimes praise, sometimes censure, for it was no mutual admiration society. There might be more reading, but soon the proceedings would spill over into talk of all kinds, sometimes heated debate, and would terminate at a late hour.
By the late nineteen-thirties the Inklings were an important part of Tolkien’s life, and among his own contributions to gatherings were readings from the still-unpublished manuscript of The Hobbit. When war broke out in 1939 another man was recruited to the group of friends. This was Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press at their London office and who with the rest of their staff was now transferred to Oxford. Williams was in his fifties; his thought and writings - he was a novelist, poet, theologian, and critic
- were already known and respected, albeit by a small circle of readers. In particular his’ spiritual thrillers’ (as they have been called), novels which deal with supernatural and mystical events in a mundane setting, had found a small but enthusiastic public. Lewis had known and admired Williams for some time, but Tolkien had only met him once or twice. Now he came to develop a complex attitude to him. Williams, with his curious face (half angel, half monkey, Lewis called it), his very un-Oxford-like blue suit, the cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a bundle of proofs wrapped in Time & Tide tucked under his arm, was a person of great natural charm. Tolkien recalled twenty years later: ‘We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest).’ But he added: ‘We had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.’
This was partly because, while Williams enjoyed the chapters from The Lord of the Rings that were then being read to the group, Tolkien did not like Williams’s books, or those which he had read. He declared that he found them ‘wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous’. And perhaps his reservations about Williams, or Williams’s place in the Inklings, were not entirely intellectual. Lewis believed, and declared in The Four Loves, that true friends cannot be jealous when another comes to join them. But here Lewis was talking about Lewis, not about Tolkien. Clearly there was a little jealousy or resentment on Tolkien’s part, and not without cause, for now the limelight of Lewis’s enthusiasm shifted almost imperceptibly from himself to Williams. ‘Lewis was a very impressionable man,’ Tolkien wrote long afterwards, and elsewhere he talked of the ‘dominant influence’ that he believed Williams had come to exercise over Lewis, especially over his third novel, That Hideous Strength.
So Williams’s arrival in Oxford marked the beginning of a third phase in Tolkien’s friendship with Lewis, a faint cooling on Tolkien’s part which even Lewis probably hardly noticed as yet. Something else made him cooler, something even more subtle: the matter of Lewis’s growing reputation as a Christian apologist. As Tolkien had played such an important part in his friend’s return to Christianity he had always regretted that Lewis had not become a Catholic like himself, but had begun to at tend his local Anglican church, resuming the religious practices of his childhood. Tolkien had a deep resentment of the Church of England which he sometimes extended to its buildings, declaring that his appreciation of their beauty was marred by his sadness that they had been (he considered) perverted from their rightful Catholicism. When Lewis published a prose allegory telling the story of his conversion under the title The Pilgrim’s Regress, Tolkien thought the title ironical. ‘Lewis would regress,’ he said. ‘He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up again, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant.’
By the mid nineteen-forties Lewis was receiving a good deal of publicity (‘too much,’ said Tolkien, ‘for his or any of our tastes’) in connection with his Christian writings, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. Tolkien perhaps felt, as he observed his friend’s increasing fame in this respect, rather as if a pupil had speedily overtaken his master to achieve almost unjustified fame. He once referred to Lewis, not altogether flatteringly, as ‘Everyman’s Theologian’.
But if these thoughts were at all in Tolkien’s mind in the early nineteen-forties they were well below the surface. He still had an almost unbounded affection for Lewis - indeed perhaps still cherished the occasional hope that his friend might one day become a Catholic. And the Inklings continued to provide much delight and encouragement to him. ‘Hwaet! we Inklings,’ he wrote in parody of the opening lines of Beowulf, ‘on aerdagum searopancolra snyttru gehierdon.’ ‘Lo! We have heard in old days of the wisdom of the cunning-minded Inklings; how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations, skillfully reciting learning and song-craft, earnestly meditating. That was true joy!’
‘What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea.’ So writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves while speculating on the history of male friendship. This is the inevitable corollary of a life that centres on the company of men, and on groups such as the Inklings: women get left out of it.
Edith Tolkien had only been given a limited education at a girls’ boarding-school which, while good in music, was indifferent in other subjects. She had spent a few years in a Birmingham lodging-house, then a period at Cheltenham in a markedly non-intellectual middle-class household, and then a long time living with her poorly educated middle-aged cousin Jennie. There had been no chance either to continue her education or to improve her mind. More than this, she had lost a good deal of her independence. She had been set for a career as a piano teacher and just possibly as a soloist, but this prospect had simply faded away, first of all because there had been no immediate need for her to earn a living, and then because she had married Ronald Tolkien. In those days there was in normal circumstances no question of a middle-class wife continuing to earn her living after marriage, for to do so would have been an indication that the husband could not earn enough by himself. So piano playing was reduced to a mere hobby, although she continued to play regularly until old age, and her music delighted Ronald. He did not encourage her to pursue any intellectual activity, partly because he did not consider it to be a necessary part of her role as wife and mother, and partly because his attitude to her in courtship (exemplified by his favourite term for her, ‘little one’) was not associated with his own intellectual life; to her he showed a side of his personality quite different from that perceived by his male friends. Just as he liked to be a man’s man among his cronies, so at home he expected to live in what was primarily a woman’s world.
Despite this, Edith might have been able to make a positive contribution to his life in the University. A number of Oxford dons’ wives managed to do this. A few lucky ones such as Joseph Wright’s wife Lizzie were themselves expert in their husband’s subjects, and could assist in their work. But a number of other wives who, like Edith, did not have university degrees could by their expert management of the household make their home into something of a social centre for their husbands’ friends, and so participate in much of their lives.
Unfortunately everything worked out rather differently for Edith. She was inclined to be shy, for she had led a very limited social life in childhood and adolescence, and when she came to live in Oxford in 1918 she was unnerved by what she found. She and Ronald and the baby (and her cousin Jennie, who was still with them, remaining until they moved to Leeds) lived in modest rooms in a side-street in the town; and, from her viewpoint as someone who did not know Oxford, the University seemed an almost impenetrable fortress, a phalanx of imposing buildings where important-looking men passed to and fro in gowns, and where Ronald disappeared to work each day. When the University deigned to cross her threshold it was in the person of polite but awkward young men, friends of Ronald’s who did not know how to talk to women, and to whom she could think of nothing to say, for their worlds simply did not overlap. Worse still, the visitors might be dons’
wives, such as the terrifying Mrs Farnell, wife of the Rector of Exeter, whose presence even frightened Ronald. These women only confirmed Edith in her belief that the University was unapproachable in its eminence. They came from their awesome college lodgings or their turreted mansions in North Oxford to coo condescendingly at baby John in his cot, and when they departed they would leave their calling-cards on the hall tray (one card bearing their own name, two cards bearing their husband’s) to indicate that Mrs Tolkien was of course expected to return the call after a short interval. But Edith’s nerve failed her. What could she say to these people if she went to their imposing houses? What possible conversation could she have with these stately women, whose talk was of people of whom she had never heard, of professors’ daughters and tided cousins and other Oxford hostesses? Ronald was worried, for he knew what a solecism would be committed if his wife did not follow the strict Oxford etiquette. He persuaded her to return one call, to Lizzie Wright, who although very learned was not at all like most dons’ wives, having a great deal of her husband’s openness and common sense; but even then Ronald had to take her to the Wrights’ front door himself and ring the bell before hurrying away round the corner. All the other calling-cards gathered dust, the calls were left unreturned, and it became known that Mr Tolkien’s wife did not call and must therefore be quietly excluded from the round of dinner parties and At Homes.
Then the Tolkiens moved to Leeds, and Edith found that things were different there. People occupied ordinary modest houses, and there was no nonsense about calling-cards. Another university wife lived a few doors down in St Mark’s Terrace and often called for a chat. Edith also began to see a good deal of Ronald’s pupils who came in for tutorials or tea, and she liked many of them very much. Many of these pupils became family friends who kept in touch with her in later years and often came to visit. There were informal university dances which she enjoyed. Even the children (there were now John, Michael, and, at the end of their time in Leeds, Christopher) were not forgotten, for the university organised splendid Christmas parties at which the Vice-Chancellor used to dress up as Father Christmas. Later, Ronald managed to afford to buy a larger house in Darnley Road, away from the smoke and dirt of the city. They employed a maid and a nurse for the children. On the whole Edith was happy.
But then suddenly they were back in Oxford. The first house in Northmoor Road was bought by Ronald while Edith was still in Leeds, without her ever having seen it, and she thought it was too small. The older boys had caught ringworm from a public comb at a photographer’s studio in Leeds, and they had to be given lengthy and expensive treatment. When they were sufficiently recovered to go to the Dragon School they were at first unhappy there among the rough-and-tumble of other boys. Then Edith became pregnant again. Not until after the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the move to the larger house next door in 1930 could she feel settled. Even then, family life never entirely regained the equilibrium it had achieved in Leeds. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald. In terms of actual hours he was certainly in the house a great deal: much of his teaching was done there, and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was really a matter of his affections. He was very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was
about his) and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the company of men of his own kind. More specifically she noticed and resented his devotion to Jack Lewis.
On the occasions when Lewis came to Northmoor Road, the children liked him because he did not talk condescendingly to them; and he gave them books by E. Nesbit, which they enjoyed. But with Edith he was shy and ungainly. Consequently she could not understand the delight that Ronald took in his company, and she became a little jealous. There were other difficulties. She had only known a home life of the most limited sort in her own childhood, and she therefore had no example on which to base the running of her household. Not surprisingly she cloaked this uncertainty in authoritarian-ism, demanding that meals be precisely on time, that the children eat up every scrap, and that servants should perform their work impeccably. Underneath all this she was often very lonely, frequently being without company other than the servants and the children during that part of the day when Ronald was out or in his study. During these years Oxford society was gradually becoming less rigid; but she did not trust it, and she made few friends among other dons’ families, with the exception of Charles Wrenn’s wife, Agnes. She also suffered from severe headaches which could prostrate her for a day or more.
It quickly became clear to Ronald that Edith was unhappy with Oxford, and especially that she was resentful of his men friends. Indeed he perceived that his need of male friendship was not entirely compatible with married life. But he believed that this was one of the sad facts of a fallen world; and on the whole he thought that a man had a right to male pleasures, and should if necessary insist on them. To a son contemplating marriage he wrote: ‘There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss. Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out - or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently - the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc., etc. If the other side’s claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and “fuss” than subterfuge.’
There was also the problem of Edith’s attitude to Catholicism. Before they were married, Ronald had persuaded her to leave the Church of England and to become a Catholic, and she had resented this a little at the tune. During the subsequent years she had almost given up going to mass. In the second decade of marriage her anti-Catholic feelings hardened, and by the time the family returned to Oxford in 1925 she was showing resentment of Ronald taking the children to church. In part these feelings were due to Ronald’s rigid, almost medieval, insistence upon frequent confession; and Edith had always hated confessing her sins to a priest. Nor could he discuss her feelings with her in a rational manner, certainly not with the lucidity he demonstrated in his theological arguments with Lewis: to Edith he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding. Occasionally her smouldering anger about church-going burst into fury; but at last after one such outburst in 1940 there was a true reconciliation between her and Ronald, in which she explained her feelings and even declared that she wished to resume the practice of her religion. In the event she did riot return to regular church-going, but for the rest of her life she showed no resentment of Catholicism, and indeed delighted to take an interest in church affairs, so that it appeared even to friends who were Catholics that she was an active church-goer.
To some extent Ronald and Edith lived separate lives at North-moor Road, sleeping in different bedrooms and keeping different hours. He worked late, partly because he was short of time in the day, but also because it was not until she had gone to bed that he could stay at his desk without interruption. During the day he could not work for long before she summoned him to some domestic duty, or called him to come and have tea with a friend. These frequent interruptions, themselves no more than an understandable demand from Edith for affection and attention, were often an irritant to him, though he bore them patiently. Yet it would be wrong to picture her as excluded totally from his work. During these years he did not share his writing with her anything like as fully as he had done long before at Great Haywood; not since then had she been encouraged to participate in his work, and of his manuscripts only the early pages of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ are in her handwriting. Yet she inevitably shared in the family’s interest when he was writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and although she was not well acquainted with the details of his books and did not have a deep understanding of them, he did not shut her out from this side of his life. Indeed she was the first person to whom he showed two of his stories, Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, and he was always warmed and encouraged by her approval.
He and Edith shared many friends. Among these, some had academic connections, such as Rosfrith Murray (daughter of the original Oxford Dictionary editor Sir James Murray) and her nephew Robert Murray, and former pupils and colleagues such as Simonne d’Ardenne, Elaine Griffiths, Stella Mills, and Mary Salu. All these were family friends, as much a part of Edith’s life as of Ronald’s, and this itself was a binding force between them. She and Ronald did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his and her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild’s measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with. Those friends and others who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible both in the small things, the almost absurd degree to which each worried about the other’s health, and the care with which they chose and wrapped each other’s birthday presents; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years at Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree to which she showed pride in his fame as an author.
A principal source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family. This bound them together until the end of their lives, and it was perhaps the strongest force in the marriage. They delighted to discuss and mull over every detail of the lives of their children, and later of their grandchildren. They were very proud when Michael won the George Medal in the Second World War for his action as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes in the Battle of Britain; and they felt similar pride when John was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church shortly after the war. Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love. If to us, reading about it so many years later, life at Northmoor Road seems dull and uneventful, we should realise that this was not how the family felt it to be at the time. To them it was full of event There was the unforgettable occasion in 1932 when Tolkien bought his first car, a Morris Cowley that was nicknamed ‘Jo’
after the first two letters of its registration. After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm. At various times during the journey ‘Jo’ sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall near Chipping Norton, with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later - not entirely without justification, for Tolkien’s driving was daring rather than skilful. When accelerating headlong across a busy main road in Oxford in order to get into a side-street, he would ignore all other vehicles and cry ‘Charge ‘em and they scatter!’ - and scatter they did. ‘Jo’ was later replaced by a second Morris which did duty until the beginning of the Second World War, when petrol rationing made it impractical to keep it. By this time Tolkien perceived the damage that the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing to the landscape, and after the war he did not buy another car or drive again.
What else remained in the children’s memories? Long summer hours digging up the asphalt of the old tennis-court at 20 Northmoor Road to enlarge the vegetable-plot, under the supervision of their father, who (like their mother) was an enthusiastic gardener, though he left much of the practical work of cultivating vegetables and pruning trees to John, preferring to concentrate his own attention on the roses and on the lawn, from which he would remove every possible weed. The early years at 22 Northmoor Road when there were a succession of Icelandic au pair girls, who told folk-tales about trolls. Visits to the theatre, which their father always seemed to enjoy, although he declared he did not approve of Drama. Bicycling to early mass at St Aloysius’, or at St Gregory’s up the Woodstock Road, or at the Carmelite convent nearby. The barrel of beer in the coal-hole behind the kitchen which dripped regularly and (said their mother) made the house smell like a brewery. July and August afternoons boating on the river Cherwell (which was only just down the road), floating in the family punt hired for the season down past the Parks to Magdalen Bridge, or better still poling up-river towards Water Eaton and Islip, where a picnic tea could be spread on the bank. Walks across the fields to Wood Eaton to look for butterflies, and then back along by the river where Michael would hide in the crack of an old willow, walks when their father seemed to have a boundless store of knowledge about trees and plants. Seaside summer holidays at Lyme Regis when old Father Francis Morgan came down from Birmingham to join them, embarrassing the children with his loud and boisterous ways just as he had embarrassed Ronald and Hilary at Lyme twenty-five years before. The family holiday at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall in 1932 with Charles Wrenn and his wife and daughter, when Wrenn and Tolkien held a swimming race wearing panama hats and smoking pipes while they swam. This was the holiday about which Tolkien later wrote: “There was a curious local character, an old man who used to go about swapping gossip and weather-wisdom and such like. To amuse my boys I named him Gaffer Gamgee, and the name became part of family lore to fix on old chaps of the kind. The choice of Gamgee was primarily directed by alliteration; but I did not invent it. It was in fact the name when I was small (in Birmingham) for “cotton-wool”.’ Then there were the later holidays at Sidmouth, where there were hill walks and marvellous rock-pools by the sea, and where their father was already beginning to write The Lord of the Rings; the drives on autumn afternoons to the villages east of Oxford, to Worminghall or Brill or Charlton-on-Otmoor, or west into Berkshire and up White Horse Hill to see the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy; the memories of Oxford, of the countryside, and of the stories that their father told them.
These stories had begun during the Leeds years. John, the eldest son, often found difficulty in getting to sleep. When he was lying awake his father would come and sit on his bed and tell him a tale of ‘Carrots’, a boy with red hair who climbed into a cuckoo clock and went off on a series of strange adventures. In this fashion Tolkien discovered that he could use the imagination which was creating the complexities of The Silmarillion to invent simpler stories. He had an amiably childlike sense of humour, and as his sons grew older this manifested itself in the noisy games he played with them - and in the stories he told Michael when the younger boy was troubled with nightmares. These tales, invented in the early days at Northmoor Road, were about the irrepressible villain ‘Bill Stickers’, a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything. His name was taken from a notice on an Oxford gate that said BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and a similar source provided the name of the righteous person who was always in pursuit of Stickers, ‘Major Road Ahead’.
The ‘Bill Stickers’ stories were never written down, but others were. When he was on holiday with the family at Filey in the summer of 1925, Tolkien composed a full-length tale for John and Michael. The younger boy lost a toy dog on the beach, and to console him his father began to invent and narrate the adventures of Rover, a small dog who annoys a wizard, is turned into a toy, and is then lost on the beach by a small boy. But this is only the beginning, for Rover is found by the sand-sorcerer Psamathos Psamathides who gives him the power to move again, and sends him on a visit to the Moon, where he has many strange adventures, most notably an encounter with the White Dragon. Tolkien wrote down this story under the title ‘Roverandom’. Many years later he offered it to his publishers, very tentatively, as one of a number of possible successors to The Hobbit, but it was not thought suitable on that occasion, and Tolkien never offered it again. The children’s enthusiasm for ‘Roverandom’ encouraged him to write more stories to amuse them. Many of these got off to a good start but were never finished. Indeed some of them never progressed beyond the first few sentences, like the tale of Timothy Titus, a very small man who is called ‘Tim Tit’ by his friends. Among other stories begun but soon abandoned was the tale of Tom Bombadil, which is set in ‘the days of King Bonhedig’ and describes a character who is clearly to be the hero of the tale: ‘Tom Bombadil was the name of one of the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom; but he was a hale and hearty fellow. Four foot high in his boots he was, and three feet broad. He wore a tall hat with a blue feather, his jacket was blue, and his boots were yellow.’
That was as far as the story ever reached on paper, but Tom Bombadil was a well-known figure in the Tolkien family, for the character was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael. The doll looked very splendid with the feather in its hat, but John did not like it and one day stuffed it down the lavatory. Tom was rescued, and survived to become the hero of a poem by the children’s father, “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, which was published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934. It tells of Tom’s encounters with ‘Gold-berry, the River-woman’s daughter’, with the ‘Old Man Willow’ which shuts him up in a crack of its bole (an idea, Tolkien once said, that probably came in part from Arthur Rackham’s tree-drawings), with a family of badgers, and with a ‘Barrow-wight’, a ghost from a prehistoric grave of the type found on the Berkshire Downs not far from Oxford. By itself, the poem seems like a sketch for something longer, and when possible successors to The Hobbit were being discussed in 1937 Tolkien suggested to his publishers that he might expand it into a more substantial tale, explaining that Tom Bombadil was intended to represent ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’. This idea was not taken up by the publishers, but Tom and his adventures subsequently found their way into The Lord of the Rings.
The purchase of a car in 1932 and Tolkien’s subsequent mishaps while driving it led him to write another children’s story, ‘Mr Bliss’. This is the tale of a tall thin man who lives in a tall thin house, and who purchases a bright yellow automobile for five shillings, with remarkable consequences (and a number of collisions). The story was lavishly illustrated by Tolkien in ink and coloured pencils, and the text was written out by him in a fair hand, the whole being bound in a small volume. ‘Mr Bliss’ owes a little to Beatrix Potter in its ironical humour and to Edward Lear in the style of its drawings, though Tolkien’s approach is less grotesque and more delicate than Lear’s. Like ‘Roverandom’ and the Bombadil poem it was shown to Tolkien’s publishers in 1937, and it was received with much enthusiasm. Preliminary arrangements were made to publish it, not so much as a successor to The Hobbit but as an entertaining stop-gap until the true sequel was ready. However its multi-coloured pictures meant that printing would be very expensive, and the publishers asked Tolkien if he would re-draw them in a simpler style. He agreed, but he could not find the time to undertake the work, and the manuscript of ‘Mr Bliss’ was consigned to a drawer, where it remained until many years later it was sold to Marquette University in America, along with the manuscripts of Tolkien’s published stories.1
The fact that ‘Mr Bliss’ was so lavishly illustrated - was constructed indeed around the pictures - is an indication of how seriously Tolkien was taking the business of drawing and painting. He had never entirely abandoned this childhood hobby, and during his undergraduate days he illustrated several of his own poems, using watercolours, coloured inks or pencils, and beginning to develop a style that was suggestive of his affection for Japanese prints and yet had an individual approach to line and colour. The war and his work interrupted him, but in about 1925 he began to draw again regularly, one of the first results being a series of illustrations for ‘Roverandom’. Later, during holidays at Lyme Regis in 1927 and 1928, he drew pictures of scenes from The Silmarillion. These show how clearly he visualised the landscapes in which his legends were set, for in several of the drawings the scenery of Lyme itself is absorbed into the stories and invested with mystery.
He was by now a very talented artist, although he had not the same skill at drawing figures as he had with landscapes. He was at his best when picturing his beloved trees, and like Arthur Rackham 1 ‘Mr Bliss’ was not the only composition by Tolkien owing its inspiration to motor transport. ‘The Bovadium Fragments’ (perhaps composed early in the nineteen-sixties) is a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode. (whose work he admired) he could give to twisted root and branch a sinister mobility that was at the same time entirely true to nature.
Tolkien’s talents as a storyteller and an illustrator were combined each December, when a letter would arrive for the children from Father Christmas. In 1920 when John was three years old and the family was about to move to Leeds, Tolkien had written a note to his son in shaky handwriting signed ‘Yr loving Fr. Chr.’. From then onwards he produced a similar letter every Christmas. From simple beginnings the ‘Father Christmas Letters’ expanded to include many additional characters such as the Polar Bear who shares Father Christmas’s house, the Snow Man who is Father Christmas’s gardener, an elf named Ilbereth who is his secretary, snow-elves, gnomes, and in the caves beneath Father Christmas’s house a host of troublesome goblins. Every Christmas, often at the last minute, Tolkien would write out an account of recent events at the North Pole in the shaky handwriting of Father Christmas, the rune-like capitals used by the Polar Bear, or the flowing script of Ilbereth. Then he would add drawings, write the address on the envelope (labelling it with such superscriptions as ‘By gnome-carrier. Immediate haste!’) and paint and cut out a highly realistic North Polar postage stamp. Finally he would deliver the letter. This was done in a variety of ways. The simplest was to leave it in the fireplace as if it had been brought down the chimney, and to cause strange noises to be heard in the early morning, which together with a snowy footprint on the carpet indicated that Father Christmas himself had called. Later the local postman became an accomplice and used to deliver the letters himself, so how could the children not believe in them? Indeed they went on believing until each in turn reached adolescence and discovered by accident or deduction that their father was the true author of the letters. Even then, nothing was said to destroy the illusion for the younger children. Besides being entertained by their father’s own stories, the Tolkien children were always provided with full nursery bookshelves. Much of their reading-matter consisted of Tolkien’s own childhood favourites, such as George Macdonald’s ‘Curdie’ stories and Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale collections; but the nursery also housed more recent additions to children’s literature, among them E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs, which was published in 1927. Tolkien noted that his sons were highly amused by the Snergs, ‘a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength’. Tolkien himself only found the time or the inclination to read a limited amount of fiction. In general he preferred the lighter contemporary novels. He liked the stories of John Buchan, and he also read some of Sinclair Lewis’s work; certainly he knew Babbitt, the novel published in 1922 about a middle-aged American businessman whose well-ordered life gradually comes off the rails.
Odd ingredients go into literary melting-pots, and both the Land of Snergs and Babbitt played a small part in The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that the former ‘was probably an unconscious source-book: for the Hobbits, not of anything else’, and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit ‘might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.’
There is less mystery about the origins of another story that Tolkien wrote at some time during the nineteen-thirties, perhaps in part to amuse his children, but chiefly to please himself. This is Farmer Giles of Ham, whose territory, The Little Kingdom’, is Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and which clearly grew from the implications of the place-name Worminghall (meaning ‘reptile-hall’ or ‘dragon-hall’), a village a few miles to the east of Oxford. The first version of the story, considerably shorter than that eventually published, is a plain tale that draws its humour from the events rather than from the narrative style. It too was offered to Tolkien’s publishers as a possible successor to The Hobbit, and like its companions was considered excellent but not exactly what was wanted at that moment.
Some months later, early in 1938, Tolkien was due to read a paper to an undergraduate society at Worcester College on the subject of fairy-stories. But the paper had not been written, and as the day approached Tolkien decided to read Farmer Giles instead. When he reconsidered it, he decided that he could make some improvements, and in the rewriting that followed he turned it into a longer story with sophisticated humour. A few nights later he read it at Worcester College. ‘I was very much surprised at the result,’ he recorded afterwards. ‘The audience was apparently not bored - indeed they were generally convulsed with mirth.’ When it became apparent that the sequel to The Hobbit would not be ready for some considerable time, he offered the revised Farmer Giles to his publishers, and it was accepted with enthusiasm; but wartime delays and Tolkien’s dissatisfaction with the original choice of illustrator meant that the book did not appear until 1949, with pictures by a young artist named Pauline Diana Baynes. Her mock-medieval drawings delighted Tolkien, and he wrote of them: ‘They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme.’ Miss Baynes’s success with Farmer Giles led to her being chosen as illustrator for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and she later drew the pictures for Tolkien’s anthology of poems and for Smith of Wootton Major, she and her husband became friends with the Tolkiens in later years.
Farmer Giles did not attract much notice at the time of its publication, and it was not until the success of The Lord of the Rings had reflected upon the sales of Tolkien’s other books that it reached a wide public. At one time Tolkien considered writing a sequel to it, and he sketched the plot in some detail; it was to concern Giles’s son George Worming and a page-boy named Suet, as well as re-introducing Chrysophylax the dragon, and it was to be set in the same countryside as its predecessor. But by 1945 the war had scarred the Oxfordshire landscape that Tolkien loved so much, and he wrote to his publishers: ‘The sequel (to Farmer Giles) is plotted but unwritten, and likely to remain so. The heart has gone out of the Little Kingdom, and the woods and plains are aerodromes and bomb-practice targets.’
Though sometimes touching on deep feelings, the short stories that Tolkien wrote for his children in the nineteen-twenties and thirties were really jeux d’ esprit. His real commitment was to grander themes, both in verse and prose.
He continued to work on his long poem ‘The Gest of Beren and Luthien’ and on the alliterative verses telling the story of Turin and the dragon. In 1926 he sent these and other poems to R. W. Reynolds, who had taught him English literature at King Edward’s School, and asked for his criticism. Reynolds approved of the various shorter pieces that Tolkien sent, but only gave lukewarm praise to the major mythological poems. Undeterred, and encouraged by C. S. Lewis’s approval of the Beren and Luthien poem, Tolkien continued to work at them both. But though the Turin verses reached more than two thousand lines and the ‘Gest’ more than four thousand, neither poem was completed; and by the time Tolkien came to revise The Silmaril-lion (after he had written The Lord of the Rings) he had perhaps abandoned any intention of incorporating them into the published text of the cycle. Nevertheless both poems were important in the development of the legends, particularly the ‘Gest’, which contains the fullest version of the Beren and Luthien story. The poems were also important for Tolkien’s technical development as a writer. The rhyming couplets of the early stanzas of the ‘Gest’ are occasionally monotonous in rhythm or banal in rhyme, but as Tolkien became more experienced in the metre the poem grew much surer, and it has many fine passages. The Turin verses are in an alliterative measure, a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon verse form; and in them Tolkien displays great skill. This passage describes Turin’s childhood and adolescence in the elven kingdom of Doriath: Much lore he learned, and loved wisdom,
but fortune followed him in few desires;
oft wrong and awry what he wrought turned;
what he loved he lost, what he longed for he won not;
and full friendship he found not easily,
nor was lightly loved for his looks were sad.
He was gloomy-hearted, and glad seldom
for the sundering sorrow that seared his youth.
On manhood’s threshold he was mighty hoi den
in the wielding of weapons; and in weaving song
?
he had a minstrel’s mastery; but mirth was not in it.
*
In adapting and modernising this ancient poetic style for his own \ purposes Tolkien was achieving something quite unusual and remarkably powerful. It is a pity that he wrote - or at least published -so little alliterative verse, for it suited his imagination far more than did modern rhyme-schemes. He wrote other poems of some length during the nineteen-thirties. by no means all of them directly connected with his own mythology. One, inspired by the Celtic legends of Brittany, was ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ (Breton for
‘Lord and Lady’), of which the earliest manuscript is dated September 1930. The poem tells the story of a childless lord who obtains a potion from an enchantress or ‘Corrigan’ (the generic Breton term for a person of fairy race). As a result of the philtre, twins are born to the lord’s wife, but the Corrigan demands in payment that the lord should wed her, and his refusal has tragic consequences. ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ was published some years later by Tolkien’s friend and fellow philologist Gwyn Jones, in the Welsh Review. It is in alliterative verse, and also incorporates a rhyme-scheme.
Another major poem from this period has alliteration but no rhyme. This is ‘The Fall of Arthur’, Tolkien’s only imaginative incursion into the Arthurian cycle, whose legends had pleased him since childhood, but which he found too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’. Arthurian stories were also unsatisfactory to him as myth in that they explicitly contained the Christian religion. In his own Arthurian poem he did not touch on the Grail but began an individual rendering of the Morte d’Arthur, in which the king and Gawain go to war in
‘Saxon lands’ but are summoned home by news of Mordred’s treachery. The poem was never finished, but it was read and approved by E. V. Gordon, and by R. W. Chambers, Professor of English at London University, who considered it to be ‘great stuff - really heroic, quite apart from its value as showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English’. It is also interesting in that it is one of the few pieces of writing in which Tolkien deals explicitly with sexual passion, describing Mordred’s unsated lust for Guinever (which is how Tolkien chooses to spell her name):
His bed was barren; there black phantoms
of desire unsated and savage fury
in his brain had brooded till bleak morning.
But Tolkien’s Guinever is not the tragic heroine beloved by most Arthurian writers; instead she is described as lady ruthless, fair as fay-woman and fell-minded, in the world walking for the woe of men. Although ‘The Fall of Arthur’ was abandoned in the mid nineteen-thirties, Tolkien wrote as late as 1955 that he still hoped to complete it; but in the event it remained unfinished. Once or twice he decided to move away from the mythical, legendary, and fantastic, and wrote a conventional short story for adults, in a modern setting. The results were unremarkable, showing that his imagination needed myth and legend in order to realise its full potential. And indeed the greater part of his attention was still occupied by The Silmarillion. He made numerous revisions and recastings of the principal stories in the cycle, deciding to abandon the original sea-voyager ‘Eriol’ to whom the stories were told, and instead renaming him ‘AElfwine’ or ‘elf-friend’. He also spent much time (probably more than he devoted to the actual stories) to working on the elvish languages and alphabets; he had now invented a new alphabet which he first called ‘Quenyatic’ and then ‘Feanorian’, and after 1926 he wrote his diary in it. He also frequently turned his attention to geography and other subsidiary topics within the cycle of legends. By the late nineteen-thirties all this work on The Silmarillion had resulted in a large body of manuscript, much of it in an exquisite hand. But as yet there was no move on Tolkien’s part to publish any of it. Indeed few people knew of its existence. Outside the Tolkien family the only person acquainted with it was C. S. Lewis. Within the family the most frequent listener to the stories was Tolkien’s third son, Christopher. The boy, wrote Tolkien in his diary, had grown into ‘a nervy, irritable, cross-grained, self-tormenting, cheeky person. Yet there is something intensely lovable about him, to me at any rate, from the very similarity between us’. On many evenings in the early nineteen-thirties Christopher, huddled for warmth by the study stove, would listen motionless while his father told him (in impromptu fashion, rather than reading aloud) about the elvish wars against the black power, and of how Beren and Luthien made their perilous journey to the very heart of Morgoth’s iron stronghold. These were not mere stories: they were legends that came alive as his father spoke, vivid accounts of a grim world where foul orcs and a sinister Necromancer guarded the way, and a dreadful red-eyed wolf tore the elvish companions of Beren to pieces one by one; but a world also where the three great elvish jewels, the Silmarilli, shone with a strange and powerful light, a world where against all odds the quest could be victorious.
Tolkien’s feelings towards his third son were perhaps one of the factors that made him begin a new book. More explicitly it owed its origins to C. S. Lewis who (Tolkien reported) one day said: ‘ “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” We agreed’
(said Tolkien) ‘that he should try “space-travel”, and I should try “time-travel”.’ They also decided that each story should lead to the discovery of Myth.
Lewis’s story was Out of the Silent Planet, which proved to be the first book of his ‘Ransom’ trilogy.1
Tolkien’s answer to the challenge was a story called The Lost Road’, in which two time-travellers, father and son, find themselves discovering the mythology of The Silmarillion, as they journey back to the land of Numenor.
Tolkien’s legend of Numenor, the great island in the West that is given to the men who aided the Elves in the wars against Morgoth, was probably composed some time before the writing of “The Lost Road’, perhaps in the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties. It had one of its origins in the nightmare that had disturbed him since childhood, his ‘Atlantis-haunting’ in which he ‘had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands’. When the inhabitants of Numenor are beguiled by Sauron (the lieutenant of Morgoth who had already appeared in the long poem about Beren and Luthien) into breaking a divine commandment and sailing West towards the forbidden lands, a great storm rises, a huge wave crashes on Numenor, and the entire island is cast into the abyss. Atlantis has sunk.
The Numenor story combines the Platonic legend of Atlantis with the imaginative qualities of The Silmarillion. At the end, Tolkien tells how with the sinking of Numenor the shape of the world is changed, and the Western lands are ‘removed for ever from the circles of the world’. The world itself is bent, yet the Straight Road to the Ancient West still remains for those who can find it. This is the ‘Lost Road’ that gave the title to the new story.
This and the subsequent books were read to the Inklings by Lewis as they were written. The first two books gained Tolkien’s almost wholehearted approval (though he did not admire all of Lewis’s invented names), and it was partly due to his support that Out of the Silent Planet, which had been rejected by two publishers, was accepted by The Bodley Head and published in 1938. He liked Perelandra even more than the first story, but when Lewis began to read That Hideous Strength to the Inklings, Tolkien recorded of it: ‘Tripish, I fear’; and a better acquaintance with the book did not make him change his mind. He regarded it as spoiled by the influence of Charles Williams’s Arthurian-Byzantine mythology.
Tolkien recognised that the character of Ransom, the philologist hero of Lewis’s stories, was perhaps modelled in part on himself. He wrote to his son Christopher in 1944: ‘As a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him.’
The protagonists are a father and son. The father, a professor of history named Alboin (the Lombardic form of
‘AElfwine’), invents languages, or rather he finds that words are transmitted to him, words that seem to be fragments of ancient and forgotten languages. Many of these words refer to the downfall of Numenor, and the story breaks off, unfinished, with Alboin and his son setting off on their journey through time towards Numenor itself. The story is rather cloying in its portrayal of the father-son relationship as Tolkien would have liked it to be; and it is notable that neither Alboin nor his own father (who appears at the beginning of the story) is encumbered with a wife, both men having been widowed at an early age. The story was probably read to the Inklings; certainly Lewis listened to the Numenor legend, for he refers to it in That Hideous Strength, mis-spelling it ‘Numinor’. (He also borrowed from Tolkien when he gave his hero Ransom the first name
‘Elwin’, which is a version of ‘AElfwine’; and again when he named his Adam and Eve in Perelandra ‘Tor and Tinidril’, which Tolkien considered to be ‘certainly an echo’ of Tuor and Idril in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’.)
‘The Lost Road’ was abandoned (‘owing to my slowness and uncertainty’, said Tolkien) shortly after the time-travellers in the story reached Numenor. But Tolkien returned to the time-travelling theme as a way of introducing the Numenor legend when, at the end of 1945, he began to write ‘The Notion Club Papers’. This uses the Inklings themselves (in thin disguise) as a setting, and this time it is two Oxford dons, members of the informal literary club that provides the tide, who set off on the time-journey. But like its predecessor the story breaks off at the end of the introductory narrative, before the actual time-travelling has been more than superficially described. ‘The Notion Club Papers’ captures much of the spirit of the Inklings, though Tolkien scarcely attempts any portraits of his friends. One part of the story did reach print, a poem about the medieval voyage of St Brendan, a legend that Tolkien adapted to fit his own mythology. Under the title ‘Imram’
(Gaelic for ‘voyage’) the poem appeared in Time & Tide in 1955. On its own it is a little bare, a forlorn memorial to an unfinished and promising story.
So it was that during the nineteen-twenties and thirties Tolkien’s imagination was running along two distinct courses that did not meet. On one side were the stories composed for mere amusement, often specifically for the entertainment of his children. On the other were the grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually associated with his own legends. Meanwhile nothing was reaching print, beyond a few poems in the Oxford Magazine which indicated to his colleagues that Tolkien was amused by dragons’ hoards and funny little men with names like Tom Bombadil: a harmless pastime, they felt, if a little childish. Something was lacking, something that would bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same time tuned to the popular imagination. He was not aware of this lack, of course; nor did it seem particularly significant to him when suddenly the missing piece fell into place.
It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’