Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  So it was that J.R.R. Tolkien, at the age of eight, became a child convert. Thereafter, he always remained a resolute Catholic, a fact which influenced profoundly the direction of his life. The realization that Catholicism may not have been the faith of his father but was the faith of his father’s fathers ignited and nurtured his love for Mediaevalism. This, in turn, led to his disdain for the humanist ‘progress’ which followed in the wake of the Reformation.

  The conversion of mother and children to the Catholic faith was not the only crucial event in the life of the Tolkien family in 1900. In September of that year Tolkien entered King Edward’s, his father’s old school, having passed the entrance examination. His fees, which amounted to twelve pounds a year, were paid by a Tolkien uncle who remained charitably disposed towards the family in spite of the controversial conversion. The school was in the centre of Birmingham, four miles from Sarehole, and his mother could not afford the train fare. Regretfully, the family knew their days in the country would have to come to an end. Late in 1900 the boys were uprooted from the cottage where they had been so happy for four years and moved to a rented house in Moseley, nearer the centre of the city. ‘Four years,’ Tolkien would recall in old age of his days in Sarehole, ‘but the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life.’8

  In contrast, Tolkien described the time spent at the small house in Moseley as ‘dreadful’. Although only a few miles from the Warwickshire countryside where he and his brother had played freely, the windows of their new home looked out onto a busy street. Trams, traffic and the drab faces of passers-by filled the foreground, and in the distance the smoking factory chimneys of Sparkbrook and Small Heath dominated the skyline. Yet no sooner had they settled in Moseley than they were uprooted again. The house was due for demolition. They moved to a villa less than a mile away in a terrace row behind King’s Heath station. The house backed onto a railway line, so that daily life was disrupted by the roar of trains and the shunting of trucks in the nearby coal-yard. Mabel Tolkien had chosen this particular house because the new Roman Catholic church of St Dunstan was in the same road. It was a far cry from Sarehole and Tolkien remained desperately unhappy at his enforced urban existence. This wrenching of the young boy from the rural life he loved to the urban existence he loathed would have lasting consequences. It formed the basis of the creative tension which would animate the contrasting visions of life and landscape in Middle Earth. The importance of this radical change of fortunes in Tolkien’s formative years was emphasized by Brian Rosebury in his book, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment:

  Much has been made, rightly, of the significance of the idyllic Sarehole years for Tolkien’s imaginative development. . . But it is at least of symbolic interest (and easily overlooked by readers determined to detach Tolkien from his times) that his intellectually formative years were spent in the busy, noisy, polluted capitalist-nonconformist atmosphere of Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham; it is as if an American writer of the same generation had been schooled and domiciled in, say, Chicago. If Tolkien was hostile to industrialism, and to the lifestyles and landscapes it generated, it was at any rate a hostility based on a degree of acquaintance than some may suppose. . . Tolkien’s social origins were (impoverished) middle-class; and the circumstances of his upbringing and education were poorer and more dispiritingly ‘urban’ than those of almost any, except D.H. Lawrence, of the major English-language writers of the first half of the century.9

  Tolkien’s time at King’s Heath was also short lived. The family moved to Edgbaston early in 1902, to a house that was little better than a slum. The one consolation was the proximity of their new home to the Birmingham Oratory, a large church established more than fifty years earlier by John Henry Newman. In particular, Mabel Tolkien discovered in Father Francis Xavier Morgan, her new parish priest, a valued friend as well as a sympathetic priest. Father Morgan was destined to play a key role in Tolkien’s life.

  At Christmas 1903 Mabel Tolkien informed her mother-in-law that ‘Ronald is making his First Communion this Christmas—so it is a very great feast indeed to us this year.’ Aware of the continued opposition of the family to their ‘popery’, she added almost apologetically, ‘I don’t say this to vex you—only you say you like to know everything about them.’10 Ominously, the letter also referred to her ailing health: ‘I keep having whole weeks of utter sleeplessness, which added to the internal cold and sickness have made it almost impossible to go on.’

  Early in the New Year her condition deteriorated. In April she was taken to hospital where she was diagnosed as diabetic. She made a partial recovery and Father Francis made provision for her convalescence at Rednal, a Worcestershire hamlet a few miles beyond the Birmingham boundary. For a few brief but idyllic summer months the boys enjoyed a return to a rural lifestyle. It was a false dawn. Unnoticed by her sons, Mabel Tolkien’s condition began to deteriorate again. At the beginning of November she collapsed in a way that seemed both sudden and terrifying. She sank into a coma and six days later, on 14 November, she died. Father Francis and her sister May Incledon were at her bedside. She had lived for thirty-four trouble-filled years.

  Mabel Tolkien was buried in the Catholic churchyard at Bromsgrove. In her will she had appointed Father Francis Morgan to be guardian of her two sons. It proved a wise choice. In the years ahead he displayed unfailing affection and generosity to them. Although their mother had left only eight hundred pounds of invested capital with which to support the boys, Father Francis, who had a private income from his family’s sherry business, discreetly augmented this from his own pocket. He also arranged for them to live with their Aunt Beatrice, not far from the Oratory, but she showed them little affection and the orphaned brothers soon began to consider the Oratory their real home. Each morning they hurried round to serve Mass for Father Francis at his favourite side-altar in the Oratory church. Afterwards they would eat breakfast in the refectory before setting off to school.

  Tolkien remained forever grateful for all that Father Francis did for him and his brother. ‘I first learned charity and forgiveness from him,’ he recalled many years later, ‘and in the light of it pierced even the “liberal” darkness out of which I came.’11 Tolkien described himself as ‘virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house’ in the years following his mother’s death. It was a ‘good Catholic home’ which contained ‘many learned fathers (largely “converts”)’ and where ‘observance of religion was strict’.12 The effect of these years of strict religious observance at the Oratory should not be understated. According to the writer and poet Charles A. Coulombe, it was in these years that Tolkien’s ‘religious sense was formed’: ‘Had he lived away from the Oratory, a living example of Catholic culture, one wonders what the effect on his work would have been.’13

  The charity and forgiveness that Tolkien learned from Father Francis in the years after his mother’s death offset the pain and sorrow which her death engendered. The pain remained throughout his life, and sixty years later he compared his mother’s sacrifices for her faith with the complacency of some of his own children towards the faith they had inherited from her:

  When I think of my mother’s death. . . worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away.14

  Tolkien always considered his mother a martyr for the faith. Nine years after her death he had written: ‘My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it was not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.’15

  Not surprisingly perhaps, Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, subjected this statement to the sort of Freudian analysis that Tolkien and Lewis so despised. According to Carpenter the statement w
as an indication of the way in which Tolkien associated his mother with his membership of the Catholic Church:

  Indeed it might be said that after she died his religion took the place in his affections that she had previously occupied. The consolation that it provided was emotional as well as spiritual. . . And certainly the loss of his mother had a profound effect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist.

  Or rather, it made him into two people. He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother’s death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won forever.16

  Unfortunately this analysis, or rather this psycho-analysis, suffers from all the flaws that C.S. Lewis discussed. One starts with a presumption, in this case that the death of Tolkien’s mother determined the depths and flaws of his whole personality for the rest of his life, and then one sets about making the events of the life fit into the theory. Thus Tolkien’s vivacious and often rumbustious approach to life is admitted but glossed over, while the relatively rare moments when he is more melancholy are magnified, caricatured and pronounced solemnly to be ‘more closely related to his mother’s death’. In this way, Tolkien’s faith, philosophy, personality, and his whole outlook on life, are squeezed into the confines of an odd sort of Oedipus complex.

  Perhaps the shallowness of Carpenter’s approach is best exemplified by his claim that Tolkien was ‘capable of bouts of profound despair’. No doubt such a statement would have elicited a wry smile from Tolkien who, on theological grounds, would have dismissed the very notion that despair could ever be ‘profound’. Yet, in point of fact, there is precious little evidence that Tolkien ever despaired. He accepted the sorrows of life with patient forbearance, and his distressed disapproval of the way society was ‘progressing’ was tempered by sincere hope in the grace of God.

  Tolkien had moments of joy and moments of melancholy, as does everybody, but he exhibited in his life and in his character a joie de vivie scarcely commensurate with one perpetually brooding over a lost parent. Neither is it plausible to suggest that a scholar as widely read and as perceptive as Tolkien would cling blindly to a belief throughout his entire life out of loyalty to, or as a substitute for, a mother’s love. Although he began his journey through life as a Catholic due to his mother’s actions, he still had to test the Catholic view of life against all the other theories he came across, many of which were in the ascendency. Decades as an Oxford don brought him into contact with every shade of opinion, but he remained convinced of the objective truth of his religious convictions. For Tolkien, Catholicism was not an opinion to which one subscribed but a reality to which one submitted. Quite simply, and pseudo-psychology aside, Tolkien remained a Catholic for the simple if disarming reason that he believed Catholicism was true.

  Similarly, Tolkien’s ‘deep sense of impending loss’ had more to do with the tenets of his faith than with memories of his mother. He believed that human history, rooted in a fallen world, was doomed to become little more than a succession of defeats and disappointments, and that even victories carried the shadows of impending loss. Yet history is temporary, locked in time as much as it is rooted in the Fall, and is itself but a shadow of eternity. Beyond the defeats of history there is always the hope of eternal joy. ‘Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic,’ he wrote in 1956, shortly after publication of The Lord of the Rings, ‘so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.’17

  Other critics have perceived this theocentric aspect of Tolkien’s psyche with a depth which eluded Carpenter. Verlyn Flieger, in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, suggested that ‘Carpenter’s description of Tolkien as two people—one a naturally cheerful man, the other pessimistic and despairing. . . may be too simple a description of the complexity of feeling which Tolkien experienced and which his work reflects. For these feelings found a Christian context in Tolkien’s Catholic view of the world as fallen and of man as imperfect. . . a Christian acceptance of the Fall of Man leads inevitably to the idea that imperfection is the state of things in this world, and that human actions—however hopeful—cannot rise above imperfection.’18

  Flieger then suggests that Tolkien had placed the loss of his mother within the wider context of a larger truth: ‘All this adds up to an outlook both psychological and religious in which the one can hardly be separated from the other, an outlook based on the sense of expulsion from both a private and a communal Eden. . . His world is shadowed by its past as well as his past, lighted only by the vision of the white Light. . . That vision of the Light remains a vision—a Grail to be sought but never grasped by fallen man in a fallen world.’19

  Perhaps Flieger is correct to assert the futility of trying to separate the psychological and the religious, and Carpenter, for all his specious speculations and presumptions of despair, was correct to stress the importance of Mabel Tolkien’s death on her son’s life. Tolkien’s relationship with his mother was very important, potent if not omnipotent. He owed his faith to her in the same way that he owed his life to her. She had given him both. Physically she had been taken from him early; metaphysically she accompanied him from the cradle to the grave, having a greater influence than anyone in shaping the man behind the myth.

  CHAPTER 3

  FATHER FRANCIS TO FATHER CHRISTMAS:

  THE FATHER BEHIND THE MYTH

  Father Francis Morgan became a surrogate father to the two orphaned boys in the years following their mother’s death. Tolkien described the priest as ‘a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers’.1 Every summer he took them to Lyme Regis, where they stayed at the Three Cups Hotel, a favourite haunt of G.K. Chesterton in later years. During these holidays they paid visits to some of Father Francis’s friends in the neighbourhood. They also talked a great deal and it was on one of these visits to Dorset that the priest discovered the two boys were not happy in the drab and loveless lodging that was provided for them by their Aunt Beatrice. Returning to Birmingham, he set about looking for somewhere more suitable. Early in 1908 the brothers moved to Duchess Road, behind the Oratory, home of a Mrs Faulkner, a friend of Father Francis who gave musical soirees which the priest and several other Oratory Fathers attended. Little did Tolkien realize that the move to Mrs Faulkner’s would change the direction of his life.

  Tolkien shared a room on the second floor with his brother. In the room below lived another lodger, a girl of nineteen who spent most of her time at her sewing machine. She was very pretty, small and slim, with grey eyes and short dark hair parted in the middle. Her name was Edith Bratt and Tolkien soon learned that they had much in common. She too was an orphan, her mother having died five years previously and her father, apparently, some time before that. In fact, she was illegitimate. Her mother never married and her father was not named on the birth certificate. In spite of the fact that she was three years his senior, Tolkien struck up an immediate friendship with her. By the summer of 1909 they were in love.

  In a letter to Edith many years later Tolkien recalled ‘my first kiss to you and your first kiss to me (which was almost accidental)—and our goodnights when sometimes you were in your little white nightgown, and our absurd long window talks; and how we watched the sun come up over town through the mist. . . and our whistle-call—and our cycle-rides—and the fire talks. . .’2

  It was one of their ‘cycle rides’ which first landed the young couple in trouble and ended, at least temporarily, their clandestine courtship. Towards the end of the
autumn term of 1909 Tolkien had arranged secretly with Edith that they should go for a bicycle ride into the countryside. Edith departed first, nominally to visit her cousin, and Tolkien left a little later on the pretext that he was going to the school sportsground. They spent the afternoon on the Worcestershire hills before taking tea in Rednal village. They returned home, arriving separately so as not to arouse suspicion. Their elaborate precautions came to naught when the woman who had given them tea at Rednal told the caretaker at Oratory House that she had seen Tolkien with an unknown girl. The gossip sealed their fate. The caretaker told the cook and the cook told Father Francis.

  The priest was furious. The boy on whom he had lavished so much love and money had been caught deceiving him and was, moreover, neglecting his studies so shortly before he was due to take the scholarship exam for Oxford. He summoned Tolkien to the Oratory and demanded that the romance with Edith come to an end. Reluctantly, Tolkien agreed to terminate the relationship and the priest made arrangements to move his ward to new lodgings away from the girl.

  In the weeks ahead, Tolkien was distraught. ‘Depressed and as much in dark as ever,’ he recorded in his diary on New Year’s Day 1910. ‘God help me. Feel weak and weary.’3 Perhaps in these circumstances it was not surprising that he found it extremely difficult to keep his promise, especially as the new lodgings to which he and his brother had been moved were not very far from Mrs Faulkner’s house. The temptation was too great and Tolkien resorted to some desperate reasoning to justify his decision to see Edith again. He reasoned that his guardian’s demand that their love affair be broken off did not specifically forbid him seeing her as a friend. Although he hated to deceive the priest, he resumed the clandestine meetings. During January he and Edith spent an afternoon together, taking a train into the countryside and discussing their plans. They also visited a jeweller’s shop, Edith purchasing a pen for Tolkien’s eighteenth birthday, and Tolkien a wrist-watch for Edith’s twenty-first. None the less, they had little to celebrate and Edith, accepting the inevitability of their separation, had decided to go and live with a friend in Cheltenham. Tolkien took the news stoically, writing ‘Thank God’ in his diary. It seemed the only practical solution to their plight, if not a particularly palatable one.