‘Think of your mother!’ Tolkien wrote to his son Michael in 1941:
Yet I do not now for a moment feel that she was doing more than she should have been asked to do—not that that detracts from the credit of it. I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p.a. (£20-40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut, on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern). She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now.25
However, if Tolkien’s departure for the trenches was hard on his newly wedded wife, it was scarcely any easier for himself. His first impressions of the horrors of the front line were described graphically by Humphrey Carpenter in his biography: ‘Worst of all were the dead men, for corpses lay in every corner, horribly torn by shells. Those that still had faces stared with dreadful eyes. Beyond the trenches no-man’s-land was littered with bloated and decaying bodies. All around was desolation. Grass and corn had vanished into a sea of mud. Trees, stripped of leaf and branch, stood as mere mutilated and blackened trunks. Tolkien never forgot what he called the “animal horror” of trench warfare.’26
Tolkien was rescued from the ‘animal horror’ by ‘pyrexia of unknown origin’, as the medical officers called it. To the troops it was simply ‘trench fever’. He was invalided home, grateful to have escaped the nightmare. Many of his friends were not so lucky, joining the ranks of the bodies littering no-man’s-land.
Amidst the enduring negative images which continued to haunt him, Tolkien retained at least one positive image which inspired one of the most lovable characters in The Lord of the Rings. ‘My “Sam Gamgee”,’ he wrote many years later, ‘is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.’27
John, the first of the four Tolkien children, was born on 16 November 1917 in a Cheltenham nursing home. Their second son, Michael, followed in October 1920, Christopher in November 1924, and Priscilla, their first daughter and final child, in 1929. The importance of these four events in Tolkien’s life cannot be overstated. Certainly, their importance should never be understated or, worse, ignored. Sadly, all too often, it is.
Charles Moseley, in his study of Tolkien, discusses the aspects of Tolkien’s life ‘which can illuminate his published narratives’. Of these, he writes, ‘three things are especially important: Tolkien’s religion, the experience of the 1914—18 War, and the nature of Oxford academic life and society’.28 Without denigrating any of these, all of which influenced his work to a greater or lesser degree, his role as storyteller and paterfamilias to his children was equally important, at least initially. When Tolkien scrawled ‘in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’, the opening sentence of The Hobbit in around 1930, he was writing for the amusement of his children as well as for the amusement of himself. Indeed, it is fair to assume that if Tolkien had remained a bachelor and had not been blessed with children he would never have written either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps he would have written The Silmarillion, but in all probability it would never have been published.
Soon after he began his first tentative sketches for what became The Silmarillion and long before he had even thought about hobbits, Tolkien amused himself and his children by becoming Father Christmas once a year. He was a talented artist as well as a gifted storyteller and he used both to great effect every Christmas in what became the ‘Father Christmas Letters’. The first letter was written in 1920 when John was three years old and the family was on the point of moving to Leeds, where Tolkien had been appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University. One wonders whether his son was able to read the English language at the time or whether he needed his parents’ assistance to decipher Father Christmas’s handwriting:
Christmas House
North Pole
1920
Dear John,
I heard you ask daddy what I was like and where I lived. I have drawn ME and My House for you. Take care of the picture. I am just off now for Oxford with my bundle of toys—some for you. Hope I shall arrive in time: the snow is very thick at the NORTH POLE tonight.
On each subsequent Christmas, as John grew older and other children were born, the Father Christmas Letters became more and more elaborate and imaginative. From the first short note signed ‘Yr loving Fr. Chr.’, there emerged new characters with every passing year. There was the Polar Bear, Father Christmas’s helper who was, more often than not, more of a hindrance than a help; there was the Snow Man, Father Christmas’s gardener; Ilbereth the elf, his secretary; and a host of other minor characters including snow-elves, gnomes and evil goblins.
Every Christmas Tolkien would write a letter addressed to his children in Father Christmas’s shaky handwriting, or the Polar Bear’s rune-like capitals, or Ilbereth’s flowing script, giving the latest news from the North Pole. In 1925 disaster struck when the Polar Bear climbed to the top of the North Pole to retrieve Father Christmas’s hood. The pole broke in the middle and landed on the roof of Father Christmas’s house with catastrophic results. The Polar Bear was also to blame the following year, turning on all the Northern Lights for two years in one go, which shook all the stars out of place and caused the Man in the Moon to fall into Father Christmas’s back garden.
Tolkien would go to elaborate lengths to add ‘realism’ to the letters. He added drawings, painstakingly coloured and sketched. He wrote out an envelope on which he stuck a hand-painted North Polar postage stamp, and across the envelope he wrote ‘By gnome-carrier. Immediate haste!’ to give it added importance. Elaborate lengths were also taken to add ‘realism’ to the way in which the letter was delivered. In the early years it was left in the fireplace so that it looked as if it had been put down the chimney. On another occasion a snowy footprint was left ostentatiously on the carpet, irrefutable evidence that Father Christmas had delivered the letter personally. In later years the local postman became an accomplice and delivered the letters himself.
The Father Christmas Letters were published posthumously by his family in 1976, half a century after they were written. Their considerable charm is accentuated by the fact that they were composed solely by a father for his children and were never intended for publication. They also represent a cosy fireside foreshadowing of the familiar foundations upon which the edifice of Middle Earth was built. ‘Those lovely letters,’ wrote Simonne d’Ardenne, a fellow philologist and family friend, ‘were the origin of The Hobbit, which soon made Tolkien famous, and the starting point of the later “fairy tale for grown-ups”, the great trilogy of The Lord of the Rings.’29
Although d’Ardenne mistakenly believed, or erroneously remembered, that Tolkien had introduced hobbits into the Father Christmas Letters, her opinions are of considerable value. She was one of relatively few people who successfully bridged the gap between being both an academic colleague and a family friend. She was at Oxford before becoming a professor at the University of Liege, and Tolkien contributed much to her edition of The Life and Passion of St Julienne, a mediaeval religious work written in the Ancrene Wisse dialect. At the same time she became a close friend of the family, as close to Edith as she was to Tolkien. When she was asked to contribute to a memorial volume of essays following Tolkien’s death, she based it ‘on the vivid memories I have kept of several visits I paid to his house, and on a friendship which extended over forty years. . . During these visits I gained firsthand knowledge of the man and the scholar.’30 Of all the ‘many aspects of him’ that she came to know, the facet of his ‘humanity’ which she chose to focus on was his role as father to his children:
Among the different aspects of Tolkien’s humanity, there is one which deserves special attention, that of the paterfamilias. All his letters, extending over about forty years, tell of hi
s concern about his children’s health, their comfort, their future; how best he could help them to succeed in life, and how to make their lives as perfect as possible. He started by giving them a most pleasant childhood, creating for them the deep sense of home, which had been denied to him, as he lost his father when he was a small child, and his splendid mother a few years later. And to provide all this Tolkien accepted the heavy and tedious burden of examining in several English universities, which, of course, took up much time that he might have devoted to his research. But, however busy he was, he always found time to rush home and kiss his younger children goodnight.
And it was this great love of his children that prompted him to invent and create the delightful hobbits and their mythology. They were wildly discussed at the breakfast table and in the nursery.31
Tolkien was, therefore, the father of the myth he created in a literal as well as in a literary sense. His sub-creation was rooted in the familiar, again in its literal as well as in its literary sense: in the very heart of the family he loved.
CHAPTER 4
TRUE MYTH:
TOLKIEN AND THE CONVERSION
OF C.S. LEWIS
‘Not Facts first Truth first.’1
Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father,’ wrote Humphrey Carpenter, ‘never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.’2 This being so, it is scarcely surprising that his children recalled their lives with their father with evident fondness. There were hot summer afternoons punting up the river Cherwell towards Water Eaton and Islip, where picnics could be spread on the bank; walks in the countryside when their father’s knowledge of trees and plants seemed boundless; and summer holidays by the sea at Lyme Regis when the aging Father Francis Morgan would come down from Birmingham to join them. The children remembered being as embarrassed by the priest’s loud and boisterous ways as had their father and his brother during holidays in Dorset twenty-five years earlier. They also retained vivid memories of bicycling to early Mass at St Aloysius’, or at St Gregory’s up the Woodstock Road, or at the Carmelite convent nearby. There were memories of the barrel of beer in the coal-hole behind the kitchen which dripped regularly, and their mother’s complaints that it made the house smell like a brewery. The children also recalled that their mother and father were keen gardeners, cultivating a large vegetable plot, and that their father was particularly fond of the roses.
These visions of halcyon days may give the impression that the Tolkien marriage was itself a bed of roses. Perhaps it was, at least when seen in relation to other marriages. Yet every bed of roses contains a crown of thorns, and the marriage had its sorrows as well as its joys. Unfortunately, it is the peculiar modern obsession to focus on the thorns to the exclusion of the roses. Far from being objective, such a jaundiced view often neglects or even fails to recognize the positive and most important facets of a subject’s character, preferring instead the blind pursuit of lurid fantasy.
Tolkien’s marriage has not escaped this cynical scrutiny. One of the worst examples was the distorted view projected by John Carey in a review of Humphrey Carpenter’s biography in The Listener. Carpenter records that Edith Tolkien ‘had almost given up going to mass’ in the years following the marriage: ‘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.’3 Carpenter suggests that Edith’s resentment was rooted in part to her dislike of confession. She ‘had always hated confessing her sins to a priest’, whereas her husband made frequent use of the sacrament. From these facts Carey composed what the critic Brian Rosebury called a ‘pharisaic fantasy’. Tolkien, Carey wrote, ‘retained something of Father Francis’s view of sex. Even marital relations had to be atoned for by frequent confession—a requirement Mrs Tolkien found distasteful, and hotly contested.’4 This ‘pharisaic fantasy’ of Carey’s was itself considered distasteful and was hotly contested by Rosebury in his critical study of Tolkien:
The implication (shielded by a theoretical ambiguity in Carey’s sentence) is that what Mrs Tolkien contested, with understandable heat, was not confession per se, but confession of, or prompted by, ‘marital relations’. Those readers of The Listener who had not already read Carpenter’s book—i.e. virtually all of them—would naturally suppose that this bizarre insinuation is supported by the biography, which it is not: Carey, with an ingenuity familiar to connoisseurs of his biography reviews, has introduced it himself. His innuendo is that Tolkien—a father of four, and ‘past master of bawdy in several languages’ (Carpenter, The Inklings, p 55)—was preoccupied by guilt about sex; but here it is Carey, not Tolkien, who takes it for granted that the mere practice of sexual intercourse may be a Catholic’s motive for confession.5
The sheer fantasy of Carey’s innuendo is best exposed by quoting Tolkien himself. In a letter to C.S. Lewis, Tolkien wrote: ‘Christian marriage is not a prohibition of sexual intercourse, but the correct way of sexual temperance—in fact probably the best way of getting the most satisfying sexual pleasure, as alcoholic temperance is the best way of enjoying beer and wine.’6
In this, Tolkien was merely echoing the teaching of the Church, as distilled via St Thomas Aquinas from Aristotle’s Ethics. Sexual pleasure was good and God-given, but sexual temperance was necessary because man does not live on sex alone. Temperance was the moderate path between prudishness and prurience, the two extremes of sexual obsession. In falsely accusing Tolkien of the former, Carey was guilty of the latter.
In the same review, Carey betrayed a similarly contorted view when he described the women in Tolkien’s mythology as ‘perfectly sexless’. Perhaps it says something of Carey’s prurience that he neglects to mention that the men in Tolkien’s mythology are also ‘perfectly sexless’, at least in the sense that Carey intends. Tolkien’s characters are certainly not sexless in the sense of being asexual but, on the contrary, are archetypally and stereotypically sexual. There are, however, no descriptions of sexual activity, or what modern materialists refer to as ‘sexual chemistry’, and an absence of implicit or explicit sexual activity is seen by some modern critics as itself sinful. None the less, the omission reveals nothing of Tolkien’s subconscious view of sex, as implied by Carey and others, but displays his conscious intention to concentrate on those aspects of life which are more important than sexual activity. As a writer he was aware that the introduction of sexual carnality within Middle Earth would detract from the greater issues on which he was intent on focusing. His ‘perfectly sexless’ characterization was a necessary literary device and nothing more.
For a greater understanding of Tolkien’s view of marriage and the relations between the sexes one need not scavenge for tantalizing titbits within the pages of The Lord of the Rings, especially as such scavenging is likely to lead to erroneous conclusions. One need look no further than a long letter he wrote to his son in March 1941:
There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition still strong, though as a product of Christendom (yet by no means the same as Christian ethics) the times are inimical to it. It idealizes ‘love’—and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service’, courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity. . . This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion. . . it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman. Yet I still think it has dangers. It
is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly ‘theocentric’. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eyes off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. (One result is for observation of the actual to make the young man turn cynical.). . . It inculcates exaggerated notions of ‘true love’, as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose. (One result of that is to make young folk look for a ‘love’ that will keep them always nice and warm in a cold world, without any effort of theirs; and the incurably romantic go on looking even in the squalor of the divorce courts.)7
Having discoursed in general about the relations between the sexes, Tolkien progressed to a discussion of sacrifice within marriage:
However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. . . No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that—even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it. When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only—. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. . . But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. . . only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation,—as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by ‘failure’ and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will. . .8
Tolkien: Man and Myth Page 5
