Edith was becoming increasingly crippled with arthritis and by the beginning of 1968, when she was seventy-nine and he was seventy-six, they decided to move to a more convenient house. A move would also have the added advantage of making Tolkien’s whereabouts secret since, by this time, the cult surrounding The Lord of the Rings had reached such dimensions that he was being inundated by fan mail, gifts and telephone calls, and was under almost permanent siege from visitors. It was, then, for reasons of both health and privacy that the Tolkiens made their ‘escape’ to Bournemouth where they bought a modest modern bungalow.
Their new home had a well-equipped kitchen in which Edith could manage to cook in spite of her increasing disability. There was central heating, a ‘luxury’ they had never had before, and outside there was a verandah where they could sit in the evenings looking out on a large garden that had plenty of room for their roses and even a few vegetables. At the end of the garden was a private gate leading into a small wooded gorge that led down to the sea. Such was the setting for the last three years of their life together.
Edith, in particular, was happy in Bournemouth and Tolkien derived much of his own happiness from hers. He was also free from the incessant harassment of ‘fans’, allowing him to resume work once more on The Silmarillion. There was regular domestic help and Catholic neighbours who often took him to church in their car, yet he confessed to his son Christopher a year after the move to Bournemouth of a lingering loneliness, complaining that ‘I see no men of my own kind’.38 There were also continuing health worries. ‘I have horrible arthritis in the left hand,’ he informed Christopher on 2 January 1969, ‘which cannot excuse this scrawl, since, mercifully, my right is not yet affected!’39 Seven months later, on 31 July, he informed his son that his doctor had ‘diagnosed an inflamed / or diseased gall-bladder’ which was causing him ‘very considerable pain’. ‘Usually a cheerful and encouraging doctor, he was alarmingly serious, and the prospect looked dark. We (or at least I) know far too little about the complicated machine we inhabit, and. . . underestimate the gall-bladder! It is a vital part of the chemical factory, and apart from all else can cause intense pain, if it goes wrong; and if it is “diseased”: well you are “for it”.’ In spite of initial fears Tolkien made a good recovery and the ominous part of the letter referred to Edith: ‘Mummy is ailing, and I fear slowly “declining”.’40
The decline was indeed slow because Edith lived for another two and a half years, but the end, when it came, was abrupt. She was taken ill on the night of Friday 19 November 1971, aged eighty-two. The cause of her final, fatal illness was an inflamed gall-bladder, putting a prophetic twist on Tolkien’s earlier letter. After a few days of severe illness she died in hospital early on Monday 29 November. Later the same day, Tolkien described Edith’s final days in a letter to a friend:
I am grieved to tell you that my wife died this morning. Her courage and determination (of which you speak truly) carried her through to what seemed the brink of recovery, but a sudden relapse occurred which she fought for nearly three days in vain. She died at last in peace.
I am utterly bereaved, and cannot yet lift up heart, but my family is gathering round me and my friends.41
It would be many months before Tolkien was able to ‘lift up heart’ after the loss of Edith. In a letter to Christopher on 11 July 1972, he expressed his love for his wife in the way he had always expressed himself when he had something to say beyond the power of mere facts. He reverted to the language of myth and, more specifically, to the language of the myth she had inspired:
I have at last got busy about Mummy’s grave. . . The inscription I should like is:
EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889—1971
Lúthien
: brief and jejune, except for Lúthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Luthien.
. . .Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion and regret—and in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement. I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy. It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.
I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography—it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths—someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings we endured after our love began—all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives—and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.42
In this heartfelt confession to his son, Tolkien had unwittingly given an evocative exposition of his philosophy of myth which exceeded in poignancy and potency the combined effect of his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, his short story Leaf by Niggle and his poem ‘Mythopoeia’. He was saying, in effect, that the only way to get at the truth of his love for his wife was to enter into the myth of Beren and Lúthien which, essentially inspired by that love, was itself the most powerful and poignant expression of it. Truth and myth were intertwined and made ‘one body’ just as he and Edith had in some mystical and mythical sense become ‘one body’ in Christian marriage.
Unable to face life in Bournemouth without Edith, Tolkien sought a return to his beloved Oxford. This was facilitated when Merton College invited him to become a resident honorary Fellow, offering him a set of rooms in a college house in Merton Street, where a scout and his wife could look after him. Soon after his return to Oxford he travelled to Buckingham Palace to be presented with a CBE by the Queen. He was deeply moved by the ceremony, as he was by the award in June 1972 of an honorary Doctorate of Letters from his own University of Oxford. Yet the trappings of the world had never satisfied Tolkien even when he was younger. Now that he was old and living his life without Edith, his sense of loneliness and exile must have seemed almost unbearable.
On Tuesday 28 August 1973 he returned to Bournemouth to stay with Denis and Jocelyn Tolhurst, the doctor and his wife who had looked after him and Edith when they had lived there. On the following day he wrote to his daughter, ending with the postscript that ‘it is stuffy, sticky, and rainy here at present—but forecasts are more favourable’.43 The next day he joined in celebrations to mark Mrs Tolhurst’s birthday, but he did not feel well and could not eat much, though he drank a little champagne. He was in pain during the night and the next morning he was taken to a private hospital where an acute bleeding gastric ulcer was diagnosed. His family were contacted, but Michael was on holiday in Switzerland and Christopher was in France. Consequently, only John and Priscilla were able to travel to Bournemouth to be with him. By Saturday a chest infection had developed, and he died early on Sunday morning, 2 September 1973. He was eighty-one.
His requiem Mass was held in Oxford four days after his death, in the plain, modern church in Headington which he had attended so often. The prayers and readings were specially
chosen by his son John, who was also principal celebrant, assisted by Tolkien’s old friend Father Robert Murray and his parish priest Monsignor Doran. He was buried alongside his wife in the Catholic cemetery at Wolvercote, a few miles outside Oxford. The inscription on the granite gravestone reads: Edith Mazy Tolkien, Luthien, 1889—1971. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beien, 1892—1973.
Their mortal lives completed and the ‘gift of death’ accepted, only ‘a far off gleam or echo of evangelium’ remained, most especially in the example of Beren and Luthien, immortalized in stone on their tomb. It remained in distant echoes of Beren’s last words: ‘ “Now is the Quest achieved,” he said, “and my doom full-wrought”; and he spoke no more.’44 Beren’s last words, however, were not the end of the story but the beginning: ’. . . thus whatever grief might lie in wait, the fates of Beren and Luthien might be joined, and their paths lead together beyond the confines of the world.’45
The very last words should he left to Tolkien himself, written in a letter to one of his sons:
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.46
EPILOGUE:
ABOVE ALL SHADOWS RIDES THE SUN
Though here at journey’s end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars forever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell.1
In 1969, when Tolkien was seventy-seven years old and living in sedate retirement in Bournemouth, he received a letter from Camilla Unwin, his publisher’s daughter. Miss Unwin, as part of a school project, had written to ask: ‘What is the purpose of life?’ Tolkien’s reply2 is here reproduced in extenso:
20 May 1969
Dear Miss Unwin,
I am sorry my reply has been delayed. I hope it will reach you in time. What a very large question! I do not think ‘opinions’, no matter whose, are of much use without some explanation of how they are arrived at; but on this question it is not easy to be brief.
What does the question really mean? Purpose and Life both need some definition. Is it a purely human and moral question; or does it refer to the Universe? It might mean: How ought I to try and use the life-span allowed to me? OR: What purpose / design do living things serve by being alive? The first question, however, will find an answer (if any) only after the second has been considered.
I think that questions about ‘purpose’ are only really useful when they refer to the conscious purposes or objects of human beings, or to the uses of things they design and make. As for ‘other things’ their value resides in themselves: they ARE, they would exist even if we did not. But since we do exist one of their functions is to be contemplated by us. If we go up the scale of being to ‘other living things’, such as, say, some small plant, it presents shape and organization: a ‘pattern’ recognizable (with variation) in its kin and offspring; and that is deeply interesting, because these things are ‘other’ and we did not make them, and they seem to proceed from a fountain of invention incalculably richer than our own.
Human curiosity soon asks the question HOW: in what way did this come to be? And since recognizable ‘pattern’ suggests design, may proceed to WHY? But WHY in this sense, implying reasons and motives, can only refer to a MIND. Only a Mind can have purposes in any way or degree akin to human purposes. So at once any question: ‘Why did life, the community of living things, appear in the physical Universe?’ introduces the Question: Is there a God, a Creator-Designer, a Mind to which our minds are akin (being derived from it) so that It is intelligible to us in part. With that we come to religion and the moral ideas that proceed from it. Of those things I will only say that ‘morals’ have two sides, derived from the fact that we are individuals (as in some degree are all living things) but do not, cannot, live in isolation, and have a bond with all other things, ever closer up to the absolute bond with our own human kind.
So morals should be a guide to our human purposes, the conduct of our lives: (a) the ways in which our individual talents can be developed without waste or misuse; and (b) without injuring our kindred or interfering with their development. (Beyond this and higher lies self-sacrifice for love.)
But these are only answers to the smaller question. To the larger there is no answer, because that requires a complete knowledge of God, which is unattainable. If we ask why God included us in his Design, we can really say no more than because He Did.
If you do not believe in a personal God the question: ‘What is the purpose of life?’ is unaskable and unanswerable. To whom or what would you address the question? But since in an odd corner (or odd corners) of the Universe things have developed with minds that ask questions and try to answer them, you might address one of these peculiar things. As one of them I should venture to say (speaking with absurd arrogance on behalf of the Universe): ‘I am as I am. There is nothing you can do about it. You may go on trying to find out what I am, but you will never succeed. And why you want to know, I do not know. Perhaps the desire to know for the mere sake of knowledge is related to the prayers that some of you address to what you call God. At their highest these seem simply to praise Him for being, as He is, and for making what He has made, as He has made it.’
Those who believe in a personal God, Creator, do not think the Universe is itself worshipful, though devoted study of it may be one of the ways of honouring Him. And while as living creatures we are (in part) within it and part of it, our ideas of God and ways of expressing them will be largely derived from contemplating the world about us. (Though there is also revelation both addressed to all men and to particular persons.)
So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour.
And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. PRAISE THE LORD. . . all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.
This is much too long, and also much too short—on such a question.
With best wishes
J.R.R. Tolkien.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following is intended only as a listing of the principal books by and about Tolkien for those interested in selective further reading. Those requiring a more definitive bibliography of Tolkien’s published writings are referred to Appendix C of Humphrey Carpenter’s biography. A more exhaustive listing of writings about Tolkien is given in Richard C. West’s Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (Kent State University Press, USA, revised edition 1991).
WORKS BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925)
The Hobbit (London: George Allen &. Unwin, 1937)
‘On Fairy Stories’, an essay by Tolkien in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C.S. Lewis (London: Oxford University Press, 1947)
Farmer Giles of Ham (London: George Allen &. Unwin, 1949)
The Fellowship of the Ring, part one
of The Lord of the Rings (London: George Allen &. Unwin, 1954)
The Two Towers, part two of The Lord of the Rings (London: George Allen &. Unwin, 1954)
The Return of the King, part three of The Lord of the Rings (London: George Allen &. Unwin, 1955)
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other verses from The Red Book (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962)
Tree and Leaf, containing the essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ and the short story Leaf by Niggle (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964). Later editions also contain the poem ‘Mythopoeia’.
Smith of Wootton Major (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967)
The Lord of the Rings, first edition in one-volume paperback (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978)
POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED
The Father Christmas Letters, edited by Baillie Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976)
The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977)
Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980)
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, assisted by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981)
Mr Bliss, reproduced from Tolkien’s illustrated manuscript (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982)
Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, edited by Alan Bliss (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982)
The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983)
Between 1983 and 1997 Christopher Tolkien has edited the twelve-volume History of Middle Earth, published by George Allen & Unwin.
Tolkien: Man and Myth Page 20
