At Christmas 1903 Mabel Tolkien wrote to her mother-in-law:
My dear Mrs Tolkien,
You said you like one of the boys’ drawings better than anything bought with their money so they’ve done these for you. Ronald has really done his splendidly this year – he has just been having quite an exhibition in Father Francis’ room – he has worked hard since he broke up on December 16th, and so have I, to find fresh subjects: – I haven’t been out for almost a month – not even to The Oratory! – but the nasty wet muggy weather is making me better and since Ronald broke up I have been able to rest in the mornings. I keep having whole weeks of utter sleeplessness, which added to the internal cold and sickness have made it almost impossible to go on.
I found a postal order for 2/6 which you sent the boys some time ago – a year at least – which has been mislaid. They’ve been in town all afternoon spending this and a little bit more on things they wanted to give. – They’ve done all my Xmas shopping – Ronald can match silk lining or any art shade like a true ‘Parisian Modiste’. – Is it his Artist or Draper Ancestry coming out? – He is going along at a great rate at school – he knows far more Greek than I do Latin – he says he is going to do German with me these holidays – though at present I feel more like Bed.
One of the clergy, a young, merry one, is teaching Ronald to play chess – he says he has read too much, everything fit for a boy under fifteen, and he doesn’t know any single classical thing to recommend him. Ronald is making his First Communion this Christmas – so it is a very great feast indeed to us this year. I don’t say this to vex you – only you say you like to know everything about them.
Yours always lovingly,
Mab.
The New Year did not begin well. Ronald and Hilary were confined to bed with measles followed by whooping-cough, and in Hilary’s case by pneumonia. The additional strain of nursing them proved too much for their mother, and as she feared it proved ‘impossible to go on’. By April 1904 she was in hospital, and her condition was diagnosed as diabetes.
The Oliver Road house was closed, the scant furniture was stored, and the boys were sent away to relatives, Hilary to his Suffield grandparents and Ronald to Hove to stay with the family of Edwin Neave, the sandy-haired insurance clerk who was now married to his Aunt Jane. Insulin treatment was not yet available for diabetic patients, and there was much anxiety over Mabel’s condition, but by the summer she had recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital. Clearly she must undergo a long and careful convalescence. A plan was proposed by Father Francis Morgan. At Rednal, a Worcestershire hamlet a few miles beyond the Birmingham boundary, Cardinal Newman had built a modest country house which served as a retreat for the Oratory clergy. On the edge of its grounds stood a little cottage occupied by the local postman, whose wife could let them have a bedroom and sitting-room, and could cook for them. It would be an ideal setting for recuperation, and all three of them would benefit from the renewed contact with country air. So, late in June 1904, the boys rejoined their mother and they all went to Rednal for the summer.
It was as if they had come back to Sarehole. The cottage lay on the corner of a quiet country lane, and behind it were the wooded grounds of the Oratory House with the little cemetery adjoining the chapel where the Oratory fathers and Newman himself were buried. The boys had the freedom of these grounds, and further afield they could roam the steep paths that led through the trees to the high Lickey Hill. Mrs Till the postman’s wife gave them good meals, and a month later Mabel was writing on a postcard to her mother-in-law: ‘Boys look ridiculously well compared to the weak white ghosts that met me on train 4 weeks ago!!! Hilary has got tweed suit and his first Etons today! and looks immense. –We’ve had perfect weather. Boys will write first wet day but what with Bilberry-gathering – Tea in Hay – Kite-flying with Fr Francis – sketching – Tree Climbing – they’ve never enjoyed a holiday so much.’
Father Francis paid them many visits. He kept a dog at Rednal named ‘Lord Roberts’, and he used to sit on the ivy-covered verandah of the Oratory House smoking a large cherrywood pipe; ‘the more remarkable’, Ronald recalled, ‘since he never smoked except there. Possibly my own later addiction to the Pipe derives from this.’ When Father Francis was not in residence and there was no other priest staying at Rednal, Mabel and the boys would drive to mass in Bromsgrove sharing a hired carriage with Mr and Mrs Church, the gardener and caretaker for the Oratory fathers. It was an idyllic existence.
Too soon September brought the school term, and Ronald, now fit and well, had to return to King Edward’s. But his mother could not yet bring herself to leave the cottage where they had been so happy, and go back to the smoke and dirt of Birmingham. So for the time being Ronald had to rise early and walk more than a mile to the station to catch a train to school. It was growing dark by the time he came home, and Hilary sometimes met him with a lamp.
Unnoticed by her sons, Mabel’s condition began to deteriorate again. At the beginning of November she collapsed in a way that seemed to them sudden and terrifying. She sank into a diabetic coma, and six days later, on 14 November, with Father Francis and her sister May Incledon at her bedside in the cottage, she died.
1 Barry’s building was demolished after the school had moved to new premises in the nineteen-thirties.
CHAPTER III
‘PRIVATE LANG.’ – AND EDITH
‘My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is 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.’
Ronald Tolkien wrote this nine years after his mother’s death. It is some indication of the way in which he associated her 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. Perhaps her death also had a cementing effect on his study of languages. It was she, after all, who had been his first teacher and who had encouraged him to take an interest in words. Now that she was gone he would pursue that path relentlessly. 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 for ever.
Mabel Tolkien was buried in the Catholic churchyard at Bromsgrove. Over her grave Father Francis Morgan placed a stone cross of the same design as that used for each of the Oratory clergy in their Rednal cemetery. In her will Mabel had appointed him to be guardian of her two sons, and it proved a wise choice, for he displayed unfailing generosity and affection to them. His generosity took a practical form, for he had a private income from his family’s sherry business, and since as an Oratorian he was not obliged to surrender his property to the community he could use his money for his own purposes. Mabel had left only eight hundred pounds of invested capital with which to support the boys, but Father Francis quietly augmented this from his own pocket, and ensured that Ronald and Hilary did not go short of anything essential for their well-being.
Immediately after their mother’s death he had to find somewhere for them to live: a tricky problem, for while ideally they should be housed by their own relatives there was a danger that the Suffield and Tolkien aunts and uncles might try to snatch them from the grasp of the Catholic Church. Already there had been some talk of contesting Mabel’s will and of sending the boys to a Protestant boarding-scho
ol. There was however one relative, an aunt by marriage, who had no particular religious views and had a room to let. She lived in Birmingham near the Oratory, and Father Francis decided that her house would be as good a home as any for the moment. So a few weeks after their mother’s death Ronald and Hilary (now aged thirteen and eleven) moved into their aunt’s top-floor bedroom.
Her name was Beatrice Suffield. She lived in a dark house in Stirling Road, a long side-street in the district of Edgbaston. The boys had a large room to themselves, and Hilary was happy leaning out of the window and throwing stones at cats below. But Ronald, still numb from the shock of his mother’s death, hated the view of almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond. The green countryside was just visible in the distance, but it now belonged to a remote past that could not be regained. He was trapped in the city. His mother’s death had severed him from the open air, from Lickey Hill where he had gathered bilberries, and from the Rednal cottage where they had been so happy. And because it was the loss of his mother that had taken him away from all these things, he came to associate them with her. His feelings towards the rural landscape, already sharp from the earlier severance that had taken him from Sarehole, now became emotionally charged with personal bereavement. This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.
Aunt Beatrice gave him and his brother board and lodging, but little more. She had been widowed not long before, and she was childless and poorly off. Sadly, she was also deficient in affection, and she showed little understanding of the boys’ state of mind. One day Ronald came into her kitchen, saw a pile of ashes in the grate, and discovered that she had burnt all his mother’s personal papers and letters. She had never considered that he might wish to keep them.
Fortunately the Oratory was near, and it soon became Ronald and Hilary’s real home. Early in the morning they would hurry round to serve mass for Father Francis at his favourite side-altar in the Oratory church. Afterwards they would eat breakfast in the plain refectory, and then, when they had played their usual game of spinning the kitchen cat around in the revolving food-hatch, they would set off for school. Hilary had passed the entrance examination and was now at King Edward’s, and the two boys would walk together down to New Street if there was time, or would take a horse-bus if the clock at Five Ways showed that they were late.
Ronald made many friends at school, and one boy in particular soon became an inseparable companion. His name was Christopher Wiseman. A year younger than Ronald, he was the son of a Wesleyan minister who lived in Edgbaston; he had fair hair, a broad good-natured face, and an energetically critical manner. The two boys met in the Fifth Class in the autumn of 1905, Tolkien achieving first place in the class – he was now showing distinct academic promise – and Wiseman coming second. This rivalry soon developed into a friendship based on a shared interest in Latin and Greek, a great delight in Rugby football (‘soccer’ was never played at King Edward’s), and an enthusiasm for discussing anything and everything. Wiseman was a staunch Methodist, but the two boys found that they could argue about religion without bitterness.
Together they moved class by class up the school. Clearly Ronald Tolkien had an aptitude for languages – his mother had seen that – and King Edward’s provided the ideal environment in which this aptitude could flourish. The study of Latin and Greek was the backbone of the curriculum, and both languages were taught particularly well in the First (or senior) Class, which Ronald reached shortly before his sixteenth birthday. The First Class was under the bright eye of the headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, a remarkable man with a neat pointed beard who was an amateur inventor and an accomplished scientist as well as a skilled teacher of the classics; among his inventions were a windmill that charged batteries to provide electric light for his house, a species of hectograph which duplicated the school exam papers (illegibly, said the boys), and a small gun that could shoot golf balls. When teaching, he encouraged his pupils to explore the byways of learning and to be expert in everything that came their way: an example that made a great impression on Ronald Tolkien. But though he was discursive, Gilson also encouraged his pupils to make a detailed study of classical linguistics. This was entirely in keeping with Tolkien’s inclinations; and, partly as a result of Gilson’s teaching, he began to develop an interest in the general principles of language.
It was one thing to know Latin, Greek, French and German; it was another to understand why they were what they were. Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all: he had begun, in fact, to study philology, the science of words. And he was encouraged to do this even more when he made his acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon.
This was thanks to George Brewerton, the master who preferred muck to manure. Under his tuition Ronald Tolkien had shown an interest in Chaucerian English. Brewerton was pleased by this and offered to lend the boy an Anglo-Saxon primer. The offer was accepted eagerly.
Opening its covers, Tolkien found himself face to face with the language that was spoken by the English before the first Normans set foot in their land. Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English, was familiar and recognisable to him as an antecedent of his own language, and at the same time was remote and obscure. The primer explained the language clearly in terms that he could easily understand, and he was soon making light work of translating the prose examples at the back of the book. He found that Old English appealed to him, though it did not have the aesthetic charm of Welsh. This was rather a historical appeal, the attraction of studying the ancestor of his own language. And he began to find real excitement when he progressed beyond the simple passages in the primer and turned to the great Old English poem Beowulf. Reading this first in a translation and then in the original language, he found it to be one of the most extraordinary poems of all time: the tale of the warrior Beowulf, his fight with two monsters, and his death after battle with a dragon.
Now Tolkien turned back to Middle English and discovered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here was another poem to fire his imagination: the medieval tale of an Arthurian knight and his search for the mysterious giant who is to deal him a terrible axeblow. Tolkien was delighted by the poem and also by its language, for he realised that its dialect was approximately that which had been spoken by his mother’s West Midland ancestors. He began to explore further in Middle English, and read the Pearl, an allegorical poem about a dead child which is believed to have been written by the author of Sir Gawain. Then he turned to a different language and took a few hesitant steps in Old Norse, reading line by line in the original words the story of Sigurd and the dragon Fafnir that had fascinated him in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book when he was a small child. By this time he had acquired a range of linguistic knowledge that was remarkable in a schoolboy.
He continued his search for the ‘bones’ behind all these languages, rummaging in the school library and exploring the remoter shelves of Cornish’s bookshop down the road. Eventually he began to find – and to scrape together enough money to buy – German books on philology that were ‘dry-as-dust’ but which could provide him with the answers to his questions. Philology: ‘the love of words’. For that was what motivated him. It was not an arid interest in the scientific principles of language; it was a deep love for the look and the sound of words, springing from the days when his mother had given him his first Latin lessons.
And as a result of this love of words, he had started to invent his own languages.
Most children make up their own words. Some even have rudimentary private languages that they share with each other. This was what Ronald’s young cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon had done. Their language was called ‘Animalic’, and it was constructed principally out of animal names; for instance Dog nightingale woodpecker forty meant ‘You are an ass’. The Incledons now lived outside Birmingham at Barnt Green, the neighbouring village to Rednal, and Ronald and
Hilary usually spent part of their holidays there. Ronald learnt ‘Animalic’ and was amused by it. A little later Marjorie (the elder sister) lost interest in it, and when she dropped out Mary and Ronald collaborated to invent a new and more sophisticated language. This was called ‘Nevbosh’ or the New Nonsense, and it was soon sufficiently developed for the two cousins to chant limericks in it:
Dar fys ma vel gom co palt ‘Hoc
Pys go iskili far maino woc?
Pro si go fys do roc de
Do cat ym maino bocte
De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc!’
(There was an old man who said ‘How
Can I possibly carry my cow?
For if I were to ask it
To get in my basket
It would make such a terrible row!’)
This kind of thing caused a good deal of amusement at Barnt Green, and as Ronald reached adolescence it gave him an idea. Already when beginning to learn Greek he had entertained himself by making up Greek-style words. Could he not take this further and invent a complete language, something more serious and properly organised than Nevbosh – most of which was only English, French, or Latin in disguise? Such a language might not have any particular use – though the invented language Esperanto was very popular at the time – but it would amuse him and allow him to put all his favourite sounds on paper. Certainly it seemed worth trying: if he had been interested in music he would very likely have wanted to compose melodies, so why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be as it were a private symphony?
In adult life Tolkien came to believe that his impulse towards linguistic invention was similar to that felt by many schoolchildren. He once remarked, while talking about the invention of languages: ‘It’s not that uncommon, you know. An enormously greater number of children have what you might call a creative element in them than is usually supposed, and it isn’t necessarily limited to certain things: they may not want to paint or draw, or have much music, but they nevertheless want to create something. And if the main mass of education takes a linguistic form, their creation will take a linguistic form. It’s so extraordinarily common, I once did think that there ought to be some organised research into it.’
J. R. R. Tolkien Page 4
