J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  But he knew that he ought to have done better. A first in ‘Mods’ is not easy to achieve, but it is within the range of an able undergraduate who devotes himself to his work. Certainly it is expected of someone who intends to follow an academic career, and Tolkien already had such a career in mind. However he had achieved a ‘pure alpha’, a practically faultless paper, in his special subject, Comparative Philology. This was partly a tribute to the excellence of Joe Wright’s teaching, but it was also an indication that Tolkien’s greatest talents lay in this field; and Exeter College took note. The college was disappointed that as one of its award-holders he had missed a First, but suggested that if he had earned an alpha in philology he ought to become a philologist. Dr Farnell who was Rector of Exeter (the head of the college) knew that he was interested in Old and Middle English and other Germanic languages, so would it not be sensible if he changed to the English School? Tolkien agreed, and at the beginning of the summer term of 1913 he abandoned Classics and began to read English.

  The Honour School of English Language and Literature was still young by Oxford standards, and it was split down the middle. On one side were the philologists and medievalists who considered that any literature later than Chaucer was not sufficiently challenging to form the basis of a degree-course syllabus. On the other were the enthusiasts for ‘modern’ literature (by which they meant literature from Chaucer to the nineteenth century) who thought that the study of philology and Old and Middle English was ‘word-mongering and pedantry’. In some ways it was mistaken to try and squeeze both factions of opinion into the same Honours School. The result was that undergraduates who chose to specialise in ‘Language’ (that is, Old and Middle English and philology) were nevertheless compelled to read a good deal of modern literature, while those who wanted to read ‘Literature’ (the modern course) were also obliged to study texts in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and acquaint themselves with a certain amount of philology. Both courses were compromises, and neither side was entirely satisfied.

  There was no question as to which side of the school would claim Tolkien. He would specialise in linguistic studies, and it was arranged that his tutor would be Kenneth Sisam, a young New Zealander who was acting as an assistant to A. S. Napier, the Professor of English Language and Literature. After meeting Sisam and surveying the syllabus Tolkien was ‘seized with panic, because I cannot see how it is going to provide me with honest labour for two years and a term’. It all seemed too easy and familiar: he was already well acquainted with many of the texts he would have to read, and he even knew a certain amount of Old Norse, which he was going to do as a special subject (under the Icelandic expert W. A. Craigie). Moreover Sisam did not at first appear to be an inspiring tutor. He was a quiet-spoken man only four years older than Tolkien, certainly lacking the commanding presence of Joe Wright. But he was an accurate and painstaking scholar, and Tolkien soon came to respect and like him. As to the work, Tolkien spent more time at his desk than he had while studying Classics. It was not as easy as he had expected, for the standard of the Oxford English School was very high; but he was soon firmly in command of the syllabus and was writing lengthy and intricate essays on ‘Problems of the dissemination of phonetic change’, ‘The lengthening of vowels in Old and Middle English times’, and ‘The Anglo-Norman element in English’. He was particularly interested in extending his knowledge of the West Midland dialect in Middle English because of its associations with his childhood and ancestry; and he was reading a number of Old English works that he had not previously encountered.

  Among these was the Crist of Cynewulf, a group of Anglo-Saxon religious poems. Two lines from it struck him forcibly:

  Eala Earendel engla beorhtast

  ofer middangeard monnum sended.

  ‘Hail Earendel brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men.’ Earendel is glossed by the Anglo-Saxon dictionary as ‘a shining light, ray’, but here it clearly has some special meaning. Tolkien himself interpreted it as referring to John the Baptist, but he believed that ‘Earendel’ had originally been the name for the star presaging the dawn, that is, Venus. He was strangely moved by its appearance in the Cynewulf lines. ‘I felt a curious thrill,’ he wrote long afterwards, ‘as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.’

  He found even more to excite his imagination when he studied his special subject. Old Norse (or Old Icelandic: the names are interchangeable) is the language that was brought to Iceland by the Norwegians who fled from their native land in the ninth century. Tolkien was already moderately acquainted with Norse, and he now made a thorough study of its literature. He read the sagas and the Prose or Younger Edda. He also studied the Poetic or Elder Edda; and so it was that he came upon the ancient storehouse of Icelandic myth and legend.

  ‘The Elder Edda’ is the name given to a collection of poems, some of them incomplete or textually corrupt, whose principal manuscript dates from the thirteenth century. But many of the poems themselves are more ancient, perhaps originating at a period earlier than the settlement of Iceland. Some are heroic, describing the world of men, while others are mythological, treating of the deeds of gods. Among the mythological lays in the Elder Edda none is more remarkable than the Völuspa or Prophecy of the Seeress, which tells the story of the cosmos from its creation, and foretells its doom. The most remarkable of all Germanic mythological poems, it dates from the very end of Norse heathendom, when Christianity was taking the place of the old gods; yet it imparts a sense of living myth, a feeling of awe and mystery, in its representation of a pagan cosmos. It had a profound appeal to Tolkien’s imagination.

  In the months following their reunion, the question of Edith’s religion caused some concern to her and Ronald. If their marriage was to be blessed by his church she would have to become a Catholic. She was in theory quite happy to do this – indeed she believed that her family had long ago been Catholic. But it was not a simple matter. She was a member of the Church of England, and a very active member. During her separation from Ronald a large proportion of her life had centred on the parish church at her Cheltenham home, and she had made herself useful in church affairs. She had in consequence acquired some status in the parish; and it was a smart parish, typical of the elegant town. Now Ronald wanted her to renounce all this and to go to a church where nobody knew her; and looking at it from that point of view she did not relish the prospect. She was also afraid that her ‘Uncle’ Jessop in whose house she lived might be very angry, for like many others of his age and class he was strongly anti-Catholic. Would he allow her to go living under his roof until her marriage if she ‘poped’? It was an awkward situation, and she suggested to Ronald that the matter might be delayed until they were officially engaged or the time of their marriage was near. But he would not hear of this. He wanted her to act quicky. He despised the Church of England, calling it ‘a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs’. And if Edith were persecuted for her decision to become a Catholic, why then, that was precisely what had happened to his own dear mother, and she had endured it. ‘I do so dearly believe,’ he wrote to Edith, ‘that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.’ (He himself was once more attending mass regularly and had perhaps chosen to forget his lapses of the previous year.) Clearly the question of Edith becoming a Catholic was an emotional matter to him; perhaps it was also in part, though he would not have admitted it, a test of her love after her unfaithfulness in becoming engaged to George Field.

  So she did what he wanted. She told the Jessops that she intended to become a Catholic, and ‘Uncle’ reacted just as she had feared, for he ordered her to leave his house as soon as she could find some other accommodation. Faced with this crisis, Edith decided to set up home with her middle-aged cousin Jennie Grove, a tiny determined woman with a deformed back.
Together they began to look for rooms. There seems to have been some suggestion that they might come to Oxford so that Edith could be near Ronald, but she does not appear to have wanted this. Perhaps she was resentful of the pressure he had brought to bear on her over the matter of Catholicism, and certainly she wanted to maintain an independent life until they were married. She and Jennie chose Warwick, which was not far from their native Birmingham but was far more attractive than that city. After a search they managed to find temporary rooms, and Ronald joined them there in June 1913.

  He found Warwick, its trees, its hill, and its castle, to be a place of remarkable beauty. The weather was hot and he went punting with Edith down the Avon. Together they attended Benediction in the Roman Catholic church, ‘from which’ (he wrote) ‘we came away serenely happy, for it was the first time that we had ever been able to go calmly side by side to church’. But they also had to spend some time searching for a house for Edith and Jennie, and when a suitable one was found there were innumerable arrangements to be made. Ronald found the hours that passed in domestic concerns to be rather irritating. Indeed he and Edith were not always happy when they were together. They no longer knew each other very well, for they had spent the three years of their separation in two totally different societies: the one all-male, boisterous, and academic; the other mixed, genteel, and domestic. They had grown up, but they had grown apart. From now on each would have to make concessions to the other if they were to come to a real understanding. Ronald would have to tolerate Edith’s absorption in the daily details of life, trivial as they might seem to him. She would have to make an effort to understand his preoccupation with his books and his languages, selfish as it might appear to her. Neither of them entirely succeeded. Their letters were full of affection but also sometimes of mutual irritation. Ronald might address Edith as ‘little one’ (his favourite name for her), and talk lovingly of her ‘little house’, but she was far from little in personality, and when they were together their tempers would often flare. Part of the trouble lay in Ronald’s self-chosen role of sentimental lover, which was quite unlike the face he showed to his male friends. There was real love and understanding between him and Edith, but he often wrapped it up in amatory cliché; while if he had shown her more of his ‘bookish’ face and had taken her into the company of his male friends, she might not have minded so much when these elements loomed large in their marriage. But he kept the two sides of his life firmly apart.

  After his visit to Warwick Ronald set out for Paris with two Mexican boys to whom he was to act as tutor and escort. In Paris they met a third boy and two aunts, who spoke virtually no English. Ronald was ashamed that his own Spanish was only rudimentary, and he found that even his French deserted him when he was faced with the necessity of speaking it. He loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own, but he disliked the Frenchmen he saw in the streets, and wrote to Edith about ‘the vulgarity and the jabber and spitting and the indecency’. Long before this expedition he had conceived a dislike of France and the French, and what he now saw did not cure him of his Gallophobia. Certainly he had some justification for hating France after what happened next. The aunts and the boys decided to visit Brittany, and the prospect appealed to him, for the true Breton people are of Celtic stock and speak a language that is in many respects similar to Welsh. But in the event their destination proved to be Dinard, a seaside resort like any other place. ‘Brittany!’ Ronald wrote to Edith. ‘And to see nothing but trippers and dirty papers and bathing machines.’ There was worse to come. A few days after their arrival he was walking in the street with one of the boys and the older aunt. A car mounted the pavement and struck the aunt, running her over and causing acute internal injury. Ronald helped to take her back to the hotel but she died a few hours later. The holiday ended in distraught arrangements for the body to be shipped back to Mexico. Ronald brought the boys back to England, telling Edith: ‘Never again except I am in the direst poverty will I take any such job.’

  In the autumn of 1913 his friend G. B. Smith came up to Oxford from King Edward’s School to be an Exhibitioner of Corpus Christi College where he was to read English. The T.C.B.S. was now equally represented at Oxford and Cambridge, for R. Q. Gilson and Christopher Wiseman were already at the latter university. The four friends occasionally met, but Tolkien had never mentioned to them the existence of Edith Bratt. Now that the time was approaching for her reception into the Catholic Church they had decided to be formally betrothed, and he would have to tell his friends. He wrote to Gilson and Wiseman, very uncertain as to what to say, and not even telling them his fiancée’s name; clearly he felt that it all seemed to have little to do with the male comradeship of the T.C.B.S. The others congratulated him, though Gilson remarked with some insight: ‘I have no fear at all that such a staunch T.C.B.S.-ite as yourself will ever be anything else.’

  Edith was instructed in the Catholic faith by Father Murphy, the parish priest at Warwick, who did the job no more than adequately. Ronald was later to blame much on the poor teaching given her at this time. But he himself did not help her. He found it difficult to communicate to her the deep and passionate nature of his own faith, entwined as it was with the memory of his dead mother.

  On 8 January 1914, Edith was received into the Roman Catholic Church. The date had been deliberately chosen by her and Ronald as it was the first anniversary of their reunion. Soon after her reception she and Ronald were officially betrothed in church by Father Murphy. Edith made her first confession and first communion, which she found to be ‘a great and wonderful happiness’; and at first she continued in this state of mind, attending mass regularly and often making her communion. But the Catholic church at Warwick was a poor affair compared to the splendours of Cheltenham (even Ronald called it ‘sordid’) and although Edith helped with a church club for working girls she made few friends in the congregation. She also began to dislike making her confession. It was therefore all too easy when she was worried about her health (which was often) to postpone going to mass. She reported to Ronald that getting up to go to church early in the morning and fasting until she had made her communion did not agree with her. ‘I want to go,’ she told him, ‘and wish I could go often, but it is quite impossible: my health won’t stand it.’

  She was leading a very dreary life. It was good to have her own house and the company of her cousin Jennie, but they often got on each other’s nerves, and unless Ronald came for a visit there was no one else to talk to and nothing to do except keep house. She had her own piano and she could practise for hours, but she knew now that she would never make a career as a musician – marriage and raising a family would prevent it – so there was little incentive to do much playing. She was not needed as an organist at the Catholic church. She missed the social life of Cheltenham, and she did not have enough money for more than occasional visits to concerts or the theatre. So she was irritated to receive letters from Ronald describing a life at Oxford that was full of dinner-parties, ‘rags’, and visits to the cinematograph.

  Ronald was becoming distinctly stylish. He bought furniture and Japanese prints for his rooms. He ordered two tailor-made suits, which he found looked very well on him. He started another club with his friend Colin Cullis; it was called the Chequers, and it met on Saturday nights to have dinner in his or Cullis’s rooms. He was elected president of the college debating society (an influential body at Exeter) after a faction-fight which gave him his first taste of college politics, a taste that he liked very much. He punted, he played tennis, and now and then he did some work, enough to win the Skeat Prize for English awarded by his college in the spring of 1914. He used the five pounds of prize money to buy books of medieval Welsh and several of the works of William Morris: The Life and Death of Jason, Morris’s translation of the Völsungasaga, and his prose-and-verse romance The House of the Wolfings.

  Morris had himself been an undergraduate at Exeter College, and this connection had probably stimulated Tolkien’s interest i
n him. But until now he had apparently not become acquainted with Morris’s imaginative writings. Indeed his knowledge of modern literature in general was limited, for the Oxford English School syllabus did not require that he, as a linguist, should make more than a comparatively superficial study of post-Chaucerian writers. During this time he did make a few sketchy notes on Johnson, Dryden, and Restoration drama, but there is no indication that he had more than a passing interest in them. As to contemporary fiction, he wrote to Edith: ‘I so rarely read a novel, as you know.’ For him English literature ended with Chaucer; or to put it another way, he received all the enjoyment and stimulus that he could possibly require from the great poems of the Old and Middle English periods, and from the early literature of Iceland.

  But that was the very reason that he now found The House of the Wolfings so absorbing. Morris’s view of literature coincided with his own. In this book Morris had tried to recreate the excitement he himself had found in the pages of early English and Icelandic narratives. The House of the Wolfings is set in a land which is threatened by an invading force of Romans. Written partly in prose and partly in verse, it centres on a House or family-tribe that dwells by a great river in a clearing of the forest named Mirkwood, a name taken from ancient Germanic geography and legend. Many elements in the story seem to have impressed Tolkien. Its style is highly idiosyncratic, heavily laden with archaisms and poetic inversions in an attempt to recreate the aura of ancient legend. Clearly Tolkien took note of this, and it would seem that he also appreciated another facet of the writing: Morris’s aptitude, despite the vagueness of time and place in which the story is set, for describing with great precision the details of his imagined landscape. Tolkien himself was to follow Morris’s example in later years.