J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  No account of the external events of Tolkien’s life can provide more than a superficial explanation of the origins of his mythology. Certainly the device that linked the stories in the first draft of the book (it was later abandoned) owes something to William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise: for, as in that story, a sea-voyager arrives at an unknown land where he is to hear a succession of tales. Tolkien’s voyager was called Eriol, a name that is explained as meaning ‘One who dreams alone’. But the tales that Eriol hears, grand, tragic, and heroic, cannot be explained as the mere product of literary influences and personal experience. When Tolkien began to write he drew upon some deeper, richer seam of his imagination than he had yet explored; and it was a seam that would continue to yield for the rest of his life.

  The first of the ‘legends’ that make up The Silmarillion tell of the creation of the universe and the establishing of the known world, which Tolkien, recalling the Norse Midgard and the equivalent words in early English, calls ‘Middle-earth’. Some readers have taken this to refer to another planet, but Tolkien had no such intention. ‘Middle-earth is our world,’ he wrote, adding: ‘I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.’

  Later stories in the cycle deal chiefly with the fashioning of the ‘Silmarilli’ (the three great jewels of the elves which give the book its title), their theft from the blessed realm of Valinor by the evil power Morgoth. and the subsequent wars in which the elves try to regain them.

  Some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien’s stories and his Christianity, and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write with such conviction about a world where God is not worshipped. But there is no mystery. The Silmarillion is the work of a profoundly religious man. It does not contradict Christianity but complements it. There is in the legends no worship of God, yet God is indeed there, more explicitly in The Silmarillion than in the work that grew out of it, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s universe is ruled over by God, ‘The One’. Beneath Him in the hierarchy are ‘The Valar’, the guardians of the world, who are not gods but angelic powers, themselves holy and subject to God; and at one terrible moment in the story they surrender their power into His hands.

  Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie. He wanted the mythological and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as a Christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshipped. At the same time, to set his stories ‘realistically’ in the known world, where religious beliefs were explicitly Christian, would deprive them of imaginative colour. So while God is present in Tolkien’s universe, He remains unseen.

  When he wrote The Silmarillion Tolkien believed that in one sense he was writing the truth. He did not suppose that precisely such peoples as he described, ‘elves’, ‘dwarves’, and malevolent ‘orcs’, had walked the earth and done the deeds that he recorded. But he did feel, or hope, that his stories were in some sense an embodiment of a profound truth. This is not to say that he was writing an allegory: far from it. Time and again he expressed his distaste for that form of literature. ‘I dislike allegory wherever I smell it,’ he once said, and similar phrases echo through his letters to readers of his books. So in what sense did he suppose The Silmarillion to be ‘true’?

  Something of the answer can be found in his essay On Fairy-Stories and in his story Leaf by Niggle, both of which suggest that a man may be given by God the gift of recording ‘a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth’. Certainly while writing The Silmarilion Tolkien believed that he was doing more than inventing a story. He wrote of the tales that make up the book: ‘They arose in my mind as “given” things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere: not of “inventing”.’

  The first story to be put on paper – it was written out during Tolkien’s convalescence at Great Haywood early in 1917 – actually occupies a place towards the end of the cycle. This is ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, which tells of the assault on the last elvish stronghold by Morgoth, the prime power of evil. After a terrible battle a group of the inhabitants of Gondolin make their escape, and among them is Earendel,1 grandson of the king; here then is the link with the early Earendel poems, the first sketches for the mythology. The style of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ suggests that Tolkien was influenced by William Morris, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the great battle which forms the central part of the story may owe a little of its inspiration to Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme – or rather to his reaction to those experiences, for the fighting at Gondolin has a heroic grandeur entirely lacking in modern warfare. But in any case these were only superficial ‘influences’: Tolkien used no models or sources for his strange and exciting tale. Indeed its two most notable characteristics are entirely his own device: the invented names, and the fact that the majority of the protagonists are elves.

  Strictly speaking it could be said that the elves of The Silmarillion grew out of the ‘fairy folk’ of Tolkien’s early poems, but really there is little connection between the two. Elves may have arisen in his mind as a result of his enthusiasm for Francis Thompson’s ‘Sister Songs’ and Edith’s fondness for ‘little elfin people’, but the elves of The Silmarillion have nothing whatever to do with the ‘tiny leprechauns’ of ‘Goblin Feet’. They are to all intents and purposes men: or rather, they are Man before the Fall which deprived him of his powers of achievement. Tolkien believed devoutly that there had once been an Eden on earth, and that man’s original sin and subsequent dethronement were responsible for the ills of the world; but his elves, though capable of sin and error, have not ‘fallen’ in the theological sense, and so are able to achieve much beyond the powers of men. They are craftsmen, poets, scribes, creators of works of beauty far surpassing human artefacts. Most important of all they are, unless slain in battle, immortal. Old age, disease, and death do not bring their work to an end while it is still unfinished or imperfect. They are therefore the ideal of every artist.

  These, then, are the elves of The Silmarillion, and of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself summed up their nature when he wrote of them: ‘They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire.’

  As to the names of persons and places in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and the other stories in The Silmarillion, they were constructed from Tolkien’s invented languages. Since the existence of these languages was a reason d’être for the whole mythology, it is not surprising that he devoted a good deal of attention to the business of making up names from them. Indeed the name-making and the linguistic work associated with it came (as he said in the passage quoted above) to occupy just as much if not more of his attention than the writing of the stories themselves. So it is worthwhile (and interesting) to get some idea of how he went about this part of the work.

  Tolkien had sketched a number of invented languages when he was an adolescent, and had developed several of them to a degree of some complexity. But ultimately only one of these early experiments had pleased him, and had come to express his personal linguistic taste. This was the invented language that had been heavily influenced by Finnish. He called it ‘Quenya’, and by 1917 it was very sophisticated, possessing a vocabulary of many hundreds of words (based albeit on a fairly limited number of word-stems). Quenya was derived, as any ‘real’ language would have been, from a more primitive language supposedly spoken in an earlier age; and from this ‘Primitive Eldarin’ Tolkien
created a second elvish language, contemporary with Quenya but spoken by different peoples of the elves. This language he eventually called ‘Sindarin’, and he modelled its phonology on Welsh, the language that after Finnish was closest to his personal linguistic taste.

  Besides Quenya and Sindarin, Tolkien invented a number of other elvish languages. Though these existed only in outline, the complexities of their inter-relationship and the elaboration of a ‘family tree’ of languages occupied much of his mind. But the elvish names in The Silmarillion were constructed almost exclusively from Quenya and Sindarin.

  It is impossible in a few sentences to give an adequate account of how Tolkien used his elvish languages to make names for the characters and places in his stories. But briefly, what happened was this. When working to plan he would form all these names with great care, first deciding on the meaning, and then developing its form first in one language and subsequently in the other; the form finally used was most frequently that in Sindarin. However, in practice he was often more arbitrary. It seems strange in view of his deep love of careful invention, yet often in the heat of writing he would construct a name that sounded appropriate to the character without paying more than cursory attention to its linguistic origins. Later he dismissed many of the names made in this way as ‘meaningless’, and he subjected others to a severe philological scrutiny in an attempt to discover how they could have reached their strange and apparently inexplicable form. This, too, is an aspect of his imagination that must be grasped by anyone trying to understand how he worked. As the years went by he came more and more to regard his own invented languages and stories as ‘real’ languages and historical chronicles that needed to be elucidated. In other words, when in this mood he did not say of an apparent contradiction in the narrative or an unsatisfactory name: ‘This is not as I wish it to be; I must change it.’ Instead he would approach the problem with the attitude: ‘What does this mean? I must find out.’

  This was not because he had lost his wits or his sense of proportion. In part it was an intellectual game of Patience 1 (he was very fond of Patience cards), and in part it grew from his belief in the ultimate truth of his mythology. Yet at other times he would consider making drastic changes in some radical aspect of the whole structure of the story, just as any other author would do. These were of course contradictory attitudes; but here as in so many areas of his personality Tolkien was a man of antitheses.

  This, then, was the remarkable work that he began while he was on sick-leave at Great Haywood early in 1917. Edith was glad to help him, and she made a fair copy of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, writing it out in a large exercise-book. It was an interlude of rare contentment. In the evenings she played the piano and he recited his poetry or made sketches of her. At this time she conceived a child. But the idyll could not last; ‘trench fever’ amounted to little more than a high temperature and general discomfort, and a month in hospital at Birmingham had apparently cured Tolkien. Now his battalion wanted him back in service in France. He did not want to go, of course, and it would be tragic if his life were wiped out by a German gun just when he was beginning his great work. But what else could he do?

  His health provided the answer. Towards the end of his leave at Great Haywood he was taken ill again. He got better after a few weeks and was posted temporarily to Yorkshire. Edith and her cousin Jennie packed their belongings and followed him north, moving into furnished lodgings a few miles from his camp, at Hornsea. But just after he had returned to duty he went sick once more, and was put into a Harrogate sanatorium.

  He was not malingering. There is no doubt that he had real symptoms of illness. But as Edith wrote to him, ‘Every day in bed means another day in England,’ and he knew that recovery would almost inevitably lead to a return to the trenches. So, as happened with many other soldiers, his body responded and kept his temperature above normal, while the fact that he was spending day after day in bed being dosed with aspirin did nothing to improve his strength. By April he was passed fit again and was sent for further training at an army signalling school in the North-East. There was a good chance that if he passed an examination he might be appointed Signals Officer at the Yorkshire camp, a post that would probably keep him from the trenches. He sat the examination in July, but failed. A few days later he was taken ill again, and by the second week in August he was back in hospital.

  This time he was in thoroughly congenial surroundings, at the Brooklands Officers’ Hospital in Hull. A pleasant group of fellow patients provided good company, and among them was a friend from the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was visited by nuns from a local Catholic convent, with one of whom he formed a friendship that was to continue till the end of her life. He could also get on with his writing. Meanwhile Edith, now heavily pregnant, was living with her cousin in miserable seaside lodgings. She had long ago regretted giving up her house in Warwick; Great Haywood had served very well, but now life was almost unbearable. There was no piano in the boarding-house, food was desperately short thanks to the sinking of British ships by U-boats, and she hardly ever saw Ronald – his hospital was a long and weary journey from Hornsea. The local Catholic church was a poor temporary affair set up in a cinema, so that she felt almost inclined to go to the Anglican parish church with Jennie, who was a member of the Church of England; and she was finding pregnancy exhausting. She decided to go back to Cheltenham, where she had lived for three years, and which was the only town she really liked. She could arrange to give birth in a comfortable hospital, and until the time came she and Jennie could stay in rooms. So to Cheltenham they went.

  At about this time, perhaps while he was lying in hospital in Hull, Tolkien composed another major story for ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. This was the tale of the hapless Túrin, which was eventually given the title ‘The Children of Húrin’. Again one may detect certain literary influences: the hero’s fight with a great dragon inevitably suggests comparison with the deeds of Sigurd and Beowulf, while his unknowing incest with his sister and his subsequent suicide were derived quite consciously from the story of Kullervo in the Kalevala. But again these ‘influences’ are only superficial. ‘The Children of Húrin’ is a powerful fusion of Icelandic and Finnish traditions, but it passes beyond this to achieve a degree of dramatic complexity and a subtlety of characterisation not often found in ancient legends.

  On 16 November 1917 a son was born to Ronald and Edith Tolkien, in a Cheltenham nursing home. It was a difficult labour, and Edith’s life was in danger. But although Ronald had been discharged from hospital he was required in camp and, much to his sorrow, he could not get leave to come south until almost a week after the birth, by which time Edith had begun to recover. They decided to name the child John Francis Reuel, ‘Francis’ being in honour of Father Francis Morgan, who came from Birmingham to baptise the baby. After the christening Ronald returned to duty, and Edith brought the child back to Yorkshire, moving into furnished rooms at Roos, a village north of the Humber estuary and not far from the camp where Ronald (promoted to full lieutenant) was now stationed. By this time it seemed unlikely that he would be posted overseas again.

  On days when he could get leave, he and Edith went for walks in the countryside. Near Roos they found a small wood with an undergrowth of hemlock, and there they wandered. Ronald recalled of Edith as she was at this time: ‘Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing – and dance.’ She sang and danced for him in the wood, and from this came the story that was to be the centre of The Silmarillion: the tale of the mortal man Beren who loves the immortal elven-maid Lúthien Tinúviel, whom he first sees dancing among hemlock in a wood.

  This deeply romantic fairy-story encompasses a wider range of emotions than anything Tolkien had previously written, achieving at times a Wagnerian intensity of passion. It is also Tolkien’s first quest-story; and the journey of the two lovers to Morgoth’s terrible fortress, where they hope to cut a Silmaril from his Iron Crown, seems as doomed to failure as Frodo’s attempt t
o carry the Ring to its destination.

  Of all his legends, the tale of Beren and Lúthien was the one most loved by Tolkien, not least because at one level he identified the character of Lúthien with his own wife. After Edith’s death more than fifty years later he wrote to his son Christopher, explaining why he wished to include the name ‘Lúthien’ on her tombstone: ‘She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien. 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 wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above 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 the memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.’

  Tolkien’s time at Roos came to an end in the spring of 1918 when he was posted to Penkridge, one of the Staffordshire camps where he had trained before going to France. At about this time those of his battalion who were still serving in France were all killed or taken prisoner at Chemin des Dames.

  Edith, the baby, and Jennie Grove travelled south to be with him. Edith was finding it a ‘miserable wandering homeless sort of life’; and scarcely had they settled at Penkridge than he was posted back to Hull. This time Edith refused to move. She was wearied by looking after the baby and was often in pain – the effects of the difficult birth had been long-lasting – and she wrote bitterly to Ronald: ‘I’ll never go round with you again.’ Meanwhile on his return to the Humber Garrison Ronald was taken ill yet again, and was sent back to the officers’ hospital in Hull. ‘I should think you ought never to feel tired again,’ Edith wrote, ‘for the amount of Bed you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.’ In hospital, besides working on his mythology and the elvish languages, he was teaching himself a little Russian and improving his Spanish and Italian.