J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  The years since the First World War had widened the old rift between Language and Literature, and each faction in the English School – and they really were factions, with personal as well as academic animosities – delighted to interfere with the syllabus of the other. The ‘Lang.’ side made sure that the ‘Lit.’ students had to spend a good deal of their time studying the obscurer branches of English philology, while the ‘Lit.’ camp insisted that the ‘Lang.’ undergraduates must set aside many hours from their specialisation (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English) to study the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Tolkien believed that this should be remedied. What was even more regrettable to him was that the linguistic courses laid considerable emphasis on the study of theoretical philology without suggesting that undergraduates should read widely in early and medieval literature. His own love of philology had always been based firmly on a knowledge of literature, and he determined that this state of affairs should be changed. He also proposed that Icelandic should be given more prominence in the syllabus; this latter hope was one reason for the formation of the Coalbiters.

  His proposals required the consent of the whole faculty, and at first he met with a good deal of opposition. Even C. S. Lewis, not yet a personal friend, was among those who originally voted against him. But as the terms passed, Lewis and many others came over to Tolkien’s side and gave him their active support. By 1931 he had managed (‘beyond my wildest hopes’, he wrote in his diary) to obtain general approval for the majority of his proposals. The revised syllabus was put into operation, and for the first time in the history of the Oxford English School something like a real rapprochement was achieved between ‘Lang.’ and ‘Lit.’.

  Besides being responsible for teaching and administration, professors at Oxford as elsewhere are expected to devote much of their time to original research. Tolkien’s contemporaries had high hopes of him in this respect, for his glossary to Sisam’s book, his edition with E. V. Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and his article on the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts demonstrated that he had an unrivalled mastery of the early Middle English of the West Midlands; and it was expected that he would continue to contribute important work in this field. He himself had every intention of doing so: he promised an edition of the Cambridge manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse to the Early English Text Society, and he did a great deal of research into this branch of early medieval English, this language ‘with the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman’ which he loved so much. But the edition was not completed for many years, while the greater part of his research work never reached print.

  Lack of time was one cause. He had chosen to devote the major part of his working life at Oxford to teaching, and this in itself limited what he could do in the matter of original research. The marking of examination papers in order to provide necessary money also ate into his time. But besides this there was the matter of his perfectionism.

  Tolkien had a passion for perfection in written work of any kind, whether it be philology or stories. This grew from his emotional commitment to his work, which did not permit him to treat it in any manner other than the deeply serious. Nothing was allowed to reach the printer until it had been revised, reconsidered, and polished – in which respect he was the opposite of C. S. Lewis, who sent manuscripts off for publication with scarcely a second glance at them. Lewis, well aware of this difference between them, wrote of Tolkien: ‘His standard of self-criticism was high and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old work they actually got the first draft of a new one.’

  This is the main reason why Tolkien only allowed a small proportion of his work to reach the printed page. But what he did publish during the nineteen-thirties was a major contribution to scholarship. His paper on the dialects of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the regional variations of fourteenth-century English. (It was read to the Philological Society in 1931 but not published until 1934, and then with a typical Tolkien apology for the lack of what the author considered to be a necessary amount of revision and improvement.) And his lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, delivered to the British Academy on 25 November 1936 and published in the following year, is a landmark in the history of criticism of this great Western Anglo-Saxon poem.

  Beowulf, said Tolkien in the lecture, is a poem and not (as other commentators had often suggested) merely a jumble of confused literary traditions, or a text for scholarly examination. And he described, in characteristically imaginative terms, the way that earlier critics had treated the Beowulf poet’s work: ‘A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: “This tower is most interesting.” But they also said (after pushing it over): “What a muddle it is in!” And even the man’s descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: “He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.” But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.’

  In his lecture Tolkien pleaded for the rebuilding of that tower. He declared that although Beowulf is about monsters and a dragon, that does not make it negligible as heroic poetry. ‘A dragon is no idle fancy,’ he told his audience. ‘Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who have yet been caught by the fascination of the worm.’

  This was Tolkien talking not primarily as a philologist or even a literary critic, but as a storyteller. Just as Lewis said of his philology, ‘He had been inside language’, so it might be remarked that when he talked of the Beowulf dragon he was speaking as the author of The Silmarillion and – by this time – of The Hobbit. He had been into the dragon’s lair.

  Since the lecture was first published, many readers of Beowulf have dissented from Tolkien’s view of the poem’s structure. But even one of the severest critics of his interpretation, his old tutor Kenneth Sisam, admitted that the lecture has a ‘fineness of perception and elegance of expression’ which distinguish it from so much else in this field.

  The Beowulf lecture and the paper on the Reeve’s Tale were the only major pieces of philological work published by Tolkien in the nineteen-thirties. He planned to do much more: besides his work on the Ancrene Wisse he intended to produce an edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem Exodus, and indeed he nearly completed this task, but it was never finished to his satisfaction. He also planned further joint editions with E. V. Gordon, in particular of Pearl (a natural companion-piece to their Gawain) and of the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer. But Gordon and Tolkien were now geographically far apart. In 1931 Gordon, who had been appointed Tolkien’s successor as professor at Leeds, moved from there to take up a chair at Manchester University, and though the two men met and corresponded frequently, collaboration proved technically less easy than when they had been in the same place. Gordon did a great deal of work on all three projects, using Tolkien as a consultant rather than as a full collaborator, but nothing had reached print by 1938. In the summer of that year, Gordon went into hospital for an operation for gall-stones. It seemed to be successful, but his condition suddenly deteriorated, and he died from a previous
ly unsuspected kidney disorder, at the age of forty-two.

  Gordon’s death robbed Tolkien not only of a close friend but also of the ideal professional collaborator; and by now it was clear that he needed a collaborator, if only to make him surrender any material to the printer.1 As it happened, he had made the acquaintance of another philologist who proved to be a good working partner. This was Simonne d’Ardenne, a Belgian graduate who studied Middle English with him for an Oxford B.Litt. early in the nineteen-thirties. Tolkien contributed much to her edition of The Life and Passion of St Juliene, a medieval religious work written in the Ancrene Wisse dialect. Indeed the d’Ardenne Juliene paradoxically contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he ever published under his own name. Mlle d’Ardenne became a professor at Liège, and she and Tolkien planned to collaborate on an edition of Katerine, another Western Middle English text of the same group. But the war intervened and made communication between them impossible for many years, and after 1945 nothing was achieved by them beyond a couple of short articles on topics concerned with the manuscript of the text. Although Tolkien was able to work with Mlle d’Ardenne when he was in Belgium to attend a philological congress in 1951, she realised sadly that collaboration with him was now impossible, for his mind was entirely on his stories.

  But even if one is to regard his failure to publish more in his professional field as a matter for regret, one should not fail to take account of his wide influence, for his theories and deductions have been quoted (with or without due acknowledgement) wherever English philology is studied.

  Nor should one forget the translations he made of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo. The Pearl translation was begun at Leeds in the nineteen-twenties; Tolkien was attracted to the task by the challenge of the poem’s complex metrical and verbal structure. He had finished it by 1926, but he did nothing about publishing it until Basil Blackwell offered to put it into print in the nineteen-forties, in return for a sum to be credited to Tolkien’s heavily overdue account at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. The translation was set into type, but Blackwell waited in vain for Tolkien to write the introduction to the volume, and eventually the project was abandoned. The translation of Gawain, probably begun during the nineteen-thirties or forties, was finished in time for it to be broadcast in dramatised form by the BBC in 1953, Tolkien himself recording a short introduction and a longer concluding talk. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings his publishers Allen & Unwin determined to issue the Gawain and Pearl translations in one volume. With this in view, Tolkien made extensive revisions of both translations, but once again an introduction was required, and he found it extremely difficult to write one, being uncertain as to what ought to be explained to the non-scholarly reader for whom the book was intended. Again the project lapsed, and it was not until after his death that the two translations were published, together with a modern English rendering of a third poem of the same period, Sir Orfeo, which Tolkien had originally translated for a wartime cadets’ course at Oxford. The introduction to the volume was assembled by Christopher Tolkien out of such materials as could be found among his father’s papers.

  These translations were in effect Tolkien’s last published philological work, for although they are accompanied by no notes or commentary they are the result of sixty years’ minute study of the poems, and in many places they provide an informed and illuminating interpretation of hard and ambiguous passages in the originals. Most important of all, they bring these poems to an audience that could not have read them in Middle English. For this reason they are a fitting conclusion to the work of a man who believed that the prime function of a linguist is to interpret literature, and that the prime function of literature is to be enjoyed.

  1 Tolkien intended to complete the Pearl edition, but he found himself unable to do so (by this time he was absorbed in writing The Lord of the Rings). It was eventually revised and completed for publication by Ida Gordon, the widow of E. V. Gordon, and herself a professional philologist.

  CHAPTER IV

  JACK

  When Tolkien returned to Oxford in 1925 there was an element missing from his life. It had disappeared with the breaking of the T.C.B.S. in the Battle of the Somme, for not since those days had he enjoyed friendship to the same degree of emotional and intellectual commitment. He had continued to see something of the other surviving T.C.B.S. member, Christopher Wiseman, but Wiseman was now heavily involved with his duties as the headmaster of a Methodist public school,1 and when the two men did meet they now found very little in common.

  On 11 May 1926 Tolkien attended a meeting of the English Faculty at Merton College. Among the familiar faces a new arrival stood out, a heavily-built man of twenty-seven in baggy clothes who had recently been elected Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. This was Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as ‘Jack’.

  At first the two men circled warily around one another. Tolkien knew that Lewis, though a medievalist, was in the ‘Lit.’ camp and thus a potential adversary, while Lewis wrote in his diary that Tolkien was ‘a smooth, pale, fluent little chap’, adding ‘No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’ But soon Lewis came to have a firm affection for this long- faced keen-eyed man who liked good talk and laughter and beer, while Tolkien warmed to Lewis’s quick mind and the generous spirit that was as huge as Lewis’s shapeless flannel trousers. By May 1927 Tolkien had enrolled Lewis into the Coalbiters to join in the reading of Icelandic sagas, and a long and complex friendship had begun.

  Additional Images

  Family group, Bloemfontein, November 1892

  Sarehole Mill (courtesy of Birmingham Public Libraries)

  Ronald and Hilary Tolkien in May 1905.

  Father Francis Morgan (courtesy of the Birmingham Oratory).

  Edith Bratt in 1906, aged seventeen.

  Ronald Tolkien in 1911, aged nineteen.

  Edith and Ronald Tolkien in 1916.

  Family group in the garden at Northmoor Road circa 1936.

  A page from the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings (by permission of Marquette University, Milwaukee).

  Ronald Tolkien when he received his honorary Doctorate of Letters in 1972 (photo by Billett Potter, from The Inklings).

  In the study at Merton Street, 1972 (photo by Billett Potter)

  The last photograph of Tolkien, taken on 9 August 1973 next to one of his favourite trees (Pinus Nigra) in the Botanic Gardens, Oxford (photo by M.G. R.Tolkien)

  Anyone who wants to know something of what Tolkien and Lewis contributed to each other’s lives should read Lewis’s essay on Friendship in his book The Four Loves. Here it all is, the account of how two companions become friends when they discover a shared insight, how their friendship is not jealous but seeks out the company of others, how such friendships are almost of necessity between men, how the greatest pleasure of all is for a group of friends to come to an inn after a hard day’s walking: ‘Those are the golden sessions,’ writes Lewis, ‘when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim or responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life – natural life – has no better gift to give.’1

  This is what it was about, those years of companionship, the walking tours, the friends gathered in Lewis’s rooms on Thursday nights. It was partly the spirit of the times – you may find something of the same sense of male companionship in the writings of Chesterton; and it was a feeling shared, though with less self-awareness, by many men of the day. It has precedents in ancient civilisations, and closer at hand it was in part the result of the First World War, in which so many friends had been killed that the survivors felt the need to stay close together. Friendship of this kind was remarkable, and at the same time entirely natur
al and inevitable. It was not homosexual (Lewis dismisses that suggestion with deserved ridicule), yet it excluded women. It is the great mystery of Tolkien’s life, and we shall understand little of it if we try to analyse it. At the same time if we have ever enjoyed a friendship of that sort we shall know exactly what it was about. And even if that fails us, we can find something of it expressed in The Lord of the Rings.

  How did it begin? Perhaps ‘Northernness’ was the shared insight that started it. Since early adolescence Lewis had been captivated by Norse mythology, and when he found in Tolkien another who delighted in the mysteries of the Edda and the complexities of the Völsung legend it was clear that they would have a lot to share. They began to meet regularly in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, sometimes sitting far into the night while they talked of the gods and giants of Asgard or discussed the politics of the English School. They also commented on each other’s poetry. Tolkien lent Lewis the typescript of his long poem ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’, and after reading it Lewis wrote to him: ‘I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it – I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author.’ He sent Tolkien detailed criticisms of the poem, which he jestingly couched in the form of a mock textual criticism, complete with the names of fictitious scholars (‘Pumpernickel’, ‘Peabody’, and ‘Schick’) who suggested that weak lines in Tolkien’s poem were simply the result of scribal inaccuracies in the manuscript, and could not be the authentic work of the original poet. Tolkien was amused by this, but he accepted few of Lewis’s suggested emendations. On the other hand he did rewrite almost every passage that Lewis had criticised, rewrote so extensively, in fact, that the revised ‘Gest of Beren and Lúthien’ was scarcely the same poem. Lewis soon discovered this to be characteristic of his friend. ‘He has only two reactions to criticism,’ he remarked. ‘Either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.’