J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Unfortunately everything worked out rather differently for Edith. She was inclined to be shy, for she had led a very limited social life in childhood and adolescence, and when she came to live in Oxford in 1918 she was unnerved by what she found. She and Ronald and the baby (and her cousin Jennie, who was still with them, remaining until they moved to Leeds) lived in modest rooms in a side-street in the town; and, from her viewpoint as someone who did not know Oxford, the University seemed an almost impenetrable fortress, a phalanx of imposing buildings where important-looking men passed to and fro in gowns, and where Ronald disappeared to work each day. When the University deigned to cross her threshold it was in the person of polite but awkward young men, friends of Ronald’s who did not know how to talk to women, and to whom she could think of nothing to say, for their worlds simply did not overlap. Worse still, the visitors might be dons’ wives, such as the terrifying Mrs Farnell, wife of the Rector of Exeter, whose presence even frightened Ronald. These women only confirmed Edith in her belief that the University was unapproachable in its eminence. They came from their awesome college lodgings or their turreted mansions in North Oxford to coo condescendingly at baby John in his cot, and when they departed they would leave their calling-cards on the hall tray (one card bearing their own name, two cards bearing their husband’s) to indicate that Mrs Tolkien was of course expected to return the call after a short interval. But Edith’s nerve failed her. What could she say to these people if she went to their imposing houses? What possible conversation could she have with these stately women, whose talk was of people of whom she had never heard, of professors’ daughters and titled cousins and other Oxford hostesses? Ronald was worried, for he knew what a solecism would be committed if his wife did not follow the strict Oxford etiquette. He persuaded her to return one call, to Lizzie Wright, who although very learned was not at all like most dons’ wives, having a great deal of her husband’s openness and common sense; but even then Ronald had to take her to the Wrights’ front door himself and ring the bell before hurrying away round the corner. All the other calling-cards gathered dust, the calls were left unreturned, and it became known that Mr Tolkien’s wife did not call and must therefore be quietly excluded from the round of dinner-parties and At Homes.

  Then the Tolkiens moved to Leeds, and Edith found that things were different there. People occupied ordinary modest houses, and there was no nonsense about calling-cards. Another university wife lived a few doors down in St Mark’s Terrace and often called for a chat. Edith also began to see a good deal of Ronald’s pupils who came in for tutorials or tea, and she liked many of them very much. Many of these pupils became family friends who kept in touch with her in later years and often came to visit. There were informal university dances which she enjoyed. Even the children (there were now John, Michael, and, at the end of their time in Leeds, Christopher) were not forgotten, for the university organised splendid Christmas parties at which the Vice-Chancellor used to dress up as Father Christmas. Later, Ronald managed to afford to buy a larger house in Darnley Road, away from the smoke and dirt of the city. They employed a maid and a nurse for the children. On the whole Edith was happy.

  But then suddenly they were back in Oxford. The first house in Northmoor Road was bought by Ronald while Edith was still in Leeds, without her ever having seen it, and she thought it was too small. The older boys had caught ringworm from a public comb at a photographer’s studio in Leeds, and they had to be given lengthy and expensive treatment. When they were sufficiently recovered to go to the Dragon School they were at first unhappy there among the rough-and-tumble of other boys. Then Edith became pregnant again. Not until after the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the move to the larger house next door in 1930 could she feel settled.

  Even then, family life never entirely regained the equilibrium it had achieved in Leeds. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald. In terms of actual hours he was certainly in the house a great deal: much of his teaching was done there, and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was really a matter of his affections. He was very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was about his) and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the company of men of his own kind. More specifically she noticed and resented his devotion to Jack Lewis.

  On the occasions when Lewis came to Northmoor Road, the children liked him because he did not talk condescendingly to them; and he gave them books by E. Nesbit, which they enjoyed. But with Edith he was shy and ungainly. Consequently she could not understand the delight that Ronald took in his company, and she became a little jealous. There were other difficulties. She had only known a home life of the most limited sort in her own childhood, and she therefore had no example on which to base the running of her household. Not surprisingly she cloaked this uncertainty in authoritarianism, demanding that meals be precisely on time, that the children eat up every scrap, and that servants should perform their work impeccably. Underneath all this she was often very lonely, frequently being without company other than the servants and the children during that part of the day when Ronald was out or in his study. During these years Oxford society was gradually becoming less rigid; but she did not trust it, and she made few friends among other dons’ families, with the exception of Charles Wrenn’s wife, Agnes. She also suffered from severe headaches which could prostrate her for a day or more.

  It quickly became clear to Ronald that Edith was unhappy with Oxford, and especially that she was resentful of his men friends. Indeed he perceived that his need of male friendship was not entirely compatible with married life. But he believed that this was one of the sad facts of a fallen world; and on the whole he thought that a man had a right to male pleasures, and should if necessary insist on them. To a son contemplating marriage he wrote: ‘There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss. Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out – or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently – the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc., etc. If the other side’s claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and “fuss” than subterfuge.’

  There was also the problem of Edith’s attitude to Catholicism. Before they were married, Ronald had persuaded her to leave the Church of England and to become a Catholic, and she had resented this a little at the time. During the subsequent years she had almost given up going to mass. In the second decade of marriage her anti-Catholic feelings hardened, and by the time the family returned to Oxford in 1925 she was showing resentment of Ronald taking the children to church. In part these feelings were due to Ronald’s rigid, almost medieval, insistence upon frequent confession; and Edith had always hated confessing her sins to a priest. Nor could he discuss her feelings with her in a rational manner, certainly not with the lucidity he demonstrated in his theological arguments with Lewis: to Edith he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding. Occasionally her smouldering anger about church-going burst into fury; but at last after one such outburst in 1940 there was a true reconciliation between her and Ronald, in which she explained her feelings and even declared that she wished to resume the practice of her religion. In the event she did not return to regular church-going, but for the rest of her life she showed no resentment of Catholicism, and indeed delighted to take an interest in church affairs, so that it appeared even to friends who were Catholics that she was an active church-goer.

  To some extent Ronald and Edith lived separate lives at Northmoor Road, sleeping in different bedrooms and keeping different hours. He worked late, partly because he was short of time in the day, but also because it was not until she had gone to bed that he could stay at his desk without interruption. During the day he could not work for long before s
he summoned him to some domestic duty, or called him to come and have tea with a friend. These frequent interruptions, themselves no more than an understandable demand from Edith for affection and attention, were often an irritant to him, though he bore them patiently.

  Yet it would be wrong to picture her as excluded totally from his work. During these years he did not share his writing with her anything like as fully as he had done long before at Great Haywood; not since then had she been encouraged to participate in his work, and of his manuscripts only the early pages of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ are in her handwriting. Yet she inevitably shared in the family’s interest when he was writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and although she was not well acquainted with the details of his books and did not have a deep understanding of them, he did not shut her out from this side of his life. Indeed she was the first person to whom he showed two of his stories. Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, and he was always warmed and encouraged by her approval.

  He and Edith shared many friends. Among these, some had academic connections, such as Rosfrith Murray (daughter of the original Oxford Dictionary editor Sir James Murray) and her nephew Robert Murray, and former pupils and colleagues such as Simonne d’Ardenne, Elaine Griffiths, Stella Mills, and Mary Salu. All these were family friends, as much a part of Edith’s life as of Ronald’s, and this itself was a binding force between them. She and Ronald did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his and her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild’s measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with.

  Those friends and others who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible both in the small things, the almost absurd degree to which each worried about the other’s health, and the care with which they chose and wrapped each other’s birthday presents; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years at Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree to which she showed pride in his fame as an author.

  A principal source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family. This bound them together until the end of their lives, and it was perhaps the strongest force in the marriage. They delighted to discuss and mull over every detail of the lives of their children, and later of their grandchildren. They were very proud when Michael won the George Medal in the Second World War for his action as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes in the Battle of Britain; and they felt similar pride when John was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church shortly after the war. Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.

  If to us, reading about it so many years later, life at Northmoor Road seems dull and uneventful, we should realise that this was not how the family felt it to be at the time. To them it was full of event. There was the unforgettable occasion in 1932 when Tolkien bought his first car, a Morris Cowley that was nicknamed ‘Jo’ after the first two letters of its registration. After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm. At various times during the journey ‘Jo’ sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall near Chipping Norton, with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later – not entirely without justification, for Tolkien’s driving was daring rather than skilful. When accelerating headlong across a busy main road in Oxford in order to get into a side-street, he would ignore all other vehicles and cry ‘Charge ‘em and they scatter!’ – and scatter they did. ‘Jo’ was later replaced by a second Morris which did duty until the beginning of the Second World War, when petrol rationing made it impractical to keep it. By this time Tolkien perceived the damage that the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing to the landscape, and after the war he did not buy another car or drive again.

  What else remained in the children’s memories? Long summer hours digging up the asphalt of the old tennis-court at 20 Northmoor Road to enlarge the vegetable-plot, under the supervision of their father, who (like their mother) was an enthusiastic gardener, though he left much of the practical work of cultivating vegetables and pruning trees to John, preferring to concentrate his own attention on the roses and on the lawn, from which he would remove every possible weed. The early years at 22 Northmoor Road when there were a succession of Icelandic au pair girls, who told folk-tales about trolls. Visits to the theatre, which their father always seemed to enjoy, although he declared he did not approve of Drama. Bicycling to early mass at St Aloysius’, or at St Gregory’s up the Woodstock Road, or at the Carmelite convent nearby. The barrel of beer in the coal-hole behind the kitchen which dripped regularly and (said their mother) made the house smell like a brewery. July and August afternoons boating on the river Cherwell (which was only just down the road), floating in the family punt hired for the season down past the Parks to Magdalen Bridge, or better still poling up-river towards Water Eaton and Islip, where a picnic tea could be spread on the bank. Walks across the fields to Wood Eaton to look for butterflies, and then back along by the river where Michael would hide in the crack of an old willow; walks when their father seemed to have a boundless store of knowledge about trees and plants. Seaside summer holidays at Lyme Regis when old Father Francis Morgan came down from Birmingham to join them, embarrassing the children with his loud and boisterous ways just as he had embarrassed Ronald and Hilary at Lyme twenty-five years before. The family holiday at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall in 1932 with Charles Wrenn and his wife and daughter, when Wrenn and Tolkien held a swimming race wearing panama hats and smoking pipes while they swam. This was the holiday about which Tolkien later wrote: ‘There was a curious local character, an old man who used to go about swapping gossip and weather-wisdom and such like. To amuse my boys I named him Gaffer Gamgee, and the name became part of family lore to fix on old chaps of the kind. The choice of Gamgee was primarily directed by alliteration; but I did not invent it. It was in fact the name when I was small (in Birmingham) for “cotton-wool”.’ Then there were the later holidays at Sidmouth, where there were hill walks and marvellous rock-pools by the sea, and where their father was already beginning to write The Lord of the Rings; the drives on autumn afternoons to the villages east of Oxford, to Worminghall or Brill or Charlton-on-Otmoor, or west into Berkshire and up White Horse Hill to see the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy; the memories of Oxford, of the countryside, and of the stories that their father told them.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE STORYTELLER

  These stories had begun during the Leeds years. John, the eldest son, often found difficulty in getting to sleep. When he was lying awake his father would come and sit on his bed and tell him a tale of ‘Carrots’, a boy with red hair who climbed into a cuckoo clock and went off on a series of strange adventures.

  In this fashion Tolkien discovered that he could use the imagination which was creating the complexities of The Silmarillion to invent simpler stories. He had an amiably child-like sense of humour, and as his sons grew older this manifested itself in the noisy games he played with them – and in the stories he told Michael when the younger boy was troubled with nightmares. These tales, invented in the early days at Northmoor Road, were about the irrepressible villain ‘Bill Stickers’, a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything. His name was taken from a notice on an Oxford gate that said BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and a similar source provided the name of the righteous person who was always in pursuit of Stickers, ‘Major Road Ahead’.

  The ‘Bill Stickers’ stories were never written down, but others were. When he was on holiday with the family at Filey in th
e summer of 1925, Tolkien composed a full-length tale for John and Michael. The younger boy lost a toy dog on the beach, and to console him his father began to invent and narrate the adventures of Rover, a small dog who annoys a wizard, is turned into a toy, and is then lost on the beach by a small boy. But this is only the beginning, for Rover is found by the sand-sorcerer Psamathos Psamathides who gives him the power to move again, and sends him on a visit to the Moon, where he has many strange adventures, most notably an encounter with the White Dragon. Tolkien wrote down this story under the title ‘Roverandom’. Many years later he offered it to his publishers, very tentatively, as one of a number of possible successors to The Hobbit, but it was not thought suitable on that occasion, and Tolkien never offered it again.

  The children’s enthusiasm for ‘Roverandom’ encouraged him to write more stories to amuse them. Many of these got off to a good start but were never finished. Indeed some of them never progressed beyond the first few sentences, like the tale of Timothy Titus, a very small man who is called ‘Tim Tit’ by his friends. Among other stories begun but soon abandoned was the tale of Tom Bombadil, which is set in ‘the days of King Bonhedig’ and describes a character who is clearly to be the hero of the tale: ‘Tom Bombadil was the name of one of the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom; but he was a hale and hearty fellow. Four foot high in his boots he was, and three feet broad. He wore a tall hat with a blue feather, his jacket was blue, and his boots were yellow.’

  That was as far as the story ever reached on paper, but Tom Bombadil was a well-known figure in the Tolkien family, for the character was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael. The doll looked very splendid with the feather in its hat, but John did not like it and one day stuffed it down the lavatory. Tom was rescued, and survived to become the hero of a poem by the children’s father, ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, which was published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934. It tells of Tom’s encounters with ‘Goldberry, the River-woman’s daughter’, with the ‘Old Man Willow’ which shuts him up in a crack of its bole (an idea, Tolkien once said, that probably came in part from Arthur Rackham’s tree-drawings), with a family of badgers, and with a ‘Barrow-wight’, a ghost from a prehistoric grave of the type found on the Berkshire Downs not far from Oxford. By itself, the poem seems like a sketch for something longer, and when possible successors to The Hobbit were being discussed in 1937 Tolkien suggested to his publishers that he might expand it into a more substantial tale, explaining that Tom Bombadil was intended to represent ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’. This idea was not taken up by the publishers, but Tom and his adventures subsequently found their way into The Lord of the Rings.