J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  The Númenor story combines the Platonic legend of Atlantis with the imaginative qualities of The Silmarillion. At the end, Tolkien tells how with the sinking of Númenor the shape of the world is changed, and the Western lands are ‘removed for ever from the circles of the world’. The world itself is bent, yet the Straight Road to the Ancient West still remains for those who can find it. This is the ‘Lost Road’ that gave the title to the new story.

  ‘The Lost Road’ itself (as opposed to the Númenor tale it was designed to introduce) is clearly a kind of idealised autobiography. Its protagonists are a father and son. The father, a professor of history named Alboin (the Lombardic form of ‘Ælfwine’), invents languages, or rather he finds that words are transmitted to him, words that seem to be fragments of ancient and forgotten languages. Many of these words refer to the downfall of Númenor, and the story breaks off, unfinished, with Alboin and his son setting off on their journey through time towards Númenor itself. The story is rather cloying in its portrayal of the father-son relationship as Tolkien would have liked it to be; and it is notable that neither Alboin nor his own father (who appears at the beginning of the story) is encumbered with a wife, both men having been widowed at an early age. The story was probably read to the Inklings; certainly Lewis listened to the Númenor legend, for he refers to it in That Hideous Strength, misspelling it ‘Numinor’. (He also borrowed from Tolkien when he gave his hero Ransom the first name ‘Elwin’, which is a version of ‘Ælfwine’; and again when he named his Adam and Eve in Perelandra ‘Tor and Tinidril’, which Tolkien considered to be ‘certainly an echo’ of Tuor and Idril in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’.)

  ‘The Lost Road’ was abandoned (‘owing to my slowness and uncertainty’, said Tolkien) shortly after the time-travellers in the story reached Númenor. But Tolkien returned to the time-travelling theme as a way of introducing the Númenor legend when, at the end of 1945, he began to write ‘The Notion Club Papers’. This uses the Inklings themselves (in thin disguise) as a setting, and this time it is two Oxford dons, members of the informal literary club that provides the title, who set off on the time-journey. But like its predecessor the story breaks off at the end of the introductory narrative, before the actual time-travelling has been more than superficially described. ‘The Notion Club Papers’ captures much of the spirit of the Inklings, though Tolkien scarcely attempts any portraits of his friends. One part of the story did reach print, a poem about the medieval voyage of St Brendan, a legend that Tolkien adapted to fit his own mythology. Under the title ‘Imram’ (Gaelic for ‘voyage’) the poem appeared in Time & Tide in 1955. On its own it is a little bare, a forlorn memorial to an unfinished and promising story.

  So it was that during the nineteen-twenties and thirties Tolkien’s imagination was running along two distinct courses that did not meet. On one side were the stories composed for mere amusement, often specifically for the entertainment of his children. On the other were the grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually associated with his own legends. Meanwhile nothing was reaching print, beyond a few poems in the Oxford Magazine which indicated to his colleagues that Tolkien was amused by dragons’ hoards and funny little men with names like Tom Bombadil: a harmless pastime, they felt, if a little childish.

  Something was lacking, something that would bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same time tuned to the popular imagination. He was not aware of this lack, of course; nor did it seem particularly significant to him when suddenly the missing piece fell into place.

  It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’

  1 ‘Mr Bliss’ was not the only composition by Tolkien owing its inspiration to motor transport. ‘The Bovadium Fragments’ (perhaps composed early in the nineteen-sixties) is a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode.

  1 This and the subsequent books were read to the Inklings by Lewis as they were written. The first two books gained Tolkien’s almost whole-hearted approval (though he did not admire all of Lewis’s invented names), and it was partly due to his support that Out of the Silent Planet, which had been rejected by two publishers, was accepted by The Bodley Head and published in 1938. He liked Perelandra even more than the first story, but when Lewis began to read That Hideous Strength to the Inklings, Tolkien recorded of it: ‘Tripish, I fear’; and a better acquaintance with the book did not make him change his mind. He regarded it as spoiled by the influence of Charles Williams’s Arthurian-Byzantine mythology.

  Tolkien recognised that the character of Ransom, the philologist hero of Lewis’s stories, was perhaps modelled in part on himself. He wrote to his son Christopher in 1944: ‘As a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him.’

  PART FIVE

  1925–1949(ii): The Third Age

  CHAPTER I

  ENTER MR BAGGINS

  Really that missing piece had been there all the time. It was the Suffield side of his own personality.

  His deep feeling that his real home was in the West Midland countryside of England had, since his undergraduate days, defined the nature of his scholarly work. The same motives that had led him to study Beowulf, Gawain, and the Ancrene Wisse now created a character that embodied everything he loved about the West Midlands: Mr Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit.

  We can see certain superficial precedents for this invention: the Snergs, the name Babbitt, and in Tolkien’s own stories the original four-foot Tom Bombadil and the tiny Timothy Titus. But this does not tell us very much. The personal element is far more revealing. In the story, Bilbo Baggins, son of the lively Belladonna Took, herself one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, descended also from the respectable and solid Bagginses, is middle aged and unadventurous, dresses in sensible clothes but likes bright colours, and has a taste for plain food; but there is something strange in his character that wakes up when the adventure begins. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, son of the enterprising Mabel Suffield, herself one of the three remarkable daughters of old John Suffield (who lived to be nearly a hundred), descended also from the respectable and solid Tolkiens, was middle aged and inclined to pessimism, dressed in sensible clothes but liked coloured waistcoats when he could afford them, and had a taste for plain food. But there was something unusual in his character that had already manifested itself in the creation of a mythology, and it now led him to begin this new story.

  Tolkien himself was well aware of the similarity between creator and creation. ‘I am in fact a hobbit,’ he once wrote, ‘in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.’ And as if to emphasise the personal parallel, Tolkien chose for the hobbit’s house the name ‘Bag End’ which was what the local people called his Aunt Jane’s Worcestershire farm. Worcestershire, the county from which the Suffields had come, and in which his brother Hilary was at that time cultivating the land, is of all West Midland counties The Shire from which the hobbits come; Tolkien wrote of it: ‘Any corner of that county (however fair or squalid) is
in an indefinable way “home” to me, as no other part of the world is.’ But the village of Hobbiton itself with its mill and river is to be found not in Worcestershire but in Warwickshire, now half hidden in the redbrick skirt of Birmingham but still identifiable as the Sarehole where Ronald Tolkien spent four formative years.

  The hobbits do not owe their origins merely to personal parallels. Tolkien once told an interviewer: ‘The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination – not the small reach of their courage or latent power.’ To put it another way, the hobbits represent the combination of small imagination with great courage which (as Tolkien had seen in the trenches during the First World War) often led to survival against all chances. ‘I’ve always been impressed,’ he once said, ‘that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.’

  In some ways it is wrong to talk of hobbits as the ‘missing piece’ that was needed before the two sides of Tolkien’s imagination during the nineteen-twenties and thirties could meet and fuse; at least chronologically wrong, because Tolkien probably began to write The Hobbit quite early in this period. It would be more accurate to say that not until the book was finished and published – indeed not until he began to write the sequel – did he realise the significance of hobbits, and see that they had a crucial role to play in his mythology. In itself The Hobbit began as merely another story for amusement. Moreover it nearly suffered the fate of so many others and remained unfinished.

  While we can see quite clearly why Tolkien began to write the story, it proves impossible to say exactly when. The manuscript gives no indication of date, and Tolkien himself was unable to remember the precise origins of the book. In one account he said: ‘I am not sure but I think the Unexpected Party (the first chapter) was hastily written before 1935 but certainly after 1930 when I moved to 20 Northmoor Road.’ Elsewhere he wrote: ‘On a blank leaf I scrawled “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early nineteen-thirties.’ This recollection that there was a hiatus between the original idea and the composition of the main body of the story is confirmed by a note that Tolkien scribbled on a surviving page of the original Chapter One: ‘Only page preserved of the first scrawled copy of The Hobbit which did not reach beyond the first chapter.’ In 1937, shortly after the book was published, Christopher Tolkien recorded (in his letter to Father Christmas) this account of the book’s origins: ‘Daddy wrote it ages ago, and read it to John, Michael and me in our Winter “Reads” after tea in the evening; but the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all; he finished it about a year ago.’ And writing to his publishers during the same year, Tolkien declared: ‘My eldest boy was thirteen when he heard the serial. It did not appeal to the younger ones who had to grow up to it successively.’

  These statements lead to the conclusion that the book was begun in 1930 or 1931 (when John, the eldest boy, was thirteen); certainly there was a completed typescript in existence (lacking only the final chapters) in time for it to be shown to C. S. Lewis late in 1932. However John and Michael Tolkien do not believe this to be the entire picture, for they have a clear memory of certain elements in the story being told to them in the study at 22 Northmoor Road, that is, before 1930. They are not certain that what they were listening to at that time was necessarily a written story: they believe that it may well have been a number of impromptu tales which were later absorbed into The Hobbit proper.

  The manuscript of The Hobbit suggests that the actual writing of the main part of the story was done over a comparatively short period of time: the ink, paper, and handwriting style are consistent, the pages are numbered consecutively, and there are almost no chapter divisions. It would also appear that Tolkien wrote the story fluently and with little hesitation, for there are comparatively few erasures or revisions. Originally the dragon was called ‘Pryftan’ the name ‘Gandalf’ was given to the chief dwarf, and the wizard was called ‘Bladorthin’. The dragon’s name was soon changed to ‘Smaug’ from the Germanic verb smugan meaning ‘to squeeze through a hole’ Tolkien called this ‘a low philological jest’. But the name ‘Bladorthin’ was retained for some time, and it was not until the draft was well advanced that the chief dwarf was renamed ‘Thorin Oakenshield’ and the name ‘Gandalf’ (taken, like all the dwarf-names, from the Elder Edda) was given to the wizard, for whom it was eminently suitable on account of its Icelandic meaning of ‘scorcerer-elf’ and hence ‘wizard’.

  The story began, then, merely for personal amusement. Certainly Tolkien had at first no intention that the bourgeois comfortable world of Bilbo Baggins would be related in any way to the vast mythological landscape of The Silmarillion. Gradually, however, elements from his mythology began to creep in. Inevitably the dwarves suggested a connection, for ‘dwarves’ (spelt in that fashion) had played a part in the earlier work; and when in the first chapter of The Hobbit the wizard mentioned ‘the Necromancer’ there was a reference to the legend of Beren and Lúthien. Soon it was apparent that the journey of Bilbo Baggins and his companions lay across a corner of that Middle-earth which had its earlier history chronicled in The Silmarillion. In Tolkien’s words this was ‘the world into which Mr Baggins strayed’. And if the events of the new story were clearly set long after those of The Silmarillion, then, since the earlier chronicles recorded the history of the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth, it appeared that The Hobbit was to be a tale of the Third Age.

  ‘One writes such a story,’ said Tolkien, ‘out of the leaf-mould of the mind’ and while we can still detect the shape of a few of the leaves – the Alpine trek of 1911, the goblins of the ‘Curdie’ books of George Macdonald, an episode in Beowulf when a cup is stolen from a sleeping dragon – this is not the essential point of Tolkien’s metaphor. One learns little by raking through a compost heap to see what dead plants originally went into it. Far better to observe its effect on the new and growing plants that it is enriching. And in The Hobbit the leaf-mould of Tolkien’s mind nurtured a rich growth with which only a few other books in children’s literature can compare.

  For it is a children’s story. Despite the fact that it had been drawn into his mythology, Tolkien did not allow it to become overwhelmingly serious or even adult in tone, but stuck to his original intention of amusing his own and perhaps other people’s children. Indeed he did this too consciously and deliberately at times in the first draft, which contains a large number of ‘asides’ to juvenile readers, remarks such as ‘Now you know quite enough to go on with’ and ‘As we shall see in the end’. He later removed many of these, but some remain in the published text – to his regret, for he came to dislike them, and even to believe that any deliberate talking down to children is a great mistake in a story. ‘Never mind about the young!’ he once wrote. ‘I am not interested in the “child” as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted).’ But when he wrote The Hobbit he was still suffering from what he later called ‘the contemporary delusions about “fairy-stories” and children’ – delusions that not long afterwards he made a conscious decision to renounce.

  The writing of the story progressed fluently until the passage not far from the end where the dragon Smaug is about to die. Here Tolkien hesitated, and tried out the narrative in rough notes – something he was often to do in The Lord of the Rings but seems to have done only rarely in The Hobbit. These notes suggest that Bilbo Baggins might creep into the dragon’s lair and stab him. ‘Bilbo plunges in his little magic knife,’ he wrote. ‘Throes of dragon. Smashes walls and entrance to tunnel.’ But this idea, which scarcely suited the character of the
hobbit or provided a grand enough death for Smaug, was rejected in favour of the published version where the dragon is slain by the archer Bard. And then, shortly after he had described the death of the dragon, Tolkien abandoned the story.

  Or to be more accurate, he did not write any more of it down. For the benefit of his children he had narrated an impromptu conclusion to the story, but, as Christopher Tolkien expressed it, ‘the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all’. Indeed they were not even written in manuscript. The typescript of the nearly finished story, made in the small neat typeface of the Hammond machine, with italics for the songs, was occasionally shown to favoured friends, together with its accompanying maps (and perhaps already a few illustrations). But it did not often leave Tolkien’s study, where it sat, incomplete and now likely to remain so. The boys were growing up and no longer asked for ‘Winter Reads’ so there was no reason why The Hobbit should ever be finished.

  One of the few people to be shown the typescript of The Hobbit was a graduate named Elaine Griffiths, who had been a pupil of Tolkien’s and had become a family friend. Upon his recommendation she was engaged by the London publishers George Allen & Unwin to revise Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf, a popular undergraduate ‘crib’. One day in 1936 (some time after The Hobbit had been abandoned) a member of Allen & Unwin’s staff came down to Oxford to see Elaine Griffiths about the project. This was Susan Dagnall, who had read English at Oxford at the same time as Elaine Griffiths and indeed knew her well. From her she learnt of the existence of the unfinished but remarkable children’s story that Professor Tolkien had written. Elaine Griffiths suggested that Susan Dagnall should go to Northmoor Road and try to borrow the typescript. Susan Dagnall went, met Tolkien, asked for the typescript, and was given it. She took it back to London, read it, and decided that it was certainly worthy of consideration by Allen & Unwin. But it stopped short just after the death of the dragon. She sent the typescript back to Tolkien, asking him if he would finish it, and preferably soon, so that the book could be considered for publication in the following year.