J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  What had happened was almost inevitable. Tolkien had not really wanted to write any more stories like The Hobbit; he had wanted to get on with the serious business of his mythology. And that was what he could now do. The new story had attached itself firmly to The Silmarillion, and was to acquire the dignity of purpose and the high style of the earlier book. True, the hobbits were still hobbits, small people with fur on their feet and funny names like Baggins and Gamgee (the family joke about ‘Gaffer Gamgee’ had led to the inclusion of a character of that name, and, more important, to the invention of his son ‘Sam’ who was to play a major part in the story). In a sense the hobbits had only been acquired by accident from the earlier book. But now, for the first time, Tolkien realised the significance of hobbits in Middle-earth. The theme of his new story was large, but it was to have its centre in the courage of these small people; and the heart of the book was to be found in the inns and gardens of The Shire, Tolkien’s representation of all that he loved best about England.

  Now that the full nature of the story had become apparent, there were fewer false starts or reconsiderations. Home from the Sidmouth holiday, Tolkien spent many hours during the autumn of 1938 continuing the tale, so that by the end of the year it was well into what eventually became Book II. Usually he worked at night, as was his habit, warmed by the idiosyncratic stove in his study grate at Northmoor Road, and writing with his dip-pen on the backs of old examination answers – so that much of The Lord of the Rings is interspersed with fragments of long-forgotten essays by undergraduates. Each chapter would begin with a scribbled and often illegible draft; then would come a rewriting in a fairer hand; and finally a typescript done on the Hammond machine. The only major change still to be made was in the matter of the hero’s name. After a brief period in the summer of 1939 when he considered changing everything he had done so far and starting all over again with Bilbo as the hero – presumably on the principle that the hero of the first book ought to be the hero of the second – Tolkien went back to his intention of using the ‘Bingo’ character; but as the name ‘Bingo’ had now become quite unbearable to him in view of the serious nature the story had taken on, he changed it to ‘Frodo’ a name that already belonged to a minor character. And ‘Frodo’ it remained.

  At about the time that Tolkien decided to call the book The Lord of the Rings, Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Hitler. Tolkien, like many others at the time, was suspicious not so much of German intentions as of those of Soviet Russia; he wrote that he had ‘a loathing of being on any side that includes Russia’ and added: ‘One fancies that Russia is probably ultimately far more responsible for the present crisis and choice of moment than Hitler.’ However this does not mean that the placing of Mordor (the seat of evil in The Lord of the Rings) in the East is an allegorical reference to contemporary world politics, for as Tolkien himself affirmed it was a ‘simple narrative and geographical necessity’. Elsewhere he made a careful distinction between allegory and applicability: ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.’ As C. S. Lewis wrote of The Lord of the Rings: ‘These things were not devised to reflect any particular situation in the real world. It was the other way round; real events began, horribly, to conform to the pattern he had freely invented.’

  Tolkien hoped to continue work on the book in the early months of 1939, but there were endless distractions, among them his commitment to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews at the beginning of March. For his subject he had chosen the topic originally promised to the undergraduate society at Worcester College a year previously: fairy-stories. It was appropriate to the occasion, being a subject that had much concerned Lang himself, and it was also much in Tolkien’s mind while he was writing his new story. The Hobbit was clearly designed for children and The Silmarillion for adults, but he was aware that The Lord of the Rings was less easy to categorise. In October 1938 he wrote to Stanley Unwin that it was ‘forgetting “children” and becoming more terrifying than The Hobbit’. And he added: ‘It may prove quite unsuitable.’ But he felt strongly that fairy-stories are not necessarily for children, and he decided to devote much of his lecture to the proof of this belief.

  He had touched on the crucial point in the poem ‘Mythopoeia’ that he had written for C. S. Lewis many years before, and he decided to quote from it in the lecture:

  The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls Him. Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons – ‘twas our right (used or misused). That right has not decayed: we make still by the law in which we’re made.

  ‘Man, Sub-creator’ was in one sense a new way of expressing what is often called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief, and Tolkien made it the central argument of the lecture.

  ‘What really happens,’ he wrote, ‘is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.’

  He made a good many points in the lecture, perhaps too many for an entirely cogent argument. But at the end he asserted in powerful terms that there is no higher function for man than the ‘sub-creation’ of a Secondary World such as he was already making in The Lord of the Rings, and he gave expression to his hope that in one sense this story and the whole of his related mythology might be found to be ‘true’. ‘Every writer making a secondary world,’ he declared, ‘wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.’ Indeed he went so far as to say that it was a specifically Christian venture to write such a story as he was now engaged upon. ‘The Christian,’ he said, ‘may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.’

  The lecture was delivered at St Andrews on 8 March 1939 (the date has been variously and erroneously given as 1938 and 1940); and afterwards Tolkien returned with a new enthusiasm to the story whose purpose he had justified. That story had been begun as a mere ‘sequel’ to The Hobbit, at the instigation of his publisher, but now, especially after the declaration of high purpose that he had made in the lecture, the Ring was as important to him as the Silmarils. In fact it was now clear that The Lord of the Rings was not so much a sequel to The Hobbit as a sequel to The Silmarillion. Every aspect of the earlier work was playing a part in the new story: the mythology itself, which provided both a historical setting and a sense of depth, the elvish languages that he had developed so painstakingly and thoroughly over more than twenty-five years, even the Fëanorian alphabet in which he had kept his diary from 1926 to 1933, and which he now used for elvish inscriptions in the story. Yet to his friends, Tolkien still referred to the story in modest terms as ‘the new Hobb
it’ or ‘the Hobbit sequel’.

  Under this title it was read chapter by chapter to the Inklings, and was received with much enthusiasm; although not everyone who listened to the story was delighted by the ‘high style’ of prose that had begun to predominate in the book. Tolkien had moved from the comparatively colloquial approach of the opening chapters into a manner that was more and more archaic and solemn as he progressed. He was well aware of this; indeed it was entirely deliberate, and it was discussed by him at the time in print – just as the intentions of the book had been discussed in the St Andrews lecture. This time the context was his introduction to the revised Clark Hall translation of Beowulf. Elaine Griffiths had found herself unable to complete the revision, and after failing to find the time to get it done himself Tolkien had handed the task over to his colleague Charles Wrenn, who was then at the University of London. Wrenn completed the work speedily, but Allen & Unwin had to wait for many months before Tolkien could be persuaded to marshal his thoughts sufficiently to write the introduction that he had promised for the volume. When he did write it, this introduction proved to be a lengthy discussion of the principles of translation, and in particular an argument in favour of the adoption of a ‘high style’ when dealing with heroic matters. Consciously or unconsciously, he was really discussing The Lord of the Rings, which had at that time (the beginning of 1940) reached the middle of what was to become Book II.

  In the introduction Tolkien declared, in justification of a high style: ‘We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer “striking” and “smiting”; talk and chat and prefer “speech” and “discourse”; well-bred, brilliant, or polite noblemen (visions of snobbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the “worthy, brave and courteous men” of long ago.’ From this time onwards he put these stylistic precepts more and more into practice in The Lord of the Rings. This was almost inevitable, for as the story grew grander in scale and purpose it adopted the style of The Silmarillion; yet Tolkien did not make any stylistic revision of the first chapters, which had been written in a much lighter vein; and he himself noted when reading the book again twenty-five years later: ‘The first volume is really very different to the rest.’

  The outbreak of war in September 1939 did not have any immediate major effect on Tolkien’s life; but during this time, to his inevitable sorrow, family life changed as the boys left home. John, the eldest, who had read English at his father’s old college, Exeter, was training for the Catholic priesthood in Rome, and was later evacuated with his fellow-students to Lancashire. Michael spent a year at Trinity College and then became an anti-aircraft gunner. Christopher, recovered from his illness, returned to school for a brief period before following his brother to Trinity. Only Priscilla, the youngest of the family, was still living at home. There was some disruption of the regular pattern of life at Northmoor Road: domestic help became scarce, evacuees and lodgers were sometimes accommodated, hens were installed in the garden to increase the supply of eggs, and Tolkien took turns of duty as an air raid warden, sleeping in the damp little hut that served as the local headquarters. There were, however, no German air attacks on Oxford; nor was Tolkien required, as were a number of dons, to undertake work for the War Office or other government departments.

  As the war progressed, the character of the University changed greatly, for large numbers of service cadets were drafted to Oxford for ‘short courses’ before they took up their duties as officers; Tolkien organised a syllabus for naval cadets in the English School, and modified many of his lectures to suit the less specialist audiences. But in general terms his life was much as it had been before the war, and his distress at the continuation of hostilities was almost as much for ideological as for personal reasons. ‘People in this land,’ he wrote in 1941, ‘seem not even yet to realise that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.’

  Many years later, Tolkien recalled that the writing of The Lord of the Rings halted for almost a year late in 1940, when it had reached the point at which the Company discovers Balin’s tomb in Moria. If this is true – and other evidence would seem to confirm that there was a hiatus at about this time – it was only the first of several major delays or hesitations in the writing, none of them ascribable to any specific external cause.

  When work was resumed, Tolkien drew up outlines for the end of the story – which he did not imagine was more than a few chapters away – and began to sketch the episode where two of the hobbits encounter Treebeard, the being who was the ultimate expression of Tolkien’s love and respect for trees. When eventually he came to write this chapter (so he told Nevill Coghill) he modelled Treebeard’s way of speaking. ‘Hrum, Hroom’, on the booming voice of C. S. Lewis.

  Allen & Unwin had originally hoped that the new story would be ready for publication a mere couple of years after they had issued The Hobbit. That hope had faded, and in 1942 even the original Hobbit had to go out of print when the warehouse stock of copies was burnt in the London blitz. But Stanley Unwin continued to take an interest in the progress of the ‘new Hobbit’ and in December 1942 he received a letter from Tolkien which reported: ‘It is now approaching completion. I hope to get a little free time this vacation, and might hope to finish it off early next year. It has reached Chapter XXXI and will require at least six more to finish (these are already sketched).’

  Yet Chapter XXXI (the original number of ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’) was only at the end of what became Book III; and in the event there were to be not six but thirty-one more chapters before the book was complete. Tolkien tried to tackle the story in the months that followed, and he wrote a little more of it. But by the summer of 1943 he had to admit that he was ‘dead stuck’.

  One cause of the difficulty was his perfectionism. Not content with writing a large and complex book, he felt he must ensure that every single detail fitted satisfactorily into the total pattern. Geography, chronology, and nomenclature all had to be entirely consistent. He had been given some assistance with the geography, for his son Christopher helped him by drawing an elaborate map of the terrain covered by the story. Tolkien himself had been making rough sketch-maps since beginning work on the book; he once said: ‘If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.’ But the map in itself was not enough, and he made endless calculations of time and distance, drawing up elaborate charts concerning events in the story, showing dates, the days of the week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the wind and the phase of the moon. This was partly his habitual insistence on perfection, partly sheer revelling in the fun of ‘sub-creation’ but most of all a concern to provide a totally convincing picture. Long afterwards he said: ‘I wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it (in a sense) as actual history.’

  Name-making also involved much of his attention, as was inevitable, for the invented languages from which the names were constructed were both the mainspring of his mythology and in themselves a central activity of his intellect. Once again, the elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, now more sophisticated than they had been when he began The Silmarillion twenty-five years earlier, played a principal role in name-making, and were used in the composition of elvish poems and songs. The story also called for the invention of at least the rudiments of several other languages, and all this took time and energy. Moreover he had reached a point where the story divided into several independent and in themselves complicated chains of events, and while he believed that it would only take him two or three chapters to get Frodo and Sam Gamgee to Mordor he could not yet face unravelling the co
mplexities of the simultaneous events in Gondor and Rohan. It had taken him nearly six years to bring the story this far; how could he ever find the time and energy to finish it, let alone to complete and revise The Silmarillion, which still clamoured for attention? He was fifty-one, tired, and fearful that in the end he would achieve nothing. He had already gained a reputation for almost indefinite procrastination in his philological work, and this sometimes amused him, though it was often saddening to him; but as to never finishing his mythology, that was a dreadful and numbing thought.

  One day at about this time Lady Agnew, who lived opposite in Northmoor Road, told him that she was nervous about a large poplar tree in the road; she said that it cut off the sun from her garden, and she feared for her house if it fell in a gale. Tolkien thought that this was ridiculous. ‘Any wind that could have uprooted it and hurled it on her house’ he said, ‘would have demolished her and her house without any assistance from the tree.’ But the poplar had already been lopped and mutilated, and though he managed to save it now, Tolkien began to think about it. He was after all ‘anxious about my own internal Tree’ his mythology; and there seemed to be some analogy.

  One morning he woke up with a short story in his head, and scribbled it down. It was the tale of a painter named Niggle, a man who, like Tolkien, ‘niggled’ over details: ‘He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a huge tree. There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out.’