J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  In the story, which he called Leaf by Niggle, Tolkien expressed his worst fears for his mythological Tree. Like Niggle he sensed that he would be snatched away from his work long before it was finished – if indeed it could ever be finished in this world. For it is in another and brighter place that Niggle finds his Tree finished, and learns that it is indeed a real tree, a true part of creation.

  The story was not published for many months, but the actual business of writing it helped to exorcise some of Tolkien’s fear, and to get him to work again on The Lord of the Rings; though the immediate impulse came from C. S. Lewis.

  By the beginning of 1944 The Lord of the Rings had lain untouched for many months, and Tolkien wrote: ‘I do not seem to have any mental energy or invention.’ But Lewis had noticed what had happened, and he urged Tolkien to get going again and finish the story. ‘I needed some pressure,’ said Tolkien, ‘and shall probably respond.’ At the beginning of April he resumed work, beginning to write what eventually became Book IV, which takes Frodo and Sam Gamgee across the marshes towards Mordor where they hope to destroy the Ring by hurling it into the Cracks of Doom.

  Christopher Tolkien had now been called up into the R.A.F., and had been sent to South Africa to train as a pilot (much to the regret of his father, who believed that aerial warfare was both immoral and excessively dangerous). Tolkien was already writing long letters to Christopher, and now these letters carried a detailed account of progress on the book, and of reading it to the Lewis brothers and Charles Williams in the White Horse, a pub they favoured at the time. Here are a few extracts from the letters:

  Wednesday 5 April 1944: ‘I have seriously embarked on an effort to finish my book, and have been sitting up rather late: a lot of re-reading and research required. And it is a painful tricky business getting into swing again. A few pages for a lot of sweat; but at the moment they are just meeting Gollum on a precipice.’

  Saturday 8 April: ‘Spent part of day (and night) struggling with chapter. Gollum is playing up well on his return. A beautiful night with high moon. About 2 a.m. I was in the warm silver-lit garden, wishing we two could go for a walk. Then went to bed.’

  Thursday 13 April: ‘I miss you hourly, and am lonely without you. I have friends, of course, but can seldom see them. I did see C. S. L. and Charles Williams yesterday for almost two hours. I read my recent chapter; it received approbation. I have begun another. Shall have spare copies typed, if possible, and sent out to you. Now I will return to Frodo and Gollum for a brief spell.’

  Friday 14 April: ‘I managed to get an hour or two’s writing, and have brought Frodo nearly to the gates of Mordor. Afternoon lawn-mowing. Term begins next week, and proofs of Wales papers have come. Still I am going to continue “Ring” in every salvable moment.’

  Tuesday 18 April: ‘I hope to see C. S. L. and Charles W. tomorrow morning and read my next chapter – on the passage of the Dead Marshes and the approach to the Gates of Mordor, which I have now practically finished. Term has almost begun: I tutored Miss Salu for an hour. The afternoon was squandered on plumbing (stopping overflow) and cleaning out fowls. They are laying generously (9 again yesterday). Leaves are out: the white-grey of the quince, the grey-green of young apples, the full green of hawthorn, the tassels of flower even on the sluggard poplars.’

  Sunday 23 April: ‘I read my second chapter, Passage of the Dead Marshes, to Lewis and Williams on Wed. morning. It was approved. I have now nearly done a third: Gates of the Land of Shadow. But this story takes me in charge, and I have already taken three chapters over what was meant to be one! And I have neglected too many things to do it. I am just enmeshed in it now, and have to wrench my mind away to tackle exam-paper proofs, and lectures.’

  Tuesday 25 April: ‘Gave a poor lecture, saw the Lewises and C.W. (White Horse) for ½ hour; mowed three lawns, and wrote letter to John, and struggled with recalcitrant passage in “The Ring”. At this point I require to know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a rabbit!’

  Thursday 4 May: ‘A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir – and he is holding up the “catastrophe” by a lot of stuff about the history of Gondor and Rohan. If he goes on much more a lot of him will have to be removed to the appendices – where already some fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone.’

  Sunday 14 May: ‘I did a certain amount of writing yesterday, but was hindered by two things: the need to clear up the study (which had got into the chaos that always indicates literary or philological pre-occupation) and attend to business; and trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons in the crucial days between Frodo’s flight and the present situation (arrival at Minas Morgul) were doing impossible things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in another. Rewriting bits of back chapters took all afternoon!’

  Sunday 21 May: ‘I have taken advantage of a bitter cold grey week (in which the lawns have not grown in spite of a little rain) to write: but struck a sticky patch. All that I had sketched or written before proved of little use, as times, motives, etc., have all changed. However at last with v. great labour, and some neglect of other duties, I have now written or nearly written all the matter up to the capture of Frodo in the high pass on the very brink of Mordor. Now I must go back to the other folk and try to bring things to the final crash with some speed. Do you think Shelob is a good name for a monstrous spider creature? It is of course only “She+lob” (=spider), but written as one, it seems to be quite noisome.’

  Wednesday 31 May: ‘I have done no serious writing since Monday. Until midday today I was sweating at Section Papers: and took my MSS. to the Press at 2 p.m. today – the last possible day. Yesterday: lecture – puncture, after fetching fish, so I had to foot it to town and back, and as bike-repairs are impossible I had to squander afternoon in a grimy struggle, which ended at last in my getting tyre off, mending one puncture in inner tube, and gash in outer, and getting thing on again. 10! triumphum!

  ‘The Inklings meeting [held the previous Thursday night] was very enjoyable. Hugo was there: rather tired-looking, but reasonably noisy. The chief entertainment was provided by a chapter of Warnie Lewis’s book on the times of Louis XIV (very good I thought it); and some excerpts from C. S. L.’s “Who Goes Home” – a book on Hell, which I suggested should have been called rather “Hugo’s Home”.1 I did not get back till after midnight. The rest of my time, barring chores in and out door, has been occupied by the desperate attempt to bring “The Ring” to a suitable pause, the capture of Frodo by Orcs in the passes of Mordor, before I am obliged to break off by examining. By sitting up all hours, I managed it: and read the last 2 chapters (“Shelob’s Lair” and “The Choice of Master Samwise”) to C. S. L. on Monday morning. He approved with unusual fervour, and was actually affected to tears by the last chapter, so it seems to be keeping up.’

  Book IV of The Lord of the Rings was typed and sent out to Christopher in South Africa. By this time Tolkien was mentally exhausted by his feverish burst of writing. ‘When my weariness has passed,’ he told Christopher, ‘I shall get on with my story.’ But for the time being he achieved nothing. ‘I am absolutely dry of any inspiration for the Ring,’ he wrote in August, and by the end of the year he had done nothing new except draft a synopsis for the remainder of the story. He meditated rewriting and completing ‘The Lost Road’ the unfinished story of time-travel that he had begun many years before, and he discussed with Lewis the idea of their collaborating on a book about the nature, function, and origin of Language. But nothing was done about either of these projects, and Lewis, referring some time later to the non-appearance of the book on Language, described Tolkien as ‘that great but dilatory and unmethodical man’. ‘Dilatory’ was not altogether fair, but ‘unmethodical’ was often true.

&nb
sp; Tolkien made little if any progress on The Lord of the Rings during 1945. On 9 May the war in Europe came to an end. The next day Charles Williams was taken ill. He underwent an operation at an Oxford hospital, but died on 15 May. Even if Williams and Tolkien had not inhabited the same plane of thought, the two men had been good friends, and the loss of Williams was a bitter thing, a symbol that peace would not bring an end to all troubles – something that Tolkien knew only too well. During the war he had said to Christopher: ‘We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring’ and now he wrote: ‘The War is not over (and the one that is, or part of it, has largely been lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint.’

  In the autumn of 1945 he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, and hence a Fellow of Merton College, an institution that he found ‘agreeably informal’ after Pembroke. A few months later the retirement of David Nichol Smith raised the question of whom to appoint to the Merton Professorship of English Literature. Tolkien was one of the electors, and he wrote: ‘It ought to be C. S. Lewis, or perhaps Lord David Cecil, but one never knows.’ And in the event both these men were passed over, and the chair was offered to and accepted by F. P. Wilson. Though there is no reason to suppose that Tolkien did not support Lewis in the election, the gap between the two friends widened a little after this; or to be more accurate there was a gradual cooling on Tolkien’s part. It is impossible to say precisely why. Lewis himself probably did not notice it at first, and when he did he was disturbed and saddened by it. Tolkien continued to attend gatherings of the Inklings, as did his son Christopher (who after the war resumed his undergraduate studies at Trinity College); Christopher was first invited to the Inklings to read aloud from The Lord of the Rings, as Lewis alleged he read better than his father, and later he became an Inkling in his own right. But though Tolkien could regularly be seen in the ‘Bird and Baby’ on Tuesday mornings and at Magdalen on Thursday nights, there was not the same intimacy as of old between him and Lewis.

  In part the friendship’s decay may have been hastened by Lewis’s sometimes stringent criticisms of details in The Lord of the Rings, particularly his comments on the poems, which (with the notable exception of the alliterative verses) he tended to dislike. Tolkien was often hurt by Lewis’s comments, and he generally ignored them, so that Lewis later remarked of him: ‘No one ever influenced Tolkien – you might as well try to influence a bander-snatch.’ In part the increasing coolness on Tolkien’s side was probably due to his dislike of Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ stories for children. In 1949 Lewis began to read the first of them. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, aloud to Tolkien. It was received with a snort of contempt. ‘It really won’t do!’ Tolkien told Roger Lancelyn Green. ‘I mean to say: “Nymphs and their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun”!’ Nevertheless Lewis completed it, and when it and its successors were published in their turn, ‘Narnia’ found as wide and enthusiastic an audience as that which had enjoyed The Hobbit. Yet Tolkien could not find it in his heart to reverse his original judgement. ‘It is sad,’ he wrote in 1964, ‘that “Narnia” and all that part of C. S. L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his.’ Undoubtedly he felt that Lewis had in some ways drawn on Tolkien ideas and stories in the books; and just as he resented Lewis’s progress from convert to popular theologian he was perhaps irritated by the fact that the friend and critic who had listened to the tales of Middle-earth had as it were got up from his armchair, gone to the desk, picked up a pen, and ‘had a go’ himself. Moreover the sheer number of Lewis’s books for children and the almost indecent haste with which they were produced undoubtedly annoyed him. The seven ‘Narnia’ stories were written and published in a mere seven years, less than half the period in which The Lord of the Rings gestated. It was another wedge between the two friends, and after 1954 when Lewis was elected to a new chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, and was obliged to spend much of his time away from Oxford, he and Tolkien only met on comparatively rare occasions.

  With the end of the war The Hobbit was reprinted, and arrangements were made to publish Farmer Giles of Ham. In the summer of 1946 Tolkien told Allen & Unwin that he had made a very great effort to finish The Lord of the Rings, but had failed; the truth was that he had scarcely touched it since the late spring of 1944. He declared: ‘I really do hope to have it done before the autumn,’ and he did manage to resume work on it in the following weeks. By the end of the year he told his publishers that he was ‘on the last chapters’. But then he moved house.

  The house in Northmoor Road was too big for the family such as it now was, and was too expensive to maintain. So Tolkien put his name down for a Merton College house, and when one became available in Manor Road near the centre of Oxford he made arrangements to rent it. He, Edith, Christopher, and Priscilla moved in during March 1947; John was by now working as a priest in the Midlands, and Michael, married with an infant son, was a schoolmaster.

  Almost immediately Tolkien realised that the new home was unbearably cramped. 3 Manor Road was an ugly brick house, and it was very small. He had no proper study, merely a ‘bed-sitter’ in the attic. It was agreed that as soon as Merton could provide a better house, the family would move again. But for the time being it would have to do.

  Rayner Unwin, the son of Tolkien’s publisher, who as a child had written the report that secured the publication of The Hobbit, was now an undergraduate at Oxford, and had made the acquaintance of Tolkien. In the summer of 1947 Tolkien decided that The Lord of the Rings was sufficiently near completion for him to be shown a typescript of the greater part of the story. After reading it, Rayner reported to his father at Allen & Unwin that it was ‘a weird book’ but nevertheless ‘a brilliant and gripping story’. He remarked that the struggle between darkness and light made him suspect allegory, and commented: ‘Quite honestly I don’t know who is expected to read it: children will miss something of it, but if grown ups will not feel infra dig to read it many will undoubtedly enjoy themselves.’ He had no doubt at all that the book deserved publication by his father’s firm, and he suggested that it would have to be divided into sections, commenting that in this respect Frodo’s ring resembled that of the Nibelungs.

  Stanley Unwin passed these comments to Tolkien. The comparison of his Ring with the Nibelungenlied and Wagner always annoyed Tolkien: he once said: ‘Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.’ Nor, of course, was he pleased by the suggestion of allegory, he replied: ‘Do not let Rayner suspect “Allegory” ‘. There is a “moral”, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals – they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.’ However he was on the whole very pleased by Rayner’s enthusiasm for the book, and he concluded by saying: ‘The thing is to finish the thing as devised, and then let it be judged.’

  Yet even now he did not finish. He revised, niggled, and corrected earlier chapters, spending so much time at it that his colleagues came to regard him as lost to philology. But the final full stop was something he could not yet achieve.

  During the summer of 1947 he drafted a revision to The Hobbit which would provide a more satisfactory explanation of Gollum’s attitude to the Ring; or rather, an explanation that fitted better with the sequel. When this was written he sent it to Stanley Unwin asking for an opinion on it. Unwin mistakenly assumed that it was intended for inclusion in the next reprint of The Hobbit without any further discussion on the matter, and he passed it directly to his production department. Many months later, Tolkien was astonished to see the revised chapter in print when the page-proofs of the new impression were sent to him.

  In the foll
owing months The Lord of the Rings at last reached its conclusion. Tolkien recalled that he ‘actually wept’ when writing the account of the heroes’ welcome that is given to the hobbits on the Field of Cormallen. Long ago he had resolved to take the chief protagonists across the sea towards the West at the end of the book, and with the writing of the chapter that describes the setting sail from the Grey Havens the huge manuscript was nearly complete. Nearly, but not quite. ‘I like tying up loose ends,’ Tolkien once said, and he wished to make sure that there were no loose ends in his great story. So he wrote an Epilogue in which Sam Gangee told his children what happened to each of the principal characters who did not sail West. It ended with Sam listening to ‘the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth’.

  And that was the end; but now Tolkien had to revise, again and again, until he was completely satisfied with the entire text, and this took many months. He once said of the book: ‘I don’t suppose there are many sentences that have not been niggled over.’ Then he typed out a fair copy, balancing his typewriter on his attic bed because there was no room on his desk, and using two fingers because he had never learned to type with ten. Not until the autumn of 1949 was it all finished.

  Tolkien lent the completed typescript to C. S. Lewis, who replied after reading it:

  My dear Tollers,

  Uton herian holbytlas indeed. I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst. Once it really gets under weigh the steady upward slope of grandeur and terror (not unrelieved by green dells, without which it would indeed be intolerable) is almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art known to me. In two virtues I think it excels: sheer sub-creation – Bombadil, Barrow Wights, Elves, Ents – as if from inexhaustible resources, and construction. Also in gravitas. No romance can repel the charge of ‘escapism’ with such confidence. If it errs, it errs in precisely the opposite direction: all victories of hope deferred and the merciless piling up of odds against the heroes are near to being too painful. And the long coda after the eucatastrophe, whether you intended it or no, has the effect of reminding us that victory is as transitory as conflict, that (as Byron says) there’s no sterner moralist than pleasure’ and so leaving a final impression of profound melancholy.