J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

As for Tolkien himself, writing to his colleague Norman Davis he referred to the widespread enthusiasm for his books as ‘my deplorable cultus’ and to a reporter who asked him if he was pleased by the enthusiasm of the young Americans he replied: ‘Art moves them and they don’t know what they’ve been moved by and they get quite drunk on it. Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I’m not.’

  Sales of the books continued to increase, and though it is impossible to give an accurate figure it would appear that by the end of 1968 approximately three million copies of The Lord of the Rings had been sold around the world. Numerous translations appeared in a variety of languages.1

  Press reporters began to seek Tolkien out in increasing numbers, and although in principle he disliked giving interviews, his natural courtesy made it difficult for him to turn them away; eventually he selected several for whom he had a particular liking and insisted on communicating with them alone. Visitors of all kinds arrived on business connected with his books, and again, though he wished to remain undisturbed, he usually agreed to see them. In general he tended to like people when he first met them, and then to find them irritating within a short time; eventually, perhaps with this in mind, he installed an alarm-clock which he set to ring a few minutes after the visitor had arrived, whereupon he would imply that he had some other matter to attend to and would show the caller out.

  Americans who were enthusiastic about his books began to make pilgrimages to see him. Dick Plotz, founder member of the Tolkien Society of America, called to interview him for a fan-magazine. Professor Clyde S. Kilby from Illinois arrived showing much interest in The Silmarillion, for which the Tolkien enthusiasts were now waiting impatiently; Tolkien showed Kilby some of the Silmarillion manuscripts, and was glad of his appreciative remarks. Another academic from the Middle West, William Ready, visited Tolkien and later published a book about him which Tolkien found ‘insulting and offensive’; and from then onwards he was more careful about visitors. Early in 1968 the BBC made a film about him, which they called ‘Tolkien in Oxford’; he performed unselfconsciously to the camera, and enjoyed himself in a mild way. Yet on the whole this kind of thing did not please him. He wrote to a reader: ‘Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant. However I do not find that it tends to puff one up; in my case at any rate it makes me feel extremely small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very modest idol cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense.’

  1 For a full list of translations see Appendix C.

  PART SEVEN

  1959–1973: Last years

  CHAPTER I

  HEADINGTON

  Fame puzzled him. It was not something that he had ever expected or felt to be appropriate. Certainly let his readers be enthusiastic about the stories, but why should they make a fuss of him? And they were indeed making a fuss. He was having to deal with a huge mound of correspondence from fans, and many readers did not merely send him letters. They enclosed gifts of every kind: paintings, sculptures, drinking-goblets, photographs of themselves dressed as characters from the books, tape-recordings, food, drink, tobacco, and tapestries. 76 Sandfield Road, where the Tolkiens were now living, was already filled to bursting with books and papers, and now it began to overflow with gifts. Tolkien spent day after day writing letters of thanks. When Allen & Unwin offered to assist with the answering of his fan-mail he accepted with gratitude. But since his private address had received some publicity and his telephone number could be found in the Oxford directory, he was troubled in another way. Callers began to arrive without appointment, asking him to autograph books or to give them money. Usually they were polite, occasionally mad or threatening. The telephone would ring in the middle of the night: an unknown American was on the line, wishing to speak to Tolkien in person, and quite unaware of the time difference. Worst of all, people began to take photographs through the windows. It was not the kind of thing that should happen in an ordered world, a scoured Shire.

  As Tolkien grew older, many of his characteristics became more deeply marked. The hasty way of talking, the bad articulation and the parenthetic sentences, grew to be more pronounced. Attitudes long held, such as his dislike for French cooking, became absurd caricatures of themselves. What he once wrote of prejudices held by C. S. Lewis could have been said of himself in old age: ‘He had several, some ineradicable, being based on ignorance but impenetrable by information.’ At the same time he had nothing like so many prejudices as Lewis; nor is ‘prejudice’ exactly the right word, for it implies that his actions were based upon these opinions, whereas in truth his stranger beliefs rarely had any bearing on his behaviour. It was not so much a matter of prejudice as the habit (and it is not an uncommon Oxford habit) of making dogmatic assertions about things of which he knew very little.

  In some ways he found old age deeply distressing, while in other respects it brought out the best in him. He was saddened by the consciousness of waning powers, and wrote in 1965: ‘I find it difficult to work – beginning to feel old and the fire dying down.’ Occasionally this plunged him into despair, and in his later years he was particularly prone to the gloom that had always characterised his life; the very sense of retirement and withdrawal was sufficient to bring out this side in his nature. But the other side of his personality, the capacity for high spirits and good fellowship, remained just as strong, and if anything it too increased to balance the growing gloom. The approach of old age suited him physically, and as the angularity of his long thin face softened into wrinkles and folds, and there was a suggestion of increased girth behind the coloured waistcoat which he now almost invariably wore, friends noted that the ripening of age was distinctly becoming. Certainly his capacity for enjoying the company of others seemed to increase as the years passed; while the twinkling eyes, the enthusiastic way of talking, the explosive laugh, the easy friendliness, and the expansiveness over the dinner-table or in a bar, made him the most congenial of companions.

  ‘He was a man of “cronies”,’ wrote C. S. Lewis in the obituary of Tolkien, ‘and was always best in some small circle of intimates where the tone was at once Bohemian, literary, and Christian.’ Yet when Tolkien retired from the Merton Professorship in the summer of 1959 he placed himself almost deliberately out of reach of such cronies, away from the society of those whom (apart from his own family) he loved best; and as a result he experienced a measure of unhappiness. In these later years he still saw a little of Lewis, making occasional visits to the ‘Bird and Baby’ and to the Kilns, Lewis’s house on the other side of Headington; and he and Lewis might conceivably have preserved something of their old friendship had not Tolkien been puzzled and even angered by Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman, which lasted from 1957 until her death in 1960. Some of his feeling may be explained by the fact that she had been divorced from her first husband before she married Lewis, some by resentment of Lewis’s expectation that his friends should pay court to his new wife – whereas in the thirties Lewis, very much the bachelor, had liked to ignore the fact that his friends had wives to go home to. But there was more to it than that. It was almost as if Tolkien felt betrayed by the marriage, resented the intrusion of a woman into his friendship with Lewis – just as Edith had resented Lewis’s intrusion into her marriage. Ironically it was Edith who became friends with Joy Davidman.

  The cessation in the mid nineteen-fifties of Tolkien’s regular meetings with Lewis marked the closing of the ‘clubbable’ chapter in his life, a chapter that had begun with the T.C.B.S. and had culminated in the Inklings. From this time onwards he was essentially a solitary man who led most of his life at home. This was chiefly through necessity, for he was greatly concerned for Edith’s health and well-being; and as she was becoming increasingly lame with every year, besides suffering from constant digestive trouble, he felt it his duty to be with her as much of the time as was possible. But this change in his life was also to some extent a deliberate withdrawal from the society in which he had li
ved, worked, and talked for forty years; for Oxford itself was changing, and his generation was making way for a different breed of men, less discursive, less sociable in the old way, and certainly less Christian.

  In his Valedictory Address, given to a packed audience in Merton College Hall at the end of his final summer term, Tolkien touched on some of the changes that were taking place in Oxford. He directed some barbed remarks towards the increasing emphasis on postgraduate research, which he described as ‘the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm into a “planned economy”, under which so much research time is stuffed into more or less standard skins and turned out in sausages of a size and shape approved by our own little printed cookery book’. Yet he ended not with any discussion of academic matters, but by quoting from his own Elvish song of farewell, ‘Namárië’. At last, after four decades of university service, he was looking forward to devoting all his time to his legends, and especially to the completion of The Silmarillion, which Allen & Unwin were now extremely keen to publish, and for which they had already been waiting for several years.

  Sandfield Road was not the best place for retirement. Tolkien had already lived there for six years and was aware of the limitations that it would impose; yet even so he was perhaps not fully expecting the sense of isolation that began when he no longer had to make the daily journey into college. The Sandfield Road house was two miles from the centre of Oxford, and the nearest bus-stop was some distance away, further than Edith was able to walk with ease. Consequently any journey into Oxford or to the Headington shops involved the hiring of a taxi. Nor did friends call with such frequency as they had when the Tolkiens lived in the centre of the city. As to the family, Christopher and his wife Faith often paid visits; Faith, a sculptor, had made a bust of her father-in-law which the English Faculty presented to Tolkien on his retirement; later Tolkien had it cast in bronze at his own expense, and the bronze was placed in the Faculty library. But Christopher, who was now a lecturer, later a Fellow, at New College, was much engaged with his own work. John was now in charge of his own parish in Staffordshire, while Michael was teaching in the Midlands and could only come for occasional visits with his family (a son and two daughters). Priscilla was now back in Oxford, working as a probation officer, and she saw a good deal of her parents; but she lived on the further side of the city and she too had her own concerns.

  Tolkien’s contacts with academic life were now restricted to occasional visits from Alistair Campbell, the Anglo-Saxon scholar who had succeeded Charles Wrenn as professor, and to lunches with his former pupil Norman Davis, the new Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Davis and his wife soon realised that these meals were an important feature of life for the Tolkiens, offering a release from the confined domestic routine at Sandfield Road. Once every week or so the Davises would call to take them to whichever country hotel was the current favourite – and none remained in favour with the Tolkiens for long, due to some defect in the cooking, the size of the bill, or the fact that the route to it involved the use of a new road which had spoiled the scenery. At the hotel they would have a round of drinks – Edith found that a large brandy agreed with her digestion – and then a good lunch with no lack of wine. During the meal Lena Davis would talk to Edith, of whom she was very fond, freeing the two men for their own conversation. But besides this and family events there was little else in Tolkien’s social life.

  Exeter College elected him to an Honorary Fellowship in 1963, Merton following suit with an Emeritus Fellowship. But though he was always welcome in both colleges and was sent frequent invitations, he rarely attended a college dinner; and when he did so he ate little, suspecting the worst of the cooking. Nor would he dine away from home unless Priscilla or a friend was able to keep Edith company for the evening. Concern for her well-being always took precedence with him.

  Immediately after his retirement there was a good deal to occupy him in the matter of domestic arrangements. He had to move all his books out of his college room and find space for them at home, and since his upstairs study-bedroom at Sandfield Road was already crammed, he decided to convert the garage (unoccupied, since there was no car) into a library-cum-office. The shifting of books took many months, and it did no good to the lumbago of which he now complained. But at last everything was in place and he could begin the major task of revising and completing The Silmarillion.

  Inevitably, given his habit of drastic rewriting, he had decided that the whole work needed to be reconstructed, and he began this great labour. He was helped by his part-time secretary Elisabeth Lumsden, who like two of her successors, Naomi Collyer and Phyllis Jenkinson, became friends with him and Edith. But no sooner had he begun to make progress than he was interrupted by the arrival of the proofs of his Ancrene Wisse edition, delayed by a printing strike. Reluctantly he abandoned his mythology and turned to the labour of correcting two hundred and twenty-two pages of Middle English with detailed footnotes. Once the Ancrene Wisse was out of the way, he began to turn back to what he called his ‘real work’ but he felt that before continuing with The Silmarillion he ought to complete the revision of his Gawain and Pearl translations, and to write the introduction that the publishers required for them. Nor did he manage to finish any of this before turning to another task for Allen & Unwin, the revision of his lecture on Fairy-Stories which they wished to reprint together with Leaf by Niggle. Thus there was a perpetual discontinuity, a breaking of threads in his work which delayed achievement and frustrated him more and more.

  A lot of his time was also spent simply in answering letters. Readers wrote to him by the score, praising, criticising, and asking for more information about elements in the stories. Tolkien took every letter seriously, especially if it came from a child or an elderly person. Sometimes he would make two or three drafts of his reply – and then be dissatisfied with the result, or so undecided as to what he should say that he never sent anything. Or he would lose a letter after writing it, and spend hours turning out the garage or his study-bedroom until he had found it. The search might reveal other forgotten things, an unanswered letter or an unfinished story, and he would abandon what he had set out to do, and sit down and read (or rewrite) whatever he had discovered. Many days passed in this fashion.

  He was always glad to deal with requests from readers who wanted to name their house or their pet or even their child after a place or a character in his books; indeed he considered it only proper that they should ask him, and he was angered when a hydrofoil was given the name ‘Shadowfax’ (the horse ridden by Gandalf) without his permission. Those who did write on such matters were often rewarded in unexpected ways; a breeder of Jersey cattle asking if he could use ‘Rivendell’ as a herd-name received a letter from Tolkien to the effect that the Elvish word for ‘bull’ was mundo, and suggesting a number of names for individual bulls that might be derived from it. (When he had posted this letter, Tolkien sat down to work out how it was that mundo came to mean ‘bull’ something that he had not previously considered.) With these and similar matters occupying him more and more, he spent little time working on The Silmarillion.

  Nevertheless he continued to attend to it, and he might have succeeded in preparing it for publication at this time if he had been able to discipline himself into adopting regular working methods. But much of his time was spent simply in playing Patience, often far into the night. It was a habit of many years’ standing, and he had invented a large number of games of his own, which he would pass on gleefully to other Patience players. Certainly he did a good deal of thinking while apparently frittering away the time over cards; but he would usually be filled with remorse at hours spent in this fashion. Often he would pass much of the day drawing marvellously intricate patterns on the backs of old newspapers, while solving the crossword. Inevitably these patterns were caught up in his stories, and became Elvish heraldic devices. Númenórean carpet designs, or drawings of exotic plants with names in Quenya or Sindarin. At first he would be delighted with them.
But then he would feel ashamed at his dilatory ways, and would try to get down to work; then the telephone would ring, or Edith would call him to come shopping or have tea with a friend, and he would have to abandon work for the day.

  He himself was thus partly to blame for the fact that he did not get much done. And this in itself depressed him, and made him even less capable of achieving much, while he was also saddened by what often seemed to him a monotonous and restricting way of life. ‘The days seem blank,’ he wrote, ‘and I cannot concentrate on anything. I find life such a bore in this imprisonment.’

  In particular he felt lonely at the lack of male company. His old friend and doctor, R. E. Havard of the Inklings, was a near neighbour and (being a Catholic) often sat next to him at mass on Sundays. Their conversation on the way home after church was an important part of Tolkien’s week, but it often only made him nostalgic.

  C. S. Lewis died on 22 November 1963, aged sixty-four. A few days later, Tolkien wrote to his daughter Priscilla: ‘So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.’

  He refused a request to write an obituary of Lewis, and he turned down an invitation to contribute to the memorial volume. But he spent many hours pondering over Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer.

  Soon after Lewis’s death, he began to keep a diary, which was something he had not done for many years. In part it was an excuse for using another alphabet that he had invented; he called it his ‘New English Alphabet’ and noted that it was intended as an improvement on what he called ‘the ridiculous alphabet propounded by persons competing for the money of that absurd man Shaw’. It used some conventional letters (though giving them different sound-values), some international phonetic signs, and some symbols from his own Fëanorian alphabet. He employed it in his diary when he wanted to write about private matters. Like all his diaries, this was more often a record of sorrows than of joys, and it does not provide an entirely balanced picture of his life at Sandfield Road. It does however indicate the appalling depths of gloom to which he could sink, albeit only for short periods. ‘Life is grey and grim,’ he wrote at one such moment. ‘I can get nothing done, between staleness and boredom (confined to quarters), and anxiety and distraction. What am I going to do? Be sucked down into residence in a hotel or old-people’s home or club, without books or contacts or talk with men? God help me!’