by Stuart Kells
A Dutch edition of The Lord of the Rings appeared in 1956, a Swedish version soon after, and the book is now in print in most living languages. On its own, the book has underwritten more than one publishing firm and many other titles. All Tolkien’s minor works have been published and re-published. There are whole franchises of Middle-earth games, comics, songs, films, cookbooks, diaries, lexicons, atlases, pop-ups, calendars, bestiaries and parodies. Every skerrick of draft manuscript has been published in the series The Making of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher. And scholars and fans have painstakingly reconstructed Tolkien’s own library, much of which was dispersed, and all of which was rich in literature, philology and mythology.
When they come on the market, volumes from Tolkien’s reference library attract much interest and high prices. The highest Tolkienian prices, though, are achieved by pristine, first edition copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In 2015, for example, a copy of The Hobbit sold at Sotheby’s in London for £137,000 against an estimate of £50,000 to £70,000. Two factors helped drive the exceptional price: an inscription written by Tolkien in Elvish; and the presence of the original dust jacket in excellent condition. The singular value of Tolkien’s first edition dust jackets has led to them being protected in archival plastic and in bank vaults. It has also led to them being stolen and faked.
Tolkien died in 1973, aged eighty-one. He did not live to see The Silmarillion in print. Published in 1977, more than fifty years after Tolkien first put pen to paper, it is a turgid work and bears only a slight family resemblance to The Lord of the Rings. A 2004 parody by Adam Roberts (writing as ‘A. R. R. R. Roberts’) was titled Sellamillion, but in truth Tolkien’s attempt to write a ‘mythology for England’ failed. Readers did not take The Silmarillion to their hearts. Tolkien’s real success lies elsewhere, in his linking generations of disparate readers through shared experiences in an unforgettable secondary world.
The history of Middle-earth contains an alternative but recognisable history of libraries—libraries large and small, classical and mediaeval, public and private. Three types of book are found there: tablets, scrolls and codices. In the great human kingdoms of Númenor and Gondor, the most valuable tablets are made from silver and gold. The earliest documented scroll from Middle-earth was The Scroll of Kings. It named all the kings and queens of Númenor, and was destroyed when that island sank. After that disaster, the survivors settled in Middle-earth.
In Tolkien’s world, Elvish culture serves as an idealised version of ancient Greece and Rome. Books are central to that cultural ideal. The second letter of the Elvish alphabet is parma, ‘book’. (The first letter is tinco, ‘metal’.) Elves received the art of book-making as a gift from a god—the divine master-craftsman, Aulë.
At Ost-in-Edhil in Eregion, Nargothrond in West Beleriand, Gondolin in Tumladen, and Menegroth in Doriath, Tolkien depicts Elvish scribes making books. Situated in the Misty Mountains, the Elf city of Rivendell is, like St Gall, a place of books. The city houses a central library, with places for scribework, study and contemplation. The library contains some of the oldest written material extant in Middle-earth. Most adult Elves at Rivendell also maintain private libraries in their homes.
At the start of the First Age, the Dwarf king Durin I established a library at Moria (also known as the Dwarrow Delf and Khazaddûm), a Dwarvish city excavated in stone far beneath the Misty Mountains. Dwarvish books are straightforward chronicles and records of royal administration, expeditions, trade and calamities. Moria’s records are stored in the Chamber of Mazarbul—one of the oldest libraries in Middle-earth. The chamber is a large, square room secured by stone doors and lit by a single wide shaft cut high in its eastern wall. The tight security that surrounds the storage of Dwarvish records reflects their rarity and value. Other Dwarvish cities have similar rooms, where communal books and documents are secured in iron-buttressed chests inside subterranean niches.
In the Chamber of Mazarbul, alongside the tomb of Balin, the Ring Party finds the remains of a Dwarvish codex, The Book of Mazarbul. Begun in Third Age 2989 and written by several Dwarves over a five-year period, the book records the fortunes of the city. The last lines, written just as Moria fell to invading orcs and trolls, are hastily scrawled. Badly damaged during the invasion, the book reveals the skilful use by Dwarves of foreign scripts. Numerous sections of the book are written in Elvish characters, for example. Other parts are written in Khuzdul, the secret language of the Dwarves.
Several early manuscripts seem to have influenced Tolkien’s description of The Book of Mazarbul, among them the scorched Cottonian Beowulf manuscript; the Codex Argenteus or Silver Bible, held in the Uppsala university library; and now at Fulda, Germany, the Ragyndrudis Codex, which Saint Boniface is said to have taken up as a shield, and which bears incisions that might have been made by a sword or an axe.
There are no public lending libraries in the Shire, or elsewhere in Middle-earth. Lending does take place, however. Hobbits routinely lend their own volumes to friends and relatives. Bilbo was generous with his books, often to a fault. Many of them were never returned. Hugo Bracegirdle borrowed and kept such a quantity of Bilbo’s books that, when Bilbo left the Shire in Third Age 3001, he pointedly gave Hugo one of his bookcases in which to store them.
Apart from the sharing of books, there is much sharing of book-making techniques. The noblest human communities seek to emulate Elvish culture. At Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor, there is a ‘writing house’ that resembles a mediaeval scriptorium. Gondor’s professional scribes are attached to the royal household and work under a chief scribe, called the king’s writer. The scribes are employed primarily as copyists, producing faithful facsimiles for the king and his family.
This and other Middle-earth libraries are part of an international tradition of scholarship and research. Examples of that tradition include the wizard Gandalf consulting The Scroll of Isildur in preparation for the last battle with Sauron; Bilbo Baggins preparing at Rivendell his Translations from the Elvish and Meriadoc Brandybuck collating information for The Tale of Years. Elrond was happy to allow foreign Elves and Elf-friends to peruse his many books and documents. He welcomed Aragorn’s and Gandalf’s interest in his maps, and he assisted Bilbo’s and Merry’s researches.
Like the Chamber of Mazarbul, Minas Tirith’s library is well secured: it resides in the treasury, which in turn is inside a guarded citadel. Númenórean émigrés established the library in the Second Age. At the end of the Third Age, it contained a wealth of codices, scrolls and tablets, many of them ancient. A few had been made in Númenor. Others had been rescued from Minas Ithil and Osgiliath before those cities were sacked by Mordor’s armies.
Minas Tirith’s books are locked in cabinets and chests, again like those of the Chamber of Mazarbul. Some of the tablets and scrolls are kept in cloth and leather pouches to further protect them. No one knows exactly what the collection contains. There are uncatalogued books in many different scripts and languages. It takes the wizard Saruman years to comb through the holdings in search of information about the One Ring. When Gondor has no king, the steward Denethor II begrudges Gandalf’s petition to use Minas Tirith’s library. Under the restored king and his heirs, access becomes easier, and the library is greatly expanded, with the city’s own scribes contributing many volumes. There is an international book trade in Middle-earth—books are imported into Gondor from distant regions like the Shire, for example—but there are no printers, and commerce doesn’t dominate the production and distribution of books.
For Tolkien, libraries signified civilisation. All the civilised peoples of Middle-earth regard their books as precious. The demonic goblins he called ‘orcs’ represent a dangerous, mindless, industrial future. They and all the other evil races are destroyers of books, and never make them. (Dragons such as Glaurung and Smaug the Magnificent are exceptional among evil creatures in so far as their treasure hoards probably include libraries of a sort: plunders of Dwarf
-made treasure-bindings.)
This, then, is Tolkien’s fantastical vision of Middle-earth’s book world. His writings are full of fantasy, as well as the occasional anachronism, like the odd references in The Hobbit to pop guns and in The Lord of the Rings to express trains. Paradoxically, however, Middle-earth’s libraries, with their scant holdings of tablets, codices and scrolls, are more mediaevally correct than the abbey library of The Name of the Rose.
Death
Andreas Wilhelm Cramer was chief librarian at Kiel in Germany. In the early 1820s he visited the precious collection of books at the marvellous rococo library of St Gall. Afterwards he noted in his family chronicle: ‘One would not mind being buried in such a library.’ Tim Munby called at a home in Blackheath after the bibliophile owner had died. Many years before, the owner had lost control of his book purchasing. Now, in every room, ‘narrow lanes ran between books stacked from floor to ceiling’. Almost all the books were inaccessible. In one room there was a small clearing just wide enough to accommodate a bed, ‘and there the owner had died, almost entombed in print’.
In 1374, at the age of sixty-nine, Petrarch died in his own library at Arquà near Padua. His body was discovered the following morning, his head resting on an open codex—the manuscript of his Life of Caesar. (Plato is said to have died similarly, ‘with his head on Sophron’s Jests’.)
Charles Van Hulthem perished much as he had lived. ‘Carried away by a sudden apoplectic fit, he died on a pile of books like a warrior on the battlefield.’ Thomas Rawlinson likewise departed, ‘among his bundles, piles, and bulwarks of paper’. Tennyson was buried with the volume of Cymbeline that he had held during his last moments. The editor and bibliophile Gustave Mouravit related a story about pompous Monsieur Servien, who on his deathbed realised he was bookless. So disturbed was he by the thought of what people would say of him when they found no books among his effects, he gave orders that a library be purchased at once.
When Aldus Manutius, ‘the prince of Renaissance printers’, died in 1515, the humanists at his funeral at the church of San Patrinian surrounded his coffin with soldier-like towers of the books he had printed in his lifetime.
CHAPTER 15
A Love Letter
Libraries for the future
In ancient Rome, public libraries were plentiful. Trajan founded several of them, including the large Ulpian Library, which endured until the fifth century AD. Augustus also instituted significant public libraries. The irony of Rome’s first public libraries was that they closely followed Greek models and were largely built from the spoils of war, including plundered Greek manuscripts.
The tradition of public libraries was revived in the European renaissance. In the sixteenth century, Nuremberg’s civic authorities established a municipal library; by the 1550s it contained some 4000 volumes, manuscript and printed. In the centuries that followed, most European nations would have national and municipal libraries, built to varying degrees around an ethos of accessibility.
Anthony Panizzi believed it was the state’s responsibility to fund a national library for the benefit of everyone.
I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.
In twentieth-century America, free public libraries opened up a lifetime of reading, and made possible—for authors such as Eudora Welty and John Updike—a literary existence. Also in that century, Britain’s municipal libraries were a prominent feature of post-war reconstruction and social reforms.
In the late 1950s some of those libraries were the stage for a grandiose, surrealist prank. Joe Orton and his partner, Kenneth Halliwell, surreptitiously removed books from several Islington libraries. Adding spurious blurbs and modifying the dust jackets with perplexing and shocking artwork, the pair then smuggled the books back inside and returned them to the shelves. The blurb on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night had the writer ‘at her most awe inspiring. At her most queer, and needless to say, at her most crude!’ According to the cover of her Clouds of Witness, borrowers should read the book behind closed doors, ‘and have a good shit while you are reading!’ Monkey and baboon pictures were added to the Collins Guide to Roses and other volumes. The biography of John Betjeman was illustrated with an elderly tattooed man in swimming trunks. The cover of Queen’s Favourite by Phyllis Hambledon featured two men wrestling. The jacket of The Collected Plays of Emlyn Williams informed readers of Poggio-ish titles such as ‘Up the Front’, ‘Up the Back’ and ‘Knickers Must Fall’. One of the Three Faces of Eve was a kitten.
Orton and Halliwell decorated the walls of their flat with pages and plates cut from art books; the pair called it ‘library wallpaper’. The pair also tormented local libraries and other institutions via the geriatric letter-writing alter ego Edna Welthorpe. The pranks had a political edge, an acid reaction to the priorities of modern libraries. ‘Libraries might as well not exist,’ Orton wrote in 1967. ‘They’ve got endless shelves for rubbish and hardly any space for good books.’
Municipal officials soon came to suspect Orton and Halliwell. The council’s law clerk, Sidney Porrett, was an English version of Jerry Seinfeld’s diligent Mr Bookman. Porrett devised an elegant sting to ‘catch these two monkeys’. He wrote to Halliwell asking him to remove an illegally parked car. The typed letter of reply, an intemperate sermon on municipal small-mindedness, matched the irregular typeface that the perpetrators had used in their creations.
In April 1962 Orton and Halliwell were arrested and charged with the theft of seventy-two books and 1653 plates. Pleading guilty to five counts of malicious damage, the pair were fined and sentenced to six months in separate prisons. In Orton’s view, the sentences were more severe because of his and Halliwell’s homosexuality.
During his imprisonment, Halliwell attempted suicide. In the five years after the pair were released, Orton built a reputation as an author and playwright. Tragically, in August 1967, Halliwell attacked and killed Orton with a hammer, taking his own life, too, with an overdose of pills.
One of the remarkable aspects of this ultimately terrible episode is that the Islington librarians kept a substantial number of the book covers that Orton and Halliwell had vandalised. The covers, and other artefacts made by the pair, have since become valued parts of the collections of the Islington Local History Centre and other nearby institutions. In 1995 the creations were put on display in the same libraries the pair had raided. A local librarian explained how ‘over the years, we have become proud of Joe Orton as a leading literary figure with local associations’.
Born between the world wars, the poet-librarian Philip Larkin lived the social changes that made modern Britain. As a boy, he was implicated in the destruction of a friend’s collection of cigarette cards. Glyn Lloyd was Larkin’s fellow pupil at a Coventry preparatory school. Lloyd was an avid collector; when his cigarette cards went missing, he called at the Larkin house and accused Philip of taking them. Larkin did have them, and he did return them. Lloyd later wrote of the incident, and how the cards had been defaced: ‘all the beautiful red, white, blue and green shirts…obliterated beneath a pattern of fine crosshatching in blue-black ink!’ Decades later, Larkin placed much of the blame on his parents. ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Lloyd wrote, ‘but certainly in terms of fucking things up, he did a Grade A job on my cigarette cards.’
As an adult, and as a poet of deprivation and ‘being on the edge of things’, Larkin championed public and university libraries. Though sympathetic to Toryism, he came to oppose the 1980s trends—new public management and neo-classical economics—that were antithetical to libraries. For many years, Larkin was university librarian at Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library. When Larkin first met a new vice chancellor there, the VC asked for the li
brary’s payroll/non-payroll breakdown. ‘Mind your own fucking business’ was the poet’s muffled reply. Larkin served on the board of the British Library, but resigned because of the early starts, and because the ‘fire-trap’ meeting room gave him claustrophobia.
Today, Britain’s public libraries are caught in a downward spiral of reduced funding, declining visitation and the de-professionalisation of library services. In The Strange Rise of Semi-literate England, Bill West decried the dispersal of public collections, the neglect of the literary classics and libraries’ disproportionate emphasis on matters other than the acquisition of good books. That emphasis has led to a series of unexpected calamities.
Suppose a library decides to dispose of much of its paper texts, relying instead on microfilm and digital copies, on the grounds that the originals are held elsewhere. And suppose, too, that other libraries make the same judgment. Nicholson Baker made a terrifying discovery: in the drive for efficiency, whole categories of physical texts had been destroyed. Many newspapers, for example, were ‘simply no longer available within the library system other than as surrogates’—a situation he blamed on ‘cost-sphinctering coneheads’.
Over the past decade, Britain’s municipal authorities have closed hundreds of branch libraries. In response to plans to shut ten of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries, the playwright Lee Hall recalled the efforts of working men and women to fight for those same libraries, and ‘for the right to read and grow intellectually, culturally and socially’.
