The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  In or around the same mensis mirabilis, Tolkien found a second wine cellar stocked with unsuspected, heady possibilities—in this instance not those of words but of pencil, ink, and watercolor. Since learning to draw under his mother’s direction, his subjects had been mostly landscapes and seascapes, many sketched or painted while on vacation in Lyme Regis or Whitby, displaying a good if stiff sense of design (his drawings never entirely escaped this architectural rigidity, reminiscent of the formal symmetries of Art Nouveau; traces exist even in his best paintings of Middle-earth). In December 1911, however, he broke lose from naturalism, beginning a series of abstract or “visionary” sketches. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, preeminent Tolkienists who have written about Tolkien’s art with great sensitivity, frequently use the latter term. Tolkien, however, was a visionary only in a very restricted sense. With one or two exceptions, most notably his 1944 vision of God’s light in Sts. Gregory & Augustine Church (see chapter 12), he did not enjoy—or suffer from—waking visions, unlike many famous Christian mystics and that earlier English mythologist, writer, and watercolorist, William Blake. Tolkien’s “visions” usually arrived in dreams, notably the recurring image of a towering wave that threatened to engulf him, from which he would awaken “gasping out of deep water,” and which he translated into fiction in the Atlantis-like drowning of the island of Númenor. Other visions came to him in the same way that melody comes to a composer or metaphor to a poet, as the fruit of that mysterious artistic process we call, obscurely, inspiration.

  Tolkien’s new art shared with dream imagery a remoteness from the scenes of ordinary life. Many of his pictures depict no scenery at all. They bear sometimes playful abstract titles like Before, Afterwards, Thought, Grownupishness, and Undertenishness, the suffixes of the last two titles lending their name to the entire group, which Tolkien called “Ishnesses.” In these images, one spies hints of the great creations to come. Wickedness, drawn in black and red pencil, suggests Melkor (later Morgoth, the prince of evil in Tolkien’s mythology), with its skull surmounted by innumerable eyes behind a cauldron spewing flames. Before, too, has the cyclopean architecture and flaming braziers of a primordial temple dedicated to death. End of the World is, by contrast, whimsical, with an impossibly long-legged man striding off a cliff into a swirl of sea beneath a starry sky topped by a looming sun. Thought discloses a third mood, neither nightmarish nor comical but monumental, with a robed figure seated outdoors on a chair or throne, head lowered, deep in meditation. Light, emanating from the head, fans across the sky. This drawing resembles Blake’s depictions of Los, archetypal poet and prophet, embodiment of the imagination—an appropriate antecedent image for a young man on the verge of unleashing his own creative daemon. One senses, in these early pictures, no organized artistic or intellectual program, no deliberate project to explore the possibilities of abstraction, simply a young mind expanding beyond the confines of realism, energetically sending out root and branch into black soil and bright sunlight.

  Tolkien needed to make the same bold leap in his academic studies. Learning new languages and cultivating his own invented ones brought frissons of joy but failed to assuage his disappointed tutors or his own conviction that he could (and must) do better. Flubbing the Honour Mods had been a severe blow; the saving grace was the splendid “pure alpha” that he had earned for his exam in comparative philology. With this in hand, he successfully petitioned, with the support of his tutors and the classicist Lewis Richard Farnell, rector of Exeter, to switch into the English Honours School, with a concentration in language.

  It was a brilliant move, flinging open the gates to his scholarly career. Now he could study Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse “lang. and lit.” along with the more standard fare of Chaucer and Shakespeare. He came under the influence of Rhodes Scholar Kenneth Sisam, a New Zealander who would become his tutor in Old and Middle English. Sisam was not an easygoing man, and Tolkien and he would butt heads on many occasions in subsequent decades, competing in 1925 for the Professorship in Anglo-Saxon and disputing in the 1960s over aspects of the Beowulf epic. But Sisam was a splendid scholar and Tolkien, as an undergraduate, benefited greatly from his ideas.

  In the spring of 1914, Tolkien won Exeter College’s Skeat Prize for excellence in English. He spent the five-pound prize on a Welsh grammar and three books by William Morris: a translation of the Völsunga saga and two narrative poems, The Life and Death of Jason and The House of the Wolfings. Purchasing the Morris volumes proved to be another watershed, profoundly affecting Tolkien’s understanding of what literature could do. Most likely, he had been aware of Morris while still at King Edward’s School, where in 1909 the Literary Society sponsored a talk on his work, or perhaps even earlier, for Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and its neomedieval sensibility were much discussed in late Victorian and early Edwardian society and it is likely that both Tolkien and Edith, with their shared interest in calligraphy and other decorative arts, came under its spell. In Oxford, at any event, the great Pre-Raphaelite’s presence was unavoidable. Along with Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris had painted the tempera murals, now fading like old ghosts, that adorn the Oxford Union library, and his magnificent tapestry, the Adoration of the Magi, with its Catholic theme, elflike angel, and haunting forest backdrop, hung in the chapel of Exeter College.

  Tolkien was thrilled by his purchases, in particular by The House of the Wolfings, with its blend of prose and poetry recounting an epic war between Goths (a Germanic people) and Romans. From it he drew nomenclature that will be familiar to his readers—in Morris’s tale, the Goths inhabit the Mark, in Mirkwood—and, more significantly, the overarching structure of a bitter clash between a bucolic, peaceful people and an imperialist military power, which would become the framework for The Lord of the Rings. Catholicism had already nudged him toward a belief in lost Edens and an associated love of nature as the imperfect mirror of God; Sarehole had given him faith in the moral integrity of simple agrarian folk. Morris now taught him how these values could be expressed in hauntingly beautiful, elaborately constructed fantasy fiction. Unfortunately, Morris also taught Tolkien a deliberately archaic style, filled with inverted syntax and outmoded expressions. This “heigh stile” (the expression comes from Chaucer) permeates both The House of the Wolfings and, to the chagrin of many of Tolkien’s readers, large portions of The Silmarillion and more than a few passages in The Lord of the Rings (“Name him not!” says Gandalf, describing his battle with the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings; “Long time I fell … Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone … Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him…”). Tolkien considered the neomedieval affectations of “heigh stile” essential to the atmosphere of ancient myth and legend he wished to convey. Many critics disagree, but it is worth noting that C. S. Lewis defended Morris’s archaisms, calling this approach “incomparably easier and clearer than any ‘natural’ style could be.” This defense appears in his 1939 essay collection, Rehabilitations; as the title suggests, Morris’s reputation was sinking at the time. But then, Lewis always enjoyed a good fight against received opinions.

  Tolkien’s ability to absorb Morris’s experiments in decorative arts proved far more successful. Many of Tolkien’s sketches, especially those that Hammond and Scull term “patterns and devices”—doodles and designs on letters, envelopes, napkins, newspapers, and the borders of paintings—show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite’s exuberant ornamentation, and Tolkien’s 1960 drawing of a Númenorean carpet, with red, yellow, and blue geometric symmetries, could pass for a Morris tapestry seen through a kaleidoscope.

  Tolkien immediately set to work applying the lessons he had learned at Morris’s feet. In a letter to Edith in late 1914, he announced, while speaking of the tales in the Finnish epic the Kalevala, that “I am trying to turn one of the stories—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in betwe
en.” His interest was not idle, but an attempt to supply a sorely felt need: to restore to England some remnant of its scattered and ruined mythological tradition. To a meeting of Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society on November 22, 1914, he declared his admiration for “that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries,” and added, “I would that we had more of it left.” Many years later, he would tell Auden that his legendarium (as he liked to call it, borrowing a Latinism found in medieval collections of saints’ lives) began in “an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.” Kullervo’s story, a seething stew of mass murder, revenge, involuntary servitude, incestuous seduction, and talking swords, eventually would become the tale of Túrin Turambar, a key part of the Silmarillion mythos.

  The retelling of the Kullervo tale began in October 1914. Just a few weeks before, Tolkien had had another literary epiphany with an even more momentous result. In late September, he, Hilary, and their aunt Jane had visited a farm owned by family friends in Gedling, Nottinghamshire. While there he had made a pencil-and-ink sketch of the slate-roofed, three-story farmhouse. It is a lovely but unremarkable building, yet it looms large in Tolkien’s life, for within it he wrote the first lines of what would become the seed of his mythology of Middle-earth; it was here, in a register yet dimly understood, that his imaginary cosmos first found voice. Tolkien had been reading—without much interest—the Anglo-Saxon poem Crist (formerly attributed to the poet Cynewulf) from the tenth-century Exeter Book, when his attention was caught by the following line, which evoked in him “a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep”:

  éala éarendel, engla beorhtast,

  ofer middangeard monnum sended

  Hail Éarendel, brightest of angels

  Sent unto men upon Middle-earth

  The poem itself is based upon the fifth of the Latin “O” Antiphons sung at Vespers during the season of Advent, and familiar to modern churchgoers from John Mason Neale’s nineteenth-century rendition in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” But who is Éarendel? This mysterious Old English word looks like a proper name; Albert Cook, in his 1900 edition of Crist, which Tolkien would have known, translates it as “rising sun,” which would seem to point to Christ. Yet in the tenth-century Blickling Homilies, as Tolkien would note later, eorendel (as it is spelled there) refers to John the Baptist in his role as herald of Christ, the rising sun. The image has biblical roots (Luke 1:68–79); John the Baptist is “brightest of angels” by virtue of being the messenger (in Greek, angelos) of Christ, and he is the morning star—namely, Venus—by virtue of being forerunner of the dawn. Tolkien thought he could see, in these associations, the baptized version of an astral myth.

  With hints like these in the back of his mind—though without conscious Christian intent, since it was mainly the sound of the words that enchanted him—Tolkien composed a poem, “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star,” in which Éarendel steers his ship of burning light across the sky in pursuit of the sun, in endless round, until cold and age end his quest. The poem’s creation seems to have been a matter of serendipity, or inspiration, without much conscious design on Tolkien’s part, for when his TCBS pal G. B. Smith asked him what the poem meant, he confessed that he didn’t know but intended to find out. It took him decades to do so. Eventually “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star,” the spearhead of the entire legendarium, became part of The Silmarillion, telling of Eärendil the Mariner, half Elf, half human, who pleads with the Valar—Tolkien’s immortal godlike beings—to show mercy upon both Elves and Men, and who rides his ship Vingilot through the sky, bringing hope to all of Middle-earth. Eärendil is, as the pioneering Tolkien authority and Old English scholar Tom Shippey points out, “not a Redeemer, but an Intercessor,” thus akin to a third New Testament figure, Mary, to whom Tolkien had throughout his life a fierce devotion. The keen-eyed reader will also note, in the original lines from Crist that gave rise to Tolkien’s poem, the word middangeard, cognate with the Old Norse Miðgarðr (Midgard), the middle “yard” where humans dwell, linked by its similar sound to the Old English eorðe, “earth”: hence Middle-earth, which Tolkien would adopt for his mythology.

  La Vita Nuova

  During these years of discovery, Tolkien’s love life blossomed apace. Edith was now openly his fiancée. At the stroke of midnight on his twenty-first birthday, January 3, 1913, the ban put in place by Father Francis officially ended, and immediately Tolkien wrote to Edith, still living in Cheltenham with family friends, to proclaim his undiminished, undying love. He emerges here as a young man in command, with the integrity to wait until the midnight hour and the alacrity to wait not one second more before reclaiming his heart’s desire. When Edith replied with the potentially stupefying news that during Tolkien’s enforced silence she had become engaged to someone else, he rushed to Cheltenham and won her back. He then demanded—further evidence of his newfound imperiousness—that Edith convert to Catholicism. This was not strictly necessary, according to canon law, but the Church (and Tolkien) preferred an all-Catholic wedding, and it ensured that the couple’s children would be raised in the fold. Edith agreed. At the time, she was a practicing Anglican, faithful but without fervor; according to at least one family friend, she agreed to switch altars largely in order to marry the man she loved.

  While wooing and winning Edith, Tolkien also cultivated his relationship with the members of the TCBS. He stayed in close touch with Wiseman and Gilson, both at Cambridge, and became fast friends with G. B. Smith, who entered Oxford in 1913. Tolkien and Wiseman corresponded regularly, often discussing religion, which Tolkien affirmed as “the moving force and at the same time the foundation of both of us.” The TCBS fellowship culminated in the “Council of London,” held on December 13–14, 1914, at Wiseman’s family home, where the four friends, gathered around a gas fire, smoked pipes and hashed out their philosophies of life. Gilson later wrote of the “bliss” of this gathering, declaring that “I never spent happier hours.”

  They were productive hours, too, for at this and later meetings the TCBS proclaimed themselves a force against corruption and a bastion of goodness, especially in the realm of art. The group’s aim, wrote Smith, was “to drive from life, letters, the stage and society that dabbling in and hankering after the unpleasant sides and incidents in life and nature which have captured the larger and worser tastes in Oxford, London and the world” and “to reestablish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everybody’s breast.” Despite its artlessness and prissiness, this declaration seems, in its moral and aesthetic program, an authentic forerunner of the Inklings. Tolkien shared in the general excitement, declaring a few years later, after learning of Gilson’s death in battle, that the TCBS “had been granted some spark of fire … that was destined to kindle a new light, or what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world.” It was not to be; he was, half-knowingly, describing what soon would become a solo mission.

  Meanwhile, he plunged into the TCBS program with gusto, expanding the legend of Éarendel, deepening his knowledge of Qenya by preparing a lexicon, the Qenyaqetsa, and producing The Land of Pohja, a painting, based on a tale from the Kalevala, that in its intricately repeating borders and elongated trees, its tints of purple, blue, and yellow, and its atmosphere of otherworldly mystery and magic, powerfully foreshadows his mature canvases. Soon the creative flow became a flood: paintings such as Water, Wind, and Sand; Tanaqui; and The Shores of Faery; poems, including “Kor: In a City Lost and Dead” and “The Shores of Faery,” in which appear some of the names and places that would later fill The Silmarillion. One poem, “Goblin Feet,” appeared in Oxford Poetry 1915. It was his first published piece of writing. The editor was his friend T. W. Earp, whose name may have been the origin of “twerp”—coining words from names was an Oxford passion at the time, but the attribution rema
ins uncertain. A poem by G. B. Smith also made it into the volume, along with work by Aldous Huxley (writing as A. L. Huxley) and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose poem “Lay” is distinctly better than Tolkien’s. This is the first time Sayers’s path crossed that of the Inklings; it would not be the last. Tolkien’s contribution, drenched in Victorian fairy lore, describes a walk along a fairy path, lit by fairy lanterns, to the tune of fairy horns and the hum of fairy wings, rising to a crescendo of fairy-instilled ecstasy. That Tolkien calls the fairies in his poem goblins, leprechauns, and gnomes does nothing to disguise their conventional character, first cousin to the precious flower-fairies of Victorian lore. Later he would abandon this view of fairy folk—epitomized forever in the fraudulent 1917–1920 Cottingley photographs of tiny winged nymphettes prancing in the fields that caused a sensation in post–World War I England—for his far more formidable Elves, Goblins, and Orcs.

  In June 1915, Tolkien took the examination for the Honours School in English Language and Literature. He earned a First, vindicating his move into the study of philology and Anglo-Saxon. Academic triumph, poems, paintings, first forays into private mythology, discovery of Finnish, heightened cultivation of his own imagined tongues—all came at breakneck speed. Everyone around him shared the same sense of urgency; the world was falling to pieces, and time was running out. War had erupted in 1914 and Oxford was now chockablock with soldiers. Tolkien, who as an undergraduate received military training in the King Edward’s Horse, a cavalry regiment (and earlier as a schoolboy in the King Edward’s School Cadet Corps), knew that sooner or later he would find himself on the front, where rumor placed the life expectancy of newly arrived soldiers at less than two weeks. Unlike many of his friends, he did not break off his studies to enlist, for he dreaded the dreariness and brutality of military life. But with examinations over, he applied to join the Lancashire Fusiliers, passed his physical, and received a commission as a temporary second lieutenant. He learned to signal in code, utilizing devices ranging from heliographs to carrier pigeons, an appropriate military role for a man more suited to language invention than the dispatching of enemy combatants. Even this congenial activity didn’t reconcile him to army life, however, and he lamented “those grey days wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing.” In March 1916, he graduated from Oxford—the ceremony had been delayed due to the war—and on March 22, he and Edith married at St. Mary Immaculate in Warwick, spending part of their honeymoon rehearsing versions of her new married name: “Edith Mary Tolkien, Mrs. Tolkien, Edith Tolkien, E.T., Mrs. J.R.R. Tolkien.” Even in the midst of training for battle, he had writing and painting on his mind, and he submitted a sheaf of poems, The Trumpets of Faërie, to the publishing firm of Sidgwick & Jackson. The manuscript was rejected on March 31. It appeared that his fate—or doom—was closing in. On June 6, he sailed to Calais and joined the British Expeditionary Force in France. A poem he composed about this time is entitled “The Lonely Isle” and dedicated “For England.” The last words, “O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!” constitute Tolkien’s wistful adieu to his adopted land, his new wife, and perhaps his life.