The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Opening a New World

  Tolkien’s convalescence, despite the prolonged suffering it entailed, proved to be a blessing in disguise, for his recurrent illness prevented return to the front lines and gave him the leisure to assess, refine, and expand his mythology. His friends urged him on. A month after his return to England, he received a letter from Wiseman, apart from Tolkien all that remained of the TCBS, declaring that “if you do come out in print you will startle our generation as no one has yet.” As prophecy, this was hyperbolic, two generations off, and yet not entirely askew, for Tolkien startled his children’s and grandchildren’s generations as much as any author; it was, in any case, a welcome spur.

  Tolkien aimed higher, however, than startlement; his ambitions soared to dizzying heights. He intended to bestow upon England a priceless gift: its own literary dowry, the mythology, fairy tales, and heroic legends it deserved but had never possessed. Olympian ambitions simmered in many young authors of this generation; it was just a few years earlier, in 1909, that James Joyce, as dissimilar to Tolkien in narrative strategy as any writer could be (although the two shared a Catholic upbringing and Catholic imagery) confessed to Nora Barnacle his aim to “become indeed the poet of my race.” As Tolkien recalled it years later, “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it has no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands … Do not laugh! But once upon a time … I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story … which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.”

  Iceland boasted the Norse sagas, Finland the Kalevala, Germany the rich subsoil of folklore and legend unearthed by the Grimm brothers. Britain, however, had no native tales to offer, its mythological and folkloric potential snuffed out by the Norman invasion and the subsequent Latinization of the culture. Arthurian mythology, despite its inherent nobility and beauty, had in Tolkien’s eyes at least three fatal flaws. It owed too much to French poets like Chrétien de Troyes, and Tolkien disliked all things French—its fussy food, its language teeming with “polysyllabic barbarities,” and now its battlefields, on which two of his closest friends had fallen. Stylistically, the Arthurian cycle was “too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive.” And it was openly Christian. Tolkien believed that while myth and fairy tale must reflect religious truth, they must do so subtly, never depicting religion as it appears in “the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.” The Arthur cycle failed the test. Nothing else would do: if Tolkien’s beloved land were to possess a mythology, it would be up to him to create it.

  What inspired this wildly high dream? Other English writers—Langland, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Peacock, and Shelley among them—had elaborated extant myths or invented their own; Blake had gone further by imagining a primordial Britain (Albion) swirling with spiritual beings. But Tolkien’s plan to create a full-fledged mythological story-cycle in poetry and prose is unmatched in English literature. The idea may have come to him first while reading, at King Edward’s, the Kalevala. To encounter the Finnish national epic was, he said, to open “a new world,” to “revel in an amazing new excitement. You feel like Columbus on a new Continent, or Thorfinn in Vinland the Good.” Perhaps Tolkien saw himself as another Elias Lönnrot, the physician and philologist who had created the Kalevala, scouring the Finnish countryside for traditional songs which he then wove, along with material collected by other ethnologists, into an epic tale stretching from the creation of the cosmos to the coming of Christ. The atmosphere is bleak, tragic, and violent, like much of Tolkien’s legendarium.

  Tolkien first encountered the Kalevala in the Everyman’s edition, featuring a translation by William Forsell Kirby, an entomologist and popular author of works like Familiar Butterflies and Moths and Marvels of Ant Life who studied languages as a hobby (one can’t help noticing how many philologists, including the Grimm Brothers, Müller, Schlegel, Joseph Wright, Kirby, and Tolkien himself, were prodigies, polymaths, or both). Kirby’s rendition of the opening lines might have been written by Tolkien himself, so perfectly do they capture the young mythmaker’s aspirations:

  I am driven by my longing,

  And my understanding urges

  That I should commence my singing,

  And begin my recitation.

  I will sing the people’s legends,

  And the ballads of the nation.

  This singing, as Tolkien conceived it, was to be “cool and clear,” distinctly northern, evoking Nordic snows rather than Grecian sands, but leavened by that “fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic, although it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things.” The literary voice was to be archaic, medieval, in the “heigh stile,” but modified for prose in the manner of William Morris’s romances.

  With these qualifications in place, Tolkien’s stories flowed, often arising in his mind unbidden, “as ‘given’ things … always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing.’” This is a well-attested experience, as old as Plato’s Meno and much celebrated among the Romantics; thus Blake’s claim in a famous 1803 letter to be no more than a “Secretary” transcribing poems by “Authors [who] are in Eternity,” and Coleridge’s cognate image of the poet as “The Eolian Harp” (1795) sounded by divine winds to produce “such a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve / Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land.” There are parallels, too, with an Old English poem well known to Tolkien, that of Cædmon, the seventh-century cowherd who had a dream or vision in which a mysterious man orders him to tell (as St. Bede describes it in his History of the English Church and People) “the beginning of created things.” Inspired by grace, Cædmon sings a nine-line hymn of praise to God, which includes the first appearance in English poetry of middangeard, or Middle-earth, that portion of creation reserved for human beings, the land in which Tolkien’s legendarium would unfold:

  Nu we sculon herigean heofonrices weard,

  Meotodes meahte ond his modgeþance,

  Weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,

  Ece drihten, or onstealde.

  He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum

  heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;

  Þa middangeard moncynnes weard,

  ece drihten, æfter teode

  firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.

  Now must we praise the guardian of heaven-kingdom,

  the might of the measurer and his mind’s aim,

  the work of the glory-father, as each of the wonders

  the eternal lord set forth in the beginning.

  First he shaped for the sons of men

  heaven as a roof, the holy maker made.

  Then middle-earth the guardian of mankind,

  the eternal lord, afterwards established

  to be a solid ground for men, almighty is the lord.

  Cædmon’s hymn is the oldest-known Old English poem and stands, as such, at or near the origins of English literature; Tolkien could not have found a more perfect seed from which to grow his imaginary world. In keeping with the hymn, he always insisted that Middle-earth was neither supernatural nor fantastic—akin neither to heaven nor to Wonderland—but was simply the “objectively real world.”

  Among Tolkien’s first tales in his newborn mythology is “The Cottage of Lost Play,” composed in late 1916 or early 1917, the fair copy being inscribed by Edith on February 12, 1917, from Tolkien’s pencil original into a “High School Exercise Book.” Set in the distant past, long before the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes entered Britain, “The Cottage of Lost Play” serves as a frame (a device ubiquitous in popular fiction of the era) for most of the early tales. A wandering sailor named Eriol (“One who dreams alone,” suggesting a Tolkien alter ego) arrives at the Lonely Isle of Tor Eressëa, enters the enchanted Cottage of Lost Play in the to
wn of Koromas, and there encounters kindly gnomes who recount the history of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s notes indicate that Tor Eressëa, with its hills and hamlets and “broad and woody plain,” is primordial England, Koromas is Warwick (where Tolkien and Edith married), and Eriol is the father of Hengest and Horsa, the legendary brothers described in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, who sailed from Jutland to England in the fifth century to fight the Picts. Middle-earth, then, includes England, but the England of an exceptionally generous imagination, a land inhabited not only by humans and fairies, but also by goblinlike Orcs (whose name Tolkien took from an Anglo-Saxon word for demon), Balrogs (cruel fiery monsters who wield whips or swords), Ainur or Valar (angels, godlike demiurges), Maiar (lesser Ainur), Melkor (the rebel angel, also known as Melko and Morgoth), and Eru Ilúvatar (the one God, creator of all things, modeled upon the biblical archetype). Tolkien details the interactions of these sublime or monstrous beings, in archaic England and in the divine enclave of Valinor, in a series of stories written, for the most part, between 1917 and 1920. The titles—“The Coming of the Valar,” “The Chaining of Melko,” “The Flight of the Noldoli,” “The Tale of Tunúviel,” “The Fall of Gondolin,” and so on—nicely adumbrate the tumultuous heroic-fantastic content, a vast sweeping history encompassing the creation of the world and the rise, triumph, and fall of his vast ensemble of human and imaginary beings.

  The most impressive of Tolkien’s early narratives is surely his creation myth, “The Music of the Ainur,” which tells how Ilúvatar creates all that is, ex nihilo. He sings “into being” the Ainur, builds them “dwellings in the void,” teaches them music, implants in them “the Secret Fire that giveth Life and Reality,” and, in what seems like a Neoplatonic variant on the Genesis account, presents them with musical themes to elaborate through their own heavenly instruments in “mighty melodies changing and interchanging, mingling and dissolving amid the thunder of harmonies greater than the roar of the great seas.” The Ainur’s celestial symphony, at first perfect in beauty and power, is soon marred by the jarring notes of the Satan-like Melko, who fashions his own discordant music, a cry of pride, cruelty, gloom, and decay. This act of musical high treason proves to be the prelude to a yet more astonishing work of creation, as Ilúvatar displays his omnipotence as sole creator by bringing into existence all that had been prefigured in the music of the Ainur: the earth, with its waters, winds, and light, and, in time, Elves and Men. For all the arresting strangeness, the implicit doctrine of creation is wholly compatible with Christian orthodoxy.

  But the tales do not make easy reading. Tolkien’s decision to cast these first stories of ancient days in the pseudoancient heigh stile, with its ceremonious utterances, convoluted syntax, and nightmarish glossary of names (for which Ilúvatar, Ainur, and Melko/Melkor/Morgoth are fair examples), resulted, as noted in chapter 3, in a false archaism that bears no relation to any stage in the history of the English language and strains the patience of many—a decidedly odd contribution from a trained philologist and literary historian. Nonetheless, in these early tales we see the promise of a new mythopoeic cosmos, if sometimes little more than biblical mythology aslant, that would blossom into the vast canvas of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

  Waggle to Walrus … To Leeds

  Tolkien had found his voice and vocation. But with an exhausted wife and bawling baby to support and unpublished manuscripts piled high on his desk, he desperately needed a job. In October 1918, he traveled to Oxford, hoping to land a university position but meeting one rebuff after another. Salvation came in the form of William Alexander Craigie, professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had tutored Tolkien in Old Norse before the war. Craigie was himself a proto-Tolkien of sorts, a small, wiry, energetic, and clever man, a philologist, a lover of northern tongues, folklore, and Faërie, and the anonymous translator of many of the Nordic tales in Andrew Lang’s fairy books. It has been said of him that “facts seemed to run round and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern … to have made one’s first steps in the study of an Anglo-Saxon or an Old Norse text under Craigie, was to acquire almost imperceptibly the ambition to become a keen and exact puzzle-solver.” In addition to his academic post, Craigie was deeply immersed in what can fairly be described as the greatest philological puzzle-solving enterprise of all time: the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary. The brainchild of Victorian intellectuals like Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the great poet, and Richard Chenivix Trench, an Anglican archbishop, this prodigious project, which had been in progress for more than half a century by the time Tolkien knocked on Craigie’s door, aimed at nothing less than a comprehensive account of the definitions, etymology, pronunciations, and literary uses of every word in the English language, excluding only those that had died out before or during the first years of the Norman conquest.

  Craigie had been at the OED since 1897 and had served, since 1901, as one of its three principal editors, and was thus in the perfect position to help his old pupil. He welcomed Tolkien with open arms and a tantalizing offer. How would Tolkien like to join the OED staff as a lexicographer, helping out Henry Bradley’s team on the letter w, coming up with Middle English and Anglo-Saxon derivations for words? Tolkien leaped at the chance. The position would provide a steady income, a return to Oxford, pleasant scholarship rummaging amidst the roots of language, and the chance to work closely with Bradley, whom Tolkien knew as the author of a celebrated history of the Goths and of a philological classic, The Making of English.

  Tolkien commenced work in January 1919, strolling each morning from the family’s new residence on St. John Street, past the monument to the Reformation heroes Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley with its anti-Catholic slogan, to the dictionary’s offices in the Old Ashmolean brownstone building on Broad Street. His task, as one of four assistants to Bradley, was to prepare “dictionary slips,” each a six-by-four-inch bit of paper with definitions, variant spellings, and pronunciations for a single word, along with its etymology and one or more literary quotations demonstrating its use. Tolkien’s first assignment, pleasing to his puckish sense of humor, was to prepare slips for words from “waggle” to “waggly.” He came up with an acceptable definition for “waggle” (“to move [anything held or fixed at one end] to and fro with short quick motions, or with a rapid undulation”) but his etymology proved inadequate, requiring Bradley’s intervention. He soon got the hang of things, however, and successfully tackled “wait-a-bit,” “wake-robin,” “walnut,” “want,” “warlock,” and “wold.” Curiously, “walrus”—its etymology deriving from Old Norse rosmhvalr—vexed him mightily, occasioning six or seven draft slips and a packet of additional notes assembled after leaving the OED. But he savored the challenges and declared that he had “learned more” during his stint at the dictionary “than in any other equal period of my life.” Always he had loved the internal workings of language; now etymological fever raged within him, and when not occupied with OED slips, he toiled on Qenya, devising hosts of new words. He also invented a cursive script, written both horizontally and vertically, which he called the Alphabet of Rúmil. He used this to inscribe Qenya and to keep a diary; the alphabet evolved so rapidly that in time he found it difficult to read his earlier entries.

  In June 1919, Kenneth Sisam, Tolkien’s former tutor, invited him to provide a glossary of Middle English for Sisam’s forthcoming volume, Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose. Tolkien gladly assented, admiring the scholarship and bibliographical expertise of the man who had taught him “not only to read texts but to study second-hand book catalogues.” Unfortunately, this relatively simple project would set a baleful precedent for almost all of Tolkien’s academic writings, ballooning, as a result of his perfectionism, to monstrous proportions with labyrinthine complications, expressed in interminable doubts, procrastinations, and rewritings. Tolkien was well aware of the problem, calling himself a “natural niggler” and an inveterate “beginner …
and non-finisher,” and admitting that “I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting.” The degree of his fastidiousness, often indistinguishable from fussiness, may be gleaned from his conviction that the Middle English glossary must cover “the ordinary machinery of expression,” including idiomatic phrases and “the uses of such innocent-looking little words as the prepositions of and for,” considerations that demanded “exceptionally full treatment to what may rightly be called the backbone of the language.” The result, as he admitted, was “a mole-hill glossary (grown into a mountain…),” although he preferred to ascribe the delay to “accumulated domestic distractions,” by which he meant, above all, the birth in October 1920 of a second son, Michael, with all its attendant disruptions.

  Needless to say, he missed the deadline. Sisam’s book was published, bereft of its glossary, in October 1921. The following May, Tolkien’s glossary appeared on its own as A Middle English Vocabulary; four weeks later, the two works came out in a single volume as originally intended. Tolkien’s snail-like pace, he confessed to Elizabeth Wright, Joseph’s wife, had brought “curses on my head.” Thus began his widespread academic reputation as a time waster and dreamer, a man who would rather write a fairy tale than a scholarly study of Faërie. To the reading public this may be a badge of honor, but to many of Tolkien’s Oxford colleagues, who lacked the ability to write fiction and any sympathy for the effort, it was a badge of shame. Some accused Tolkien of indolence; this charge is unwarranted. He worked indefatigably, often toiling long past midnight on his projects (including scholarship, about which he could be, sporadically, passionate). He dithered but never dallied. His priorities, however, remained firm: art trumped academia. He was a poet and storyteller by nature, a scholar by profession.