The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  A Middle English Vocabulary soon became a minor classic. As the first comprehensive Middle English glossary, with more than 4,700 entries, it ably filled a void, and The Year’s Work in English Studies 1920–1921 commended it as “a piece of work which can hardly be praised too highly,” lauding in particular its “exhaustive textual references.” The praise cost Tolkien dearly, however, for the project had consumed months that might have been devoted to his legendarium, and he had shelved The Book of Lost Tales in order to complete it. The loss of creative opportunity was “terrible to recall.”

  On March 10, 1920, in the midst of his labors on the Vocabulary, Tolkien crossed a personal Rubicon, for the first time exposing his private mythology to public view by reading portions of “The Fall of Gondolin” to the Exeter College Essay Club. The talk, he told his audience, came from a “complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse of my own imagining” that “has for some time grown up (rather than been constructed) in my mind.” The presentation was a roaring success, despite Tolkien’s rapid, often incomprehensible delivery, with the Club minutes applauding his tale as “very graphically and astonishingly told … with a wealth of attendance to detail interesting in extreme.” In the audience were Henry Dyson and Nevill Coghill, two future Inklings; Coghill later remembered losing several days at the Bodleian fruitlessly trying to pin down “what Gondolin was.”

  Tolkien must have been delighted by this successful unveiling, but he held no illusions about making a living by his pen. He still longed for and needed a secure academic post, one with greater earning potential than the OED could offer. In 1920 he found it, landing the Readership in English Language at the University of Leeds, a position paying six hundred pounds per annum. His professional future was now, if not assured, at least well launched. In September, he moved to Leeds for the autumn term. Edith, again pregnant, remained in Oxford until the birth. The baby arrived on October 22 and was christened with the usual garland of family names as Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien. The family separation, a painful trial for everyone concerned, continued for several months more; not until March did Tolkien find suitable lodgings and Edith sufficient strength to permit relocation of mother and children to Leeds. As a result, this year’s Christmas reunion took on heightened importance, marked by one of Tolkien’s merriest concoctions. John, now an inquisitive three-year-old, had been quizzing his father about Father Christmas and his North Pole hideaway, and Tolkien responded by handing him an envelope, addressed in a wobbly hand to “Mrs. Tolkien & Master John Francis Reuel Tolkien” and postmarked “North Pole, 22 Dec. 1920.” The envelope contained, in the same shaky hand, a letter from Father Christmas announcing that he was setting off for Oxford with his bag of toys and enclosing pictures of himself and his house. The self-portrait shows a surprisingly slender Santa toting a large sack bulging with gifts, his long white beard blown nearly horizontal by the snow-flecked wind; another drawing depicts his igloolike polar redoubt, surrounded by mysterious snow towers and—a botanical anomaly—high firs. The Father Christmas letter would become an annual tradition, delighting the Tolkien children for the next twenty-three years.

  In the spring, Edith and the boys joined Tolkien in Leeds, moving into a house owned by a niece of John Henry Newman. They soon relocated to new lodgings closer to the university, but these did not suit, either: the polluted air of Leeds “rotted the curtains” and required Tolkien to “change his collar three times a day”—an annoying problem for a natty dresser. He could not afford much in the way of new clothing, however; his salary was low, and he began to spend his summers grading exams to supplement the family funds, further eroding his precious writing time.

  Happily, the School of English at Leeds proved a congenial place to work. Tolkien fell under the spell of its head, George Stuart Gordon, Professor of English Language and Literature, a brilliant scholar who had broad literary tastes, from Greek classics to Shakespeare, and, like Tolkien, a scrupulous diligence often mistaken for procrastination. Gordon, beloved by students and fellow teachers for his kindness and wit—Lewis, who also knew him, called him “more like a man and less like a don than any I have known”—went out of his way to befriend Tolkien and make him a key player in his campaign to enlarge and strengthen English studies at Leeds. “It is not often in ‘universities,’” wrote Tolkien, “that a Professor bothers with the domestic difficulties of a new junior in his twenties; but G. did. He found me rooms himself, and let me share his private room at the University … I do not think that my experience was peculiar. He was the very master of men.”

  Tolkien shouldered, while at Leeds, a heavy teaching load. Over several semesters, he taught the history of English, Old and Middle English philology, Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, Medieval Welsh, and more. To his relief, the department expanded by adding a second bright light, the Canadian scholar E. V. (Eric Valentine) Gordon (“his name is a disadvantage,” wryly observed George Stuart Gordon, who was unrelated to his new hire). E. V. was a former Rhodes scholar, a dashing fellow with a mop of dark hair and a goatee. Tolkien, who had tutored him at Oxford, knew him as an “industrious little devil”; at Leeds he soon became “my devoted friend and pal.” E. V. held Tolkien in equally high regard. Together they founded the Viking Club, dedicated to the study of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon letters and manners, a goal that entailed many nights of beer swilling and singing. Tolkien composed poems and songs for the revels, including an Anglo-Saxon lyric, “Syx Mynet,” to be sung to the tune of “I Love Sixpence,” while Gordon contributed “When I’m Dead Don’t Bury Me at All, Just Pickle My Bones in Alcohol” in Old English, Gothic, and Scottish dialect. Soon the entire English faculty began to sing as one. To the delighted George Stuart Gordon, his cohorts made up “not so much a staff as a Club!” while to Tolkien, the faculty was a “team fired not only with a departmental esprit de corps, determined to put ‘English’ at the head of the Arts departments, but inspired also with a missionary zeal.” After two years of hard labor, Gordon’s “Club” had so enlarged its enrollment that an ebullient Tolkien could write to Elizabeth Wright that “the proportion of ‘language’ students is very high, and there is no trace of the press-gang!” Philology was a major beneficiary. At the time Tolkien arrived in Leeds, one student in twelve studied philology; by 1925, the ratio had changed to nearly one in three.

  In addition to teaching, Tolkien toiled away at his legendarium and began an alliterative translation of Beowulf (finally published in 2014, long after Tolkien’s death). He and E. V. Gordon collaborated on an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tolkien handling the text, Gordon the notes. United in their distaste for pedantry, both editors hoped the volume would “provide the student with a text which, treating the unique manuscript with all due respect, is yet pleasant for the modern reader to look at, and is free (as are few Middle English texts) from a litter of italics, asterisks, and brackets, the trail of the passing editor.” They succeeded admirably. The Modern Language Review praised the book, in unconscious echo of the poem’s alliteration, for its “clearness, conciseness, scholarship, and commonsense,” although the reviewer went on to indulge in the sort of scholarly nitpicking that Tolkien and Gordon despised, raising nearly a hundred quibbles over seven pages.

  The happy team assembled by George Stuart Gordon did not last. Its dismantling was not due, as is so often the case in academia, to internal dissent, but rather to external allurements. In the late summer of 1922, George Stuart Gordon left for Oxford to become the Merton Professor of English Literature, one of the more prestigious academic positions in England. Tolkien applied for his vacated professorship, but the position went to Lascelles Abercrombie, one of the Georgian poets. As a result of this and other blows, Tolkien soon felt ready to depart himself. The city of Leeds, with its belching factories and ungainly architecture, held little appeal. In his brief tenure there, the family had suffered from more than its share of illnesses: Edith and the boys had contracted measles, Michael appendicitis, and Tolkien him
self pneumonia, a severe bout that brought him close to death. He remembered his grandfather John Suffield, who visited at the height of Tolkien’s fever, “standing by my bedside, a tall thin black-clad figure, and looking at me and speaking to me with contempt—to the effect that I and my generation were degenerate weaklings.” Some months after Tolkien’s recovery, the house was burglarized—an inside job that involved the maid—and Edith’s coat and engagement ring were stolen. But there were compensatory domestic joys, above all the birth of a third boy, Christopher Reuel, named for Christopher Wiseman, on November 21, 1924 (a fourth child, Priscilla, would arrive in 1929), and public accomplishments, especially Tolkien’s appointment to the newly created position of Professor of English Language. He had managed to publish some undistinguished poems, too, mostly in local venues, such as Yorkshire Poetry and the university’s own magazine, The Gryphon. Yet he longed for greater things. Edith, although fond of the university’s casual atmosphere, was willing to move as well.

  In 1925, Tolkien’s opportunity arrived, when he learned that William Craigie, his old benefactor, planned to vacate the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Tolkien had already looked into other teaching venues, applying for posts in Manchester and at Cape Town; he won the latter but turned it down, fearing that the requisite travel and African climate would prove too exhausting for Edith and the children. But to teach at Oxford—that would be a dream fulfilled! The Anglo-Saxon chair was a choice position with a venerable history, bequeathed in 1755 by Richard Rawlinson, bishop and bibliophile, first occupied in 1795, and filled throughout the nineteenth century by a series of first-rate scholars, not least Joseph Bosworth, author of the pioneering Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar (1823), whose name was added to the professorship in 1916. Tolkien prepared an outstanding application, including a twelve-page pamphlet containing his own summary of his qualifications, along with warm endorsements by leading Anglo-Saxonists and other scholars. The enthusiasm for his candidacy can be gauged by the testimony of Lascelles Abercrombie, who wrote that “I have never consulted him without gaining an illumination that can penetrate as well as expatiate. But I must not omit to mention that I have gained at least as much from the keen artistic sensibility as from the science of his scholarship.” George Stuart Gordon went even further, declaring that “there is no philological (or literary) scholar of his generation from whom I have learned so much, with whom I have worked more happily, or from whom, in my opinion, greater things may be expected.” Henry Bradley and Joseph Wright also wrote in his favor. Notably absent among his endorsers was Kenneth Sisam. But then Sisam, by now assistant secretary—an exalted post, despite the name—at Oxford University Press, was his chief rival for the position. The board of electors split the vote evenly; Tolkien triumphed when the university vice-chancellor, either impressed by Tolkien’s youthful zeal (he was only thirty-three at the time) or put off by Sisam’s reputation as a martinet, cast the deciding vote for Tolkien. The victory sat poorly with Sisam’s supporters, who interpreted it as an upstart displacing his better; after all, it wasn’t long ago that Tolkien had sat at Sisam’s feet in Oxford lecture halls. The resentment simmered for decades; nearly a half century later, the Arthurian scholar Eugène Vinaver would declare that “for many years I have felt strongly that much less than justice had been done to Sisam the scholar and the model of scholarship. Everyone knows what a terrible mistake Oxford made when they by-passed him for the Chair of Anglo-Saxon.” Despite the kerfuffle, however, Tolkien’s friendship with Sisam remained more or less intact, albeit strained, as it had been during Tolkien’s tardiness while completing his Anglo-Saxon glossary. Whatever his faults, Sisam—unlike his supporters in the battle against Tolkien—was capable of dropping a grudge.

  Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini

  The move to Oxford was a strain. Contractually obliged to remain at Leeds University until the end of 1925, Tolkien spent many autumn weekends shuttling between Leeds and Oxford’s Pembroke College, where he delivered his first set of lectures. This exhausting regimen ended in January 1926, when the family moved to a new brick house at 22 Northmoor Road, in a neighborhood thickly populated by dons and their families. The Tolkiens enjoyed the location and remained on Northmoor Road until 1947, ensuring their children the stable, secure, two-parent childhood that both of them had lacked. Tolkien’s enlarged income—he was now earning a thousand pounds a year—permitted extravagances: John and Michael attended the Dragon School, a prestigious prep school founded to educate children of university faculty, and an Icelandic au pair girl was brought in to supervise them when at home.

  Not all was well, however. Tolkien had begun, while in Leeds, to slacken his religious observances, and this lassitude continued at 22 Northmoor Road. He ascribed his failure to “wickedness and sloth,” a stinging self-indictment that must be taken seriously. We don’t know what caused this falling-off, although a heavy workload, added to the stress of two moves in six years, likely played a part; Tolkien may also have been distracted by the pomp and prestige of his professorships. The memory rankled, even forty years later; in 1963 he would tell Michael that “I regret those days bitterly (and suffer for them with such patience as I can be given); most of all because I failed as a father. Now I pray for you all, unceasingly, that the Healer (the Hælend as the Saviour was usually called in Old English) shall heal my defects, and that none of you shall ever cease to cry Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini [‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’].” In any event, he overcame the trial, spiritual fervor returned, and he began to attend Mass daily, often accompanied by the boys—Edith would join in on Sundays—walking on the Woodstock Road to St. Aloysius, a Jesuit church with a Victorian Gothic exterior and a rich Italianate interior, including a relic chapel, an imposing black marble altar, and flocks of brightly painted angels and saints crowding the reredos, elements that suited well his heigh-stile aesthetic and traditional Catholic bent.

  He spent much time at home—an anomaly among Oxford professors, many of whom, during this era, lived in bachelor quarters at college—and enjoyed playing with his boys in the garden or thrilling them with tales of fantastic beings, including Tom Bombadil, a merry creature who represented “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.” Tolkien was well-placed to watch the countryside shrink, as new houses filled up North Oxford and his beloved local trees—poplar, quince, apple, hawthorn—fell right and left, a denudation that cut him to the bone. In 1930, the family moved next door to 20 Northmoor Road, a large eight-bedroom house vacated by the bookseller Basil Blackwell; Tolkien took advantage of his new grounds to plant trees and transform the tennis court into a vegetable garden, while Edith erected an aviary filled with canaries and parakeets, bringing some of the spirit of the countryside back into the encroaching city.

  Even as a youth, trees had captured Tolkien’s heart. In his writings they represent the Platonic virtues of beauty, truth, and goodness; as early as 1916, he had imagined Kortirion, the fairy city on the enchanted Lonely Isle, as girdled by “a thousand whispering trees.” In “The Coming of the Valar,” two trees, Laurelin and Silpion (later Telperion) shed golden and silver light over the land of the immortals, and when a foul beast destroys them, their fruit and flower give rise to the sun and moon. His ardor for trees was intense, even eccentric; he despised the wanton destruction of any tree and did not hesitate to label normal horticultural practices like pruning and felling as “torture” and “murder.” In the late 1930s, he would be especially fond of “a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls.”

  In 1926, however, Tolkien was too busy to mourn for long any arboreal amputations. The new position at Oxford severely taxed his time and
energy. Sometimes he managed to spend mornings after Mass sequestered in his book-lined office. A photo shows him, in tweed jacket and tie, poring over a pile of manuscripts, notes, and examination papers that nearly overwhelm his tobacco jar and pipe-filled Toby jug (a pottery jug in human shape). His children remember, too, “a row of coloured Quink and Stevenson inks, and sets of sealing-wax in different shades to match his large supply of stationery … [and] wonderful boxes of Koh-i-Noor coloured pencils, and tubes of paint with magical names like Burnt Sienna, Gamboge and Crimson Lake.” He was still drawing and painting at this time, although his tight schedule drastically limited his output.

  On other days, however, he would dash off after Mass on his high-seated bicycle to the university, his academic gown trailing in the wind. The typical professorial contract of the time required at least thirty-six lectures a year, but Tolkien soon exceeded this number. Students flocked to his Beowulf talks, though few stayed the course. He talked rapidly, slurring and swallowing his words, and his speech was often incomprehensible, especially to students not seated in the front row. By the third or fourth class, his voice and his erudition had frightened away all but a small coterie of devotees. The circle that remained included W. H. Auden, who said of one lecture that “I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound.” Another student, J.I.M. Stewart, who would become a mystery novelist under the name of Michael Innes, remembered that Tolkien “could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.” Barfield’s stutter vanished when singing or reciting poetry; so, too, did speaking in Anglo-Saxon turn Tolkien’s leaden tongue to gold.