The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Almost simultaneously, a heavier blow descended. Tolkien had added, to the package that contained The Lost Road, large chunks of The Silmarillion, including The Lay of Leithian, “The Fall of Númenor,” and the prose Quenta Silmarillion, the last a vastly expanded version of portions of Sketch of the Mythology and its immediate successor, the Quenta Noldorinwa. Tolkien’s publisher rejected the entire collection, explaining that the firm would much prefer a hobbit sequel. The Lay of Leithian, wrote an outside reader, was “of a very thin, if not always downright bad, quality.” Thankfully, the official report to Tolkien blunted the criticism, and he was able to write back that “my chief joy comes from learning that the Silmarillion is not rejected with scorn. I have suffered a sense of fear and bereavement, quite ridiculous, since I let this private and beloved nonsense out; and I think if it had seemed to you to be nonsense I should have felt really crushed.” He was feeling low, in any case, from a bout with the flu, and when an acquaintance wrote to point out inconsistencies in The Hobbit, he responded, with a note of exasperation, that “I don’t much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature … and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Völuspá, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes.” In the event, Unwin’s magnanimity in sending a cushioned report proved providential, for Tolkien agreed that a direct sequel to The Hobbit did indeed make sense.

  What sort of sequel, though? He told Stanley Unwin in October 1937 that his fount of hobbit ideas had run dry. “Goodness knows what will happen,” he continued on December 16. “… What more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental. But the real fun about orcs and dragons (to my mind) was before their time.” He cast about for a new story line, wondering if “Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?” He was riddled with doubts and hesitations, yet soon his marvelously fecund brain brimmed with new ideas, and on December 19 he informed C. A. Furth, a production staffer at Allen & Unwin, that he had completed the first chapter of the sequel, “A long expected party.”

  This celebrated opening to The Lord of the Rings, describing Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday bash, would go through multiple rewrites before Tolkien was satisfied. Unlike Lewis, who composed with consummate ease, Tolkien scribbled and erased, cut and rewrote, and reworked again. The first version of “A Long Expected Party” has Bilbo celebrating his seventieth birthday; the second brings in Gandalf; in the third, Bilbo’s son Bingo organizes the party; in the fourth, a cousin, Bingo Bolger-Baggins, undertakes the task. In the months to come, the project advanced in imaginative leaps. Tolkien realized that the magic ring from The Hobbit would dominate the sequel, that a terrifying Necromancer would threaten global doom, that the new Hobbit would be painted in altogether darker pigments than the original. It would not be a book solely for children; perhaps it would not be for children at all.

  He typed up the first chapter, sent it along to Furth, and shared the manuscript with his son Christopher and with Lewis. He was eager to press on, but academic obligations kept interfering—lectures, work on Old Norse and Old and Middle English texts—and for many months there was no additional progress. Frustrated, he complained to Furth in February 1938 that all his ideas had been “squandered” on The Hobbit. By July, blocked and disgusted, he declared that the sequel had “lost my favour” and that all work with hobbits would be set aside until The Silmarillion was complete. Thus was The Lord of the Rings nearly aborted—a crisis that would repeat itself more than once. Happily the muses and a few days of rest from academic labors worked their charms, and in late August he reported to Furth that the project was “flowing along, and getting quite out of hand.” By October, he began to grow seriously concerned that his new approach would prove too frightening for children—he was, after all, known as a children’s author; perhaps, he worried, the prewar gloom now permeating England had affected the tone. But he forged ahead at a steady pace and by the following February had produced over three hundred manuscript pages. His heart lifted; he might even be finished by June 1939! His estimate would prove to be off by nearly ten years.

  “Story-Making in Its Primary and Most Potent Mode”

  During 1938, when not engaged on the Hobbit sequel, Tolkien made progress on several projects, including his edition of the Ancrenne Wisse and one of the Pearl, a fourteenth-century Middle English poem by the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien’s theatrical skills, honed by reading during Inklings meetings, entranced a wide audience when, in response to a request from John Masefield and Nevill Coghill, he appeared in the Summer Diversions at the Oxford Playhouse. Robed in green, with a turban and false beard, he recited, without benefit of notes, almost all of Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest Tale.” A reporter from the Oxford Mail, beside himself with admiration, reported that “Prof. Tolkien spoke his lines magnificently” and that “one can only stand amazed at his bravery.” These accomplishments pale, however, beside a far more important event: Tolkien’s delivery, on March 8, 1939, while the shadows of war pressed ever closer, of the annual Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He called his talk “On Fairy-Stories.”

  Andrew Lang, as George Stuart Gordon had pointed out when inaugurating the lecture series ten years earlier, was the great modern champion of folklore. His collections of folktales, published in a rainbow array—The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, and so on, twelve in all—had taken Victorian and Edwardian England by storm. Tolkien and thousands of others devoured them while children, and adults enjoyed them, too. Not only did Lang make fairy tales popular, he made them academically respectable. His scholarship sharply rebutted the contention of Max Müller—whom Barfield had pilloried in Poetic Diction—that mythology is a “disease of language” (caused, Müller believed, by the personification of natural phenomena as gods and goddesses), and that folklore is its attenuated aftereffect. For Lang, folklore is not debased mythology but mythology’s very basis; fairy tales are the building blocks of the mythic imagination. Tolkien, staking his literary life on the intrinsic value of folktale and myth, was strongly sympathetic toward Lang’s view. However, he rejected Lang’s insistence, inspired by Edward Burnett Tylor and anticipating James George Frazer, that myth and folktale belonged to a primitive stage of human culture, now superseded by our more enlightened scientific epoch. When the University of St. Andrews extended its invitation, he seized the opportunity to counter Lang, Tylor, and Frazer by presenting a theory of folklore grounded, not in an account of cultural evolution, but in Christian theology and the religious underpinnings of literary art.

  Tolkien commenced his address in high spirits, quipping that as an Englishman lecturing on fairies in Scotland, he felt like a conjuror before an Elvish court. He then plunged boldly in—good magicians excel at courage as well as sleight-of-hand—examining definitions of fairies, fairy stories, and the like, in the process puncturing several popular beliefs. Most fairies are not miniature (he laid this slur at the feet of William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton); nor is a fairy story identical to a beast fable (such as Reynard the Fox), a traveler’s tale (Gulliver’s Travels), or a dream tale (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland); nor do fairy stories reject reason (rational understanding of the difference between frogs and princes is necessary for the enjoyment of a tale in which a prince becomes a frog).

  What, then, is a fairy story, and what is its use? A fairy story tells of Faërie, “the realm or state in which fairies have their being”; Faërie is the world itself—our world, but only “when we are enchanted.” A fairy tale’s essence is enchantment or magic: not the mechanical magic of the conjuror or the power-seeking magic of the magus, but the magic of Elvish enchantment that bares the mystery and beauty of creation. In a fairy story, enchantment is the resu
lt of applying adjectives in new and startling ways—in effect, rearranging the constitutive elements of the world—so that we have flying broomsticks or green suns or walking woods.

  This process has two stages. First, the writer (or painter) employs imagination to produce images “not actually present”; then he or she turns to art to channel, tame, and refine these images. Through this process—and here we encounter the heart of Tolkien’s religio-aesthetic theory—the artist becomes a subcreator, echoing on a human scale God’s great work of creation. The power to subcreate lies within our grasp because we are stamped with the image of God: “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” We do not make miraculously, ex nihilo, as God does, but we have been given the power to subcreate, to bring into being secondary worlds, by means of the imaginative arts.

  The theory of subcreation did not originate solely with Tolkien. Shakespeare famously celebrated, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the tandem work of imagination and poet to conjure images “not actually present”: “as imagination / bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), the third Earl of Shaftesbury described the poet as “a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove”: this definition would circulate widely among the Romantics. Coleridge advanced the metaphor by positing a primary and secondary imagination—a terminology that surely influenced Tolkien’s account. The primary imagination, argued Coleridge, is the power of the mind to perceive, regulate, and give form to the inchoate raw data of perception, just as God brings order out of chaos: “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”; the secondary imagination takes the world perceived and shaped by the primary imagination, scatters it, and reassembles it as art: “The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will … it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.”

  Tolkien was a realist who would not have been interested in the Kantian idealism implicit in Coleridge’s notion of the primary imagination. It was the secondary imagination—the desire to subcreate—that interested him, and it was fantasy, he believed, that best fulfilled this desire. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and other poems, Coleridge disclosed a taste for the fantastic, but he never granted it the privileged position that Tolkien did. Fantasy for Tolkien was “not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.” Such an achievement, he readily admitted, is an “elvish craft,” for fantasy entails creation of a different world from the one that we inhabit, and yet, to succeed as art, this newly minted world must offer the “inner consistency of reality.” We must believe in the green sun, the flying horse, the diminutive hobbit. This takes surpassing skill, but when a writer succeeds in crafting a believable fantasy, he has achieved “story-making in its primary and most potent mode.”

  It is precisely story making in this mode that Tolkien sought to achieve in the Hobbit sequel, begun fifteen months before delivering “On Fairy-Stories.” To accomplish this, he needed a fundamental change in his approach to narrative. The Lang lecture would point the way. Tolkien already knew that fairy tales appeal to adults; his own taste had settled that. Now it dawned on him that the tastes of children, while less informed than those of adults, may not be, should not be, satisfied by watered-down representations of Faërie. He had erred, he realized, by writing The Hobbit as he did, modifying his tone to appease a young and naïve readership. In The Lord of the Rings—a book for children and adults, for all who gather beneath the Tree of Tales (a tree whose seeds, Tolkien archly comments, may sprout even in England’s unpromising soil)—he would develop to its fullest every element of the fantasist’s art.

  In his Lang lecture, Tolkien analyzes the most important of these elements: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation (the capitals and italics are his). Recovery is regaining the ability to see things with clarity, “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.” Escape is flight from the horrors of the modern world (factories, pollution, bombs, and technology ranked high on Tolkien’s list); it is not a sign of weakness, but of strength and sanity. Does not a man in prison do well to escape? To escape means also to overcome the embargo imposed by our natural limitations; in fantasy, we may fly through the clouds, talk with bees, or reach the ocean floor. Consolation is the satisfaction of desires, which include our deep-seated longing for a world, if only a secondary one, of wonder and enchantment. One desire surpasses all others, by joining Consolation to Escape: the “Escape from Death”—a theme that abounds in fairy stories around the world. Escape from death is itself the supreme instance of the greatest of all Consolations: the “Happy Ending.”

  For Tolkien, the Happy Ending lies at the heart of fantasy and fairy story; it is so essential to the genre that when he revised his talk for publication in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, he coined the word “eucatastrophe” from eu (Greek for good) and catastrophe (Greek for overturning) to describe those glorious volte-faces in which evil, on the verge of triumph, gives way to good, corruption to innocence, grief to rejoicing, certain death to yet more certain life. It is “a sudden and miraculous grace … a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” There are echoes here of Lewis’s idea of Joy, that painful, delicious longing that only God can fulfill. It may be that Lewis drew inspiration for his carefully constructed account of Joy in his autobiography from Tolkien’s earlier presentation. In any event, eucatastrophe is for Tolkien the crucial event in fairy tale, the hinge upon which the greatest stories turn, imparting “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.” There is a peculiar reason for this “peculiar quality”: the joy that floods us as eucatastrophe unfolds is not limited to the fairy story in which it originates; here art oversteps its bounds, and joy breaks into the primary world. Eucatastrophe leads us out of literature and into faith. Through it we glimpse “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.” Fairy tale, then, is a door opening upon divine truth. Recovery, Consolation, Escape, in their highest modes of Escape from Death and eucatastrophe, would play a crucial role in The Lord of the Rings.

  The Deepening Eclipse

  It’s not easy to be a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand. By 1930, Barfield knew that when he mentioned Rudolf Steiner’s ideas to persons outside the Anthroposophical fold, the response would fall somewhere between polite disbelief and outright scorn. His friends’ reaction proved the point; even Lewis, “who would never, for instance, express an opinion even on a minor but all too prolix poet of the sixteenth century without first having read the great bulk of what the man himself had actually written … on more than one occasion, broke his rule in the case of Steiner.”

  Barfield was “shocked and puzzled” by the pervasive rejection of Steiner’s self-evident genius. How to get around this infuriating boycott? He hit upon the plan of presenting the seer’s teachings indirectly, by exploring their affinities to Romanticism, and he began to turn out essays (later published in Romanticism Comes of Age, 1944), arguing that Steiner, like the Romantics, grasped the cognitive value of imagination but that he had gone further by seeing that “Imagination” must blend with what Barfield termed “Inspiration” in order to attain “Intuition” (the capitals are Barfield’s): that is, objective knowledge of supersensible and supernatural realities. Imagination by itself offers mystical and aesthetic insights, but only Steiner’s Spiritual Science, the end of a “long, sober process” of which Imagination is but the first step, produces “exact results.” Anthroposophy, Barfield concluded
, “was nothing less than Romanticism grown up.”

  At about the same time that he initiated this campaign, he began to step away from regular participation in the Inklings. The difficulty of traveling from London to Oxford played a part, but so, too, one suspects, did dismay and embarrassment over his literary disappointments. He viewed the situation with bitter humor tinged with resignation, noting that by entering a law firm, he had “lost the inestimable privilege of leisure and as a result was able, as far as the lettered world was concerned, to advance cautiously from inaudibility to silence.” His Oxford jaunts dwindled to one or two per academic term; during these brief but happy interludes he would attend an Inklings meeting, to the great pleasure of the assembly, who enjoyed his soft-spoken contributions and the skill that he alone possessed to temper Lewis’s more heated outbursts; he would then pass the weekend with Lewis at the Kilns, reading together in Virgil, Homer, and Dante. Each time Lewis welcomed him warmly, but the two friends never regained their earlier intimacy: the termination of the “Great War” and Lewis’s conversion had put an end to that.

  Barfield’s marriage was under strain as well. There was no mystery about the reason: Maud distrusted Anthroposophy and disliked her husband’s involvement in it. On September 27, 1928, she had written him a furious letter, describing a text by Steiner as “nauseating” and “petty,” accusing Barfield of being obsessed with his own spiritual path without “any desire to find out what my mind was like or on what high quest I was traveling” and of failing to acknowledge her prayers on his behalf. The Barfield scholar Simon Blaxland–de Lange speculates that this letter, “a private outpouring of grief and anger,” was never sent. In any event, the couple remained together. Maud continued to loathe Anthroposophy and all its trappings, while her husband nursed the wound inflicted by this “sword through the marriage knot.”