The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  *

  Professors and college tutors at Oxford do not necessarily meet often in the course of duty, even if they are members of the same faculty. It was not until Tuesday 11 May 1926, after he had been in residence at Magdalen for two terms, that Lewis had a chance to talk at any length to the new Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had started work in the University at the same time as himself. On that day he went to an ‘English Tea’ at Merton College for a discussion of faculty business.

  At the tea there was some discussion of the General Strike, but not much was said about it, for Oxford had scarcely been affected. Then came some business involving the lecture lists. After that (Lewis recorded in his diary) ‘Tolkien managed to get the discussion round to the proposed English Prelim. I had a talk with him afterwards. He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap – can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks the language is the real thing in the school – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest – still the sound changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons. His pet abomination is the idea of “liberal studies”. Technical hobbies are more in his line. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’

  2

  ‘What? You too?’

  John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was aged thirty-four, young by the standard of Oxford professors. He had been an Oxford undergraduate between 1911 and 1915, reading Classical Moderations and then English, specialising in the ‘language’ side of the course; that is, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and philology. After marrying, serving in France during the war, and working briefly in Oxford on the New English Dictionary, he had been appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University. While teaching in Leeds he had built up a ‘language’ side to the English syllabus that was notable for its imagination and liveliness. Now that he was back in Oxford, he was determined to remodel the Oxford English School’s ‘language’ side on the lines that had been successful in Leeds.

  He put his proposals to the Faculty not long after Lewis’s first conversation with him. Lewis was among those who voted against him.

  *

  In declaring to Lewis that ‘the language is the real thing in the school’, Tolkien was in fact reviving an old Oxford quarrel, which had split the Honour School of English Language and Literature ever since its foundation at the end of the nineteenth century.

  It was a quarrel about what a university course in ‘English’ should consist of. One faction believed that it ought to be based on ancient and medieval texts and their language, with at most only a brief excursion into ‘modern’ literature – by ‘modern’ they meant anything later than Chaucer. These people wanted an English course that was as severe a discipline as a study of the classics. On the other side were those who thought the most important thing was to study the whole range of English literature up to the present day.

  The two factions had different ancestors. The people who were in favour of ancient and medieval studies and philology (all known familiarly as ‘language’, though a good deal more than linguistics was involved) were the cultural descendants of the traditional Oxford classical scholarship, and more recently of nineteenth-century comparative philologists such as Max Müller. The ‘literature’ people (those in favour of the study of post-Chaucerian writers) were in general a new breed of teachers and literary critics who believed that the study of recent vernacular literature was just as important as reading Latin and Greek or other ancient writings. Indeed many of these people thought that, in a time of broadening educational opportunities, recent literature had a far greater future than ‘dead’ languages as an academic discipline. Some of them (more notably at Cambridge than at Oxford) were also beginning to form the idea that by reading English literature a student could in some way improve his character as well as his knowledge. It was this view which Tolkien attacked so vehemently when he told Lewis that he abominated ‘liberal studies’.

  There were several reasons why Tolkien took this attitude. First, he himself had never studied post-Chaucerian literature more than cursorily, for ‘English’ had scarcely been taught at his school (King Edward’s, Birmingham), and as an undergraduate he had concentrated on the ‘language’ side of the English course. Moreover, although he had many favourites among later writers, he took an impish delight in challenging established values, saying that he found The Faerie Queene unreadable because of Spenser’s idiosyncratic treatment of the language, and declaring that Shakespeare had been unjustifiably deified. But a deeper and more important reason was that his own mind and imagination had been captivated since schooldays by early English poems such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Pearl, and by the Old Icelandic Völsungasaga and Elder Edda. These were all the literature that he needed.

  Lewis’s view was rather different. For him the great works of post-Chaucerian literature had, after all, been a source of joy since boyhood. Spenser was a particular favourite with him. He knew comparatively little Anglo-Saxon literature, and though he was deeply attached to Norse mythology he did not know more than a few words of Old Icelandic itself. So the notion that the earliest part of the course was of special importance – or, as Tolkien put it, that ‘the language is the real thing’ – seemed an exaggeration. There was thus every reason for him to vote against Tolkien.

  On the other hand the changes proposed by Tolkien were quite logical. At that time the Oxford syllabus was, in his view, gravely deficient in that it did not encourage a literary approach to early and medieval writings; and Tolkien did believe passionately that Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English prose and poetry should be treated as literature and not merely as a quarry for ‘gobbets’ (passages set in examinations) and for teaching the rules of sound-changes. He was annoyed that students were required by the syllabus to learn off pat such linguistic rules as Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws, but did not have to read any Old or Middle-English literature other than short pieces in anthologies. He thought it absurd, in other words, that Lewis’s pupils were having to learn rules by rote (‘Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’’) while they scarcely knew any of the literature to which these rules applied. Lewis in fact had realised the absurdity of this situation. Hence his ‘Beer and Beowulf’ evenings, in which his pupils actually did some reading beyond the syllabus.

  This state of affairs applied to the men and women who chose the course which specialised in post-Chaucerian literature – in fact about ninety per cent of the undergraduates reading English Nor were conditions much better for the few who opted for early and medieval studies, for they had to spend a good deal of time – wasted time, thought Tolkien – away from their special field, reading Shakespeare and Milton. Tolkien was determined to end this, and to get the Faculty to accept a remodelled syllabus, in which everyone would be expected to read widely in early English literature, while the early and medieval specialists could pursue their chosen work without having to turn aside and study later writers.

  Few people in the Faculty quarrelled with these notions as such. The trouble was that in order to make room for a more thorough study of the early period some other part of the syllabus would have to be abandoned or made optional. Tolkien recommended, in an article in the Oxford Magazine, ‘jettisoning certainly the nineteenth century (unless parts of it could appear as an “additional subject”)’, and suggested that the compulsory papers should stop at 1830.

  The notion of improving the study of ancient literature by curtailing the reading of modern writers had a certain appeal at Oxford. The English Faculty had always been embarrassed by those in the University – and there were many – who alleged that undergraduates could read English literature in their baths, and did not need dons to teach it to them any more than they needed nursemaids to wipe their noses. (Lewis himself shared this view.) The study of recent writers was particularly open to this charge; so there was some attraction in amputating the nineteenth century from the syllabus, particularly if it was to g
ive place to what was indubitably a more scholarly pursuit in Oxford’s eyes, the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. This is perhaps why, though Tolkien’s proposal to finish the syllabus at 1830 was strongly resisted by many of the ‘literature’ dons, it was not quashed, but became the subject of considerable argument in the English Faculty during the months following Tolkien’s first meeting with Lewis; years, indeed, rather than months, for it was not until 1931 that the issue was settled.

  *

  At first, Lewis was among the opponents of Tolkien’s proposals. But soon he began to come round to Tolkien’s side in the English School faction fight. This was due in the beginning to the Coalbiters.

  Tolkien had decided to form a club among the dons to read Icelandic sagas and myths. Among his proposals for syllabus reform was the suggestion that Old Icelandic, also known as Old Norse, should be given a more prominent place among early and medieval studies, at least for the specialists; and he thought that the best way to proselytise would be to show his colleagues how enjoyable the reading of Icelandic can be. So the Coalbiters came into existence.

  Their Icelandic name was Kolbítar, a jesting term meaning ‘men who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal’. Tolkien founded the club in the spring term of 1926. Its first members included several men with a reasonable knowledge of Icelandic: R. M. Dawkins, the Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek; C. T. Onions of the Dictionary; G. E. K. Braunholtz, the Professor of Comparative Philology; and John Fraser, the Celtic Professor. But another founder-member was Nevill Coghill, who knew no Icelandic; and soon he was joined by others who were similarly ignorant and were merely enthusiastic beginners. These included John Bryson, the English tutor at Balliol College; George Gordon, the Professor of English Literature and later President of Magdalen (who had been Tolkien’s head of department at Leeds); and two Magdalen dons, Bruce McFarlane, the historian, and C. S. Lewis.

  The suggestion that Lewis be invited to join may have come from John Bryson, a fellow Ulsterman, or from George Gordon, who had taught Lewis as an undergraduate and had been influential in getting him the Magdalen fellowship (Gordon was a great intriguer and campaigner: he had also had a hand in Tolkien’s election as Professor of Anglo-Saxon). Or maybe it was Tolkien himself who discovered that Lewis was keen to join the club. At all events by January 1927 Lewis was attending the Kolbítar, and was finding it invigorating.

  Like Coghill and several of the others he could not, when he first joined, read more than a few words of Icelandic without a dictionary. But this did not matter. During the evening, those present would take turns to translate from the text they were reading. Tolkien, who was of course expert in the language and knew the text well, would improvise a perfect translation of perhaps a dozen pages. Then Dawkins and others who had a working knowledge of Icelandic would translate perhaps a page each. Then the beginners – Lewis, Coghill, Bryson and the others – would work their way through no more than a paragraph or two, and might have to call on Tolkien for help in a difficult passage. The learners certainly found it hard going; as John Bryson remarked, ‘When we were enrolled we never realised that it was going to be such a business.’ He recalled that on one occasion ‘a certain scholar, who must remain nameless, was actually caught using a printed “crib” under the table as he translated his passage apparently impromptu. He was not invited back again!’ But most of them took it seriously, especially Lewis.

  For someone who had been devoted to Norse myths and legends since adolescence it was exhilarating to be reading them in the original language. ‘Spent the morning partly on the Edda,’ Lewis wrote in his diary in February 1927: the Coalbiters were working their way through the Younger Edda, which contains a version of the great Norse myths. ‘Hammered my way through a couple of pages in about an hour, but I am making some headway. It is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse under the initiation of Longfellow. It seemed impossible then that I should ever come to read these things in the original. The old authentic thrill came back to me once or twice this morning: the mere names of god and giant catching my eye as I turned the pages of Zoega’s dictionary were enough.’

  The Coalbiters met once every few weeks in term-time, progressing through the sagas towards their eventual goal of the Elder Edda. But not until three years had passed did Lewis begin to realise that the thrill he received from Norse mythology was shared by Tolkien.

  On 3 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘One week I was up till 2.30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien, who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain – who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good.’

  It was the beginning of a friendship: the moment, as Lewis once remarked, when someone who has till then believed his feelings to be unique cries out, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

  *

  Tolkien entirely shared Lewis’s love for ‘Northernness’. He too had first discovered the taste in childhood1 when he found in a book of fairy stories the tale of Sigurd the Völsung who slew the dragon Fafnir. Reading it, the young Tolkien fell under the spell of what he called ‘the nameless North’. He ‘desired dragons with a profound desire’. At school in Birmingham he taught himself the Norse language and began to read the myths and sagas in their original words. Like Lewis, he fell under the spell of William Morris. And, just as Lewis during adolescence had begun to write his own Norse-style poetry and drama, Tolkien at about the age of eighteen conceived the idea of recreating the ‘Northernness’ that delighted him by writing a cycle of myth and legend. But it was a far more ambitious task than anything Lewis attempted, for whereas Lewis had merely written a pastiche of existing Norse stories, Tolkien began to create a whole new mythology out of his imagination. And while Lewis soon passed on from his adolescent ‘Northern’ writings to other kinds of poetry, Tolkien continued to work at his cycle year after year. It remained the centre of his imaginative life.

  During the First World War he began to write in prose form the tales which were the principal elements of his cycle, and by the time he moved from Leeds to Oxford in 1925 these tales had long since been sketched out. But he did not organise them into an entirely continuous or consistent narrative, partly because his attention was taken up with a series of invented languages which were closely related to the mythology, being spoken by ‘elvish’ peoples; in fact these languages and the need to provide a ‘history’ for them had been a major motive for beginning the whole project. Tolkien also delayed drawing up a finished version of The Silmarillion, as he came to call his cycle, because he wanted to recast two of the principal stories into verse. Like Lewis he regarded himself chiefly as a poet. During his time at Leeds he began to write two long narrative poems, one telling the story of Túrin Túram-bar the dragon-slayer and the other recounting the romantic tale of Beren and Lúthien, the mortal man and the elven maid whom he loves, and for whose sake he goes on a terrible quest.

  Tolkien kept this occupation a very private matter, rarely mentioning it to anyone. In 1925 he did send parts of the two poems to a retired schoolmaster who had once taught him, and he was disappointed when they were criticised rather severely. For a long time afterwards he consulted nobody.

  It was early in December 1929, a few days after their late-night conversation about the Norse gods and giants, that he decided to show the Beren and Lúthien poem to Lewis. It was very long and still unfinished; its title was ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’, and it was in rhyming couplets. Here is part of the description, in the version Tolkien showed to Lewis, of the ‘elder days’ of the elven kingdom of Doriath:

  There once, and long and long ago,

  before the sun and moon we know

  were lit to sail above the world,

  when first the shaggy woods unfurled,

  and shadowy shapes did stare and roam


  beneath the dark and starry dome

  that hung above the dawn of Earth,

  the silences with silver mirth

  were shaken, and the rocks were ringing –

  the birds of Melian were singing,

  the first to sing in mortal lands.

  On 7 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Tolkien:

  My dear Tolkien,

  Just a line to say that I sat up late last night and have read the geste as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of the ores above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf. I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it – I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader. So much at the first flush. Detailed criticisms (including grumbles at individual lines) will follow.

  Yours,

  C. S. Lewis.

  When Lewis’s ‘detailed criticisms’ of the poem arrived, Tolkien found that Lewis had, in jest, annotated its text as if it were a celebrated piece of ancient literature, already heavily studied by scholars with such names as ‘Pumpernickel’, ‘Peabody’, ‘Bentley’, and ‘Schick’; he alleged that any weaknesses in Tolkien’s verses were the result of scribal errors or corruptions in the manuscript. Sometimes Lewis actually suggested entirely new passages to replace lines he thought poor, and here too he ascribed his own versions to supposedly historical sources. For example, he suggested that the lines about the ‘elder days’ quoted above could be replaced by the following stanza of his own, which he described as ‘the so called Poema Historiale, probably contemporary with the earliest MSS of the geste’: