Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  For Tolkien, northernness was a far more complicated proposition. The Norse culture that the young Lewis made the center of a semispiritual, imaginative, but mostly private inner life was, for him, tangled in feelings about his family, his religion, his ancestry, and his profession. Where Lewis’s Anglo-Irish national identity could be fluid, allowing him to be English or Irish as the spirit moved him, Tol- kien believed very strongly in his own Englishness. His father’s name, true, had come over from Saxony in the eighteenth century, but Tolkien insisted that his paternal forebears had been instantly absorbed into the English soil, and besides, it was his mother’s people he regarded as his real ancestors. “Barring the Tolkien (which must long ago have become a pretty thin strand),” he once wrote to his son Christopher, “you are a Mercian or Hwiccian (of Wychwood) on both sides,” referring, with a characteristic degree of specificity, to two of the kingdoms in what historians once called the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy.

  To understand the significance of Tolkien’s deeply felt national identity, it helps to know a little of the ethnic history of Britain (a term that, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll use to include Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as England, acknowledging that there’s much controversy over that usage). The islands have been peopled for hundreds of thousands of years, apart from the Ice Age interludes during which glaciers and a frozen climate rendered them uninhabitable. Theirs is a history of successive migrations or invasions and settlements, with the loose grouping of British tribes we customarily call the Celts absorbing their nameless prehistoric predecessors, followed by a period of Roman occupation, an influx of Germanic tribes, including the Angles and Saxons, and finally the Norman Conquest in 1066, which installed a French-speaking elite. With each addition, the lingua franca of the islands changed and adapted.

  The first time Tolkien encountered the language called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (a schoolmaster loaned him a primer when he was a boy), he felt that he recognized it immediately, not just as the basis of the English spoken all around him, but in his bones. Tolkien thought, as many do, that races and ethnicities have certain inherent traits, but he also believed, more firmly than most, that a people’s essence and history are captured in their language. Tolkien responded to languages intensely, as aesthetic objects — but, really, “objects” is not an adequate word for it. For Tolkien, languages were aesthetic realms, lovely (or not) in detail, on the level of particular words, and in the larger structures of grammar. As his skill in philology, the study of languages, grew, a single word in an old manuscript or the name of a place — what might seem like inert nuggets of letters or sound to most people — could tell Tolkien all kinds of stories: about a god who used to be worshipped at this stone, a Roman villa that used to stand in that hamlet, the history of how a certain animal first appeared in a certain region.

  Tolkien admired several languages — Finnish, Spanish, and Welsh, for three — but Anglo-Saxon was his home. And home was a fragile construct for Tolkien, whose father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever when he was four, and whose mother succumbed to complications resulting from diabetes when he was twelve. Mabel Tolkien had converted to Roman Catholicism not long after her son was born, and she had been cut off financially and emotionally by her family as a result. She struggled to support herself and her two children (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had a younger brother named Hilary) on the limited funds left to her by her husband, but there were a few idyllic years spent in villages in Worcestershire. The area not only served as a model for the Shire in Middle-earth, but came to figure prominently in Tolkien’s sense of himself as an Englishman. He was, he maintained, “a West-Midlander, at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches,” and this, he felt, explained both his personality and his love of Anglo-Saxon.

  For Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon was the heart of Englishness, and the Norman Conquest initiated the shameful decay of that noble tongue by introducing Continental borrowings and other forms of linguistic pollution. He felt the defeat of the Saxon King Harold by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 as a fresh wound, and he held this against the French language and culture to the end of his days.

  Tolkien was acutely susceptible to viewing life in this fashion, to seeing it as a tragic drift away from some past ideal. He had lost his perfect country home when his mother was forced by her financial woes to move to the city of Birmingham. Then he lost Mabel herself, a catastrophe he blamed on her family, who in his view had subjected her to “persecution, poverty, and largely consequent, disease” because of her religion. For the rest of his life he would cling fiercely to his Catholicism, a commitment his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, attributes to loyalty to Mabel’s memory: “after she died his religion took the place in his affections that she had previously occupied.” (Tolkien was still invoking his mother’s sufferings in 1965, when reproaching his children for drifting away from the Church.)

  But if Tolkien saw his Catholicism as an unbreakable bond with his lost, beloved mother, the religion also suited his disposition. It was the first, the most ancient, the Mother Church, from which the wayward, venal world insisted on straying; however, Tolkien (a man who knew the value of ancient things and of mothers) would remain true to it. There’s a certain gloomy strain in Catholicism, preoccupied with the Fall and the corruption of this earthly existence, that jibed with Tolkien’s own temperament. “It is a fallen world,” he wrote to his son Michael, sounding a theme that resonates through his letters, “and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls. However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.”

  All this explains why Tolkien was inclined to envision the Anglo-Saxon language (and, by extension, Anglo-Saxon culture) as an embattled underdog, ebbing away into the past. He knew that many precious works of Old English literature, particularly from the first half of the six-hundred-year reign of the Anglo-Saxon kings in England — which would necessarily include most of the pre-Christian texts — had been lost. Of the culture’s heroic tradition, little more than Beowulf remains. “One sees,” writes Tom Shippey, a professor of Anglo-Saxon himself and a champion of the philological aspects of Tolkien’s work, “that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realize, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in a.d. 419.”

  Passages in Beowulf and other surviving works allude to legends and entire epics that have vanished, in part because Christianizing Crusaders in the latter days of Anglo-Saxon rule ordered some materials destroyed, but also because the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition was primarily oral. The arrival of the French-speaking Normans eventually put an end even to that. “Modern English,” Tolkien wrote to the poet W. H. Auden of the language we speak today, this polyglot mixture of words adopted from many other tongues, “is very remote from my personal taste.” Whereas the conventional scholarly opinion is that English literature begins with Chaucer, Tolkien thought it ended with him (or a little later — Spenser was certainly a death knell!).

  An entire body of heroic epics and legends, stories that were, in Tolkien’s opinion, purely English, had vanished, leaving his mother-land bereft. Unlike the Scandinavians, whose ancient stories had been preserved in the Eddas, and the Finns, whose oral traditions were collected in a book called the Kalevala (another favorite of Tolkien’s), the English had forgotten their native “mythology,” and even the humblest of folklore had been neglected; England had no equivalent to Germany’s Brothers Grimm, dedicated to preserving her fairy tales. Of the old, pre-Norman English world, only a handful of hints remain in the surviving Anglo-Saxon texts, primarily in the epic Tolkien loved and studied all his life, Beowulf.

  Beowulf, the story of a great warrior who defeats a monster, the monster’s mother, and finally a dragon, is the oldest
extant example of Germanic literature, the only intact remainder of a vanished world. A pagan tale related by a Christian poet, it was most likely composed sometime in the 700s, but the concentration of pagan elements in the mixture is strong. Although written in Old English, Beowulf describes events that happen in Denmark, and its eponymous hero is a Geat — that is, from a part of Scandinavia that would eventually become Sweden.

  Tolkien’s conception of English identity revolved around language, and that made it essentially Germanic. Anglo-Saxon polytheism was derived from Norse mythology: the king of the Norse gods, Odin, was the Anglo-Saxon Woden; Thunor, a version of the Norse thunder god Thor, and so on. The Icelandic Eddas, the works that the Kolbitar was dedicated to reading, interested Tolkien in their own right, but their special value to him lay in the fact that they are the most extensive collection we have of Old Norse myth and legend and therefore offer us a shadow of what he thought his own ancestors believed.

  While both Lewis and Tolkien were entranced by Norse myths, they came to the old stories with very different yearnings. For Lewis, “northernness” was something distant and austere, a call from far away that fed his appetite for transcendence. For Tolkien, the old tales had some of that frosty charm — “very remote and strange and beautiful” is how he described the passage in Anglo-Saxon that inspired his first imaginings of Middle-earth — but northernness was also “homely” to him, if not quite in the same way that Lewis defined that word; it was home, his roots, a fundamental part of his identity, even if he could see it only through a Scandinavian glass, and darkly. Still, what survived of Norse paganism did not really fill the gap Tolkien felt in his nation’s imaginative past — or in his own. And finally he felt the urge to supply the missing stories himself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Builder and the Dreamer

  By 1929, Tolkien was meeting with Lewis in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen every Monday morning. They drank (tea and beer), talked, and read to each other from their work. Lewis loved to be read to, and excelled at off-the-cuff literary criticism; Tolkien needed someone with whom to share his love of Anglo-Saxon, Old England, and eventually, the secret, handmade world he had begun inventing during the war: Middle-earth. It was from the seed of these meetings that the informal institution of the Inklings would eventually grow.

  The friendship between the two men was a complicated, fruitful affair; Tolkien would affirm to the end of his days, even after their connection had withered, that he never would have written The Lord of the Rings without Lewis’s constant nudging and encouragement. They had much in common, and several significant differences. It’s hard to contemplate their relationship without slipping into comparisons that would have distressed Lewis. He saw Tolkien and himself as cronies and collaborators — surely they fought for the same cause and in the same way? Lewis was the type to get swept up in a friendship, especially a new one, and to envision his friend as an ideal companion, brushing aside or simply ignoring any dissonance.

  Tolkien, however, was a stickler by nature, the kind of person who feels compelled to raise objections to every observation and to dismiss every suggestion of influence on his own work, including that of Lewis. Not every one of Tolkien’s quibbles is completely convincing; at times, his protests seem more like a reflex than anything else. According to Carpenter, Tolkien’s children remember that, despite claiming to “disapprove” of drama, he seemed to enjoy the theater greatly. He was fond of saying that he disliked Shakespeare “cordially,” but his letters contain several Shakespearean analogies suggesting that he was on a familiar basis with the plays, comparing, for example, Sam Gamgee’s treatment of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings to the way Ariel behaves toward Caliban in The Tempest. (By contrast, Tolkien never makes such references to the artists he really hated, Wagner being the prime example.)

  Lewis’s Narnia seems a wispy caprice compared to Tolkien’s imaginary land. There has never been another creative endeavor quite like Middle-earth — beginning with the extensive, fully elaborated languages Tolkien devised, and then the maps, genealogies, history, literature, and mythology that sprung from them. In the same way that certain people love movies so much they cannot rest until they get to make them, Tolkien’s passion for languages led him, at an early age, to formulate languages of his own. And because his understanding of language was profound and organic (rather than the arid pedantry often assumed to motivate philologists), he knew that languages can’t exist without someone to speak them; even a dead language was spoken and shaped by living people once. So Tolkien resolved to animate his handiwork by devising a world and a time in which the elvish tongues Sindarin and Quenya could be spoken. “I made the discovery,” he explained to a reader, “that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition.”

  Tolkien often spoke of Middle-earth as partly of his own devising and partly received from a mysterious other source. From the first, when he began to write verses about an ancient mariner named Earendel in 1914 and showed them to a friend, the border between his own imagination and some variety of semirevealed truth was blurred. The friend asked Tolkien what the verses “really meant,” and Tolkien’s response was “I’ll find out.”

  He soon came to think of the myths, legends, and epics he concocted in his spare time as a suitable replacement for the forgotten mythology and legends of the Anglo-Saxons. (His first efforts at writing The Silmarillion were compiled in a notebook entitled “The Book of Lost Tales.”) “Imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet,” he once told his publisher. He had fashioned a fictional past for a real country. In his later years in particular, Tolkien felt compelled to clear up minor discrepancies in Middle-earth’s history by “finding out” obscure “facts” that would explain one thing or another.

  To his lasting astonishment, Tolkien’s “private and beloved nonsense” (as he called it), when unleashed upon the world, became immensely popular. His complete conviction in his own creation — one of the most comprehensive and steadfast cases of authorial conviction known to literature — was transmitted to many of his readers. They set about studying and speaking his languages and designing all sorts of time-consuming ancillary versions of Middle-earth, games like Dungeons and Dragons or gatherings where people dressed up like wizards or hobbits. He had created a new world; they packed their bags and moved in. Tolkien had a term for the practice of inventing worlds: “sub-creation.” It was, he believed, in the construction of consistent, believable alternate realities that human beings paid the highest tribute to their Creator — by imitating him. Eventually, for the would-be denizens of Middle-earth, the professor himself became not unlike a god.

  Tolkien’s books were not among my own childhood favorites. With the vague notion that it was esoteric and dense, I put off attempting The Fellowship of the Ring until I was almost ready to leave for college. Even The Hobbit had, among owlish eleven-year-olds, a reputation for being a “hard” book; The Lord of the Rings was considered an intellectual Everest. I tried The Hobbit too soon, attempting it a couple of times before giving up at age eight or so. The copy we had lying around the house (presumably my father’s) was a small, thick drugstore paperback, and its tiny type, combined with the story’s uninspiringly middle-aged hero and all those odd names, contributed to make the story seem stuffy and impenetrable. By the time I acquired the patience for it, I was embarked on a jag of reading plays: Shakespeare, Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and (because my father had a shelf of these) George Bernard Shaw.

  Besides, I much preferred fantasies whose main characters were children from this world. Yet even taking that into account, my own resistance to Middle-earth puzzles me. I loved Mr. Tumnus, yet somehow didn’t recognize that Bilbo Baggins, with his cozily appointed hole, was the same type (and probably an inspiration for Tumnus, I now realize). I had trouble, I think, with The Hobbit’s longish passag
es of description. I couldn’t visualize any of these places, and although Tolkien was even more devoted to the natural world than Lewis, his style was less lyrical and he didn’t have Lewis’s knack for suffusing scenery with human emotions. He wouldn’t have wanted to, since he thought human beings already got far too much attention as it was. That was the nub of his objection to drama and to those critics whose taste ran toward “dramatic” fiction: they are, he wrote, “likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.”

  Just before leaving home, however, I finally tackled The Lord of the Rings, burning through it over the course of a summer. (It is the perfect long book to read before you set off on an ambitious and incomprehensible adventure.) I approached it then with a diligence that now strikes me as bizarre; it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I was able to read it for pure, escapist pleasure. By that point, I recognized that, much as I liked it, Tolkien’s freakishly prodigious powers of invention could not supply the book with what four years of studying English literature had led me to expect from a great novel. I relished The Lord of the Rings, and have reread it several times since then. I awaited each installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part film version with excitement and even delved into the “mythological” texts collected in The Silmarillion — the province, really, of the hardcore fan, the geek. But by the time I left college I had read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Absalom, Absalom! and Crime and Punishment — to name just three books with related themes — and knew they sounded depths that Tolkien never touched.