Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  This conjures up yet another parallel between Chesterton and Tolkien. Chesterton had written The Flying Inn partly as a risible riposte to the Temperance movement and to the spectre of Prohibition, and Tolkien would have sympathized fully with Chesterton’s jocular jousting with these puritanical ‘killjoys’. Tolkien’s regular meetings with Lewis and the other Inklings in the Eagle and Child were as important to him as the meetings with Belloc and Baring in the inns of Fleet Street had been to Chesterton. The consumption of traditional ale in traditional inns was as central to each man’s image of Englishness as it was to Frodo’s and Sam’s image of hobbitness.

  Tolkien had stated that his conceptions of ‘Englishry’ and ‘hobbitry’ were synonymous and, according to these criteria, Chesterton certainly qualifies as an honorary hobbit. The two writers seem to epitomize Englishness, quintessentially so, and one can almost picture them being perfectly at home in the Shire. Indeed, they would be more appreciated in the Shire than they are in modern England. Hobbits, Tolkien wrote, are very fond of stories and it is easy to imagine Farmer Giles of Ham and The Flying Inn at the very top of the hobbits’ reading list!

  ‘Tolkienian Fantasy’ aside, the two writers were certainly kindred spirits. As Tolkien would no doubt have said, if Chesterton had not already done so, ‘The more truly we can see life as a fairy-tale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.’70

  CHAPTER 10

  APPROACHING MOUNT DOOM:

  TOLKIEN’S FINAL YEARS

  In late July 1955, three months before the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien and his daughter Priscilla visited Italy. Throughout the visit he kept a diary, and recorded that he felt as though he had ‘come to the heart of Christendom: an exile from the borders and the far provinces returning home, or at least to the home of his fathers’. Among the canals of Venice he found himself ‘almost free of the cursed disease of the internal combustion engine of which all the world is dying’. Later he wrote that ‘Venice seemed incredibly, elvishly lovely—to me like a dream of Old Gondor, or Pelargir of the Númenórean Ships, before the return of the Shadow.’1 In a letter to his son and daughter-in-law Tolkien wrote that ‘for pure fun and pleasure, I enjoyed the first days at Venice most’2 and on their last day they attended a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto which he described as ‘perfectly astounding’.3 On the following day he and Priscilla travelled to Assisi ‘for the great feast of Santa Chiara’, where they attended ‘High Mass sung by Cardinal Micara with silver trumpets at the elevation!’ In the letter to his son and daughter-in-law, he reported being ‘staggered by the frescos of Assisi’ and wrote that ‘I remain in love with Italian, and feel quite lorn without a chance of trying to speak it!’4

  Tolkien returned to England to find himself besieged by anxious publishers, pressing him to deal with the last few remaining queries from the printers concerning the overdue third volume of The Lord of the Rings. This finally reached the bookshops on 20 October, a year after the publication of the first two volumes.

  The Lord of the Rings was soon established as an international bestseller and its success attracted the attention of the film world. On 4 September 1957 Tolkien was approached by three American businessmen, Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax, who showed him drawings for a proposed animated motion picture of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was impressed by the ‘really astonishingly good pictures’ which were ‘Rackham rather than Disney’, but he was not impressed by the proposed ‘Story Line’: ‘The Story Line or Scenario was, however, on a lower level. In fact bad.’5 ‘People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation,’ Tolkien complained in a letter to his publisher, ‘Lorien becomes a fairy-castle with “delicate minarets”, and all that sort of thing.’6 A number of names were consistently misspelt in the synopsis—Boromir being rendered as ‘Borimor’—and lembas, the elvish waybread which several critics had compared to the Blessed Sacrament, was described as a ‘food concentrate’.

  Negotiations with the film moguls were discontinued, but the celebrity status Tolkien was to enjoy and endure in the wake of the international success of The Lord of the Rings was only just beginning.

  At around the time he was being courted by rich American film makers, he became the winner of the International Fantasy Award, which was presented to him at the Fifteenth World Science Fiction Convention on 10 September. ‘What it boiled down to,’ Tolkien wrote, ‘was a lunch at the Criterion. . . with speeches, and the handing over of an absurd “trophy”. A massive metal “model” ’ of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter).’7

  Tolkien’s new-found fame was far removed from his academic career as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, and the incongruity of his dual role as popular fantasy writer and internationally acclaimed philologist caused both bemusement and a certain wry amusement among his fellow dons at Oxford. He was now in his sixties and his academic career was coming to an end even as his international fame as a writer was beginning. He retired in 1959, at the age of sixty-seven, and gave his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford on 5 June of that year. It was full of the self-effacing humility befitting the occasion and he displayed an attitude to the subject of philology which was both modest and moderate: ‘Philology was part of my job, and I enjoyed it. I have always found it amusing. But I have never had strong views about it. I do not think it necessary to salvation. I do not think it should be thrust down the throats of the young, as a pill, the more efficacious the nastier it tastes.’8 Yet his self-effacement should not detract from his key role in reconciling the formerly estranged schools of language and literature at Oxford. During the years 1925—35 he had been, in the words of his obituarist in The Times, ‘more than any other single man, responsible for closing the old rift between “literature” and “philology” in English studies at Oxford and thus giving the existing school its characteristic temper. His unique insight at once into the language of poetry and into the poetry of language qualified him for this task.’9 In his Valedictory Address Tolkien referred to this aspect of his life’s work in terms which alluded to his birth in South Africa: ‘I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.’10

  One of the best descriptions of Tolkien as an Oxford professor, viewed from the perspective of one of the many undergraduates he taught over the years, was given by Desmond Albrow, writing in the Catholic Herald. Albrow’s first meeting with Tolkien had taken place in Tolkien’s study at his home in Northmoor Road, north Oxford, in 1943:

  Tolkien was not then widely known outside the narrow confines of Oxbridge and academe. . . I, with my provincial ignorance of the ways of the literary and intellectual world, had never even heard of Tolkien. But he was the first Oxford professor that I had ever met face to face and the delightful fact was that he behaved to me like a true scholar-gentleman.

  I was then a fairly clever, but fairly callow, 18-year-old, fresh and unbruised by life from the North of England for whom Oxford at first taste was almost a foreign hinterland with bizarre rules and traps to snare both the arrogant and the innocent. In about a quarter of an hour Tolkien gave me a confidence and an optimism that he so easily could have destroyed with a cutting phrase or a supercilious quip. Just imagine if I had encountered one of those modern-day, smart-alec, television-preening dons who have now despoiled what is left of the high tables of Oxford.

  Here was a professor who looked like a professor. . . Tolkien wore cords and a sports jacket, smoked a reassuring pipe, laughed a lot, sometimes mumbled when his thoughts outstripped words, looked in those days to my idealistic eyes like the young Leslie Howard, the film actor. There was a sense of civilisation, winsome sanity and sophistication about him. . .

  After the conclusion of the interview, Albrow left Tolkien’s house, ‘with its books, pipesmoke and ob
vious testaments to children and family life’, with a ‘jaunty step’ and a new confidence about his future as an Oxford undergraduate.

  Years later, when Albrow became engaged to be married, he discovered that his future wife’s family had been friends in north Oxford with the Tolkiens for many years. His future father-in-law had bought Tolkien’s last car after Tolkien’s dislike for the internal combustion engine had finally led to his forsaking car ownership. ‘I liked this,’ Albrow recalled. ‘Somehow Hobbits and motor-cars did not seem to make sense.’

  As a good friend of the family into which Albrow was marrying, Tolkien had re-entered his life:

  He was still the kind man who had befriended me when there was no need, still laughed and gently mocked the world, still mumbled and puffed his pipe. Later he made a gracious and witty speech at our wedding. . .11

  In his memoir, Albrow compared Tolkien, ‘a professor who looked like a professor’, with C.S. Lewis, who ‘looked more like an intellectual butcher’. Yet during the 1950s differences had emerged between Tolkien and Lewis which went deeper than the sartorial. There was never a breach in their friendship, just a gradual, almost imperceptible cooling of relations which was exacerbated by Lewis’s controversial marriage to Joy Davidman in March 1957. None of Lewis’s friends were told of the marriage, learning of the event only through the notice in The Times, and Tolkien was only one of several of Lewis’s closest friends who were astonished and offended by the news. Since Lewis’s love affair with Joy Davidman has now been immortalized, and partially fictionalized, in the BBC and Hollywood productions of Shadowlands, it is difficult to sympathize with, or understand, the opposition which the marriage provoked at the time. Yet to Lewis’s friends, Tolkien included, only the bare facts were visible. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor who was not far short of his sixtieth birthday, had married an American divorcée, in itself shocking in the eyes of those who saw Lewis as a bastion of traditional Christian teaching on marriage. Furthermore, this divorcée was seen as an arriviste, exerting an unhealthy influence on Lewis. However unjust such a viewpoint may seem in hindsight, it was not so easy for those closest to Lewis to see things dispassionately at the time.

  The depth of Tolkien’s feelings for Lewis and his regrets at their estrangement were expressed in a letter to Priscilla four days after Lewis’s death on 22 November 1963:

  So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have become so separated in the last years,—but our time of close communion endured in our memory for both of us. I had a mass said this morning, and was there, and served.12

  R.E. Havard and James Dundas-Grant, two other members of the Inklings, were also present at the Mass.

  At Lewis’s funeral at Holy Trinity, the Headington Quarry church which Lewis attended throughout the last years of his life, Tolkien met up with several other old friends, including Owen Barfield, George Sayer and John Lawlor. They had their own memories of Lewis, unique to each of them, but the deep sense of loss was shared by all. Tolkien expressed his own feelings in several letters to members of his family. To his son Michael he wrote that ‘many people still regard me as one of his intimates. Alas! that ceased to be so some ten years ago. We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage. Of which he never even told me. . . But we owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie with the deep affection that it begot, remains. He was a great man of whom the cold-blooded official obituaries only scraped the surface, in places with injustice.’13 The grief which Tolkien felt at the loss of Lewis was expressed in a letter to his publisher on 23 December in which he bemoaned ‘a troublous year, of endless distraction and much weariness, ending with the blow of C.S.L.’s death’.14 In a letter to Christopher Bretherton in July of the following year Tolkien wrote that Lewis ‘was my closest friend from about 1927 to 1940, and remained very dear to me. His death was a grievous blow.’15

  In the following month Tolkien was moved to defend Lewis from comments which George Bailey, one of Lewis’s former pupils, had made in an article in The Reporter.

  C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T.S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.16

  Lewis’s and Tolkien’s negative attitude towards Eliot is certainly curious and perhaps a little anomalous. In both cases their disdain for Eliot’s verse dated back to the early ‘20s when The Waste Land had shocked the sensibilities of the poetic establishment while striking a pessimistic chord with the post-war generation. Tolkien’s and Lewis’s intense traditionalism prevented them from coming to terms with the freeness of form employed by Eliot, even though the sentiments expressed in his verse echoed their own view of life to a remarkable extent. In his later verse, Choruses from ‘The Rock’ and Four Quartets, Eliot expressed an opposition to materialism and scientism with a profundity which few, if any, have matched this century. If anything, he was probably even more traditionalist than either Tolkien or Lewis, as dismayed as they about the cultural decline throughout the century, and in the specifically religious context he slots somewhere between the two of them. As an Anglo-Catholic he was ‘higher’ than Lewis in Anglican terms while never actually ‘poping’ and becoming a convert to Roman Catholicism.

  In spite of Tolkien’s inability to appreciate Eliot’s verse, many critics have been quick to see parallels between their respective visions. Charles Moseley, in his study of Tolkien, stressed the similarities between the image of the Waste Land and the image of Mordor:

  Already the motif to which Tolkien often returned, the Quest journey through a Waste Land, the challenge to a dark Tower—a challenge that in turn tests the maturity and integrity of the challenger—is dominant. The echoes of medieval Arthurian romance are patent, just as they are in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; and both writers share an interest in the way the mythic stirs half-understood resonances in a reader’s mind.17

  Another parallel was drawn by Colin Wilson: ‘The Lord of the Rings is a criticism of the modern world and of the values of technological civilization. It asserts its own values, and tries to persuade the reader that they are preferable to current values. . . In fact, like The Waste Land, it is at once an attack on the modern world and a credo, a manifesto.’18

  More recently, in the aftermath of Tolkien’s triumph in the Waterstone’s poll, John Clute, editor of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, sought to explain the cultural criteria which underpin The Lord of the Rings in terms which culminated naturally in Eliot’s ‘waste land’ motif. Clute described The Lord of the Rings, with its hard-won triumph of good over evil and its ‘earned happy ending’, as ‘a comprehensive counter-myth to the story of the twentieth century’, stressing that it enshrined Tolkien’s sense ‘that what had happened to life in the twentieth century was profoundly inhuman’. Tolkien’s counter-myth, Clute concluded, was ‘a description of a universe that feels right—another reality that the soul requires in this waste-land century’.19

  Meanwhile, Charles W. Moorman endeavoured to place the connections in a wider context. Moorman argued that the image of the City formulated by St Augustine largely shaped and regulated the tone and form of the work of Tolkien, Lewis, Eliot, Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers.20 When Eliot died in January 1965 Tolkien became the only survivor of this group of Christian writers, intensifying his feeling that he had outstayed his welcome in the ‘waste land’ century he had grown to despise. The previous decade had seen the death of most of the generation
of literary figures whose traditionalist response to twentieth-century materialism had constituted a significant Christian cultural revival. Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers and Roy Campbell had all died in 1957, Alfred Noyes the following year, and Edith Sitwell in 1964. Evelyn Waugh would die in 1966 and Siegfried Sassoon in 1967. As he watched his literary peers, and his world, quite literally pass away before his eyes, the sense of exile surfaced as never before. This was evident in a letter to his friend Amy Ronald, dated 16 November 1969:

  What a dreadful, fear-darkened, sorrow-laden world we live in—especially for those who have also the burden of age, whose friends and all they especially care for are afflicted in the same way. Chesterton once said that it is our duty to keep the Flag of This World flying: but it takes now a sturdier and more sublime patriotism than it did then. Gandalf added that it is not for us to choose the times into which we are born, but to do what we could to repair them,—but the spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads. . .21

  In such circumstances Tolkien gained much consolation from his faith, writing in the same letter to Amy Ronald of his belief in the power of prayer: ‘I pray for you—because I have a feeling (more near a certainty) that God, for some ineffable reason which to us may seem almost like humour, is so curiously ready to answer the prayers of the least worthy of his suppliants—if they pray for others. I do not of course mean to say that he only answers the prayers of the unworthy (who ought not to expect to be heard at all), or I should not now be benefitting by the prayers of others.’