Now that Ronald was at school, Mabel moved the household from rural Sarehole to a rented house in Moseley in the city centre, near a Catholic church. Ronald was desolate at the move, and was at first unhappy at school, but after a term settled in well enough. After two years, Mabel moved them again, this time to be closer to the Birmingham Oratory, as she had grown to dislike the church they had been attending. One of the Fathers of the Oratory, Fr Francis Xavier Morgan, half Welsh, half Anglo-Spanish (his family were in the wine trade), became a family friend and (we would probably say today) spiritual director to Mabel.
The Oratory also ran a school, St Philip’s; Ronald and Hilary were enrolled there in 1902, but after a year, it became clear that although the education was Catholic and the fees were lower than those of King Edward’s, the schooling was not of the same quality; and Ronald needed to be stretched. His mother took the boys out of school and taught them at home. With the help of coaching from his mother, and from his aunt Jane (who was a mathematics teacher14), Ronald won a scholarship to King Edward’s, and returned there in 1903.
At the start of 1904, both Ronald and Hilary were ill with measles and whooping cough; then Hilary contracted pneumonia. Mabel exhausted herself nursing them, and in April was admitted to hospital. She was diagnosed with diabetes. This was before the discovery of insulin, and there was no effective treatment except rest. Ronald and Hilary were sent to stay with relatives; by June, however, Mabel had recovered enough to leave hospital. Fr Francis Morgan arranged for her and the boys to stay in a cottage near the Oratory retreat house at Rednal, in the Worcestershire countryside. They stayed at Rednal for the summer and autumn; it was a welcome return to the country, although when school began Ronald had to walk a mile to catch a train into Birmingham.
At the start of November, after five months of country life, Mabel’s illness suddenly and catastrophically returned. She fell into a diabetic coma; six days later, on 14 November 1904, aged only thirty-four, Mabel Tolkien died. Ronald was twelve, Hilary ten.
It is probably fair to say Ronald Tolkien never got over his mother’s death. His first biographer noted that, thereafter, his naturally cheerful and outgoing manner was counterbalanced by periods of intense despondency, when he felt ‘a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.’15 Tolkien remembered many years later talking to one of his cousins at this time and ‘vainly waving a hand at the sky saying “it is so empty and cold”’.16 The interests his mother had given him – botany, drawing, the English countryside, and language – were now charged with a strong memory of her; so, too, was the Catholic religion.
Her boys became wards of Fr Francis Morgan. Some of their Tolkien and Suffield relatives wanted to contest Mabel’s will, and raise the boys Protestant; Fr Francis arranged for them to live with the one Suffield aunt-by-marriage who was content for them to stay Catholic. He ensured that both brothers’ education continued (at King Edward’s). He also supplemented the Tolkiens’ meagre patrimony from his own private income, and continued to do so for some years. Many years later, Tolkien said his example outweighed that of all the disagreeable or even plain bad priests he had met: ‘and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him …’17
Francis Morgan was born in 1857, the same year in fact as Tolkien’s father, in Puerto de Santa Maria in southern Spain, headquarters of the sherry trade. His father, also Francis Morgan, had moved there in the 1840s to represent his family business, wine and spirit import and distribution (although the Morgans were originally from Tredegar, they had lived in London since the eighteenth century). There, Francis Morgan senior married a daughter of the Anglo-Spanish Osborne family, which even today remains one of the great sherry houses. Their four children were all brought up Catholic; the third child, and youngest son, was named Francisco Javier, or Francis Xavier. There had been significant involvement of English Catholics in the sherry trade for generations, but the Osbornes had only become Catholic recently; the Morgans were solidly Protestant. Nevertheless anyone in the wine-shipping business would likely have been more familiar with English Catholicism than was usual.
For many years Francis Morgan senior managed the Osborne business. Like many expatriate children, Francis junior was sent to England for schooling, at the Oratory School in Edgbaston;18 he then attended Manning’s short-lived Catholic University College in Kensington, which folded after systematic mismanagement (and probable embezzlement) by its Rector, one Mgr Capel, a plausible Irish crook and reputed ladies’ man who had made a name for himself as a preacher to fashionable invalids in Le Touquet before persuading Manning he was the man to run his Catholic rival to the then dogmatically Anglican ancient Universities. Francis Morgan’s time at this patchy institution was supplemented with some terms at Louvain, before, in 1877, he entered the Birmingham Oratory (where Newman, its founder, still lived) as a novice. In 1882, aged twenty-five, he was ordained priest.
There is no doubt these bare facts give little of the man who was, as Tolkien saw it, to be his ‘second father’. He was by all accounts loud and ebullient, a pastor rather than one of the Oratory’s intellectuals. Children found Francis Morgan embarrassing at first, but soon warmed to him, his incurable fondness for practical jokes, his invariable pipe-smoking; the same is said of Tolkien in later life. Certainly, Tolkien later recalled ‘the sudden miraculous experience of Fr Francis’s love and care and humour’ amidst the desolation after his mother’s death.19
Orphans are prominent in Tolkien’s fiction: Frodo Baggins lost his parents as a child, and was raised by Bilbo, his older cousin; Aragorn’s father died when he was two, his mother when he was young, and he was brought up in the household of Elrond, whose hidden house at Rivendell has, not wholly fancifully, been linked to the Oratorian enclave at Rednal; in The Silmarillion, orphaned heroes abound: Fëanor, Túrin, Tuor, Beren, Eärendil: all lose their fathers young, many are raised by sometimes strict substitutes. Clearly no single equation between any one of these fictional characters and Tolkien himself, or Francis Morgan, is wholly satisfactory or indeed appropriate: Tolkien is too subtle a writer to be happy with any such simplistic roman à clef. But it is not unfair, I suggest, to think that his own experience of being caught in a web of obligation and emotional ties enriched his fiction, and gave him a particular sympathy both for orphaned children and for their wise, well-meaning but humanly (or elvishly) limited guardians.
Moreover, it is not illegitimate, surely, to think that since writers, by the popular adage, write best on what they know, Tolkien’s repeated portrayals of orphans and fosterage, although it may owe something to Norse models, where fosterage was usual (conversely, of course, one might cite this as an additional reason for Tolkien’s attraction to Norse literature), is related in a strong sense to his own life: this had been his experience of childhood, and it was natural to him to describe it in fiction, and, because it had been his own experience, to do so sympathetically and well.
As we have seen, Ronald and Hilary, after a brief time living in the Oratory itself (which could not be a permanent arrangement as all spare space was taken up by boys from St Philip’s), and then some weeks staying with a Tolkien uncle in nearby Kings Norton, went in January 1905 to stay with their aunt (by marriage) Beatrice Suffield, who had married Mabel’s younger brother William and lived in Stirling Road, Edgbaston, close by the Oratory. She was recently widowed, and the house was gloomy; like many widows, she took paying lodgers.20 Ronald discovered one day that she had, without consulting him, burnt the great bulk of his mother’s letters and private papers. Beatrice Suffield was not especially fond of children, and the brothers were hardly happy (Tolkien later called it a ‘sad and troublous time’, and may have found solace in rereading fairy tales21), but the monthly stipend Fr Francis gave her for their board and lodging (£4 16s.) was presumably welcome. Even though they coul
d not live there, the Tolkien brothers stayed close to the Oratory. They usually went there, most mornings, to serve Francis Morgan’s early Mass, and then eat breakfast in the refectory before going to school; Tolkien said later he had been ‘virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house, which contained many learned fathers (largely “converts”)’.22
Amongst the other Oratorian Fathers, Tolkien’s closest friend seems to have been Fr (Francis) Vincent Reade. One of the younger men (born in 1874, he was eighteen years Tolkien’s senior), he was a convert from a family of Cornish gentry: his father was an Anglican clergyman, his brother a Fellow of Keble and expert on Dante and medieval philosophy.23 He was a connexion of the novelist Charles Reade (now known, if at all, only for The Cloister and the Hearth) and of William Winwood Reade, atheist and historian, the Richard Dawkins of late Victorian England, whom readers of Conan Doyle will recognize (from The Sign of Four) as author of The Martyrdom of Man, an otherwise largely forgotten piece of ‘psycho-history’ (and, amongst much else, the wholly forgotten The Veil of Isis, or The Mysteries of the Druids, one of whose chapters is intriguingly titled ‘Vestiges of Druidism: In the Ceremonies of the Church of Rome’). Fr Vincent does not seem to have shared his family’s literary bent to any great degree, although he was probably well read beyond the norm for Catholic clergy. He later became Headmaster at St Philip’s; he was probably at this time already involved in the school, and may have known the Tolkien brothers from their time there.
Tolkien’s piety was of a traditional cast, and was (in later life, at any rate) heavily focussed on the Blessed Sacrament; but his theology is typically expansive and generous, hidebound neither by Thomist categorizing nor by Ultramontane triumphalism. We may look to Francis Morgan, and the humane atmosphere of the Oratory, for this formation.
Each summer, Fr Francis took the boys to Lyme Regis in Dorset for a seaside holiday; he also quietly supplemented their tiny income. They were involved to some extent in the life of the Oratory parish: in May 1909, the parish organized three troops of scouts, under the charge of ‘the Brothers Tolkien’, who by that time were seventeen and fifteen, and so presumably supervising younger boys rather than scouting themselves.
Tolkien’s life was now almost wholly urban. There were occasional trips to the Oratory house in still-rural Rednal (Tolkien remembered this as the only place where Fr Francis would smoke a pipe, and attributed his own later habitual pipe-smoking to this example), and, we should remember, the city of Birmingham was then smaller than it is now; but for the most part Tolkien’s schooldays and early youth were spent in the vaunting, grimy surroundings of this busy commercial and Imperial city (Joseph Chamberlain, expansionist Colonial Secretary and advocate of the protectionist ‘imperial preference’ tariff reform, was a local magnate who had been Mayor of Birmingham before he was returned to Parliament).
All this, of course, only made his memories of rural living, and occasional exposure to it, all the more precious: he could no longer take the countryside for granted. It also, or so some have thought, cast a glamour over the rare eccentricities of the urban landscape: prominent on the skyline were the chimney-tower of the Edgbaston Waterworks, and an odd building called Perrott’s Folly, a tower built by a local landowner in the mid-eighteenth century for an uncertain purpose but subsequently used as an observatory. These ‘two towers’ were a daily part of the young Tolkien’s horizon, and have been claimed as the seeds of later imaginings. Tolkien himself never mentioned them, but we may think the connexion suggestive. The great clock-tower of nearby Birmingham University (a memorial, in fact, to Joseph Chamberlain) was then recently built; it too may have made an impression.
III – Schooldays
School now assumed a large part in Tolkien’s life. Greek and Latin were the backbone of the curriculum, but he was also taught a good deal of English literature, including Chaucer in the original. He was academically strong, and was soon placed regularly at the top of his class. He was also, although slightly built, a keen rugby player. In 1907, the Headmaster, Cary Gilson, established an army cadet force for the boys;24 at first, this was an ad hoc body of volunteers such as had been common since the 1860s. Tolkien was amongst the 130 boys who became cadets, in what later became the school’s Officer Training Corps (OTC).25
Tolkien’s first close friend at school was Christopher Wiseman, son of a Methodist minister. Tolkien and Wiseman were together in the same class from 1905; Tolkien was placed first, Wiseman (who was a year younger) second. They were academic rivals as well as friends, and vied for these places for the rest of their school careers. Both played rugby energetically and well; they took to calling themselves ‘the Great Twin Brethren’, a phrase borrowed from Macaulay’s ‘Battle of Lake Regillus’. Wiseman was a mathematician, and an amateur musician and composer. Both he and Tolkien took their religion seriously, and were convinced of the necessity of a moral framework for artistic and social endeavour; this, although surrounded by a variety of shared interests, remained at the core of their friendship.
Doubtless it helped that their respective father-figures were both ministers of religion; it is likely Francis Morgan and Christopher Wiseman’s father, Frederick Luke Wiseman, knew each other, although we have no record of it. When Wiseman senior was appointed President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, Fr Francis used to refer to him as ‘the Pope of Wesley’.26 Tolkien in later life spoke highly of Wiseman senior – ‘one of the most delightful Christian men I have met’;27 it is probably not fanciful to see in this early contact a seed of Tolkien’s later sympathy for ecumenical initiatives between Christians.
Tolkien at this time began dabbling in what was to become an abiding interest: making up his own languages, what he called ‘private lang’. We saw above how, as a boy, he and two of his cousins had made up code languages. Now he was armed with a formidable battery of actual languages: as well as Latin, Greek, French (which he disliked) and German, he also had some Spanish (via Fr Francis), some Welsh, some Old Norse and, thanks as we shall see to one of his schoolmasters, Old and Middle English. He began to devise a properly structured language, somewhat after the phonetic model of Spanish, that he called ‘Naffarin’. Wiseman, who was interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was an occasional confidant. Later, a schoolfellow and would-be missionary bought, by mistake, A Primer of the Gothic Language (by an Oxford professor named Joseph Wright), under the impression it might be useful for his proposed avocation; he passed this on to Tolkien. Gothic is the most ancient Germanic language still preserved; Tolkien was instantly bowled over by it.
Wright’s Gothic Primer is not simply a bare grammar of Gothic; Wright prefixed his formal grammar with a brief but comprehensive history of Indo-European and Germanic sound-changes, which may have been Tolkien’s first real initiation into technical philology; it is followed by a substantial appendix of texts in Gothic, specifically extracts from the Gothic Bible, which is the only surviving evidence for the language. The character of these texts, incidentally, makes Tolkien’s schoolfellow’s mistake in buying it an understandable one: a grammar with an appendix of scripture was a familiar format for language primers for missionaries. The Bodleian Library in Oxford today holds Tolkien’s copy of Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary (bought, it seems, at some point during his schooldays, and kept throughout his life28), whose introduction had a philological section that became so worn by repeated reading that it fell out. This probably preceded Tolkien’s discovery of Wright’s Primer, and he described it (in a note pasted into the book) as the start of his interest in philology. Whilst this abbreviated discussion may have fired Tolkien’s interest, it seems reasonable, however, to see Wright’s Primer as his first real exposure to philology in the round. As well as the usual etymologies for each word, the Dictionary also contains an appendix of the etymology of place-names (which became a lifelong interest) and a brief stemma of the ‘divisions of the Aryan languages’.29
Tolkien’s other close friend from this time was a boy called Vincent Tr
ought. Trought was a poet with a keen aesthetic sense and, by all accounts, a fondness for bizarre and extravagant rhetoric in debate. He was also a competent full-back on the rugby field, although his health had been much compromised by Birmingham’s polluted air. He and Wiseman became the heart of a small group whose friendship and collective influence defined much of Tolkien’s remaining time at school and for some years afterwards.
The bulk of Tolkien’s schooling was, as was customary, in the Greek and Latin classics and in history, mostly Greek and Roman although including some English (of, presumably, a Whiggish cast); two of Tolkien’s schoolmasters, however, were keen to introduce their pupils to English literature. One was George Brewerton, who had been Tolkien’s form-master in the Sixth Class, which, after a couple of terms in the Lower Remove, he was placed in when he went back to King Edward’s in 1903. Brewerton introduced his class to Shakespeare (whom Tolkien mostly disliked, especially Macbeth – he reckoned the device of the coming of Great Birnam Wood to Dunsinane ‘shabby’ and remembered ‘bitter disappointment and disgust’ at it 30) and Chaucer; he read Chaucer to them in the original, and Tolkien was spellbound. Brewerton encouraged his bent to historical linguistics, and some time later lent him an Old English primer (probably Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, which alongside an elementary grammar and phonology had an appendix of prose texts for translation31).
The other was R.W. ‘Dickie’ Reynolds, who after Balliol had been a literary critic for the National Observer in the 1890s, before returning to King Edward’s, his old school, as a master. Reynolds was Tolkien’s formmaster when he entered the Fourth Class, in 1906. Reynolds was not, Tolkien observed later, an especially good teacher, but he did make the boys read Milton, Keats and more contemporary poets (Kipling, Walter de la Mare) and carried with him something of the excitement and glamour of the literary life, which made him ‘immensely interesting as a person’.32 Reynolds moved easily in the world of publishers and poets, and may have had some part in prompting Tolkien’s interest in writing. He was also in charge of the school’s Literary and Debating Societies; the latter at any rate became one of Tolkien’s diversions.
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