Tolkien

by Raymond Edwards

  As much as anything, though, Tolkien was excited by language – by the forms of words, in addition to (and to an extent separable from) their meaning. In each language he knew, he found a unique element of aesthetic pleasure that, somehow, chimed with his own innate preferences. In later years, he proposed the theory that we each of us have a ‘native language’ (whether an actually existing language or one ‘invented’ or ‘recovered’) which satisfies all our particular linguistic predilections, and that this language is not our ‘first-learned language’ or mothertongue.33 Much of Tolkien’s life can be seen, from one angle, as a search for, and an attempt to recover, this ‘native language’.

  Tolkien made steady progress up the school, usually being placed first or second in the form; by his sixteenth birthday, he entered the First Class, which was under the direct supervision of the headmaster (‘Chief Master’ in King Edward’s School parlance).

  In the First Class (which, by a curious inversion, was what King Edward’s then called its Sixth Form; it now has the more usual name) Tolkien was given permission by Francis Morgan to attend the headmaster’s classes in New Testament Greek; this was a significant concession from Fr Francis.

  These were the early years of Pius X’s Pontifical Biblical Commission, whose pronouncements (including blanket, and frankly bizarre, prohibitions of modern critical scholarship) embarrassed Catholic scriptural scholarship for a generation; it was also in the immediate aftermath of Pius X’s decrees against ‘Modernism’ (a synthetic catch-all heresy, cooked up by a diligent Vatican official from a conspectus of heterodox views drawn indiscriminately from a range of contemporary historians and theologians), and Rome had encouraged Catholic clergy to denounce it wherever they plausibly detected it. This is not to dispute that some trends in and dogmas of contemporary critical scholarship, when applied indiscriminately, were potentially corrosive of Christianity as traditionally understood; but to compound from these things a catch-all heresy and encourage its delation was in another way just as unhelpful.34

  To an anti-Modernist zealot, having Catholic boys taught scripture by a Protestant would have been unthinkable. Fortunately there were few of these amongst English Catholics. The exception was the diocese of Southwark, whose bishop, the Gibraltarian Peter Amigo, was privately convinced his episcopal colleagues (especially his arch-enemy, Archbishop Bourne of Westminster) were all closet Modernist sympathizers. None of this had penetrated into the diocese of Birmingham, however, and Oratorians, as non-diocesan priests, had in any case a degree more leeway than would most clergy. Tolkien later commented, ‘I certainly took no “harm”, and was better equipped ultimately to make my way in a non-Catholic professional society.’35

  Tolkien was to stay at King Edward’s for another three years, until he was almost twenty. This may seem odd to us now, who are used to rigid correlations between age and scholastic progression; but it was quite usual at the time. Boys would stay at their school until they found a university place, or their parents tired of paying fees and found them a job or a trade instead. Tolkien was clearly clever enough to go to Oxford, but was too poor to do so without financial help; and this meant studying hard for a scholarship examination (these, we should remember, were the days before nationally recognized public qualifications: all university entrance was achieved not by a comparison of grades but by the private decision of the university).

  IV – First love

  Our next topic requires a small step back in time. In 1907, on their annual summer holiday to Lyme Regis, Fr Francis finally discovered from Tolkien and Hilary quite how miserable they were living with their aunt. He arranged for them to move, although he quietly continued paying a stipend to Aunt Beatrice.

  At the start of 1908, Tolkien, now sixteen, and his brother Hilary moved from Beatrice Suffield’s house to live as lodgers with the Faulkners, a wine merchant and his wife, in Duchess Road also in Edgbaston, one block away from the Oratory. The Faulkners were active in the Oratory parish, and hosted musical evenings which some of the Fathers attended. The Tolkiens found they had as a fellow lodger a nineteen-year-old girl, Edith Bratt. She and Tolkien became friends, and allies against Mrs Faulkner’s constricting household regime (Edith persuaded the housemaid to smuggle extra food from the kitchen to the boys). By the following summer, they decided they were in love. They began to meet in secret.

  Like Tolkien, Edith was an orphan; her mother had died when she was fourteen. Unlike him, she was illegitimate; her mother had been a governess in her father’s house, and Edith had never been recognized as his daughter by him or his family. Edith’s father has been identified as Alfred Warrilow, a paper dealer in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth. He was married with a five-year-old daughter, and Frances Bratt, Edith’s mother, was her governess. In 1888, Warrilow’s wife divorced him; Edith was born in 1889. Alfred Warrilow died in 1891, aged forty-nine.36 Frances Bratt was named sole executrix of Alfred Warrilow’s will. Warrilow’s estate was valued at just over £8,700, a fair sum, but we know nothing of the liabilities on it, which may have diminished it considerably, nor indeed how it was disposed. Any money or property left for Edith and her mother will hardly have amounted to the full sum proved.37

  After her mother died in 1903, Edith had inherited small amounts of property in different parts of Birmingham; these, with careful husbanding by her guardian (a lawyer), generated a tiny income that was just enough to keep her, after sending her to school in Evesham. She was musical, playing the piano well, and was by background at least an Anglican. She had hoped, at one time, for a career as a concert pianist, or at least a music teacher; but although Mrs Faulkner was ‘musical’, she disliked the sound of Edith practising, and inevitably her playing (and career prospects) suffered.

  Whether this youthful romance would have, under other circumstances, amounted to anything is obviously unknowable and probably irrelevant; as it was, Francis Morgan learnt of the connexion in the autumn of 1909, and, seeing only something to distract Tolkien from his schoolwork (he was supposed to be studying hard for an Oxford scholarship) insisted it stop. Soon afterwards, Tolkien sat and failed the scholarship examination. Without the financial help from an award, he had no chance of attending the University. In the new year, Fr Francis arranged for Tolkien and his brother to move to different lodgings, with a Mrs MacSherry in Highfield Road.

  The year 1910 started darkly for Tolkien; his academic future and his happiness with Edith both seemed imperilled. Throughout his life, Tolkien was subject to black moods, gloom, periodic feelings of hopelessness. Outwardly, he kept busy and sociable, but in his private diary he was often near despair.38

  Tolkien saw Edith again, secretly; they were seen together, and Fr Francis found out. He formally forbade Tolkien to see her until he should come of age on his twenty-first birthday three years later. Edith, meanwhile, had arranged to move to Cheltenham, to live with family friends. Tolkien saw her again, by chance, a couple of times; again he was observed and reported to his guardian, who was furious, and threatened to stop Tolkien from going to university if he did not break with her absolutely. Tolkien was appalled, but submitted. ‘I owe all to Fr. F and so must obey’, he wrote in his diary. On 2 March, Edith left Birmingham. Tolkien saw her from a distance, but they did not speak.

  This business, forbidding an eighteen-year-old young man to see a girl, may seem to cast Fr Francis Morgan in a tyrannical light. We need to see this within the context of its time: long engagements, and marriages postponed for financial reasons or because of reservations on the part of one or the other family, were a normal part of Victorian life, and were not unusual in the Edwardian age; Francis Morgan may have been a touch old-fashioned in his approach, but no one would have supposed him wrong, or necessarily unreasonable, to act in this way, and indeed he might have seemed irresponsible had he not done so. Tolkien was still legally a minor (the age of majority was twenty-one until 1970) and had only a very modest income from his father’s estate; he could not possibly afford to get married
without a good job, and that, for him, meant getting a degree. His academic gifts were obvious, and Fr Francis was anxious to help him make the most of them. Tolkien could not in any case have got married, or engaged (an engagement was still at this date a legally binding connexion, which could provoke an action for breach of promise if subsequently broken off) without his guardian’s permission.

  Tolkien’s acquiescence in this, which may seem odd to us, can be partly explained by the social expectations of the time; for the rest of it, we should look to Tolkien’s attitude to his religion. He was convinced, not unreasonably, that his mother’s conversion and in particular her family’s reaction to it had led in part to her early death: better medical care, which they could have enabled, might well have brought her through the crisis that caused her death. This made her, in some fashion, ‘a martyr for the faith’. Fr Francis Morgan’s subsequent role as guardian was by no means a perfunctory one. He was almost the exact age Tolkien’s own father would have been; aside from considerable financial generosity, he also (as we saw) took a close interest in the Tolkien brothers. Francis Morgan, Tolkien said, had been his ‘second father’.

  Whilst he may have been sometimes privately miserable, Tolkien still had the energy and enthusiasm of early youth. He immersed himself in work, both in preparation for another Oxford scholarship examination that December (1910) and for his own private ends. He had by now a good knowledge of Gothic and Old English and could discourse at length on comparative philology; invited to talk on this subject to the sixth form, Tolkien, with the confidence of his age, gave them fully three hours of lecture and would have said more had the master not stopped him. The school had the custom of holding debates in Latin; this, for Tolkien, was all too easy, and he once, in the role of Greek ambassador to the Senate, spoke wholly in Greek; on other occasions, in the character of barbarian envoys, he broke into Gothic or Old English. Tolkien’s hobby of ‘private languages’ developed, too; he devised hypothetical Gothic words to supplement the meagre vocabulary that had survived from the historical language, and also further elaborated his ‘Naffarin’ language. In June 1910, for instance, he wrote a longish inscription in pastiche Gothic into his copy of The Fifth Book of Thucydides, which he had read for a school prize; the volume turned up in a Salisbury second-hand bookshop in 1965. He ‘Gothicized’ his name as Ruginwaldus Dwalakōneis; habitués of old book shops may want to take note.39

  Perhaps not all of this was strictly pertinent to an Oxford scholarship exam; but it reveals him as a young man of varied and exuberant intellectual interests. He also kept up his involvement in rugby and theatricals.

  He also worked towards taking the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate (the precursor to the School Certificate, itself later replaced by ‘A’ Levels), which that July he successfully took in five subjects (Latin, Greek, Scripture Knowledge (Greek Text), History and Elementary Mathematics) as well as an English Essay paper.

  On 17 December 1910, he learnt he had been awarded an Exhibition (a minor scholarship) worth £60 a year to Exeter College, Oxford, to read Literae Humaniores (Classics).40 Added to this was a leaving bursary from King Edward’s, and some money from Fr Francis. Tolkien would not be rich, but he could now go to Oxford.

  Tolkien himself reckoned, rightly, that he was clever enough to have won a more valuable Scholarship (and his headmaster later confirmed this to him), but he had not been ‘industrious or single-minded’, instead spending his time ‘studying something else: Gothic and what not’.41 For Tolkien, keeping his intellectual curiosity, and expenditure of intellectual effort, confined to approved channels was to be a constant and not wholly successful struggle for most of his life.

  For the moment, however, his future seemed secure; and he had the best part of a calendar year until the University year began the following October. His last two terms at King Edward’s were not exactly idle – he was still obliged to take school exams, and had OTC and First XV rugby, and also edited several numbers of the school magazine – but did allow more leisure for debate, both formal and informal, than had the preceding years. They also saw his first venture into print.

  Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome were then, as for many years, staples of schoolboy recitation.42 Tolkien is unlikely to have been the first to see their potential for pastiche or parody; but at any rate, he wrote around this time a poem – ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ – in the manner of ‘The Battle of Lake Regillus’, but taking as its subject a school rugby match.

  Tolkien’s poem, his first publication, appeared in the school magazine in March 1911.‘The Battle of Lake Regillus’ tells of a Roman victory over the Latins won by the intervention of the gods Castor and Pollux, whom Macaulay calls ‘the Great Twin Brethren’; this is clearly the source of Tolkien’s and Wiseman’s self-description. Tolkien’s pastiche is deft and mildly amusing, although a good deal is exact or near-exact quotation of the original in an altered context; it shows a real affection for Macaulay’s verse alongside a relish for the mock-heroic.

  We should not perhaps make too much of this, but for a modern attracted by the heroic style (and, like Tolkien and most of his contemporaries, exposed to it constantly in the works of Homer) it is very difficult, almost impossible, to shed our inherited sophistication and write it without irony; attempts at the heroic style fall, almost inevitably, into bathos and parody. In some ways, then, it is easiest to learn the heroic style of writing (of which Macaulay was preternaturally capable) by deliberate parody and pastiche: if we begin with the mock-heroic we may, in time, pass from it to the heroic done ‘straight’, but if we start with the second, we will almost certainly lapse into the first. We might be reminded of Proust’s efforts to achieve his own literary style by writing deliberate pastiche of his favourite authors (Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve) so as to avoid writing unconscious pastiche for the rest of his life.43 Or, as I say, we might not want to make too much of this.

  V – ‘T.C., B.S. &c.’

  Perhaps the most important thing to occur during Tolkien’s last term at King Edward’s was not part either of the formal curriculum nor any of the school’s myriad other activities: it was, instead, a purely adventitious connexion between Tolkien and some of his contemporaries.

  At King Edward’s, it was the custom for the school library to be run by some of the senior boys; Tolkien and Wiseman were two of them. In the summer term of 1911, his last at the school, Tolkien became senior Librarian; Wiseman and Trought were amongst his assistants, as was R.Q. (‘Rob’) Gilson, son of the school’s headmaster, Cary Gilson. To while away the long unoccupied hours of the examination season (for six weeks, senior boys were required to take exams, but had otherwise no obligations) the four of them started to meet for tea (illicitly) in the library. The habit persisted through the following autumn term, and the group together referred to themselves, humorously, as the ‘TCBS’, which stood for ‘Tea Club [and] Barrovian Society’; their meetings now took place both in the library and at Barrow’s Stores in the city. Their talk soon took on a serious and literary character – Tolkien and Wiseman, as we have seen, were inclined to look at artistic endeavour in moral terms; they were also much exercised by questions of patriotic and civic duty. In some ways this sort of thing was a natural outgrowth of the habit of schoolboy debating, itself a corollary to the ancient rhetorical training of making an argument in favour of, or against, an arbitrarily assigned position, but taken to a new level of personal interest not normally possible either in the classroom or the debating hall. These sorts of topics, too, probably never again seem so important as they do to clever and well-read boys in their late teens, on the verge of university or profession and ripe with an intellectual self-confidence and apparent clear-sightedness that, in later years, they might reckon callow. They each had artistic talent, or at least ambition; and they were at an age when anything seems possible.

  As well as Tolkien, Wiseman, Gilson and Trought, several others were also associated with the TCBS, but the four
close friends were its core. The group expanded to include various other senior boys – Sidney Barrowclough, the brothers R.S. Payton and W.H. Payton, T.K. (‘Tea-Cake’) Barnsley, Geoffrey Bache Smith. For a while, the tone of their discussions was dominated by what Tolkien in particular thought trivial and lightweight witticism; eventually the group was reformed without those responsible. Some have taken at face value later remarks confining the TCBS proper to four only: Tolkien, Wiseman, Gilson, Smith; but the extant records make it clear that Smith was a peripheral figure until after he and the other TCBS-ites had left school.

  As we shall see, the majority of these schoolboy friends did not survive early manhood.

  The abbreviation TCBS, which began as a slightly arch joke, became convenient shorthand for their collective sense of themselves, and (more importantly) their artistic ambitions (Gilson had a flair for drawing and design, Smith was a talented poet; Smith also had an interest in Welsh language and poetry, which he shared with Tolkien). It is easy to exaggerate the importance of this type of schoolboy connexion, and from the comfortable disillusion of middle age, perhaps, to mock the vaunting idealism of teenage boys; but the fact remains that it was this time, and these friends, which helped Tolkien to discover that he wanted, above all, to write; and to write, in particular, something characteristically English in the way that, say, Greek or Norse myth was characteristic of those languages or cultures, something England had once had but had because of historical accident lost. Tolkien gradually determined to do this as a poet. But what sort of poet did he want to be, and why? To answer this, it is worth glancing at some of the writers Tolkien was reading.