VI – Literary divagations
We have little hard evidence for who of his contemporaries or nearcontemporaries Tolkien was reading in these years; but there were a good number of writers working in Edwardian England whose works clearly made an impact on him, and have left traces in Tolkien’s later writing, and in some of his earlier material, whether he read them then or later. In all subsequent discussion of literary influence on Tolkien, we should bear this uncertainty in mind.
Diligent source-hunters have nosed out, in Tolkien’s mature work, a number of influences from an in some ways unremarkable range of schoolboy favourites, whom he may be allowed to have read at this time – Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, S.R. Crockett, Buchan – alongside several contemporary exponents of faërie: Andrew Lang, George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany. There was, too, always William Morris, although it may have been slightly later before Tolkien started reading him seriously. The clear and ascertainable model of his earliest writing, however, was above all the Catholic poet Francis Thompson.
Francis Thompson is, perhaps, not much read today, although The Hound of Heaven, or extracts from it, is still sometimes found in anthologies. His manner is arch, whimsical and for the most part curiously bloodless. Thompson was a failed medical student who lived as a downand-out in London for three years, until in 1888, aged twenty-nine, he was discovered by the Catholic converts and magazine publishers Alice and Wilfrid Meynell, who arranged for his poems to be published. He had developed an addiction to opium, and died in 1907, aged only forty-seven.
Thompson is at best an uneven poet; he is given to fantastical imagery (it might be simplistic to see this as legacy of his opium-eating, but the connexion inevitably suggests itself), an eclectic and profuse vocabulary, and wild flights of a sentimentalism that must sometimes have made even his contemporaries gag. But he can write with deft control of complex metres and with a force of language and metaphor that should not be despised. He was also given to introducing theological themes and reflexions into quite disparate subjects; although, from one angle, all of Thompson’s verse is about his own conversion, and the history God had made by drawing him out from the mire of his misery, poverty and addiction. One suspects that this as much as anything attracted Tolkien, who was, remember, a very pious young man; taken together with the richness of Thompson’s language and the variety of his technique, this must have made him a strongly attractive figure: an unashamedly Catholic writer at the centre of contemporary verse-making. In a talk on Thompson given four years later, Tolkien professed ‘perfect harmony with the poet’44. So him it was that, above all, the young Tolkien imitated.
For those who may not know much of him, it is worth giving here a taster of Thompson’s verse. This is from the Proem to ‘Sister Songs’:
From its red leash my heart strains tamelessly
For spring leaps in the womb of the young year!
The first line illustrates Thompson’s technical weakness (the assonance ‘strains tamelessly’), the second his occasional vigour of metaphor; the whole couplet, his rather over-coloured circumlocution, the uneasy prurience of his imagery.
Or, from the same Proem, there is this, which (I think) describes the sky at evening:
The beamy-textured tent transpicuous,
Of webbéd cœrule wrought and woven calms,
Whence has paced forth the lambent-footed sun;
Kind critics called this sort of thing ‘Miltonic’; it is certainly striking. Other parts of the same poem are simply bad: at one point, Thompson rhymes ‘ladies’, ‘shade is’ and ‘Hades’, something it is probably kind to call ‘Cockney’. He is also sometimes ponderous, or clumsy: ‘If ever I did do thee ease in song’ is a line neither musical nor clear. We could multiply examples without, probably, shedding much more light.45
Tolkien’s poems laboured, for years, under the burden of imitating Thompson; we may reckon he only properly shook free from him when he began writing in alliterative verse, and in other consciously medieval metres. Reading Thompson, one is often reminded of Wiseman’s comment on reading an early draft of what became Tolkien’s poem ‘Sea-Chant of an Elder Day’, that (to borrow a phrase) it was like a woman wearing all her jewellery after breakfast.46
It is in one sense distressing to discover that this sentimental, technically patchy and lexically incontinent writer was the literary figure with whom, above all others, the young Tolkien identified; and it is tempting to see his later literary development as a gradual shedding of this influence. Certainly Tolkien abandoned, and came heartily to detest, the apparatus of daffodowndilly fairy whimsy Thompson found so appealing; and Tolkien claimed to find in Thompson an intellectual and theological rigour that his readers today, such as they are, would probably not trouble to detect, although it is arguably there. What strikes us most about Thompson, probably, is his saccharine and awkwardly verbose language, his imagery chocolate-box and phantasmagoric by turns, his doggerel rhyme-schemes; it is almost embarrassing to find Tolkien a fan. It needs to be said, however, that Tolkien’s early poems are, for the most part, unremarkable except inasmuch as they foreshadow themes from his later writing; and that, throughout his life, there was a strain of whimsy in Tolkien’s verse which we might trace to Thompson’s influence, or (more plausibly perhaps) assume reflects an aspect of Tolkien’s character that found in Thompson’s florid fantasias a kindred spirit.
One work by Thompson we may claim Tolkien knew closely is his ‘Sister Songs’, dedicated to two of the Meynells’ daughters. It falls clearly in the (to us) odd tradition of the Victorian sentimentalizing of childhood, of Kate Greenaway and late Ruskin, of Lewis Carroll’s unread books (Sylvie and Bruno, another Tolkien favourite47), of advertisements for Pears’ Soap. For Tolkien, however, early childhood was a precious time of lost happiness and unstained promise; he was obviously predisposed to find Thompson’s presentation of it attractive. This is a biographical or perhaps psychological fact rather than a literary one; but it had an important literary consequence. Thompson, whose botanical descriptions were unusually exact (another point in his favour in Tolkien’s eyes), writes of the laburnum:
The long laburnum drips
Its honey of wild flame, its jocund spilth of fire.
This is a telling parallel with Tolkien’s later mythology of the Trees;48 but the immediate link was between a section of the first poem, which offers a vision of woodland sprite and fairies, and a poem, ‘Woodsunshine’, written by Tolkien in July 1910 and apostrophizing ‘ye light fairy things tripping so gay … dance for me! Sprites of the wood’.49 Anything less like Tolkien’s later account of elves, and more inclined to revolt an adult modern taste, can hardly be imagined; but Tolkien had been led to this in part by Thompson’s own enthusiasm, and in part by the strange Edwardian vogue for fairies, exemplified by Barrie’s Peter Pan, which Tolkien saw in April of 1910 (‘shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E. had been with me’ he wrote in his diary50), and a few years later in a base empirical fashion by the frauds imposed on Arthur Conan Doyle and the gullible public as the ‘Cottingley Fairies’.51 Edith seems to have been much taken with this fashion for gossamer fairy things.
Two other of Thompson’s poems had specific, identifiable impact on Tolkien’s writing: ‘Daisy’, another sentimentalizing ballad of childhood, is alluded to in a poem Tolkien wrote five years later;52 whilst in the odd, and rather good, ‘Mistress of Vision’ (which treats of the rootedness of inspiration in suffering) Tolkien found the name Luthany, and kept it for later.
As we have said, we cannot usually say with certainty when Tolkien first read some writers, although we may guess. It is likely, for instance, that he read Lord Dunsany’s works soon after they were published, but we do not know for sure.
Dunsany’s major collections of fantasy tales were published between 1905 and 1916; in the period of Tolkien’s schooldays, the important volumes are Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908) and, in 1910, A Dreamer’s Tales; there is also the odd, and
slightly anomalous, Gods of Pegāna of 1905. Several stories which, it has been argued, had a definite influence on Tolkien appeared only in 1912, in the collection The Book of Wonder.53 These early books were all finely illustrated by Sidney Sime, whose strange polychromatic fantasias (reminiscent, in turn, of Rackham, Beardsley, Lord Leighton, Whistler, Klimt) may well have influenced Tolkien’s own burgeoning style as an artist in pencil and watercolour, although Tolkien’s control of line was comparatively weak. Nevertheless the visual component of Tolkien’s imagination was a strong one, and these striking illustrations would only have heightened the impact of the text. The tales themselves are probably the oddest things ever written by a former Guards officer (Dunsany served with the Coldstream Guards in the Boer War). Teasingly written, occasionally satirical, knowing, they are not really much like anything Tolkien himself would write; but in two particulars they are exemplars. First, in point of literary style: Dunsany took the high aureate prose of the 1890s and tempered it with plain discursive, to its benefit; second, in use of unexplained and resonant allusion to names, places, things otherwise unknown or glimpsed at the margins of another picture. This, the unexpected vista, was to become one of the mature Tolkien’s favourite narrative techniques, and he probably learnt it first from Dunsany.
Another influence was Lord Macaulay, who for all that he was a noxious Whig as a historian, had also, in his Lays of Ancient Rome, tried to recreate in verse the lost early literature of Rome (one of Tolkien’s schoolboy poems, as we have seen, was an affectionate parody of Macaulay’s verse).
This also suggests Tolkien was familiar, at very least, with the Liedertheorie of epic composition (which claimed later epic poems as assemblages of earlier ‘lays’ or ‘ballads’); in the Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay had feigned to produce what these early poems might have looked like. This effort to reproduce a lost early literature is, perhaps, an archetypally romantic one; it was to find echoes in Tolkien’s later literary activity.
Tolkien in years to come was a fan of the novels of John Buchan, most of which were not yet written; but he may well have read Buchan’s early short stories. Of particular interest is Buchan’s early collection The Watcher by the Threshold, published in 1902 when Buchan was twenty-seven, and Tolkien ten. The title story is narrated by a philologist, ‘deputy-professor of Northern Antiquities’ at Oxford and an expert on Celtic elements in the Norse Edda; a background better able to pique Tolkien’s interest could hardly be designed. The narrator discovers ‘the Folk’, a surviving remnant of aboriginal Picts, and hears something of their stories: ‘I heard fragments of old religions, primeval names of gods and goddesses, half-understood by the Folk, but to me a key to a hundred puzzles. Tales which survive to us in broken disjointed riddles were intact here in living form.’54 Something closer to a philologist’s holy grail might hardly be described. Buchan’s narrator, needless to say, comes to a sticky end before he can make good on what he has found. The collection also includes the remarkable ‘The Far Islands’, which tells of a man haunted by an ancestral memory of an enchanted island in the far west. All the stories in the book, however, are ‘supernatural’ in theme, in one way or another, and are saturated with Buchan’s fine mixture of classical learning and interest in Scottish folklore, and (what is very like Tolkien’s own later interests) the intersections and parallels between the two. Ten years later The Moon Endureth appeared; this, like the previous volume, collected shorter pieces Buchan had written and published over the previous decade. There is perhaps less obviously to connect with Tolkien’s work in this later book; although the story ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, a powerful narrative of biblical paganism in an African setting, has descriptions of the South African landscape done with a lyrical precision (like the descriptions of Scots landscape elsewhere in the book) that prefigures Tolkien’s own later writing. The South African connexion would surely have been attractive to Tolkien. ‘Streams of Water in the South’, another tale from that volume, again hints at a ‘straight road’ across water to an ancestral homeland, although, here, one in the Borders. Most pertinent of all, however, is the last tale in the collection, ‘The Rime of True Thomas’, where a shepherd, a devout man, hears the music of faërie (the ‘Song of the Open Road’, the ‘Song of Lost Battles’, the ‘Ballad of Grey Weather’, ‘which makes him who hears it sick all the days of his life for something which he cannot name’) and is driven by longing from his settled avocation to wander the ways of the world.55
VII – Farewell to Birmingham
That summer, Tolkien’s career in the school OTC reached its pinnacle. In June 1911, he was one of eight King Edward’s School OTC cadets chosen to attend the coronation of the King-Emperor George V; along with hundreds of other cadets, they lined the route between the Palace of Westminster and the Abbey. Tolkien was later, on 3 July, amongst seventy-six King Edward’s School cadets who attended a review of OTCs from across the nation by the King in Windsor Great Park. On that occasion, almost eighteen thousand young men assembled before their King, representing what The Times called the ‘intellectual reinforcement that the Military Services controlling the Empire will receive five or six years hence’56. We might lazily suppose that war awoke Edwardian England from a glib pacifism; but the truth is that military display, and particularly voluntary soldiering, had played an increasing part in middle-class English life for some decades (Victorian England had experienced several French invasion scares, and had accumulated a large number of bodies of amateur soldiers); the reforms of the Army after the Boer War, where (we should remember) volunteer cavalry had played a large part in Britain’s eventual victory, had merely formalized and made more efficient an existing movement of significant strength.
Tolkien’s time at King Edward’s came to a formal close on Speech Day, that 26 July, with the usual business of speeches and prize-giving (he was awarded one of six Leaving Prizes by the headmaster) topped off with musical and dramatic pieces; the last of these was Aristophanes’ Peace, in Greek, with Tolkien in the part of Hermes. The school then sang the national anthem, also in Greek, and Tolkien’s career at King Edward’s was over.
He was nineteen, rising twenty. It is unlikely he experienced leaving King Edward’s as the expulsion from paradise lamented by any number of Edwardian Etonians, for whom no later university or other experience could ever equal the heady joys of Sixth Form and its challenges, victories, friendships;57 but Tolkien had risen to the top of his school, and was academically and (as far as we can tell) socially at ease amongst his schoolfellows. He was a Prefect, Captain of his house rugby XV, a regular member of the school’s First XV, Secretary of the Debating Society, and chief Librarian, as well as being active in various other societies. For any clever boy, the transplanting from the familiar and compassed environment of school to the broader, more heterogeneous and less structured surroundings of Oxford is likely to be a challenge and to some extent a shock.
But all that was three months away, a lifetime at that age; and Tolkien’s summer was not without planned diversions. The most important of these, and the one that made the most enduring mark, was a journey to Switzerland. This came about in crabwise fashion.
Hilary had left school early to work on the land. After a short time in an office job in his uncle Walter Incledon’s firm, he had been offered work by the Brookes-Smith family on their farm in Sussex. The Brookes-Smiths seem to have known the Tolkiens through their aunt Jane Neave, who had been in charge of a women students’ hostel at St Andrews; the two Brookes-Smith daughters had been educated at a nearby school. That summer, as usual, the Brookes-Smiths organized a walking tour of the Swiss Alps, and put together a party of a dozen (together with two Swiss). Jane Neave arranged for the two Tolkien brothers to join the party; we may also suspect she paid for them to go, although there is no record of it.
Jane Neave was a remarkable woman. She was the first of her family to receive a university education, gaining a University of London B.Sc. through Birmingham’s Mason College (l
ater part of Birmingham University), and thereafter worked as a schoolmistress. We last saw her, as Jane Suffield, Mabel’s younger sister, teaching Ronald Tolkien geometry for his entrance examination for King Edward’s in 1903; soon thereafter, in the summer of 1905, she married an insurance salesman called Edwin Neave (her family disapproved of him, thinking him common), gave up her teaching post and moved to the village of Gedling near Nottingham, whence her husband travelled for work. Edwin Neave had been a lodger in the Suffield household; he and Jane seem to have had an understanding, if they were not formally engaged, since around the time Mabel Tolkien came back from South Africa. He died young in 1909; he was thirty-seven, and the cause of death was given as ‘broncho-pneumonia’, which some have speculated was code for, or brought on by, drink. Jane did not repine, but took a residential job as warden of a women students’ hostel, part of the University of St Andrews. She resigned from the post in June 1911 (there was a squabble with the Principal, and her mother had been ill), with the intention of moving back to Gedling, where she had bought a farm, which she planned to run with her friends the Brookes-Smiths, although she did not actually take up residence until April 1912.58 At some point in the summer of 1910 or 1911, Tolkien (perhaps in company with his brother) visited St Andrews; this may well have been the occasion for their invitation to join the Alpine tour.59
The party, then, included the Tolkien brothers and Jane Neave, the Brookes-Smith parents and their three children (a boy of twelve and two daughters of fourteen and sixteen), with the balance made up of schoolmistress friends of Jane Neave and other friends and acquaintances. Another pair joined the party midway through their venture.
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