They went by train to Innsbruck, and thence crossed into Switzerland; they then walked, in presumably easy stages, from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and Mürren, to Grindelwald past the Eiger, then to Meiringen (seeing the Jungfrau and the Silberhorn), and across the Grimsel Pass to Brig. From Brig they walked to Visp, perhaps also Zermatt, with a far vista of the Matterhorn; then over a high pass to Gruben, then the Forcletta Pass to Grimentz, and at last to Sion. There they took the first of numerous trains back to England, arriving in early September. This was Tolkien’s first foreign holiday, indeed the first time he had left England since arriving from South Africa sixteen years earlier: ‘a remarkable experience … after a poor boy’s childhood’.60
That summer was an extraordinary one, with sunshine almost continuous between April and October, and the mountains made a strong and enduring impression on Tolkien’s imagination; even forty years later, his vision of mountain scenery is clearly drawn from his Alpine memories of this high Edwardian summer.
The valley of Lauterbrunnen inspires Rivendell (at least visually), whilst the three peaks of Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau may well be the three mountains of Moria (even though Celebdil, Silvertine, is Silberhorn, in name anyway). The Matterhorn, seen from Zermatt, is as good a model as any for Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Any reader of Tolkien’s mature prose will recognize in him an almost mystical feeling for mountain scenery, which was constantly fed on these memories of the summer of 1911; even half a century later, his recall of the scenes of his holiday was exact and rich. Three decades later, as we shall see, he used ‘the Mountains’ as a shorthand for ‘heaven’.61
Humphrey Carpenter states that, before leaving for England, Tolkien bought a postcard of Josef Madlener’s painting Der Berggeist. Der Berggeist (‘the mountain spirit’) shows a bearded and cloaked figure, seated on a rock amidst forest trees with a vista of mountains in the background, with a white deer nuzzling his hands. Tolkien later wrote on the envelope containing it ‘origin of Gandalf’, although some have speculated that the wizard’s acerbic manner and brisk efficiency might owe something to Jane Neave. According to the artist’s daughter, however, Der Berggeist was painted in the late 1920s, and so cannot date from this period; so (if Carpenter’s information derives from Tolkien’s own memory) Tolkien must have confused this with some other occasion, unless (what seems unlikely) Madlener’s daughter is mistaken.62 Nevertheless, since Tolkien’s attraction to mountains was so intense, and there seems to be some link between Tolkien’s 1911 trip and his attraction for Madlener’s painting, it seemed easiest to notice it here, especially as we have no other clear event to which to tie it. The picture is not perhaps an especially remarkable one, in a minor if attractive vein of illustrations to German folklore (Madlener painted companion pieces of, apparently, a fairy woman of the woods and the mountain spirit Rübezahl); but for some reason it lodged in Tolkien’s memory and imagination.
On his return to England, Tolkien wrote a poem, ‘The New Lemminkäinen’, a pastiche of the manner of Kirby’s translation of the Finnish Kalevala; we may suspect, as with his earlier Macaulay pastiche, that he was making an oblique approach to themes and styles of writing that, with the self-consciousness of youth, he did not yet feel able to tackle ‘straight’.
Chapter 2 – University and Edith
I – Oxford
In October 1911, Tolkien matriculated at the University. He and another Old Edwardian were driven up to Oxford by his sometime form-master, ‘Dickie’ Reynolds, whose fashionableness ran to keeping a motor-car, then a comparative rarity.
The first four terms of the Literae Humaniores course are devoted to subjects to be examined in the preliminary examination, Classical Moderations (‘Mods’). The great bulk of the course was close study of classical authors, most of whom he will have read at school, and the general literary history of Greece and Rome; with, of course, the uncounselled horrors of unseen translations, of ‘gobbets’ drawn from no set or predetermined text, and the elaborate parlour games of Greek and Latin verse and prose composition. Homer and Demosthenes, Virgil and Cicero were read in extenso; whilst close study was made of four Greek plays (Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, King Oedipus and Electra by Sophocles, Euripides’ Bacchae), two of Plato’s dialogues, and the first four books of Tacitus’s Annals. This was all familiar, or mostly familiar, ground, although not without interest or intellectual challenges; but his heart was not in it. He was much more excited by Gothic, or Old English, or Welsh, or (as we shall see) Finnish, after finding a Finnish grammar in his college library a month into his first term. The one exception to Tolkien’s uninterest in his official course of study was the optional paper he took; from a list of possible choices, he settled on Comparative Philology of Greek and Latin. We shall look at this in more detail below; but the choice both saved Tolkien’s university career and further influenced, if it did not quite determine (his intellectual bent was already to a good degree settled), the future course of his life. We shall come to all this, however, in its proper place.
II – ‘Settling in’
The first year at university is for most undergraduates a time of discovery and of adjustment: discovery of one’s own interests and limitations, both of which are probably wider than was apparent in the narrow space of school; and adjustment to these facts, and to the freedom of managing one’s own timetable and budget. All this is tricky enough, but must be further balanced with the need to follow a determined course of study. This imperative is stronger in some than in others: many Oxford undergraduates in Tolkien’s day, as indeed later, had no especial need or desire for academic distinction, and were happy to read for a Pass degree, or for lesser Honours, whilst diverting themselves in the numerous heady ways open to youth gathered for the first time without parental or in-locoparental supervision (dons, emphatically, are not schoolmasters) and with money or at least credit to hand. Many a promising academic career has come to shipwreck when a young scholar has been drawn onto the rocks of distraction by the siren’s song of society, drink and old money. Oxford is curiously prone to giving an exposure to these things to those who may have the taste for them without the permanent means to satisfy it. For a man like Tolkien, however, whose whole bent was evidently to scholarship, and who was moreover financially dependent on an award, his Exhibition, which might be withdrawn by the College if his work fell below par, much of what was on offer was pure distraction; for him, the imperative to balance fun with work, and a good deal of it, was much stronger. Nevertheless it was one that Tolkien sat light to for his first few terms at Oxford. Apart from anything else, without the discipline of compelled early rising (he had, remember, been in the habit of serving or hearing Fr Francis’s Mass before school), he found sleep stole away an altogether disproportionate part of his day. Tolkien, like many others before and since, blamed the Oxford climate for his lethargy, but we may suspect late nights, beer and wine, and lack of compulsion to be the more likely culprits.
Some of his activities were continuations of those he had enjoyed at school; he founded a dining-and-debate society, the Apolausticks (‘those given to self-indulgence’) in that first term, together with other freshmen; and trialled for the College rugby XV (he was not quite good, or heavy, enough for a regular place, but seems to have turned out for them occasionally). Other activities were comparative new departures: town-and-gown scuffles, hide and seek with the Proctors (the university police, who had the unending and thankless task of keeping the undergraduates out of Oxford’s pubs) and that Oxford perennial, roof-climbing. This was not exactly usual behaviour for a poor man on an Exhibition who hoped to make his life in scholarship.
But Tolkien was unusual for a scholar in at least one other visible way: he was careful of his clothes and enjoyed good pictures. He bought handmade suits and some Japanese prints for his rooms, and was pleased by the effect. Tolkien was never an aesthete in the dressy, late Victorian sense, nor in its Edwardian iteration, of a prurient, sexually ambivalent litterateur; but he was cer
tainly aesthetically sensitive to a degree, and liked good clothes and pictures. He would never be Des Esseintes, or Aubrey Beardsley; but there was something in him of the delicate humour and attention of Max Beerbohm, say. He could hardly afford to be a full-blown dandy, but was and remained throughout his life notably well dressed in an understated way.
After the OTC at school, Tolkien clearly wanted to retain some connexion with military matters; at the end of his first term, he enlisted in King Edward’s Horse, a yeomanry (volunteer cavalry) regiment open to those born in the colonies. He was Trooper no. 1624. Choosing this regiment must have been a conscious decision; they were based in London, not Oxford. They had originally been raised – as the King’s Colonials (4th County of London Imperial Yeomanry) – in 1901, from men originally from the colonies now living in London, as part of the great expansion of yeomanry (mounted volunteers) for the South African War, although they were too late to see action. After the death of Edward VII, they took the name King Edward’s Horse (the King’s Oversea Dominions Regiment).
He did not lose touch with his schoolfriends; if anything, his closeness to some of them increased. Rob Gilson, as secretary of the King Edward’s School Musical and Dramatic Society, organized a production of The Rivals; Tolkien was prevailed upon to come down from Oxford that December to take the part of Mrs Malaprop. Several other parts were played by members of the TCBS – Wiseman, Gilson, T.K. Barnsley and G.B. Smith. This seems to have been Smith’s first real entry into the TCBS ‘inner circle’. Most of Tolkien’s TCBS friends were a year or two below him at school; they did not go to university until that autumn, or the one after.1 For a while, then, Tolkien’s social life was as much directed to Birmingham as to Oxford.
Vincent Trought had been ill for some months, and had gone to Cornwall for his health; on 20 January 1912, he died. Tolkien learnt too late to travel down for the funeral.
In the new year, as his second term opened, Tolkien started to attend tutorials in his Special Paper, Comparative Philology; for this, he was taught by the Professor of Comparative Philology, Joseph Wright, who took a Germanic delight in teaching undergraduates at odds with the usual Oxford approach (where tutoring is done by fellows of the Colleges, and professors reserve themselves for lecturing and research students). Wright was also, as we may remember, author of the Gothic primer Tolkien had owned since he was a schoolboy.
We have little other evidence for what Tolkien did this year; the Apolausticks met regularly, to discuss literary subjects and, from time to time, to eat elaborate dinners. He also seems to have taken part in the Stapeldon Society, the established College debating body. There were probably other activities that have left no record; and he did play, occasionally, for the College XV. He did some work, but spent most of his intellectual energy on extraneous linguistic matters – Welsh, Finnish, Old English and Gothic. College libraries, and the library of the Taylorian, then as now contain enough to distract the intellectual magpie from regular, and apparently tedious, courses of study. During Trinity (summer) Term, he was warned he might lose his Exhibition if his academic performance did not improve. He made some effort to this end, but his heart was not in it. He later blamed ‘Old Norse, festivity, and classical philology’ for his neglect of his course.2
As a schoolboy, and ward of an Oratorian Father, Tolkien had been diligent to the point of rigour in performing his religious duties. Day had as often as not begun with Mass. At Oxford, away from this framework, he had begun to slacken. Again, we do not have detail, and may be looking at little more than occasional oversleeping leading to his once or twice missing Sunday Mass; but it was indicative, or Tolkien felt it to be so, of a general lethargy and dissipation of energy and purpose, enough to generate guilt without provoking reformation.
At some point, probably during the Easter vacation, he again visited his aunt Jane in St Andrews, and wrote there a poem, ‘The Grimness of the Sea’.3
In the summer of 1912, Tolkien began a poem, a ‘fragment of an epic’, titled ‘Before Jerusalem Richard Makes an End of Speech’; this was an uncharacteristic subject for Tolkien, who seems to have had no more than an ordinary English schoolboy’s interest in the Crusades (presumably drawn, like so much else, from Ivanhoe and Henty), and was very probably meant as an entry for the Newdigate Prize that year, whose set subject was ‘Richard before Jerusalem’.4 He also went on a walking tour of Berkshire at the end of August, staying around Lambourn, painting and drawing.
III – Edith
Edith, meanwhile, had made a life for herself in Cheltenham. The family friends she lived with, the Jessops, had a large house and a comfortable life. Edith was socially active, in particular in the local Anglican church. She had always been an accomplished pianist, and now took great pleasure playing the organ at her parish church. During this time she injured her back whilst playing the organ; she never fully recovered.
Tolkien had not forgotten her; whilst staying with his Incledon cousins for Christmas 1912, he wrote a play for them all to perform, a light-hearted piece turning on the trials of an heiress living in hiding in a lodging house, who has fallen in love with a penniless undergraduate whom she can marry when she turns twenty-one, two days after the action on the play opens, if her father does not discover her first. Tolkien took the part of the consulting detective hired to find her and prevent the marriage.5 That the Edith-character was presented as an heiress may be of mild interest; we have seen how, by the terms of her father’s will, she had inherited property around Birmingham. It may be that this, to her, was a detail that set her apart from her otherwise unremarkable background; it might, in fact, be thought of as her version of Tolkien’s ‘Saxon nobility’ ancestor-myth. Whilst she might, outwardly, be an orphan of uncertain parentage living in a lodging-house, in reality she was an heiress to a fortune. Many people in adolescence and early youth nurture, I suspect, such comforting illusions, which serve to make the disagreeable aspects of their lives mere temporary and unfortunate disguise, cloaking their real nature. If pressed, they would not insist on them, or indeed volunteer them unprompted, and, at some level, these things are known to be fiction; but they are comforting fictions, and so are privately kept up, and shared only with intimates, and then as great secrets.
At midnight on 3 January 1913, Tolkien turned twenty-one. He at once sat down and wrote to Edith, asking her when they might be reunited. She told him by return that she had got engaged to the brother of a schoolfriend; she had lost hope that Tolkien would still love her. As soon as he could, Tolkien went to Cheltenham to see her; on 8 January, she broke off her engagement and agreed to marry him instead. Her family were unhappy at his apparent lack of prospects, and more so at his Catholicism, particularly as he insisted that a reluctant Edith should herself convert. She resisted, but Tolkien was insistent and she gave in. At this time, the Catholic Church was very discouraging of ‘mixed marriages’ between a Catholic and a non-Catholic Christian, although they inevitably remained frequent. As well as promising to ensure any children were brought up Catholic, the Catholic party in such marriages was enjoined to work to convert the non-Catholic. Moreover, a ‘mixed marriage’ might never be celebrated in the context of a full Nuptial Mass, but only in an abbreviated and grudging ceremony of its own. Unity in religious practice within a marriage is surely important; but it is dangerous to think it can be imposed. When Edith told the Jessops that she meant to become a Catholic, she was told to find somewhere else to live. Mr Jessop (‘Uncle Jessop’ to Edith) wrote to Edith’s guardian,
I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentm., but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine, had he adopted a Profession it would have been different.6
We may wonder whether he said anything in addition about Tolkien’s religion; but if he did, it has not been recorded. In June, together with an older cousin, Edith moved to Warwick and found lodgings there. Her cousin, Jennie Grove, was at that time forty-nine years old; owi
ng to a childhood accident, she had only ever reached four foot eight in height. She was the closest Edith had to a mother-figure. Edith was to live in Warwick, with Jennie Grove, until 1916; Tolkien frequently visited her there, and their romance shed, for him, an enchantment over the town, which was to assume a prominent role in his early writings.
Tolkien also wrote to Francis Morgan, telling him that he and Edith had renewed their connexion and were engaged. He was very apprehensive of his reaction; but Fr Francis’s reply was patiently accepting, if not enthusiastic. Tolkien still relied on him for supplemental funds, but his primary motive in telling him was a sense of duty. Apart from him, however, Tolkien told no one; the engagement was to be a secret, for a while at least. It is tempting to suppose that this was a function of embarrassment or half-heartedness on one side or another, but it is likely to have had a more practical explanation: money. Tolkien was still a poor student, with only a tiny income in his own right; he could certainly not plan marriage until he had a job or at least prospects of one. He promised Edith he would study hard so as to make an academic job a real possibility; there is no evidence he ever thought of any other career.
Resolutions aside, he continued to find his time at Oxford agreeable. In the autumn of 1912, Wiseman and Gilson had both gone up to Cambridge; this would have further weakened Tolkien’s social ties to his old school and to Birmingham in general.
As we have seen, he had thrown himself into college social life, but found the work frankly dull. He had trouble maintaining interest in Greek dramas he had read at school and already knew as well as he cared to. He was easily distracted onto intellectual (mostly linguistic) bypaths. The one exception to this was the optional paper he took in Comparative Philology. For this, as we saw, he was taught by the remarkable Joseph Wright.
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