He seems at this time to have contemplated, and even begun, a thorough and wholesale revision of the Book of Lost Tales; there are drafts of a tale of Ælfwine, to replace the old Eriol framework, that show in places a distinct stylistic advance over their predecessor. Consider, for instance, this description of the heart’s longing felt by Ælfwine and his shipmates when they come within sight of Tol Eressëa:
Then came the music very gently over the waters and it was laden with unimagined longing, that Ælfwine and his companions leant upon their oars and wept softly each for his heart’s half-remembered hurts, and memory of fair things lost, and each for the thirst that is in every child of Men for the flawless loveliness they seek and do not find.25
Apart from these drafts of the one text, however, Tolkien took the revision no further.
Early in 1920, Edith again became pregnant. That June, Sisam told Tolkien there was a job coming up at the University of Leeds, as Reader in English Language (it had previously been a full professorship, but on the death by drowning of its incumbent, F.W. Moorman, in the summer of 1919, it was reduced to a readership). Tolkien applied, and was successful. He later professed to believe that he was only considered for the post because Sisam, whom the Leeds authorities had approached, had turned them down and recommended him instead; but he may have been mistaken.26 The job began that October; it paid a round £600 a year. Tolkien spent a few weeks living in a bedsitter in Leeds and returning to Oxford and Edith only at the weekends. His second son, Michael, was born in October 1920. His godfather was Augustine Emery, sometime priest at Great Haywood, and thereafter ‘Uncle Gus’ to the Tolkien children. Emery retired to Milford-on-Sea on the Hampshire coast; the Tolkiens had a family holiday there in 1931.
Edith and the children did not move north to join Tolkien until the start of 1921. Edith’s cousin, Jennie Grove (‘Auntie Ie’ to young John Tolkien), at last left their household; she had been living with Edith since 1913. We may wonder what it was like for the Tolkiens, as a young married couple, to spend the first five years of their married life with her as part of their household in a series of modest lodgings and houses; it may seem, to us, as something that would imply a loss of privacy that most of us, perhaps, would find intolerable. But many people then, and some now, lived and live their marriages in similar or comparable circumstances, with one or more members of their extended family as part of their household. Our contemporary fetish for privacy is not a luxury that most ages or societies have been able to indulge; moreover, it was quite usual for even modest middle-class families to have domestic staff living with them, thus further compromising their privacy considered in absolute terms. Eighteen months into their marriage, the Tolkiens had a child; Ronald Tolkien was ill and poor, and a full-time nurse or nanny for baby John was impossible. Edith was much weakened by childbirth; for them, and especially her, to have the help of another adult to hand was (surely) invaluable, and probably saved her health and sanity. We may reckon Edith certainly, and Ronald probably, saw Jennie Grove’s companionship as a God-send rather than an imposition; although as anyone who has ever shared a house with another human being will recognize, no arrangement like this is ever wholly straightforward.
II – Leeds
Tolkien now started a busy and diligent time at Leeds, teaching a growing number of students specializing in English philology, and encouraging (with some success) the incorporation of philological elements (history of the language, and the reading of early texts) into the wider English course. His fundamental conviction was that, at bottom, all literary study should be based in hard linguistic knowledge: and this amalgam he called philology. Tom Shippey has, again, neatly summed this up:
… philology is not and should not be confined to language study. The texts in which these old forms of the language survive are often literary works of great power and distinctiveness, and (in the philological view) any literary study which ignores them, which refuses to pay the necessary linguistic toll to be able to read them, is accordingly incomplete and impoverished. Conversely, of course, any study which remains solely linguistic (as was often the case with twentieth century philology) is throwing away its best material and its best argument for existence. In philology, literary and linguistic study are indissoluble. They ought to be the same thing.27
This definition was not original to Tolkien; but he was unusual in the care with which he sought to emphasize both parts of the pact – linguistic enquiry and literary awareness not opposed but in combination. For many self-styled philologists, as we saw, it was enough to drill pupils in forms and sound-changes, and let the literary stuff look after itself. Tolkien reckoned this both short-sighted and dangerous, and also a cheating of one’s pupils of the proper end of their studies.
The English School at Leeds was a young department in a young university. The University of Leeds had been formed in 1904 from the merger of a medical school and a college of science, both nineteenthcentury foundations. The founders, however, had from the start instituted an arts faculty to sit alongside these existing bodies; it was planned to include an English Department within this faculty. Its development was slow, however; only in 1913 was a Professor of English Language and Literature appointed. The job was given to George Gordon, a young (he was thirty-two) protégé of Walter Raleigh, great panjandrum of ‘literary’ English studies and (as we saw) Professor of English Literature at Oxford since 1904. Gordon had hitherto been a research fellow at Raleigh’s college, Magdalen (Raleigh, and his professorship, did not move to Merton until 1914).
Gordon was keen to remake the Leeds syllabus along Oxford lines; war service prevented him from making a start before mid-1919. Tolkien’s appointment was key to his efforts: the technical side of philology was not Gordon’s strong suit (he was a much-admired, if painstaking, writer of short essays and leading articles on a wide range of literary subjects), but its establishment at Leeds was essential to Gordon’s aim of giving Leeds an intellectually robust and attractive English School. Tolkien had very considerable freedom to devise an appropriate philological syllabus, and worked closely with Gordon to integrate it with the general plan of the School.
It was not a big department: as well as Gordon and Tolkien, there were a pair of assistant lecturers and a tutor in English composition. Early in 1922, another lecturer was appointed, a Canadian Rhodes Scholar called E.V. (Eric Valentine) Gordon, who when an undergraduate in 1919 had been one of Tolkien’s pupils; Tolkien in fact suggested he be approached. Gordon was a competent and industrious philologist, and he and Tolkien were to collaborate closely at Leeds both in teaching and in writing. At the same time as Gordon was appointed, another lecturer’s job went to Wilfred Childe, a man two years Tolkien’s senior and a published poet. He shared Tolkien’s interests in faërie; he was also a Catholic. He had read a paper to the Exeter College Essay Club in June 1919, and Tolkien would have met him then, if they had not, as seems likely, met whilst undergraduates, perhaps at church (Childe had been at Magdalen, and probably knew George Gordon from there). In 1917, Childe had published Dream English: A Fantastical Romance. It is a curious Dunsanian piece, a study in resonant prose and high-coloured image of a medieval England unknown to history, flavoured with Byzantine curlicues and a heavy tincture of William Morris, but the Pre-Raphaelite Morris of love-sickness and carven furniture, rather than the reteller of Germanic legend Tolkien loved. Its plot is negligible, and it is really only a highly written (at times overwritten) string of vignettes. Nevertheless, one can see how its author and Tolkien could easily be friends; it shows a poet’s gift for the evocative phrase and the sudden revelation of hidden vistas through an unexplained name or allusion. Dream English is now one of those books with the uncertain status of a minor ‘cult classic’, largely forgotten; would this, one wonders, have been the fate of the Book of Lost Tales, if it had been finished and published in the 1920s?
Tolkien was happy in his new job; but he was not settled. In his first term, he was approached by the electors to t
wo professorial chairs in English language, and invited to apply. He did, to both: one in Liverpool, for which he was turned down; the other in Cape Town. It is not at this distance clear who put his name forward for these jobs; it may well have been Sisam again, or Joseph Wright. He was offered the latter job at the end of January 1921; but Edith was still recovering from the birth of Michael, and neither she nor the children were fit to travel. Tolkien was strongly tempted to take the job: he felt a keen desire to revisit South Africa, and the opportunity was a good one; but he would not be separated from his children again, and so he turned it down. The odd parallel with his own father’s last years might have struck him, perhaps to his discouragement; certainly he regretted the decision over the next year or two (‘I have often wondered since if that was not our chance that came then, and we had not the courage to seize it’28), but there was much to be done at Leeds, and Tolkien busied himself doing it.
Over the next few years, the Leeds English syllabus gradually evolved to contain a broader range of philological study, much of it taught by Tolkien himself. As well as Old and Middle English (both philology in itself and the study of texts) and fundamental philology of the Germanic tongues, he also taught Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. Those undergraduates who, after a year of general study, chose the English School were given a choice between two ‘schemes’: ‘A’ and ‘B’. Broadly, the ‘A’ scheme was mainstream ‘literary’ study; whilst ‘B’ was a more exclusively historical and philological course. ‘B’ students were obliged to study the history of the language, Old English prose and verse, Gothic, and various elements of literary history both particular and synoptic; and to take two optional papers chosen from Old Icelandic, Old High German, Old French, and Palaeography, although these optional papers might be replaced by a thesis. There was in addition a requirement to take courses from other faculties: two years of medieval or modern history, two years of a modern language (French or German) followed by a year of the corresponding literary and linguistic history. Before any of this, too, there was a compulsory year of Latin or Greek. This gave all the essentials of an education in solid philology for those prepared to put in the work. This division of the syllabus, modified over time, persisted until 1983, when it was finally abolished by (of all people) Tolkien’s remote successor, Professor Tom Shippey.
When Tolkien began at Leeds, of the sixty undergraduates in the second, third and fourth years, only five had chosen the then embryonic ‘B’ scheme; by 1924, fully a third of the undergraduate body took it. This was a higher proportion than took the equivalent course at Oxford; we may reckon his reforms, and teaching, a success. Whilst the politics of academic life were not absent (presumably they never are), Tolkien and George Gordon had at Leeds the great advantage of starting from a nearly clean slate: their battles needed to be fought to get money for more staff and books and buildings, rather than against the entrenched intellectual habits or teaching and lecturing routines of senior colleagues. In that sense, Tolkien’s time at Leeds was an encouraging one, and he relished his success in bringing on what he affectionately described as the ‘dull stodges’ of the undergraduate body. He did not abandon his imaginative writing, as we shall see; but the press of work cannot have made it easy.
Tolkien also founded a Viking Club for undergraduates, who met to drink beer, read Norse literature and sing comic songs, some in the ancient Germanic languages, composed by Tolkien and Gordon. The only extant poems in Gothic are two pieces by Tolkien from this period.
At some point in the early 1920s, E.V. Gordon collected these songs into a mimeographed booklet, titled ‘Leeds Songs’: it contained his own and Tolkien’s compositions in the old languages, Icelandic students’ songs both modern and traditional and several modern English songs of mildly satirical bent, in which Tolkien and Gordon mock the French, or the ‘literary’ faction (the ‘A’ scheme) in the English School. These last are in the (to us, now) deeply unfunny vein of Edwardian humour; we might compare G.K. Chesterton’s verses mocking the ‘Cocoa Press’29, or any number of the hundreds of such things to be discovered in volumes of Punch from the period. The Old English and Gothic verses are, for us now, much more interesting. Two in particular may be mentioned; both involve the birch tree.30
Tolkien was in later life given to calling the birch his ‘totem tree’; its mention in these two poems (the Gothic ‘Bagme Bloma’, and Old English ‘Éadig Béo Þu’) is on one level a simple private joke: in the Leeds English School, the birch stood for the ‘B’ scheme, as against the oak (Old English ác), which was the ‘A’ scheme. Their respective descriptions reflect this partisanship:
Ác sceal feallan on þæt fýr
lustes, léafes, lifes wan!
Beorc sceal ágan langne tír,
bréme glǽme glengan wang!31
On another level, Tolkien knew of extensive folkloric evidence that the birch tree was associated with the faërie Otherworld in the lost English mythology whose remnants are scattered through some of the northern ballads collected by the American folklorist Francis James Child (notably ‘The Wife of Ussher’s Well’); it functioned, in some sense, as both a sign of that Otherworld and a passport to it. Under this aspect, the birch was a doubly potent symbol of philology, at least as practised by Tolkien.32
Edith liked Leeds better than Oxford; social life amongst the University wives, and the students, was much less formal than at Oxford, and her own position, too, was now less negligible: she was wife to the rising star of the English Faculty, rather than to an underpaid jobbing tutor. Money was still tight, however: they had rented a house near the University, but it was cramped and the air polluted. Tolkien was eager to buy a house, and that meant both saving money and trying to earn more of it. He took on work marking School Certificate papers, a dull business that had to be fitted into the ends and corners of time left over when his day’s work was done.
In May 1922, Tolkien published his first book: A Middle English Vocabulary. It had begun as the glossary to accompany Kenneth Sisam’s anthology, but Tolkien’s delays and corrections to the text were so extensive that the anthology’s first printing (in 1921) did not include it. When the anthology was reprinted, in June 1925, Tolkien’s glossary was included, and all later editions, to this day, have retained it. The additional time and care he had taken meant that the glossary was a permanently valuable and useful text; but Sisam was irritated by Tolkien’s approach, and this made their subsequent relations difficult.
Sisam was notable for asperity and a briskly ruthless approach to philology; he was temperamentally unsympathetic to Tolkien’s more expansive and comprehensive approach. There was probably another reason for tension: Sisam was wholly responsible for the text of the anthology apart from the glossary, and his introductions to individual texts have an undercurrent of robust Protestant, or at least anti-Roman, sentiment (the proto-Protestant Wyclif, for instance, was ‘the greatest of those who broke the way for the modern world’ whose ‘moral courage’ in challenging the established (clerical) order was wholly admirable) which Tolkien can hardly have relished. Sisam’s years of association with Edmund Bishop had not made him sympathetic to Catholicism.
Certainly he and Tolkien never collaborated on anything again, and, whilst Sisam worked at the University Press (which he did from October 1922 until he retired in 1948), Tolkien published nothing with them (and, Sisam might have added, precious little with anyone else). The one exception was an edition of the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien, together with his colleague at Leeds, E.V. Gordon, had begun in February 1922; this was commissioned not by Sisam, but by the eminent lexicographer C.T. Onions. There was another struggle with Sisam, who wanted to cut down the notes and glossary, and was impatient to publish. This was a foreshadowing of the long and unhappy saga of the ‘Clarendon Chaucer’, which we will come to soon.
The Tolkien–Gordon edition of Gawain was an immediate success; to this day, it remains the standard student edition of the
text (albeit in a revision made by one of Tolkien’s pupils).
In 1922, two years into Tolkien’s time at Leeds, George Gordon was elected to one of the Oxford Merton chairs, left empty by Walter Raleigh’s death. This left a vacancy at the head of the department at Leeds. Tolkien applied to succeed Gordon in the Chair of English Literature, but was unsuccessful. The post went, instead, to Lascelles Abercrombie, a poet and critic from the ‘literary’ school, ten years Tolkien’s senior, author of books on aesthetics, the Epic, and Thomas Hardy. The electors went with what they knew, although Abercrombie had been a mere lecturer in Liverpool; he was an extensively published poet, and had known Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas in their youth. Tolkien’s candidacy was not as improbable as it might seem, however; he had been Gordon’s closest collaborator, and his effective deputy. He was only two years younger than Gordon had been when first elected. The Leeds Vice-Chancellor, eager to retain Tolkien’s services, privately assured him a chair of English Language would be created for him (this was from another angle simply restoring the situation as it was before the death of F.W. Moorman in 1919; he had done Tolkien’s job with the title and salary of a full professor). This was to be done in October 1924, when Tolkien became Professor of English Language. In the meantime he was given a pay-rise, to £700 per annum, starting in the academic year from October 1923.
Tolkien Page 14