On 26 April 1923, the Times Literary Supplement published a review, by Tolkien but unsigned (as all TLS reviews were until 1974), of the EETS edition of Hali Meidenhad (or Hali Meiðhad), a text from a manuscript, Bodley 34, which contains a number of texts written during the thirteenth century for women religious in the West Midlands, in a linguistically consistent style; the texts are known as the ‘Katherine Group’, after the longest of them, a life of St Catherine of Alexandria.33 Tolkien was not impressed by the edition, which the editor had left incomplete on his death and which, he reckoned, did no especial service to his memory. Nevertheless the material itself was, he asserted, of the greatest interest both linguistic and literary. He later said that he had at once taken to the language of the texts ‘as a known language’; they came, after all, from exactly the same region as his Suffield forebears. This was the first public evidence of one of Tolkien’s great academic interests, which he was concerned with for all of his subsequent professional life.
Unusually, Tolkien seems to have published very few book reviews, leaving aside some portmanteau articles for the Year’s Work in English Studies; it is of course possible that some still lurk undiscovered, signed or unsigned, in places obscure or overlooked; and certainly he sometimes speaks of reviewing as something he is familiar with, but this may simply be a rhetorical allusion to his Year’s Work in English Studies work. The Hali Meiðhad piece seems to have been his only contribution to the TLS, according to the index of pre-1974 (unsigned) reviews. His connexion to the paper probably came through George Gordon, his boss at Leeds, whose editorials for the TLS were so highly regarded they were reputed to have won him his Oxford chair.
III – Mythology revisited
In May 1923, Tolkien contracted pneumonia and became severely ill; his life was in danger. The polluted air of Leeds had clearly done his lungs no favours. His ninety-year-old Suffield grandfather had come to visit; Tolkien remembered him standing at his bedside, ‘a tall thin black-clad figure … looking at me and speaking to me in contempt – to the effect that I and my generation were degenerate weaklings’.34 The old man then left to take a boat trip around the British Isles; he lived until he was ninety-seven. By mid-June, Tolkien had begun to recover; he took Edith and their children to stay with his brother Hilary at his fruit farm near Evesham. They spent their time kite-flying and helping out with the trees; Tolkien also turned again to his writing.
He had not abandoned work on his legendarium, but rather than continuing or revising the Lost Tales, he began to retell some of them in verse. Tolkien still thought of himself as primarily a poet, or perhaps (like William Morris) someone who could work in prose and verse with equal facility.
During his time at Leeds, he did publish a few of his shorter poems. Some appeared in the 1923 collection A Northern Venture (‘The Happy Mariners’, ‘The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon’ and ‘Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo’), and the following year others were included in Leeds University Verse 1914–24 (‘An Evening in Tavrobel’, ‘The Lonely Isle’, ‘The Princess Ní’). Wilfred Childe also had pieces in both, and may have been responsible for introducing Tolkien to the projects. E.V. Gordon and their student A.H. Smith also featured in both collections. Tolkien’s poems also appeared in two local journals: Yorkshire Poetry, which in its 1923 issue printed ‘The Cat and the Fiddle’, another ‘nursery rhymes explained’ poem; and another Leeds periodical, Microcosm, which in spring 1923 had ‘The City of the Gods’, written in 1915. Presumably Childe, again, was his contact for these fugitive publications.
Apart from ‘Enigmata Saxonica’ (a pair of pastiche Old English riddles) and ‘The Cat and the Fiddle’, none of Tolkien’s pieces was however a new composition; ‘An Evening in Tavrobel’ was a revision of part of his 1916 poem ‘A Dream of Coming Home’. All the rest we have seen written during the war (apart from ‘The Man in the Moon’, which first began in the pre-war Book of Ishness).
Two new things did appear: Gryphon (a Leeds University periodical) for January 1923 had ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ (later ‘The Hoard’) – the title is from Beowulf, but the story of cursed gold is really that of Mím the Dwarf, Túrin and the dragon Glórund from the Lost Tales; whilst in May 1924, he wrote a five-stanza poem, ‘The Nameless Land’, which describes Tol Eressëa in a verse-form borrowed from the Middle English poem Pearl, a vision of the afterlife usually attributed to the poet of Gawain. Pearl is composed in a complex metre combining alliteration and rhyme, and Tolkien claimed he had written his poem as an exercise to show this is not the impossible feat that most modern editors supposed.35 Both of these new poems, notably, took their inspiration from a combination of his academic work and the developing legendarium.
His first effort at a long poem, a Lay of the Fall of Gondolin, was in a (not very successful) hexameter line, and was early abandoned. He then decided to use the Old English alliterative line, the same verse form used in the great monuments of Old English poetry such as Beowulf. For much of his time in Leeds he worked on an alliterative poem on the Children of Húrin; late in 1924, or early in 1925, he put it aside and began two other alliterative poems, ‘The Flight of the Noldoli’ and a ‘Lay of Éarendel’. Both were soon abandoned.
We have little evidence from this time about what, exactly, Tolkien thought his stories were for, inasmuch as a story needs to be for anything apart from itself; most of the surviving discussion of storytelling, and specifically his own legendarium, in Tolkien’s published letters is from a later date, and concerns books as yet unwritten. We may guess, however; a recent scholar puts it like this:
The principal conceit of Tolkien’s legendarium is that it stands as a lost prehistoric tradition, of which the many myths and legends we know in our own primary world are meant (fictively, by Tolkien) to be echoes, fragments, and transformations. Tolkien viewed his legendarium as seeding the world’s mythologies and their expansive repositories of tales. Eventually, these seeds would have grown (we are still speaking fictively) into the Greek myths, Beowulf, the Eddas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Finnish Kalevala, and all the rest. In this sense, the ‘mythology for England’ really becomes universal, almost a mythology for the entire world; certainly a pan-European one.36
Put starkly, like this, it is the manifesto of a lunatic; one may doubt whether Tolkien would have ever made so explicit a statement of intent. But this does, at some level, express pretty exactly what (it seems) Tolkien was aiming at: the recovery of a ‘true tradition’ of legendry, recreating stories from fugitive hints and corrupted later versions, testing these surviving elements by the paired touchstones of philological coherence and his own aesthetic sense of what was right, of what ‘actually happened’. We do not need to suppose Tolkien thought that the Beren legend, for instance, was a matter of historical record, or the geography of Beleriand a guide to proto-European regions (although in its earliest forms it may have been more patently meant as such); rather, what was important was that his versions of these much-patterned tales were, he feigned, truer as stories than any of their ‘later’ reflexes and analogues. The worm Glórund (Glaurung) is the ur-dragon behind Fáfnir and Beowulf’s bane; the elves in their varied splendour are the source of the baffling and apparently contradictory scraps and rumours of faërie, perilous and timeless, alluring and fleeting, jealously gathered by folklorists.
This accounts for two curious features of his work: first, his (presumably laborious, or at any rate painstaking) composition of Old English versions of some of his texts, relics (he feigned) of the lost true tradition; and, second, his calling his longer poems ‘lays’. This is not simply, or not even, an arch pseudo-archaic equivalent of ‘long poem’ (in the same way as, today, ‘saga’ means no more than ‘any long(-ish) or episodic story in any medium whatever’), but a precise and deliberate reference to the nineteenth-century Liedertheorie of composition, whereby behind extant literary epic, or narrative history, the cunning philologist might discern primitive shorter narrative verse compositions, ‘
lays’, on which the old historians and poets had drawn. Tolkien would have come across this theory, first, in the preface to Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which he had affectionately pastiched as a schoolboy, and which sought to recreate exactly such ‘primitive’ verse compositions. Those who are still inclined to dismiss Macaulay’s poems should read the stirring account of Horatius given by Kingsley Amis in his introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter,37 or, better still, reread the poem itself.
We should not forget that, alongside these narrative elements of the legendarium, Tolkien produced very substantial quantities of purely linguistic writing discussing elements of, and interrelations between, his elvish languages; this linguistic material remains in great part unpublished, and (to judge by such fragments as have appeared) is often forbiddingly technical. Nevertheless, this was an enduring and essential part of Tolkien’s imaginative writing, and details or apparent anomalies in the linguistic legendarium were very often the immediate spur to some narrative feature that sought to account for or resolve them. This parallel work, of what we might call the open (narrative) and the hidden (linguistic) legendarium, should be borne in mind in all that follows; the extant remains of Tolkien’s linguistic writings run to thousands of manuscript pages, and all of it had to be written some time. It was probably at this time that he wrote A Descriptive Grammar of the Qenya Language, which collected and systematized the accidence, syntax and phonology of Qenya as it had developed since 1915. The text is unfinished, but extensive.38 He also wrote a ‘Noldorin Dictionary’ (which was now the name for Gnomish or Goldogrin) at this time, to supplement a ‘Noldorin Grammar’ (Lam i·Ngolthor, later Lam na·NGoluith) he had been working on since 1921.39
IV – Check and advance
By June 1923, George Gordon (formerly Tolkien’s boss at Leeds, but now Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford) had managed to establish Tolkien as his co-editor on a school anthology, Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose, which would concentrate on works other than the Canterbury Tales, and be published by the OUP. Gordon’s and Tolkien’s contact at the Press was, inevitably, Kenneth Sisam. Gordon had come up with the idea in 1922, but now realized he needed a collaborator if the project was to make headway amidst his other heavy responsibilities. Tolkien’s glossary to Sisam’s anthology, and his work on Sir Gawain (with the other Gordon, E.V.), made him, it was thought, the ideal person; he was, besides, a friend and sometime colleague, and Gordon was tenacious in patronage.
For this project, dubbed the ‘Clarendon Chaucer’ (the Clarendon Press was the University printer), they initially proposed to use fresh texts of Chaucer, drawn from the monographs of the Chaucer Society; but Sisam vetoed this, preferring to use the old edition of Walter Skeat, which the OUP published in various formats including a ‘Student’s Chaucer’. Tolkien thought this an inferior text, but was told that, for the purposes of a school edition (which, to turn a good profit, needed to be as cheap as possible to produce), it was good enough. He and Gordon selected their texts, and they were set up in proof. Further work on the book was impeded by Tolkien’s health, which had not fully returned after his pneumonia, and by his teaching load at Leeds.
Proofs of the Clarendon Chaucer arrived late in 1923; Tolkien started to mark them up two days before Christmas, and resumed work on the glossary and the textual notes.
At the same time, Tolkien wondered whether the OUP would be interested in an Introduction to German Philology he was contemplating writing (we may wonder whether Tolkien actually proposed an Introduction to Germanic Philology, which had somehow been thus misleadingly abbreviated);40 they would, Sisam thought, if it were not too long or complicated. But first, Chaucer needed to be done.
When Tolkien sent his Chaucer text in, Sisam objected to his proposed changes to Skeat’s text, some because he was not convinced by Tolkien’s reasoning, but mainly on grounds of cost (each emendation, he claimed, would cost 6d.). In March 1924, Sisam decided he wanted Tolkien removed from the Chaucer project, and conveyed this to Gordon. Sisam was also annoyed that Tolkien was (as he saw it) holding up the completion of the Gawain edition. Gordon told Tolkien, and he agreed to step down from the Chaucer project; but Sisam could find no competent substitute, so Tolkien continued working on the glossary, notes and preface. Gordon was too busy to do more than advise on this part of the text; such time as he could spare for the book he spent compiling extracts from various critics illustrative of the selection. The project was becoming a decided incubus.
Late in 1923, the Tolkiens’ house in Leeds was burgled; their new maid, it turned out, was involved with a criminal gang. Edith’s engagement ring was amongst the things taken. Their domestic situation was, clearly, not ideal; we have noted above the heavily polluted air of the city centre, and now (surely) the Tolkiens would have felt unsafe as well.
At the start of 1924, Edith was distressed to find she was again pregnant. She was thirty-five; her two boys were then six and three. She hoped for a daughter, but, in the event, a third boy was born on 21 November. He was named Christopher Reuel, after Christopher Wiseman. Wilfred Childe stood godfather to him.
That same year, however, 1924, saw Tolkien’s promotion to a newly created professorial chair; he was now for the first time, as he would remain, Professor Tolkien. He was thirty-two. Although his promotion did not formally take place until October, on the strength of it (and his new salary of £800 a year) he and Edith that March bought a house on the outskirts of the town, larger than their previous rented place and (what was better still) surrounded by open fields. The air too was noticeably cleaner. This was the house where they first lived with their third son, Christopher.
Tolkien had also assumed another academic task of significant weight: he prepared a review article for the annual Year’s Work in English Studies, covering Philology: General Works for 1923. It ran to eighteen printed pages, and represented a great deal of reading and evaluation. It was well enough received that he was asked to repeat the job for the following two years; after that, as we shall see, he simply did not have the time.41
That October (1924), George Gordon assured Sisam at the OUP that the Clarendon Chaucer was almost done: he sent in the text, and its accompanying essays; Tolkien, he declared, had finished the glossary and had drafted the textual notes. This was not wholly true; the glossary was not done. In December, Tolkien wrote to Sisam pleading illness (his own and his family’s) as reason for delay; Sisam replied asking for the glossary by the end of the year, and the notes by the end of January. Tolkien sent the glossary to Gordon in early December; Gordon forwarded it to Sisam two weeks later. When he received it, two days before Christmas, Sisam at once wrote to Gordon sternly telling him Tolkien would have to pay for the cost of correcting the glossary proofs if he made as many changes to them as he had to those of his glossary for Sisam’s anthology.
Two weeks later, on 5 January, he told Gordon the glossary needed to be cut by ten pages; and he suggested to Tolkien that he drop references to the text, and all ‘easy’ words: the very things, in fact, that made it useful as a tool for a student to learn Middle English rather than mug up a text for an examination. Tolkien dutifully cut the glossary, and sent it to Gordon for review; Gordon sent it on to Sisam at the start of March, with a preface of his own in place of Tolkien’s one, which he reckoned too cerebral (Sisam agreed).
That April, 1925, the Tolkien–E.V. Gordon edition of Sir Gawain was finally published; it remains the standard edition of the text, although it was revised in 1967 by Tolkien’s sometime pupil (and eventual professorial successor) Norman Davis. It was the last full-scale edition of a text Tolkien ever published.
Tolkien also contributed an article to the newly founded Review of English Studies, called ‘Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography’; it appeared in April 1925. Much of the piece was drawn from Tolkien’s attention to the (in his view highly deficient) glossary to the EETS Hali Meidenhad, and marked the next stage of Tolkien’s interest in the language of
that text. The previous issue of the journal, its first, had included an article on ‘Recent Research upon the Ancren Riwle’ by one of England’s more eminent philologists (in Tolkien’s sense of the word), R.W. Chambers of University College London42; it gives an inspiring account of the text, praising its vigour and purity of speech and affirming its Englishness against those who had tried to argue for it as a rendering of a French or Latin original. Chambers also, characteristically, claimed it for a tradition of English prose-writing ‘deliberately created by King Alfred, three centuries before the rise of French prose’ and still preserved in the thirteenth century in the face of Norman Conquest and neglect. He ended by expressing a wish ‘for a final edition of this extraordinarily interesting and important text’. This, as we shall see, was to become one of Tolkien’s aims.43 Chambers also commends as ‘the best and probably the earliest manuscript’ the Cambridge manuscript, Corpus 402;44 Tolkien was to choose this as his base text, and it is still reckoned the definitive text of the work, although now rather as a later authorial revision than the earliest text. Tolkien and Chambers had met at some point, and became friendly. We shall look more at him next.
The next issue of the Review of English Studies had another piece by Tolkien, ‘The Devil’s Coach-horses’, analysing a phrase from Hali Meiðhad, þe deofles eaueres; these, Tolkien argued, were not boars (Old English eoforas), drawing the devil’s chariot like that of Þórr, but in fact cart-horses, dobbins (Middle English aver, or in West Midland dialect eaver, from Old English *afor, *eafor), rather than horses for riding. ‘The devil appears to have ridden his coach-horses like a postillion.’45
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