One of the most immediate professional concerns for Tolkien was the status of the Oxford English School itself. As we have seen, when it was established in 1894 it was explicitly only a Final Honour School – that is, no undergraduate might read for it unless he had already passed a First Public Examination (which meant, in practice, either Honour Moderations in Literae Humaniores (Classics), which had been Tolkien’s route, or the less demanding Pass Moderations) or had already gained Honours in another subject. It was not possible to begin the specific English course immediately on matriculation; the most that could be done was to read for Pass Moderations with a bias towards literary-philological subjects. Soon after Tolkien returned to Oxford, the English Faculty in Michaelmas (autumn) Term 1926 became formally independent of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literature. One of the first acts of the newly constituted Faculty Board (of which Tolkien was an ex officio member) was to propose setting up a separate and specific First Public Examination in English (the so-called ‘English Prelim’) to replace the required Honour or Pass Moderations. This request was denied.
His next priority was reform of the syllabus; he made a tentative start. We should remember that Tolkien at Leeds had been given a largely free hand to design a syllabus according to his own sense of priorities and value; any vested interests were by-passed or overruled with the strong help of George Gordon and the University Vice-Chancellor. He may have come to his Oxford job with a similar amount of reforming zeal; certainly, his application had hinted as much. He was to find, however, that his freedom of movement at Oxford was, by comparison, significantly restrained.
One important reason for this was his own lack of authority over his colleagues. As a professor, he had some standing in the English Faculty; but whereas in Leeds (say) this had meant real authority over all who taught his subject in the University, and the capacity, funds permitting, to hire and fire staff, at Oxford this was not so. At Oxford, certainly then, the faculties were comparatively insignificant, particularly in their responsibility for personnel other than the handful of professors and readers. Tutorial fellows were hired by, responsible to, and under the authority of, their colleges above all, and colleges were jealous of their autonomy. Tolkien might persuade or cajole, but he could not order or (much less) threaten.
An additional if related difficulty, and one that had a significant effect on Tolkien’s scholarly productivity, was a chronic shortage of teaching staff.7 This too was a direct consequence of Oxford’s collegiate structure, which means that the vast majority of tenured staff are hired not by the University (as Tolkien was) but by individual colleges according to an almost infinitely variable, and unpredictable, schedule of their own private priorities. Thus, if a particular college had a fellow who was able and willing to teach undergraduates a particular part of the English course, he might be able (and willing) to do so only for undergraduates from his own college, or for his own and one other; and, should he die or retire or become incapacitated, there was no guarantee or even likelihood that his position would be filled by a man similarly qualified. As a result, undergraduate teaching across the University was both patchy and precarious. For long-established subjects (such as Classics), a temporary shortage in one college or another might easily be made up; for English, this was emphatically not so. One consequence of this was that the few scholars who held, in addition to or prior to their college fellowships, a salaried University teaching position such as a professorship, were in practice obliged to assume a far wider responsibility for undergraduate teaching than the statues defining their jobs envisaged. In the particular practical case of the English Faculty, at this period there were only three scholars available to teach the technical philological side of the course, which all undergraduates were obliged to follow: Tolkien, C.T. Onions (as Reader in English Philology) and the old Merton Professor of English Language, H.C. Wyld. All of these men gave far more lectures than they might have been expected to give, Tolkien and Wyld each two or three times more, often covering the elementary parts of the subject. Tolkien regularly gave six lecture courses a term. This may not seem a great deal, but we should remember that physical time on his feet talking was a small part of the time and effort needed to write and give a course of study. Few if any of the tutorial fellows at individual colleges made any effective contribution to teaching the philological basics of the course; which meant that the burden of teaching the subject fell on to Tolkien and his salaried colleagues, who were obliged to do so by lectures and classes, rather than the more effective individual tutorials that remain the foundation of Oxford undergraduate teaching. One immediate consequence of all this, in turn, was that many candidates did not learn much philology, and the examiners noticed. For the next twenty years, Tolkien and his allies made repeated efforts to persuade the University to hire more people to teach linguistic subjects, but with very limited success. If a subject is both compulsory and, for whatever reason, not very well taught (and it was a frequent complaint that Tolkien did not lecture well, or at least audibly), it is likely to become unpopular, certainly when compared with flashy and less demanding topics; and this, undeniably, is what happened to the philological side of the Oxford course. An exception to this was the women’s colleges, which, for historical reasons, were all well provided with English dons: at least one at each women’s college would be a philologist, and so they were usually able to give their undergraduates a good foundation in the technical side of the course in the more congenial, and more effective, environment of the college tutorial, allowing them to take from the professorial lectures the broader and more synthetic knowledge they were designed to impart, rather than attending lectures by world authorities so as to mug up the basics of sound-changes.
A solution to this would, of course, have been to co-ordinate college tutorial appointments across the University so as to ensure effective teaching coverage for all aspects of the English course; but this would require the sort of interference with collegiate autonomy that was practically impossible. A tutorial fellow was elected by the other fellows of his college, who as a class were notoriously impermeable to external persuasion, and were as likely to choose (or reject) a man for his personal qualities as for his scholarship. Many colleges, moreover, were only temporarily persuaded that tutorial fellows in English were worth having in the first place, let alone a particular type of tutorial fellow to suit the exigencies of a new-minted faculty rather than the considered and customary discernment of a Senior Common Room who were, after all, the ones who would have to listen to him at dinner each night.
For historical reasons, then, there were too few teachers of philology at Oxford; and this meant the ones, like Tolkien, who were both present and able, were chronically overworked as lecturers and, also, in the setting and marking of examinations. I would not wish to argue that teaching and examining are worthless activities, or that they formed an unexpected part of Tolkien’s job; but they surely assumed a disproportionate position, and often consisted of elementary instruction that should have been done by other more junior staff. A professor was expected to teach, certainly, but also to research and to write, and the amount of teaching Tolkien was obliged to do had a real effect on his capacity to undertake the rest of his job.
II – The legendarium continued
Aside from his professional activities, Tolkien did manage to snatch time for what, if pressed, he might have described as his hobby: his invented languages, and the growing corpus of story that surrounded them.
Tolkien had put aside the alliterative Children of Húrin before leaving Leeds; he began, now, a retelling of the Beren and Lúthien story in octosyllabic couplets, with the title The Lay of Leithian. He worked on this poem, on and off, for the next six years (from the summer of 1925 to September 1931).
Certain concepts from the Lost Tales had by now been modified; the most important was the role of England. Where, previously, England – Lúthany, Lúthien, Leithian – was physically identical to the Elvish Tol E
ressëa, now it becomes, instead, the place where elves from the Great Lands took refuge after various invasions, and whence they sailed to Tol Eressëa, now in the Uttermost West. The Tale-telling, also, was moved: Eriol was now made a man of the eleventh century rather than the fifth, and renamed Ælfwine, ‘Elf-friend’. There was also an attempt, which seems never to have been fully articulated, to connect the Ing (Ingwë, Inwë) of the Lost Tales with the legendary and eponymous founder of the Ingvaeones, Pliny’s name for the Germanic tribes of the North Sea coasts (the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians), the Old English reflex of whose name was Ingwine, ‘friends of Ing’ (and who are so mentioned in Widsith). Jacob Grimm had connected this Ing with one of the by-names for the Norse God Freyr; indeed, he had noted, frey (Old English frea) seems to be a title, ‘Lord’, and Ing or Yngvi (proto-Germanic *Ingwaz) his original name (Ing and Yngvi-frey appear in a lecture Tolkien gave fifteen years later8). In drafts of unwritten Tales the Ingwine appear as the Ingwaiwar, the ancestral English in their Baltic littoral home. Ing was to meet elves, or perhaps Earendel, and from them, or him, be given a draught of deathlessness (limpë) before returning to found the Ingvaeones. This presumably would account for his later elevation to godhood. The surviving fragments are confusing, and the precise narrative sequence and projected historico-legendary connexion not wholly certain; but Tolkien clearly planned a radical grafting of proto-English history into his legendarium. It never seems to have achieved satisfactory form; no subsequent connected narrative takes it up. The surviving tale Ælfwine of England, which may have been revised at this time, does not mention Ing or the Ingwine, although they are prominent in Tolkien’s notes.9
There remained much in the prehistory of the English that was suggestive and enticing; but Tolkien seems never to have been able explicitly to grasp, or if he grasped satisfactorily to formulate, its ‘true narrative’. The material itself, or such fragments as are known or conjectured, is tangled and sometimes contradictory, which cannot have helped.
Early in 1926, Tolkien wrote a short prose text, ‘A Sketch of the Mythology’, to give a brief background to the long poems The Lay of Leithian and The Children of Húrin which he sent to his old schoolmaster, R.W. Reynolds, for comment. Originally meant purely as a background synopsis, the ‘Sketch’ however now became the primary prose vehicle for the development of Tolkien’s legendarium; the original Lost Tales were put aside, and never revised further. Indeed it seems probable that Tolkien had not done much to the Tales whilst in Leeds, and when composing the synopsis incorporated many developments that had not hitherto been written down or had been silently adopted in the composition of the alliterative Children of Húrin. It was this text, many years and layers of development later, which became the book we know as The Silmarillion. When Tolkien returned to the prose cycles of his mythology (in part because Reynolds was less than enthusiastic about the poems) he took as his basis not the Book of Lost Tales but the ‘Sketch’; as John Garth put it, ‘the précis turned into a replacement’.10 Garth, amongst others, regrets this; the Lost Tales, he argues, have an ‘ebullience, earthiness and humour’ lacking from the later versions, which miss, also, the ‘physical and psychological detail’ of the narrative verse.
Nevertheless, the legendarium is still a literal ‘mythology for England’: Britain, in this version, is the last remnant of Beleriand, broken in the wars of Morgoth’s overthrow; the stories are still told to Eriol, who alone had returned from the Lonely Isle. Eventually, however, Tolkien abandoned their original ‘Anglo-Saxon’ framework of tales told to a traveller, and an identification of the places of the mythology with England, although he tried hard to find some way to keep the first of these, even in its very latest versions. What he lost, arguably, was that ‘contact with the earth’ he declared was essential to a living mythology. He also needed a framework for the stories that would make them accessible to the reader.
All of these points are debatable, and their resolution was to a large extent many years in the future. But it was to be some time before Tolkien was to find the necessary middle term between the high matter of his mythology and the grounded experience of the English reader. None of this was made easier by the fact that Tolkien showed his writing to very few. Tolkien needed a properly appreciative audience.
III – Heavy Lewis
On 11 May 1926, at an English Faculty meeting, Tolkien met Magdalen’s recently elected Tutorial Fellow in English, a Belfast atheist, frustrated philosopher and aspirant poet named C.S. Lewis – ‘Jack’ to his intimates; to his undergraduate contemporaries, on account of his earnest intensity, ‘Heavy Lewis’.11 Lewis noted in his diary that evening that Tolkien was ‘a smooth, pale, fluent little chap … No harm in him: only needs a smack or two.’12
Lewis is now a very familiar figure; in 1926, he was wholly obscure, having published only one unsuccessful volume of verse (a second, equally unsuccessful, appeared that September). It was almost a decade before the first of his major works was published. Like Tolkien, he had been an infantry subaltern during the war; he was in France between January and May 1918. After a month at the front, he too had contracted trench fever, but he had made a quick enough recovery to be sent back in time to be wounded in March 1918, and eventually (again like Tolkien) sent back to England to convalesce. His schooling had been patchy (he had hated his three English boarding schools, but had thrived under a private tutor) but his undergraduate career, resumed after the war, had been academically outstanding. He had taken Firsts in Classical Moderations and Greats and then, after only nine months’ work, First Class Honours in English (he had been taught, in part, by George Gordon). Despite this, it took him two years to find an academic job; indeed, he only read English at all to give himself a ‘second string’ – his first ambition had been to teach philosophy as a tutor in Greats.
Lewis had spent the eight years previous to his election to Magdalen living in a series of rented houses in the Oxford suburbs with a woman called Janie Moore, whose son Paddy had been Lewis’s room-mate in military training. Paddy Moore was killed in 1918, and Lewis, on the strength of a promise he had made him, had taken it on himself to make a home with his mother. Lewis’s own mother had died when he was ten. This is of course obviously parallel to Tolkien’s experience, although if either man ever remarked on this, he did so only privately; but it is worth comparing Tolkien’s recorded words on his mother’s death (pointing at the sky, and saying ‘it is so empty and cold’) with Lewis’s account in Surprised by Joy: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.’13
To some extent Mrs Moore was an obvious substitute for Lewis’s mother (although she was ten years younger than her), but there seems to have been more to it than that. When she first met Lewis, she was forty-five years old, and had been separated from her husband for a decade; Lewis was eighteen, and emotionally starved. Certainty on this point is not possible, but it seems very probable that their relationship was sexual, at least at first and possibly until Lewis became a Christian in 1931. Whatever the truth of this, his private life was in some definite ways irregular, and was never discussed with intimates.
Lewis was at great pains to conceal the real nature of his domestic life from his family and friends, particularly from his father Albert Lewis, a successful police court lawyer for whom he had in early youth developed a fine and enduring contempt (a quarter of a century later, he wrote, ‘I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious’14), but who had uncomplainingly funded Lewis’s university career (and, unbeknownst to him, his domestic set-up) until he finally landed his fellowship. Lewis had deliberately lied to his father about his domestic life and the state of his finances; when, eventually, he had been discovered in the lie, or at least the financial part of it (he had told his father he had money in credit, but was seriously overdrawn), there was a bad scene, in which Lewis said ‘terrible, insulting, and despising things’ to his father.
Albert Lewis, who in his clumsy way loved his sons dearly, wrote in his diary that this was ‘one of the most miserable periods of my life’. He never seems to have found out the full extent of Lewis’s deceit regarding Mrs Moore, although he certainly suspected it: Albert Lewis was a clever and observant man, who however was determined not to believe anything bad about his sons without inescapable evidence being forced on him. In this he probably resembles many fathers.15
Lewis’s closest friends were his brother Warren (‘Warnie’), a professional soldier three years his senior who was heartily bored stationed in Shanghai and relieved his boredom with whisky; Owen Barfield, an undergraduate contemporary who was now perforce a solicitor, like Lewis a frustrated philosopher (although unlike Lewis a very good one); and a boyhood crony, Arthur Greeves, a chronic invalid of independent means, an amateur painter, stolid, unhappy, homosexual. Only Greeves, who still lived in Belfast, was ever given the true story of Lewis’s private life: and he never told (he burnt the relevant parts of Lewis’s letters to him). Part of this was an innate and creditable discretion (Mrs Moore was a married woman with a husband still living); part was professional prudence (his university career would have been finished had the authorities learnt of it); part, one suspects, sheer embarrassment. Had his father known (for certain, rather than strongly suspecting), he would certainly have fiercely disapproved, and might well (Lewis feared) have docked the allowance he paid until his son was twenty-six. Albert surely suspected the true state of affairs, but decided to accept Lewis’s flat and deliberate denials. When, thirty-five years later, Lewis came to write his autobiography, he gave nothing away:
… I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged. But even were I free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of the book.16
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