The last sentence may strike one as at least a little disingenuous, although Lewis may have believed it true. Lewis was, in at least one particular, definitely his father’s son: he delighted in argument, fierce, ruthless, at times unscrupulous; but also in poetry and story to a degree unusual even, or perhaps especially, amongst dons. In this he was also his father’s son: Albert Lewis was an intensely literary man, whose book-filled house had provided the enduring foundation for his son’s remarkable learning. This, at any rate, was the man, at once immensely private and furiously talkative, who now came into Tolkien’s professional ambit.
The previous term (Hilary Term 1926), in an effort to win allies for his proposal to admit more Old and Middle English literature into the syllabus (and full texts, rather than a mere list of sound-changes illustrated by ‘gobbets’) at the expense of nineteenth-century literature, Tolkien had organized a reading club for dons, to work through the major Icelandic sagas. It was called the Coalbiters (from the Norse kolbítar, those who sit so close to the fire that they ‘bite the coal’).17 They met twice a term or so, with each man attending being assigned, in advance, a passage of one of the sagas to get up ready for translation (without notes or crib) at the actual meeting.
Some were already more than competent scholars of Icelandic. These included three full professors: Gustav Braunholtz, five years Tolkien’s senior, who was elected to the Chair of Comparative Philology (in succession to Joseph Wright, on his retirement) the same year Tolkien was elected to his chair; John Fraser, a decade his elder, and Jesus Professor of Celtic since 1921 (and a fellow Catholic); and the formidably eccentric R.M. (Richard) Dawkins,18 who was older still (he was born in 1871), Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek, veteran archaeologist and authority on Greek dialect and folklore. Two decades earlier, Dawkins had been a cohort of the odious but talented Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), who repaid his generosity with crude lampooning. Dawkins had inherited property in Wales, where his neighbours were the Pirie-Gordons, whose son Harry was Rolfe’s then literary collaborator (and bankroll); he met Rolfe whilst visiting them. Dawkins and Rolfe discovered a shared interest in ‘artistic’ photography of young men in the Greek manner, and Dawkins took Rolfe off to Venice, where, he reckoned, these things could be better pursued. Rolfe was a difficult companion, and Dawkins moreover was alarmed by his directness in approaching potential subjects, so they parted. Dawkins went on to Greece to archaeologize, leaving Rolfe in Venice, where, for the next five years, he sponged, wrote and brooded on his wrongs, supported by donations from the gullible or prurient, until a heart attack did for him in October 1913. Dawkins himself was massively discreet about his predilections, as was not uncommon at the time; they were more understanding about these things abroad, where he often was.19
C.T. Onions of the OED was another old hand – he was only two years younger than Dawkins, had been Tolkien’s senior at the OED and was now also a fellow at Magdalen.
Others were interested, and had read sagas in translation, but had only modest knowledge of the language: these included Tolkien’s old Leeds boss George Gordon, John Bryson, who taught English at Merton, and Bruce McFarlane, the Magdalen historian (who became a fellow only in 1927, so may not have been amongst the first members).
Another was the English don at Tolkien’s old college, Exeter, Nevill Coghill, a pillar of the University dramatic societies. Coghill’s father was an Anglo-Irish baronet, from Castle Townshend near Skibbereen. He had gone up to Exeter in 1919, after war service, and thus knew Tolkien only as an old member. He was however Lewis’s exact contemporary in the English School. Coghill was a devout Protestant, and (according to A.N. Wilson, anyway) a homosexual. At some stage, someone (perhaps Coghill, or McFarlane) invited Lewis to come along;20 he soon became a regular attender, but his acquaintance with Tolkien only ripened into friendship late in 1929, when, at last, Lewis realized that Tolkien shared his visceral enthusiasm for Norse mythology and William Morris. They were also both fond of beer and tobacco (which helped), and of country walks, although Tolkien preferred a more leisurely progress with frequent stops to examine trees and flowers to the twenty-mile-a-day route marches Lewis was given to. We should note that it took fully three years for their acquaintance to ripen into friendship; although Tolkien is mentioned in Lewis’s diaries and letters from these years, he appears only in passing.
This initial reserve may have been mutual: Tolkien was unusually private, although often superficially expansive and personable, whilst Lewis was suspicious of what Tolkien stood for on at least two counts, professional and religious; but once it had passed, they discovered a rare sympathy of mind and interests. Soon Tolkien lent Lewis the manuscript of his long poem on Beren and Lúthien; Lewis was enthusiastic, with some quibbling over detail. Tolkien read him some of his prose narratives; he was more enthusiastic still. We should not underestimate the risk Tolkien took in thus sharing his imaginative work; few other Oxford dons would have been receptive to the sort of things he wrote and thought, and the danger of mockery or embarrassment was real. Tolkien’s need for a friendly but critical ear was however greater yet, and outweighed the risk. Tolkien wrote, many years later, that Lewis ‘was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby’; this encouragement, Tolkien said, was ‘the unpayable debt that I owe to him’.21
The debt was not wholly one-sided, though; on 19 September 1931, Lewis had a long night talk with Tolkien and their friend Hugo Dyson which was instrumental in Lewis beginning to accept the ‘myth of Christ’ as true. Soon afterwards, Tolkien wrote a poem, ‘Mythopoeia’, summarizing their talk. It is an important source for his theory of ‘sub-creation’.22 Lewis had come to a form of theism probably a year earlier, soon after his father’s death, in fact, but his acceptance of actual dogmatic Christianity was uncertain before Tolkien and Dyson resolved his doubts. Alister McGrath has made a convincing case that Lewis misdated his initial conversion to theism in his autobiography, placing it a good year or so before it actually occurred; this is not insignificant, since during the year in question, amongst other things, Lewis’s father Albert died. One need not be a thoroughgoing Freudian to suppose there may be a connexion between his death and Lewis’s turning to God, nor preternaturally suspicious to suspect Lewis of wishing, consciously or otherwise, to obscure any such collocation as it might be made by a lazy reader. He may indeed – and this is just as likely, if not more so – have elided the events in his own memory of the time.23
Tolkien was disappointed, perhaps at the time and certainly in hindsight, that Lewis simply returned to his historical practice of Anglicanism, rather than becoming a Catholic; but, as Tolkien must have known, anti-Catholic prejudice was deeply rooted in Lewis, as in any Ulster Protestant of his vintage (his nurse, for instance, may during potty training have referred to the young Lewis’s stools as ‘wee popes’24), and in one sense, which Lewis later acknowledged, friendship with Tolkien of itself represented an ecumenical triumph of a high order:
At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.25
By this time, Lewis’s domestic life had if anything become even odder. His father had died, and his brother, aged thirty-six, took early retirement from the Army (questions had been asked about his drinking, and he was asked to resign from the active list). George Sayer, who knew him well, speculates that Warnie’s drinking may have become chronic during the war, when in addition to the danger to himself (Warnie was in the Army Service Corps, rather than a front-line job, but was often under shellfire) he was very worried about his brother, who was an infantry subaltern. Worry led Warnie into nightmares, nightmares to insomnia; and insomnia he dosed with whisky. He finally retired from the active list in December 1932, fourteen months after the purchase of The Kilns (of which more next) was finalized. The stagnation of his
career may be gauged, in part, by his promotions: he was made Captain in November 1917, after three years of active service, but was not subsequently promoted in the fifteen years before he retired. This might be down to innumerable reasons, but is at any rate suggestive.
Money from the sale of the Lewis family house in Belfast, combined with Warnie’s savings and what money Janie Moore could raise, was when taken together enough for them to buy, collectively, a smallish house set in eight acres of woods and lakes at the foot of Shotover Hill in east Oxford. This house, The Kilns, now became home to Lewis, Janie Moore, Warnie and, intermittently, Janie’s adult daughter Maureen, now a music teacher at various secondary schools. Over the years, they collected a varied household of domestic staff and animals, and the house got shabbier and shabbier. Warnie settled into a pattern of quiet reading and writing (he arranged and transcribed great quantities of the family archive, and was a punctilious and observant diarist) punctuated by drinking sprees; but for the most part he was an unobtrusive companion to his brother and his ménage.
IV – Stories told to my children
It was clearly a great help to Tolkien to have a sympathetic adult audience for his stories; but Lewis was not his only audience. Tolkien’s children were, alongside his professional life, another and different spur to his imagination. He used to make up stories for them, often incorporating their favourite toys, or unusual places or things they saw whilst on holiday. Most of these were ephemeral, and have not survived; others were written down, and eventually published. It was here, in fact, that the key to the eventual emergence of his mythological writing was to be found.
The earliest children’s stories to survive are a series of letters written to the Tolkien children from, it was feigned, Father Christmas. These began in 1920, when John Tolkien was three, and continued each year until 1943, when Priscilla, the youngest child, was fourteen. They were increasingly elaborate, and were copiously illustrated: Tolkien was a very competent amateur artist in pencil, ink, chalk and watercolour. Another story began as an effort to console his son Michael after he lost a toy dog on holiday at Filey on the Yorkshire coast, in September 1925. It was written down by 1927, but not published, as Roverandom, until 1998. The next year Tolkien wrote Mr Bliss, an illustrated children’s story giving the adventures of some of his children’s favourite toys (bears and a clockwork car). It was published only in 1982. Around this time he wrote, also, an early version of Farmer Giles of Ham; this began as a story explaining Oxfordshire place-names. It was expanded and rewritten several times over the next decade, and changed its nature a little during the process.
All of these are stand-alone tales, with no point of contact with what still lay at the heart of Tolkien’s imagination, the evolving linguistic and legendary corpus of the ‘Quenta’. This, as we shall see, was not to be true of the next story to be considered.
In about 1930, sitting at his desk marking examination papers, Tolkien had the happy experience of finding the last page of a script left blank. On that blank page, he wrote, ‘In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.’
Much ink has subsequently been spilt debating the origins of this sentence. Tolkien, however, said it had come to him from nowhere, and it is simplest to believe him. Sometimes the creative faculty works like this: when the mind is tired, or bored with routine work, it pulls from the subconscious (or somewhere) a phrase or image that is, as it were, fully formed. The hobbit seems to have been conceived in this way. Tolkien himself thought the Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt, dealing with a smug businessman, may have influenced the form of the word. He also subsequently gave it a cod-etymology as a worn-down form of a hypothetical Old English *hol-bytla, ‘hole-dweller’; it is not impossible this second account may have been at least as accurate as the first, since it would be quite in character for Tolkien to generate this sort of thing without conscious effort.
Soon, a story grew around that first sentence, and parts of it were told to the Tolkien children during the early 1930s. Unusually, perhaps because the story was on a larger scale than previous efforts, Tolkien wrote much of it down, although the end of the tale may have been composed, if at all, only orally. Certainly, by February 1933 there was enough of it on paper for it to be given to Lewis to read. Lewis was impressed, not merely by the narrative fluency, but also by its distinct imaginative air. He wrote to an old friend:
Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we wd. both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry.26
This first impression on reading Tolkien, of recognition (particularly of something hitherto touched if at all only in Norse myth), is (I suspect) not an unusual one; I vividly remember feeling exactly this when I first read the book, some few years after a half-remembered encounter with retold Norse mythology. Perhaps this sense may be taken as a touchstone of a likely taste for Tolkien’s imaginative project as a whole?
Tolkien had written The Hobbit in bursts, mostly during the University vacations, over several years, and the manuscripts were (as might be expected) a jumble; he prepared a typescript of the bulk of the book, although the last chapters, when they were finally written down, were left in manuscript.27 The resulting document, known as the ‘home manuscript’, was both used as a reading copy (it was Tolkien’s custom, during part of the year at least, to read to his children in his study after their supper) and as a text to be lent to selected friends and students, who he thought might like it (and the copy, accordingly, became increasingly dog-eared). We may wonder whether, in expending the significant time and effort to make a typescript, Tolkien had a potentially wider audience in mind; for the moment, however, he had no particular impulse to try to get The Hobbit published; like the rest of his writing, it remained a wholly private amusement, to be shared, if at all, only with friends and family.28
V – The true tradition of English: the AB language
Storytelling for adults and children was intellectually stimulating, even if only a private amusement; but Tolkien’s job also gave him a rich field for intellectual endeavour and excitement.
In 1929, he published an article, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, in Essays and Studies; it had been in gestation since at least 1925 (he mentioned it on his application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair as ‘forthcoming’). It analyses the language of the texts contained in the ‘Katherine Group’ manuscript, which included Hali Meiðhad, alongside that of one of the major manuscripts of the Ancrene Riwle, an early Middle English guide for solitary women religious (‘anchoresses’); this manuscript called it Ancrene Wisse. Tolkien demonstrated that not only were these two manuscripts written in an identical form of Middle English, but that this dialect (which he christened the ‘AB language’, after the conventional sigla for the two manuscripts – the term has since become a standard one) showed philologically accurate distinctions in the forms of certain verbs carried over, and indeed in some respects developed, from Old English. The consistent and pure English of these texts, written by several different hands, shows (Tolkien argued) that, in at least one place in England (he guessed Herefordshire, which later research has confirmed), there was an established school of writers who employed a standardized language that descended from Old English with informed awareness of its grammatical traditions, elsewhere neglected, confused or lost.
It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands,’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters … but rather one that … has contrived, in troublous times, to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions, and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England.29
Here at least, Tolkien argued, the catastrophic breach in English literary tradition effected by the Norman Conquest had not occurred. The article was a bravura performance, one that took the smallest p
hilological details and made from them a wholly plausible inference to a larger linguistic and historical picture, one that shed light both on the texts in hand and the conditions under which they were written and read: told us, in fact, something about English history of which we would otherwise be thoroughly ignorant.30 It was a fine and worthy product of a professor’s chair, at what was near the beginning of a potentially long career; Tolkien’s colleagues presumed it was the presage of larger and greater things to come. This hope was, as we shall see, not fulfilled exactly as they might have expected.
VI – Syllabus reform
The syllabus Tolkien followed as an undergraduate had comprised four papers (Beowulf and Old English, Gawain and Middle English, Chaucer and Shakespeare) compulsory for all taking the School, plus five papers chosen exclusively from a ‘Language’ or ‘Literature’ selection. The former excluded almost all ‘literary’ considerations, but included a compulsory History of Literature paper; the latter in contradistinction excluded any linguistic or philological matter, apart from a compulsory history of the language. The result was that those who had a philological bent were largely deprived of anything other than ‘gobbets’ to exercise it on, whilst ‘literary’ students were in large part technically unequipped for close analysis of pre-modern writers. By the time serious consideration was being given to revising the syllabus, fully nine-tenths of those reading English chose the ‘literary’ option. For Tolkien, whose application for his professorial chair had been founded on promoting philological study at Oxford with as much success as he had had at Leeds, this was an intolerable state of affairs.
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