There was another more ephemeral result. One of Nevill Coghill’s great interests was the oral performance of medieval poetry, and to this end, in the 1930s, he organized annual ‘Summer Diversions’ with John Masefield, the Poet Laureate; at the 1938 ‘Diversions’, Tolkien, in costume, recited the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and the following year, the Reeve’s Tale, in both cases possibly from memory (although he seems to have worked from abridgements of Skeat’s text, which may suggest he used a crib, or perhaps his own abortive edition); certainly, after almost two decades working intermittently on the Clarendon Chaucer, he will have known these texts very well.11
III – Analecta and excurses
At some point in the summer of 1932, probably to while away the long hours invigilating Final Schools, Tolkien wrote a verse account of viva voce exams (usually administered only to candidates who would otherwise fail outright) in the style of Piers Plowman, the prolix fourteenth-century vision-satire; he called it Visio Petri Aratoris de Doworst, and cunningly worked in actual ‘howlers’ that he had been told by desperate or unteachably stupid candidates. The title refers to the plot of Piers Plowman, which includes the figures of Dowel, Dobet and Dobest. One would hope Tolkien’s verse is a better read than the original, which is fiercely dull and preachy by turns. His fellow examiners that year were C.S. Lewis, Charles Wrenn and H.F.B. Brett-Smith; the four of them feature as Plato, Grim, Britoner and Regulus, who is probably Tolkien himself (these identifications are perforce partly conjectural). Tolkien made an elaborate and decorated manuscript copy of it, had it bound in vellum, and gave it as a Christmas present in 1933 to his friend R.W. Chambers, an authority on Piers Plowman. Only a few lines of it have ever been published.12
In 1932, an article by Tolkien appeared as an appendix to the archaeological report on the excavations at the site of a Romano-British temple at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. After some years of unregulated pilfering, the site’s owner had, in 1805, commissioned a comprehensive excavation (the report of which took three-quarters of a century to appear, a not unparalleled delay even amongst later archaeological literature); in 1928, the Society of Antiquaries was invited to dig it again and supplement the earlier finds with the application of modern archaeological science. The 1928–9 excavations were directed by Mortimer Wheeler, the great name in forensic archaeology, and his then wife Tessa; as part of their brief they reviewed the results of the previous excavation, and this included the dedication of the temple that formed the heart of the site. This, as evidenced by several inscriptions, was to one Nodens or Nodons, evidently a god or object of worship. One of the Nodens inscriptions, presumably drawn from the earlier report, was used by Arthur Machen to add colour and texture to his 1890 short story The Great God Pan; thence the name ‘Nodens’ was borrowed by H.P. Lovecraft for a short story (The Strange High House in the Mist) published in 1926, and from there it has spread to a thousand Lovecraftian derivatives. None of these, sadly, has much to do with Tolkien.
Tolkien agreed to produce a note analysing the name; typically, he did so with an unforeseen thoroughness that came close to delaying the publication as a whole. The name was otherwise unattested; Tolkien connected it with the Irish Núadu or Núada, Welsh Nudd, an obscure figure with connexions to the underworld (and, Tolkien noted, to Lludd, the Welsh original of King Lear), and with an original meaning of ‘snarer’ or ‘hunter’; although the archaeological record shows clearly that the temple functioned primarily as a centre for healing, with (perhaps) a subsidiary cultus amongst hunters and fishermen, and sailors. Tolkien also added, at a late stage, a more speculative paragraph linking Lludd with the name Lydney; but this was either too late or too venturesome for Wheeler to include it in what was finally printed. The site was dug in 1928–9; Tolkien’s note was written some time between 1929 and 1931, and appeared when the report came out in July 1932. Statements that Tolkien was part of the excavation team are without foundation.13
It may be worth noticing another small matter arising from this business. One of the curse tablets found on site in the earlier dig was an imprecation directed against a man named Senicianus, who was apparently responsible for the loss of a ring belonging to one Silvianus. Silvianus made an offering to Nodens of half of the ring’s value against its return. Wheeler, it seems, was the first to connect this inscription with another artefact found, probably at Silchester (which is eighty miles from Lydney), late in the eighteenth century: a heavy gold ring inscribed with Silvianus’s name, bearing an image of Venus and what may be a Christian inscription. This may well be the very ring mentioned, once abstracted by Senicianus. It has been in private hands since its discovery, and is kept at The Vyne, a country house near Basingstoke.
Some time in 2013, an enterprising person made the connexion between all this and the Ring in Tolkien’s fiction. Wheeler, it is argued, would have told Tolkien of his ‘discovery’, and thus the device of a cursed ring was lodged in the leaf-mould of Tolkien’s mind, to emerge first in The Hobbit and then in The Lord of the Rings.
There are unfortunately several problems with this story. First, we have no evidence that Tolkien ever saw the Silvianus ring, or even visited Lydney, let alone The Vyne; it is possible that Wheeler told him the story in the course of sharing the inscriptional evidence with him, but not proven: their relationship seems to have been a purely professional one, conducted by letter, and they may not ever have met. Even if Tolkien had been told the story, it was probably too early to have the sort of influence suggested – in 1930–1, The Hobbit was in an early draft, and the ring featured only as a convenient plot device (a burglar’s help), not as the more weighty and sinister artefact of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien hardly needed a late Roman find to bring the device of a cursed ring to his notice: the Nibelungs’ ring, bearer of the dwarf’s curse on his treasure, was ready to hand in The Red Fairy Book and all its familiar antecedents. The most we might admit is that this curious and intriguing piece of archaeology may have reminded Tolkien that rings might be lost, and cursed, and their owners try to reclaim them; but all this was a late and unplanned addition to the simple invisibility device of The Hobbit, and would not emerge until a decade later. Industrious journalists have made further links between Dwarf’s Hill – the local name for the Roman iron mine at Lydney – and Tolkien’s dwarves. We may politely regard this as unproven.
None of this, of course, has spoiled a good story, and visitors to The Vyne, now owned by the National Trust, can now see the ring displayed in a special ‘Ring Room’, with paraphernalia and speculative commentary (and copy of the Ruling Ring inscription) provided by the Tolkien Society, who really should know better. There is also a Middle Earth adventure playground in the grounds of the house.
Those familiar with the literature of interwar Oxford may wonder whether Tolkien knew, or was friendly with, another famous Oxford Catholic, Fr Ronald Knox. Knox, son of an Anglican bishop, had had a glittering career at Eton and Oxford before the war; although only four years older than Tolkien, he was already a Fellow of Trinity by the time Tolkien matriculated. In 1912, he took Anglican orders and became Chaplain of his college. In 1917, however, he converted to Catholicism, resigned from his fellowship, and became a schoolmaster. Nine years later, friends concerned at his stagnation prevailed on the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bourne, to appoint him Catholic Chaplain to Oxford University. He remained in post for thirteen years until, in 1939, he left to be a country-house chaplain and to complete single-handed a translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English (the complete Knox Bible finally appeared in 1950). Knox’s ministry was exclusively to the male Catholic undergraduate body; Tolkien habitually went to Mass at the Jesuit-run parish of St Aloysius at the head of the Woodstock Road (now the Oxford Oratory), or at St Gregory and St Augustine in north Oxford, a smaller parish two miles or so to the north-west. He had no immediate reason to visit Knox in the Chaplaincy at the Old Palace on St Aldate’s. Nevertheless, it seems improbable that their paths did not cross; Pembro
ke, Tolkien’s college, is close by the Chaplaincy, and Knox was a frequent guest at high tables across the city. There is also a story of Tolkien appearing at a Christmas party for his children and those of Charles Wrenn, held at the Old Palace. He, as often on such occasions, was dressed as a bear.14 This does not mean, of course, that Tolkien had any dealings with Knox, in or out of costume; but it does make it more likely. There does not, however, seem to be any direct evidence of acquaintance between them; although a chance record of a conversation with the Lewis brothers in the early 1950s might be reckoned as such, the evidence is at best inconclusive.15
IV – Poems and prose
At roughly this time, Tolkien wrote two longish poems, the New Lay of the Völsungs and the New Lay of Gudrún (which he usually called by the Old Norse names Völsungakviða en nýja and Guðrúnakviða en nýja), to fill up long-debated lacunae in the extant legends; this was a fine intersection between professional philology and his private endeavours.16 It was utterly characteristic of Tolkien’s unconventional approach to his subject that he thought the best way to resolve textual cruces was to write another poetic treatment of the subject; it was also, unfortunately, one that was unlikely to gain wide acceptance amongst his scholarly peers. Work on these poems probably replaced that on The Lay of Leithian, which he laid aside in September 1931.
After putting the Völsung–Gudrún poems aside, Tolkien seems to have turned to writing another work in the classical Old English alliterative line, this time on an Arthurian subject. The Fall of Arthur was planned in a number of cantos or ‘fits’, and runs, in its extant fragments, to almost 1,000 lines.17 In 1934 Tolkien lent the poem, as far as it then went, to R.W. Chambers, who was strongly enthusiastic, and urged him to finish it. Tolkien may have worked on the poem as late as 1937, but, like much else, it was never completed.18 Nevertheless, apart from the intrinsic value of the fragments (and it is amongst the best alliterative verse Tolkien ever wrote), the exercise was not a wholly fruitless one: Tolkien seems to have been groping towards a synthesis that would incorporate ‘the Matter of Britain’, too, in some way into his legendarium: Arthur’s departure after his mortal wound at Camlann is not to Glastonbury, but oversea, to Avallone, which at this time became another name for Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle. This was part of a wholesale and wide-ranging attempt that Tolkien seems to have begun at this time to gather and correlate legends, preserved amongst littoral peoples, of an old straight path to the vanished Uttermost West; we will look at this in more detail in a later chapter.
Some may wish to speculate about a personal connexion: was Tolkien, on some level, trying to externalize a lament for his own father, Arthur, who had died across far-sundering seas? Such a thing is not of course impossible, and Tolkien of all men would have been alive to the link that names make; but the poem as it stands gives us too little of Arthur himself, and nothing of the later events of his downfall, and so can hardly stand as evidence of its author’s emotional disposition.
Tolkien had not published any short poems since ‘The Nameless Land’ in 192719; in the 1930s, he placed occasional pieces in The Oxford Magazine (the same semi-official journal that had printed his 1930 piece proposing a revised syllabus): in 1933 ‘Errantry’, a metrical feu-de-joie exploring trisyllabic assonances; in 1934 ‘Looney’ (later ‘The Sea-Bell’) and ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’; and in 1937 ‘The Dragon’s Visit’ and ‘Knocking at the Door’ (later ‘The Mewlips’) and a revised text of ‘Iumonna Gold’. ‘The Dragon’s Visit’ was one of a sequence of six poems set in an imaginary English seaside resort, and of a primarily satirical or humorous intent; ‘The Mewlips’ is a Dunsanian mood piece; ‘Tom Bombadil’ a picaresque series of Oxfordshire landscapes tied together by a character inspired by one of his children’s toys. Of the new items, only ‘Looney’, which expresses the dissociation felt by a returned traveller from faërie, is primarily a serious piece; and even that was not the grim lament it later became. These are for the great part ‘occasional verses’, professorial diversions rather than efforts of high imagining. If Tolkien retained any ambition as a poet, it was not expressed in these pieces.
Despite all this miscellaneous activity, Tolkien had not abandoned his legendarium: he had been working on an expanded and revised version of the 1926 ‘sketch of the mythology’; this was completed in 1930, with the title Quenta Noldorinwa (‘the history of the Noldor’); it was the only version of the ‘Silmarillion’ narrative tradition ever fully completed.20 It was deliberately conceived as a compendium or summary of stories that, at least notionally, were told in a fuller form elsewhere. The island of Britain, as in 1926, remains the fragment of shattered Beleriand; the Quenta itself is attributed to Eriol, who (Tolkien feigned) made it as an epitome of the Book of Lost Tales which he had condensed, in turn, from the Parma Kuluina, the Golden Book of Kortirion on Tol Eressëa. Only the last of these was not an existing text; Tolkien clearly at some level desired to preserve, in some form, the earlier Lost Tales. This made the Quenta, as Charles Noad has noted, ‘an epitome of a redaction’.21 Tolkien also composed fragments of an Old English version of the Quenta, as made by Eriol/Ælfwine.
At about this time, he began two further prose works recounting the stories of the legendarium, the Annals of Beleriand and the Annals of Valinor, in an annalistic format like that of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in fact, Tolkien also translated some of these Annals into Old English, to reinforce the Old English connexion). He revised them later in the decade. The Annals of Beleriand were attributed to Pengolod the Wise of Tol Eressëa, those of Valinor to the Elfsage Rúmil; the Old English texts of both to Eriol/Ælfwine. Tolkien now seems to have thought of the ‘Silmarillion’ as a three-part text: the Quenta Noldorinwa, plus the two sets of Annals.22 He was still careful to locate his legendarium within specifically English history; although a subsidiary text from later in the decade, the Ambarkanta or ‘Shaping of the World’, shows him uncertain how to reconcile the obviously ‘unscientific’ world-picture of the Tales with something like a Copernican universe.23 The original creation myth, The Music of the Ainur, was now recast and expanded as Ainulindalë, explained as a tale recited by Rúmil to Ælfwine.
V – Domestic troubles
Tolkien’s professional life, then, was busy, and his imaginative writing varied and prolific (if all, at this stage, exclusively for private consumption); his personal life, though, was not easy. There were difficulties in his marriage; Edith had never settled into the social life of Oxford dons’ wives, and had never been part of Tolkien’s circle of (male) friends. Tolkien was usually out for much of the day, and often in the evenings also. She was lonely, and felt neglected by her husband. She had had no particular preparation for running the large household she now had (four children, plus domestic help of one sort or another) and tended to cloak uncertainty with authoritarianism. Money was tight, even with Tolkien’s constant work as an examiner; Edith’s health was often precarious (she suffered from debilitating headaches and chronic back pain), and doctors’ bills were another worry. Also there was religion: with time, Edith came to feel that Tolkien had unfairly pressured her into becoming a Catholic, and she resented this, particularly as her experience of Anglicanism in the years they were apart had been a happy and sociable one. At some point in these years, probably towards the end of the 1920s, she stopped practising as a Catholic, and was unhappy that Tolkien took the children to church; occasionally, she let her resentment spill over into anger. Tolkien himself kept the emotional loyalty to the faith of his childhood (as far as we can tell, he kept up his religious practice during these years, although he may have lacked something in fervour), and was grieved by what he saw as Edith’s desertion of it. Years later, he remarked on ‘the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling’.24 Carpenter said, baldly, that Tolkien’s ‘marriage, never easy, had begun [in the late 1920s] to go through a long period of extreme difficulty’.2
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Nevertheless, amidst the quarrels, there was both forgiveness and enduring affection; although their domestic life was clearly often unhappy. Tolkien wrote in his diary, on 1 October 1933, ‘Friendship with Lewis compensates for much’.26 Lewis himself, in 1939, wrote to his brother that Tolkien’s ‘trials, beside being frequent and severe, are usually of such a complicated nature as to be impenetrable’.27 Part of this ‘impenetrability’ may be the result of Lewis’s notorious refusal to interest himself in his friends’ home lives (his own, which as we have seen was itself complex and to outsiders inexplicable, was strictly off limits to everyone), part the result of Tolkien’s habitually oblique manner of selfexpression. We should not doubt, however, that Tolkien suffered mental anguish of a high order from various sources (relations with his wife; her health; guilt for neglecting his religion; worries about his children; doubts about his literary work), or that Lewis’s encouragement of him was a great help in bearing it.28
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