Lewis himself was assiduous in keeping up with older friends, and probably relied less on Tolkien than Tolkien did on him; in September 1931, he wrote to his oldest friend, Arthur Greeves, about Hugo Dyson: ‘I meet him I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the 2nd class — i.e. not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien or Macfarlane.’29 Lewis’s brother, although he and Tolkien were on friendly terms, sometimes thought he took too much of his brother’s time and attention (of which he was decidedly jealous): ‘Confound Tolkien! I seem to see less and less of J. [Jack] every day.’30
In 1934, Fr Francis Morgan died aged seventy-seven. He had kept in touch with Tolkien, and on occasion joined family holidays to Lyme Regis; all three of Tolkien’s sons were sent, as Francis Morgan had been, to the Oratory School near Reading. Fr Francis left Tolkien and his brother £1,000 each in his will (this would not have been far short of Tolkien’s annual salary). Hearing the news of his death, Tolkien said to Lewis he felt like ‘a lost survivor into a new alien world after the real world has passed away’.31
VI – The Inklings
Some time in the mid-1930s,32 an informal literary and discussion club was started by Lewis, centred on him and his friends. They borrowed the name of a defunct undergraduate literary society, ‘The Inklings’.33 Tolkien was one of the original circle. They met every week or two during term-time, and listened to one or more of their number read from a work-in-progress. This was followed by general talk, often until the small hours. Later, they also met one morning a week to drink beer in, usually, the Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’; in fact, Tolkien and Lewis had since the late 1920s regularly met for morning talk over beer, and this opened it to a wider circle.
A deal of over-solemn analysis of this group has been written, claiming it as a deliberate and organized attempt to change the course of twentieth-century cultural and literary history by the reinsertion into contemporary contexts of older ideas: to replace modernism with a robustly Christian appropriation of mythical forms and methods, and to recast Christian apologetics in an accessible form. Most of this analysis is, to put it no stronger, exaggerated. The Inklings was, above all else, a collection of Lewis’s friends; his friends, by and large, were interesting men, educated, curious, with (in some cases great) literary talent, and overwhelmingly Christian. Like most ‘writers’ groups’, their main function was as an audience, to listen and criticize and encourage. For a writer to have a regular and sympathetic but not uncritical audience is an unmeasurable boon. It was part of Lewis’s gift for friendship that he could coax quite disparate people, and some like Tolkien who were shy of making their work public, to engage in such an enterprise. If the Inklings did nothing else, its function as partial midwife for The Lord of the Rings would mark it as a significant literary phenomenon; but this was part of the normal function of friendship, at least as Lewis understood it. The Inklings are important because of what some of them (Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams) individually achieved, and the way the group as a whole encouraged those achievements, not because (like other selfconscious literary groupings before or since) they set out with a manifesto to change the world. In fact, if the Inklings as a whole have any shared traits, suspicion of exactly such movements and manifestos is decidedly one of them. There is surprisingly little information extant about the early years of the group; their activities from the following decade are much better documented. The earliest ‘members’ (although this was, we should remember, a loose and informal category), aside from Lewis and Tolkien, were Nevill Coghill, Lewis’s brother Warnie and Adam Fox, Magdalen’s Dean of Divinity (college chaplain) and an amateur of poetry. Lewis’s old sparring-partner Owen Barfield was unhappily bound to his solicitor’s office in London, and thus was only an occasional attender, as was Hugo Dyson of Reading.
Another early member was Lewis’s doctor, Robert Havard, known to history as ‘Humphrey’ (allegedly because Hugo Dyson couldn’t remember his real name). Havard’s father was an Anglican clergyman; he himself became a Catholic in 1931, aged thirty. In 1934 he took over an Oxford medical practice, with surgeries in both St Giles’ and Headington: he was Lewis’s doctor, and friend, before he was Tolkien’s. He and Lewis became friendly in 1934 or 1935, and Havard was soon thereafter invited to the Inklings. Havard seems to have become the Tolkien family doctor in the early 1940s; he found Tolkien ‘extremely good company’ with lightly worn but profound scholarship and a sharp verbal wit, although ‘neither was ever paraded or used to inflict pain’. Nevertheless, he wrote later, ‘we were, I felt, worlds apart in outlook, apart from our common religion’.34 He also, sensibly, observed, ‘there does seem to be some tendency to take us all more seriously than we took ourselves’.35 Havard remembers C.L. Wrenn and Lord David Cecil as being at these early meetings.36 Wrenn however was in 1939 appointed to the Chair of English Language and Literature at King’s College, London, and so presumably thereafter came irregularly if at all (indeed, his later reported shock at Tolkien’s literary activities can hardly be accounted for if, during his London years, he came much to the Inklings). Cecil had only ever come occasionally. Havard did war service in the Navy, and so was from 1939 only an intermittent member.
As the years passed, other men were drawn into the circle, some only fleetingly, others more permanently. We shall encounter some of them in later chapters.
Chapter 7 – A Wilderness of Dragons: Beowulf and The Hobbit
I – Reclaiming Beowulf
On 25 November 1936, aged forty-four, Tolkien gave a lecture which revolutionized the study of the Old English poem Beowulf, and has pretty much defined the trend of subsequent criticism of the poem, and of much Old English verse besides. He had been lecturing on Beowulf every year since he was appointed to his Oxford chair, and had taught countless classes and individual students. His sense of what Beowulf was, and his sympathy for the temper and manner of its author, had grown and developed enormously. He was given the chance to summarize all of this for a broader academic audience when he was invited to give a prestigious British Academy lecture. Tolkien went to Manchester on 9 December 1936, and repeated the lecture to the Manchester Medieval Society (at the invitation of E.V. Gordon, who had been Professor of English Language and Germanic Philology at Manchester since 1931). His paper was called ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’; and no one afterwards has been able to read the poem in the same way.1
The lecture was in effect a synopsis of a series of lectures, titled ‘Beowulf and the Critics’, which represent a course with the advertised title ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’ given three times over the previous four years.2 The original course went into significantly more detail about the specific critics whose views on Beowulf Tolkien considered so corrosive.3
We should not think that Tolkien was wholly original in his approach; his overarching historical attitude to Beowulf might, in fact, be summed up in the words of Chambers, first published a decade and a half previously:
… we are justified in regarding the poem as homogeneous: a production of the Germanic world enlightened by the new faith. Whether through external violence or internal decay, this world was fated to rapid change, and perished with its promise unfulfilled. The great merit of Beowulf as a historic document is that it shows us a picture of a period in which the virtues of the heathen ‘Heroic Age’ were tempered by the gentleness of the new belief: an age warlike, yet Christian: devout, yet tolerant.4
Indeed, the very title of the lecture was an oblique homage to Chambers: Chapter 4 of Widsith is titled ‘Widsith and the Critics’. Nevertheless, there were important differences in their respective approaches: principally, Tolkien unlike Chambers thought the poem as we have it was a coherent literary artefact.
In insisting on the coherence of the poem as a poem, then, Tolkien was going up against not just the heavyweights of German Beowulf scholarship – Müllenhoff, ten Brink, Klaeber – but also the two home-grown champion
philologists of University College London, Ker and Chambers, both of whom are cited by name, quoted, and refuted – refuted, it is true, with respect and courtesy, but refuted nonetheless.
Tolkien was insistent about the Englishness of the poem; this he saw as compounded of two elements – language, and existence under ‘our northern sky and soil’. The second element was one that Tolkien thought immensely important, in (amongst other ways) a purely physical sense. He once commented to Lewis that
the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the woods – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scottish oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine today) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.5
Tolkien claimed that Beowulf illustrated exactly this sort of connexion: it was thus an English poem, then, but also an English poem. Beowulf, he argued, must be read not as a quarry for other things, but (as it was) as a poem, and a poem by a Christian man at that: one who lived, nevertheless, in the shadow of the old paganism, and who felt nostalgia for and a sympathy with those who had died according to its bleak, defiant code. This code, which Tolkien called ‘the northern theory of courage’, may be crisply summarized as the claim that (in Tom Shippey’s words, borrowed ultimately from W.P. Ker6) ‘defeat is no refutation’; that even if all human endeavour is finally doomed to end in decay and failure, and if (as Norse legend claimed) at the end even the gods would be defeated by the powers of evil, nevertheless it was still right to fight for truth, and loyalty, and honour, even (perhaps especially) without hope of victory or reward. The ‘monsters’ – the ogres Grendel and his mother, and the dragon that is Beowulf’s bane – are proper opponents for a man in this setting.
If this, now, is how the poem is typically understood and approached, this is in large part down to Tolkien. Previously, it had been treated as (at best) a source of antiquarian lore of one sort or another, overlaid with a bizarre and frankly distasteful monster story, clearly unworthy of its author, whose verse, most admitted, showed some skill. Tolkien changed all that. The lecture remains a major contribution to scholarship; but it was the last significant academic publication in his lifetime. Tom Shippey has argued that subsequent critics of Beowulf have if anything taken Tolkien too literally in focussing exclusively on the poetic character of the text, to the neglect of its proper and valid use as an historical document; some of Tolkien’s own lectures on other aspects of Beowulf, posthumously published as Finn and Hengest, show him taking its historical claims very seriously indeed; but, unlike ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, these are forbiddingly technical in tone, and have been virtually ignored even after their publication.7
At around the same time, Tolkien was also writing a more unusual piece of critical scholarship, a poem in the English alliterative metre giving a sequel to the events of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, which is one of the major places where the ‘northern theory’ is exemplified, in English at least.8 But it would be almost twenty years before Tolkien’s poem was published. He had probably come to write it when asked to help with an edition of the poem by an old friend, his sometime Leeds colleague and ‘devoted friend and pal’,9 E.V. Gordon.10
After Tolkien left Leeds, Gordon was appointed to his old post as Professor of English Language; five years later, in 1931, he moved to Manchester as Smith Professor of English Language and Germanic Philology. He and Tolkien had stayed in close touch, and were frequent collaborators as examiners and on works of scholarship. Tolkien had proofread Gordon’s celebrated Introduction to Old Norse (which appeared in 1927, but was very probably begun whilst Tolkien was still at Leeds), and also, as we have seen, his 1937 edition of The Battle of Maldon. In both cases Tolkien’s help was very considerably more than simple proof correction: he had made suggestions and provided textual and philological help, in the manner the pair of them had grown used to when preparing their great edition of Gawain. Tolkien and Gordon had planned to collaborate on further editions of texts: the Middle English Pearl, and the Old English Wanderer and Seafarer. Work had begun on all of them. The Wanderer and Seafarer editions, indeed (which had begun as two books, with Tolkien senior partner on the first and Gordon on the second, but had been amalgamated to allow a more extensive glossary), were effectively complete in manuscript by the mid-1930s; but, inevitably, they were overlong and needed reduction, and this had yet to occur. But in 1938, E.V. Gordon died, suddenly, aged only forty-two. A routine operation to remove his gall-bladder discovered a terminal failure in some supra-renal glands; it would, eventually, have led to a slow and painful death. As it was, it carried him off in days. He left a wife and four children.
Gordon’s death put an end to all his collaborations, actual or projected. Tolkien offered Gordon’s widow, Ida, one of his former Leeds pupils who also now taught at Manchester, help with some outstanding obligations: he took over some of Gordon’s work as an external examiner, and undertook to complete his edition of Pearl. In the event, it did not appear for a decade and a half, and then done, mostly, by Ida Gordon. She also assumed responsibility for the Wanderer and Seafarer editions; only the second was ever finished, and that not until 1960. Tolkien made significant contributions to all these texts, but not, as had been planned, as a co-editor. Progress had been slow since he left Leeds; but Gordon had been notably productive (‘an industrious little devil’, Tolkien had noted early in the friendship11), and would perhaps have chivvied Tolkien into doing more than he was later able to manage (although, we might note, he had not managed to bring Tolkien to complete a project in the decade since he had left Leeds). His death was a blow; apart from his personal feelings, Tolkien now knew only too well how far the pressure of administrative business, supervisions, lectures and endless examining both domestic and external impeded his own freedom to work on what, after all, was one of his primary functions: academic research. He clearly needed a collaborator to prompt and cajole and help with the spadework; but he did not find them easily.
II – Time travel, space travel – ‘what we really like in stories’
Tolkien recalled years later a conversation with Lewis about speculative fiction in which both lamented the lack of the sort of books they liked to read; Lewis proposed they should make good this lack themselves. Lewis took space travel as his theme, Tolkien time travel. This at least is the story. John Rateliff has argued, plausibly enough, that this conversation, which most probably took place in 1936 (and is sometimes called a wager), happened under the spur of Lewis’s recent reading: the science fiction novel Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, and The Place of the Lion, a ‘supernatural thriller’ by a prolific author, Charles Williams. Both of these took avowedly popular forms of writing and used them as the vehicle for highly moral, or even ‘spiritual’, themes. This clearly appealed to the two of them, who were keen to write fiction of high seriousness, but baffled about how to present it. Rateliff also notes that both Lewis and Tolkien looked, at this juncture, rather like unsuccessful writers: Lewis had published nothing apart from two unsuccessful books of verse (the last a decade previously) and, three years before, The Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical account of his return to Christian belief. None had made any great impact; his first major scholarly book, The Allegory of Love, was about to be published; but as an imaginative writer, and especially as a poet, he seemed to have failed. Tolkien’s case was if anything worse; he had not tried to publish any of his imaginative writing, other than a few short and fugitive poems, since 1916, when The Trumpets of Faerie had been reject
ed. His legendarium remained a ‘private amusement’; his only audience was Lewis.12
In Lewis’s case, the conversation (or, perhaps, wager) led directly to the first of his science fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet (in which Tolkien appears, thinly disguised, as the philologist Elwin Ransom). Tolkien, characteristically, was more elaborate and piecemeal in his efforts. In the years 1936–7 he drafted parts of a story called The Lost Road, in which a father-and-son pair are traced backwards through successive ages from the present to a time of myth, where the recurring theme of a ‘lost road’ to the Uttermost West (which is found in disparate early medieval legends attached to Irish saints, to Lombardic heroes, and the mysterious King Sheave of early English legend) finds its proper exemplar in the downfall of Númenor, Tolkien’s Atlantis. This was done, in part, to exorcise a recurrent dream of a great wave drowning a sunlit land that Tolkien had experienced since childhood. Like much else written at this time, however, The Lost Road was never completed; Tolkien returned to the theme a decade later.
The form of the novel is an unusual one; it has a close parallel, however, in John Buchan’s The Path of the King, where a series of chronologically separated stories are linked by an (unwitting) genealogy, which turns out to be the tale of the ancestors of George Washington.13
The father-son-grandson triad that opens The Lost Road (Oswin Errol – Alboin Errol – Audoin Errol) may well present, in analogue, the relations between Francis Morgan, Tolkien and his son Christopher. Oswin is a schoolmaster (Francis Morgan had some involvement in schoolwork), whose name means ‘God-friend’; as the story opens, his son Alboin is twelve, the age Tolkien was when Francis Morgan became his guardian, and it is set on the coast in what could easily be Lyme Regis. A later scene has Oswin gently chiding Alboin for neglecting Greek and Latin in favour of invented (here, truly ‘discovered’) languages, and admitting he is worried Alboin will not get a scholarship: ‘Cash is not too abundant’14. Oswin Errol dies soon after the novel’s beginning; Francis Morgan, we may remember, had died in 1934, perhaps two years before Tolkien started to write. Stories of Númenor’s fall in the novel are transmitted through father-and-son pairs by descent and some species of ‘race memory’ (this sort of idea was common currency for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so we should not be too exercised by it); Tolkien saw an instance of this in the way that one of his sons, Michael, had inherited the same ‘Atlantis haunting’ dreams he himself experienced.
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