There are remarkable parallels, too, between Lewis’s novel and what survives of Tolkien’s: both, Tolkien averred, were to end with ‘the discovery of Myth’ – in Lewis’s case, the rebellion of Lucifer and the Fall; in Tolkien’s, the downfall of Atlantis. Their protagonists have, moreover, the same name: Alboin-Ælfwine-Elwin. Lewis undoubtedly borrowed this from Tolkien, as he later did Númenor (misspelt ‘Numinor’) in That Hideous Strength, the names of his primæval human pair in Perelandra (Tor and Tinidril, clearly parallel to Tolkien’s Tuor and Idril) and, very likely, his ‘angelic’ beings, the eldils (a name too like Eldar for coincidence, although Tolkien’s Eldar are not angelic). These things illustrate, more than anything else, how close in accord Tolkien’s and Lewis’s imaginations were at this time: they borrowed quite naturally from a common fund of name and story. Both books aimed to smuggle myth in under the form of popular fiction since, as Lewis and Tolkien had both discovered, there was no apparent appetite for it in its more expected forms – heroic verse, or William Morris-style prose.
The Lost Road seems to have marked the first appearance of Númenor, a concept integrated from the start, or almost so, into the formed legendarium; indeed, its Downfall provided a useful mechanism for transforming the older ‘naïve’ flat-world cosmology of The Lost Tales, the Quenta and the Ambarkanta into something like our contemporary world-picture: with the Downfall of Númenor, the old straight road is now bent. Some, however, were still able by chance or favour to sail that old road, and come at least within sight of the Uttermost West; amongst these, Tolkien noted, was ‘Ælfwine father of Eadwine’, who reached Eressea and was ‘told the Lost Tales’. This indicates that even now the original framework for the legendarium survived, if varied in detail; although there are hints that Tolkien contemplated abandoning it15. The character Alboin Errol of The Lost Road is, of course, merely Ælfwine Eriol of The Lost Tales in modern English; his putative Anglo-Saxon cognate, Ælfwine Wídlast (‘the far-travelled’), is (again) nominally identical with Eriol Wæfre. If The Lost Road was to end in the ‘discovery of myth’, the myth was to be not, as in Lewis’s novel, a neglected piece of Christianity, but a fragment of Tolkien’s own formed legendarium, here made deliberately a ‘mythology for England’.
At first sight, the poem ‘King Sheave’ inserted into The Lost Road seems incongruous; but Tolkien (here as in much else following R.W. Chambers) associated the figure of Sceaf (as he is called in Beowulf) with the Lombards or Langobards (‘long-beards’), who although we associate them with northern Italy, where they eventually fetched up, were in origin a tribe of the North Sea coasts, and thus neatly placed to preserve a legend of a mysterious sea-borne foundling who becomes a culture hero, bringing the arts of cultivation and the rule of law. He then becomes a mythical ancestor, whom they then passed to the Anglo-Saxons, their sometime neighbours in the northern coastlands, and thence his appearance in Beowulf.16 Behind these broken fragments of Germanic legendry, Tolkien hinted, was a memory of something coming from out of the Uttermost West, to the enlightening and strengthening of men before that living in darkness. This, taken with the historically attested Lombard names Audoin and Alboin (‘bliss-friend’ and ‘Elf-friend’, parallel to Old English Eadwine and Ælfwine, Edwin and Elwin), led Tolkien to bring the Lombards into the sphere of those who were somehow carriers of the legacy of Númenor, and thus beyond that the Elven West. There was the difficulty, which Tolkien acknowledged, of somehow relating this to the surviving story of the Lombards Alboin and Audoin, which, although Chambers called it ‘the greatest of all Germanic tales’,17 is compounded of revenge and considered brutality. We may remember Tolkien’s earlier attempts to incorporate the mythical Ing, founder of the littoral Ingvæones and notional ancestor of the English, into his legendarium. Christopher Tolkien argues that his father ‘was envisaging a massive and explicit linking of his own legends with those of many other places and times: all concerned with the stories and the dreams of peoples who dwelt by the coasts of the great Western Sea’.18 We noticed in a previous chapter Tolkien’s introduction of this theme in his proposed retelling of the end of King Arthur.
As before, the very considerable effort needed to harmonize these very disparate elements into a coherent story was not one that, at this time, Tolkien was able to make; but we see him here in full philological form, collecting and trying to make sense of materials obviously related but also baffling in their incongruities. The attempt was too ambitious, however; the material Tolkien was trying to marshal was not patient of his purpose. Perhaps, with more time, he might have made something workable of it; but the time he might have given it was spent, instead, on another book. The Lost Road was not to make Tolkien’s name; this was to come about from a wholly unexpected quarter: one of the stories told to his children.
III – The Hobbit: style and sources
We last saw The Hobbit as an unfinished story, or one finished only orally, known to Tolkien’s children and to a small number of his close friends and sometime pupils, mostly connected with the hostel for Catholic women students at Cherwell Edge, run by the nuns of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.19 Some time between 1933 and 1936, Tolkien lent an unfinished typescript of The Hobbit to one of his students, Elaine Griffiths;20 she passed it to a friend, Susan Dagnall, like her a sometime resident at Cherwell Edge, who now worked for the publisher George Allen & Unwin.21 She in turn strongly suggested the story be finished and submitted for publication; and this Tolkien did in late 1936.
We may wonder why it is that Tolkien was able to complete The Hobbit but not at this time any of his myriad other projects; I strongly suspect it is because it was confessedly a children’s story and thus not fundamentally, in Tolkien’s mind, a serious work, and one that could thus be issued even if imperfect, so evading the inner perfectionist who vetoed or sabotaged his grander schemes.
Unwin’s chairman, Stanley Unwin, paid his ten-year-old son Rayner a shilling for a report on the book; Rayner liked it, and Unwin agreed to publish. In some ways Unwin was an unlikely partner for Tolkien; he was a non-smoking, teetotal pacifist and Nonconformist of distinctly left-wing views (he had published both Bertrand Russell, and Arthur Ransome’s shameless apology for Bolshevism, Six Weeks in Russia): he and Tolkien would have disagreed on pretty much everything. Nevertheless, Unwin was a canny businessman, and recognized a classic when he saw one.
This turn of events ended any immediate chance that The Lost Road would be completed; it would, in any case, have been a tricky task, but in the months (up to December 1937) when Lewis was finishing Out of the Silent Planet, Tolkien was obliged to set aside The Lost Road to complete and revise The Hobbit, and be at pains to satisfy Unwin’s need for ancillary material – maps, blurbs, illustrations – to make it a publishable book. He obtained ‘puff pieces’ (or, more formally, testimonials) praising the book from various well-disposed friends and colleagues, including R.W. Chambers; George Gordon promised one, but there is no indication whether he made good on it (‘I may warn you that his promises are usually generous,’ Tolkien told Unwin22). In September 1937, The Hobbit was published; Tolkien was forty-five.
He also took some trouble to get Lewis’s book published; J.M. Dent, who had published The Pilgrim’s Regress, rejected Out of the Silent Planet as ‘bunk’. Tolkien persuaded Unwin to look at it, but to no avail; his reader also rejected it. Tolkien protested, and Unwin was prevailed on to take it to the Bodley Head, another publishing firm of which he was also chairman. They accepted it, and it was published on 23 September 1938.
The Hobbit had started, as we saw, at Tolkien’s desk some years earlier during his annual chore of examination marking. As usual with him, a name gave rise to a story; it soon attracted to itself further names from Tolkien’s professional life. The names of the dwarves, and the wizard Gandalf, come from the Elder Edda, in a list (the Dvergatal) usually dismissed as a meaningless rigmarole; Tolkien decided it in fact preserved the roster of a famous quest for lost treasure. Mirkwood,
of course, came straight from the asterisk reality of *Gothia; the dragon, Smaug, has elements of the drakes of Beowulf and Sigurðr; the crosscountry journey of Bilbo and the dwarves bears some resemblance to William Morris’s Icelandic Journals. The dwarven ‘Longbeards’ borrow, of course, the name (and perhaps the grim humour) of the Lombards, whom (as we saw) Tolkien was much exercised by at this time. This cross-fertilization of names brought with it, perhaps inevitably, a similar cross-fertilization of theme: most readers of The Hobbit will note how, as the story progresses, it becomes by degrees more serious until, at its end, with the debates before the Lonely Mountain and the Battle of the Five Armies, it approaches the high seriousness and brusque moral complexity of Icelandic saga.
There was another source, too, besides Tolkien’s philological day-job; names and characters and settings from his legendarium (Gondolin, Elrond, the Elvenking in his halls) found their way into the story, and gave it another layer of resonance and what Tolkien called ‘depth’: the sense of untold stories and half-seen vistas at the edge of the tale. This not only had implications for Tolkien’s literary technique; it also meant that hobbits were now a tangential part of his legendarium. This was to have tremendous consequences for his writing.
It is fair to claim, however, as Tolkien himself did, that The Hobbit in its original form was not intended as part of his legendarium; although the manner in which it developed during its writing makes it not quite accurate to state, as Christopher Tolkien has done, that ‘The Hobbit … as it stood in 1937 … was not a part of it.’ Nevertheless he is quite correct to declare that ‘Its significance for Middle-Earth lies in what it would do, not in what it was.’23
IV – Quenta Silmarillion
Meanwhile, Tolkien began writing a fine manuscript copy of the Quenta Silmarillion, incorporating all the numerous revisions he had made to the tales since the Quenta Noldorinwa of 1930.24 It was probably at this time that he revised the Annals of Valinor and the Annals of Beleriand, and wrote a short text called the Lhammas, or ‘account of tongues’, which described his invented languages and their interrelations.
We may reasonably ask what, exactly, Tolkien thought of as the relations between the various texts of his legendarium at this juncture; what were its constituent texts, and how were they to be accounted for? Charles Noad, whose research is fundamental here, has attempted a careful reconstruction of the notional scheme for the 1930s Silmarillion.25
The Silmarillion seems to have been adopted as a general title for the whole corpus of legendarium writing; it was to consist of (1) the Quenta (or Qenta) Noldorinwa (also called, variously, the Pennas inGeleidh (‘history of the gnomes’), I Eldanyárë (‘history of the elves’) or, simply, Quenta Silmarillion), with, as an appendix, genealogies of the houses of men and elves, a Tale of Years and a Tale of Battles;26 (2) The Annals of Valinor; (3) The Annals of Beleriand; (4) the Lhammas. Other longer versions of some tales were to appear as appendices: Ainulindalë, Ambarkanta and the long poems on the Children of Húrin and Beren and Lúthien.
The notional ‘real-world’ status of the texts, given in a short preamble, was much as for the 1930 version. Britain is still a fragment of Beleriand; the Quenta represents Ælfwine’s translation into Old English of a synopsis made by Pengolod of Gondolin (later of Tol Eressea) of various legends – prose and verse alike – written in the Golden Book, some of which were translated directly by Ælfwine; the Annals of Valinor were originally by Rúmil, completed by Pengolod, those of Beleriand by Pengolod ab initio; the Lhammas was Rúmil’s.27
V – They asked for a sequel
The Hobbit was an immediate success, and Tolkien’s publisher was eager for more. He asked Tolkien to write a sequel. Tolkien was not unwilling, but asked Unwin if he would like to consider any of the stories he had already written. Unwin was happy to do so; so, in mid-November 1937, Tolkien met Unwin in London and gave him a large bundle of manuscripts. These included versions of the children’s tales Farmer Giles of Ham and Mr Bliss, and the unfinished Lost Road; most importantly for Tolkien, however, he also handed over the unfinished long poem The Lay of Leithian and the fine manuscript text of the Quenta Silmarillion, comprising the first two-thirds of the text (the remaining third, as yet unrevised, was not included). Most of this was given to a publisher’s reader named Edward Crankshaw to be assessed; apart from, it seems, The Silmarillion itself. Crankshaw (1909–84) was a sometime journalist, reviewer, novelist and historian; he had lived in Vienna for much of the 1930s, and was fluent in German. He later worked for MI6 attached to the wartime Military Mission to Moscow as a SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) specialist, before being assigned to Bletchley Park. After the war he became a prominent authority on Soviet affairs, and a fine amateur of Austrian history. He wrote a large number of books, including some well-regarded biographical and historical studies (on Bismarck, Maria Theresa, The Fall of the House of Habsburg and various others).
The Lost Road, however, after being partially (and inaccurately) typed up by the publisher from Tolkien’s barely legible manuscript, was given to Susan Dagnall, who had recommended The Hobbit; she said it was ‘a hopeless proposition’.28
Crankshaw, meanwhile, confessed himself puzzled by The Lay of Leithian (and according to Carpenter ‘he was very rude about the rhyming couplets’29), but very impressed by the few pages of the prose version (unidentified, but presumably part of The Silmarillion in some form) he had been given to read as background. These few pages were all he saw, however; for some reason, the full text as it had been given to Unwin was withheld, and the only person to see it was Stanley Unwin himself. This was unfortunate; Crankshaw, as far as one can judge from his own books, was a man of wide culture and unusual imaginative sympathy, and could well have been enthusiastic had he read the whole Silmarillion as it then existed.
As it was, Crankshaw did not feel able to recommend any of the texts he had seen should be published; Unwin conveyed this to Tolkien on 16 December, with the hope that The Silmarillion might be the source for further stories like The Hobbit. Tolkien confessed to ‘a sense of fear and bereavement, quite ridiculous, since I let this private and beloved nonsense out’. Understandably, he was under the misapprehension that The Silmarillion had been read in full before being rejected, but took comfort from what he mistakenly interpreted as the general approval of it: ‘if it had seemed to you to be nonsense I should have felt really crushed’30. The result was unexpected to both sides: ‘They wanted a sequel. But I wanted heroic legends and high romance. The result was The Lord of the Rings.’31
There is of course no knowing what might have happened if Crankshaw had actually been given the whole Silmarillion to read, or if it had even been published; but it is utterly certain that, if it had been accepted in 1937, the sequel to The Hobbit would have been very different. The rejection of the 1937 Silmarillion was the direct cause of The Lord of the Rings in its eventual form; it was also the major reason The Silmarillion was never completed.
King Edward’s School, Birmingham, as it was when Tolkien was a pupil
The Birmingham Oratory, home to Father Francis Morgan, Tolkien’s guardian
The Birmingham Oratory, interior. As a schoolboy, Tolkien would have worshipped here almost daily
Perrott’s Folly; at left, the top of the Waterworks tower can be seen. These landmarks of the Birmingham skyline have been claimed as the inspiration for Tolkien’s ‘two towers’
The Valley of Lauterbrunnen, which Tolkien visited in 1911, may have inspired Rivendell
The quadrangle at Exeter College, Oxford, where Tolkien was an undergraduate
Warwick Castle from across the River Avon. Edith lived in Warwick between 1913 and her marriage; Tolkien often visited her, and the town assumed a role in his earliest stories
Jacob Grimm, pioneering philologist and collector of fairy-tales, and the sort of scholar Tolkien aspired to be
The battlefield at Beaumont Hamel; Tolkien’s battalion was in the front line here for some of July and
August 1916
The Chancellor’s Court of Birmingham University, where the Southern General Hospital was located and Tolkien was sent from France
Pembroke College, Oxford, where Tolkien was a professorial fellow between 1925 and 1945
20 Northmoor Road, where the Tolkiens lived between 1930 and 1947
The Botanical Gardens, where Tolkien often walked
Merton College from the south. Tolkien was a professorial fellow here between 1945 and 1959
The Tolkiens’ grave, Wolvercote Cemetery; the inscription names them as ‘Beren’ and ‘Lúthien’
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