Bust of Tolkien in Exeter College chapel, sculpted by his daughter-in-law
Part III – Achievement
‘It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.’1
Chapter 8 – In the Background, War
I – The tale grew in the telling
Tolkien began the ‘new Hobbit’ the same year the original was published, in fact by 19 December 1937. It was not finished until twelve years later, and not published for another six after that. The completion and publication of the book are, in some ways, the central achievement of Tolkien’s life, one carried through in the midst of numerous adversities and discouragements; although, ironically, this was neither the great book he meant to write, nor (really) the sequel he had been asked for. Circumstances, or providence if you like, arranged matters otherwise; these chapters try to give some account of the winding paths Tolkien and his magnum opus took.
The development of The Lord of the Rings has been traced in absorbing detail by Christopher Tolkien in four magisterial volumes; readers interested in Tolkien’s drafting process, and the slow development of the story from a (rather aimless) straight sequel to The Hobbit (Bilbo has run out of money, and needs to go adventuring again) to the grand design of the finished work, gradually drawing in (or, better, being attracted towards) the high matter of the legendarium, should consult the relevant volumes of The History of Middle Earth. Here I will only give a broad outline.
Tolkien made several unsatisfactory drafts of the first chapters between December 1937 and March 1938; then he laid the book aside until August 1938, when he took it up again and worked solidly between then and December 1938; for much of 1939, although he told his publisher he hoped to finish the story by mid-June, he worked on it only in desultory fashion, not helped by the uncertainties of the political situation, and by a head injury that left him concussed and unwell for some months. He was also distracted by the need to research and write a lecture to be given at St Andrews in commemoration of Andrew Lang, which was not finished until late February. Slowly and inexorably, though, as had happened increasingly with The Hobbit in the last stages of its composition, the sequel was drawn into the ambit of Tolkien’s wider legendarium. As a modern writer has noted, ‘In Tolkien’s fiction, all roads lead to “The Silmarillion”.’2
But we have run a little ahead of ourselves. In the fallow interval of early 1939, he wrote and gave his lecture ‘Fairy Stories’ which we will discuss below; and perhaps, also, wrote Leaf by Niggle, an allegory of the creative life and its frustrations and hopes.3
The lecture was given at St Andrew’s on 8 March, as the latest in a series commemorating Andrew Lang. Tolkien had been asked to give it in the previous June; in fact, he was the University authorities’ third choice, after the classicist Gilbert Murray and Hugh Macmillan, a Law Lord, but neither of them was available for the academic year 1938–9. March was unusually late in the academic year for the Andrew Lang lecture, which was typically given in November or December; we may suppose pressure of work (particularly examining) meant there was little spare time beforehand. Time to prepare it had to be stolen from the new Hobbit; perhaps unsurprisingly, as it was written instead of his own imaginative work, the lecture became an extended meditation on the nature of storytelling, particularly of the sort he himself practised.
In preparation for the lecture, Tolkien (who knew himself an amateur beside the great savants of comparative fairy-tale lore, but also relied on what he – rightly – saw as an imaginative and creative sympathy for, and in a certain sense access to, the material) began a furious programme of reading. He did not draw up a list of works of folklore studies, however; instead, he reread all twelve of Lang’s coloured Fairy Books, and probably also Grimm and Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse (he is on record as disliking Hans Christian Andersen). One of the few academic texts he drew on directly was Christopher Dawson’s Progress and Religion, which attracted Tolkien mostly (we may guess) because of its excoriating analysis of the faults of contemporary secular society and culture; this was useful to rebut charges of ‘escapism’ – if ‘reality’ was sufficiently horrible (and Tolkien and Dawson both thought it was) then ‘escape’ from it, as a mental category at least, became not a fault or an immaturity but a duty. Dawson had nothing particular to say about fairy stories per se; but he was, also, a Catholic (he was soon to become editor of the Dublin Review, although at this date he did not hold a university job4). The main sources for the philosophical underpinning of Tolkien’s lecture, although it did not become fully explicit until later revision, were however G.K. Chesterton (in particular a collection of his short fiction called The Coloured Lands, and most especially the introduction to it by Maisie Ward) and Poetic Diction by Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield. From Barfield Tolkien took – or assented to – the notion that language and mythology (or folklore) are both coeval and correlate, and from Ward’s introduction to Chesterton the bold claim that in storytelling we co-operate with God in the enrichment of creation (although, as I say, this is at this stage only implicit).5
Again characteristically, Tolkien seems to have prepared more material than he could use, and had to abridge the lecture in delivering it. No text of the original 1939 lecture survives, although there are very full newspaper accounts of it;6 but it was clearly an important text for Tolkien’s development as a writer, confirming his notions of the high seriousness of his imaginative fiction and, inevitably, reacting on the tone of the ‘Hobbit sequel’ when eventually he took it up again. The lecture itself was put aside, with a view (presumably) for publication: the Lang lectures were usually issued as pamphlets by the OUP the year after their delivery. Tolkien’s, as we shall see, took a while longer to appear; events elsewhere were upsetting all plans.
II – The return of the shadow
As is now notorious, in September 1938, the British government under Chamberlain agreed at Munich, with French complicity, to sanction the German annexation of the Czech Sudetenland. Thereafter, only the most sanguine or muddle-headed thought war with Germany could be long avoided.
In March 1939, the War Office, as part of a general gearing-up for conflict, conducted an assessment of potential cryptographers. Tolkien was amongst those who took a four-day course in London run by the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), who ran the now famous operation at Bletchley Park; he was amongst fifty dons from the ancient universities approached by the GCCS either as having previous experience in cryptography (like Ronald Knox’s brother Dilwyn, Fellow of King’s and an expert in a very obscure Greek fragmentary dramatist, who had worked as a codebreaker during the Great War and retained a connexion with the business) or as having potentially useful expertise. He was not in the event called on to work in this area (which probably allowed The Lord of the Rings to be finished); or, if he was offered a fulltime position, he declined it – presumably on financial grounds, since the GCCS was offering £500 per annum, less than half of what Tolkien was struggling to support his family on.7
The opening of the Second World War that September took no one, really, by surprise. In September 1939, the staff of the OUP’s London office moved to Oxford; amongst them was an editor called Charles Williams. Williams was a prolific writer of ‘spiritual thrillers’ and an exponent of romantic theology (that is, human love as an authentic route to knowing God) in what he reckoned was the style of Dante. He was also a confirmed dabbler in the occult, mostly in its mistier forms. Between 1917 and 1927, he was a member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an offshoot, founded by veteran occultist A.E. Waite, of the more famous Order of the Golden Dawn. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1887 by a trio of freemasons – a coroner called Westcott, a retired doctor called Woodman and a sometime clerk, Samuel Liddell ‘MacGregor’ Mathers – for the study and practice of ceremonial magic based on some enciphered manuscripts and the claimed guidance of ‘secret chiefs’, both of uncertain provenance. It was a fashionable diversion for various writer
s, actors and the like for a decade or more, and ran ‘temples’ in London, Paris, Edinburgh, Bradford and Weston-super-Mare, until it dissolved into squabbling factions early in 1900. Williams was given to claiming membership in the original Order, to overuse of abstract nouns and extended flirtations with impressionable young women. Williams clothed these flirtations, which in a couple of cases were prolonged over years and involved hundreds of letters, with a pseudo-mystical flummery borrowed from Dante, Swinburne and the whole overripe Blavatskian-Hermeticist tradition; but to all but dedicated fans, this stuff reads like transparent special pleading for what has aptly been called ‘moral adultery’.
Many, like the writer Arthur Ward (‘Sax Rohmer’ of Fu Manchu fame), Algernon Blackwood and a string of others, were similarly given to passing off their belonging to one of the myriad Golden Dawn splinter-groups as membership in the original Order; presumably each of these shards considered itself the true inheritor of the Golden Dawn apostolic succession. Williams certainly knew Evelyn Underhill, who had some association with the original Golden Dawn, and may have known Arthur Machen, who was on the fringe of the group. In any event, the interconnexions, feuds, squabbles and alliances that existed at this time amongst the habitués of the whole hermetic-theosophical movement (if this ragbag of muddle-headed borrowings from hither and yon, bolted together into ramshackle systems by a series of magpie minds, can be dignified with that description) were so labyrinthine as to be opaque to anything other than close study, which, for any except would-be adepts, it hardly repays.
C.S. Lewis had read some of Williams’s work, Williams had read Lewis’s Allegory of Love in proof, and they had exchanged admiring letters. Soon Lewis read Williams’s poems, of which perhaps the politest thing to say is that they are an acquired taste. Williams was in the process of writing a series of long poems on Arthurian themes, whose involute language, layered with abstractions and polysyllabic Byzantinisms, and allegorical pretensions were wholly outside Tolkien’s taste, and formed a strong contrast to his own unfinished Arthurian verse tale, The Fall of Arthur. Lewis’s loudly expressed enthusiasm for Williams’s Arthurian cycle (he wrote a commentary on it, eventually published in Arthurian Torso of 1948) would only have confirmed Tolkien’s decision to lay his own Arthurian work aside, or (at least) not show it to Lewis, which may almost stand as a precondition for any of his works being completed. There is in fact no evidence that Lewis ever read The Fall of Arthur, although it is possible such evidence has merely not survived; nevertheless, Lewis’s enthusiasm for Tolkien’s alliterative verse in general (the alliterative verse was the only element in the poems of The Lord of the Rings that Lewis liked) makes this an odd omission. Perhaps Tolkien reckoned Lewis’s own taste in Arthuriana was so far from his own to make the exercise a pointless one; but there is probably little to be gained from further speculation here.
Now that Williams was living in Oxford, Lewis was quick to incorporate him in his circle of friends, and this included meetings of the Inklings. He also got Williams official permission to give lectures at the University; in February 1943, Williams was awarded an honorary MA, in some part arranged by Lewis and Tolkien (although it was a distinction routinely awarded to long-serving employees of the OUP). Very obviously Williams, rather than Tolkien, was now the primary object of Lewis’s enthusiasm. Tolkien was a sensitive man, and quickly noticed. Lewis professed to believe that closeness to one friend does not diminish with the arrival of another; but Tolkien, and I suspect most of us, would disagree. It is difficult to have two best friends simultaneously. He, along with Lewis’s other friends, was now expected to join in Lewis’s admiration for Williams’s writing. This Tolkien was temperamentally unable to do; he liked Williams, but found his writing baffling and distasteful by turns. He was also, unsurprisingly, uncomfortable with Williams’s ‘dabblings in the occult’.8 In November 1943, or thereabouts, Tolkien wrote a poem on Williams, titled ‘A Closed Letter to Andrea Charicoryides Surnamed Polygrapheus, Logothete of the Theme of Geodesia in the Empire, Bard of the Court of Camelot, Malleus Malitiarium, Inclinga Sum Sometimes Known as Charles Williams’.9 Though it is an affectionate treatment, Tolkien’s exasperation with Williams’s writing (particularly his occasionally ludicrous mock-cabbalistic identification of his idiosyncratic geography with human anatomy – ‘buttocks to Caucasia!’) is obvious.
The arrival of Williams in Oxford marks the first stage in the decline of Tolkien’s relations with Lewis. Emblematic of this is the change in the central character, Elwin Ransom, between the different books of Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. In the first two he is transparently based on Tolkien; in the third, That Hideous Strength (published in 1945), he now uses the by-name ‘Dr Fisher King’ and is emphatically Charles Williams.
There is an interesting paragraph in a letter Lewis wrote to his brother soon after war was declared:
Here’s a funny thing I found out yesterday: that Tolkien is descended from one of the Saxon nobility to whom Frederick the Great gave the alternative of exile or submission when he took Saxony; and the old graf chose exile and came over to England and became a clock maker. T. is the very last of my friends whom I shd. have suspected of being geboren.10
We may detect a hint of amused scepticism here; it suggests that Tolkien was comfortable enough with Lewis thus to share with him a cherished (if mildly implausible) piece of family mythology, and also, perhaps, that he ever so slightly misjudged Lewis’s reaction, or (at least) mistook, as it is so easy to do, affection for uncritical acceptance. Lewis’s native satirical bent, which he consciously suppressed as a requirement of Christian charity, remained not far below the surface.
III – The exigencies of wartime
Whilst Tolkien was not called up to fight nor formally enlisted in government service, the war made significant changes to his daily life, aside from the common inconvenience of rationing, air raid precautions and general shortage. Soon after war was declared, petrol rationing induced Tolkien to sell his car (he never bought another). The War Office did not require his services as a cryptographer, for now at any rate; he was in fact never called on to help, which was probably a good thing since it would have been financially disastrous. He took on war work as an Air Raid Warden, and spent one night a week with another warden on duty in a post in Park Town, a quarter of a mile from his house in Northmoor Road. Either he or his fellow warden would sit up all night watching, whilst the other slept as he might. At some point, perhaps because of their work with officer cadets, the occupation of Oxford dons was declared ‘permanently reserved’ and so Tolkien was exempted from other service.11
Lewis, who was six years younger, joined the Home Guard and, one night in nine, patrolled ‘the most malodorous and depressing parts of Oxford’ with an antique rifle.12 His brother Warnie was recalled to the active list, and promoted Major; from the start of September 1939, he was on duty first in Yorkshire and then with the British Expeditionary Force in France. He seems to have spent much of this stint of active service in hospital with an unspecified illness; Warnie was overweight and out of condition, but the primary culprit is likely, as usual, to have been whisky. Some might reckon the Army Service Corps, Warnie’s distinctly unglamorous unit, was not a dangerous posting, when compared with front-line service; but in the chaos of May 1940, when the British Expeditionary Force rushed into Belgium only days before the German armoured attacks in the Ardennes drove deep into France behind them and threw the Allies into catastrophic disorder, even a line-of-service station was not safe. Many British line-of-service troops were caught up in the chaotic fighting of that May. At the very least, Warnie and his unit would have been bundled out of France amidst a disorganized host of troops and refugees, an experience to shake the nerves of a younger and more active man. After his unit was evacuated back to England in May or June 1940,13 he was, in August, transferred from the active list back to the Reserve of Officers. He joined the Home Guard and used to patrol the rivers in his motorboat. George Sayer notes that �
��he never spoke about his experiences in the Second World War’, and reckons ‘his silence suggests deep shame’.14 Nevertheless he remained ‘the Major’ for the rest of his life.
A good proportion of the normal undergraduate body was off in uniform, and most undergraduates now took only one-year courses, which might be converted to ‘proper’ degrees after the war was over; instead, there were amorphous classes of cadets from the armed services to be taught. Special six-month cadets’ courses were devised; from March 1943 until March 1944, Tolkien was responsible for the English course taught to Naval and RAF cadets. He devoted much time and effort to this, and to the frustrating business of devising shortened undergraduate Honours courses, which were the invariable object of criticism from colleagues who had not been so occupied.
More practical impact was made by the University’s decision to suspend recruitment and replacement of staff for the duration of the war. As posts fell vacant, proportionately more work devolved onto the remaining dons.
Edith was ill at the end of 1939, and had to go into hospital for an operation. The resulting doctors’ bills were a worry, since (owing again to the war) many of Tolkien’s usual sources of additional income (examining and external lectures) had dried up. He badgered Stanley Unwin to publish Farmer Giles of Ham, in the absence of the promised Hobbit sequel (which Tolkien told him he hoped to finish in the spring of 1940). Unwin in reply asked that Tolkien finish the preface he had promised for a revision of the old Clark Hall translation of Beowulf (in fact, he had barely started it); Unwin still thought Farmer Giles was best kept until after the new Hobbit was done, but in the meantime offered Tolkien £100 as advance of royalties due the following April.
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