At the start of 1940, burst water-pipes meant Tolkien had to spend some weeks in a nearby hotel.15 Edith and Priscilla seem to have gone to Weston-super-Mare for some at least of the time, so Edith could recover from her operation; Christopher had presumably returned to school. Tolkien sent his Clark Hall preface to Unwin, after being assured that it would be printed despite its unsolicited length, and his extensive metrical appendix too. The book was published in July 1940; Tolkien was paid five guineas.16 In mid-May, he had to remind Unwin to pay him outstanding royalties for The Hobbit: money was again very tight. In the summer and early autumn of 1940, two women evacuees from Ashford in Kent were billeted in the Tolkien household.
The war had a larger effect on Tolkien’s children; John, his eldest son, had gone to Rome to begin priestly formation at the English College only in November 1939 (he had been an undergraduate at Tolkien’s old college, Exeter, between 1936 and 1939); when, in May 1940, the German attack on France and Belgium opened and it became clear that Italian neutrality was a temporary business, he along with other students at the College were sent back to England, travelling in mufti. They spent five days on trains crossing Italy and France, then took the last boat out of Le Havre. After a brief time in Ambleside in the Lake District, the College settled in Stonyhurst for the duration of the war. John Tolkien, as well as studying, acted as head gardener, helping to supplement the College’s rations with home-grown vegetables (he had for some years been his father’s chief accomplice in keeping up their large garden in Oxford).
Michael, his second son, was in 1939 still in the Sixth Form at the Oratory School in Caversham; he left and volunteered for the Army, but was told to spend a year at university first. This seems to have been in part an act of late adolescent rebellion.
Michael was at Trinity in Oxford reading history until mid-1940, when he joined the Royal Artillery. During the Battle of Britain, he manned anti-aircraft guns on aerodromes, and was awarded the George Medal. At the end of the year, he was injured in a motor accident whilst on night training; whilst in hospital, he met a nurse four years his senior (he was barely twenty) whom he proposed to marry. His father urged caution and delay, despite or more probably because of his own precipitate wartime marriage, but the marriage took place anyway in November 1941.17 Tolkien was not present; indeed, the marriage may have happened clandestinely. Michael Tolkien’s son, another Michael Tolkien, has said his grandparents disapproved of Michael’s marriage on the grounds of its haste and his youth and also, privately, because of Joan’s ‘apparently uncultured, lower middle class, C.of E. background’; he also claims she was ‘one of many nurses he fell in love with when he was being treated for the shell-shock he only superficially got over’,18 which is inaccurate in at least one point: Michael Tolkien senior’s 1940 hospitalization was caused by a motor crash; the shell-shock came three or four years later. By the time he was married, after Sandhurst (although it is unclear if he was ever commissioned) and a spell in coastal defence at Sidmouth, he transferred to the RAF, and fought first as a gunner in night fighters, then as a rear-gunner in bombers.19 After almost three years of this, his nerves were gone, and he was declared medically unfit for further service. He returned to Trinity in 1944, to finish his degree in a year; in 1945, he was placed in the Second Class. His father reasonably blamed Michael’s war service, and the truncation of his degree course, for his failure to get a First. By now he had two children, and needed a job. He didn’t settle to one until 1946.
Christopher had also been at the Oratory, but a heart condition meant he had spent much of his time at home taught by a private tutor. He returned to school in the autumn of 1940, after three years at home. In 1942, when he was only seventeen, he also started a year at Trinity before entering the RAF the following July. In 1944, he was sent to South Africa for pilot training. Both Michael and Christopher had their fees reduced by Trinity as a favour to Tolkien, whose finances were, as usual, straitened.
Priscilla spent the first three years of the war at home, taught by a governess (the school she had been attending was taken over for war work); from 1942, she attended the Oxford High School for Girls as a day pupil.
IV – The Lord of the Rings continued
‘The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.’20
Now, having seen how the war affected Tolkien’s family, we need to return to the dark days of 1940, with Britain’s army, defeated, evacuated to England but mostly without equipment, the Air Force fighting for the country’s life in the Battle of Britain, and British cities nightly bombed.
Tolkien took up The Lord of the Rings again in August 1940, and wrote steadily until term started in October. He had previously reached Balin’s tomb in Moria in the autumn of 1939, and then stopped, baffled. Now he again put the book aside until the Christmas vacation of 1940–1; throughout 1941, he worked intermittently until, by the end of the year, the story had reached Lothlórien. He also rewrote his 1936–7 text The Fall of Númenor (prompted, presumably, by the growing connexions he discerned between Aragorn and Elendil). Paper was very short in these years, and Tolkien needed a lot of it. He re-used a large quantity of an American candidate’s examination scripts he was sent by the University in August 1940, writing on the blank verso sides of the sheets and the blue covers of the booklets; he also resumed the habit of drafting his texts in pencil, and then subsequently overwriting them in ink as they were revised (and this was aside from the inevitable insertion of pastedin riders, recast pages from earlier versions and persistent niggling over names and time sequence). The original pencil drafts were sometimes erased, occasionally not. The resulting manuscripts present formidable problems of interpretation now; at the time, his son Christopher was, when he was at home, much employed as an amanuensis, typist and general helper (this, as we shall see, was only a foretaste of a task he took up forty years later).
In October 1940 C.S. Lewis published The Problem of Pain, the first of his explicit works of Christian apologetic; it was dedicated to the Inklings, to whom it had been read chapter by chapter. Lewis and Tolkien’s doctor, R.E. ‘Humphrey’ Havard, now often known as ‘the Useless Quack’ or ‘U.Q.’, contributed an appendix on the clinical experience of pain. Tolkien was mildly sceptical of Lewis’s new-minted status as amateur of theology, but kept his peace.21
This book was the seed of Lewis’s wartime career as itinerant apologist: he spent much of the next years making a round of dreary RAF bases to talk, night after night, to roomfuls of unreceptive men, at the request of the Air Force chaplaincy; this was interspersed with journeys to London to deliver or record broadcast talks for the BBC that were to form a basic course in Christian apologetics. It was weary, dogged work, on top of Lewis’s teaching, his enforced involvement in college administration, and his heavy domestic responsibilities. In light of all this, it is a wonder that he managed anything else; but as we shall see, these were busy years for the Inklings.
Tolkien was also busy, and likewise discouraged. On the night of 7 November 1940, incendiary bombs destroyed the binder’s warehouse where stock of the second printing of The Hobbit was held, along with most of the Unwin backlist; the entire remaining run of the book was amongst the one and a half million books burnt. Paper was by now severely and increasingly rationed, and it was two years before Unwin managed to schedule a reprint. During this time The Hobbit was virtually unobtainable, and sales – and Tolkien’s royalties – fell off almost to nothing. A week later, Tolkien was working late when he saw a glow on the horizon; it was the city of Coventry, forty miles away, burning.
Oxford proper was never bombed, although there were sporadic air raid alerts throughout 1940–1, and the Cowley motor works were certainly a target; there is usually said to have been an informal agreement that England’s ancient university towns would be spared if, reciprocally, neither Heidelberg nor Göttingen was bombed, although there is little actual evidence for this assertion. Another theory argues that Hitler planned to use Oxford as capital o
f a conquered Britain, and so wanted it intact.
On 22 March 1941, the Tolkiens celebrated twenty-five years of marriage; they ate dinner with friends, including Lewis and Hugo Dyson; of their children, only Priscilla could be present.
On 4 May 1941, an RAF Whitley bomber crashed in Linton Road, which adjoins Northmoor Road. The crew were killed, and three residents injured. Christopher, aged sixteen, had been watching the plane through his telescope; his father, as an Air Raid Warden, attended the scene of the crash.
Tolkien was increasingly depressed by the progress of the war; he developed a loathing of aeroplanes as weapons of war, and was quietly appalled that two of his sons were in the Air Force. He was also disheartened by the effect of the war on the perception of the Germanic spirit, even more than in 1914:
I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler … Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.22
Tolkien was a strong patriot, but was also (what might seem to some now unusual) avowedly anti-Imperialist – ‘I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth).’23 We have little information as to the exact nature of his anti-Imperialism, although one may speculate that reflexion on his time in South Africa might have contributed. Nevertheless, in later years he did look back nostalgically to the apogee of British power, Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which occurred when he was five.24 It is difficult to grasp the full sense of gradual and inevitable decline in British power and position that Tolkien must have experienced during his lifetime; when he was born, and during his formative years, the Empire seemed a vast and immutable fact, founded on unassailable supremacy at sea. In 1942, he witnessed the unthinkable – the fall of Singapore, fortress of the East, to an army of the hitherto despised Japanese, after the sinking of a British battle squadron by Japanese aircraft. Whatever one’s views of Empire, the moral shock of these events must have been considerable.
The records for the Inklings from this time are unusually full; in the midst of war and its uncertainties and privations, and the manifold extra duties whether academic or military that it brought, the familiar routine of Tuesday morning beer and Thursday evening talk amongst old friends took on, it is reasonable to think, a greater importance than before. Certainly, Charles Williams’s advent had galvanized Lewis at least, and (together with Lewis’s own peripatetic evangelism) had given the group, or at any rate individual members of it, a higher public profile. These were the years not only of The Lord of the Rings but also of Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (first published in 1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), Perelandra (1943) and The Great Divorce (1945) and Williams’s Region of the Summer Stars (1942) and All Hallows’ Eve (1945), and of the early drafts of Warnie Lewis’s first book on Louis XIV and his times, which finally appeared (as The Splendid Century) in 1953. It is not likely that all of these books will be equally to the taste of any given reader; but a dispassionate observer must (surely) be impressed by the range and quality of the wartime productions of this small idiosyncratically assembled group, which Tolkien half-seriously called ‘the Lewis séance’;25 it may well be that, aside from the stimulating and co-ordinating function of Lewis (and to some extent Williams), the threat of imminent destruction by war had an effect analogous to Dr Johnson’s prospect of hanging.
Tolkien may have entertained quiet doubts about Lewis’s apologetic writing; but Lewis’s admiration for Tolkien’s work was undiminished. He wrote to an American correspondent,
The Hobbit is merely the adaptation to children of part of a huge private mythology of a most serious kind: the whole cosmic struggle as he sees it but mediated through an imaginary world. The Hobbit’s successor, which will soon be finished, will reveal this more clearly. Private worlds have hitherto been mainly the work of decadents or, at least, mere aesthetes. This is the private world of a Christian. He is a very great man. His published works (both imaginative & scholarly) ought to fill a shelf by now; but he’s one of those people who is never satisfied with a MS. The mere suggestion of publication provokes the reply, ‘Yes, I’ll just look through it and give it a few finishing touches’ – wh. means that he really begins the whole thing over again.26
Lewis dedicated Screwtape to Tolkien, who (he later admitted) was mildly puzzled as to why.27 Many years later, Tolkien discovered that Lewis had not, apparently, much liked Screwtape; he was, though, wryly amused rather than offended.
During the Christmas vacation of 1941–2, Tolkien pressed on with The Lord of the Rings. By the end of January 1942, he had drafted the first four or five chapters of Book III. He then laid the work aside for the rest of the academic year.
He may have written Leaf by Niggle during this hiatus, probably in April 1942.28 Certainly its portrait of the painter Niggle, caught up in an ever-ramifying work he is unable to complete, may serve as an objective correlative (to borrow a term Tolkien would probably have disliked) of Tolkien’s state of mind at this time. We might also notice the way Niggle’s great unfinished and unfinishable picture is housed in a shed built on his sometime potato patch; potatoes, Tom Shippey has plausibly argued, may stand for Tolkien’s professional concerns as a philologist, which were increasingly edged out by his imaginative writing. It was not that Tolkien abandoned philology – if anything, The Lord of the Rings is philology sublimated or transformed – but that the simple time occupied by writing it inevitably encroached on other activities. The productive years of middle life are the period when, for scholars as for other men, what has been wrought by the energies and enthusiasms of early youth – such as Tolkien had amply evidenced – is broadened and built upon, the large structures of evidence and argument raised, the solid work done, intuition heightened and buttressed into achievement. Grimm was thirty-four when he published the first edition of his Deutsche Grammatik, fifty when Deutsche Mythologie first appeared, sixty-three for the Geschichte der deutschen Sprache;29 Chambers was thirty-eight when he published Widsith, forty-seven when he published Beowulf. There is a particular quality to a work of learning informed also by enthusiasm, where the heart of the writer is engaged as well as his learning and effort; it is this (and, although this is a separate point, literary style) that marks out scholarship that will, or should, endure. Each of us can, probably, think of several books that would fall into this category, membership of which is determined in large part by personal taste. I would name, in no particular order (and with no claim to exhaust even my own predilections), Peter Brown’s Augustine, Ker’s Dark Ages, Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England, Bishop’s Liturgica Historica. Tolkien, however, poured his scholarly heart into his legendarium; deprived of any other outlet, it informed and transformed The Lord of the Rings. This did not exhaust his capacity for scholarship; but, aside from the bare mechanics of time spent, it did give an outlet for an impulse that would otherwise have been satisfied only by a heavyweight book of philology, written with (we may guess) infinite pains and reworkings, and to this day on the bookshelves of all who care about language, and English, and the northern spirit. What we might call the moral place of this notional book in Tolkien’s life was taken up by The Lord of the Rings. He could do nothing else.
Leaf by Niggle is in many ways an important work for understanding Tolkien’s aesthetic, and his sense of being overwhelmed by his work and responsibilities. It also portrays his conviction that he was naturally lazy and given to procrastination; Niggle is ‘sometimes just idle, and [does] nothing at all’.30 But we should note, primarily, the tension it portrays between the painter’s artistic compulsion to complete his picture, which has absorbed all of his other interests and projects, and his moral obligation to his neighbour. The fact that Niggle, finally and grudgingly to be sure, follows the second at the expense of the first leads almost naturally to the final redemption o
f his unfinished work, and its transformation into a real and living Tree, exactly as Niggle had first envisioned it, as it would have been (in fact) were man unfallen and his sub-creative powers uncompromised by sin and toil. Our artistic efforts – our makings – are, Tolkien claims, taken up in God’s providence and made real, not just as objects to be admired, but also as bearing a sacramental function within the economy of grace, set within the context of the apparently humdrum makings of our ‘unartistic’ neighbours. The Tree becomes not something to be admired in isolation, in some sort of celestial museum or botanical garden, but the heart of Niggle’s Parish, a country made with the conscious and essential collaboration of his neighbour, which is (for some) ‘the best introduction to the Mountains’. The Mountains are God’s country: heaven. Tolkien’s memories of his 1911 trip to Switzerland here achieve apotheosis.
This is a great deal more than a simple claim for the social importance of art; our imaginative efforts, our storytelling (Tolkien is saying), contribute directly, under God’s mercy, to the redemption of the world and the salvation of our neighbour, even if we can never complete them as we would wish (this obviously raises other questions also that we will look at later).31
Idleness, then, and the distraction of the legendarium both got in the way of professional philological research. Another factor, of course, was Tolkien’s perfectionism, as described above by Lewis; he would not submit material for publication unless utterly sure it represented his last word on the matter and, in the nature of things, this degree of satisfaction was, for one with so many calls on his time, almost impossible of achievement. Needless to say, this attitude was a particular bugbear of Kenneth Sisam at the University Press, who throughout his professional life was constantly exasperated by learned authors refusing to let books out of their clutches. As late as 1954, when he was retired, Sisam was still insistent on this; his daughter Celia had taken up his long-delayed edition on the Salisbury Psalter, and he modestly said, ‘My part will be to counsel her against perfectionism and other bars to publication.’32 He was perhaps unduly affected, alarmed even, by the example of his own master, Arthur Napier, neither of whose great projects (a historical grammar of English, and an edition of all the previously unpublished Old English homilies) was completed, in part because of the constant burden of teaching, supervising and examining, in greater part because of an incurable perfectionism. Sisam, who had the highest respect for Napier’s powers and learning, saw this as both a grievous loss to scholarship and a cautionary tale for others.33 This disposition is likely to have made things difficult for Tolkien even if the long shadow of the Clarendon Chaucer had not lain across his relations with the University Press.
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