His old friends and fellow scholars George Gordon (his old boss at Leeds, latterly President of Magdalen) and R.W. Chambers both died that spring, Chambers on St George’s Day. Chambers was only sixtyeight, Gordon sixty-one. Chambers had retired the previous year, but was much dispirited first by ill-health, then by the effects of the war: University College London was moved to Aberystwyth for the duration; bombs destroyed much of the College library Chambers had spent his adult life building up, and also severely damaged Chelsea Old Church, where Thomas More, whose biographer Chambers was, had worshipped. Chambers did not repine, but his resources were depleted by the strain and illness took him off suddenly. He left a mass of unpublished work on Piers Plowman.
Gordon had been ill with cancer for much of 1941; he was known to be dying, although not to himself. Tolkien is likely to have known, however, since that year it was Lewis’s turn to act as Magdalen’s Vice-President, and because of Gordon’s illness he was required frequently to stand in for him. Lewis was a very bad administrator, and was prevailed on to step down as Vice-President after only a year; something of his hatred for college business may be detected in the vitriolic scenes of (fictional) college meetings in That Hideous Strength, written at this time.
With Gordon’s death, the whole burden of the still-pending Clarendon Chaucer fell on Tolkien; although, practically, this had been the case almost since the book’s inception.
V – The fruits of scholarship
At some point in these years, Tolkien wrote Sellic Spell, a short story reconstructing the mythological or folktale elements in Beowulf as they might have been before their combination with the historical matter of the poem (the Freswæl, the Swedish wars); Sellic Spell exists in as many as four different versions, besides a text in Old English; it was published for the first time in May 2014. Tolkien’s friend Gwyn Jones, Professor of English at Aberystwyth, reckoned it should be required reading for all students of Beowulf; it was set to be published in Jones’s journal the Welsh Review: which, however, folded before the relevant issue could appear.
Sellic Spell may, in fact, stand as a colophon to the influence on Tolkien’s academic work of Chambers, who now was dead. The impulse behind it can arguably be traced to a passage in Chambers’s Beowulf: An Introduction where, after discussing parallels between Beowulf and Grettis Saga, and positing behind them both a tradition of folk or fairy tale, Chambers concluded:
to speak of Beowulf as a version of the fairy tale is undoubtedly going too far. All we can say is that some early story-teller took, from folk-tale, those elements which suited his purpose, and that a tale, containing many leading features found in the ‘Bear’s son’ story … came to be told of Beowulf and of Grettir.34
Sellic Spell was an imaginative effort to recreate exactly that ‘folk-tale’, but this was just the latest of Tolkien’s debts to Chambers; Widsith, as we have seen, lent a title to ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, and its form and approach to Tolkien’s Freswael lectures (Finn and Hengest), which also drew on Chambers’s Beowulf; the latter work contains a careful analysis of the Sceaf legends, which undoubtedly influenced another of Tolkien’s imaginative recreations, the poem ‘King Sheave’ (in The Lost Road).
Sellic Spell and ‘King Sheave’, together with Tolkien’s alliterative poem ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’ and his versions of the Völsung legends, represent a characteristic use of what we might call ‘tertiary composition’ of an independent literary text, often a poem, to reconstruct a learned crux. This was not unprecedented amongst scholars – Axel Olrik had reconstructed the Old Norse Bjarkamál on the basis of fragments of the original and an epitome in Saxo’s Latin, whilst Nicolai Grundtvig and others were convinced Beowulf had originally been written in Old Danish and might be reconstructed as such; and, of course, there was Schleicher’s Fable – and can be seen as a literary reflex of exactly the same motive as underlay all philological endeavour: if we can by intellectual work and imaginative sympathy reconstruct the words our distant ancestors used, why can we not combine those words, or their lineal descendants, into the very patterns (stories) they set them in, where these, too, are recoverable? On one level, this sort of activity – writing pastiche Old English folk tale, in the original language – looks very like donnish whimsy, a diversion of intellectual energy into fruitless bypaths; on another, however, it may be seen as in one sense the culmination of the whole philological project, recreating those very lost tales whose rumour, perhaps, first stirred our hearts to enter the dry world of sound-changes and asterisked grammar: where grammar, in fact, becomes gramarye. It is no chance, or mere bagatelle, that Sellic Spell also exists in an Old English version. The sadness, indeed, lies in the fact that this sort of scholarly enterprise is not usually, or these days, admitted into the ranks of ‘proper research’, since the capacity to do it is precisely what philology was always aiming at creating in its adherents.
VI – Frustrations
The Long Vacation of 1942 gave Tolkien time to return to The Lord of the Rings and write the remaining chapters of Book III, bringing the story past the defence of the Hornburg to the fall of Isengard and the quelling of Saruman. He may have written an opening page, no more, for the first chapter of Book IV. Then he stopped, and wrote nothing more (except possibly some notes and outlines) for almost eighteen months.
Basil Blackwell, who had been given Tolkien’s translation of the Middle English Pearl to read, was so impressed by it that in August 1942 he offered to have it published in return for a sum to be set against Tolkien’s substantial outstanding account at Blackwell’s bookshop. Tolkien agreed, and began to contemplate writing the introduction for the modern reader that Blackwell thought it needed. He doesn’t seem to have made much progress.
That December, Foyles arranged to publish an edition of The Hobbit for their Children’s Book Club; Unwin were able to schedule a reprint of their own edition as part of the same run. The book finally appeared in July 1943.
Unwin wrote to Tolkien telling him about The Hobbit reprint; on 7 December, Tolkien replied, evidently encouraged by the news; he had been meaning to write for a while, he said, to ask whether finishing the Hobbit sequel was worth while, ‘other than private and family amusement’. He admitted to misgivings: it was long, in places distressing, not really a children’s book at all.35 He already had thirty-one chapters, he told Unwin, and reckoned he needed another six; it could be finished, he thought, ‘early next year’. The wartime shortage of paper would, he recognized, be a problem. Meanwhile, he wondered if Unwin was interested in a compilation volume made up of Farmer Giles, some other short stories and the Tom Bombadil poems. Unwin, politely, was not.
Despite his expressed hope of finishing The Lord of the Rings early in 1943, Tolkien in the event did almost nothing to the book all that year. What, then, did Tolkien do in 1943?
He prepared an edition of the Middle English Sir Orfeo for the use of cadets from the armed services studying six-month courses at Oxford; it was reproduced as a mimeograph by the University’s Copying Office. Based closely on the text in Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, it was clearly meant as a substitute for copies of that book, which was probably then unavailable, as it was reprinted in 1944. Tolkien also, perhaps at this time, prepared a modern English translation of the text.
Tolkien in fact was given the task of organizing the whole of these cadets’ courses, as they related to the English School. This took up most of his spare time; he was of course still giving his usual round of lectures and tutorials. Christopher and Priscilla were enlisted as typists of The Lord of the Rings as it then existed; Christopher also redrew the maps.
In the first half of the year, Tolkien revised and expanded his lecture ‘Fairy Stories’; now entitled On Fairy-Stories, it became, in this form, the primary statement of Tolkien’s mature aesthetic: what he thought stories did, why we tell them and what, ultimately, their value is. The prompt for this revision may have been a plan for its long-delayed publication; as we
saw, the Lang lectures were typically published the year after being given, but Tolkien’s had (we may guess) run afoul of general wartime disarrangement and entropy. As well as general revisions and expansions, he seems to have added, at this stage, the specifically theological ‘Epilogue’ to the lecture, introducing the theme, which we saw in Leaf by Niggle, that our imperfect stories may be taken up into the providence of God and both completed and, in his mercy and in keeping with our status as ‘makers’ in his image, be themselves contributory to the efflorescence of creation itself. This theme certainly appears in Leaf by Niggle before it does in the lecture, and may be reckoned to have been introduced into the latter as a consequence of the former. Obviously the two texts were closely related in theme, and probably also in time; the introduction of this theme into the 1943 revision of the lecture is probably another argument for the later dating of Leaf by Niggle, to 1942 rather than 1939, and also may explain Tolkien’s mistake in dating the story to the earlier year: he clearly remembered the connexion between Niggle and the lecture, but mistakenly located it at the time of the original writing of the lecture rather than its later revision. In the event, the lecture was not published at this time, either because it was unfinished or because the OUP postponed it.
By March 1943, Blackwell had made up proofs of Tolkien’s translation of Pearl; it still needed an introduction ‘for the lay reader’ and, of course, checking. Neither of these things Tolkien found time to do.
In April, Lewis published Christian Behaviour, the third series of apologetic talks given for the BBC; it now forms Book 3 of Mere Christianity. Tolkien took the strongest objection to Lewis’s chapter on ‘Christian Marriage’, which argued for a two-tier system of religious and nonreligious marriages. He drafted a long letter to Lewis giving his reasons for disagreeing; if it was ever sent, it did not cause Lewis to change his views.36 There was, years later, to be a curious and unexpected practical sequel to this.
That July, Christopher Tolkien was conscripted into the RAF; his work as his father’s typist and map-drawer came to an abrupt end. Basil Blackwell asked Tolkien again about the proofs of Pearl; and again, nothing came of this. The Foyles Children’s Book Club Hobbit was finally published.
Blackwell, with admirable persistence, wrote again in September asking about Pearl; something, he said, needed to be put against the large debit balance on Tolkien’s bookshop account. Tolkien sent him a cheque and an excuse. Blackwell replied hoping for the proofs before Christmas. Needless to say, they were not forthcoming.
In November, Tolkien seems to have written his satirical ‘Closed Letter’ to Charles Williams.37 Williams’s lectures continued to be popular amongst the much-diminished undergraduate population; on one occasion that month, his lecture on Hamlet clashed with one of Tolkien’s Old English lectures, and all of Tolkien’s usual audience deserted him, apart from one who was sent to take notes for the rest. Tolkien gave his lecture, then went for a drink with Williams.38
At some point this year, Tolkien took up the study of Polish, with the aim of helping a Polish soldier come up with a renewed technical vocabulary. Like so much war work, it seems to have issued in no actual result, other than a deal of wasted time and effort.
At the end of the year, Christopher Tolkien was sent to South Africa to train as a pilot. His father began a series of long letters (numbering at least eighty) sent to him by airmail.
All this time, The Lord of the Rings lay if not untouched, then certainly unfinished and (Tolkien began to think) unfinishable. The dam seems to have been breached after a lunch with Lewis and Warnie on 29 March 1944; Lewis had begun a new story (probably The Great Divorce) and, Tolkien wrote to Christopher, was ‘putting the screw on me’ to complete The Lord of the Rings. ‘I needed some pressure, and shall probably respond.’39 Tolkien’s letters for the next two months mention frequent meetings with Lewis alone, for the sole purpose of reading him the latest chapter or section of the book; Tolkien was also coaxed into reading some to the Inklings, although reluctantly. Lewis clearly saw that Tolkien’s book was on the verge of becoming another great project lost to the collateral damage of war, and seems to have exerted himself to coax and encourage and cajole him into taking it up again. This was by no means least amongst Lewis’s services to his friend and, if we may be grandiose, to literature. The personal inconvenience to him (he was furiously busy with his usual work, and was still in demand as a lecturer to servicemen and on the radio, although he tried to keep these things outside term-time) was likely considerable.
Tolkien, then, did not tackle Book IV (Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor) until April 1944, during the last three weeks of the Easter vacation (Trinity Term that year began on St George’s Day); by the end of May, after a series of very late nights and much rewriting, it was done. This was perhaps the only part of the book written, rather than revised, during full term; he had that term an unusually light lecture list, and professedly skimped as much other work and responsibility as he could. Nevertheless, bringing the book so far in so short a time took great effort, and was exhausting. Chapters were sent to Christopher in South Africa as they were written. June was occupied by examinations – setting, invigilating, marking – and producing typescripts of the new Lord of the Rings chapters (some done by Tolkien, some by a friend of Charles Williams). After the exertions of April and May, Tolkien was written out:
I am absolutely dry of any inspiration for the Ring and am back where I was in the Spring, with all the inertia to overcome again. What a relief it would be to get it done.40
July and August were barren of literary activity: he did some lecturing to cadets, and made further typescripts to send to Christopher, accompanied by long letters to him: these were most of what Tolkien wrote that summer. Christopher was now, he considered, his primary audience.
In September 1944, Basil Blackwell wrote yet again asking what had become of the Pearl translation, set up in type but never revised or given a preface; he offered to pay Tolkien a royalty rather than a flat fee for the copyright. Tolkien pleaded pressure of time, which left him no leisure to write a preface. Meanwhile Priscilla was enlisted as Lord of the Rings typist, beginning with its earliest chapters.
We come, now, to another much-written-about Inklings tableau. At midday on 3 October 1944, drinking in the Eagle and Child with Charles Williams and the Lewis brothers, Tolkien met Roy Campbell, who was there alone, eavesdropping. Campbell introduced himself, and joined the company.
Campbell was South African, a recent convert to Catholicism, who had been in Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War and had witnessed anti-Catholic atrocities perpetrated by the Republican government and their sympathizers (he had gone to France in the early 1930s to save money, and moved to Spain in 1933 to avoid a law suit). He was – is – a very fine poet, but one whose view of reality was unconventional and whose approach to truth-telling, particularly with regard to his own exploits, was a roundabout one. Lewis had once mocked Campbell in a poem printed in the Cherwell, and now quoted it from memory to Campbell’s face.41 Campbell had published ‘Flowering Rifle’, a long narrative poem praising Franco’s fight against the Reds, and had carelessly embroidered his own part in the fighting. In fact, he had made a single trip to the front line as a war correspondent, during which he fell and hurt his hip. But you would not know this from the way he wrote and spoke about it, especially when amplified by beer. He regaled Tolkien and company with war stories, which Tolkien at least took at face value, and with anecdotes of famous progressives (the sculptor Epstein, for example, who was married to his wife’s sister) he had known in London between the wars and had insulted.
There was also, so they discovered, an older connexion: Campbell had lived in Oxford in 1919, after coming there from South Africa with the aim of attending the University but failing the entrance examinations. He had fallen into an ‘aesthetic’ circle including William Walton, the Sitwells and Wyndham Lewis, but also Tolkien’s undergraduate contemporary T.W. Earp, poet and critic (
one biographer has claimed Earp and Campbell were homosexual lovers, for a while at least), and his later Leeds colleague Wilfred Childe, Christopher Tolkien’s godfather. Campbell had been uncomfortable in this Bloomsbury world (not least when he discovered his wife was having a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West), and had lampooned it in vigorous heroic couplets before decamping to the continent with his wife and children. Since returning from Spain, he had joined the Army, despite indifferent health and being over-age (he was born in 1901); he ended up as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, working as a censor in Nairobi then a coast-watcher in Mombasa. He finally managed to get himself enrolled in training for jungle warfare, with the aim of going to fight the Japanese; but instead he had a motorcycle crash and injured his hip, which had never been right since his Spanish adventure, and in April 1944 was discharged from the Army as unfit. He was sent back to England, and after some time in hospital ended up in Oxford, staying with friends.
Tolkien Page 25