Understandably, Campbell himself dwelt only on the creditable aspects of his colourful past, damascened by rhetoric and alcohol. He told a good story, and Tolkien was clearly impressed by him. Writing to Christopher, Tolkien compared Campbell’s first appearance to that of Strider (or the character who became him) in The Lord of the Rings.42 After their initial encounter, Campbell may have joined Lewis and Tolkien in the Eagle and Child on other occasions; he does not seem to have become a regular member of their circle, however, although he did come to an evening Inklings later that week. Lewis remained suspicious, which Tolkien put down to residual anti-Catholicism; also Campbell’s circumstances took him away from Oxford. There is no suggestion he attended further evening Inklings apart from an isolated occasion two years later (on 28 November 1946) when he read a translation of some ‘Spanish poems’, perhaps his celebrated versions of John of the Cross, although he was a prolific translator and so it may have been another text altogether.43
By the end of 1944, the war began to seem like a business tending towards a conclusion, rather than a permanent state. The Inklings planned a celebration in the (it was hoped) not too distant event of victory: they proposed hiring a country pub for a week, and spending it in talk around the clock. Things were to turn out rather differently.
Tolkien began Book V of The Lord of the Rings that October; he quickly discovered anomalies in the parallel timelines for the distinct strands of the story, and expended much effort in fixing them. At this time he and Lewis discussed collaborating on a book on ‘“Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions). Would there were time for all these projects!’44 According to Lewis, the book was tentatively titled Language and Human Nature; he said to a friend in 1948 that it was to be published the following year, by the Student Christian Movement Press.45 In a letter dated 12 January 1950, Lewis was more realistic: ‘My book with Professor Tolkien – any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man – is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends!’46 Needless to say, nothing further came of this. This is a tremendous shame; but I suspect most of us, given the choice, would settle for The Lord of the Rings over even such a book as this might have been.
During the next two University terms and vacation, Tolkien managed some sporadic work on The Lord of the Rings. After March 1945, however, he did nothing more to the book until September of the following year: ‘real life’ made a violent intervention.
VII – Distractions
On 26 January 1945, the Merton Professor of English Language, H.C.K. Wyld, died. Wyld, remember, was a German-educated philologist, who had also been a pupil of the famously cantankerous Henry Sweet; he had been Merton Professor since 1920, and was one of the electors to the Chair of Anglo-Saxon in 1925. Tolkien mentioned years later ‘seeing Henry Cecil Wyld wreck a table in the Cadena Café with the vigour of his representation of Finnish minstrels chanting the Kalevala’;47 Wyld was also the prime mover in a spoof rendering of the opening and closing lines of Beowulf into cod-eighteenth-century heroic couplets, printed in the Oxford Magazine in March 1925 under the title Gothique, attributed to one ‘Mr Beach’. His accomplice in this prank was H.F.B. Brett-Smith, an authority on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century verse, and one of Tolkien’s fellow examiners in Doworst. Four years later, Wyld published a short article, ‘Experiments in Translating Beowulf ’ in a Festschrift for Frederick Klaeber, rendering passages in the style of Pope, Tennyson and Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Some may find this type of humour a touch elephantine, but it surely belies the mirthless reputation of philologists. He was in any case one of a fast-diminishing breed of scholar.
There were, as we saw earlier, two Merton chairs of English at Oxford; at that time, they and Tolkien’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair were the only professorial chairs in the English Faculty. The Merton chairs were more prestigious and better paid than Tolkien’s position, although of more recent foundation (1885 and 1904 respectively, as against 1795 for the Chair of Anglo-Saxon). They also came with a fellowship at Merton, one of the richer and physically more agreeable colleges, certainly compared to Tolkien’s then college, Pembroke, which was poor, formal, unfriendly and (Tolkien reckoned) constitutionally suspicious of papists. He was unofficially sounded out whether he wished to be considered for the job. He decided he did. In the meantime, as one of the two surviving professors in the English School, proportionately more administrative work devolved onto Tolkien. This, and the normal business of termtime (lectures, tutorials, supervision of graduate students, interminable meetings of college and faculty), meant no leisure for writing.
Leaf by Niggle appeared in the Dublin Review that January. Stanley Unwin saw it in March, and liked it; he thought three or four such things could make a book. Tolkien was willing to try to put them together, but doubted he would have the leisure to do so. Three weeks’ uninterrupted work, he declared, should be enough to finish The Lord of the Rings; of late, though, he admitted finding work on it difficult, mostly because of the absence abroad of Christopher, ‘my real primary audience’. He was desperately worried about Christopher’s safety (fatal crashes were common amongst trainee pilots) – ‘my heart is gnawed out with anxiety’ – and freely admitted to spending such small free time as he had writing not The Lord of the Rings, but letters to him.48 Unwin, whose own son Rayner was now a naval cadet, presumably understood.
Other outstanding responsibilities crowded in on Tolkien: examining both local and external; E.V. Gordon’s posthumous Pearl edition, which Tolkien had agreed to complete, and which Gordon’s widow was chasing; the interminable Clarendon Chaucer; an edition of the Middle English Seinte Katerine, being done in collaboration with his former pupil Simonne d’Ardenne and promised to the EETS (they had also projected an edition of the shorter Katherine Group text Sawles Warde); his own edition of the Ancrene Wisse, likewise promised to the EETS; and, inevitably, Basil Blackwell’s Pearl, still unproofed and unprefaced. As well as Wyld’s Merton chair, various philological jobs at other universities had fallen vacant during the war years, and Tolkien was much in demand as adviser, elector and referee.
Christopher Tolkien now returned from South Africa; he was stationed at an RAF base in Shropshire. Although war in Europe ended on 7 May, fighting against Japan in the Far East was to continue for some months. There was still a strong possibility that Christopher would see combat; he transferred to the Fleet Air Arm, which if anything made it more likely he would see action (a large part in the proposed assault on Japan was to be taken by the Royal Navy’s Pacific Fleet, which had a heavy component of aircraft carriers).
On 15 May 1945, Charles Williams died suddenly after a supposedly routine operation. Tolkien and, especially, Lewis were shocked. They contributed to a memorial volume (it came out at the end of 1947); Tolkien offered the revised and expanded version of his 1939 ‘Fairy Stories’ lecture, including the longest expression of his theory of ‘subcreation’.49 In one way, Williams’s early death crystallized his position in Lewis’s affections; the damage to his friendship with Tolkien would not, now, be undone.
Lewis persisted in his inability to see that his friendship with Williams had affected his relations with Tolkien; indeed, he all but explicitly made them the illustrative example of exactly the reverse point in his book The Four Loves:
Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence friendship is the least jealous of loves.50
The book was published in 1960, based on notes for radio talks given two years earlier. Lewis had brooded on this matter for more than a decade.
During the war, Lewis had discovered with glee and relish the long ‘romances’ of E.R. Eddison, a retired civil servant with a gift for pastiche seventeenth-century prose and convoluted plots in a heroic pre-modern setting. He had introduced Tolkien to the books, and Eddison had twice been invited to the Inklings (in 1943
and 1944), on the second occasion reading from an unpublished book. Tolkien liked Eddison’s writing, although he was unimpressed by his characters and philosophy.51 On 18 August 1945, Eddison died; he was sixty-two.
At the end of May, the electors to the Merton chair met and agreed to offer it to Tolkien. As well as the Vice-Chancellor and the Warden of Merton, the electors were C.T. Onions of Magdalen and the OED, David Nichol Smith (the surviving Merton Professor) and Kenneth Sisam; Tolkien himself would normally have been of their number, but was replaced first by F.M. Powicke, Regius Professor of Modern History, and then (of all people) by C.S. Lewis. A month later, on 23 June, Tolkien was formally elected; his new job began with the academic year, that October. He had now, at the age of fifty-three, reached the highest position open to an English scholar of philology: he was the undisputed head of his profession. In the short term, however, this was more a burden than anything else, as he had to cover, in addition to his new responsibilities, those of his former chair as well. Procedural delays meant that a new professor of Anglo-Saxon (Tolkien’s old friend C.L. Wrenn) was not appointed until April 1946, to begin work that October. Tolkien in effect did two jobs for a whole year. From this point on, the focus of Tolkien’s academic work (lectures and graduate supervisions) was Middle English, the primary responsibility of his chair, rather than Old English as hitherto.
Tolkien’s successor Wrenn was one of several considered by the electors; the others included Dorothy Whitelock of St Hilda’s, whom many considered the stronger candidate, and who had support from, amongst others, Kenneth Sisam and Professor Frank Stenton of Reading, whose magisterial Anglo-Saxon England had appeared first two years before, in 1943. Tolkien voted for Wrenn, some have claimed from prejudice against women scholars. This is rather belied by his close collaboration with Mary Salu and Simonne d’Ardenne, and his later support of Dorothy Everett for the Readership in English Language (to which she was elected in October 1948); although one might argue that it is one thing to have women as junior colleagues, and another to support one as one’s own successor. Tolkien did hold views on women’s intellectual predilections of a traditional cast;52 but there is exactly no evidence this prejudiced him against recommending them for jobs. The very next month, indeed, Tolkien was part of a committee that recommended Whitelock for a University Lectureship. Whatever the truth of all this, it is probably more likely that Tolkien was not biased against Whitelock so much as biased in favour of Wrenn, who was a friend and co-religionist. The Tolkien and Wrenn families had gone on holiday together before the war.
Tolkien’s new colleagues at Merton were, on the whole, more agreeable to Tolkien than the ‘old gents’ at Pembroke;53 they included Hugo Dyson, elected to a tutorial fellowship at much the same time as Tolkien was to his new chair, and Kenneth Sisam, who since 1942 had been Secretary to the Delegates (that is, operational head of the University Press) and as such had been given a Merton fellowship.
Chapter 9 – Peace, Not Rest
I – A false start?
In December 1945, the Welsh Review (edited by Tolkien’s friend Gwyn Jones) published Tolkien’s poem ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’, a pastiche ‘Breton lay’ treating man’s dealings with faërie. As the year drew to an end, Tolkien’s friend and former pupil Simonne d’Ardenne came to stay in Oxford, very likely with the Tolkien family, to work closely with him on their joint edition of Seinte Katerine. She and Tolkien both were in poor health, however, and this, together perhaps with Tolkien’s other activities, meant the edition was not then completed.1
The week after full term ended was earmarked for the delayed ‘Victory Inklings’, a comparatively subdued affair compared to the heady plans of the year before. Tolkien and Warnie Lewis took a morning train that Tuesday to Fairford in Gloucestershire, which the Lewis brothers had visited that autumn, went for a walk in the afternoon, and, as their first choice of pub was full of Polish soldiers, spent a quiet evening reading. The next day, C.S. Lewis arrived by train, and Havard drove down. Barfield was ill and could not join them, and Dyson could not come; the absence of Charles Williams was (we may reckon) acutely felt. Havard drove back to Oxford that afternoon. The remaining three of them spent that day and the next in walk and talk; after lunch on the day after that (the Friday) they took the train back to Oxford. They made the best of it, but there had been a definite change, and it was, in all likelihood, a faintly melancholy affair. Yet their Thursday evening meetings continued; and it was now that they received their most direct literary analogue, in another work by Tolkien.
For many years Tolkien had experienced vivid dreams, which were (he felt) closely connected with his creative life; we earlier noticed the ‘Atlantis dream’ that underlay the Númenor story in The Lost Road. At the end of 1945 and the start of 1946, during the long hiatus in the writing of The Lord of the Rings, he began The Notion Club Papers.2 This purports to be the records of a group of dons analogous to (indeed transparently based on) the Inklings, who in the course of discussions of the nature of dream, and its use in time and space travel, are borne in upon by a series of cataleptic dreams involving the ‘old straight road’ to the west, culminating in a new version of Tolkien’s Atlantis myth. It recasts The Lost Road of the previous decade, and rather improves on it; but, as so often, it was unfinished. This is a shame, as although the story begins slowly and wordily, it builds to a high pitch of tension, advancing as scraps of unknown languages, texts and legends (all fabricated with care and plausibility) are recovered by various of the dons. In the end, though, the Númenor story outgrew its contemporary frame; as Stratford Caldecott has observed, however, the resulting clarification of the place of Númenor in the legendarium may have been justification enough for the work.3
There are several matters of biographical interest in the text as we have it: one of the characters (several of whom are clear Tolkien-figures, despite superficial identifications with others of the group) remarks, of the historical basis for the ‘Matter of Britain’, ‘there was a man called Arthur at the centre of the cycle’;4 another tells of browsing in the secondhand department of what is obviously Blackwell’s bookshop, and finding a manuscript, since disappeared, entitled Quenta Eldalie, by one John Arthurson: this is obviously the Silmarillion, unpublished and forgotten as Tolkien reckoned it might be: Tolkien himself is of course the ‘son of Arthur’. He had not forgotten his own father; presumably meditating on the patterned father–son relationships that underlay The Lost Road had brought him to mind. ‘The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh’, he had written to his troublesome son Michael, some four years previously, ‘it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called “heaven” where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet …’5 Caldecott comments:
This link between generations, through which life and hope are transmitted from father to son, is also the way back through memory and language from the present world to a world that can accurately be described only in myth.6
Caldecott has also, more speculatively, connected Tolkien’s often-expressed sea-longing with his memory of leaving his father, Arthur, at the far end of a long sea-voyage when he was four.7 Those who collect fortean correlates should note that the action of the story is set in 1987; and that the climax of one of the cataleptic visitations provokes a great and destructive storm (in the story, an analogue and in some way an irruption of the cataclysm that drowned Númenor). The reader will perhaps remember the Great Storm of 1987 that caused astonishing destruction across England, and draw whatever conclusion his metaphysics suggests.
Tolkien wrote drafts of these texts at a furious pace over Christmas 1945, with the presumed intention of completing them before the academic term started, and also (perhaps) to reassure himself that his creative powers had not been permanently affected by his failure (as it seemed) to complete The Lord of the Rings. The strain of this, after a term of double w
orkload, was simply too much, and his health gave way.
John Rateliff has argued, plausibly enough, that Tolkien continued work on The Notion Club Papers between putting aside The Lord of the Rings in October 1944 (when concentrated work finished, although as we have seen he made some desultory progress until March 1945) and August 1946, when Warnie Lewis’s diaries record him reading a completed Atlantis story (presumably, the reworked Drowning of Anadûnê that concludes The Notion Club Papers) to the Inklings. Only at this point did he finally respond to the repeated proddings of his publisher, Unwin, and resume work on The Lord of the Rings.8
The Notion Club Papers are linked, clearly, with Lewis’s unfinished ‘Ransom’ novel, now known by its editorial title The Dark Tower (the manuscript is untitled); Rateliff, again, has made a very good case for dating this to 1944–6, rather than (as was previously supposed) 1938, making it an unfinished fourth in Lewis’s science fiction sequence rather than an abortive second. Its theme fits well with what Tolkien described in a December 1944 letter to Christopher Tolkien as Lewis’s ‘fourth (or fifth?)’ novel (after the three published Ransom books, and possibly The Great Divorce, written at this time); it also, as Tolkien notes, clashes with his own ideas for The Notion Club Papers (which become his ‘dimly projected third’ novel, after The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien clearly reckoned on finishing and publishing in short order). Both books are explorations of time travel, taking up (in varying degrees) the theories of the Anglo-Irish aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne’s then famous An Experiment with Time (Dunne argued from an experience of precognitive dreams to the non-linear nature of time). Tolkien’s book is significantly better than Lewis’s; indeed, Lewis’s fragment is decidedly not his best work, to the degree that it has been claimed as an editorial forgery (something, alas, which manuscript evidence definitively refutes). A combination of this, with the reasonable charge that he was trespassing on what had by their compact been Tolkien’s territory (time rather than space), may have led Lewis to turn from it to other things.
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