Soon after sending the new Hobbit chapter off, Tolkien spent four days with Merton’s Warden (or Head of House, at that time the philosopher G.H.G. Mure) and Bursar visiting the college estates in Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, and Lincolnshire. Although it was a piece of college duty (one of the fellows was always nominated to accompany these regular visitations), Tolkien found the trip both enjoyable and instructive.
That December, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, the now post-humous Festschrift, was published. Tolkien’s revised ‘Fairy Stories’ lecture now first appeared, alongside pieces by both Lewis brothers (Warnie, remember, was an amateur of eighteenth-century French history), Owen Barfield, Gervase Mathew and Dorothy Sayers; C.S. Lewis also wrote a preface paying tribute to Williams.
Farmer Giles was still hanging fire; at last, in mid-January 1948, Unwin sent Tolkien a specimen illustration done by Milein Cosman. Tolkien was not enthusiastic, but after meeting Cosman agreed to her doing the job, if Unwin still wanted her. They prevaricated, and asked her for more samples.
Tolkien’s health was poor again in February, and he was given three weeks’ leave during term-time to recover. He and Christopher spent some of it in Brighton. The remainder of that academic year was again a busy one, filled with committees and negotiations over lectureships and readerships, and lectures and supervisions and associated whatnot. A major distraction was the introduction, at last, of the ‘English Prelim’, a dedicated First Public Examination that would allow undergraduates to read exclusively for English for the whole of their Oxford career. It was over two decades since it had first been mooted. Tolkien had been a member of the English Faculty committee charged with devising the syllabus for the ‘Prelim’, and with negotiating its approval by the University; they had managed successfully to avoid the suggested imposition of additional optional subjects (philosophy and modern languages) that would have diluted its critical and philological character. This was a minor triumph, perhaps, but also (and inevitably) a source of extra work, not least in examining.
II – Almost done?
As the long vacation started, Tolkien made plans to split his time between Oxford and his son Michael’s house in Woodcote (Michael was now teaching there at the Oratory School, which had moved from Caversham during wartime3), where he hoped to write. Unwin sent him more sample illustrations by Cosman for Farmer Giles; Tolkien disliked them, and said so at length. He was by now transparently frustrated by what he saw as Unwin’s foot-dragging over the book. Unwin started to look for another illustrator.
Tolkien spent some time at Woodcote in late July and early August; in mid-August, when Michael went on holiday, he went there for a full month to try to finish The Lord of the Rings. There, at Payables Farm, between 14 August and 14 September, he completed a draft of Book VI. Soon afterwards, the academic year began again. The complete work was revised, and typed up, by October 1949; Tolkien commented:
this university business of earning one’s living by teaching, delivering philological lectures, and daily attendance at ‘boards’ and other talkmeetings, interferes sadly with serious work.4
Because he could not afford a professional typist, he typed the whole book himself, twice; some passages were done and redone multiple times. He mostly worked
on my bed in the attic of the tiny terrace-house to which war had exiled us from the house in which my family had grown up.5
The intervening year did not pass without incident, naturally; Tolkien was still in poor health, and much burdened by administrative tasks. He asked about the possibility of a sabbatical leave, perhaps including the Trinity Term that year; the Registrar seems to have misunderstood an enquiry as a request, and arranged for him to have the term off. There was too much pressing work to hand, Tolkien decided, to allow his original plan (which had been to request both Trinity and the following term off), so instead he proposed (after telling the Registrar of the misunderstanding) to ask for the following two terms, Michaelmas 1949 and Hilary 1950, instead. This was granted.
At the end of January, Christopher was accepted as a probationary B.Litt. student. His supervisor, who was not appointed until December, was his father’s former pupil Gabriel Turville-Petre, now Reader in Icelandic. Turville-Petre and Christopher collaborated on an edition of Heiðreks Saga (perhaps the most archaic and interesting of the Norse fornaldarsǫgur, the ‘sagas of ancient times’). At the end of February, Tolkien went to Downside for a rest.
The chances of The Lord of the Rings being ever published improved slightly that March, when paper was no longer rationed, although it was not yet abundantly available.
Tolkien spent a fortnight that summer in the Irish Free State, as an external examiner for the National University. This was his first journey abroad since 1917; getting a passport was troublesome, owing to his having been born in South Africa and some of his family papers being lost. The Irish trip became almost an annual event for the next decade, usually supplemented by an additional visit in early autumn.6 He grew to like Ireland, although he found the Irish language, after several attempts to learn it, wholly intractable. The financial imperatives for this additional examining work had clearly not diminished, even though his two oldest children were no longer a charge on him; medical bills for himself and for Edith only grew with age and debility.
He began gathering material for appendices to The Lord of the Rings (which seem to have been a foreseen part of the book even at this stage), and wrote a foreword, dedicating the work to the Inklings (he later added his children also).7 Calendars, annals, family trees, linguistic essays, accounts of scripts and runes, synoptic chronologies of the narrative: all of these, together with some straight historical narrative, were begun and in some cases highly elaborated to round out the story, which, now, was in almost its familiar form. Work on this ancillary material stretched into 1950.
III – Teeth, and other things
In the meantime, another problem was added to Tolkien’s litany of physical woes: his teeth. They had been identified as a problem by his doctors as early as October 1947. In February 1949, the enquiry about a sabbatical mentioned that it would be partly to write, but also to have his teeth, ‘which are said to be poisoning me’, drawn. In the event, as we have seen, his leave was postponed, and his teeth were left until April of the next year, when in a series of procedures they were all removed. This may seem a mildly shocking procedure to twenty-first-century sensibilities, but we should remember that dental health was until the last half-century chronically bad, and comprehensive tooth-drawing was seen as the cure for any number of conditions even when the teeth in question were not (as they seem to have been here) thoroughly rotten (my own father, for instance, born when Tolkien was thirty-six, had a half-set of false teeth from (I think) his late forties). Tolkien was now fitted with a set of false teeth, which for the next quarter-century he used as an intermittent prop or physical distracter (even if they were prone to come loose during ‘the excitements of rhetoric’). They were, for instance, in later decades sometimes passed to inattentive shopkeepers along with money (or so at least Humphrey Carpenter tells us, although I confess to finding the notion a faintly revolting one8). He suffered much from throat problems, with frequent bouts of laryngitis making lecturing often difficult; over the next decade he several times had to postpone or cancel lectures, or radio talks, because of the state of his voice. In fact, as Tolkien approached his seventh decade (he was fifty-seven, remember, when The Lord of the Rings was finished) his habitual proneness to physical complaints grew; lumbago, arthritis, fibrositis, rheumatism, sciatica: all feature in his letters as reasons for the non-completion of work, or its chronic postponement. Many of these ailments were, in fact, brought on by habitual sitting for long hours at a desk writing. We may in part agree with Rayner Unwin that these excuses were ‘a defence against his failure to achieve some rashly-promised goal’,9 but we should remember that, although Tolkien and especially Edith were frequent invalids, and probably made much of their medical aff
airs, there were for both of them genuine physical complaints that increasingly impeded them as they grew older. We should also remember that Tolkien’s long bout of trench fever had, it seems clear, permanently damaged his health, and made him less able to resist other things, and more heavily burdened by them when they came.
There was also, undoubtedly, a psychological and even moral aspect to some at least of Tolkien’s illnesses. George Sayer quotes something Tolkien said in commendation of his doctor, ‘Humphrey’ Havard:
I told him that I was feeling depressed, so depressed that I hadn’t been to Mass for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t sleeping well either. He said I didn’t need drugs, what I needed was to go to Confession. He was at my house at 7:30 the following morning to take me to Confession and Mass. Of course I was completely cured. Now that’s the sort of doctor to have!10
IV – An end to Chaucer, and to children
Kenneth Sisam retired from the OUP at the end of 1948, aged only sixty-two. He had continued to write scholarly articles in the intervals of his office work, and began now to collect them for republication. An impressive collection, Studies in the History of Old English Literature, appeared in 1953, the same year as a seminal British Academy paper on Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies was published.11 Sisam was elected to the Academy in 1941; Tolkien never was. Sisam’s sponsors included R.W. Chambers and Sir William Craigie. Some might have observed that Sisam, a full-time publisher in habitually poor health, had managed to write and publish more on Old English than his successful rival for the Anglo-Saxon chair had in a quarter-century of tenure. A dozen years later, aged seventy-seven, Sisam published The Structure of Beowulf, a short but pithy work which included some trenchant criticism of Tolkien’s famous lecture. ‘As an account of what the poem means to Professor Tolkien, or of the way in which he, as a storyteller, would treat the plot, I have no criticism of it,’ he declared, before going on to dissent strongly from pretty much all Tolkien had said about the poem’s construction.12 He also pointedly omits Tolkien’s lecture from a preliminary footnote listing the most useful books on the poem.13 Sisam was not without detractors, however; James Wyllie, sometime editor of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and a long-term collaborator on the OED, wrote a twelve-book epic poem in which Sisam featured as the Antichrist, plagiarizing his scholarly articles from lecture notes stolen from his old master Napier. Wyllie, to be fair, was at the time quite mad.
The old project of the Clarendon Chaucer was resurrected after Sisam’s retirement. Nothing had been done to it since Tolkien had set it aside in 1932; Sisam had suggested it be taken over by a younger or more industrious or less busy scholar, first (before his untimely death) E.V. Gordon, then Tolkien’s former student, J.A.W. Bennett; but neither, in the event, had taken it over.14 Now that Sisam had retired, his successor, D.M. Davin, approached Tolkien; Tolkien said he was happy to give the OUP the extensive materials that he still retained (galley proofs with handwritten revisions), for someone else to complete. He did not do this at once, though, probably because the material was not ready to hand.
By now, Priscilla, the youngest Tolkien child, had gone up to Lady Margaret Hall to read English (she matriculated in October 1948); she moved into college rooms, and thus Tolkien and Edith were alone for the first time since 1917.
Chapter 11 – Finished, at Last
I – ‘His Tree, finished’
In some ways, The Lord of the Rings underwent something of the same transformation as The Hobbit; as Tolkien wrote, the story became increasingly drawn into the web of stories that was the Silmarillion material, which became, in fact, the ancient history of the world in which Tolkien’s characters moved. The Lord of the Rings became the elegiac conclusion to Middle Earth’s long history, the final episode in the gradual fading of elvish things from the world. Here, as in The Hobbit, allusions throughout the text and appendices give an impression of ‘depth’, only to a far greater extent.
One critical difference between The Lord of the Rings and the earlier Silmarillion stories is the presence of hobbits. They function not only as a vehicle for Tolkien to express his love for a vanished (and idealized) rural England (parochial, smug and ignorant of its neighbours, but also rooted in history and good sense, with a slow-burning indomitable courage and, when awoken, a deep sensitivity to the heart-breaking melancholy of the world’s beauty and perishability), but also as a ‘way in’ for the reader unfamiliar with the high literary modes of romance, myth and epic. Tolkien’s story values deeply unfashionable qualities (nobility, loyalty, self-sacrifice, ceremoniousness) which an audience accustomed only to ‘realistic’ novels typically find baffling or repellent; but we see these qualities, mostly, through the eyes of the hobbits, whose initial reactions may mirror our own, but who allow us gradually to enter into these themes, as they do, without cynicism or irony. The hobbits provide a focus for the narrative that mediates between our normal reactions to events and the high style appropriate to an earlier literary age, which Tolkien, boldly, wanted to revive.
As in The Hobbit, but on a greater scale, Tolkien drew on his professional interests for The Lord of the Rings (the Rohirrim, for instance, are an idealized portrait of early Mercians). However, although it is possible to discern sources for elements in The Lord of the Rings, it is not necessarily helpful to itemize them, as if that explained how they work in the finished book; Tolkien integrated elements from a wide variety of sources both literary and personal into a story that functions on its own terms. Thinking that by identifying the source of a particular theme or passage or event, we have thus understood or explained it, is to fall into exactly the same mistake Tolkien complained of in the critics of Beowulf. Not that this activity is without interest, or wholly unprofitable: it is intriguing and often illuminating to trace the workings of Tolkien’s mind, or at least to note the disparate sources he drew on.1 But it does not necessarily tell us anything about The Lord of the Rings, or somehow reduce Tolkien’s achievement in writing it. The art in making a book, especially one of this length, is shown exactly in the sublimation of its component elements into a new thing, a story; and it is only this new thing, this story, that may properly be judged. If it moves, delights, instructs, enthrals, seizes and compels us, it does so as itself, not as an assemblage of component parts, an analogue in words of Dr Frankenstein’s monster, more or less competently riveted together from the hacked or discarded limbs of other entities. Rather, a story is (or should be) a new being, with its own life and motive power, not one borrowed or compounded from others.
As with the best of his legendarium, Tolkien felt that he was not engaged in a process of pure literary invention, but ‘recording what was already “there”, somewhere’.2
II – Authorship and its discontents
After some months of crossed purposes and misplaced letters, Tolkien finally went to London to look at samples by potential illustrators for Farmer Giles. He settled on an unknown artist, Pauline Baynes, who had been chart-making for the Admiralty and had produced for Unwin some delicate work in the style of medieval manuscript marginalia. Tolkien was delighted by her drawings; her work on Farmer Giles led directly to her most famous work, for (of all people) C.S. Lewis.
Lewis had been unstinting in his encouragement and praise of The Lord of the Rings as it was read to the Inklings, or passed to him privately; Tolkien however was less enthusiastic about Lewis’s own ‘big book’, the sixteenth-century volume of the Oxford History of English Literature (known as OHEL, pronounced ‘oh, hell’), which was also slowly gestating during these years. It was finally published in 1954, and runs to fully 700 pages. When the series had originally been mooted in 1935, Tolkien (we may remember) had been asked to write the volume on Old English literature, but had turned it down owing to lack of time. Tolkien took strong objection to Lewis’s estimation of St Thomas More, and to other aspects of the book which he felt illustrated Lewis’s aboriginal anti-Catholicism. Lewis criticized More both as a stylist and, on the basis of his polemical writings,
as an example of Christian charity. This must have offended Tolkien not merely on purely denominational grounds, but also as a deliberate contradiction of the high place accorded More on both counts by R.W. Chambers, who, although an Anglican, had in various studies of More’s life and works done much to advance his cause for canonization. More and John Fisher were both canonized in 1935; Chambers, in recognition of his work, received from Pope Pius XI a letter and a signed photograph, which he treasured.
Tolkien’s opinion of Lewis’s OHEL seems to have changed over time; a decade or more later, he wrote that it was ‘a great book, the only one of his that gives me unalloyed pleasure’.3 We do not, to be fair, know the full context of this statement, which is certainly at odds with his estimates elsewhere; but perhaps time and circumstance had covered over the more (to Tolkien) painful parts of the work. It is true that Lewis’s OHEL is a very fine and readable book, which bears revisiting more than do most comparable things.
Lewis had also begun his Narnia stories for children, and read parts to Tolkien; Tolkien detested them. He deplored their eclecticism (Father Christmas appears alongside the fauns and satyrs of Greek myth, talking animals, and children straight from E. Nesbit) bound together only by Lewis’s own taste, and what was to him the evident haste and carelessness of the writing. Tolkien said, to a former pupil who had also seen the stories, ‘It really won’t do, you know!’ Ironically, it can surely be contended that, in many ways, The Hobbit was equally eclectic in its sources (Eddas, William Morris, Dr Dolittle, The Marvellous Land of Snergs); but perhaps Tolkien may be allowed to have integrated them better, and also Tolkien’s taste was more homogeneous than Lewis’s. Nevertheless, Lewis published the Narnia stories, finely illustrated by Pauline Baynes, with great success. The contrast with Tolkien’s own slow and laborious methods of composition was surely a painful one. Lewis was undoubtedly disappointed and hurt by Tolkien’s reaction; he had, after all, been unfailingly supportive of Tolkien’s writing and scrupulously constructive in his criticism of it. To be faced, in his turn, with flat condemnation impatient of any mitigation or suggested improvement was surely hard. Lewis was, moreover, himself diffident about the quality of the Narnia stories, and might have abandoned them outright had he not been encouraged to persevere by Tolkien’s former pupil Roger Lancelyn Green – the very man to whom Tolkien had been so forthright about his own views of Narnia.
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