Lewis seems to have read some of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Tolkien, perhaps in company with others, early in 1949. Five of the Narnia books were written in a burst between the summer of 1948 and March 1951; he began The Magician’s Nephew thereafter, but ran into difficulties and put it aside for a year or more. He then, early in 1953, wrote The Last Battle, before returning to The Magician’s Nephew later that year. It is the most personal of the books – Digory Kirke is an almost exact figure of Lewis in age and setting, from the time when Lewis’s mother, like Digory’s, was dying of cancer. Digory brings back a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides and effects her miraculous cure. There is something almost inexpressibly painful and touching about this; a middle-aged man reaches back to heal, at least in fiction, the overwhelming grief of his childhood, when ‘all settled happiness … disappeared from my life’4. Tolkien of all people would surely have recognized this; but probably by this time he had made his feelings about Narnia so clear that Lewis did not bother to show the story to him. Tolkien had however recommended Lewis approach Pauline Baynes to illustrate the books; her pictures are, for many readers, as memorable as the text. The Narnia books were published, one a year, between 1950 and 1956. Lewis had also begun to write his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, in 1948; it was finished seven years later. It is a fine and evocative book, although hardly an exhaustively honest one; indeed, its elisions and partialities are such that one who knew Lewis well, his doctor Robert Havard, in a letter to another of Lewis’s friends renamed it ‘Suppressed by Jack’.5 A recent biographer has argued, though, that the driving force of these suppressions – notably about Janie Moore, his wartime service and his father’s death – was not dishonesty so much as pain.6 This may well be partly true in the last instance, and mainly in the second; in the first case, however, it looks like special pleading.
Lewis’s academic career, however, was not prospering at Oxford. In 1948, two years after he missed out on the Merton chair, the same had happened with the newly created Goldsmith’s Chair of English Literature, which, although Lewis was considered, went instead to Lord David Cecil. In early 1951, Lewis stood for the Professorship of Poetry, which uniquely amongst Oxford chairs is directly elected by graduates of the University. After vigorous campaigning on both sides, Lewis lost narrowly to his near-namesake, the Anglo-Irish Communist poet Cecil Day Lewis. Part of this might have been a hangover from an unfortunate episode a dozen years before, when Lewis had masterminded the election to the same chair of his friend Adam Fox, Magdalen’s Dean of Divinity (chaplain), who was an amateur poet but otherwise little qualified for the position, against a pair of distinguished literary critics who had also been put up for the post. Fox, so the story goes, had remarked dismissively on one of the other candidates at breakfast at Magdalen, saying, ‘they might as well elect me!’; to which Lewis answered, ‘Well, we will.’ This sort of thing, in Oxford, tends to be long remembered and (in some quarters) resented. Tolkien had, in a letter of June 1938 to Stanley Unwin, applauded Fox’s election as one of ‘our literary club of practising poets’.7 Over time, his views changed; in 1973, he voted against John Wain, who was elected, on the grounds that ‘It is high time the chair came back to what it was originally intended for, scholars interested in poetry, but not practising poets, who are not in general very good lecturers on the subject.’8 As well as being disappointed at Fox’s tenure, Tolkien is also on record as attending at least one lecture by Robert Graves, Professor of Poetry in 1961–5, ‘the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard’.9
The Thursday evening meetings of the Inklings seem to have come to an end at this time; in his diary for 27 October 1949, Warnie Lewis recorded ‘No one turned up.’ Various theories have been advanced to explain this: as the group had grown and changed over the years, its original focus (on reading out works in progress) had been diluted, particularly under pressure from the corrosive criticism of Hugo Dyson; Charles Williams’s death had removed another prop, whilst the general amelioration of social life as the austerities of wartime gradually receded may have been another factor. Newer members had as we have seen been introduced, and the old intimacy receded. Tensions between Tolkien and Lewis could not have helped, although Lewis remained a strong advocate of The Lord of the Rings. Morning sessions over beer carried on for some years, though; but these were necessarily confined to general conversation, and reading works aloud was precluded. This meant, in effect, that the Inklings was no longer a practical ‘writers’ group’ so much as a collection of like-minded friends who met for talk. This had an inevitable effect on Tolkien’s writing. Reading his work aloud to an (at least in theory) sympathetic audience had been an important part of his self-confidence as a writer, and also a reassurance as to the quality of his work. Without these things, he was increasingly liable not merely to selfdoubt (this seems an inevitable if thankfully intermittent part of writing anything) but also to self-doubt that became debilitating.
III – But who would publish?
The Lord of the Rings had been written in response to Stanley Unwin’s request for a sequel, which Unwin had hoped might appear within a year or two of The Hobbit, and be of comparable size and tone. Now, twelve years later, it was actually finished, and looked very different from what Unwin had expected, Tolkien needed to get it published. It took five years for this to happen.
Late in 1949, Unwin finally published Farmer Giles of Ham. After agreeing to ask Pauline Baynes to act as illustrator, Unwin had sent her a typescript of the book, which got lost in the post, or was mispacked, but at any rate disappeared for a month. In the interim, he sent her another copy, which she read and enjoyed; she then set to work. She sent a large number of illustrations to Unwin that March; Unwin forwarded them to Tolkien, who was delighted. The text was in proof by April, but Tolkien was bothered by conferences and examination setting, and took a month to return the text with corrections. By mid-June details of illustrations and dust-jacket were agreed; Tolkien sent back corrected proofs in July. In mid-September, Unwin sent Tolkien an advance copy and his £25 publication fee. Farmer Giles appeared in bookshops on 20 October.
The book sold only slowly, and Tolkien was not convinced of Unwin’s enthusiasm for his work, still less for the now-finished Lord of the Rings. Increasingly, Tolkien wanted The Silmarillion published at the same time; only thus, he reckoned, could the mass of allusions within the text to his legendarium be made sense of.
It was against this background of unhappiness with Unwin that Fr Gervase Mathew had introduced Tolkien to Milton Waldman, a Catholic who worked as an adviser to the publisher Collins. Late in 1949, Waldman was given the completed Lord of the Rings to read. In the new year, he told Tolkien he wanted to publish both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion if Tolkien had no ‘moral or legal’ commitment to Unwin. Collins were quietly eager to obtain the rights to The Hobbit; Waldman baited his hook by telling Tolkien that, since Collins were stationers and printers as well as publishers, they had access to larger supplies of now heavily rationed paper than did Unwin, and so might more calmly entertain publishing an unusually long book.
Late in February 1950, Tolkien asked Stanley Unwin to publish both books, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings together; Unwin told him it would be difficult and expensive, but not impossible. At the start of April, he sent Tolkien a copy of a report written by his son, Rayner, who had seen The Lord of the Rings but not The Silmarillion. Rayner recommended incorporating anything essential from The Silmarillion into The Lord of the Rings, if necessary by cutting material from the latter; or, if Tolkien would not entertain this, publishing The Lord of the Rings and, ‘after having a second look at it’, ‘dropping’ The Silmarillion. Tolkien was furious, and was baffled that Unwin had thought showing him Rayner’s letter might be helpful. He insisted Unwin answer his flat question: would he publish The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion together, both uncut? Not unnaturally (since he had never seen a completed typescript of the latter �
�� in fact, one did not then exist) Unwin refused, as Tolkien must have known he would, in a letter dated 17 April 1950. Tolkien then approached Milton Waldman, who invited him to London to discuss publication. Waldman bluntly told him The Lord of the Rings was too long. Nevertheless, Tolkien still meant to publish both works together.
In May 1950, there was another disruption, when Tolkien, Edith and Priscilla moved again, from Manor Road to a bigger college house in Holywell Street.
IV – The Silmarillion renewed
If Tolkien was to hope to publish The Silmarillion, it needed to be set in order and, for the most part, largely revised, both in light of how his mythology had developed since the previous draft, and also to make sure it was congruent with The Lord of the Rings. His earlier revisions in 1937 had not covered the whole text, and had been abandoned late in 1937 when, as Tolkien understood it, the book had been rejected by Unwin. Typically, Tolkien did not begin by completing the earlier revision, but started again at the beginning of the work, and reached roughly the same point as he had in 1937 before, some time in 1951, again laying the work aside. He also revised the two sets of Annals (of Beleriand and of Valinor), now renamed the Annals of Aman and the Grey Annals. At the same time, he began to rewrite the three Great Tales of the legendarium on ampler scale, from which, he planned, the latter parts of the eventual Silmarillion would derive.
For the story of Beren and Lúthien, he had already started, in 1949 or so, to rewrite the old Lay of Leithian; the rewritten text forms no more than one-sixth of the original four thousand lines of rhyming couplets; and even that, we should remember, had not completed the story. At the same time, he began a prose version of the same tale; it did not proceed very far. In 1951, he started an extended prose saga of The Fall of Gondolin; sadly, he took the story only as far as Tuor’s arrival at the hidden city, and never wrote the planned account of its fall. John Garth has pointed out that this text specifies Tuor’s age when he begins his quest: twenty-three, the exact age Tolkien was when he joined the Army in 1915.10
He also began a long and ambitious prose version of the Túrin story, the Narn i Chîn Húrin (‘Tale of the Children of Húrin’). The Narn drew heavily on the alliterative verse Lay of the 1920s and 1930s; indeed, the Narn itself (Tolkien feigned) was a translation of a text (by a Mannish poet, Dírhaval) composed in an Elvish verse mode (Minlamad thent/ estent) designed to be spoken, not sung, and whose notional form, it has been plausibly argued, is supposed to be an Elvish alliterative line. The prose Narn as we have it, then, would be rather like Tolkien’s prose translation of Beowulf.11 The Narn, too, was set aside incomplete. All three of the long versions of the Great Tales, then, were stalled in their revision; this meant that, in effect, the last third or so of the Silmarillion text was also stalled, since Tolkien intended to derive it from the longer Tales.
There is also mention of a fourth Great Tale, of Eärendil the Wanderer; this seems to have been merely projected rather than actually written down even in draft (the same, as we saw, had been true of the cognate text in the Book of Lost Tales).12
The revisions and new compositions of this time, written in the immediate aftermath of The Lord of the Rings, show Tolkien at the top of his literary game: vigorous, eloquent, fertile of imagination and prolific in human sympathy.
He had also begun a revision of his creation narrative, Ainulindalë, perhaps as early as 1946; certainly at that time he had experimented with a wholly new concept, incorporating not the naïve ‘flat world’ of his original but a cosmologically more accurate ‘round world’. In the event, however, he stayed with the ‘flat world’ version, although incorporating much of the newer material from the ‘round world’ text. Unusually for Tolkien, he had shown both variants to Katharine Farrer, who much preferred the ‘flat world’ original. It may not be wholly fanciful to see in this hesitation over what had hitherto been a wholly uncontroverted part of the legendarium a hint of the doubts over fundamentals of his work as it had grown up that would, in coming years, increasingly paralyse Tolkien’s invention. At this juncture, however, he was still confident enough in his capacity to produce a series of fine manuscript versions of the renewed Ainulindalë; although these, inevitably, later became the vehicle for disfiguring revisions and interpolations.
A fascinating text from (probably) the early 1950s is Dangweth Pengoloð (‘The Answers of Pengoloð’), presented as answers given by Pengoloð to specifically linguistic questions posed by Ælfwine: why, if the elves are immortal and changeless, do their languages show change and variation? It stands, in effect, as a manifesto of ‘art language’ – the Noldor (later Ñoldor, or Ngoldor) are presented as a race of philologists, and change in Elvish (or at least in Quenya) as conscious and patterned, illustrating Elvish linguistic taste as much, or more, than the familiar forms of historical change seen in human languages.13 This trope of the Noldor as philologists was taken up again in the late text The Shibboleth of Fëanor.14
The major substantive changes to the Silmarillion text, however, were not simple authorial perfectionism or ‘niggling’: they necessarily followed on the enormous expansion of the history and geography of the legendarium consequent on the incorporation of the Lord of the Rings into the context of the Elvish tongues. This meant that the in some ways naïve geography of The Hobbit, as modified and enlarged in its sequel, now had to supersede whatever notions Tolkien had previously had for the ‘eastern extension’ of the lands beyond Beleriand. When The Hobbit’s map was drawn, Tolkien had taken no especial care to integrate it with existing concepts of the legendarium; these emerged in The Hobbit only incidentally during its writing as, at first, mere ‘colour and texture’. Now, however, this was by default a map of the world of his legendary. Most importantly, since The Lord of the Rings map shows the state of affairs after the destruction of Beleriand, and does not correspond to historical European geography, it was no longer possible simply to equate the island of Britain with one of the fragments of fallen Beleriand. At a stroke, this severed the strongest surviving link between the legendarium and English legend: the old equations between the places of legend and the towns of Tolkien’s youth could no longer stand. If Ælfwine and his voyage were to be retained as framework for the stories, they would need to be given a new and wholly different context. These problems were all of a piece with questions of the plausibility of ‘flat-world’ mythology, and the post-Númenórean disjuncture of straight road and bent road to Elvenhome. Tolkien experimented with schemes attributing the ‘erroneous’ (i.e. ‘flat world’) cosmologies to human as opposed to Elvish traditions, and this led to further questioning of his established narrative framework for the Silmarillion stories. If some Númenórean influence or transmission was required to explain the very shape of the stories, they could no longer simply be told to Ælfwine by the Eressëan elves, but would have to represent (perhaps) traditions of Gondor.
These were tricky but resolvable questions of textual transmission, matters of the sort that Tolkien in his professional life was well able to explain; coming up with a plausible vehicle for the tales’ transmission was not of itself an impossible difficulty. The issue of ‘round world’ versus ‘flat world’ was of a wholly different order. There were essentially two possible solutions: one, which is implicit behind The Lord of the Rings, has a previously flat world made round after the Downfall of Númenor. This leaves unresolved wider cosmological questions: was the original world a small bounded universe, that subsequently was changed to be the vast field of stars and galaxies known to modern science? This sort of uncomfortable question led Tolkien to posit his second alternative: that the world had been round from the beginning, and was known by the elves to be so (otherwise, they would be very poor observers and would have had to have been misled by the Valar), but their traditions had become garbled and confused when passed through generations of men, and thus the flat world was devised. This was unsatisfactory on various grounds; but, all else aside, it was clearly and immediately fatal to what had
become the cardinal myth of the legendarium, that of the Light of the Two Trees, as preserved unstained only in the Silmarils, which stood before and superior to the lesser lights of sun and moon, which were mere fruits of the Two Trees. If the world was round from the beginning, amidst a cosmos of stars and a solar system like the one known to modern science, none of this could stand, and the whole fabric of the legendary would unravel. We have seen Tolkien dissuaded by Katharine Farrer from making such a radical shift; but throughout the 1950s, he searched for a way out of this dilemma.
One effect of these uncertainties was to loosen the attribution of these texts to what we might call the Ælfwine–Pengolodh tradition, and thus further dissolve the old connexion between the legendarium and England. Nevertheless, Ælfwine was still supposed the translator of the Narn, and had made his version in Eressea, although the Narn itself was attributed to a Mannish poet, Dírhaval. Here there seems to be no supposition of an intermediate Númenórean phase in the transmission of the text, which was reckoned one of the major parts of the Silmarillion complex. Clearly Tolkien at this time was hesitating between different frameworks to account for the existence of the Silmarillion texts; he does not seem to have made any final decision.
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