Warnie marked his brother’s election with a drinking spree, which led to another stay in a nursing home and postponement of their summer holiday to Ireland.
Although Lewis still lived in Oxford at the weekends, this meant that he saw less of Tolkien, although their days of very close friendship had been over for a decade. There was also, as we shall see, a woman.
For the moment, though, Lewis was strongly encouraging of Tolkien’s efforts to get The Lord of the Rings into print.
Chapter 13 – ‘My heart, to be shot at’
I – ‘The long-delayed appearance’
Between July 1953 and mid-1955, Tolkien was busy with proofs of The Lord of the Rings, which (he had conceded, reluctantly) should be published serially, in three volumes, although it was not in any sense a ‘trilogy’ as normally understood. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published on 29 July 1954, and the second, The Two Towers, on 11 November that same year. There was then a delay of almost a year before the final volume was published, as Tolkien scrambled to complete the Appendices which, in the absence of the full Silmarillion, he saw as the irreducible minimum of additional information needed to make the book comprehensible. It seems that, at about this time, he started Tal-Elmar, a story of the interaction between Númenor and ‘Wild Men’ in the Dark Years of the Second Age; presumably it arose in the course of his work on what became Appendix B. It did not proceed beyond its first chapter.1 Inevitably, he produced more material than there was space for in the Appendices, and a good deal had to be dropped. It included a reworking of The Hobbit, eventually published (in Unfinished Tales) as The Quest of Erebor, and other material collected in volume 12 of The History of Middle Earth. Some of the texts in that volume show signs of furious compression and recasting, rewriting material against time when elements of it were still inchoate or shifting: ‘the situation was indeed afflicting’;2 Tolkien also abandoned a promised index. Finally, on 20 October 1955, the last volume, The Return of the King, was published. The following day, Tolkien gave the first of a series of annual lectures on ‘English and Welsh’; he mentioned ‘the long-delayed appearance of a large “work” … which contains, in the way of presentation that I find most natural, much of what I personally have received from the study of things Celtic’.3
Tolkien was apprehensive: ‘I have exposed my heart to be shot at.’4 Despite Tolkien’s apprehension, and his publisher’s caution, The Lord of the Rings was a success from the start; when cheap American editions of it appeared in the mid-1960s, his fame became global.
Unwin initially printed 3,000 copies of the first volume and 3,250 of the second, and a further 1,500 and 1,000 copies of each which were sent to America to be bound and issued by Houghton Mifflin; these initial impressions sold out in six weeks, so for the third volume, the run was increased to 7,000 copies with 5,000 unbound for the American market.
II – Bafflement and praise
In the manner of publishers, Unwin had sent proof copies of the first volume to several well-disposed writers, and had elicited from them remarks, excerpts of which were used as ‘blurb’ on the inside of the dust-jacket. Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis were all fulsome in praise, citing Spenser, Malory, Ariosto, and claiming Tolkien had outdone them all. Lewis followed this with a review in Time and Tide on 14 August, in which he stated, ‘Nothing quite like it was ever done before.’
Most of the initial review notices were, in fact, baffled. Alfred Duggan, Lord Curzon’s half-Brazilian stepson, reformed drunk, pedestrian historical novelist and friend to Evelyn Waugh, was given The Fellowship of the Ring to review, anonymously, by the TLS; he praised its ‘sound prose and rare imagination’ but thought its moral framework simplistic and unexamined, and its plot unbalanced; his, or anyway the TLS’s, opinion improved as succeeding volumes appeared. There was much dismissive reference to schoolboy literature amongst the more selfconsciously literary reviewers. The American littérateur Edmund Wilson, writing in the left-wing (and anti-Catholic) magazine The Nation, attributed any success the book (‘these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash’) might enjoy to the ‘life-long appetite … for juvenile trash’ he thought especially characteristic of the British public. Otherwise, he wrote, ‘Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form.’5
Some of Tolkien’s colleagues at Oxford were privately, or not so privately, suspicious that he had written The Lord of the Rings in time that would have been better spent on proper scholarship. C.L. Wrenn, who was a fellow Catholic, and had been a family friend as well as a professional colleague since the 1930s, held Tolkien in the highest regard as a scholar (according to one of his pupils, Wrenn reckoned him the only man of genius in the English School6). He was correspondingly shocked by The Lord of the Rings, ‘the fall of a philological into “Trivial literature”’7. Other scholars agreed: Ida Gordon, widow of his sometime Leeds colleague E.V. Gordon and herself a considerable philologist, wrote, ‘I have very little interest in the Tolkien of The Lord of the Rings. In my opinion that side of him robbed us of a very fine medieval scholar.’8 This was not an isolated view; when I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1980s, my tutor – a humane and diligent scholar of Old and Middle English, a published poet in Welsh and English, and a Christian – told me it was a tremendous shame Tolkien had spent so much time writing fairy stories rather than making proper editions of Middle English texts. The Scots academic and novelist J.I.M. Stewart’s five-book sequence A Staircase in Surrey features a ‘Professor Timbermill’, author of The Magic Quest: ‘A notable scholar, it seems. Unchallenged in his field. But he ran off the rails somehow, and produced a long mad book – a kind of apocalyptic romance.’9 Stewart was an English don at Oxford from 1949 onwards, and this may be taken as an accurate pastiche of contemporary Oxford gossip about Tolkien. In a letter of 1956, Tolkien said, ‘anyway the cry is “now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years”. So the screw is on for many things of a more professional kind long overdue. Alas! I like them both, but have only one man’s time.’10
III – The fruits of research?
It is indisputably true that Tolkien was intellectually capable of writing a big and important book on English philology, and never did so; and that the vast intellectual efforts and energies expended on his legendarium must in part be to blame. Naturally, his academic contemporaries and colleagues noticed.
It is notable, for instance, that he was never elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), unlike C.S. Lewis (elected in 1955, in the afterglow of OHEL), or (say) Craigie, W.P. Ker, Henry Bradley, Joseph Wright, Chambers, Sisam, Dorothy Whitelock, F.P. Wilson even (not to mention great panjandrums like Stenton and Mortimer Wheeler). Lewis had given the Academy’s Shakespeare Lecture in 1942; soon afterwards, he wrote to one of the Anglican nuns at Wantage, ‘The British Academy made a v. stupid audience compared with your young ladies! They were all the sort of people whom one often sees getting out of taxis and going into big doorways and wonders who on earth they are – all those beards and double chins and fur collars and lorgnettes. Now I know.’11 Whilst election to that august body is doubtless governed by coteries and dilections which the uninitiated can hardly suspect, it represents, in some sense, the verdict of Tolkien’s academic peers, and a verdict of, if not quite failure, then certainly disappointed promise. FBAs have typically produced at least one great book, or ‘work’, or have one in the offing; no one could detect Tolkien doing this.
It would of course be wrong to suppose that Tolkien alone was responsible, by neglect, for the decline of philology as an academic subject; although one could argue that, had he devoted the energies spent on The Lord of the Rings to writing, say, a great study of English medieval language and literature, he might have done something to arrest or slow that decline. But one suspects that the tide of academic fashion, in English departments at least, was running strongly away from the sort of close, textually rigorous, historically based wo
rk Tolkien thought essential, and any efforts by one man could not have been permanently effective. On another level, though, exactly the reverse is true: outside the narrow compass of university English faculties, Tolkien’s success has been remarkable and seems likely to be enduring (he is repeatedly, and by a long chalk, voted the ‘best author’ in any number of popular polls). What marks him off from his hordes of imitators is, precisely, philology: the fact that his imaginary world is deeply rooted in language, in names and words with their own inner consistency, meaning and resonance, which have in fact arguably given rise to that world, is in the best and broadest sense a philological one, and is (I would suggest) the key to his success.
It may be worth expanding on this point. It was Tolkien’s contention, and corresponds (I maintain) with the experience of his readers, that one of the most characteristic and compelling features of his books is their ability to evoke a palpable sense of untold stories and unexplored vistas, of landscapes glimpsed at the edges of other foregrounded pictures, that are at once suggestive, enticing and unbreachably distant: we desire to go there (to hear the story), and at the same time know it is, for now, unbearably beyond our reach – like the luminous countries glimpsed through windows in fifteenth-century Italian paintings. The means Tolkien uses to achieve this effect are, most usually, names: unglossed but resonant, with a felt (because real) internal consistency and meaning. This is the fruit of the linguistic background of his tales; the languages, he insisted, presupposed a world they described, and so by devising the one he necessarily created the other. This is exactly the function that technical philology had for Tolkien and for scholars like him: words and phrases implied a reality, a world inhabited by their speakers and best described by these very words.
Whilst philology was defeated in the academy, then, outside, amongst people who read books for enjoyment, it has won a stupendous victory, although, since philology is not now a familiar scholarly discipline, probably most of Tolkien’s readers are unaware of it.12 This does mean, of course, that his achievement can probably not now ever be reproduced: there are no more philologists like him, or at least none being produced by today’s universities.
His personal academic achievement is perhaps another matter; whilst it is doubtless true that all but the very best-regulated academic careers (and perhaps even them) are almost necessarily filled with uncompleted projects, Tolkien’s case was an extreme one, although not without parallel. The problem for his colleagues, I have no doubt, is not that he did not finish all the academic work he started (most dons are self-aware enough to know that, in this respect, their own houses are at least partly glass-built), nor even that his hobby was to write fairy tales on a preposterously grand scale, but that he chose, and was able, to finish the second, but not the first; and that his failure to complete (or even properly begin) any large-scale academic work was arguably due precisely to the time and effort he had expended on The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would have been as aware of this as any man alive; it may give us some idea of the courage he showed in finishing and publishing the book, and also of the value he set on it, knowing, as he must have done, that for many even of his friends and allies it would be an end to his academic credibility. There were other factors, too, of course: he was much burdened by teaching and administration, by piece-work persistently taken on to supplement an inadequate salary (inadequate for a father of children, at any rate) and by his own tendency to self-doubt and to distraction. But he had early in his professional career given clear proof he was capable of hard and concentrated work, and of finishing complex work against the odds (his Middle English Vocabulary done for Sisam’s anthology is no negligible piece of work); in middle life, he deployed the same capacity primarily in the service of his imaginative writing. This was on one level a choice, of faërie over scholarship; on another level, being the man he was, he could not have done otherwise.
Failure to be elected to the British Academy was perhaps mildly compensated by his election, in 1957, as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a distinction, as he remarked, rarely accorded to scholars from the ‘language’ side.
Another compensation, it might be thought, was financial: the royalties from The Lord of the Rings were considerable. The punitive tax regime of post-war Britain, however, meant that, until he retired at least, the bulk of Tolkien’s literary earnings were confiscated by the Inland Revenue. He was unlikely, now, ever again to be poor, but he was not exactly rich.
IV – Next, the Jerusalem Bible?
Tolkien contemplated at least one direct sequel to The Lord of the Rings. In the late 1950s, he began The New Shadow, a story of Gondor a hundred years after the Downfall of the Ring; it was abandoned after a single short chapter. Tolkien was understandably depressed at he thought of writing a story which would take as its theme the resurrection of human wickedness (devil-worship, ‘orc cults’ and the like) after its apparent ending and amidst the external trappings of a ‘golden age’. Resolution of such a tale would, he reckoned, be little more than a ‘thriller’, and thus comparatively uninteresting to write.13 There were various abortive proposals for film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings; Tolkien spent some time and effort on these in the decade or so after publication.14
In 1956, preparation began of the Jerusalem Bible, an English version of the great monument of French Biblical scholarship, the Bible de Jérusalem. The general editor of the English version, Fr Alexander Jones of Upholland seminary, assembled a mixed bag of scholars, writers and his own friends and relations (including his young nephew, Fr (later Sir) Anthony Kenny) to produce the text. He approached Tolkien, who agreed to help. Tolkien produced a complete draft of the book of Jonah, although it is unclear how closely the published text reflects his work; he may also have drafted some other texts, but in a more fragmentary form (possibly Job, although the published text is Anthony Kenny’s). Draft texts from original translators were passed to a ‘literary editor’ for polish; the literary editor for the Old Testament was the novelist, translator and popular historian Alan Neame (the New Testament was given to the Benedictine aesthete Sylvester Houédard).15 Neame certainly tinkered extensively with Tolkien’s draft, with mixed results. In the early 2000s, the original publisher of the Jerusalem Bible, Darton, Longman and Todd, mooted an edition of Tolkien’s translation as originally drafted; at a late stage, though, copyright issues prevented its appearing.
In the event, pressure of work meant Tolkien was unable to do as much as he, or Jones, had supposed; at one stage Jones seems to have hoped Tolkien would agree, after his retirement in 1959, to act as literary editor for the whole project, but that scheme came to nothing.
V – Breach with Lewis
There had been growing distance between Tolkien and Lewis since, at least, 1940, when Charles Williams had arrived in Oxford and almost overnight took over Tolkien’s former place as primary focus for Lewis’s enthusiasms. As we have seen, even after Williams’s death, professional matters, not uninfluenced by religious difference, introduced tension between Tolkien and Lewis, and in 1954 Lewis left Oxford altogether. The gradual decay of friendship is one thing; a positive breach is another, and that came with Lewis’s unexpected marriage.
Lewis’s marriage is probably best known now through the sentimentalized version of it offered by the 1993 film Shadowlands; it is not a wholly accurate picture.16 Joy Gresham (née Davidman) had come to England first in August 1952, ostensibly to visit a (woman) penfriend and to finish a book on the Ten Commandments (it appeared, dedicated to Lewis, in 1954, as Smoke on the Mountain; an English edition, with a preface by Lewis, followed in 1955, and sold twice as many copies as the American one). She left her two sons with her husband; a female cousin of hers went to stay with him to help out.
Born in New York in 1915 to non-practising Jewish parents, Joy Davidman had become an atheist and communist; her husband had fought for the Spanish Republic. Around 1946, worn down by her husband’s drinking and affairs, she had experienced a sudden co
nversion to Christianity; she soon discovered Lewis’s apologetic works, and became an ardent fan and, from January 1950, a correspondent. There is some evidence that the real aim of her visit to England was to meet Lewis and, if possible, insert herself into his affections. She went twice to Oxford and each time met Lewis for lunch; he was careful they should not be alone. Early in December, she met Lewis for lunch again, but this time in London and alone. This led to an invitation to spend Christmas 1952 at The Kilns, now a bachelor establishment (Mrs Moore, remember, had died in 1951) and increasingly on the squalid side of shabby. She loved it, or said she did. In the meantime her husband wrote to tell her he had in her absence, and hardly unexpectedly, begun an affair with her cousin, and wanted a divorce. After telling Lewis about her husband’s letter, she returned to America at the start of January 1953.
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