III – ‘His way now led back to bereavement’
In the summer of 1966, Clyde Kilby, an American fan who was curator of the Tolkien and Lewis manuscripts at Wheaton College, Illinois, spent three months in Oxford helping Tolkien sort through the manuscripts of The Silmarillion.19 Kilby was struck by the sheer quantity and variety of the unpublished material:
One can imagine the perplexity of a writer with so many ideas and so many incomplete or unperfected writings on hand and with the realization of so little time left. He was then seventy-four.
Two things immediately impressed me. One was that The Silmarillion would never be completed. The other was the size of my own task.20
In the event, whilst the visit doubtless helped to introduce a little more order to Tolkien’s papers, it was only a small start on a large problem, and was soon overtaken by further sources of entropy.
The short tale Smith of Wootton Major appeared in 1967; it is another minor work (it in fact began as an introduction, never finished, to a volume of George MacDonald), but one which again expresses Tolkien’s sadness at what he saw as his exile from faërie, the elvish springs of his creativity. Unusually, Tolkien simply shows us Smith’s wanderings, or some of them, in faërie, as a series of pictures, all unexplained. Verlyn Flieger has commented:
Wandering in a myth he does not understand, Smith … witnesses a whole world to which he does not have the key; nor, in consequence, does the reader.21
Some elements of the story may perhaps be deciphered: the birch that shelters Smith from the wind that hunts him is, probably, philology, as it was in Tolkien’s Old English and Gothic ‘syllabus’ poems of the early 1920s; Tolkien sometimes named the birch as his ‘totem tree’. It shelters Smith from the wind, but in sheltering him, it is not unscathed:
When at last the Wind passed he rose and saw that the birch was naked. It was stripped of every leaf, and it wept, and tears fell from its branches like rain. He set his hand upon its white bark, saying: ‘Blessed be the birch! What can I do to make amends or give thanks?’ He felt the answer of the tree pass up from his hand: ‘Nothing’, it said. ‘Go away! The Wind is hunting you. You do not belong here. Go away and never return!’
As he climbed back out of that dale he felt the tears of the birch trickle down his face and they were bitter on his lips.22
Tolkien, we might translate, had been sheltered and favoured by philology, but by his trespassing into faërie had drawn the ‘world’s wind’ onto it, to its lasting harm. Certainly the standing of philology as a school of learning was, in 1967, immeasurably lower than it had been in Tolkien’s youth. He could not, perhaps, wholly absolve himself from blame. But this is not to make Smith a narrow allegory of academic politics; it is, above all, a lament for the inevitable transience of mortal dealings with the Perilous Realm. The sorrow that arises from this is an inescapable accompaniment to the freight that any mortal carries back with him across the border with faërie.
Increasingly, Tolkien saw his writing as something given to him rather than invented by him; he had always tended to view creative work in this way (indeed, it is not unusual amongst writers – both C.S. Lewis and Robert Graves, to name no others, say something very similar), but as he grew older, and the strong impact of his work on others’ lives and imaginations was shown to him (as it was, most days, in his still-innumerable fan letters), his sense of this developed. There is a curious anecdote in a late letter, referring (probably) to an incident from this time. Tolkien was visited by a man who reckoned various (unspecified) old pictures were apt illustrations of The Lord of the Rings. He showed Tolkien some reproductions; Tolkien had never seen them before. The man was silent, and stared at him.
Suddenly he said: ‘Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?’ … I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement.23
With a heightened sense of ‘mission’, if you like, went also and inevitably a sense of unworthiness, of incapacity; and also, what was worse, that the gift might be withdrawn – might already, indeed, have been withdrawn, leaving him, like Smith, cold and cut off from what had hitherto nourished him.
In September and October of 1967 Tolkien was ill with a viral infection, which needed daily visits from his doctor over a month and left him ‘an emaciated wreck’; he was laid up for another two months to recover.24 His eldest son, Fr John Tolkien, came to stay with his parents to recover, as he had several times before, from nervous exhaustion. The following January, Edith’s health failed owing, in great part, to the strain of looking after them both.
IV – Bournemouth
For some years Tolkien and Edith had taken holidays in Bournemouth, usually staying at the Miramar Hotel on the sea-front. This provided the sort of agreeable, unstuffy (and unbookish) society in which Edith flourished. She became very attached to their visits; in 1968, Tolkien decided they should move there permanently, to make some belated recompense to her for the years of her loneliness amongst his friends and occupations in Oxford. They rather impulsively bought a bungalow a short distance from the hotel, and began, once more, to pack up and move house.
In mid-June, before they had moved from their Oxford house, Tolkien fell downstairs and broke his leg badly; he spent the next month in hospital, and never went back to Sandfield Road. The contents of his study were packed and moved in his absence. The disruption to his books and papers was considerable; although not as much was actually lost as Tolkien feared, nevertheless this chaos, added to the shock of the injury, interrupted him when, at last, he had begun to make some progress with his writing. His wife was too frail properly to supervise the movers, and Tolkien’s boxed books and papers were piled indiscriminately in the garage. When he left hospital, he and Edith spent another month living in the Miramar whilst their house was made ready. His leg was another month in plaster, and he was unable to walk without crutches or a stick for the rest of the year. His library and papers remained in chaos for months.
In June 1969, the film, stage and merchandising rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were sold to United Artists for $250,000, some £100,000 at the then exchange rate. The terms of the sale did not give Tolkien or his heirs much control over any subsequent film or other product; this was, perhaps, in line with his previous declaration to Rayner Unwin that the rights must produce ‘cash or kudos’ – either complete artistic veto or, in compensation, a very substantial fee. We may wonder whether the money they actually brought was, even in 1969 terms, in fact very substantial; it has been suggested that the expenses of the move to Bournemouth, and the unexpectedly extended hotel stays caused by Tolkien’s fall, left him with a pressing need for ready cash; or, alternatively, that he sought by this sale to secure a lump sum with which to offset likely inheritance tax on his estate. Without inspection of his financial accounts for the period in question, it is impossible to know if either of these explanations is correct, but it seems possible that one of them, or even both in combination, is close to the truth.25
Edith was happy to be in Bournemouth, and regained something of the vivacity she had possessed as a young woman; Tolkien, although he took pleasure in his wife’s happiness, felt isolated, cut off from the society of his intellectual peers. Friends visited occasionally, but it was not like living in Oxford. For all his adult life, he had been what used to be called a clubbable man, much given to talk with male cronies and belonging to various societies and clubs whose meetings were often enriched by dinners. Oxford is much given to this sort of association, partly as an excuse for good food and company, partly to cater for the myriad shared interests that dons nurture, partly to allow the ceremonious mock-solemnity that collegiate life permits so well. All of this now came to an end; Tolkien had no car, and travel to Oxford was hardly straightforward.
Slowly, after his papers had finally been set in order, he began to write. As in 1958–60, however, rather than undertaking furthe
r on The Silmarillion proper, he wrote a number of speculative treatises addressing particular questions from the legendarium; usually these began as philological investigations (sometimes in answer to readers’ letters, and often into names that, as the languages had subsequently evolved, were now anomalous but were ‘fixed’ by their appearance in The Lord of the Rings) but soon developed into philosophical, theological or simple narrative directions. Many of these texts survive only in more or less illegible manuscripts. Datable texts from this time, that have been published, include The Shibboleth of Fëanor (1968), The Disaster of the Gladden Fields (1969), The Battles of the Fords of Isen (1969 or later), ‘Nomenclature’, published as The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor (July 1969), Cirion and Eorl (summer 1969) and Part of the Legend of Amroth and Nimrodel (1969 or later).26 This burst of creativity (Tolkien, remember, was now seventy-seven) was interrupted by illness in July. He resumed work in October 1969, and wrote a short text, Of Dwarves and Men. It contains much previously unrecorded material about the early history and relations of dwarves. It also, whilst discussing the (what he had come to consider mistaken) use of Norse dwarf-names in what purported to be the facsimile inscriptions in The Lord of the Rings, betrays a fundamental uncertainty in Tolkien’s mind. If already published material was both fixed and radically inconsistent with itself, how could his legendarium ever achieve final form? Amidst the still-fecund narrative invention is an air of grave self-doubt.
A fascinating text from this time is The Shibboleth of Fëanor, an explanation for what had become an anomalous variation in Quenya between /þ/ and /s/. Tolkien’s ingenious account locates this in a conscious decision by Fëanor, the Noldorin arch-maker who here also appears as arch-philologist, betrayed by pride. Indeed, Fëanor is almost a shadow-self for Tolkien, the maker and philologist seduced by pride in his creations.
At the start of 1970, he complained to his son Michael that progress on The Silmarillion was slow, mostly confined to co-ordinating details of nomenclature, and constantly interrupted: Edith’s health was poor, he was feeling his own age, and there was a constant press of ‘business’ and chores.27 He had no permanent secretary or domestic help. At the start of 1971, he made some revision and expansions to what became the Silmarillion chapter ‘Of Maeglin’. This seems to have been intended by Tolkien as a later chapter for the extended, if radically incomplete, tale Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin.
In July he wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green, and in a discussion of the ‘immortal lands’ remarked that the tales of his legendarium were now to be explained as predominantly ‘Mannish’ in origin, but influenced by Sindar and other elves who had never seen Valinor;28 this was perhaps now necessary to explain what he saw as their anomalous cosmogony, but raised a whole series of other questions about the transmission, if this were so, of the purely ‘Valinorean’ element of the stories (the doings of the Noldor before their Exile, for instance). Why should these have become contaminated with a whole framework of erroneous cosmology? And if there were contamination in the cosmological framework, why not in the narrative matter also? One problem might be removed, but only at the cost of raising another. The reader may feel that Tolkien was overly exercised about a phantom consistency that could never have been fully achieved, and (moreover) did not matter, since the power and coherence of the tales was hardly affected by it; but whilst this is certainly true of (to use Tolkien’s own metaphor) the ‘beads’ of the necklace, he was, I suggest, not wrong to think that the ‘string’, their framework, was of critical importance for the reception of the stories: how we read something is not wholly determined but is surely profoundly affected by its explicit or implicit status. Many readers have felt the absence of such a framework in the posthumously published Silmarillion; in its absence, many simply do not know how to situate the book within their previous experience not just of reading in general, but even of reading Tolkien’s other works. In his essay On Fairy Stories Tolkien had noted Andrew Lang’s observation, that for children ‘“Is it true” is the great question’; but he had added, in a footnote, that in his own experience this was not the most important one, which was, instead, ‘Was he good? Was he wicked?’29 In old age, Tolkien seems to have found that the first question kept tripping him up in his efforts to organize his various answers to the second.
He did little for the rest of the year, and in October was ill again.
V – Oxford at last
On 29 November 1971, after ten days’ illness, Edith Tolkien died. She fell ill on the 19th with an inflamed gall-bladder, and hung on for a week to what her husband reckoned ‘the brink of recovery’ before suffering a relapse.30 Tolkien was bereft; ‘she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien. But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.’31 He was not sure he could write again. Certainly, he did not want to stay in Bournemouth. He began to cast about for a house in Oxford; he stayed with his daughter Priscilla, who still lived there (although he spent Christmas with his eldest son John).
Early in the new year, he visited Christopher Wiseman, who now lived in Milford-on-Sea, some sixteen miles or so east of Bournemouth (where, if we remember, Fr Augustine Emery had also lived in retirement). Wiseman was also recently widowed, but also (and more recently) remarried. Tolkien walked in their garden with Wiseman, his wife and her daughter, but, although Tolkien said much, the Great Twin Brethren said little to each other directly, or of any great moment: certainly nothing of bereavement.32
In the 1972 New Year’s Honours, Tolkien was appointed CBE; later that month, Christopher, still a Fellow of New College, wrote unprompted to the Warden of Merton asking about college rooms for his father; the governing body there unanimously voted Tolkien should be made a residential fellow. In the meantime, he went to stay with Christopher and his family in their house in West Hanney, a Berkshire village a dozen miles south-west of Oxford. In mid-March, Tolkien moved to a flat in Merton Street, with a college scout (servant) and his wife to look after him. At the end of March, he went to Buckingham Palace to receive his CBE. He planned to resume writing, and publish The Silmarillion in instalments. Tolkien sometimes observed that he came of long-lived stock, and might have many years left (his Suffield grandfather, remember, had lived to ninety-seven). On 3 June, he was awarded an honorary D.Litt.; the University Orator’s speech, composed and given (in Latin) by his old friend Colin Hardie, hoped he would yet ‘produce from his store Silmarillion and scholarship’33. Later that month, his rooms were burgled and his CBE medal, together with some of Edith’s jewellery, was stolen. His papers remained in storage for some time; he wrote nothing, it seems, until that November. Thereafter he produced some brief discussions of particular points, often (as before) provoked by questions in readers’ letters: on elvish reincarnation, wizards and minor characters from the legendarium.
He was ill again at the start of 1973, with persistent and severe indigestion; his doctor banned wine and rich food. He wrote little or nothing other than letters; at the end of May he finally wrote to Wiseman, suggesting they meet again. He signed himself ‘JRRT. TCBS.’34
That summer, he wrote to a friend, ‘over and above all the afflictions and obstacles I have endured since The Lord of the Rings came out, I have lost confidence’.35 That year, he made a few notes in August, nothing more.
On 28 August, he was driven to Bournemouth to stay with friends. He planned to spend a few days at the Miramar from 4 September, and to visit Christopher Wiseman. During the night of 30 August, after attending a birthday party, he was taken ill; a hospital diagnosed a bleeding gastric ulcer. Two of his children were abroad, but John and Priscilla came to Bournemouth at once. He seemed to be getting better; but the next day, 1 September, he developed a chest infection.
In the early hours of the following morning, Sunday, 2 September 1973, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien died. He was eighty-one years old.
Part V – Niggle’s Parish
‘At any minute it is what we are and are doing, not what we
plan to be and do that counts.’1
Chapter 16 – Posthumous Publications
Tolkien’s will named his third son Christopher as his literary executor. His immediate task was to see what could be done with his father’s papers. Could the long-promised Silmarillion ever be published?
The Silmarillion
Tolkien had perhaps hoped to finish The Silmarillion in time for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977; he still thought of it as dedicated ‘to England, to my country’. In 1975 Christopher Tolkien resigned his fellowship at New College to devote himself full-time to his father’s estate. With the help of Guy Gavriel Kay (a Canadian law student, later himself a noted writer of quasi-historical fantasy fiction) he compiled the published Silmarillion. He was under considerable pressure from readers, his publisher and his own sense of duty as his father’s literary executor to produce a readable text quickly; inevitably, he made a number of editorial decisions that, with hindsight and given leisure, he might have made otherwise. But the nature of the component texts would hardly admit of any other procedure. As we have seen, any continuous narrative was perforce a patchwork of texts from wildly varying dates and (sometimes) in distinct styles. Absolute consistency was neither sought nor achieved. The book was published in 1977.
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