There is, then, at the heart of Tolkien’s work a conviction that what we say, and in particular the tales we tell, expresses as well as anything else we do the image we bear of the Creator God, the gift granted our first parents, not wholly lost by them in the Fall and now redeemed – both rescued from debility and made new and greater – by the Incarnation. Even death, which Tolkien once named as his greatest theme, is now not wholly a defeat, but a means despite itself of greater victory, beyond hope or expectation.
He also gives a profound, if unfashionable, reflexion on the nature of evil, and the temporary and provisional nature of our victories over it in this life, whether small and private victories over vice or great national triumphs over a tyrant or oppressor. In one sense, the northern theory of courage was true: defeat, in this world, was inevitable, and all our hopes and schemes and efforts would fail. But this was still the proper side to fight on, and courage in its service was the only proper attitude. Tom Shippey puts it thus: ‘dying undaunted is no defeat; furthermore … this was true before the Christian myth that came to explain why’24. The Christian revelation does not abolish ‘northern courage’; rather it fulfils and redeems it, because it adds that, beyond the end of all things in defeat and fire, there is a new life, and a redeemed world, healed from its hurts and new-made according to its Creator’s mind, only this time further enriched and made beautiful by the works of his children. This is the whole burden, in one sense, of The Silmarillion, from its creation story to its prophecy of the End. Tolkien’s elves are bound to the circles of the world, and endure whilst it does, tending and making as they live, enfolded in and in some way giving voice to its joys and sorrows; but man’s fate lies beyond the world, in the good counsels of the One.
References
Chapter 1 Early Years
1.HME, 9.233.
2.See Max Mechow, Deutsche Familiennamen prussischer Herkunft, Dieburg, Tolkemita, 1994.
3.Letters, pp. 428–9.
4.Cf. Letters, p. 73.
5.‘Reuel’, ‘friend of God’, is from the Hebrew scriptures, where (in Exodus 2:18 and Numbers 10:29) it is an alternative name for Moses’ father-in-law, elsewhere called Jethro (modern criticism detects here the conflation of two separate traditions), and, in the extended form Raguel, of Tobias’s fatherin-law in the book of Tobit, and also the name of several otherwise unattested Israelites.
6.HME 5.37.
7.Letters, pp. 68, 213.
8.Carpenter prints an example of it in Biography, p. 36.
9.OFS, p. 188.
10.Atherton, There and Back Again, p. 40.
11.See OFS, pp. 107–8.
12.The Barry buildings were demolished in 1936, allegedly as a fire risk, and the school moved to its current site, an undistinguished complex in Edgbaston. Part of an upper corridor of the Barry building was moved brick by brick, and re-erected to act as school chapel.
13.Slim had in fact been brought up as a Catholic, and was at the Oratorian school, St Philip’s, between 1903 and 1908, when he went to King Edward’s; Tolkien was briefly at St Philip’s in 1902–3, but for the rest of his schooldays (1900–11) was at King Edward’s, whilst Slim left King Edward’s within a year of arriving to work as a schoolmaster.
14.She was a schoolteacher in Birmingham between 1892 and 1905. See Morton, Tolkien’s Bag End, p. 28.
15.Carpenter, Biography, p. 31.
16.Letters, p. 416 (to Michael Tolkien, 24 January 1972).
17.Letters, p. 354 (to Michael Tolkien, 9–10 January 1965).
18. The school was based there until 1922, when it moved to Caversham outside Reading.
19.Letters, pp. 416–17 (to Michael Tolkien, 24 January 1972).
20.See OFS, p. 108.
21.So, at least, suggest Flieger and Anderson in their edition of OFS (pp. 56, 108); although we should also note in the same volume (p. 234) that Tolkien said his boyhood reading of fairy tales finished when he was eight. It is possible he was mistaken about dates, as he often was; or, although this would be a rather forced reading of the text, that he meant he stopped reading new stories, as opposed to rereading old ones.
22.Letters, p. 395 (to Michael Tolkien, 1967/8).
23.See Fox-Davies, Armorial Families, vol. 2, p. 1629, and ‘Francis Vincent Reade’, Oratory Parish Magazine (early 2007), pp. 2–3 (No. 1 of the series ‘Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory’). H&S 2, p. 814, says he was born c.1895; Fox-Davies states 1874, which is much more probable.
24.See Garth, pp. 22–4, and H&S 2, pp. 952–3.
25.In 1908, as part of the Haldane reforms of the Army after the Boer War, where there had been a shortage of trained officers, Army Order 160 incorporated existing school cadet corps across the country into a national Officer Training Corps (OTC). The aim was to give basic military training (drill, musketry, map-reading, fieldwork) to boys who might then go on to commissions in the regular or territorial forces. Successful cadets were given a certificate by their OTC that would gain them preferential consideration for commissioned rank. The King Edward’s School cadet corps may not have formally become an OTC until 1910; see H&S 2, p. 952.
26.Wiseman’s father held this position in 1912; from 1914, he was also President of the National Free Church Council. In 1932, various separate Methodist bodies joined together in the Methodist Union; Wiseman senior was its second President.
27.Letters, p. 395 (to Michael Tolkien, 1967/8).
28.See H&S 1, p. 9. Hammond and Scull date the purchase to 1903, on uncertain grounds.
29.See the catalogue to the Bodleian Library’s Tolkien centenary exhibition (Priestman, J.R.R. Tolkien, Life and Legend, p. 16), and Atherton, There and Back Again, p. 183.
30.See Letters, p. 212.
31.It might possibly have been, instead, Sweet’s First Steps in Anglo-Saxon. For a useful discussion of Tolkien’s first encounter with philology, see chapter 13 of Atherton’s There and Back Again (pp. 183–203).
32.Letters, p. 343 (to the Rev. Denis Tyndall, 9 January 1964).
33.See the lecture ‘English and Welsh’ in M&C, pp. 190–1.
34.There is a very extensive literature on the Modernist crisis, most of it partisan from one side or another. There is a useful summary of ‘Modernist’ positions and partial attempt at justifying the Church’s actions, in Aidan Nichols, Criticising the Critics (Oxford, Family Publications, 2010), chapter 1; the best short account of the phenomenon as a whole remains Alec Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (London, Cambridge University Press, 1970), although Vidler, as a liberal Anglican, obviously brings his own preconceptions to the account.
35.Letters, p. 395 (to Michael Tolkien, 1967/8).
36.See H&S 2, p.1012, and corrigenda to it at http://www.hammondandscull.com/addenda.html.
37.See Duriez, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend, pp. 33, 222.
38.His private diaries have never been published, and are not available for public consultation; however Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s official biographer, drew on them for his biography.
39.See Letters, pp. 356–8, which include a facsimile of the inscription.
40.£60 in 1910 apparently equates to about £6,000 today.
41.Letters, p. 52 (to Michael Tolkien, 6–8 March 1941).
42.I have no idea whether this is still true, although it would be a tearing shame if it were not; I was certainly made to read him (aloud) as a schoolboy in the early 1980s, and in hindsight see this as a wholly profitable experience for which I remain profoundly grateful.
43.See the 1919 collection Pastiches et mélanges.
44.Cited in the article by John Garth in TEnc, p. 220.
45.These are all taken from ‘Sister Songs’; see The Poems of Francis Thompson (London, Hollis and Carter, 1946), pp. 23–60.
46.See Carpenter, Biography, pp. 73–4. The comment was first made by the poet and critic Arthur Symons about the novelist George Meredith’s verse. This Symons should not be confused with the biographer A.J.A. Symons (The Quest for Corvo), brother
to the crime writer Julian Symons, nor any of them with the historian and homosexual proselytizer John Addington (J.A.) Symonds. All are roughly contemporary, which does not help.
47. See H&S 2, p. 815.
48.See HME 10.157–8, where Tolkien explicitly acknowledges the link.
49.Quoted in Carpenter, Biography, p. 47.
50.Quoted in Carpenter, Biography, pp. 47–8.
51.In 1917, two girls in Yorkshire, one sixteen and one nine, took five photographs that were made famous by Conan Doyle in a magazine article; half a century later, they confessed to having faked them, but claimed to have been too intimidated by the weight of adult interest (particularly from theosophists and spiritualists of one stripe or another) to admit the fraud at the time.
52.‘The Cottage of Lost Play’. See Chapter 3.V below.
53.All of these are conveniently included in the volume Time and the Gods (London, Gollancz, 2000) in the excellent Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series.
54.The Watcher by the Threshold, in the portmanteau edition Four Tales (Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1936), p. 240.
55. Likewise in Four Tales, pp. 622–32, esp. pp. 627–30.
56.H&S 1, p. 26.
57.Compare, at a slightly later date, the lyrical nostalgia of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise; or the account of Ronald Knox’s Etonian career in Evelyn Waugh’s biography.
58.For Jane Neave, see Andrew H. Morton and John Hayes’s careful and illuminating Tolkien’s Gedling 1914 (Studley, Brewin Books, 2008).
59.The only evidence for this visit is a drawing Tolkien did of St Andrews from Kinkell Brae; see H&S 1, p. 20.
60.Letters, p. 393 (to Michael Tolkien, 1967–8).
61.See Chapter 8.IV below.
62.See Carpenter, Biography, p. 51, and Zimmermann, Manfred, ‘The Origin of Gandalf and Josef Madlener’ in Mythlore, 34 (1983), pp. 22, 24.
Chapter 2 – University and Edith
1The exception was the elder Payton brother, Wilfrid, who went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1911.
2Tolkien’s obituary in The Times, drafted by C.S. Lewis, and reprinted in Salu and Farrell (eds), J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, pp. 11–15.
3It was eventually annexed to his legendarium, and, titled The Horns of Ylmir, is printed (in a version made in 1917) in HME 4.213–18. Hammond and Scull (H&S 1, p. 54) are inclined to place this visit to St Andrews in the summer, rather than at Easter; but after April, Jane Neave was living on the farm in Nottinghamshire she had bought with the Brooke-Smiths, not at St Andrews at all, and it seems reasonable to suppose he went there to see her. The 1912 Easter vacation ran from 16 March to 28 April; Tolkien was in Birmingham for the annual King Edward’s Open Debate on 2 April, but April is otherwise unoccupied. Easter fell that year on 7 April.
4The poem remains unpublished. See H&S 1, pp. 25, 776, where, however, it is placed, following a manuscript note, in June or July 1911; but this must be a mistake by Tolkien, since the Newdigate is open only to undergraduate members of the University, and he did not matriculate until that October.
5The play was called The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette; it has, needless to say, never been published. See Carpenter, Biography, p. 59.
6Quoted in Tolkien, The Tolkien Family Album, p. 34.
7See OFS, p. 41.
8Shippey, Road, p. 24.
9Revision by D.Q. Adams in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (London, Routledge, 1997), p. 501. There is a further, radically different attempt, published in 2007 (see: www.kortlandt.nl) by the Dutch scholar Frederik Kortlandt: ‘ʕʷeuis ʔkeuskʷeʕʷeuis iosmi ʕuelʔn neʔst ʔekuns ʔe ‹dērkt, tom ‹gʷrʕeum uogom ugentm, tom m›geʕm borom, tom dgmenm ʔoʔku brentm. ʔe uēukʷt ʕʷeuis ʔkumus: kʷntske ʔmoi kērt ʕnerm ui›denti ʔekuns ʕ›gentm. ʔe ueukʷnt ʔkeus: kludi ʕʷuei, kʷntske nsmi kērt ui›dntsu: ʕnēr potis ʕʷuiom ʕulʔenm subi gʷormom uestrom kʷrneuti, ʕʷuimus kʷe ʕuelʔn neʔsti. To›d kekluus ʕʷeuis ʕe›grom ʔe bēu›gd.’
10More ambitious efforts, too, have been made to recover the nature and characteristic themes and vocabulary of proto-Indo-European folktales; see Calvert Watkins’s fascinating How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford, OUP, 1995), or the comprehensive and eclectic Indo-European Poetry and Myth of M.L. West (Oxford, OUP, 2007), which culminates in a reconstructed ‘Elegy on an Indo-European Hero’, done in modern English.
11There is, indeed, still much research done into this topic; see, for example, J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams (eds), The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford, OUP, 2006).
12Letters, p. 214 (to W.H. Auden, 7 June 1955); Tolkien first borrowed Eliot’s Finnish Grammar on 25 November 1911.
13Kirby’s version appeared first in 1907. Tolkien, as we saw, wrote a verse pastiche of Kirby called ‘The New Lemminkäinen’; Hammond and Scull call it a parody, but I suspect it to be closer in intention to his earlier Macaulay pastiche, The Battle of the Eastern Field.
14Essay on the Kalevala, quoted in H&S 1, p. 29.
15Letters, p. 214 (to W.H. Auden, 7 June 1955); see the journal Parma Eldalamberon, 12 (1998), pp. iv, x–xi, and Garth, p. 17.
16See Garth, p. 24.
17 See H&S 1, p. 39.
18His resignation was dated 28 February, when he was in the midst of Honour Moderations, although this may be purely an administrative quirk. It seems most likely that Tolkien resigned because he could not afford the time, and perhaps also the expense, of membership; it is also coincidentally the case that in 1913 King Edward’s Horse was transferred from the Volunteer Forces to the Special Reserve, a distinct social downgrading (the Special Reserve was the successor of the old militia, and functioned as home training units for (largely) working-class men, whereas the Volunteers, and especially the mounted Yeomanry, were both middle class and expected to function as active service units during wartime). They remained a cavalry regiment, though, and as such saw service in France and Italy. They were disbanded in 1924.
19C.S. Lewis’s diaries, quoted in McGrath, C.S.Lewis: A Life, p. 99.
20Ker, The Dark Ages, pp. 104–5.
21The Dark Ages was published first in 1904, as part of a series ‘Periods of European Literature’ published by Blackwood; Tolkien certainly read it at some stage, for he quotes extensively from it in lectures given in the early 1930s (see Chapter 7 below).
22He published, in 1892, a scientific Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on his mother dialect.
23Shippey (see Road passim) in particular cites Lear and Macbeth; according to Hammond and Scull (H&S 1, p. 40), the Oxford syllabus at this time prescribed Love’s Labours Lost, the two Henry IVs, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. We may however assume Tolkien brought a good working knowledge of much Shakespeare from his schooldays.
24Carpenter, Biography, pp. 67–8.
25Carpenter, Biography, pp. 67–8.
26See Carpenter, Biography, p. 54, and H&S 1, p. 46. This incident cannot be located more precisely than the academic year 1913–14, if Smith was indeed the ‘Geoffrey’ whom Tolkien names as his cohort in the business.
27John Garth (Garth, p. 33) has suggested he deputed Smith to write to the others, but this remains unproven. See H&S 2, p. 778. At any rate they were told of the engagement by letter.
28 M&C, p. 192.
29Some of these are reproduced in Hammond and Scull’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. They are curious and occasionally striking, if technically unremarkable.
Chapter 3 – War
1Sir John (he was knighted in 1914) inherited his father’s business as a building contractor, and was a local worthy; he was also educated at King Edward’s. His military experience, as far as I can determine, was entirely in the voluntary reserves rather than the Regular Army.
2For the history of the farm, of Jane Neave’s time there and of Tolkien’s 1914 visit, see Morton and Hayes, Tolkien’s Gedling 1914.
3T
olkien used this term himself in a number of letters written between 1951 and 1955; it is used historically to describe collections of saints’ lives, but seems to have become accepted shorthand amongst writers on Tolkien, so I have adopted it for convenience.
4See, here, Letters, p. 231 (to ‘Mr Thompson’, 14 January 1956).
5The Magnificat antiphon for Evening Prayer (Vespers) on 21 December. The English is from the current Breviary; the Latin text is O Oriens, splendor lucis æternæ et sol iustitiæ: veni, et illumine sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis. Oriens would seem to be the rising sun rather than the morning star, and this would be supported by the occurrence of sol iustitiæ later in the antiphon. On the other hand, the scriptural source is from the canticle of Zechariah in Luke’s Gospel, which in its second part is addressed to John the Baptist.
6One of the tenth-century Blickling Homilies refers to John the Baptist as se niwa éorendel; see Letters, p. 385.
7Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 66.
8Letters, p. 144 (to Milton Waldman, late 1951).
9See Garth, p. 48.
10Carpenter, Biography, p. 72.
11Two years later, C.S. Lewis was to suffer much anxious fear of being conscripted into the ranks (although as an Irishman he was exempt) or being morally bullied into enlisting, before he too discovered the Oxford OTC as a route to a commission: see McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, pp. 43–7.
12See Carpenter, Biography, p. 75, HME 2.2613 and Garth, p. 53.
13See HME 2.269–70, where part of one late text is given.
14See H&S 2, pp. 106–7.
15He worked on The Story of Kullervo for at least two years, but it was never finished. It runs to twenty-one foolscap pages, and covers about three-quarters of the projected narrative. It was published in the journal Tolkien Studies for 2010 (vol.7, pp. 211–78) and in book form in 2015. There is an abstract in H&S 2, pp. 445–6; see also H&S 1, p. 55.
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