J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  By October he had been discharged from hospital. Peace seemed a little nearer, and he went to Oxford to see if there was any chance of finding an academic job. The outlook was poor: the University was scarcely functioning, and nobody knew what would happen when peace came. But when he called on William Craigie who had taught him Icelandic, there was more encouraging news. Craigie was on the staff of the New English Dictionary, the later parts of which were still being compiled at Oxford, and he told Tolkien that he could find him a job as an assistant lexicographer. When the war came to an end on 11 November, Tolkien contacted the army authorities and obtained permission to be stationed at Oxford ‘for the purposes of completing his education’ until demobilisation. He found rooms near his old digs in St John’s Street, and late in November 1918 he, Edith, the baby, and Jennie Grove took up residence in Oxford.

  1 The spelling ‘Eärendil’ was not adopted by Tolkien until some years later.

  1 ‘Patience’, the English term for one-player card games, is known elsewhere as ‘Solitaire’.

  CHAPTER II

  OXFORD INTERLUDE

  Tolkien had long dreamt of returning to Oxford. Throughout his war service he had suffered an ache of nostalgia for his college, his friends, and the way of life that he had led for four years. He was also uncomfortably conscious of wasted time, for he was now twenty-seven and Edith was thirty. But at last they could enjoy what they had long hoped for: ‘Our home together’.

  Realising that he had entered a new phase of his life, Tolkien began (on New Year’s Day 1919) to keep a diary in which he recorded principal events and his thoughts on them. After starting it in ordinary handwriting he began instead to use a remarkable alphabet that he had just invented, which looked like a mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman’s shorthand. He soon decided to involve it with his mythology, and he named it ‘The Alphabet of Rúmil’ after an elvish sage in his stories. His diary entries were all in English but they were now written in this alphabet. The only difficulty was that he could not decide on a final form of it; he kept on altering the letters and changing their use, so that a sign that was used for ‘r’ one week might be used for ‘l’ the next. Nor did he always remember to keep a record of these changes, and after a time he found it difficult to read earlier entries in the diary. Resolutions to stop altering the alphabet and leave it alone were of no avail: a restless perfectionism in this as in so much else made him constantly refine and adjust.

  With patience, the diary can be deciphered; and it provides a detailed picture of Tolkien’s new pattern of life. After breakfast he would set out from 50 St John’s Street to the New English Dictionary work-room, which was in the Old Ashmolean building in nearby Broad Street. There, in what he called ‘that great dusty workshop, that brownest of brown studies’, a small group of experts laboured away at producing the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language ever to be compiled. Their work had begun in 1878, and by 1900 the sections covering the letters A to H had been published; but eighteen years later, after delays caused by the war, U to Z was still incomplete. The original editor, Sir James Murray, had died in 1915, and the work was now supervised by Henry Bradley, a remarkable man who had spent twenty years as a clerk to a Sheffield cutler before devoting himself to full-time scholarship and becoming a distinguished philologist.1

  Tolkien enjoyed working at the Dictionary, and liked his colleagues, especially the accomplished C. T. Onions. For his first weeks he was given the job of researching the etymology of warm, wasp, water, wick (lamp), and winter. Some indication of the skill that this required may be gathered from a glance at the entry that was finally printed for wasp. It is not a particularly difficult word, but the paragraph dealing with it cites comparable forms in Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Old High German, Middle Low German, Middle High German, Modern German, Old Teutonic, primitive pre-Teutonic, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Russian, and Latin. Not surprisingly, Tolkien found that this kind of work taught him a good deal about languages, and he once said of the period 1919–20 when he was working on the Dictionary: ‘I learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life.’ He did his job remarkably well, even by the standards of the Dictionary, and Dr Bradley reported of him: ‘His work gives evidence of an unusually thorough mastery of Anglo-Saxon and of the facts and principles of the comparative grammar of the Germanic languages. Indeed, I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal.’

  From the Dictionary it was only a short walk home for lunch, and, not long after, for tea. Dr Bradley was an undemanding taskmaster as far as hours were concerned, and in any case the work was scarcely supposed to occupy Tolkien’s entire day. Like many others who were employed at the Dictionary he was expected to fill out his time and his income by teaching in the University. He made it known that he was willing to accept pupils, and one by one the colleges began to respond – chiefly the women’s colleges, for Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s badly needed someone to teach Anglo-Saxon to their young ladies, and Tolkien had the advantage of being married, which meant that a chaperon did not have to be sent to his home when he was teaching them.

  Soon he and Edith decided that they could afford the rent of a small house, and they found a suitable one just round the corner from their rooms, at 1 Alfred Street (now called Pusey Street). They moved into it in the late summer of 1919, and engaged a cook-housemaid. It was a great joy to have a house of their own. Edith’s piano was brought back from store, and she could play regularly again for the first time in years. She was pregnant once more, but at least she could give birth in her own house and bring up the baby in a proper home. By the spring of 1920 Ronald was earning enough from tuition to give up work at the Dictionary.

  Meanwhile he continued to write ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, and one evening he read ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ aloud to the Essay Club at Exeter College. It was well received by an undergraduate audience that included two young men named Nevill Coghill and Hugo Dyson.

  Suddenly the family’s plans changed. Tolkien applied for the post of Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, scarcely expecting to be considered, but in the summer of 1920 he was asked to go for an interview. He was met at the station in Leeds by George Gordon, Professor of English at the university. Gordon had been a prominent member of the English School at Oxford before the war, but Tolkien did not know him, and conversation was a little stilted as they took the tram through the town and up to the university. They started to talk about Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Tolkien recalled the occasion: ‘I did not in fact think much of Raleigh – he was not, of course, a good lecturer; but some kind spirit prompted me to say that he was “Olympian”. It went well; though I only really meant that he reposed gracefully on a lofty pinnacle above my criticism. I knew privately before I left Leeds that I had got the job.’

  1 As a child, Bradley had first learnt to read upside-down by looking at the Bible on his father’s knees during family prayers.

  CHAPTER III

  NORTHERN VENTURE

  Smoky, begrimed, hung about with a thick industrial fog, crowded with factories and terraced houses, Leeds offered little prospect of a good life. The late Victorian university buildings, constructed of variegated brick in the mock-Gothic style, were a sad contrast to what Tolkien had been used to. He had serious misgivings about his decision to accept the post, and to move to the north of England.

  At first life was difficult for him. Just after the Leeds term began in October 1920, Edith gave birth to a second son, who was christened Michael Hilary Reuel; Tolkien, living in a bedsitter in Leeds during the week, had to make a journey to Oxford at weekends to see his family. Not until the beginning of 1921 were Edith and the baby ready to move north, and even then Tolkien could only find temporary accommodation for them in furnished rooms in Leeds. However, at the end of 1921 they took the lease of 11 St Mark’s Terrace, a small dark house in a side
-street near the university, and here they established their new home.

  The English Department at Leeds University was still small, but George Gordon was building it up. Gordon was an organiser rather than a scholar, but Tolkien found him ‘the very master of men’; moreover Gordon displayed great kindness to his new assistant, making space for him in his own office, a bare room of glazed bricks and hot-water pipes already shared with the Professor of French, and showing concern for his domestic arrangements. More important, he handed over to Tolkien virtual responsibility for all the linguistic teaching in the department.

  Gordon had decided to follow the Oxford pattern and divide the Leeds English syllabus into two options, one for undergraduates wishing to specialise in post-Chaucerian literature and the other for those who wanted to concentrate their attention on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. This latter course had only just been established, and Gordon wanted Tolkien to organise a syllabus that would be attractive to undergraduates and would provide them with a sound philological training. Tolkien immediately threw himself into the work. He was at first a little glum at the sight of solid and dour Yorkshire students, but he soon came to have a great admiration for many of them. He once wrote: ‘I am wholly in favour of the “dull stodges”. A surprisingly large proportion prove “educable”: for which a primary qualification is the willingness to do some work.’ Many of his students at Leeds worked very hard indeed, and were soon achieving excellent results.

  Yet Tolkien very nearly did not remain at Leeds. During his first term there, he was invited to submit his name as a candidate for two professorships of the English Language: the Baines Chair at Liverpool and the new De Beers Chair at Cape Town. He sent in his applications. Liverpool turned him down, but at the end of January 1921 Cape Town offered him the post. In many ways he would have liked to accept. It would have meant a return to the land of his birth, and he had always wanted to see South Africa again. But he refused the job. Edith and the baby were in no fit state to travel, and he did not want to be separated from her. Yet he wrote in his diary twelve months later: ‘I have often wondered since if that was not our chance that came then, and we had not the courage to seize it.’ Events were to prove this fear unfounded.

  Early in 1922 a new junior lecturer was appointed to the language side of the English Department at Leeds, a young man named E. V. Gordon. This small dark Canadian (who was unrelated to George Gordon) had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and Tolkien had tutored him during 1920. Now he made him very welcome in Leeds. ‘Eric Valentine Gordon has come and got firmly established and is my devoted friend and pal,’ he wrote in his diary.

  Soon after Gordon’s arrival the two men began to collaborate on a major piece of scholarship. Tolkien had been working for some time at a glossary for a book of Middle English extracts that his former tutor Kenneth Sisam had edited. This meant in effect compiling a small Middle English dictionary, a task that he undertook with infinite precision and much imagination. The glossary took a long time to complete, but it reached print early in 1922, by which time Tolkien wanted to turn his hand to something that would give greater scope to his scholarship. He and E. V. Gordon decided to compile a new edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as there was none in print that was suitable for university students. Tolkien was to be responsible for the text and glossary while Gordon would provide the greater part of the notes.

  Tolkien found that his collaborator was ‘an industrious little devil’, and he had to work fast to keep up with him. They finished the book in time for publication by the Clarendon Press early in 1925. It was a major contribution to the study of medieval literature – though Tolkien himself would often in later years entertain his audience at lectures by making disparaging references to some point of interpretation in the edition, as if he himself had nothing to do with it: ‘Tolkien and Gordon were quite wrong, quite wrong when they said that! Can’t imagine what they were thinking of!’

  E. V. Gordon shared Tolkien’s sense of humour. Together the two men helped to form a Viking Club among the undergraduates, which met to drink large quantities of beer, read sagas, and sing comic songs. These were mostly written by Tolkien and Gordon, who made up rude verses about the students, translated nursery rhymes into Anglo-Saxon, and sang drinking songs in Old Norse. Several of their verses were printed privately some years later as Songs for the Philologists. Not surprisingly, the Viking Club helped to make Tolkien and Gordon popular as teachers, and through this and the excellence of their teaching the language side of the English Department attracted more and more pupils. By 1925 there were twenty linguistic specialists among the undergraduates, more than a third of the total number in the department, and a far higher proportion than was usually enrolled at Oxford for the equivalent course.

  Home life for the Tolkiens was generally happy. Edith found the atmosphere in the university refreshingly informal, and she made friends with other wives. Money was not plentiful and Tolkien was saving to buy a house, so family holidays were few, but in the summer of 1922 there was a visit of some weeks to Filey on the Yorkshire coast. Tolkien did not like the place; he called it ‘a very nasty little suburban seaside resort’, and while he was there he had to spend a good deal of time marking School Certificate examination papers, a chore that he now undertook annually to earn some extra money. But he also wrote several poems.

  He had been composing a good deal of verse over the last few years. Much of it was concerned with his mythology. Some found its way into print in the Leeds university magazine The Gryphon, in a local series called Yorkshire Poetry, and in a book of verses by members of the English Department entitled Northern Venture. Now he began a series of poems that he called ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’. One, suggested by his feelings about Filey, complains of the sordid noisy character of modern urban life. Another, ‘The Dragon’s Visit’, describes the ravages of a dragon who arrives at Bimble Bay and encounters ‘Miss Biggins’. A third, ‘Glip’, tells of a strange slimy creature who lives beneath the floor of a cave and his pale luminous eyes. All are glimpses of important things to come.

  In May 1923 Tolkien caught a severe cold which lingered and turned into pneumonia. His grandfather John Suffield, then aged ninety, was staying with the family at the time, and Tolkien recalled a vision of him ‘standing by my bedside, a tall thin black-clad figure, and looking at me and speaking to me in contempt – to the effect that I and my generation were degenerate weaklings. There was I gasping for breath, but he must now say goodbye, as he was off to catch a boat to go a trip by sea around the British Isles!’ The old man lived for another seven years, spending much of his time with his youngest daughter, Tolkien’s Aunt Jane. She had left Nottinghamshire and had taken a farm at Dormston in Worcestershire. It was at the end of a lane that led no further, and the local people used sometimes to refer to it as ‘Bag End’.

  When Tolkien had recovered from pneumonia he went with Edith and the children to stay with his brother Hilary, who after his war service had bought a small orchard and market garden near Evesham, ancestral town of the Suffields. The family were pressed into service to help on the land, and there were also hilarious games with giant kites, which the two brothers flew from the field opposite the house to amuse the children. Tolkien also managed to find time to do some work, and to turn again to his mythology.

  ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ was almost complete. At Oxford and at Leeds Tolkien had composed the stories that tell of the creation of the universe, the fashioning of the Silmarils, and their theft from the blessed realm of Valinor by Morgoth. The cycle still lacked a clear ending – it was to conclude with the voyage of Earendel’s star-ship that had been the first element of the mythology to arise in Tolkien’s mind – and some of the stories were only in synopsis; but a little more effort would bring the work to a conclusion. Nevertheless Tolkien did not press on towards this objective, but began instead to rewrite. It was almost as if he did not want to finish it. Perhaps he doubted whether it
would ever find a publisher; certainly it was a most unconventional work. But it was no odder than the books of Lord Dunsany, which had proved very popular. So what was holding him back? Principally his desire for perfection, but perhaps it was also something that Christopher Wiseman had once said about the elves in his early poems: ‘Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them. When you have finished creating them they will be as dead to you as the atoms that make our living food.’ In other words, Tolkien did not want to finish because he could not contemplate the thought of having no more creating to do inside his invented world; ‘sub-creation’, he was later to call it.

  So he did not complete The Silmarillion (as he came to call the book) but went back and altered and polished and revised. He also began to cast two of the principal stories as poems, an indication that he still aspired as much towards verse as towards prose. For the story of Túrin he chose a modern equivalent of the type of alliterative measure that is found in Beowulf, and for the story of Beren and Lúthien he elected to work in rhyming couplets. This latter poem he called ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’; later he renamed it ‘The Lay of Leithian’.

  Meanwhile his career at Leeds took an important step forward. In 1922 George Gordon had left to go back to Oxford as Professor of English Literature, and Tolkien was a candidate for the Leeds chair that Gordon had occupied. In the event Lascelles Abercrombie was appointed, but Michael Sadler the Vice-Chancellor promised Tolkien that the University would soon be able to create a new Professorship of the English Language especially for him. Sadler kept his word, and Tolkien became a professor in 1924 at the age of thirty-two, remarkably young by the standards of British universities. In the same year, he and Edith bought a house on the outskirts of Leeds, at 2 Darnley Road, West Park. It was a great improvement on St Mark’s Terrace, being of some considerable size, and it was surrounded by open fields where Tolkien could take the children for walks.