J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  What else can we observe? Perhaps the imaginary account of a typical day tells us something in that it starts with a journey to mass at St Aloysius’; and any close scrutiny of his life must take account of the importance of his religion. His commitment to Christianity and in particular to the Catholic Church was total. This is not to say that the practice of his faith was always a source of consolation to him: he set himself a rigorous code of behaviour, especially in the matter of making his confession before receiving communion, and when (as often happened) he could not bring himself to go to confession he would deny himself communion and live in a pathetic state of spiritual depression. Another source of unhappiness in his last years was the introduction of the vernacular mass, for the use of English in the liturgy rather than the Latin he had known and loved since boyhood pained him deeply. But even during an English mass in the bare modern church in Headington that he attended during his retirement, where he was sometimes irritated by the singing of the children’s choir and the wailing of babies, he would, when receiving communion, experience a profound spiritual joy, a state of contentment that he could reach in no other way. His religion was therefore one of the deepest and strongest elements in his personality.

  On one level his devotion to Catholicism is explicable solely as a spiritual matter; on another, it was bound up very closely with his love for the mother who had made him a Catholic and who had died (he believed) for her Catholicism. Indeed one can see his love for her memory as a governing motive throughout his life and writings. Her death made him a pessimist; or rather, it made him capable of violent shifts of emotion. Once he had lost her, there was no security, and his natural optimism was balanced by deep uncertainty. Perhaps as a result, he was never moderate: love, intellectual enthusiasm, distaste, anger, self-doubt, guilt, laughter, each was in his mind exclusively and in full force when he experienced it; and at that moment no other emotion was permitted to modify it. He was thus a man of extreme contrasts. When in a black mood he would feel that there was no hope, either for himself or the world; and since this was often the very mood that drove him to record his feelings on paper, his diaries tend to show only the sad side of his nature. But five minutes later in the company of a friend he would forget this black gloom and be in the best of humour.

  Someone so strongly guided by his emotions is unlikely to be a cynic, and Tolkien was never cynical, for he cared too deeply about everything to adopt an intellectual detachment. He could, indeed, hold no opinion half-heartedly, could not be uncommitted about any topic that interested him. This sometimes led to strange attitudes. For example, his Gallophobia (itself almost inexplicable) made him angry not only about what he considered to be the pernicious influence of French cooking in England but about the Norman Conquest itself, which pained him as much as if it had happened in his lifetime. This strength of emotion was also reflected in his passion for perfection in any kind of written work, and in his inability to shrug off a domestic disaster philosophically. Again, he cared too much.

  If he had been a proud man, his strong emotions would probably have made him unbearable. But he was in fact very humble. This is not to say that he was unaware of his own talents, for he had a perfectly accurate idea of what he could do, and a firm belief in his ability both as a scholar and a writer. But he did not consider that these talents were particularly important (with the result that in later years fame greatly puzzled him), and he certainly had no personal pride in his own character. Far from it: he took an almost tragic view of himself as a weak man – which was another cause of his deep troughs of pessimism. But there was a different result of his humility: a deep sense of comedy that sprang from his picture of himself as yet another feeble member of the human race.

  He could laugh at anybody, but most of all at himself, and his complete lack of any sense of dignity could and often did make him behave like a riotous schoolboy. At a New Year’s Eve party in the nineteen-thirties he would don an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug and paint his face white to impersonate a polar bear, or he would dress up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe and chase an astonished neighbour down the road. Later in life he delighted to offer inattentive shopkeepers his false teeth among a handful of change. ‘I have,’ he once wrote, ‘a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome.’

  A strange and complex man, and this attempt to study his personality has not taught us very much. But as C. S. Lewis makes a character say in one of his novels, ‘I happen to believe that you can’t study men, you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing.’

  CHAPTER III

  ‘HE HAD BEEN INSIDE LANGUAGE’

  If you are primarily interested in Tolkien as the author of The Lord of the Rings, you may take fright at the prospect of a chapter that discusses ‘Tolkien the scholar and the teacher’. Expressed in that fashion, it certainly sounds very dull. So the first thing to be said is that it is not dull. There were not two Tolkiens, one an academic and the other a writer. They were the same man, and the two sides of him overlapped so that they were indistinguishable – or rather they were not two sides at all, but different expressions of the same mind, the same imagination. So if we are going to understand anything about his work as a writer we had better spend a short time examining his scholarship.

  The first thing to understand is why he liked languages. We know a good deal about this from the account of his childhood. The fact that he was excited by the Welsh names on coal-trucks, by the ‘surface glitter’ of Greek, by the strange forms of the Gothic words in the book he acquired by accident, and by the Finnish of the Kalevala, shows that he had a most unusual sensitivity to the sound and appearance of words. They filled for him the place that music has in many people’s lives. Indeed the response that words awakened in him was almost entirely emotional.

  But why should he choose to specialise in early English? Someone so fond of strange words would be more likely to have concentrated his attention on foreign languages. The answer is again to be found in his capacity for excitement.

  We know already of his emotional response to Finnish, Welsh, and Gothic, and we ought to understand that something equally exciting happened when he first realised that a large proportion of the poetry and prose of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England was written in the dialect that had been spoken by his mother’s ancestors. In other words it was remote, but at the same time intensely personal to him.

  We already know that he was deeply attached to the West Midlands because of their associations with his mother. Her family had come from the town of Evesham, and he believed that this West Midland borough and its surrounding county of Worcestershire had been the home of that family, the Suffields, for countless generations. He himself had also spent much of his childhood at Sarehole, a West Midland hamlet. That part of the English countryside had in consequence a strong emotional attraction for him; and as a result so did its language.

  He once wrote to W. H. Auden: ‘I am a West-midlander by blood, and took to early West-midland Middle English as to a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it.’ A known tongue: something that already seemed familiar to him. One might dismiss this as a ludicrous exaggeration, for how could he ‘recognise’ a language that was seven hundred and fifty years old? Yet this was what he really believed, that he had inherited some faint ancestral memory of the tongue spoken by distant generations of Suffields. And once this idea had occurred to him, it was inevitable that he should study the language closely and make it the centre of his life’s work as a scholar.

  This is not to say that he only studied the early English of the West Midlands. He became well versed in all dialects of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and (as we have seen) he also read widely in Icelandic. Moreover during 1919 and 1920 when he was working on the Oxford Dictionary he made himself acquainted with a number of other early Germanic languages. In consequence by the time he began work at Leeds University in 1920 he had a remarkably wide range of linguistic knowledge.
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  At Leeds and later at Oxford he proved to be a good teacher. He was not at his best in the lecture room, where his quick speech and indistinct articulation meant that pupils had to concentrate hard in order to hear him. Nor was he always very good at explaining himself in the clearest terms, for he found it difficult to scale down his own knowledge of the subject so that his pupils could understand everything he was saying. But he invariably brought the subject alive and showed that it mattered to him.

  The most celebrated example of this, remembered by everyone who was taught by him, was the opening of his series of lectures on Beowulf. He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of ‘Hwœt!’ (the first word of this and several other Old English poems), which some undergraduates took to be ‘Quiet!’ It was not so much a recitation as a dramatic performance, an impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it impressed generations of students because it brought home to them that Beowulf was not just a set text to be read for the purposes of an examination but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry. As one former pupil, the writer J. I. M. Stewart, expressed it: ‘He could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.’ Another who sat in the audience at these lectures was W. H. Auden, who wrote to Tolkien many years later: ‘I don’t think I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.’

  One reason for Tolkien’s effectiveness as a teacher was that besides being a philologist he was a writer and poet, a man who not only studied words but who used them for poetic means. He could find poetry in the sound of the words themselves, as he had done since childhood; but he also had a poet’s understanding of how language is used. This was expressed in a memorable phrase in The Times obituary of him (undoubtedly written by C. S. Lewis long before Tolkien’s death) which talks of his ‘unique insight at once into the language of poetry and into the poetry of language’. In practical terms this meant that he could show a pupil not just what the words meant, but why the author had chosen that particular form of expression and how it fitted into his scheme of imagery. He thus encouraged students of early texts to treat them not as mere exemplars of a developing language but as literature deserving serious appreciation and criticism.

  Even when dealing solely with the technical matters of language, Tolkien was a vivid teacher. Lewis suggests in the obituary that this was in part the product of the long attention to private languages, the fact that he had been not merely a student of languages but a linguistic inventor: ‘Strange as it may seem, it was undoubtedly the source of that unparalleled richness and concreteness which later distinguished him from all other philologists. He had been inside language.’

  ‘Distinguished him from all other philologists’ sounds like a sweeping statement, but it is entirely true. Comparative philology grew up in nineteenth-century Germany, and although its practitioners were painstaking in their accuracy their writing was almost unredeemed in its dullness. Tolkien’s own mentor Joseph Wright had been trained in Germany, and while his books are invaluable for their contribution to the science of language they reflect almost nothing of Wright’s vigorous personality. Much as he loved his old teacher, Tolkien was perhaps thinking partly of Wright when he wrote of ‘the bespectacled philologist, English but trained in Germany, where he lost his literary soul’.

  Tolkien never lost his literary soul. His philological writings invariably reflect the richness of his mind. He brought to even the most intricate aspects of his subject a grace of expression and a sense of the larger significance of the matter. Nowhere is this demonstrated to better advantage than in his article (published in 1929) on the Ancrene Wisse, a medieval book of instruction for a group of anchorites, which probably originated in the West Midlands. By a remarkable and subtle piece of scholarship, Tolkien showed that the language of two important manuscripts of the text (one in a Cambridge college, the other in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) was no mere unpolished dialect, but a literary language, with an unbroken literary tradition going back to before the Conquest. He expressed this conclusion in vivid terms – and it should be appreciated that he is here really talking about his beloved West Midland dialect as a whole:

  ‘It is not a language long relegated to the “uplands” struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into “lewdness”, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England.’

  This kind of writing, forceful in its imagery, characterised all his articles and lectures, however abstruse or unpromising the subject might seem. In this respect he almost founded a new school of philology; certainly there had been no one before him who brought such humanity, one might say such emotion, to the subject; and it was an approach which influenced many of his most able pupils who themselves became philologists of distinction.

  It ought also to be said that he was immensely painstaking. Broad and powerful statements such as that quoted above may have characterised his work, yet they were no mere assertions, but the product of countless hours of research into the minutiae of the subject. Even by the usual scrupulous standards of comparative philology, Tolkien was extraordinary in this respect. His concern for accuracy cannot be overemphasised, and it was doubly valuable because it was coupled with a flair for detecting patterns and relations. ‘Detecting’ is a good word, for it is not too great a flight of fancy to picture him as a linguistic Sherlock Holmes, presenting himself with an apparently disconnected series of facts and deducing from them the truth about some major matter. He also demonstrated his ability to ‘detect’ on a simpler level, for when discussing a word or phrase with a pupil he would cite a wide range of comparable forms and expressions in other languages. Similarly in casual conversation he delighted in producing unexpected remarks about names, such as his observation that the name ‘Waugh’ is historically the singular of ‘Wales’.

  But probably all this sounds like the scholar in his ivory tower. What did he do? What, in practical terms, did it mean to be the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford? The simplest answer is that it meant a good deal of hard work. The statutes called upon Tolkien to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or classes a year, but he did not consider this to be sufficient to cover the subject, and in the second year after being elected Professor he gave one hundred and thirty-six lectures and classes. This was partly because there were comparatively few other people to lecture on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. Later he managed to get another philologist, an excellent if intimidating teacher named Charles Wrenn, appointed to assist him, and then he was able to set himself a slightly less strenuous programme. But throughout the nineteen-thirties he continued to give at least twice the statutory number of lectures and classes each year, considerably more than most of his colleagues undertook.

  So lectures, and the preparation for them, took up a very large proportion of his time. In fact this heavy teaching load was sometimes more than he could manage efficiently, and occasionally he would abandon a course of lectures because of insufficient time to prepare it. Oxford seized gleefully on this sin and bestowed upon him the reputation of not preparing his lectures properly, whereas the truth was that he prepared them too thoroughly. His deep commitment to the subject prevented him from tackling it in anything less than an exhaustive manner, with the result that he often side-tracked himself into the consideration of subsidiary details, and never managed to finish the treatment of the main topic.

  His job also required him to supervise post-graduate students, and to examine within the University. In addition he underto
ok a good deal of ‘freelance’ work as an external examiner to other universities, for with four children to bring up he needed to augment his income. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties he made frequent visits to many of the British universities as an examiner, and spent countless hours marking papers. After the Second World War he restricted this activity to examining regularly for various colleges in Ireland, touring Eire and making many friends there in the process. This was much to his taste. Less attractive, indeed an unredeemed chore, was the marking of School Certificate (the examination then set for British secondary schools) which he undertook annually in the pre-war years to earn extra money. His time would have been better devoted to research or writing, but his concern for the family income made him spend many hours in the summer at this irritating task.

  A good deal of his attention was also taken up by administration. It should be understood that an Oxford professor, unlike those in many other universities, is not by virtue of his office necessarily in a position of power in his faculty. He has no authority over the college tutors who in all probability make up the majority of the faculty staff, for they are appointed by their colleges and are not answerable to him. So if he wishes to initiate some major change of policy he must adopt persuasive rather than authoritarian tactics. And, on his return to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien did wish to make a major change: he wanted to reform certain aspects of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature.