J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  The purchase of a car in 1932 and Tolkien’s subsequent mishaps while driving it led him to write another children’s story, ‘Mr Bliss’. This is the tale of a tall thin man who lives in a tall thin house, and who purchases a bright yellow automobile for five shillings, with remarkable consequences (and a number of collisions). The story was lavishly illustrated by Tolkien in ink and coloured pencils, and the text was written out by him in a fair hand, the whole being bound in a small volume. ‘Mr Bliss’ owes a little to Beatrix Potter in its ironical humour and to Edward Lear in the style of its drawings, though Tolkien’s approach is less grotesque and more delicate than Lear’s. Like ‘Roverandom’ and the Bombadil poem it was shown to Tolkien’s publishers in 1937, and it was received with much enthusiasm. Preliminary arrangements were made to publish it, not so much as a successor to The Hobbit but as an entertaining stop-gap until the true sequel was ready. However its multi-coloured pictures meant that printing would be very expensive, and the publishers asked Tolkien if he would re-draw them in a simpler style. He agreed, but he could not find the time to undertake the work, and the manuscript of ‘Mr Bliss’ was consigned to a drawer, where it remained until many years later it was sold to Marquette University in America, along with the manuscripts of Tolkien’s published stories.1

  The fact that ‘Mr Bliss’ was so lavishly illustrated – was constructed indeed around the pictures – is an indication of how seriously Tolkien was taking the business of drawing and painting. He had never entirely abandoned this childhood hobby, and during his undergraduate days he illustrated several of his own poems, using watercolours, coloured inks or pencils, and beginning to develop a style that was suggestive of his affection for Japanese prints and yet had an individual approach to line and colour. The war and his work interrupted him, but in about 1925 he began to draw again regularly, one of the first results being a series of illustrations for ‘Roverandom’. Later, during holidays at Lyme Regis in 1927 and 1928, he drew pictures of scenes from The Silmarillion. These show how clearly he visualised the landscapes in which his legends were set, for in several of the drawings the scenery of Lyme itself is absorbed into the stories and invested with mystery.

  He was by now a very talented artist, although he had not the same skill at drawing figures as he had with landscapes. He was at his best when picturing his beloved trees, and like Arthur Rackham (whose work he admired) he could give to twisted root and branch a sinister mobility that was at the same time entirely true to nature.

  Tolkien’s talents as a storyteller and an illustrator were combined each December, when a letter would arrive for the children from Father Christmas. In 1920 when John was three years old and the family was about to move to Leeds, Tolkien had written a note to his son in shaky handwriting signed ‘Yr loving Fr. Chr.’. From then onwards he produced a similar letter every Christmas. From simple beginnings the ‘Father Christmas Letters’ expanded to include many additional characters such as the Polar Bear who shares Father Christmas’s house, the Snow Man who is Father Christmas’s gardener, an elf named Ilbereth who is his secretary, snow-elves, gnomes, and in the caves beneath Father Christmas’s house a host of troublesome goblins. Every Christmas, often at the last minute, Tolkien would write out an account of recent events at the North Pole in the shaky handwriting of Father Christmas, the rune-like capitals used by the Polar Bear, or the flowing script of Ilbereth. Then he would add drawings, write the address on the envelope (labelling it with such superscriptions as ‘By gnome-carrier. Immediate haste!’) and paint and cut out a highly realistic North Polar postage stamp. Finally he would deliver the letter. This was done in a variety of ways. The simplest was to leave it in the fireplace as if it had been brought down the chimney, and to cause strange noises to be heard in the early morning, which together with a snowy footprint on the carpet indicated that Father Christmas himself had called. Later the local postman became an accomplice and used to deliver the letters himself, so how could the children not believe in them? Indeed they went on believing until each in turn reached adolescence and discovered by accident or deduction that their father was the true author of the letters. Even then, nothing was said to destroy the illusion for the younger children.

  Besides being entertained by their father’s own stories, the Tolkien children were always provided with full nursery bookshelves. Much of their reading-matter consisted of Tolkien’s own childhood favourites, such as George Macdonald’s ‘Curdie’ stories and Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale collections; but the nursery also housed more recent additions to children’s literature, among them E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs, which was published in 1927. Tolkien noted that his sons were highly amused by the Snergs, ‘a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength’.

  Tolkien himself only found the time or the inclination to read a limited amount of fiction. In general he preferred the lighter contemporary novels. He liked the stories of John Buchan, and he also read some of Sinclair Lewis’s work; certainly he knew Babbitt, the novel published in 1922 about a middle-aged American businessman whose well-ordered life gradually comes off the rails.

  Odd ingredients go into literary melting-pots, and both the Land of Snergs and Babbitt played a small part in The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that the former ‘was probably an unconscious source-book: for the Hobbits, not of anything else’, and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit ‘might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.’

  There is less mystery about the origins of another story that Tolkien wrote at some time during the nineteen-thirties, perhaps in part to amuse his children, but chiefly to please himself. This is Farmer Giles of Ham, whose territory, ‘The Little Kingdom’, is Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and which clearly grew from the implications of the place-name Worminghall (meaning ‘reptile-hall’ or ‘dragon-hall’), a village a few miles to the east of Oxford. The first version of the story, considerably shorter than that eventually published, is a plain tale that draws its humour from the events rather than from the narrative style. It too was offered to Tolkien’s publishers as a possible successor to The Hobbit, and like its companions was considered excellent but not exactly what was wanted at that moment.

  Some months later, early in 1938, Tolkien was due to read a paper to an undergraduate society at Worcester College on the subject of fairy-stories. But the paper had not been written, and as the day approached Tolkien decided to read Farmer Giles instead. When he reconsidered it, he decided that he could make some improvements, and in the rewriting that followed he turned it into a longer story with sophisticated humour. A few nights later he read it at Worcester College. ‘I was very much surprised at the result,’ he recorded afterwards. ‘The audience was apparently not bored – indeed they were generally convulsed with mirth.’ When it became apparent that the sequel to The Hobbit would not be ready for some considerable time, he offered the revised Farmer Giles to his publishers, and it was accepted with enthusiasm; but wartime delays and Tolkien’s dissatisfaction with the original choice of illustrator meant that the book did not appear until 1949, with pictures by a young artist named Pauline Diana Baynes. Her mock-medieval drawings delighted Tolkien, and he wrote of them: ‘They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme.’ Miss Baynes’s success with Farmer Giles led to her being chosen as illustrator for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and she later drew the pictures for Tolkien’s anthology of poems and for Smith of Wootton Major, she and her husband became friends with the Tolkiens in later years.

  Farmer Giles did not attract much notice at the time of its publication, and it was not until the success of The Lord of the Rings had reflected upon the sales of Tolkien’s other books that it reached a wide public. At one time Tolkien considered writing a sequel to it, and he sketched the plot in some detail;
it was to concern Giles’s son George Worming and a page-boy named Suet, as well as re-introducing Chrysophylax the dragon, and it was to be set in the same countryside as its predecessor. But by 1945 the war had scarred the Oxfordshire landscape that Tolkien loved so much, and he wrote to his publishers: ‘The sequel (to Farmer Giles) is plotted but unwritten, and likely to remain so. The heart has gone out of the Little Kingdom, and the woods and plains are aerodromes and bomb-practice targets.’

  Though sometimes touching on deep feelings, the short stories that Tolkien wrote for his children in the nineteen-twenties and thirties were really jeux d’esprit. His real commitment was to grander themes, both in verse and prose.

  He continued to work on his long poem ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’ and on the alliterative verses telling the story of Túrin and the dragon. In 1926 he sent these and other poems to R. W. Reynolds, who had taught him English literature at King Edward’s School, and asked for his criticism. Reynolds approved of the various shorter pieces that Tolkien sent, but only gave lukewarm praise to the major mythological poems. Undeterred, and encouraged by C. S. Lewis’s approval of the Beren and Lúthien poem, Tolkien continued to work at them both. But though the Túrin verses reached more than two thousand lines and the ‘Gest’ more than four thousand, neither poem was completed; and by the time Tolkien came to revise The Silmarillion (after he had written The Lord of the Rings) he had perhaps abandoned any intention of incorporating them into the published text of the cycle. Nevertheless both poems were important in the development of the legends, particularly the ‘Gest’, which contains the fullest version of the Beren and Lúthien story.

  The poems were also important for Tolkien’s technical development as a writer. The rhyming couplets of the early stanzas of the ‘Gest’ are occasionally monotonous in rhythm or banal in rhyme, but as Tolkien became more experienced in the metre the poem grew much surer, and it has many fine passages. The Túrin verses are in an alliterative measure, a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon verse form; and in them Tolkien displays great skill. This passage describes Túrin’s childhood and adolescence in the elven kingdom of Doriath:

  Much lore he learned, and loved wisdom, but fortune followed him in few desires; oft wrong and awry what he wrought turnéd; what he loved he lost, what he longed for he won

  not;

  and full friendship he found not easily,

  nor was lightly loved for his looks were sad.

  He was gloomy-hearted, and glad seldom

  for the sundering sorrow that seared his youth.

  On manhood’s threshold he was mighty holden

  in the wielding of weapons; and in weaving song

  he had a ministrel’s mastery; but mirth was not in it.

  In adapting and modernising this ancient poetic style for his own purposes Tolkien was achieving something quite unusual and remarkably powerful. It is a pity that he wrote – or at least published – so little alliterative verse, for it suited his imagination far more than did modern rhyme-schemes.

  He wrote other poems of some length during the nineteen-thirties, by no means all of them directly connected with his own mythology. One, inspired by the Celtic legends of Brittany, was ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ (Breton for ‘Lord and Lady’), of which the earliest manuscript is dated September 1930. The poem tells the story of a childless lord who obtains a potion from an enchantress or ‘Corrigan’ (the generic Breton term for a person of fairy race). As a result of the philtre, twins are born to the lord’s wife, but the Corrigan demands in payment that the lord should wed her, and his refusal has tragic consequences. ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ was published some years later by Tolkien’s friend and fellow philologist Gwyn Jones, in the Welsh Review. It is in alliterative verse, and also incorporates a rhyme-scheme.

  Another major poem from this period has alliteration but no rhyme. This is ‘The Fall of Arthur’, Tolkien’s only imaginative incursion into the Arthurian cycle, whose legends had pleased him since childhood, but which he found ‘too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’. Arthurian stories were also unsatisfactory to him as myth in that they explicitly contained the Christian religion. In his own Arthurian poem he did not touch on the Grail but began an individual rendering of the Morte d’Arthur, in which the king and Gawain go to war in ‘Saxon lands’ but are summoned home by news of Mordred’s treachery. The poem was never finished, but it was read and approved by E. V. Gordon, and by R. W. Chambers, Professor of English at London University, who considered it to be ‘great stuff – really heroic, quite apart from its value as showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English’. It is also interesting in that it is one of the few pieces of writing in which Tolkien deals explicitly with sexual passion, describing Mordred’s unsated lust for Guinever (which is how Tolkien chooses to spell her name):

  His bed was barren; there black phantoms

  of desire unsated and savage fury

  in his brain had brooded till bleak morning.

  But Tolkien’s Guinever is not the tragic heroine beloved by most Arthurian writers; instead she is described as

  lady ruthless,

  fair as fay-woman and fell-minded,

  in the world walking for the woe of men.

  Although ‘The Fall of Arthur’ was abandoned in the mid nineteen-thirties, Tolkien wrote as late as 1955 that he still hoped to complete it; but in the event it remained unfinished.

  Once or twice he decided to move away from the mythical, legendary, and fantastic, and wrote a conventional short story for adults, in a modern setting. The results were unremarkable, showing that his imagination needed myth and legend in order to realise its full potential. And indeed the greater part of his attention was still occupied by The Silmarillion. He made numerous revisions and recastings of the principal stories in the cycle, deciding to abandon the original sea-voyager ‘Eriol’ to whom the stories were told, and instead renaming him ‘Ælfwine’ or ‘elf-friend’. He also spent much time (probably more than he devoted to the actual stories) to working on the elvish languages and alphabets; he had now invented a new alphabet which he first called ‘Quenyatic’ and then ‘Fëanorian’, and after 1926 he wrote his diary in it. He also frequently turned his attention to geography and other subsidiary topics within the cycle of legends.

  By the late nineteen-thirties all this work on The Silmarillion had resulted in a large body of manuscript, much of it in an exquisite hand. But as yet there was no move on Tolkien’s part to publish any of it. Indeed few people knew of its existence. Outside the Tolkien family the only person acquainted with it was C. S. Lewis. Within the family the most frequent listener to the stories was Tolkien’s third son, Christopher. The boy, wrote Tolkien in his diary, had grown into ‘a nervy, irritable, cross-grained, self-tormenting, cheeky person. Yet there is something intensely lovable about him, to me at any rate, from the very similarity between us’. On many evenings in the early nineteen-thirties Christopher, huddled for warmth by the study stove, would listen motionless while his father told him (in impromptu fashion, rather than reading aloud) about the elvish wars against the black power, and of how Beren and Lúthien made their perilous journey to the very heart of Morgoth’s iron stronghold. These were not mere stories: they were legends that came alive as his father spoke, vivid accounts of a grim world where foul orcs and a sinister Necromancer guarded the way, and a dreadful red-eyed wolf tore the elvish companions of Beren to pieces one by one; but a world also where the three great elvish jewels, the Silmarilli, shone with a strange and powerful light, a world where against all odds the quest could be victorious.

  Tolkien’s feelings towards his third son were perhaps one of the factors that made him begin a new book. More explicitly it owed its origins to C. S. Lewis who (Tolkien reported) one day said: ‘ “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” We agreed’ (said Tolkien) ‘that he should try “space-travel”, and I should try “time-tra
vel".’ They also decided that each story should lead to the discovery of Myth.

  Lewis’s story was Out of the Silent Planet, which proved to be the first book of his ‘Ransom’ trilogy.1 Tolkien’s answer to the challenge was a story called ‘The Lost Road’, in which two time-travellers, father and son, find themselves discovering the mythology of The Silmarillion, as they journey back to the land of Númenor.

  Tolkien’s legend of Númenor, the great island in the West that is given to the men who aided the Elves in the wars against Morgoth, was probably composed some time before the writing of ‘The Lost Road’, perhaps in the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties. It had one of its origins in the nightmare that had disturbed him since childhood, his ‘Atlantis-haunting’ in which he ‘had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands’. When the inhabitants of Númenor are beguiled by Sauron (the lieutenant of Morgoth who had already appeared in the long poem about Beren and Lúthien) into breaking a divine commandment and sailing West towards the forbidden lands, a great storm rises, a huge wave crashes on Númenor, and the entire island is cast into the abyss. Atlantis has sunk.