by John Garth
But first he launched into a retelling of part of the Kalevala, in the verse-and-prose manner of William Morris. This was the Story of Kullervo, about a young fugitive from slavery. It is a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Roman Catholic: Kullervo unwittingly seduces his sister, who kills herself, and then he too commits suicide. But the appeal perhaps lay partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair: Tolkien, after all, was in the midst of his enforced separation from Edith Bratt. The deaths of Kullervo’s parents may have struck a chord, too. An overriding attraction, though, was the sounds of the Finnish names, the remote primitivism, and the Northern air.
If Tolkien had merely wanted passionate pessimism he could have found it far closer to home in much of the English literature read avidly by his peers. The four years before the Great War were, in the words of J. B. Priestley, ‘hurrying and febrile and strangely fatalistic’. The evocations of doomed youth in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) were immensely popular:
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
One admirer of Housman was the Great War’s first literary celebrity, Rupert Brooke, who wrote that if he died in some corner of a foreign field it would be ‘for ever England’. G. B. Smith’s poetry was tinged with something of the same pessimism.
Tolkien, through the loss of his parents, had already known bereavement, and so had several of his friends. Rob Gilson’s mother had died in 1907 and Smith’s father was dead by the time the young historian got to Oxford. But the lesson of mortality came forcibly home again at the end of Tolkien’s first vacation from university.
Back in October 1911 Rob Gilson had written from King Edward’s School to lament that ‘The passing of certain among the gods seems almost to have robbed the remainder of the light of life.’ No one had died: what he meant was that Tolkien was sorely missed, along with W. H. Payton and their waggish friend ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley, both now at Cambridge. ‘Alas! for the good days of yore,’ Gilson added: ‘who knows whether the T. Club will ever meet again?’ In fact Birmingham’s remaining members continued to gather at ‘the old shrine’ of Barrow’s Stores, and to rule the library office. Now the clique also included Sidney Barrowclough and ‘the Baby’, Payton’s younger brother Ralph. During a mock school strike they demanded that all overdue-book fines be sequestered to pay for tea, cake, and comfortable chairs for themselves. The King Edward’s School Chronicle sternly admonished Gilson, Tolkien’s successor as Librarian, to ‘induce the Library to…assume a less exhibitionary character’. But the club cultivated its conspiratorial air with sly ostentation. The editors of the Chronicle, and the authors of this admonition, were none other than Wiseman and Gilson. It was this issue which distinguished several of the prefects and ex-pupils as ‘T.C., B.S., etc.’ – initials that were quite inscrutable to most at King Edward’s.
Returning to Birmingham for Christmas, Tolkien took part in the annual Old Boys’ debate, appearing on midwinter’s night as the linguistically incompetent Mrs Malaprop in Rob’s extravagant production of Sheridan’s The Rivals with Christopher Wiseman, Tea-Cake, and G. B. Smith – who was now accorded full TCBS membership.
In effect, Smith was stepping into the void left by Vincent Trought, who had been struck down by a severe illness in the autumn. Trought had now gone down to Cornwall to get away from the city’s polluted air and recover his strength. The attempt failed. In the new year, 1912, on the first day of the Oxford term, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien: ‘Poor old Vincent passed away at five o’clock yesterday (Saturday) morning. Mrs Trought went down to Cornwall on Monday and thought he was getting better, but he was taken very ill on Friday evening and passed away in the morning. I expect a wreath will be sent from the School, but I am going to try to get one from the TCBS specially.’ He added, ‘I am in the most miserable of spirits…you mustn’t expect any TCBSiness in this letter.’ Tolkien wanted to attend the funeral, but could not get to Cornwall in time.
Trought’s influence on his friends had been quiet but profound. Grimly tenacious on the rugby pitch, he was nervous and retiring in social situations, and prone to slow deliberation where others around him devoted so much energy to repartee. But he epitomized some of the best qualities of the TCBS: not its facetious humour, but its ambitious and creative individualism. For in moments of seriousness the key members of the circle felt that they were a force to be reckoned with: not a grammar school clique, but a republic of individuals with the potential to do something truly significant in the wider world. Vincent’s creative strength lay in poetry and, the school Chronicle noted after his death, ‘some of his verses show great depth of feeling and control of language’. For instruction and inspiration Trought could draw upon the whole lush field of Romanticism. But his tastes were more eclectic than those of his friends, and deeply responsive to beauty in sculpture, painting, and music. He was, his school obituary said, ‘a true artist’, and would have made an impact had he lived.* In a later year, in the midst of a crisis Trought could not have envisaged, his name would be invoked as an inspiration.
About the time of Trought’s decline and death, Tolkien began a series of twenty or so unusual symbolist designs he called ‘Ishnesses’, because they illustrated states of mind or being. He had always enjoyed drawing landscapes and medieval buildings, but perhaps such figurative work was now inadequate to his needs. This was a changeful, dark, and reflective period for Tolkien, cut loose from his school and friends and forbidden by Father Francis to contact Edith. He had crossed the threshold of adulthood, and his feelings about it may perhaps be inferred from the contrast between the exuberant Undertenishness, with its two trees, and the reluctant Grownupishness, with its blind scholarly figure, bearded like the veteran academics of Oxford. More upbeat, bizarrely, was the image of a stick-figure stepping jauntily off The End of the World into a swirling celestial void. Much darker were the torchlit rite-of-passage visions, Before and Afterwards, showing first the approach to a mysterious threshold and then a somnambulist figure passing between torches on the other side of the door. The sense of a fearful transformation is remarkable. Equally apparent is that here was a rich, visionary imagination that had not yet found the medium of its full fluency.
Tolkien’s life reached its major personal and academic turning point a year later. Up until 1913 he had lived the mere preliminaries. He had been thwarted in love and it was becoming increasingly clear that in pursuing Classics at Oxford he was heading up a blind alley. Now all that changed. On 3 January 1913 he reached the age of twenty-one, and the guardianship of Father Francis Morgan came to its end. Tolkien immediately contacted Edith Bratt, who had made a new life in Cheltenham. But three years apart had withered her hopes and she was engaged to someone else. Within the week, however, Tolkien was by her side and had persuaded her to marry him instead.
By now, a year had passed in which Tolkien continued to neglect his studies under his Classics tutor, Lewis Farnell. A vigorous, wiry man with a long bespectacled face and drooping whiskers, Farnell was a fastidious scholar who had lately completed a five-volume opus on ancient Greek cults. Twenty years earlier, when Greece was still a remote and relatively untravelled land, he had been something of an adventurer, riding and hiking through bandit country to locate some half-forgotten shrine, or shooting rapids on the upper Danube. Nowadays his archaeological fervour was nourished by the rediscovery of legendary Troy and by excavations at Knossos that annually yielded more secrets of Homeric civilization – and an undeciphered script to tantalize linguists. But neither Farnell nor Sophocles and Aeschylus fired Tolkien’s enthusiasm. Most of his time and energies were expended on extra-curricular activities. He socialized with college friends, spoke in debates, trained with his cavalry squadron, and pored over Eliot’s Finnish Grammar. ‘People couldn’t make out,’ he recalled later, ‘why my essays on the Greek drama were
getting worse and worse.’
He had one opportunity to follow his heart, in the ‘special paper’ that gave him the option of studying comparative philology. If he did so, he realized, he would be taught by Joseph Wright, whose Gothic Primer had so inspired him as a schoolboy. ‘Old Joe’, a giant among philologists, who had started out as a millhand but had gone on to compile the massive English Dialect Dictionary, gave him a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin philology. But Tolkien’s overall failure to apply himself to Classics, together with the dramatic reunion with Edith, took their toll on his mid-course university exams, Honour Moderations. Instead of the first-class result that Cary Gilson thought his former pupil should have achieved, he only just scraped a second, and he would have sunk to a dismal third but for an excellent paper on Greek philology. Luckily Farnell was broad-minded, with an affection for German culture that disposed him favourably towards the field of philological inquiry that truly interested Tolkien. He suggested that Tolkien switch to studying English, and made discreet arrangements so that he would not lose his £60 scholarship money, which had been meant for funding Classical studies. At last Tolkien was in his element, devoting his studies to the languages and literature that had long stirred his imagination.
Meanwhile, Tolkien’s friendship with the TCBS was growing more and more tenuous. He had played no part in a revival of The Rivals staged in October 1912 as a farewell to King Edward’s by Christopher Wiseman and Rob Gilson, and he had missed the traditional old boys’ school debate that Christmas, though he was in Birmingham at the time. At university, Tolkien kept in touch with acquaintances at meetings of the Old Edwardian Society, but very few Birmingham friends had come to Oxford. One, Frederick Scopes, had gone sketching churches in northern France with Gilson during Easter 1912, but Tolkien’s own funds were relatively limited, and evaporated in the heat of Oxford life.
At Exeter College, Tolkien had tried to recreate the TCBSian spirit by founding similar clubs, first the Apolausticks and then the Chequers, which substituted lavish dinners for secret snacks and consisted of his new undergraduate friends. He joined the Dialectical Society and the Essay Club, and enjoyed chin-wagging over a pipe. One visitor eyeing the cards on his mantelpiece wryly commented that he appeared to have signed up to every single college association. (Some of these cards were his own work, drawn with characteristic humour and stylish flair: among them an invitation to a ‘Smoker’, a popular social affair, depicting four students dancing – and falling over – in Turl Street under the disapproving airborne gaze of owls clad in the mortarboards and bowler-hats of the university authorities.) Tolkien was elected ‘deputy jester’ to the most important of these bodies, the Stapeldon Society, later becoming secretary and finally, at a noisy and anarchic meeting on 1 December 1913, president.
For the TCBS, however, the centre of gravity had shifted from Birmingham to Cambridge, where Wiseman was now at Peterhouse with a maths scholarship and Gilson was studying Classics at Trinity. The group’s numbers there were swelled in October 1913 by the arrival of Sidney Barrowclough and Ralph Payton (the Baby).
But at the same time, crucially for Tolkien, G. B. Smith came up to Oxford to study history at Corpus Christi. Wiseman wrote to Tolkien: ‘I envy you Smith, for, though we have Barrowclough and Payton, he is the pick of the bunch.’ GBS excelled in conversational wit, and he was certainly the most precocious TCBSite, already regarding himself as a poet when he took Vincent Trought’s place in the cabal. He also shared some of Tolkien’s heartfelt interests, particularly Welsh language and legend; he admired the original stories of King Arthur, and felt that the French troubadours had left these Celtic tales shorn of their native serenity and vigour. Smith’s arrival in Oxford was the start of a more meaningful friendship with Tolkien, a friendship that grew apace in isolation from the constant waggishness that afflicted the TCBS en masse.
In Cambridge, by contrast, Wiseman found his spirits failing under the relentless badinage. Rob Gilson attributed this depression to the health problems that had stopped him playing college rugby, proclaiming ingenuously in a letter to Tolkien: ‘We have managed to relieve his boredom at times. On Friday he and I and Tea Cake and the Baby all went for a long walk, and had tea at a pub…We were all in the best of spirits – not that Tea Cake’s ever fail.’ Wiseman found much-needed refreshment when he saw Smith and Tolkien that term, but shortly afterwards wrote to the latter: ‘I am very anxious to breathe again the true TCBS spirit fostered by its Oxford branch. Teacake has so fed me lately that I verily believe I shall murder him if he has not altered by next term…’
Happily for Wiseman, when most of the old friends were reunited to play their December 1913 rugby match against the King Edward’s First XV a few days later, he was well at the back of the field and T. K. Barnsley was in the scrum. But after another two months the ill-assorted pair, both Methodists, had to form a delegation from Cambridge to the Oxford Wesley Society. Rob Gilson came down with them and wrote effusively afterwards: ‘We had such a splendid week-end: “Full marks”, as Tea-Cake would say…I saw lots of [Frederick] Scopes and Tolkien and G. B. Smith, all of whom seem very contented with life…’
Tolkien had reason to feel at ease at the start of 1914. In January, Edith had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in Warwick, where she had now made her home with her cousin, Jennie Grove; soon afterwards Edith and John Ronald were formally betrothed. In preparation for the momentous event Tolkien had finally told his friends about Edith; or rather, he appears to have told Smith, who apparently passed the news on to Gilson and Wiseman. Tolkien feared that his engagement might cut him off from the TCBS. Likewise, their congratulations were tinged with the anxiety that they might lose a friend. Wiseman said as much in a postcard. ‘The only fear is that you will rise above the TCBS,’ he said, and demanded half-seriously that Tolkien somehow prove ‘this most recent folly’ was only ‘an ebullition of ultra-TCBSianism’. Gilson wrote more frankly: ‘Convention bids me congratulate you, and though my feelings are of course a little mixed, I do it with very sincere good wishes for your happiness. And I have no fear at all that such a staunch tcbsite as yourself will ever be anything else.’ Would John Ronald reveal the lady’s name? he added.
The English course onto which Tolkien had transferred a year ago was a further source of contentment. The Oxford course allowed him to ignore almost completely Shakespeare and other ‘modern’ writers, in whom he had little interest, and to focus on language and literature up to the end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. This was the field in which he would work – with the exception of his three unforeseeable years as a soldier – for all his professional life. Meanwhile ‘Schools’, his final university exams (properly the examinations of the Honour School of English Language and Literature), were a year and a half away, and for now he could afford to explore the subject at his leisure. He studied Germanic origins under the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon, A. S. Napier. William Craigie, one of the editors of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, taught him in his new special subject, Old Norse, in which he read the Poetic Edda, the collection of heroic and mythological lays that recount, along with much else, the creation and destruction of the world. Meanwhile, the young Kenneth Sisam tutored him in aspects of historical phonology, as well as in the art of finding cheap second-hand books. Tolkien already knew many of the set texts well, and could devote time to broadening and deepening his knowledge.
He wrote essays on the ‘Continental affinities of the English People’ and ‘Ablaut’, constructing intricate tables of the familial words father, mother, brother, and daughter in ‘Vorgermanisch’, ‘Urgermanisch’, Gothic, Old Norse, and the various Old English dialects, demonstrating the sound shifts that had produced the divergent forms. As well as copious notes on the regular descent of English from Germanic, he also examined the influence of its Celtic neighbours and the linguistic impact of Scandinavian and Norman invasions. He translated the Anglo-Saxon ep
ic Beowulf line by line and sampled its various Germanic analogues (among them the story of Frotho, who goes seeking treasure from a ‘hoard the hill-haunter holds, a serpent of winding coils’). He speculated on the provenance of the obscure figures of Ing and Finn and King Sheaf in the Germanic literatures. Tolkien was enjoying it so much that he had to share his pleasure. Giving a paper on the Norse sagas to Exeter College’s Essay Club, he characteristically thought himself into the part and adopted what a fellow undergraduate described as ‘a somewhat unconventional turn of phrase, suiting admirably with his subject’. (We may guess that he used a pseudo-medieval idiom, as William Morris had done in his translations from Icelandic, and as Tolkien would do in many of his own writings.)
A fertile tension is apparent in all this; a tension within philology itself, which stood (unlike modern linguistics) with one foot in science and the other in art, examining the intimate relationship between language and culture. Tolkien was attracted by both the scientific rigour of phonology, morphology, and semantics, and by the imaginative or ‘romantic’ powers of story, myth, and legend. As yet, he could not entirely reconcile the scientific and romantic sides, but nor could he ignore the thrilling glimpses of the ancient Northern world that kept appearing in the literature with which he was dealing. Furthermore, his hunger for the old world was leading him again beyond the confines of his appointed discipline. When he was awarded the college’s Skeat Prize for English in the spring of 1914, to the consternation of his tutors he spent the money not on English set texts, but on books about medieval Welsh, including a new historical Welsh Grammar, as well as William Morris’s historical romance The House of the Wolfings, his epic poem The Life and Death of Jason, and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga.