The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  There were, during these dark days, a few solaces. The first was King Edward’s School, founded in 1552, a day school, one of the best in the nation, where Tolkien began his formal education, the costs underwritten initially by the handful of relatives who remained friendly to Mabel and later by academic scholarships. Another was the Birmingham Oratory, founded by Newman in 1848. Among the many benevolent Oratorians who befriended the beleaguered family, Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan (1867–1935) stands out. This bespectacled, pipe-smoking, dog-loving priest descended like a fairy godfather upon Mabel and the boys, filling their straitened lives with hope and joy. He paid regular visits to their home, vacationed with them, offered financial help and paternal counsel, and generally brightened their days with his unrestrained bearlike warmth and goodwill. In later life, Ronald would credit Father Francis with teaching him the meaning of charity and forgiveness, and in his honor he named his first child John Francis Reuel. But not even Oratorian love could stave off the doom hovering over the family, and in 1904 Mabel fell desperately ill from diabetes. There was no effective treatment—insulin would not be available for medical use until the 1920s—and on November 14, 1904, in the presence of Father Francis and May Incledon, she died.

  * * *

  Leon Edel, speaking of one of Tolkien’s contemporaries, Leonard Woolf, who lost his father when he was eleven, commented that “there is no hurt among all the human hurts deeper and less understandable than the loss of a parent when one is not yet an adolescent.” Tolkien was twelve when Mabel died. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, he remembered her as a “gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith.” These notes of admiration and bitterness accompanied his memories of his mother all his life. At age seventy-three, he reiterated the theme, describing, again to Michael, her death “worn out with persecution” in “rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal.” In Tolkien’s mind, the cruel shunning that Mabel suffered after her conversion led inexorably to her fatal disease, and she thus became for him not just a beloved mother but a Job figure, a saint, and a martyr, even a type of Christ, a selfless victim whose death gave life to those whom she loved and who loved her. Mabel appears in his fiction in countless sacrificial figures, a gallery of quasi Christs: Galadriel the Elven queen, who willingly surrenders her power for the good of Middle-earth; Gandalf the wizard, who submits to death to save his companions; Aragorn the king, who puts his rightful rule and very life to the ultimate test; Arwen (and her ancestor Lúthien Tinuviel), who gives up her immortality for love; and the hobbits Frodo and Sam, companions in sacrifice. The bitterness of death, the sweetness of faith, the ransom to be paid in blood; thanks in large measure to Mabel’s indelible presence in his consciousness, these would become keynotes of Tolkien’s imaginative world.

  Perhaps the greatest of Mabel’s legacies to Tolkien, however, was love of the Catholic Church. He became a lifelong believer, and in later years he recalled with shame those times when other pursuits—clubs, romance, art—tempted him away from prayer and Mass. He had a passionate love for the Eucharist and counseled his children to memorize important devotional prayers such as the Magnificat and the Litany of Loreto. “If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy.” In later life, he translated Catholic prayers—the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Gloria Patri, Sub Tuum Praesidium, and the Litany of Loreto—into Quenya, the High Elvish tongue of his devising. He was, as one friend summed it up, “a devout and strict old-fashioned Catholic” with a special regard for Mary and her motherly ministrations; she became for him a kind of muse, the source, he believed, of all goodness and beauty in his work. The Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter argues that after Mabel’s death, the Church became Tolkien’s new mother. Carpenter means this in the ordinary psychological sense, that the Church filled in for a missing parent, but it is true also in a deeper sense. There is nothing idiosyncratic about embracing the Church as mother; as early as the third century, St. Cyprian declared that “no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother,” a saying appended, in the 1994 Vatican-sponsored Catechism of the Catholic Church, to the declaration, “The Church is the mother of all believers.” Throughout his life, Tolkien would draw comfort, courage, and artistic inspiration from this second mother, who, unlike Mabel, would never die (“Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”).

  Ruginwaldus Dwalakōneis

  Mabel’s death transformed Tolkien’s life. She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and to her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion. Ronald responded to the same afflictions—plus the additional discovery that he and Hilary must now live with Beatrice Suffield, Mabel’s widowed sister-in-law, an insensitive woman who had no affection to spare for her young, bereft, and brooding Catholic charges—by closing in upon himself, by inventing private languages, landscapes, creatures, and worlds, eventually composing a personal mythology of exceptional richness and depth. Accompanying this inward movement, however, was an intense increase in knowledge and perception of the outer world. Inventing languages required learning the genetic code that governs all language; inventing fantastic landscapes meant learning the real landscapes of his boyhood: the Birmingham streets, the waters of Lyme Regis, the stones of Whitby Abbey.

  When young, Tolkien excelled in nature studies: drawings of a flower, a starfish, and what look like oak leaves fill a juvenile notebook. The subject matter turns somber as his mother’s illness progresses; a sketch from 1904, drawn while Mabel was in the hospital and Ronald had taken refuge in the house of Edwin Neave—an insurance clerk who would soon marry his aunt Jane—carries the heartrending title What Is Home Without a Mother (or a Wife). It depicts Ronald and Edwin sitting before the fire, mending clothes—rarely a man’s pursuit back then. The drawing, with its close observation of Victorian furnishings and its symmetrical composition, shows considerable raw talent. Another early work, a watercolor depicting two boys, presumably Ronald and Hilary, on the beach, sustains this interest in symmetry: the boys mirror each other, with one, in red shirt and blue-black pants, facing the viewer, while the other, in blue-black shirt and yellow pants, turns away; two islands neatly divide the seascape. Throughout these early sketches, such symmetries of line and color, shape and movement, rule Tolkien’s images, a visual analogue to the contrapuntal harmonics of Catholic scholasticism, and one might surmise, a deeply felt aesthetic response to the chaos of disaster and death that had ripped apart his childhood. This obsession with balance would recede in many of his subsequent sketches, such as one of Lyme Regis (where he stayed with Hilary and Father Francis in the summer of 1906), awhirl with swirling clouds, choppy seas, and moored boats, but would return in full force in his mature paintings for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—books that contain a longing for peace and stability in the face of cosmic disorder and that speak, as we shall see, a distinctively Catholic idiom.

  Language, however, held pride of place from the start in Tolkien’s imagination. In Bloemfontein, he must have heard Afrikaans and perhaps Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and other native tongues, and soon after his return from South Africa, as noted above, his mother began to tutor him in European languages. French left him cold—indeed, he disliked throughout his life all things French, including haute cuisine and, later, existentialism. But he warmed to Latin, and came to delight in the shapes and sounds of its vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. In part this may be explained by his love of the Mass, celebrated in the ancient tongue until he was in his seventies; his grandson Simon recalls attending a Bournemouth Mass with his grandfather after the sea change of Vatican II and watching the old man make “all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English.” Tolkien also felt
the lure of Welsh, whose strange spellings he spied on the side of passing coal trucks. But it was German and Germanic languages that won his heart; he garnered prizes for German proficiency at King Edward’s and began to study Anglo-Saxon (now commonly called Old English) and Gothic. The latter, a tongue that had flourished during the late Roman Empire and died out by the ninth century, he discovered through a secondhand copy of Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language. It utterly captivated him, “the first [language] to take me by storm, to move my heart … a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Immediately, he peppered his other books with Gothic inscriptions and inscribed them with his Gothicized name, Ruginwaldus Dwalakōneis.

  Joseph Wright (1855–1930) would play a significant role in the growth of Ronald’s intellect, not only through his celebrated Gothic grammar but as Ronald’s instructor, friend, and mentor at Oxford, where he took the budding philologist under his wing, guiding his studies and inviting him to Sunday afternoon teas. Wright’s is one of the great Cinderella stories in the annals of English philology. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a charwoman and a miner who drank himself to death, he went to work in Blake’s dark Satanic mills at the age of seven, changing bobbins on spinning frames and, in his spare time, selling horse manure. A lifetime of illiteracy and drudgery beckoned, but—like Mabel Tolkien—Wright resisted fate, in his case successfully. When he was fifteen, a fellow mill worker taught him to read and write, using the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress for texts. Wright followed up by teaching himself Latin, French, and German through grammars purchased from his paltry income. Then he added Welsh, Greek, Lithuanian, Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, Old Bulgarian, and Old High German to his repertoire, acquiring a doctorate in the process at Heidelberg University. At thirty-three, he published his Middle High German Primer and later edited the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary. He became, upon the death of Max Müller, England’s leading philologist, and was named professor of comparative philology at Oxford. In his breathtaking ability to master new languages, “Old Joe,” as Tolkien referred to him, served as an inspiring professional model; in his moral goodness, fortitude, and kindness, combined with his rough Yorkshire ways, he was a prototype for Tolkien’s Hobbits. When Wright died, Tolkien declared that “it was your works, that came into my hands by chance as a schoolboy, that first revealed to me the philology I love.”

  What was this discipline that so entranced the young Tolkien? Philology, defined by C. S. Lewis as “the love and knowledge of words,” may also be usefully described as the zone where history, linguistics, and literature meet. The field began to take its modern form in 1786, when William Jones, a.k.a. “Asiatic” Jones, “Oriental” Jones, and “Persian” Jones, an Anglo-Welsh judge in the supreme court of Bengal and a linguistic prodigy of the first order—he mastered more than two dozen languages during his brief life—announced to the Asiatic Society of Bengal and to the world his discovery that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin share a common ancestry. Further progress came through two significant, far-ranging nineteenth-century enterprises: the application of linguistic analysis to Biblical studies and the ongoing decipherment of ancient tongues, including Assyrian and Egyptian. Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts. As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the nature of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that “exists to communicate whatever it can communicate” but also, as in That Hideous Strength, an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift (“O felix peccatum Babel!” he exclaimed in his essay “English and Welsh”), a supreme art, and, as “Word,” a name for God.

  Tolkien experienced words as a maddening liquor, a phonic ambrosia, tastes of an exquisite, rapturous, higher world. The sound of words affected him as colors or music do others; he complained to his aunt Jane, in later life, of adults who fail to hear the music of words but only grasp their meaning, and he recommended that when encountering a new word—for example, argent—one should first approach it as a “sound only … in a poetic context” before thinking about its meaning. In “English and Welsh,” he writes of the phrase “cellar door” (long celebrated as a striking word combination) that “most English-speaking people … will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful,’ especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.” He then adds that “in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.” Tolkien made similar declarations about Finnish, which he first encountered at Oxford, likening it to a wine cellar filled with bewitching new vintages. As these various cellar images suggest, languages became for Tolkien vaults of beauty and seeds for his fiction. He came to see language in mystical terms, claiming that each of us possesses a “native language” that is not our first tongue but rather our “inherent linguistic predilections,” something deep in the soul, or perhaps the genes. And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to “cellar door”: “Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—‘cellar door,’ say. From that, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.”

  Tolkien’s rapturous romance with words produced numerous offspring: his mythological fiction, of course, but before that, his invented languages. The first hint of things to come appeared in 1904, in an illustrated letter to Father Francis that uses the rebus principle, in which each syllable is indicated by a picture that suggests, without spelling out, its pronunciation (thus a map of France and a hissing snake add up to “Francis”). From now on, Tolkien would never approach words simply as dead lumps of information. At about the same time, he learned Animalic, a rudimentary language invented by his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon, in which the names of birds, fish, and animals replace standard English words. These early tastes of what he later termed his “secret vice” soon led to the invention of Nevbosh (i.e., “New Nonsense”), which he pieced together with Mary, and which included coinages like woc for “cow” and maino for “my.” The vice grew more entrenched at King Edward’s, where in 1907 he concocted Naffarin, a tongue heavily salted with Latin and Spanish and with, possibly, its own rudimentary grammar; it is difficult to assess, as only a snippet remains. A few years later he devised his first private alphabet, a mishmash of English letters, runic slashes, and “monographs” (i.e., ideographs), and inscribed its rules in a sixteen-page notebook written in English and Esperanto entitled “The Book of the Foxrook.” But all this was prelude to the sophisticated language-creation, complete with invented grammar and syntax, of his later Elvish tongues, and to the mythos that grew up alongside it. In a largely autobiographical paper Tolkien wrote in 1931 for the Oxford Esperanto Society (“A Hobby for the Home,” later entitled “A Secret Vice”), he would maintain that the making of a language necessitates the making of a mythology in which that language is spoken, that the two processes are intertwined, each giving rise to the other. People thought Tolkien was joking when he later said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to bring into being a world that might contain the Elvish greeting, so pleasing to his sense of linguistic beauty, Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo (“A star shines on the hour of our meeting”). The remark is witty—but also deadly serious.

  “Friendship to the Nth Power”

  The grammar of Tolkien’s outer life was evolving as well. He had lost
both father and mother and needed, in loco parentis, more than art and wordplay. Father Francis helped to fill the void, counseling and consoling, entertaining in his gruff, exuberant way, taking the boys kite flying and catechizing them in the faith. But a middle-aged man cannot sate a teenager’s hunger for companionship, and Tolkien soon turned to his fellow students at King Edward’s, forming with three of them—Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith, and Christopher Wiseman—a club known as the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS for short), named after the shop (Barrow’s Stores) in which they met and the beverage that they drank while debating, as most sensitive young people do, religion, art, and moral behavior. All four were bright, idealistic, and a tad prudish; perfectly fitted to each other, they remained a tight-knit band until the Great War unraveled the fellowship. Within the TCBS, Tolkien came into his own, reciting from Beowulf, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, urging his friends on to great artistic and moral heights, finding his voice in the loud, exuberant, sometimes boorish thrust-and-parry of male camaraderie—the milieu in which he and all the future Inklings achieved much of their work. “Friendship to the Nth power,” Tolkien called it.

  There was nothing odd in this; exclusively or primarily male clubs—from the local lepidopterist circle to the gentleman clubs of London to the Royal Society—had dominated English social and intellectual life for centuries. Often these associations devoted themselves to pastimes such as gambling, drinking, or hunting, but nobler pursuits, literature in particular, inspired more than one celebrated private club. Early models for the TCBS (and for the Inklings), at least some of which Tolkien and his friends may have been aware of, include the seventeenth-century Friday Street Club at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, with its boisterous Elizabethan roster of Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Francis Beaumont, a paradise of male society immortalized two centuries later by John Keats in his “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern” (“Souls of poets dead and gone, / What Elysium have ye known, / Happy field or mossy cavern, / Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?”); the early eighteenth-century Scriblerus Club, a Tory group led by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, and others, which Colin Hardie, himself an Inkling, identified as a prototype of the Oxford group; and, later in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s dinner-and-discussion circle, generically entitled “The Club,” with Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and “Asiatic” Jones among its members, which convened every Monday at Turk’s Head Tavern in Soho and was designed, according to Bishop Thomas Percy, to “consist of Such men, as that if only Two of them chanced to meet, they should be able to entertain each other without wanting the addition of more company to pass the Evening agreeably”—a fair description, too, of the TCBS and the Inklings at their best. As Keats’s poem and Bishop Percy’s remarks suggest, these clubs offered grand things: escape from domesticity, a base for intellectual exploration, an arena for clashing wits, an outlet for enthusiasms, a socially acceptable replacement for the thrills and dangers of war, and, in the aftermath of World War I, a surviving remnant to mourn and honor fallen friends. Tolkien and his fellow Inklings made much of these opportunities, and clubs and fellowships loomed large in their lives and in their fiction.