The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Yet the anachronisms are not without value. The hobbits are meant to seem parochially modern in their customs and outlook. One easily pictures Bilbo ensconced in the Bird and Baby, exchanging war stories over a pint, or reading drafts of his memoir, There and Back Again, A Hobbit’s Holiday, in the frayed comfort of Lewis’s Magdalen digs. It is an essential effect of Tolkien’s art that one should feel the strangeness of being pulled back from the familiar modern world into the archaic North, with its Mirkwood (Old Norse Myrkviðr) and Misty Mountains. It is this anachronism, this bridging of worlds—ours with the archaic past—that gives the story its power to enchant and to disturb.

  Undigested elements from The Silmarillion, which are especially numerous in the earliest drafts, suggest that The Hobbit was, from the beginning, linked, though by no means integrated, with that never-ending, interlocking chain of myths. Tolkien was of two minds about how far to press and how openly to acknowledge these links. Now and then he dropped hints that The Hobbit was based on The Silmarillion, but more often he was at pains to insist that The Hobbit began as a children’s story unrelated to The Silmarillion, that as time went on it was drawn into his mythology—or, rather, invaded by it—and that it was only under the pressure of creating a sequel that he labored to bridge the gap.

  He sent the manuscript around to friends and sympathetic colleagues, often with a self-deprecating note about how the book came to be written and accepted by Allen & Unwin for publication. To R. W. Chambers, professor of English at University College London, he said that the whole thing was an accident; he had written the story for his children, and an employee of his publisher happened to discover it “lying about in a nunnery” (of the Holy Child Sisters at Cherwell Edge). The first official reader’s report came from Stanley Unwin’s ten-year-old son Rayner, a precocious critic:

  Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins and wargs at last they got to the lonley mountain; Smaug, the dragon who gawreds it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home—rich!

  This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.

  Surely it was not lost on Tolkien that a ten-year-old reader saw the book as suitable for five-to-nine-year-olds. Better to downplay the Silmarillion elements and characterize The Hobbit as a don’s folly, lightly tossed off, than to expose his whole mythopoeic project to misunderstanding or ridicule. If The Hobbit failed, at least it need not take The Silmarillion down with it.

  The Hobbit was published in September 1937, lavishly furnished with Tolkien’s illustrations, to healthy sales and immediate (if not universal) critical acclaim. R. W. Chambers provided an ecstatically positive blurb. The novelist Richard Hughes, in a glowing review for the New Statesman and Nation, observed that Tolkien’s “wholly original story of adventure among goblins, elves, and dragons, instead of being a tour-de-force, a separate creation of his own, gives rather the impression of a well-informed glimpse into the life of a wide other-world; a world wholly real, and with a quite matter-of-fact, supernatural natural-history of its own.” Lewis, now that he had heard and read the finished work, with a more fully realized “there and back again” plot than the first version he had seen, was convinced that indeed it was really good and said so in an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on October 2:

  The publishers claim that “The Hobbit,” though very unlike “Alice,” resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own—a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with “Alice,” “Flatland,” “Phantastes,” “The Wind in the Willows.”

  Lewis was also the author of the unsigned review in the London Times of October 8, declaring that

  the truth is that in this book a number of good things, never before united, have come together; a fund of humour, an understanding of children, and a happy fusion of the scholar’s with the poet’s grasp of mythology. On the edge of a valley one of Professor Tolkien’s characters can pause and say: “It smells like elves.” It may be years before we produce another author with such a nose for an elf. The Professor has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity which is worth oceans of glib “originality.”

  Tolkien was clearly delighted, telling Unwin that he had divined the authorship of the two anonymous reviews and that “I must respect his opinion, as I believed him to be the best living critic until he turned his attention to me.” Typically, though, he focuses attention in this high-spirited letter on something his best reviewers failed to notice: that The Hobbit contains the incorrect plural for “dwarf”—Tolkien’s “private bad grammar” preferred “dwarves” to “dwarfs”—along with the puckish observation that the “real” plural is “dwarrows,” which “I rather wish I had used.”

  The Extraordinary Ordinary

  Tolkien worked intensely on other projects before and during his plunge into hobbitry. He added to his legendarium, crafted his Elvish languages, and each year expanded, in complexity and size, the family’s portfolio of Father Christmas letters. The letter for 1931 features polar mountains in thick bold lines reminiscent of Rockwell Kent, purportedly drawn by “North Polar Bear”; 1932’s letter depicts Father Christmas in his sleigh swooping down on nighttime Oxford, along with a whimsical yet remarkably convincing mimicry of cave painting, probably modeled (as Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have discovered) on Gerard Baldwin Brown’s Art of the Cave Dweller (1928), with woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and goblins riding an imaginary, elongated horselike beast called a drasil (from drasill, Icelandic for “horse”). “Some” of these cave paintings, drily notes Father Christmas, “are very good (mostly of animals), and some are queer and some bad; and there are many strange marks, signs and scribbles, some of which have a nasty look…” The Father Christmas letters faded with the decade, as Priscilla, the youngest child, outgrew them.

  The enormous outlay of time and artistic energy that Tolkien expended upon this family project, which went on for more than twenty years, highlights an aspect of his character that set him apart from many other Inklings. As we have seen, he was to a great extent a conventional family man, a lover of home and hearth. His life during the 1930s was typical in this regard. His domestic routine was admirable in its regularity and its devotion to others: whenever possible, he ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with wife and children, encouraged their hobbies—Edith’s aviary, his sons’ model railroading—told fairy tales to put the children to sleep, shopped for food at Oxford’s Covered Market, and enjoyed two-week family holidays at the shore, where he, Edith, and the kids would lounge on the beach, swim, shop, and collect shells. Even the occasional antic—such as in the summer of 1932, when he and C. L. Wrenn lit their pipes, donned their hats, and stepped into the waters of Cornwall’s Lamorna Cove for a swimming contest—was the joyous activity of a stable father and husband acting silly within prescribed and approved limits. He never gambled, womanized, drank to excess, or took drugs.

  In many ways, he excelled as a parent. Late in life he would berate himself for failures (“I brought you all up ill and talked to you too little,” he told Michael in 1963), but many would be inclined to judge him more kindly. Certainly he entertained, encouraged, and enlivened his children, as a group and individually. “He would like to take us out for walks by ourselves separately,” Michael recalled, “because he felt each one of us had different needs and different kinds of interests … they were most wonderful experiences … he tried to make home for us somewhere where we wanted to go.” In 1937, while Christopher recovered from an
appendicitis operation, Tolkien nursed him devotedly, and when Christopher was sent home from the Oratory School in 1938 with heart trouble and spent nearly a year in bed, his father bought him a telescope to idle away evening hours peering at the heavens. These acts typified Tolkien’s fatherly ministrations. He grew especially fond of Christopher, noting in his diary that his youngest son was “a nervy, irritable, cross-grained, self-tormenting, cheeky person. Yet there is something intensely loveable about him, to me at any rate, from the very similarity between us.” He stayed attentive to the needs of each child with a love that never flagged, even in his old age.

  Edith’s problems proved more complex and difficult to solve. She was lonely and frustrated, too timid to forge many friendships within Oxford’s academic community (Agnes Wrenn, the wife of C. L.Wrenn, being one of the few exceptions). As a result, she passed many long days alone. She had no career, no passions apart from family and piano; she displayed exceptional skill at the keyboard and might have been a professional musician, but marriage and motherhood had put an end to that. Never an ardent Catholic, she resented her husband’s incessant churchgoing. Her frustrations mounted, sometimes erupting in heated argument.

  Tolkien did what he could to assuage the situation, skipping lectures and Inklings gatherings to be at home and help with chores. His love for Edith ran deep, as did her love for him. He was, no doubt, hamstrung by views on marriage that offend many modern conventions. He believed that women are monogamous and men polygamous, and that fidelity in marriage requires, of the man, self-will and self-denial; that men require a career, women children; that men are aggressive, women “receptive”; and that, when differences arise—on “the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc. etc.”—the man must hold his ground, the woman must yield. And yet he knew, as his many sacrifices demonstrate, that sometimes the man must yield. It should be noted also that at times his views on marriage possess a startling originality, as when he asserts—this was not a popular view in England at the time—that “nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes,” as a better partner might easily have been found, but that, nonetheless, one’s spouse is one’s “real soul-mate,” chosen by God through seemingly haphazard events. Edith, despite her lack of intellectual depth, her religious recalcitrance, and her fading beauty, was his real soul mate, and to her he pledged his body, his energies, his life.

  Why did Tolkien choose such a middle-class, conventional, well-regulated existence? Largely because he believed it was the right way to live. He had a deep admiration for ordinary people—butchers, police officers, mail carriers, gardeners—and a knack for befriending them. He valued their courage, common sense, and decency, all of which he had had ample opportunity to observe in the trenches. Love for the man and woman next door ran deep in Tolkien; it pervades his fiction and explains why he wrote tales of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Ordinariness carried, also, cultural implications that were important to him and many of the Inklings. The group wore their hair short, their pants baggy, and their Englishness on their sleeve (Tolkien added a fine waistcoat as a touch of elegance but avoided all signs of foppishness). As Humphrey Carpenter points out, this was a rebellion against the dandyism of Oxford aesthetes and a vote for traditional, middle-of-the-road cultural values. But there was more to it than this. A man in Rome may do as Romans do in order to savor the Roman experience or to make a statement about his admiration for Roman ways—or he may do it to disguise his non-Roman status. Ordinariness may be a uniform, or it may be camouflage. In his imaginative life, a vitally important part of the whole man, Tolkien was anything but ordinary. Elves, hobbits, goblins, giant spiders, dragons, wizards: these were the neighbors with whom he trafficked almost every day. Tolkien resembles closely, in this regard, other early twentieth-century fantasists, like David Lindsay or H. P. Lovecraft, who produced their best work around the same time Tolkien was dreaming up hobbits, and who similarly led conventional lives and held conservative views. Tolkien, like Lindsay and Lovecraft, kept his genie bottled in ordinary brown glass, letting it escape and take extravagant shape only in his art.

  Was he happy, leading this sort of life? On the whole, yes. Some critics have suggested that his was a divided personality, that he inhabited a black-and-white world and veered wildly from despair to joy. Humphrey Carpenter speculates that the death of Tolkien’s mother “made him a pessimist,” that as a result of this devastating loss “he was never moderate” and became “a man of extreme contrasts.” The truth is that he was often depressed about his own work and the world about him, but he was also in many ways a profoundly contented man. He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him. His domesticity instilled a quiet stability that enabled him to navigate through life without the dramatic conversions and intellectual combativeness so characteristic of Lewis. He found at home a refuge that rarely failed him.

  Catholicism continued to be another refuge, indefectible and invincible, the single most important element in Tolkien’s mental makeup. His faith shaped his domestic arrangements, his professional work, his art, his way of being. Having passed successfully through the spiritual doldrums of the 1920s, he remained an ardent Catholic for the rest of his life. He attended Mass daily at 7:30 a.m. He confessed regularly. He raised his children Catholic, befriended priests and nuns, and was president of the Oxford branch of the Catenian Association, an international fraternal order of Catholic professionals. Tolkien’s pessimism—if that is the right word to use—may be the shadow of his mother’s early death, but it came to fruition through his mature belief in the Fall, his conviction that man, left to his own devices, is prone to corrupt all that he touches, including his person, his culture, and his environment. Thus his strong distrust of mechanization and technology, and his passionate admiration and defense of the natural world, of plants and animals who are, by their nature, exempt from moral decay.

  Yet underlying his pessimism about humanity was an indomitable hope, born, as surely as his pessimism, from his Catholic faith. Belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, logos over chaos, bestowed upon all the oppositions in his life—scholarship and art, male friendship and marriage, high spirits and despair—a final and satisfying unity, a deep and abiding joy. When Tolkien said of himself that “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size),” he spoke the truth, not only about his material likes (trees, farms, tobacco, mushrooms, plain English food) and dislikes (cars, French cooking, early rising) but also about the disposition of his soul. He, like a hobbit, was at home in his shire; he, like a hobbit, trusted the cosmos—but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

  Hermits, Monsters, and Critics

  Tolkien’s Catholicism also informed his professional research. He was naturally drawn toward the life of the church, especially of the English Catholic Church in its pre-Reformation state, as expressed in Old and Middle English texts. As early as his years in Leeds, he had begun intensive study of a Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, manuscript copy (MS402) of the Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century rule for anchoresses (female hermits), who typically inhabited cells (anchorholds) attached to churches and devoted their lives to solitary contemplation. Tolkien was captivated by the language of the text, which he recognized as an important West Midland dialect, “in its day and to its users a natural, easy, and cultivated speech, familiar with the courtesy of letters, able to combine colloquial liveliness with a reverence for the already long tradition of English writing.” The manuscript appealed to him spiritually as well, for its account of the earthly struggles and heavenly rewards of the anchoress underwrote his own belief in the transformation, through grace, of suffering into joy, as this passage from part six of the Ancrene Wisse well expresses:

  Vilitas et asperitas—abjectness and hardship, these two, shame and suffering, as St. Bernard says, are the two ladder-uprights which are set up to heaven, and
between these uprights are the rungs of all virtues fixed, by which one climbs to the joy of heaven … In these two things, in which is all penance, rejoice and be glad, for in return for these, twofold blisses are prepared: in return for shame, honour; in return for suffering, delight and rest without end.

  In 1935, the Early English Text Society invited Tolkien to produce for publication a critical edition of the Ancrene Wisse. Tolkien accepted the commission, the first step in a long trail of starts, stumbles, and stops that typified his dilatoriness in academic labors. Family and medical problems, disputes over editorial matters, and the press of other academic work took their toll, but the real reason for delay was that his heart lay elsewhere, in the development of the legendarium and its offspring, including The Hobbit and what would become The Lord of the Rings. On July 31, 1960, he wrote to Rayner Unwin confessing his many “crimes of omission,” most notably his failure to complete work on the Ancrene Wisse: “My edition of the prime MS. should have been completed many years ago!” The book finally appeared in December 1962, twenty-seven years after inception, surely one of the longer runs from conception to publication in the annals of modern academic publishing.

  But whatever crimes of omission Tolkien committed as a scholar in the 1930s, he more than atoned for in a single stroke on November 25, 1936, when he delivered to the British Academy in London the annual Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”