The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  His translation of Gawain was published posthumously in 1975. It was not well received. Tolkien had argued in the W. P. Ker Lecture that a translation should retain “the original metre and alliteration, without which translation is of little value except as a crib” (a view also upheld by T. S. Eliot, who argued that Dante, for one, could only be properly translated in terza rima, for “a different metre is a different mode of thought … and a poem should be translated as nearly as possible in the same thought-form as the original”). But transforming into modern verse the long-abandoned thought-forms of the Gawain poet proved beyond Tolkien’s ability. To the American critic Roger Sale, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, the work suffered from “constructions that are straightforward in Middle English but awkward now,” forcing Tolkien to employ “an idiom that is neither medieval nor twentieth-century—just as he does in The Lord of the Rings.” In The Times Higher Education Supplement, the medievalist A. C. Spearing agreed, remarking that the “style and diction have an archaic quality that produces a quite different effect from that of the originals—not of ancient grandeur, but of faded romanticism laced with awkwardness.”

  More successful was The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, a dramatic dialogue that Tolkien had worked on intermittently throughout the 1930s and ’40s and eventually published in the English Association’s Essays and Studies 1953. He based this short, dark work on the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” which celebrates the heroic ethos while telling of a crushing Anglo-Saxon defeat at the hands of Viking invaders in A.D. 991 (in Lewis’s Perelandra, Ransom shouts out a line from the poem while throttling the demonic Unman). Tolkien, however, focuses on the battle’s aftermath, as two servants search the carnage for the body of the fallen hero Beorhtnoth (or Byrhtnoth: the name in Old English means “bright courage”). While the Old English poem lauds Beorhtnoth for his nobility in allowing the Vikings to move to a more advantageous location, Tolkien interprets this move as a disastrously foolhardy act prompted by ofermod, over-spirit, or “overmastering pride” (as Tolkien translates it). As in his Gawain translation, Tolkien retains the dense alliteration of the original, but here, unhampered by the strict requirements of translation, his method works, and the servants’ terse, gritty conversation offers a modern gloss upon the values of the original poem by emphasizing the violence, ugliness, confusion, and horror of war. Since its publication, the drama has received mixed notices from medievalists, some of whom challenge Tolkien’s interpretation of historical events. Nonetheless, the work enhanced his literary reputation. In early 1954, still enamored of his own thespian skills, he tape-recorded it in his study, assaying all the parts himself and adding home-brewed sound effects, and then proposed to P. H. Newby that the BBC mount a professional production. When the Third Programme broadcast the play some months later, Tolkien, always seeking perfection, criticized it harshly, but with the twin productions of Gawain and Homecoming, his Old English and Middle English labors had, against all expectations, reached a wide audience.

  By then it scarcely mattered. A far more important event was unfolding: the great epic of Middle-earth was about to see the light of day. The production process had been long and arduous. Tolkien had promised Rayner Unwin that the book would be delivered in final form by March 25, 1953. This deadline he had failed to meet. He submitted the text as quickly as he could, adding maps and appendices, improving spelling, grammar, and chronological consistency. Various titles came and went, some of them smacking of old radio serials: The Return of the Shadow for what would become The Fellowship of the Ring; The Shadow Lengthens for The Two Towers. Finally the great labor came to a close, and on July 29, 1954, Unwin published The Fellowship of the Ring, followed on November 11, 1954, by The Two Towers, and on October 20, 1955, by The Return of the King: approximately 475,000 words in total, one of the longest novels in modern English literature.

  On July 30, 1955, Tolkien and his daughter, Priscilla, set out by train and boat for Italy, while Edith departed for a Mediterranean cruise with friends. Husband and wife had long accepted their differing tastes and temperaments in the matter of friends and pastimes, and separate vacations of this sort seemed in order. For Tolkien, the voyage afforded an opportunity to step back for two weeks from the tensions and trials of guiding his masterwork into print, while also allowing him to set foot in a land he had admired from afar and to revel in a language that he found lovely but spoke haltingly, although he had studied it while recovering from gastritis during World War I. It came as a “linguistic shock,” when he arrived on Italian soil, to learn that Italians, contrary to reputation, “dislike exaggeration, superlatives, and adjectives of excessive praise. But they seem to answer to colour and poetic expression, if justified.” This opalescent language worked its magic: after his return, he wrote Christopher that “I remain in love with Italian, and feel quite lorn without a chance of trying to speak it! We must keep it up…”

  Italy and magic seemed synonymous. Venice, the first significant stop, where the travelers were met by Christopher and his wife, Faith, proved bewitching, otherworldly, with its intersecting canals, crumbling palaces, and mysterious plazas, “elvishly lovely—to me like a dream of Old Gondor, or Pelargir of the Númenorean ships, before the return of the Shadow.” The enchantment arose from more than the cityscape: Italy was saturated with Catholicism—a far cry from England, with its history of anti-Catholic murder and riot—and Tolkien felt like “an exile from the borders and far provinces returning home, or at least to the home of his fathers.” Especially welcoming were the many chapels that housed the Blessed Sacrament, buildings that emanated “a curious glow of dormant life and Charity.” Tolkien rejoiced also in Venice’s lack of cars, a brief respite from “the cursed disease of the internal combustion engine of which all the world is dying.” Assisi, too, was a revelation. He and Priscilla stayed in a convent, awoke to the “tremendous babel of bells” at 5:30 a.m., strolled around the church of San Damiano, “soaked with a sense of the personality of St Clare, and of St Francis,” and attended a Mass at the Basilica of San Francesco and a High Mass at the church of Santa Chiara, where, Tolkien thought, “the great choir of friars sang magnificently, to my thinking, with enormous controlled power—capable of lifting the roof even of Santa Chiara instantaneously and without effort.” Like all trips, this one also offered irritations and disappointments: too much rain, some architectural monstrosities, a friar who preached an interminable sermon, and clouds of mosquitoes, who savagely bit Tolkien’s face, hands, and legs, resulting in swellings and blisters.

  Overall, however, the voyage proved an extraordinary success. Those lucky enough to read the Giornale d’Italia—which remains lamentably unpublished, languishing in a bin at the Bodleian—cannot help but be impressed by the extent to which Tolkien, on vacation, far away from the university, his great literary labor in its final stages, bursts loose in glorious descriptive passages, using words as splashes of paint to capture, impressionistically, the moods of this bewitching land. Tolkien was always more immersed in the visual arts than most of his readers realize. Here is Tolkien the watercolorist, registering the tones of Venice; Tolkien the art critic, passing judgment on medieval and Renaissance paintings. Of Venice: “it is much paler and less hard and clear in colour than I expected: black, white, pale pink, grey,” and “heartrendingly lovely after so short a stay, so soon to end. Still no hard or deep colours. Clear but pale sky, glass-grey glinting water, light olive-greenness.” As for Italian art, the famous frescoes ascribed, perhaps erroneously, to Giotto in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi struck him as too dependent upon shades of red (“ochre, brick-red, scarlet, crimson”), while in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia he admired the Tintorettos and was “much moved” by Bassano’s St. Jerome (1556), which depicts the elderly saint in a cave, wearing a loincloth, surrounded by books. Perhaps he read in Jerome’s suffering and scholarship something of his own life. To Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18) in the Franc
iscan Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, also in Venice, he had a complicated response, approving its bright colors but put off by its histrionics, its startled Virgin and wildly gesticulating apostles, commenting that “it has nothing whatever to say to me about the Assumption: which means that with that in mind it is offensive (to me).”

  This raised questions about the relation of religion to art: “Can a picture concerned with religion be satisfactory on one side only? Spiritual but bad art; great art but irreligious?” Many would answer positively, at least to the second clause—after all, Picasso, the most important artist of the twentieth century, was relentlessly irreligious, even in his Crucifixion (1930)—but to Tolkien, it was “impossible to disentangle the two. Easier perhaps for the irreligious.” For him religiosity in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly; in 1953 he had written to Fr. Robert Murray that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

  Lightning from a Clear Sky

  Tolkien’s best argument that it is impossible to disentangle great art from religion is The Lord of the Rings itself; no other twentieth-century fiction comes close to Tolkien’s fusion of invented mythology, imagined history, high fantasy, and deep piety. His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable. Thus Lewis in “The Gods Return to Earth,” a review of The Lord of the Rings for Time and Tide: “This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs … Nothing quite like it was ever done before…” To the “predestined readers” of Tolkien’s heroic romance—the only readers who would be prepared to understand—Lewis prophesied, “here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. They will know that this is good news, news beyond hope.”

  Years earlier, commenting on the slow progress of his friend’s Hobbit sequel, Lewis had observed that Tolkien “works like a coral insect.” It was a stock image: the Victorians likened missionaries to coral insects building up the majestic reefs by their ceaseless, unseen, and unrewarded labor, soli Deo gloria. The divine drudgery of this coral-insect labor was rewarded by moments of serendipitous discovery: “I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me,” Tolkien told Auden. “Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlórien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.”

  It had been clear from the outset that the settled happiness of The Hobbit’s conclusion would have to be overturned and Bilbo would have to step aside—the sequel demanded an heir, and the heir would need a new rationale for venturing beyond the secure confines of the Shire. “Make return of ring a motive” occurred early on to Tolkien, as we have seen, but the nature of this ring was still unclear to him; in the original version of The Hobbit, Bilbo had stumbled upon a magic ring that conferred invisibility and helped him through various scrapes, but initially Tolkien thought of this ring as “not very dangerous, when used for good purpose.”

  As Tolkien labored on, however, the story turned more ominous as well as more profound. Figures familiar from The Hobbit become much stranger in the sequel. The Dwarves disclose their character as a people apart—like the Jews, Tolkien thought, “at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue…” The Necromancer from The Hobbit becomes the Dark Lord Sauron (so named, Tolkien told a correspondent, from an Elvish word for “detestable”), Morgoth’s lieutenant, maker of the Rings of Power, and intent upon conquering Middle-earth by means of the master Ring into which he poured his libido dominandi. And with Morgoth and Sauron come a vast procession of beings from Tolkien’s master myth: the longeval High Elves, survivors of the epic wars of the past, who linger in Middle-earth, conscious that their glory is fading; the dreadful Orcs (tortured and corrupted beings, akin to goblins) and Uruk-hai (warrior Orcs crossbred with Men); the langorous Ents (“giants” in Old English), tree-shepherds assigned by the godlike Valar to protect the primeval forests; and the Istari (“wise ones”) clad in the bodies of aged Men, among them Saruman (his name means “Craft-Man”), chief of the Order and bent on domination, and Gandalf (“Staff-Elf”) the Grey Pilgrim, who wanders Middle-earth giving aid and counsel, now unveiled as the keeper of the primordial Secret Fire (“his joy, and his swift wrath, were veiled in garments grey as ash, so that only those that knew him well glimpsed the flame that was within.”)

  While the Men of Bree regularly mingle with Hobbits, Men are for the most part strange, aloof, oversized; their motivations and values—the medieval Germanic shame/honor culture of the Rohirrim, the Byzantine grandeur of Gondor, the clandestine fellowship of the Dúnedain—inscrutable, even alien, when seen through ordinary Hobbit eyes. Clearly the reader is meant to identify with small Hobbits rather than with great Men. Tolkien’s deeply Catholic understanding of the Magnificat theme—the exaltation of the humble, already present in The Hobbit, as we have seen, and adumbrated in all his writing—would be fully realized here.

  How to frame the story, now that it was so much more complex than The Hobbit, was a real puzzle. Tolkien was torn between different authorial registers. In a foreword to the first edition, he begins by speaking as the (fictional) chronicler of the history of Middle-earth, but ends by speaking as the real-world author, dedicating The Lord of the Rings to his children and fellow Inklings. But it didn’t work; the two voices clashed. For the second edition, published in 1965, he produced a new foreword in his real-world voice, explaining why it had taken so long to write the book (and, incidentally, dropping the dedication to the Inklings); this was followed by a prologue by the unnamed scholar who, within Tolkien’s secondary world, is responsible for the book known in English translation as The Lord of the Rings.

  The unnamed scholar, we are given to believe, is a compiler, redactor, and translator of prodigious text-critical skills who has mined the Matter of Middle-earth from The Red Book of Westmarch and other documentary sources, reconciling manuscript variants, transcribing runic and alphabetic scripts, and rendering in various shades of modern English the idioms, accents, musicality, and poetic diction of the languages of Elves, Men, Dwarves, Ents, Orcs, and Valar. To take just one example: Sam’s real name, transliterated from the Mannish vernacular called Westron, is Banazîr (“halfwise”) Galbasi (galab is “game” and bas is a suffix used in place names), for which Samwise Gamwich is an English approximation, devolving into Samwise Gammidgy, or Gamgee. Shire place-names, similarly, are represented by English place-names, most of which have recognizably Midlands roots. Tolkien’s invented nomenclature thus enabled him to locate the Shire in a region replete with nostalgic significance—the region of his lost childhood home, which was also, as he argued in his study of the Ancrene Wisse, a sanctuary for Anglo-Saxon language and culture during the centuries after the catastrophe of 1066.

  * * *

  A translator must perforce be an interpreter of cultures; hence a good deal of the fictional prologue is taken up with Hobbit ethnography, much of it tongue in cheek. The Hobbits are “an unobtrusive but very ancient people” who “love peace and quiet and good tilled earth” and enjoy their six meals a day, though they are capable of
enduring extraordinary privation at need. Like most traditional peoples, they have a keen interest in genealogies and family histories. Though on better terms with the natural world than we moderns, their preference is for nature cultivated rather than wild, for the products of small-scale farming and artisanship and for civilized pleasures like the smoking of pipe-weed. The Shire is not a medieval town so much as a nineteenth-century hamlet (“more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee,” Tolkien told Allen & Unwin), a gossipy, provincial, preindustrial little world, rather like Cure Hardy in That Hideous Strength, which is attractive “in spite of all its obvious absurdities” and deserves to be saved. As Gandalf will say, “It would be a grievous blow to the world, if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your kind, jolly, stupid Bolgers, Hornblowers, Boffins, Bracegirdles, and the rest, not to mention the ridiculous Bagginses, became enslaved.” Even more so than in The Hobbit, the very anachronisms in the tale—like Bilbo’s pocket handkerchiefs and Sam’s fish and chips—can be understood most profitably as acts of translation meant to convey the homely goodness of the Shire, and all that deserves to be saved, by means of quintessentially English comforts.

  The story opens with a comic explosion in the form of an antic “long-expected party”—an ironic inversion of the “unexpected party” with which The Hobbit begins. The occasion is Bilbo’s “eleventy-first” and Frodo’s thirty-third birthday, and Gandalf has arrived with fireworks to crown the occasion. A last gasp of Hobbit silliness and facetiousness (regretted by Tolkien and his critics alike) marks the moment of transition from a children’s story to the tremendous narrative that is about to unfold. Bilbo makes a mocking valedictory speech, puts on the Ring that he had obtained during the adventures of The Hobbit, and abruptly vanishes, leaving Frodo to distribute the gifts and preside as heir in his place. Bilbo returns to Bag End and prepares to take to the open road again; yet when it comes to surrendering the Ring—the hidden purpose of the whole affair—he shows an unwillingness that arouses Gandalf’s suspicion.