Since the lecture was first published, many readers of Beowulf have dissented from Tolkien"s view of the poem"s structure. But even one of the severest critics of his interpretation, his old tutor Kenneth Sisam, admitted that the lecture has a fineness of perception and elegance of expression" which distinguish it from so much else in this field.
The Beowulf lecture and the paper on the Reeve"s Tale were the only major pieces of philological work published by Tolkien in the nineteen-thirties. He planned to do much more: besides his work on the Ancrene Wisse he intended to produce an edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem Exodus, and indeed he nearly completed this task, but it was never finished to his satisfaction. He also planned further joint editions with E. V. Gordon, in particular of Pearl (a natural companion-piece to their Gawain) and of the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer. But Gordon and Tolkien were now geographically far apart. In 1931 Gordon, who had been appointed Tolkien"s successor as professor at Leeds, moved from there to take up a chair at Manchester University, and though the two men met and corresponded frequently, collaboration proved technically less easy than when they had been in the same place. Gordon did a great deal of work on all three projects, using Tolkien as a consultant rather than as a full collaborator, but nothing had reached print by 1938.
In the summer of that year, Gordon went into hospital for an operation for gall-stones. It seemed to be successful, but his condition suddenly deteriorated, and he died from a previously unsuspected kidney disorder, at the age of forty-two.
Gordon"s death robbed Tolkien not only of a close friend but also of the ideal professional collaborator; and by now it was clear that he needed a collaborator, if only to make him surrender any material to the printer.1 As it happened, he had made the acquaintance of another philologist who proved to be a good working partner. This was Simonne d"Ardenne, a Belgian graduate who studied Middle English with him for an Oxford B.Litt. early in the nineteen-thirties. Tolkien contributed much to her edition of The Life and Pa.s.sion of St Juliene, a medieval religious work written in the Ancrene Wisse dialect. Indeed the d"Ardenne Juliene paradoxically contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he ever published under his own name. Mile d"Ardenne became a professor at Liege, and she and Tolkien planned to collaborate on an edition of Katerine, another Western Middle English text of the same group. But the war intervened and made communication between them impossible for many years, and after 1945 nothing was achieved by them beyond a couple of short articles on topics concerned with the ma.n.u.script of the text. Although Tolkien was able to work with Mile d"Ardenne when he was in Belgium to attend a philological congress in 1951, she realised sadly that collaboration with him was now impossible, for his mind was entirely on his stories.
But even if one is to regard his failure to publish more in his professional field as a matter for regret, one should not fail to take account of his wide influence, for his theories and deductions have been quoted (with or without due acknowledgement) wherever English philology is studied.
Nor should one forget the translations he made of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo. The Pearl translation was begun at Leeds in the nineteen-twenties; Tolkien was attracted to the task by the challenge of the poem"s complex metrical and verbal structure. He had finished it by 1926, but he did nothing about publishing it until Basil Blackwell offered to put it into print in the 1 Tolkien intended to complete the Pearl edition, but he found himself unable to do so (by this time he was absorbed in writing The Lord of the Rings). It was eventually revised and completed for publication by Ida Gordon, the widow of E. V. Gordon, and herself a professional philologist nineteen-forties, in return for a sum to be credited to Tolkien"s heavily overdue account at Blackwell"s bookshop in Oxford. The translation was set into type, but Blackwell waited in vain for Tolkien to write the introduction to the volume, and eventually the project was abandoned. The translation of Gawain, probably begun during the nineteen-thirties or forties, was finished in time for it to be broadcast in dramatised form by the BBC in 1953, Tolkien himself recording a short introduction and a longer concluding talk. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings his publishers Alien & Unwin determined to issue the Gawain and Pearl translations in one volume. With this in view, Tolkien made extensive revisions of both translations, but once again an introduction was required, and he found it extremely difficult to write one, being uncertain as to what ought to be explained to the non-scholarly reader for whom the book was intended. Again the project lapsed, and it was not until after his death that the two translations were published, together with a modern English rendering of a third poem of the same period, Sir Orjeo, which Tolkien had originally translated for a wartime cadets" course at Oxford. The introduction to the volume was a.s.sembled by Christopher Tolkien out of such materials as could be found among his father"s papers.
These translations were in effect Tolkien"s last published philological work, for although they are accompanied by no notes or commentary they are the result of sixty years" minute study of the poems, and in many places they provide an informed and illuminating interpretation of hard and ambiguous pa.s.sages in the originals. Most important of all, they bring these poems to an audience that could not have read them in Middle English. For this reason they are a fitting conclusion to the work of a man who believed that the prime function of a linguist is to interpret literature, and that the prime function of literature is to be enjoyed.
When Tolkien returned to Oxford in 1925 there was an element missing from his life. It had disappeared with the breaking of the T.C.B.S. in the Battle of the Somme, for not since those days had he enjoyed friendship to the same degree of emotional and intellectual commitment. He had continued to see something of the other surviving T.C.B.S. member, Christopher Wiseman, but Wiseman was now heavily involved with his duties as the headmaster of a Methodist public school,1 and when the two men did meet they now found very little in common.
On 11 May 1926 Tolkien attended a meeting of the English Faculty at Merton College. Among the familiar faces a new arrival stood out, a heavily-built man of twenty-seven in baggy clothes who had recently been elected Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. This was Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as Jack".
At first the two men circled warily around one another. Tolkien knew that Lewis, though a medievalist, was in the Lit." camp and thus a potential adversary, while Lewis wrote in his diary that Tolkien was a smooth, pale, fluent little chap", adding No harm in him: only needs a smack or so." But soon Lewis came to have a firm affection for this long-faced keen-eyed man who liked good talk and laughter and beer, while Tolkien warmed to Lewis"s quick mind and the generous spirit that was as huge as Lewis"s shapeless flannel trousers. By May 1927 Tolkien had enrolled Lewis into the Coal-biters to join in the reading of Icelandic sagas, and a long and complex friendship had begun.
Anyone who wants to know something of what Tolkien and Lewis contributed to each other"s lives should read Lewis"s essay on Friendship in his book The Four Loves. Here it all is, the account of how Queen"s College Taunton, which Tolkien"s grandfather John Suffield had attended as one of its earliest pupils. The two companions become friends when they discover a shared insight, how their friendship is not jealous but seeks out the company of others, how such friendships are almost of necessity between men, how the greatest pleasure of all is for a group of friends to come to an inn after a hard day"s walking: Those are the golden sessions," writes Lewis, when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim or responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life - natural life - has no better gift to give."1 This is what it was about, those years of companionship, the walking tours, the friends gathered in Lewis"s rooms on Thursday nights. It was partly the spirit of the tunes - you may find something of the same sense of male companionship in the writings of Chesterton; and it was a feeling shared, though with less self-awareness, by many men of the day. It has precedents in ancient civilizations, and closer at hand it was in part the result of the First World War, in which so many friends had been killed that the survivors felt the need to stay close together.
Friendship of this kind was remarkable, and at the same time entirely natural and inevitable. It was not h.o.m.os.e.xual (Lewis dismisses that suggestion with deserved ridicule), yet it excluded women. It is the great mystery of Tolkien"s life, and we shall understand little of it if we try to a.n.a.lyse it. At the same time if we have ever enjoyed a friendship of that sort we shall know exactly what it was about. And even if that fails us, we can find something of it expressed in The Lord of the Rings.
How did it begin? Perhaps Northernness" was the shared insight that started it. Since early adolescence Lewis had been captivated by Norse mythology, and when he found in Tolkien another who delighted in the mysteries of the Edda and the complexities of the V61-sung legend it was clear that they would have a lot to share. They began to meet regularly in Lewis"s rooms in Magdalen, sometimes sitting far into the night while they talked of the G.o.ds and giants of Asgard or discussed the politics of the English School. They also commented on each other"s poetry.
Tolkien lent Lewis the typescript of his long poem" The Gest of Beren and Luthien", and after reading it Lewis wrote to him: I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend"s work had very little to do with it -1 should have enjoyed it just as well if I"d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author." He sent Tolkien detailed criticisms of the poem, which he jestingly couched in the form of a mock textual criticism, complete with the names of fict.i.tious scholars (Pumpernickel", Peabody", and Schick") who suggested that weak lines in Tolkien"s poem were simply the result of scribal inaccuracies in the ma.n.u.script, and could not be the authentic work of the original poet. Tolkien was amused by this, but he accepted few of Lewis"s suggested emendations. On the other hand he did rewrite almost every pa.s.sage that Lewis had criticised, rewrote so extensively, in fact, that the revised Gest of Beren and Luthien" was scarcely the same poem.
Lewis soon discovered this to be characteristic of his friend. He has only two reactions to criticism," he remarked.
Either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all."
By this time - the end of 1929 - Lewis was supporting Tolkien"s plans for changes within the English School. The two men intrigued and discussed. Lewis wrote conspiratorially to Tolkien: Forgive me if I remind you that there are disguised orcs behind every tree." Together they waged a skilful campaign, and it was partly thanks to Lewis"s support on the Faculty Board that Tolkien managed to get his reformed syllabus accepted in 1931.
In Surprised by Joy Lewis wrote that friendship with Tolkien marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both". Soon after the second prejudice had been overcome, the friendship moved into the area of the first Lewis, the son of a Belfast solicitor, had been brought up as an Ulster protestant. During adolescence he had professed agnosticism; or rather he had discovered that for him the greatest delight was to be found not in Christianity but in pagan mythologies. Yet already he had receded a little from this standpoint. During the middle nineteen-twenties, after taking a First Cla.s.s in the English School (and earlier a double First in Cla.s.sics) and while making a precarious living as a tutor, he had arrived at what he called his New Look", the belief that the Christian myth" conveys as much truth as most men can comprehend. By 1926 he had moved further and had come to the conclusion that in effect his search for the source of what he called Joy was a search for G.o.d. Soon it became apparent to him that he must accept or reject G.o.d. At this juncture he became friends with Tolkien.
In Tolkien he found a person of wit and intellectual verve who was nevertheless a devout Christian. During the early years of their friendship there were many hours when Tolkien would lounge in one of Lewis"s plain armchairs in the centre of the big sitting-room in Magdalen New Buildings while Lewis, his heavy fist grasping the bowl of his pipe and his eyebrows raised behind a cloud of smoke, would pace up and down, talking or listening, suddenly swinging round and exclaiming Distinguo, Tollers! Distinguo!" as the other man, similarly wreathed in pipe smoke, made too sweeping an a.s.sertion. Lewis argued, but more and more in the matter of belief he was coming to admit that Tolkien was right. By the summer of 1929 he had come to profess theism, a simple faith in G.o.d. But he was not yet a Christian.
Usually his discussions with Tolkien took place on Monday mornings, when they would talk for an hour or two and then conclude with beer at the Eastgate, a nearby pub. But on Sat.u.r.day 19 September 1931 they met in the evening. Lewis had invited Tolkien to dine at Magdalen, and he had another guest, Hugo Dyson, whom Tolkien had first known at Exeter College in 1919. Dyson was now Lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, and he paid frequent visits to Oxford. He was a Christian, and a man of feline wit. After dinner, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson went out for air. It was a bl.u.s.tery night, but they strolled along Addison"s Walk discussing the purpose of myth.
Lewis, though now a believer in G.o.d, could not yet understand the function of Christ in Christianity, could not perceive the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. He declared that he had to understand the purpose of these events - as he later expressed it in a letter to a friend, how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now - except in so far as his example could help us".
As the night wore on, Tolkien and Dyson showed him that he was here making a totally unnecessary demand.
When he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination since he had read the story of the Norse G.o.d Balder. But from the Gospels (they said) he was requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?
But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not. And, indicating the great trees of Magdalen Grove as their branches bent in the wind, he struck out a different line of argument.
You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a tree" until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from G.o.d (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with G.o.d. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology, Tolkien had laid bare the centre of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion.
Lewis listened as Dyson affirmed in his own way what Tolkien had said. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened! In that case, he said, I begin to understand.
At last the wind drove them inside, and they talked in Lewis"s rooms until three a.m., when Tolkien went home.
After seeing him out into the High Street, Lewis and Dyson walked up and down the cloister of New Buildings, still talking, until the sky grew light.
Twelve days later Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves: I have just pa.s.sed on from believing in G.o.d to definitely believing in Christ - in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it."
Meanwhile Tolkien, invigilating in the Examination Schools, was composing a long poem recording what he had said to Lewis. He called it Mythopoeia", the making of myths. And he wrote in his diary: Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual - a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher - and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord."
Lewis and Tolkien continued to see much of each other. Tolkien read aloud to Lewis from The Silmarillion, and Lewis urged him to press on and finish writing it. Tolkien later said of this: The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience.
Only from him did I ever get the idea that my stuff could be more than a private hobby."
Lewis"s conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of a new stage in his friendship with Tolkien. From the early nineteen-thirties onwards the two men depended less exclusively on each other"s company and more on that of other men. In The Four Loves Lewis states that two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best", and he suggests that each friend added to a group brings out some special characteristic in the others. Tolkien had experienced this in the T.C.B.S.; and the knot of friends which now began to come together was the ultimate expression of the T.C.B.S. principle, the clubbable" urge which Tolkien had felt since those adolescent days. This group was known as The Inklings.
It began to form itself at about the tune (in the early nineteen-thirties) when the Coalbiters ceased to meet, having fulfilled their aim of reading all the princ.i.p.al Icelandic sagas and finally the Elder Edda. The Inklings" was originally the name of a literary society founded in about 1931 by a University College undergraduate named Tangye Lean.
Lewis and Tolkien both attended its meetings, at which unpublished compositions were read and criticised. After Lean left Oxford the club lived on; or rather its name was transferred half jestingly to the circle of friends who gathered at regular intervals around Lewis.
The Inklings have now entered literary history, and a good deal has been written about them, much of it over-solemn. They were no more (and no less) than a number of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature. Numbers of people have been stated to have been members" at this or that period, whereas in truth there was no system of membership. Some men attended more or less regularly at various periods, while others were only occasional visitors. Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable. A list of other names gives little idea of what the Inklings really were; but if names matter, besides Lewis and Tolkien (who was almost invariably present) among those who attended in the years before and during the war were Major Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis"s brother, known as Warnie"), R. E. Havard (an Oxford doctor who attended the Lewis and Tolkien households), Lewis"s long-standing friend Owen Barfield (although, being a London solicitor, Barfield rarely came to meetings), and Hugo Dyson.
It was a thoroughly casual business. One should not imagine that the same people turned up week after week, or sent apologies if they were to be absent. Nevertheless there were certain invariable elements. The group, or various members of it, would meet on a weekday morning in a pub, generally on Tuesdays in the Eagle and Child (known familiarly as The Bird and Baby"); though during the war when beer was short and pubs crowded with servicemen their habits were more flexible. On Thursday nights they would meet in Lewis"s big Magdalen sitting-room, congregating some time after nine o"clock. Tea would be made and pipes lit, and then Lewis would boom out: Well, has n.o.body got anything to read us?" Someone would produce a ma.n.u.script and begin to read it aloud - it might be a poem, or a story, or a chapter. Then would come criticism: sometimes praise, sometimes censure, for it was no mutual admiration society. There might be more reading, but soon the proceedings would spill over into talk of all kinds, sometimes heated debate, and would terminate at a late hour.
By the late nineteen-thirties the Inklings were an important part of Tolkien"s life, and among his own contributions to gatherings were readings from the still-unpublished ma.n.u.script of The Hobbit. When war broke out in 1939 another man was recruited to the group of friends. This was Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press at their London office and who with the rest of their staff was now transferred to Oxford. Williams was in his fifties; his thought and writings - he was a novelist, poet, theologian, and critic - were already known and respected, albeit by a small circle of readers. In particular his" spiritual thrillers" (as they have been called), novels which deal with supernatural and mystical events in a mundane setting, had found a small but enthusiastic public. Lewis had known and admired Williams for some time, but Tolkien had only met him once or twice. Now he came to develop a complex att.i.tude to him.
Williams, with his curious face (half angel, half monkey, Lewis called it), his very un-Oxford-like blue suit, the cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a bundle of proofs wrapped in Time & Tide tucked under his arm, was a person of great natural charm. Tolkien recalled twenty years later: We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest)." But he added: We had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels." This was partly because, while Williams enjoyed the chapters from The Lord of the Rings that were then being read to the group, Tolkien did not like Williams"s books, or those which he had read. He declared that he found them wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous". And perhaps his reservations about Williams, or Williams"s place in the Inklings, were not entirely intellectual. Lewis believed, and declared in The Four Loves, that true friends cannot be jealous when another comes to join them. But here Lewis was talking about Lewis, not about Tolkien.
Clearly there was a little jealousy or resentment on Tolkien"s part, and not without cause, for now the limelight of Lewis"s enthusiasm shifted almost imperceptibly from himself to Williams. Lewis was a very impressionable man,"
Tolkien wrote long afterwards, and elsewhere he talked of the dominant influence" that he believed Williams had come to exercise over Lewis, especially over his third novel, That Hideous Strength.
So Williams"s arrival in Oxford marked the beginning of a third phase in Tolkien"s friendship with Lewis, a faint cooling on Tolkien"s part which even Lewis probably hardly noticed as yet. Something else made him cooler, something even more subtle: the matter of Lewis"s growing reputation as a Christian apologist. As Tolkien had played such an important part in his friend"s return to Christianity he had always regretted that Lewis had not become a Catholic like himself, but had begun to at tend his local Anglican church, resuming the religious practices of his childhood. Tolkien had a deep resentment of the Church of England which he sometimes extended to its buildings, declaring that his appreciation of their beauty was marred by his sadness that they had been (he considered) perverted from their rightful Catholicism. When Lewis published a prose allegory telling the story of his conversion under the t.i.tle The Pilgrim"s Regress, Tolkien thought the t.i.tle ironical. Lewis would regress," he said.
He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up again, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant."
By the mid nineteen-forties Lewis was receiving a good deal of publicity (too much," said Tolkien, for his or any of our tastes") in connection with his Christian writings, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. Tolkien perhaps felt, as he observed his friend"s increasing fame in this respect, rather as if a pupil had speedily overtaken his master to achieve almost unjustified fame. He once referred to Lewis, not altogether flatteringly, as Everyman"s Theologian".
But if these thoughts were at all in Tolkien"s mind in the early nineteen-forties they were well below the surface. He still had an almost unbounded affection for Lewis - indeed perhaps still cherished the occasional hope that his friend might one day become a Catholic. And the Inklings continued to provide much delight and encouragement to him. Hwaet! we Inklings," he wrote in parody of the opening lines of Beowulf, on aerdagum searopancolra snyttru gehierdon." Lo! We have heard in old days of the wisdom of the cunning-minded Inklings; how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations, skillfully reciting learning and song-craft, earnestly meditating. That was true joy!"
What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea." So writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves while speculating on the history of male friendship. This is the inevitable corollary of a life that centres on the company of men, and on groups such as the Inklings: women get left out of it.
Edith Tolkien had only been given a limited education at a girls" boarding-school which, while good in music, was indifferent in other subjects. She had spent a few years in a Birmingham lodging-house, then a period at Cheltenham in a markedly non-intellectual middle-cla.s.s household, and then a long time living with her poorly educated middle-aged cousin Jennie. There had been no chance either to continue her education or to improve her mind. More than this, she had lost a good deal of her independence. She had been set for a career as a piano teacher and just possibly as a soloist, but this prospect had simply faded away, first of all because there had been no immediate need for her to earn a living, and then because she had married Ronald Tolkien. In those days there was in normal circ.u.mstances no question of a middle-cla.s.s wife continuing to earn her living after marriage, for to do so would have been an indication that the husband could not earn enough by himself. So piano playing was reduced to a mere hobby, although she continued to play regularly until old age, and her music delighted Ronald.
He did not encourage her to pursue any intellectual activity, partly because he did not consider it to be a necessary part of her role as wife and mother, and partly because his att.i.tude to her in courtship (exemplified by his favourite term for her, little one") was not a.s.sociated with his own intellectual life; to her he showed a side of his personality quite different from that perceived by his male friends. Just as he liked to be a man"s man among his cronies, so at home he expected to live in what was primarily a woman"s world.
Despite this, Edith might have been able to make a positive contribution to his life in the University. A number of Oxford dons" wives managed to do this. A few lucky ones such as Joseph Wright"s wife Lizzie were themselves expert in their husband"s subjects, and could a.s.sist in their work. But a number of other wives who, like Edith, did not have university degrees could by their expert management of the household make their home into something of a social centre for their husbands" friends, and so partic.i.p.ate in much of their lives.
Unfortunately everything worked out rather differently for Edith. She was inclined to be shy, for she had led a very limited social life in childhood and adolescence, and when she came to live in Oxford in 1918 she was unnerved by what she found. She and Ronald and the baby (and her cousin Jennie, who was still with them, remaining until they moved to Leeds) lived in modest rooms in a side-street in the town; and, from her viewpoint as someone who did not know Oxford, the University seemed an almost impenetrable fortress, a phalanx of imposing buildings where important-looking men pa.s.sed to and fro in gowns, and where Ronald disappeared to work each day. When the University deigned to cross her threshold it was in the person of polite but awkward young men, friends of Ronald"s who did not know how to talk to women, and to whom she could think of nothing to say, for their worlds simply did not overlap. Worse still, the visitors might be dons" wives, such as the terrifying Mrs Farnell, wife of the Rector of Exeter, whose presence even frightened Ronald. These women only confirmed Edith in her belief that the University was unapproachable in its eminence. They came from their awesome college lodgings or their turreted mansions in North Oxford to coo condescendingly at baby John in his cot, and when they departed they would leave their calling-cards on the hall tray (one card bearing their own name, two cards bearing their husband"s) to indicate that Mrs Tolkien was of course expected to return the call after a short interval. But Edith"s nerve failed her.
What could she say to these people if she went to their imposing houses? What possible conversation could she have with these stately women, whose talk was of people of whom she had never heard, of professors" daughters and tided cousins and other Oxford hostesses? Ronald was worried, for he knew what a solecism would be committed if his wife did not follow the strict Oxford etiquette. He persuaded her to return one call, to Lizzie Wright, who although very learned was not at all like most dons" wives, having a great deal of her husband"s openness and common sense; but even then Ronald had to take her to the Wrights" front door himself and ring the bell before hurrying away round the corner. All the other calling-cards gathered dust, the calls were left unreturned, and it became known that Mr Tolkien"s wife did not call and must therefore be quietly excluded from the round of dinner parties and At Homes.
Then the Tolkiens moved to Leeds, and Edith found that things were different there. People occupied ordinary modest houses, and there was no nonsense about calling-cards. Another university wife lived a few doors down in St Mark"s Terrace and often called for a chat. Edith also began to see a good deal of Ronald"s pupils who came in for tutorials or tea, and she liked many of them very much. Many of these pupils became family friends who kept in touch with her in later years and often came to visit. There were informal university dances which she enjoyed.
Even the children (there were now John, Michael, and, at the end of their time in Leeds, Christopher) were not forgotten, for the university organised splendid Christmas parties at which the Vice-Chancellor used to dress up as Father Christmas. Later, Ronald managed to afford to buy a larger house in Darnley Road, away from the smoke and dirt of the city. They employed a maid and a nurse for the children. On the whole Edith was happy.
But then suddenly they were back in Oxford. The first house in Northmoor Road was bought by Ronald while Edith was still in Leeds, without her ever having seen it, and she thought it was too small. The older boys had caught ringworm from a public comb at a photographer"s studio in Leeds, and they had to be given lengthy and expensive treatment. When they were sufficiently recovered to go to the Dragon School they were at first unhappy there among the rough-and-tumble of other boys. Then Edith became pregnant again. Not until after the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the move to the larger house next door in 1930 could she feel settled.
Even then, family life never entirely regained the equilibrium it had achieved in Leeds. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald. In terms of actual hours he was certainly in the house a great deal: much of his teaching was done there, and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was really a matter of his affections. He was very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was about his) and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the company of men of his own kind. More specifically she noticed and resented his devotion to Jack Lewis.
On the occasions when Lewis came to Northmoor Road, the children liked him because he did not talk condescendingly to them; and he gave them books by E. Nesbit, which they enjoyed. But with Edith he was shy and ungainly. Consequently she could not understand the delight that Ronald took in his company, and she became a little jealous. There were other difficulties. She had only known a home life of the most limited sort in her own childhood, and she therefore had no example on which to base the running of her household. Not surprisingly she cloaked this uncertainty in authoritarian-ism, demanding that meals be precisely on time, that the children eat up every sc.r.a.p, and that servants should perform their work impeccably. Underneath all this she was often very lonely, frequently being without company other than the servants and the children during that part of the day when Ronald was out or in his study. During these years Oxford society was gradually becoming less rigid; but she did not trust it, and she made few friends among other dons" families, with the exception of Charles Wrenn"s wife, Agnes. She also suffered from severe headaches which could prostrate her for a day or more.
It quickly became clear to Ronald that Edith was unhappy with Oxford, and especially that she was resentful of his men friends. Indeed he perceived that his need of male friendship was not entirely compatible with married life. But he believed that this was one of the sad facts of a fallen world; and on the whole he thought that a man had a right to male pleasures, and should if necessary insist on them. To a son contemplating marriage he wrote: There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss. Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out - or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently - the gla.s.s of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc., etc. If the other side"s claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and fuss than subterfuge."
There was also the problem of Edith"s att.i.tude to Catholicism. Before they were married, Ronald had persuaded her to leave the Church of England and to become a Catholic, and she had resented this a little at the tune. During the subsequent years she had almost given up going to ma.s.s. In the second decade of marriage her anti-Catholic feelings hardened, and by the time the family returned to Oxford in 1925 she was showing resentment of Ronald taking the children to church. In part these feelings were due to Ronald"s rigid, almost medieval, insistence upon frequent confession; and Edith had always hated confessing her sins to a priest. Nor could he discuss her feelings with her in a rational manner, certainly not with the lucidity he demonstrated in his theological arguments with Lewis: to Edith he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding.
Occasionally her smouldering anger about church-going burst into fury; but at last after one such outburst in 1940 there was a true reconciliation between her and Ronald, in which she explained her feelings and even declared that she wished to resume the practice of her religion. In the event she did riot return to regular church-going, but for the rest of her life she showed no resentment of Catholicism, and indeed delighted to take an interest in church affairs, so that it appeared even to friends who were Catholics that she was an active church-goer.
To some extent Ronald and Edith lived separate lives at North-moor Road, sleeping in different bedrooms and keeping different hours. He worked late, partly because he was short of time in the day, but also because it was not until she had gone to bed that he could stay at his desk without interruption. During the day he could not work for long before she summoned him to some domestic duty, or called him to come and have tea with a friend. These frequent interruptions, themselves no more than an understandable demand from Edith for affection and attention, were often an irritant to him, though he bore them patiently.
Yet it would be wrong to picture her as excluded totally from his work. During these years he did not share his writing with her anything like as fully as he had done long before at Great Haywood; not since then had she been encouraged to partic.i.p.ate in his work, and of his ma.n.u.scripts only the early pages of The Book of Lost Tales" are in her handwriting. Yet she inevitably shared in the family"s interest when he was writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and although she was not well acquainted with the details of his books and did not have a deep understanding of them, he did not shut her out from this side of his life. Indeed she was the first person to whom he showed two of his stories, Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, and he was always warmed and encouraged by her approval.
He and Edith shared many friends. Among these, some had academic connections, such as Rosfrith Murray (daughter of the original Oxford Dictionary editor Sir James Murray) and her nephew Robert Murray, and former pupils and colleagues such as Simonne d"Ardenne, Elaine Griffiths, Stella Mills, and Mary Salu. All these were family friends, as much a part of Edith"s life as of Ronald"s, and this itself was a binding force between them. She and Ronald did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his and her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild"s measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with.
Those friends and others who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible both in the small things, the almost absurd degree to which each worried about the other"s health, and the care with which they chose and wrapped each other"s birthday presents; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years at Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree to which she showed pride in his fame as an author.
A princ.i.p.al source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family. This bound them together until the end of their lives, and it was perhaps the strongest force in the marriage. They delighted to discuss and mull over every detail of the lives of their children, and later of their grandchildren. They were very proud when Michael won the George Medal in the Second World War for his action as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes in the Battle of Britain; and they felt similar pride when John was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church shortly after the war. Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.
If to us, reading about it so many years later, life at Northmoor Road seems dull and uneventful, we should realise that this was not how the family felt it to be at the time. To them it was full of event There was the unforgettable occasion in 1932 when Tolkien bought his first car, a Morris Cowley that was nicknamed Jo" after the first two letters of its registration. After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm. At various times during the journey Jo" sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall near Chipping Norton, with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later - not entirely without justification, for Tolkien"s driving was daring rather than skilful. When accelerating headlong across a busy main road in Oxford in order to get into a side-street, he would ignore all other vehicles and cry Charge em and they scatter!" - and scatter they did. Jo" was later replaced by a second Morris which did duty until the beginning of the Second World War, when petrol rationing made it impractical to keep it. By this time Tolkien perceived the damage that the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing to the landscape, and after the war he did not buy another car or drive again.
What else remained in the children"s memories? Long summer hours digging up the asphalt of the old tennis-court at 20 Northmoor Road to enlarge the vegetable-plot, under the supervision of their father, who (like their mother) was an enthusiastic gardener, though he left much of the practical work of cultivating vegetables and pruning trees to John, preferring to concentrate his own attention on the roses and on the lawn, from which he would remove every possible weed. The early years at 22 Northmoor Road when there were a succession of Icelandic au pair girls, who told folk-tales about trolls. Visits to the theatre, which their father always seemed to enjoy, although he declared he did not approve of Drama. Bicycling to early ma.s.s at St Aloysius", or at St Gregory"s up the Woodstock Road, or at the Carmelite convent nearby. The barrel of beer in the coal-hole behind the kitchen which dripped regularly and (said their mother) made the house smell like a brewery. July and August afternoons boating on the river Cherwell (which was only just down the road), floating in the family punt hired for the season down past the Parks to Magdalen Bridge, or better still poling up-river towards Water Eaton and Islip, where a picnic tea could be spread on the bank. Walks across the fields to Wood Eaton to look for b.u.t.terflies, and then back along by the river where Michael would hide in the crack of an old willow, walks when their father seemed to have a boundless store of knowledge about trees and plants. Seaside summer holidays at Lyme Regis when old Father Francis Morgan came down from Birmingham to join them, embarra.s.sing the children with his loud and boisterous ways just as he had embarra.s.sed Ronald and Hilary at Lyme twenty-five years before. The family holiday at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall in 1932 with Charles Wrenn and his wife and daughter, when Wrenn and Tolkien held a swimming race wearing panama hats and smoking pipes while they swam. This was the holiday about which Tolkien later wrote: There was a curious local character, an old man who used to go about swapping gossip and weather-wisdom and such like. To amuse my boys I named him Gaffer Gamgee, and the name became part of family lore to fix on old chaps of the kind. The choice of Gamgee was primarily directed by alliteration; but I did not invent it. It was in fact the name when I was small (in Birmingham) for cotton-wool." Then there were the later holidays at Sidmouth, where there were hill walks and marvellous rock-pools by the sea, and where their father was already beginning to write The Lord of the Rings; the drives on autumn afternoons to the villages east of Oxford, to Worminghall or Brill or Charlton-on-Otmoor, or west into Berkshire and up White Horse Hill to see the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland"s Smithy; the memories of Oxford, of the countryside, and of the stories that their father told them.
These stories had begun during the Leeds years. John, the eldest son, often found difficulty in getting to sleep.
When he was lying awake his father would come and sit on his bed and tell him a tale of Carrots", a boy with red hair who climbed into a cuckoo clock and went off on a series of strange adventures.
In this fashion Tolkien discovered that he could use the imagination which was creating the complexities of The Silmarillion to invent simpler stories. He had an amiably childlike sense of humour, and as his sons grew older this manifested itself in the noisy games he played with them - and in the stories he told Michael when the younger boy was troubled with nightmares. These tales, invented in the early days at Northmoor Road, were about the irrepressible villain Bill Stickers", a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything. His name was taken from a notice on an Oxford gate that said BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and a similar source provided the name of the righteous person who was always in pursuit of Stickers, Major Road Ahead".
The Bill Stickers" stories were never written down, but others were. When he was on holiday with the family at Filey in the summer of 1925, Tolkien composed a full-length tale for John and Michael. The younger boy lost a toy dog on the beach, and to console him his father began to invent and narrate the adventures of Rover, a small dog who annoys a wizard, is turned into a toy, and is then lost on the beach by a small boy. But this is only the beginning, for Rover is found by the sand-sorcerer Psamathos Psamathides who gives him the power to move again, and sends him on a visit to the Moon, where he has many strange adventures, most notably an encounter with the White Dragon. Tolkien wrote down this story under the t.i.tle Roverandom". Many years later he offered it to his publishers, very tentatively, as one of a number of possible successors to The Hobbit, but it was not thought suitable on that occasion, and Tolkien never offered it again.
The children"s enthusiasm for Roverandom" encouraged him to write more stories to amuse them. Many of these got off to a good start but were never finished. Indeed some of them never progressed beyond the first few sentences, like the tale of Timothy t.i.tus, a very small man who is called Tim t.i.t" by his friends. Among other stories begun but soon abandoned was the tale of Tom Bombadil, which is set in the days of King Bonhedig" and describes a character who is clearly to be the hero of the tale: Tom Bombadil was the name of one of the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom; but he was a hale and hearty fellow. Four foot high in his boots he was, and three feet broad. He wore a tall hat with a blue feather, his jacket was blue, and his boots were yellow."
That was as far as the story ever reached on paper, but Tom Bombadil was a well-known figure in the Tolkien family, for the character was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael. The doll looked very splendid with the feather in its hat, but John did not like it and one day stuffed it down the lavatory. Tom was rescued, and survived to become the hero of a poem by the children"s father, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", which was published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934. It tells of Tom"s encounters with Gold-berry, the River-woman"s daughter", with the Old Man Willow" which shuts him up in a crack of its bole (an idea, Tolkien once said, that probably came in part from Arthur Rackham"s tree-drawings), with a family of badgers, and with a Barrow-wight", a ghost from a prehistoric grave of the type found on the Berkshire Downs not far from Oxford. By itself, the poem seems like a sketch for something longer, and when possible successors to The Hobbit were being discussed in 1937 Tolkien suggested to his publishers that he might expand it into a more substantial tale, explaining that Tom Bombadil was intended to represent the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside". This idea was not taken up by the publishers, but Tom and his adventures subsequently found their way into The Lord of the Rings.
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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.scripts of Tolkien"s published stories.1 The fact that Mr Bliss" was so lavishly ill.u.s.trated - 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 ill.u.s.trated several of his own poems, using watercolours, coloured inks or pencils, and beginning to develop a style that was suggestive of his affection for j.a.panese 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 1 Mr Bliss" was not the only composition by Tolkien owing its inspiration to motor transport. The Bovadium Fragments" (perhaps composed early in the nineteen-sixties) is a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode. (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 ill.u.s.trator 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 a.s.sociated 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 ill.u.s.trator 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 ill.u.s.trations, they are a collateral theme." Miss Baynes"s success with Farmer Giles led to her being chosen as ill.u.s.trator 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 Luthien" and on the alliterative verses telling the story of Turin 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 Luthien poem, Tolkien continued to work at them both. But though the Turin 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 Silmaril-lion (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 Luthien 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 ba.n.a.l in rhyme, but as Tolkien became more experienced in the metre the poem grew much surer, and it has many fine pa.s.sages. The Turin verses are in an alliterative measure, a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon verse form; and in them Tolkien displays great skill. This pa.s.sage describes Turin"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 turned; 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 hoi den in the wielding of weapons; and in weaving song ?
he had a minstrel"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 ma.n.u.script 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 repet.i.tive". 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 s.e.xual pa.s.sion, describing Mordred"s unsated l.u.s.t 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