Chambers of London, and Kenneth Sisam. However Mawer decided not to apply and Chambers refused the chair, so it was whittled down to a fight between Tolkien and his old tutor Sisam. Kenneth Sisam was now in a senior position at the Clarendon Press, and though he was not engaged in full-time scholarship he had a good reputation in Oxford and a number of supporters. Tolkien was backed by many people, including George Gordon, a master hand at intrigue. But at the election the votes came out equal, so Joseph Wells the Vice-Chancellor had to make the decision with his casting vote. He voted for Tolkien.
Part Four.
1925-1949(i): In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit"
And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon for twenty years, was then elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one. It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that - apart from the strange fact that during these years when nothing happened" he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.
Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that a man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-cla.s.s watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?
Perhaps in his years of middle age and old age we can do no more than observe, and puzzle; or perhaps, slowly, we shall see a pattern emerge.
Until the late nineteenth century the holders of most college fellowships at Oxford, that is the majority of teachers in the University, had to take holy orders and were not permitted to marry while they remained in office. The reformers of that era introduced non-clerical fellowships and abolished the requirement of celibacy. In so doing they changed the face of Oxford, and changed it visibly; for in the years that followed a tide of brick flowed steadily northwards from the old boundary of the city, covering the fields along the Banbury and Woodstock Roads as the speculators erected hundreds of homes for the new married dons. By the beginning of the twentieth century North Oxford was a concentrated colony of academics, their wives, their children and their servants, its inhabitants occupying a variety of mansions ranging from the gothic and palatial (complete with turrets and stained gla.s.s) to the frankly suburban villa. Churches, schools, and cl.u.s.ters of shops were erected to serve the needs of this strange community, and soon few acres were left unoccupied. There was, however, a small amount of building still in progress during the nineteen-twenties; and in one of the North Oxford streets Tolkien found and bought a modest new house, L-shaped and of pale brick, with one wing running towards the road. The family travelled down from Leeds at the beginning of 1926 and moved in.
Here, in Northmoor Road, they remained for twenty-one years. Later in 1929 a larger neighbouring house was vacated by Basil Black-well the bookseller and publisher, and the Tolkiens decided to buy it, moving from number twenty-two to number twenty early in the next year. This second house was broad and grey, more imposing than its neighbour, with small leaded windows and a high Slate roof. Shortly before the move a fourth and last child was born, the daughter that Edith had long hoped for, and was christened Priscilla Mary Reuel.
Apart from these two incidents, the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the change of houses in 1930, life at Northmoor Road was without major event; or rather it was a life of pattern, almost of routine, in which there were minor interruptions but no significant change. So perhaps the best way to describe it is to follow Tolkien through a typical (though entirely imaginary) day in the early nineteen-thirties.
It is a saint"s day, so it begins early. The alarm rings at seven in Tolkien"s bedroom, a back room that looks east over the garden. It is really a bathroom-c.u.m-dressing-room, and there is a bath in one comer of it, but he sleeps here because Edith finds his snoring tiresome, and because he keeps late hours that do not harmonise with her habits. So they have their own rooms and do not disturb one another.
He gets up unwillingly (he has never been an early riser by nature), decides to shave after ma.s.s, and goes in his dressing-gown along the pa.s.sage to the boys" bedrooms to wake Michael and Christopher. John, the eldest boy, is now aged fourteen and away at a Catholic boarding-school in Berkshire, but the two younger sons, aged eleven and seven respectively, are still living at home.
Going into Michael"s bedroom, Tolkien nearly trips over a model railway engine that has been left in the middle of the floor. He curses to himself. Michael and Christopher have a pa.s.sion for railways at the moment, and they have devoted a complete upstairs room to a track layout. They also go to watch engines, and draw (with impressive precision) pictures of Great Western Railway locomotives. Tolkien does not understand or really approve of what he calls their railway-mania"; to him railways only mean noise and dirt, and the despoiling of the countryside. But he tolerates the hobby, and can even be persuaded on occasions to take them on expeditions to a distant station to watch the Cheltenham Flyer pa.s.s through.
When he has woken the boys, he gets dressed in his usual weekday outfit of flannel trousers and tweed jacket.
Then he and his sons, who are wearing their dark blue Dragon School jackets and shorts, get their bicycles out of the garage and set off along the silent North-moor Road, where the bedroom curtains are still drawn in other houses, up Linton Road, and into the broad Banbury Road where the occasional car or bus pa.s.ses them on its way into the city. It is a spring morning and there is a fine display of blossom on the cherry-trees that hang over the pavements from the front gardens.
They bicycle three-quarters of a mile into the town, to St Aloysius" Catholic Church, an unlovely edifice next to the hospital in the Wood-stock Road. Ma.s.s is at seven-thirty, so by the time they get home they are just a few minutes late for breakfast. This is always served punctually at eight - strictly speaking at seven fifty-five, since Edith likes to keep the clocks in the house five minutes fast. Phoebe Coles, the daily help, has just arrived in the kitchen and is clattering about with dishes. Phoebe, who wears a housemaid"s cap and works in the house all day, has been with the family for a couple of years and shows every sign of staying for many more; which is a great blessing, since before her arrival there were endless difficulties over servants. During breakfast, Tolkien glances at the newspaper, but only in the most cursory fashion. He, like his friend C. S. Lewis, regards news" as on the whole trivial and fit to be ignored, and they both argue (to the annoyance of many of their friends) that the only truth" is to be found in literature. However, both men enjoy the crossword.
When breakfast is over, Tolkien goes into his study to light the stove. It is not a warm day and the house (like most middle-cla.s.s English houses at this time) has no central heating, so he will need to get a good blaze going to make the room habitable. He is in a hurry, for he has a pupil coming at nine and he wants to check his lecture notes for the morning, so he clears out the ashes from the previous night"s fire rather hastily; they are still warm, for he did not finish work and go to bed until after two o"clock. When he has lit the fire he throws a good deal of coal on to it, shuts the doors of the stove, and opens the draught regulator to full. Then he hurries upstairs to shave. The boys go off to school.
He has not finished shaving when the front door bell rings. Edith answers it, but she calls him and he comes downstairs with half his face still covered in lather. It is only the postman, but he says that there is a great deal of smoke coming out of the study chimney, and ought Mr Tolkien to see if everything is all right? Tolkien rushes into the study and finds that, as so often happens, the fire has blazed up in the stove and is about to set the chimney alight. He damps it down, thanks the postman, and exchanges some remarks I with him about the growing of spring vegetables. Then he begins to open the post, remembers that he has not finished shaving, and only makes himself presentable just in time for the arrival of his pupil. This is a young woman graduate who is studying Middle English.
By ten past nine she and Tolkien are hard at work in the study discussing the significance of an awkward word in the Ancrene Wisse. If you were to put your head around the study door you would not be able to see them, for inside the door is a tunnel of books formed by a double row of bookcases, and it is not until the visitor emerges from this that the rest of the room becomes visible. There are windows on two sides, so that the room looks southwards towards a neighbouring garden and west towards the road. Tolkien"s desk is in the south-facing window, but he is not sitting at it; he is standing by the fireplace waving his pipe in the air while he talks. The pupil frowns slightly as she puzzles over the complexities of what he is saying, and the difficulty of hearing all of it clearly, for he is talking very fast and sometimes indistinctly. But she begins to see the shape of his argument and the point to which he is leading, and scribbles enthusiastically in her notebook. By the time her hour" of supervision finishes, late, at twenty to eleven, she feels that she has been given a new insight into the way in which a medieval author chose his words. She leaves on her bicycle, reflecting that if all Oxford philologists could teach in this fashion, the English School would be a livelier place.
When he has seen her to the gate, Tolkien hurries back to his study and gathers up his lecture notes. He did not have time to check through them after all, and he hopes that everything he needs is there. He also takes a copy of the text that he is to lecture on, the Old English poem Exodus, knowing that if the worst happens and his notes do fail him, he can always expound directly from it extempore. Then, with his briefcase and his M.A. gown in the basket of his bicycle, he rides down to the town.
Sometimes he lectures in his own college, Pembroke, but this morning (as is more often the case) his destination is the Examination Schools, an oppressively grandiose late Victorian building in the High Street. Lectures on popular subjects are allocated a large hall, such as the East School, where today C. S. Lewis will be drawing a large audience for his series on medieval studies. Tolkien himself gets a good attendance for his general lectures on Beowulf, which are intended for the non-specialist undergraduates; but today he is talking about a text that is required reading only for those few men and women in the English School who have opted for the philological course, and consequently he goes along the pa.s.sage to a small dark ground-floor room where a mere eight or ten undergraduates, knowing his punctual habits, are already waiting for him in their gowns. He puts on his own gown and begins to lecture exactly as the deep bell of Merton clock a quarter of a mile away strikes eleven.
He lectures fluently, chiefly from his notes, but with occasional impromptu additions. He works through the text line by line, discussing the significance of certain words and expressions, and the problems raised by them. The undergraduates in the audience know him well and are faithful followers of his lectures, not only because he provides an illuminating interpretation of the texts but also because they like him: they enjoy his jokes, are used to his quick-fire manner of speaking, and find him thoroughly humane, certainly more humane than some of his colleagues, who lecture with a total disregard for their audience.
He need not have worried that his notes will run out. The chimes for twelve o"clock and the noise of people in the pa.s.sage bring him to a halt long before he can finish his prepared material. Indeed for the last ten minutes he has departed entirely from his notes, and has been talking about a particular point of relation between Gothic and Old English that was suggested by a word in the text. Now he gathers up his papers, converses briefly with one of the undergraduates, and then departs to make way for the next lecturer.
In the pa.s.sage he catches up for a moment with C. S. Lewis, and has a brief conversation with him. He wishes it were a Monday, on which day he regularly has a pint of beer with Lewis and talks for an hour or so, but neither man has time today, and Tolkien has to do some shopping before going home for lunch. He leaves Lewis and bicycles up the High Street to the busy arcade known as the Covered Market, where he has to collect sausages from Lindsey the butcher; Edith forgot to include them in the week"s order that was delivered the day before. He exchanges a joke with Mr Lindsey, and also calls in at the stationer on the corner of Market Street to buy some pen nibs. Then he bicycles home up the Banbury Road, and manages to fit in fifteen minutes at a long-overdue letter to E. V. Gordon about their plans to collaborate on an edition of Pearl. He begins to type the letter on his Hammond typewriter, a big machine with interchangeable typefaces on a revolving disc; his model has italics and the Anglo-Saxon letters p, o, and ae. Edith rings the handbell for lunch before he can finish.
Lunch, at which all the family is present, is chiefly taken up with a discussion about Michael"s dislike of swimming lessons at school, and whether or not a septic toe should be allowed to prevent the boy from bathing. After the meal, Tolkien goes into the garden to see how the broad beans are coming along. Edith brings Priscilla out to play on the lawn, and discusses with him whether they should dig up the remainder of the old tennis court, to increase the size of the vegetable plot. Then, leaving Edith to feed the canaries and budgerigars in her aviary at the side of the house, he gets on his bicycle once more and pedals down to the town, this time for a meeting of the English Faculty.
The meeting is in Merton College, for the Faculty has no premises of its own other than a cramped library in the attic of the Examination Schools, and Merton is the college most closely a.s.sociated with it Tolkien himself is a Fellow of Pembroke, but he is not much involved with his college, and like all professors his first responsibility is towards his Faculty. The meeting begins at half past two. Besides the other professors - Wyld, who holds the chair of English Language and Literature, and Nichol Smith, the professor of English Literature - there are about a dozen dons present, several of them women. Sometimes these meetings can be acrimonious, and Tolkien himself has attended many when, while trying to initiate reforms of the syllabus, he has been the target for bitter attacks from the literature" camp. But those days are pa.s.sed, and his reforms have been accepted and put into practice.
Today"s meeting is mostly concerned with routine business such as the dates of examinations, minor details of the syllabus, and the question of funds for the Faculty library. It all takes time, and the meeting does not break up until nearly four, which just gives Tolkien a few minutes to call in at the Bodleian Library and look up something in a book that he ordered from the stack the previous day. Then he rides home again in time for the children"s tea at half past four.
After tea he manages to put in an hour and a half at his desk, finishing the letter to E. V. Gordon and beginning to arrange his lecture notes for the next day. When life goes according to plan he manages to prepare an entire course of lectures before the beginning of term, but too often pressure of time forces him to leave the work until the last minute. Even now he does not get very much done, for Michael wants help with his Latin prose homework, and this occupies twenty minutes. All too soon it is half past six and he must change into a dinner-jacket. He does not dine out more than once or twice a week, but tonight there is a guest night at his college, Pembroke, and he has promised to be there to meet a friend"s guest. He ties his black tie hastily and again mounts his bicycle, leaving Edith to an early supper at home.
He reaches college in time for sherry in the Senior Common Room. His position at Pembroke is somewhat anomalous, thanks to the confused and confusing administrative practices of Oxford. It could almost be said that the colleges are the University, for the majority of the teaching staff hold college fellowships, and their primary responsibility is to instruct undergraduates in their own college. But professors are in a different position. They are primarily outside the collegiate system, for they teach on a faculty basis, irrespective of what college their pupils may belong to. However, so that a professor shall not be deprived of the social facilities and other conveniences of college life, he is allocated to a college and given a fellowship in it ex officio. This sometimes leads to bad feeling, for in all other circ.u.mstances colleges elect their own fellows, whereas Professorial Fellows" such as Tolkien are to some extent wished upon them. Tolkien thinks that Pembroke resents him a little; certainly the atmosphere in the common room is unfriendly and austere. Fortunately there is a junior fellow, R. B. McCallum, a lively man several years younger than Tolkien, who is an ally; and he is waiting now to introduce his guest. Dinner proves to be enjoyable - and edible, since the food is plain without any suggestion of that tiresome French cooking which (Tolkien reflects with disgust) is beginning to invade the high tables of several colleges.
After dinner he makes his excuses and leaves early, crossing the town to Balliol College where there is to be a meeting of the Coal-biters in John Bryson"s rooms. The Kolbitar, to give it the Icelandic t.i.tle (meaning those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal"), is an informal reading club founded by Tolkien somewhat on the model of the Viking Club in Leeds, except that its members are all dons. They meet for an evening several times each term to read Icelandic sagas. Tonight there is a good turn-out: George Gordon, now the President of Magdalen, Nevill Coghill of Exeter, C. T. Onions from the Dictionary, Dawkins the Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek, Bryson himself, and - Tolkien is glad to note - C. S. Lewis, who chides him noisily for being late. They are currently reading the Grettis Saga, and Tolkien himself begins, which is customary as he is easily the best Norse scholar of anyone in the club. He resumes at the point where they left off last time, improvising a fluent translation from the text that is spread open on his knees.
After he has done a couple of pages Dawkins takes over. He too is fluent, though not quite as fluent as Tolkien, but when the others take their turn they proceed much more slowly, each of them translating no more than half a page, for none of them professes to be more than a beginner at the language. This however is the whole purpose of the Coalbiters, for Tolkien started the club to persuade his friends that Icelandic literature is worth reading in the original language; and he encourages their somewhat halting steps and applauds their efforts.
After an hour or so they reach a good stopping-place, and the whisky bottle is opened while they discuss the saga.
Then they listen to a scurrilous and very funny poem that Tolkien has just written about another member of the English Faculty. It is after eleven when they break up. Tolkien walks with Lewis to the end of Broad Street, and then they go their separate ways, Lewis down Holywell Street towards Magdalen (for he is a bachelor and usually sleeps in college in term-time) and Tolkien on his bicycle back to Northmoor Road.
Edith has gone to bed and the house is in darkness when he gets home. He builds up the fire in the study stove and fills his pipe. He ought, he knows, to do some more work on his lecture notes for the next morning, but he cannot resist taking from a drawer the half-finished ma.n.u.script of a story that he is writing to amuse himself and his children. It is probably, he suspects, a waste of time; certainly if he is going to devote any attention to this sort of thing it ought to be to The Silmarillion. But something draws him back night after night to this amusing little tale - at least it seems to amuse the boys. He sits down at the desk, fits a new relief nib to his dip pen (which he prefers to a fountain pen), unscrews the ink bottle, takes a sheet of old examination paper (which still has a candidate"s essay on the Battle of Maldon on the back of it), and begins to write: When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! ...
We will leave him now. He will be at his desk until hah* past one, or two o"clock, or perhaps even later, with only the scratching of his pen to disturb the silence, while around him Northmoor Road sleeps.
These, then, were some of the externals of his life: domestic routine, teaching, preparation for teaching, correspondence, an occasional evening with friends - and it would in truth be a rare evening that included both a dinner in college and a meeting of the Coalbiters; these and other irregular events such as the Faculty meeting are here put under the umbrella of the same imaginary day simply as an indication of the range of his activities. A truly average day would be more dull.
Or perhaps to the reader the events here described are all dull, unredeemed by a flicker of excitement: the trivial activities of a man enclosed in a narrow way of life that holds no interest for anyone outside it. All this, says the reader, this account of lighting the stove and bicycling to lectures and feeling unwelcome in a college common room, all this says nothing about the man who wrote The Silmarillion and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, does nothing to explain the nature of his mind and the way in which his imagination responded to his surroundings.
Certainly Tolkien himself would have agreed with this. It was one of his strongest-held opinions that the investigation of an author"s life reveals very little of the workings of his mind. Maybe; but before we abandon our task as utterly hopeless, we could perhaps move in a little closer than the viewpoint we adopted for the imaginary day, move in and observe, or at least hazard a few guesses about some of the more obvious aspects of his personality. And if after this we may not have any better idea why he wrote his books, then at least we should know a little more about the man who did write them.
Perhaps we could start with photographs. There are plenty of them, for the Tolkiens took and kept endless snapshots. At first we get nowhere. Photographs of Tolkien in middle age reveal virtually nothing. Facing the camera is an ordinary middle-cla.s.s Englishman of light build and moderate height. He is mildly handsome, with a long face; and that is about all that can be said. Admittedly there is a keenness in the eyes which suggests a lively mind, but nothing else reveals itself - nothing except his clothes, which are exceptionally ordinary.
His manner of dressing was of course partly the result of circ.u.mstances, the necessity of bringing up a large family on a relatively small income that left nothing over for personal extravagances. Later, when he became a wealthy man, he did indulge in coloured waistcoats. But his choice of clothes in middle age was also the sign of a dislike of dandyism. This he shared with C. S. Lewis. Neither could abide any manner of affectation in dress, which seemed to them to smack of the unmasculine and hence of the objectionable. Lewis took this to extremes, not only buying indifferent clothes but wearing them indifferently; Tolkien, always the more fastidious, at least kept his trousers pressed. But fundamentally both men had the same att.i.tude to their appearance, an att.i.tude that was shared by many of their contemporaries. This preference for plain masculine clothing was in part perhaps a reaction to the excessive dandyism and implied h.o.m.os.e.xuality of the aesthetes", who had first made their mark on Oxford in the age of Wilde and whose successors lingered on in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, affecting delicate shades of garment and ambiguous nuances of manner. Theirs was a way of life of which Tolkien and the majority of his friends would have none; hence their almost exaggerated preference for tweed jackets, flannel trousers, nondescript ties, solid brown shoes that were built for country walks, dull-coloured raincoats and hats, and short hair. Tolkien"s manner of dress also reflected some of his positive values, his love of everything that was moderate and sensible and unflorid and English. But beyond that his clothes gave no idea of the delicate and complex inner nature of the man who wore them.
What else can we discover from photographs of him? There is in most of them something so obvious that we are likely to miss it: the almost unvarying ordinariness of the backgrounds. In one picture he is sitting in his garden having tea; in another, standing in the sunlight in the angle of his house; in another, digging with his children in the sands at some coastal resort. One begins to get the idea that he was entirely conventional in the places that he lived in, even in the places that he visited.
And this is true. He occupied a North Oxford house that was both inside and outside almost indistinguishable from many hundreds of others in that district - it was less flamboyant, indeed, than many of its neighbours. He took his family on holiday to ordinary places. During the central years of his life, the richest period of creativity, he made no journeys outside the British Isles. Again this was partly the product of circ.u.mstances, of limited means; nor did he entirely lack the desire to travel: for instance he would have liked to follow E. V. Gordon"s example and visit Iceland.
Later in life when he had more money and fewer family ties he did make a few journeys abroad. But travel never played a large part in his life - simply because his imagination did not need to be stimulated by unfamiliar landscapes and cultures. What is more surprising is that he also denied himself many of the stimuli of familiar and loved places nearer home. It is true that during the years when he owned and drove a car (from 1932 to the beginning of the Second World War) he loved to explore the villages of Oxfordshire, particularly those in the east of the county; but he was not by habit a long-distance walker, and only once or twice did he join C. S. Lewis for the cross-country walking tours that were such an important part of his friend"s life. He knew the Welsh mountains, but he rarely visited them; he loved the sea, but his only expeditions to it took the form of conventional English family holidays at ordinary resorts. Here again pressure of domestic responsibility is one explanation, and here again it does not provide the whole answer. Gradually one forms the idea that he did not altogether care very much where he was.
In one sense this is not true, and in another sense it is. Certainly he was not indifferent to his surroundings, for man"s destruction of the landscape moved him to profound anger. Here, from his diary, is his anguished description of a return to his childhood landscape of Sarehole Mill in 1933, when he was driving his family to visit relatives in Birmingham: I pa.s.s over the pangs to me of pa.s.sing through Hall Green - become a huge tram-ridden meaningless suburb, where I actually lost my way - and eventually down what is left of beloved lanes of childhood, and past the very gate of our cottage, now in the midst of a sea of new red-brick. The old mill still stands, and Mrs Hunt"s still sticks out into the road as it turns uphill; but the crossing beyond the now fenced-in pool, where the bluebell lane ran down into the mill lane, is now a dangerous crossing alive with motors and red lights. The White Ogre"s house (which the children were excited to see) is become a petrol station, and most of Short Avenue and the elms between it and the crossing have gone. How I envy those whose precious early scenery has not been exposed to such violent and peculiarly hideous change."
He was similarly sensitive to the damage that was inflicted on the Oxfordshire countryside by the construction of wartime aerodromes and the improvement" of roads. Later in life, when his strongest-held opinions began to become obsessions, he would see a new road that had been driven across the comer of a field and cry, There goes the last of England"s arable!" By this time of his life he would maintain that there was not one unspoilt wood or hillside left in the land, and if there was, then he would refuse to visit it for fear of finding it contaminated by litter.
The converse of this is that he chose to live in almost excessively man-made surroundings, in the suburbs of Oxford and later of Bournemouth, themselves almost as meaningless" as the red-brick wilderness that had once been Sarehole. How can we reconcile these viewpoints?
Again, part of the answer lies in circ.u.mstance. The places where he lived were not really chosen by him at all: they were simply the places where, for a number of reasons, he found himself. Maybe, but in this case why did not his soul cry out against them? To which th6 reply comes, sometimes it did, aloud to a few close friends or privately in his diary. But for much of the time it did not, and the explanation for this would seem to lie in his belief that we live in a fallen world. If the world were unfallen and man were not sinful, he himself would have spent an undisturbed childhood with his mother in a paradise such as Sarehole had in memory become to him. But his mother had been taken from him by the wickedness of the world (for he believed ultimately that she had died through the cruelty and neglect of her family), and now even the Sarehole landscape itself had been wantonly destroyed. In such a world, where perfection and true happiness were impossible, did it really matter in what surroundings one lived, any more than it really mattered what clothes one wore or what food one ate (providing it was plain food)? They were all temporary imperfections, and though imperfect were merely transient. It was in this sense a profoundly Christian and ascetic att.i.tude to life.
There is another explanation for his apparently careless approach to the externals of existence. By the tune he reached middle age his imagination no longer needed to be stimulated by experience; or rather, it had received all the stimulus it required in the early years of his life, the years of event and changing landscapes; now it could nourish itself upon these acc.u.mulated memories. Here is how he himself explained this process, when describing the creation of The Lord of the Rings: One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one"s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter."
Vegetable matter has to decompose for a long time before it has broken down sufficiently to be used to enrich the soil, and Tolkien is saying here that it was almost exclusively upon early experience, sufficiently broken down by time, that he nourished the seeds of his imagination. Further experience was not necessary, and it was not sought.
We seem to have found out a little about him as a result of looking at old photographs; so perhaps it might be worth our while to pa.s.s on from regarding his appearance and his surroundings to considering another external characteristic, his voice and his manner of speaking. From adolescence to the end of his life he was notable, almost notorious, for the speed and indistinctness of his way of talking. Actually it is easy to exaggerate this, to make him into a caricature of the comic professor muttering inaudibly to himself. In reality it was not much like that.
He did speak fast and not very clearly, but once the listener was used to the mannerism there was little difficulty in understanding most of what he said. Or rather, the difficulty was not physical but intellectual. He moved on so fast from idea to idea and spoke so allusively, a.s.suming an equal knowledge in his listener, that all but those with a comparable range of learning were left behind. Not that to speak too cleverly is necessarily more defensible than to speak too fast, and Tolkien can be justly accused of overestimating the intellectual powers of his listeners.
Alternatively one can say that he did not bother to make himself clear because he was really speaking to himself, airing his own ideas without any attempt at real conversation. Certainly this was often true of his later years, when he lived a life that was for the most part devoid of intellectual companionship; the result was that he was simply not used to conversation, and he tended to talk in monologues. But even in those days one could challenge him verbally, could engage him in real discourse, and he would listen and respond with enthusiasm.
Indeed he never bore the hallmark of the truly selfish man, the man who will not listen to anyone else. Tolkien always listened, always had a deep concern for the joys and sorrows of others. In consequence, though in many respects a shy man, he made friends easily. He liked to strike up a conversation with a Central European refugee on a train, a waiter in a favourite restaurant, or a hall porter in a hotel. In such company he was always entirely happy. He reported of a railway journey in 1953, when he was returning after lecturing on Sir Gawain at Glasgow: I travelled all the way from Motherwell to Wolverhampton with a Scotch mother and a wee la.s.sie, whom I rescued from standing in the corridor of a packed train, and they were allowed to go first without payment since I told the inspector I welcomed their company. My reward was to be informed ere we parted that (while I was at lunch) the wee la.s.sie had declared: I like him but I canna understand a word he says. To which I could only lamely reply that the latter was universal but the former not so usual."
During his later years he formed friendships with the taxi-drivers whose cars he used to hire, with the policeman who patrolled the streets around his Bournemouth bungalow, and with the college scout and his wife who looked after him at the end of his Life. There was no element of condescension in these friendships; it was simply that he liked company, and these were the people nearest at hand. Nor was he without consciousness of cla.s.s: the very opposite was true. But it was precisely because of his certainty of his own station in life that there was about him nothing of intellectual or social conceit. His view of the world, in which each man belonged or ought to belong to a specific estate", whether high or low, meant that in one sense he was an old-fashioned conservative. But in another sense it made him highly sympathetic to his fellow-men, for it is those who are unsure of their status in the world, who feel they have to prove themselves and if necessary put down other men to do so, who are the truly ruthless.
Tolkien was, in modern jargon, right-wing" in that he honoured his monarch and his country and did not believe in the rule of the people; but he opposed democracy simply because he believed that in the end his fellow-men would not benefit from it. He once wrote: I am not a democrat, if only because humility and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Ore gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery." As to the virtues of an old-fashioned feudal society, this is what he once said about respect for one"s superiors: Touching your cap to the Squire may be d.a.m.n bad for the Squire but it"s d.a.m.n good for you."
What else can we observe? Perhaps the imaginary account of a typical day tells us something in that it starts with a journey to ma.s.s at St Aloysius"; and any close scrutiny of his life must take account of the importance of his religion. His commitment to Christianity and in particular to the Catholic Church was total. This is not to say that the practice of his faith was always a source of consolation to him: he set himself a rigorous code of behaviour, especially in the matter of making his confession before receiving communion, and when (as often happened) he could not bring himself to go to confession he would deny himself communion and live in a pathetic state of spiritual depression. Another source of unhappiness in his last years was the introduction of the vernacular ma.s.s, for the use of English in the liturgy rather than the Latin he had known and loved since boyhood pained him deeply. But even during an English ma.s.s in the bare modern church in Headington that he attended during his retirement, where he was sometimes irritated by the singing of the children"s choir and the wailing of babies, he would, when receiving communion, experience a profound spiritual joy, a state of contentment that he could reach in no other way. His religion was therefore one of the deepest and strongest elements in his personality.
On one level his devotion to Catholicism is explicable solely as a spiritual matter; on another, it was bound up very closely with his love for the mother who had made him a Catholic and who had died (he believed) for her Catholicism. Indeed one can see his love for her memory as a governing motive throughout his life and writings.
Her death made him a pessimist; or rather, it made him capable of violent shifts of emotion. Once he had lost her, there was no security, and his natural optimism was balanced by deep uncertainty. Perhaps as a result, he was never moderate: love, intellectual enthusiasm, distaste, anger, self-doubt, guilt, laughter, each was in his mind exclusively and in full force when he experienced it; and at that moment no other emotion was permitted to modify it. He was thus a man of extreme contrasts. When in a black mood he would feel that there was no hope, either for himself or the world; and since this was often the very mood that drove him to record his feelings on paper, his diaries tend to show only the sad side of his nature. But five minutes later in the company of a friend he would forget this black gloom and be in the best of humour.
Someone so strongly guided by his emotions is unlikely to be a cynic, and Tolkien was never cynical, for he cared too deeply about everything to adopt an intellectual detachment. He could, indeed, hold no opinion half-heartedly, could not be uncommitted about any topic that interested him. This sometimes led to strange att.i.tudes. For example, his Gallophobia (itself almost inexplicable) made him angry not only about what he considered to be the pernicious influence of French cooking in England but about the Norman Conquest itself, which pained him as much as if it had happened in his lifetime. This strength of emotion was also reflected in his pa.s.sion for perfection in any kind of written work, and in his inability to shrug off a domestic disaster philosophically. Again, he cared too much.
If he had been a proud man, his strong emotions would probably have made him unbearable. But he was in fact very humble. This is not to say that he was unaware of his own talents, for he had a perfectly accurate idea of what he could do, and a firm belief in his ability both as a scholar and a writer. But he did not consider that these talents were particularly important (with the result that in later years fame greatly puzzled bun), and he certainly had no personal pride in his own character. Far from it: he took an almost tragic view of himself as a weak man - which was another cause of his deep troughs of pessimism. But there was a different result of his humility: a deep sense of comedy that sprang from his picture of himself as yet another feeble member of the human race.
He could laugh at anybody, but most of all at himself, and his complete lack of any sense of dignity could and often did make him behave like a riotous schoolboy. At a New Year"s Eve party in the nineteen-thirties he would don an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug and paint his face white to impersonate a polar bear, or he would dress up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe and chase an astonished neighbour down the road. Later in life he delighted to offer inattentive shopkeepers his false teeth among a handful of change. I have,* he once wrote, *a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome."
A strange and complex man, and this attempt to study his personality has not taught us very much. But as C. S.
Lewis makes a character say in one of his novels, I happen to believe that you can"t study men, you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing."
If you are primarily interested in Tolkien as the author of The Lord of the Rings, you may take fright at the prospect of a chapter that discusses Tolkien the scholar and the teacher". Expressed in that fashion, it certainly sounds very dull. So the first thing to be said is that it is not dull. There were not two Tolkiens, one an academic and the other a writer. They were the same man, and the two sides of him overlapped so that they were indistinguishable-or rather they were not; two sides at all, but different expressions of the same mind, the same imagination. So if we are going to understand anything about his work as a writer we had better spend a short time examining his scholarship.
The first thing to understand is why he liked languages. We know [. a good deal about this from the account of his childhood. The fact I that he was excited by the Welsh names on coal-trucks, by the surface glitter" of Greek, by the strange forms of the Gothic words in the book he acquired by accident, and by the Finnish of the Kalevala, shows that he had a most unusual sensitivity to the sound and appearance of words. They filled for him the place that music has in many people"s lives. Indeed the response that words awakened in him was almost entirely emotional.
But why should he choose to specialise in early English? Someone so fond of strange words would be more likely to have concentrated his attention on foreign languages. The answer is again to be found in his capacity for excitement. We know already of his emotional response to Finnish, Welsh, and Gothic, and we ought to understand that something equally exciting happened when he first realised that a large proportion of the poetry and prose of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England was written in the dialect that had been spoken by his mother"s ancestors. In other words it was remote, but at the same time intensely personal to him.
We already know that he was deeply attached to the West Midlands because of their a.s.sociations with his mother.
Her family had come from the town of Evesham, and he believed that this West Midland borough and its surrounding county of Worcestershire had been the home of that family, the Suffields, for countless generations. He himself had also spent much of his childhood at Sarehole, a West Midland hamlet. That part of the English countryside had in consequence a strong emotional attraction for him; and as a result so did its language.
He once wrote to W. H. Auden: T am a West-midlander by blood, and took to early West-midland Middle English as to a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it." A known tongue: something that already seemed familiar to him.
One might dismiss this as a ludicrous exaggeration, for how could he recognise" a language that was seven hundred and fifty years old? Yet this was what he really believed, that he had inherited some faint ancestral memory of the tongue spoken by distant generations of Suffields. And once this idea had occurred to him, it was inevitable that he should study the language closely and make it the centre of his life"s work as a scholar.
This is not to say that he only studied the early English of the West Midlands. He became well versed in all dialects of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and (as we have seen) he also read widely in Icelandic. Moreover during 1919 and 1920 when he was working on the Oxford Dictionary he made himself acquainted with a number of other early Germanic languages. In consequence by the time he began work at Leeds University in 1920 he had a remarkably wide range of linguistic knowledge.
At Leeds and later at Oxford he proved to be a good teacher. He was not at his best in the lecture room, where his quick speech and indistinct articulation meant that pupils had to concentrate hard in order to hear him. Nor was he always very good at explaining himself in the clearest terms, for he found it difficult to scale down his own knowledge of the subject so that his pupils could understand everything he was saying. But he invariably brought the subject alive and showed that it mattered to him.
The most celebrated example of this, remembered by everyone who was taught by him, was the opening of his series of lectures on Beowulf. He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of Hwaet!" (the first word of this and several other Old English poems), which some undergraduates took to be Quiet!" It was not so much a recitation as a dramatic performance, an impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it impressed generations of students because it brought home to them that Beowulf was not just a set text to be read for the purposes of an examination but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry. As one former pupil, the writer J. I. M. Stewart, expressed it: He could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests." Another who sat in the audience at these lectures was W. H.
Auden, who wrote to Tolkien many years later: I don"t think I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf."
One reason for Tolkien"s effectiveness as a teacher was that besides being a philologist he was a writer and poet, a man who not only studied words but who used them for poetic means. He could find poetry in the sound of the words themselves, as he had done since childhood; but he also had a poet"s understanding of how language is used. This was expressed in a memorable phrase in The Times obituary of him (undoubtedly written by C. S. Lewis long before Tolkien"s death) which talks of his unique insight at once into the language of poetry and into the poetry of language". In practical terms this meant that he could show a pupil not just what the words meant, but why the author had chosen that particular form of expression and how it fitted into his scheme of imagery. He thus encouraged students of early texts to treat them not as mere exemplars of a developing language but as literature deserving serious appreciation and criticism.
Even when dealing solely with the technical matters of language, Tolkien was a vivid teacher. Lewis suggests in the obituary that this was in part the product of the long attention to private languages, the fact that he had been not merely a student of languages but a linguistic inventor: Strange as it may seem, it was undoubtedly the source of that unparalleled richness and concreteness which later distinguished him from all other philologists. He had been inside language."
Distinguished him from all other philologists" sounds like a sweeping statement, but it is entirely true. Comparative philology grew up in nineteenth-century Germany, and although its pract.i.tioners were painstaking in their accuracy their writing was almost unredeemed in its dullness. Tolkien"s own mentor Joseph Wright had been trained in Germany, and while his books are invaluable for their contribution to the science of language they reflect almost nothing of Wright"s vigorous personality. Much as he loved his old teacher, Tolkien was perhaps thinking partly of Wright when he wrote of the bespectacled philologist, English but trained in Germany, where he lost his literary soul".
Tolkien never lost his literary soul. His philological writings invariably reflect the richness of his mind. He brought to even the most intricate aspects of his subject a grace of expression and a sense of the larger significance of the matter. Nowhere is this demonstrated to better advantage than in his article (published in 1929) on the Ancrene Wisse, a medieval book of instruction for a group of anchorites, which probably originated in the West Midlands. By a remarkable and subtle piece of scholarship, Tolkien showed that the language of two important ma.n.u.scripts of the text (one in a Cambridge college, the other in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) was no mere unpolished dialect, but a literary language, with an unbroken literary tradition going back to before the Conquest. He expressed this conclusion in vivid terms - and it should be appreciated that he is here really talking about his beloved West Midland dialect as a whole: It is not a language long relegated to the uplands struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compa.s.sion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into lewdness, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech - a soil somewhere in England."
This kind of writing, forceful in its imagery, characterised all his articles and lectures, however abstruse or unpromising the subject might seem. In this respect he almost founded a new school of philology; certainly there had been no one before him who brought such humanity, one might say such emotion, to the subject; and it was an approach which influenced many of his most able pupils who themselves became philologists of distinction.
It ought also to be said that he was immensely painstaking. Broad and powerful statements such as that quoted above may have characterised his work, yet they were no mere a.s.sertions, but the product of countless hours of research into the minutiae of the subject Even by the usual scrupulous standards of comparative philology, Tolkien was extraordinary in this respect. His concern for accuracy cannot be overemphasised, and it was doubly valuable because it was coupled with a flair for detecting patterns and relations. Detecting" is a good word, for it is not too great a flight of fancy to picture him as a linguistic Sherlock Holmes, presenting himself with an apparently disconnected series of facts and deducing from them the truth about some major matter. He also demonstrated his ability to detect" on a simpler level, for when discussing a word or phrase with a pupil he would cite a wide range of comparable forms and expressions in other languages. Similarly in casual conversation he delighted in producing unexpected remarks about names, such as his observation that the name Waugh" is historically the singular of Wales".
But probably all this sounds like the scholar in his ivory tower. What did he do! What, in practical terms, did it mean to be the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford? The simplest answer is that it meant a good deal of hard work. The statutes called upon Tolkien to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or cla.s.ses a year, but he did not consider this to be sufficient to cover the subject, and in the second year after being elected Professor he gave one hundred and thirty-six lectures and cla.s.ses. This was partly because there were comparatively few other people to lecture on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. Later he managed to get another philologist, an excellent if intimidating teacher named Charles Wrenn, appointed to a.s.sist him, and then he was able to set himself a slightly less strenuous programme. But throughout the nineteen-thirties he continued to give at least twice the statutory number of lectures and cla.s.ses each year, considerably more than most of his colleagues undertook.
So lectures, and the preparation for them, took up a very large proportion of his time. In fact this heavy teaching load was sometimes more than he could manage efficiently, and occasionally he would abandon a course of lectures because of insufficient time to prepare it Oxford seized gleefully on this sin and bestowed upon him the reputation of not preparing his lectures properly, whereas the truth was that he prepared them too thoroughly. His deep commitment to the subject prevented bun from tackling it in anything less than an exhaustive manner, with the result that he often sidetracked himself into the consideration of subsidiary details, and never managed to finish the treatment of the main topic.
His job also required him to supervise post-graduate students, and to examine within the University. In addition he undertook a good deal of freelance" work as an external examiner to other universities, for with four children to bring up he needed to augment his income. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties he made frequent visits to many of the British universities as an examiner, and spent countless hours marking papers. After the Second World War he restricted this activity to examining regularly for various colleges in Ireland, touring Eire and making many friends there in the process. This was much to his taste. Less attractive, indeed an unredeemed ch.o.r.e, was the marking of School Certificate (the examination then set for British secondary schools) which he undertook annually in the prewar years to earn extra money. His time would have been better devoted to research or writing, but his concern for the family income made him spend many hours in the summer at this irritating task.
A good deal of his attention was also taken up by administration. It should be understood that an Oxford professor, unlike those in many other universities, is not by virtue of his office necessarily in a position of power in his faculty.
He has no authority over the college tutors who in all probability make up the majority of the faculty staff, for they are appointed by their colleges and are not answerable to him. So if he wishes to initiate some major change of policy he must adopt persuasive rather than authoritarian tactics. And, on his return to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien did wish to make a major change: he wanted to reform certain aspects of the Final Honour School of English Language and Literature.
The years since the First World War had widened the old rift between Language and Literature, and each faction in the English School - and they really were factions, with personal as well as academic animosities - delighted to interfere with the syllabus of the other. The Lang." side made sure that the Lit" students had to spend a good deal of their time studying the obscurer branches of English philology, while the Lit." camp insisted that the Lang."
undergraduates must set aside many hours from their specialisation (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English) to study the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Tolkien believed that this should be remedied. What was even more regrettable to him was that the linguistic courses laid considerable emphasis on the study of theoretical philology without suggesting that undergraduates should read widely in early and medieval literature. His own love of philology had always been based firmly on a knowledge of literature, and he determined that this state of affairs should be changed. He also proposed that Icelandic should be given more prominence in the syllabus; this latter hope was one reason for the formation of the Coalbiters.
His proposals required the consent of the whole faculty, and at first he met with a good deal of opposition. Even C.
S. Lewis, not yet a personal friend, was among those who originally voted against him. But as the terms pa.s.sed, Lewis and many others came over to Tolkien"s side and gave him their active support. By 1931 he had managed (beyond my wildest hopes", he wrote in his diary) to obtain general approval for the majority of his proposals. The revised syllabus was put into operation, and for the first time in the history of the Oxford English School something like a real rapprochement was achieved between Lang." and Lit.".
Besides being responsible for teaching and administration, professors at Oxford as elsewhere are expected to devote much of their time to original research. Tolkien"s contemporaries had high hopes of him in this respect, for his glossary to Sisam"s book, his edition with E. V. Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and his article on the Ancrene Wisse ma.n.u.scripts demonstrated that he had an unrivalled mastery of the early Middle English of the West Midlands; and it was expected that he would continue to contribute important work in this field. He himself had every intention of doing so: he promised an edition of the Cambridge ma.n.u.script of the Ancrene Wisse to the Early English Text Society, and he did a great deal of research into this branch of early medieval English, this language with the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman" which he loved so much. But the edition was not completed for many years, while the greater part of his research work never reached print.
Lack of time was one cause. He had chosen to devote the major part of his working life at Oxford to teaching, and this in itself limited what he could do in the matter of original research. The marking of examination papers in order to provide necessary money also ate into his time. But besides this there was the matter of his perfectionism.
Tolkien had a pa.s.sion for perfection in written work of any kind, whether it be philology or stories. This grew from his emotional commitment to his work, which did not permit him to treat it in any manner other than the deeply serious. Nothing was allowed to reach the printer until it had been revised, reconsidered, and polished in which respect he was the opposite of C. S. Lewis, who sent ma.n.u.scripts off for publication with scarcely a second glance at them. Lewis, well aware of this difference between them, wrote of Tolkien: His standard of self-criticism was high and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old work they actually got the first draft of a new one."
This is the main reason why Tolkien only allowed a small proportion of his work to reach the printed page. But what he did publish during the nineteen-thirties was a major contribution to scholarship. His paper on the dialects of Chaucer"s Reeve"s Tale is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the regional variations of fourteenth-century English. (It was read to the Philological Society in 1931 but not published until 1934, and then with a typical Tolkien apology for the lack of what the author considered to be a necessary amount of revision and improvement.) And his lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, delivered to the British Academy on 25 November 1936 and published in the following year, is a landmark in the history of criticism of this great Western Anglo-Saxon poem.
Beowulf, said Tolkien in the lecture, is a poem and not (as other commentators had often suggested) merely a jumble of confused literary traditions, or a text for scholarly examination. And he described, in characteristically imaginative terms, the way that earlier critics had treated the Beowulf poet"s work: A man inherited a field in which was an acc.u.mulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man"s distant forefathers had obtained their building material.
Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: This tower is most interesting. But they also said (after pushing it over): What a muddle it is in! And even the man"s descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion. But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."
In his lecture Tolkien pleaded for the rebuilding of that tower. He declared that although Beowulf is about monsters and a dragon, that does not make it negligible as heroic poetry. A dragon is no idle fancy," he told his audience.
Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who have yet been caught by the fascination of the worm."
This was Tolkien talking not primarily as a philologist or even a literary critic, but as a storyteller. Just as Lewis said of his philology, He had been inside language", so it might be remarked that when he talked of the Beowulf dragon he was speaking as the author of The Silmarillion and - by this time - of The Hobbit. He had been into the dragon"s lair.