J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography

In the summer vacation of 1912 Tolkien went into camp for a fortnight with King Edward’s Horse, a territorial cavalry regiment in which he had recently enrolled. He enjoyed the experience of galloping across the Kentish plains – the camp was near Folkestone – but it was a wet and windy fortnight and the tents were often blown down in the night. This taste of life on horseback and under canvas was enough for him, and he resigned from the regiment after a few months. When the camp had concluded he went on a walking holiday in Berkshire, sketching the villages and climbing the downs. And then, all too soon, his first year as an undergraduate was over.

He had done very little work and he was getting into lazy habits. At Birmingham he had attended mass several times a week, but without Father Francis to watch over him he found it all too easy to stay in bed in the mornings, particularly after sitting up late talking to friends and smoking in front of the fire. He recorded sadly that his first terms at Oxford had passed ‘with practically none or very little practice of religion’. He tried to mend his ways, and he kept a diary for Edith in which he recorded all his misdemeanours and failings. But though she was a shining ideal to him – had they not vowed their love to each other, and did this not commit them to each other? – he was still forbidden to write to her or see her until he was twenty-one, and this would not happen for many months. In the meantime it was easy to while away the terms in expensive dinners, late-night conversations, and hours spent poring over medieval Welsh and invented languages.

At about this time he discovered Finnish. He had hoped to acquire some knowledge of the language ever since he had read the Kalevala in an English translation, and now in Exeter College library he found a Finnish grammar. With its aid he began an assault on the original language of the poems. He said afterwards: ‘It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.’

He never learned Finnish well enough to do more than work through part of the original Kalevala, but the effect on his language-inventing was fundamental and remarkable. He abandoned neo-Gothic and began to create a private language that was heavily influenced by Finnish. This was the language that would eventually emerge in his stories as ‘Quenya’ or High-elven. That would not happen for many years; yet already a seed of what was to come was germinating in his mind. He read a paper on the Kalevala to a college society, and in it began to talk about the importance of the type of mythology found in the Finnish poems. ‘These mythological ballads,’ he said, ‘are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ And he added: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ An exciting notion; and perhaps he was already thinking of creating that mythology for England himself.

He spent Christmas 1912 with his Incledon relatives at Barnt Green near Birmingham. As usual in that family, the season was enlivened with theatricals, and this time Ronald himself wrote the play that they performed. It was called ‘The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette’. Later in life he professed to despise drama, but on this occasion he was not only the author but the leading actor, playing ‘Professor Joseph Quilter, M.A., B.A., A.B.C., alias world-wide detective Sexton Q. Blake-Holmes, the Bloodhound’, who is searching for a lost heiress named Gwendoline Goodchild. She meanwhile has fallen in love with a penniless student whom she meets while they are living in the same lodging-house, and she has to remain undiscovered by her father until her twenty-first birthday in two days’ time, after which she will be free to marry.

This piece of family nonsense was even more topical than the Incledons realised. Not only was Ronald due to celebrate his own twenty-first a few days after the performance, but he also intended to reunite himself with Edith Bratt, for whom he had waited for nearly three years, and who he was quite certain had waited for him. As the clock struck midnight and marked the beginning of 3 January 1913, his coming of age, he sat up in bed and wrote a letter to her, renewing his declaration of love and asking her: ‘How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the world?’

But when Edith wrote in reply, it was to say that she was engaged to be married to George Field, brother of her school-friend Molly.

CHAPTER VI REUNION (#ulink_eabea6b8-08b8-538b-859c-96e69014bc90)

He could have decided to forget all about her. His friends did not know of her existence and his aunts and uncles and cousins had never been told about her. Only Father Francis knew, and even though he was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian he had no wish that the affair with Edith should begin again. So Ronald could have torn up Edith’s letter and left her to marry George Field.

Yet there had been declarations and promises in the Duchess Road days that Ronald felt could not be lightly broken. Moreover Edith had been his ideal in the last three years, his inspiration and his hope for the future. He had nurtured and cultivated his love for her so that it grew in secret, even though it had to be fed solely on his memories of their adolescent romance and a few photographs of her as a child. He now perceived only one course of action: he must go to Cheltenham, beseech her to give up George Field, and ask her to marry him.

In truth he knew that she would say yes. She had hinted as much in her letter, explaining that she had only become engaged to George because he had been kind to her, and she felt ‘on the shelf’, and there was no other young man that she knew, and she had given up believing that Ronald would want to see her again after the three years had passed. ‘I began to doubt you, Ronald,’ she told him in her letter, ‘and to think you would cease to care for me.’ But now that he had written to renew his vow of love, she indicated that everything had changed.

So on Wednesday 8 January 1913 he travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. They walked out into the country and sat under a railway viaduct where they talked. By the end of the day Edith had declared that she would give up George Field and marry Ronald Tolkien.

She wrote to George and sent him back his ring; and he, poor young man, was dreadfully upset at first and his family was insulted and angry. But eventually the matter ceased to be alluded to, and they all became friends once more. Edith and Ronald did not announce their engagement, being a little nervous of family reaction and wanting to wait until Ronald’s prospects were more certain. But Ronald returned to his new term at Oxford in ‘a bursting happiness’.

One of his first actions on arriving was to write to Father Francis explaining that he and Edith intended to be married. He was very nervous about this, but when Father Francis’s reply came it was calm and resigned if far from enthusiastic. This was as well, for although the priest was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian, he still gave him much-needed financial support; so it was essential that he tolerate the engagement.

Now that Ronald had been reunited with Edith he had to turn his full attention to Honour Moderations,

(#litres_trial_promo) the first of the two examinations that would earn him his degree in Classics. He tried to cram into six weeks the work that he should have done during the previous four terms, but it was not easy to break the habit of sitting up late talking to friends, and he found it difficult to get up in the morning – though like many others before him he blamed this on the damp Oxford climate rather than on his own late hours. When Honour Moderations began at the end of February he was still poorly prepared for many papers. On the whole he was relieved when he learnt that he had at least managed to achieve a Second Class.

But he knew that he ought to have done better. A first in ‘Mods’ is not easy to achieve, but it is within the range of an able undergraduate who devotes himself to his work. Certainly it is expected of someone who intends to follow an academic career, and Tolkien already had such a career in mind. However he had achieved a ‘pure alpha’, a practically faultless paper, in his special subject, Comparative Philology. This was partly a tribute to the excellence of Joe Wright’s teaching, but it was also an indication that Tolkien’s greatest talents lay in this field; and Exeter College took note. The college was disappointed that as one of its award-holders he had missed a First, but suggested that if he had earned an alpha in philology he ought to become a philologist. Dr Farnell who was Rector of Exeter (the head of the college) knew that he was interested in Old and Middle English and other Germanic languages, so would it not be sensible if he changed to the English School? Tolkien agreed, and at the beginning of the summer term of 1913 he abandoned Classics and began to read English.

The Honour School of English Language and Literature was still young by Oxford standards, and it was split down the middle. On one side were the philologists and medievalists who considered that any literature later than Chaucer was not sufficiently challenging to form the basis of a degree-course syllabus. On the other were the enthusiasts for ‘modern’ literature (by which they meant literature from Chaucer to the nineteenth century) who thought that the study of philology and Old and Middle English was ‘word-mongering and pedantry’. In some ways it was mistaken to try and squeeze both factions of opinion into the same Honours School. The result was that undergraduates who chose to specialise in ‘Language’ (that is, Old and Middle English and philology) were nevertheless compelled to read a good deal of modern literature, while those who wanted to read ‘Literature’ (the modern course) were also obliged to study texts in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and acquaint themselves with a certain amount of philology. Both courses were compromises, and neither side was entirely satisfied.

There was no question as to which side of the school would claim Tolkien. He would specialise in linguistic studies, and it was arranged that his tutor would be Kenneth Sisam, a young New Zealander who was acting as an assistant to A. S. Napier, the Professor of English Language and Literature. After meeting Sisam and surveying the syllabus Tolkien was ‘seized with panic, because I cannot see how it is going to provide me with honest labour for two years and a term’. It all seemed too easy and familiar: he was already well acquainted with many of the texts he would have to read, and he even knew a certain amount of Old Norse, which he was going to do as a special subject (under the Icelandic expert W. A. Craigie). Moreover Sisam did not at first appear to be an inspiring tutor. He was a quiet-spoken man only four years older than Tolkien, certainly lacking the commanding presence of Joe Wright. But he was an accurate and painstaking scholar, and Tolkien soon came to respect and like him. As to the work, Tolkien spent more time at his desk than he had while studying Classics. It was not as easy as he had expected, for the standard of the Oxford English School was very high; but he was soon firmly in command of the syllabus and was writing lengthy and intricate essays on ‘Problems of the dissemination of phonetic change’, ‘The lengthening of vowels in Old and Middle English times’, and ‘The Anglo-Norman element in English’. He was particularly interested in extending his knowledge of the West Midland dialect in Middle English because of its associations with his childhood and ancestry; and he was reading a number of Old English works that he had not previously encountered.

Among these was the Crist of Cynewulf, a group of Anglo-Saxon religious poems. Two lines from it struck him forcibly:

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended.

‘Hail Earendel brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men.’ Earendel is glossed by the Anglo-Saxon dictionary as ‘a shining light, ray’, but here it clearly has some special meaning. Tolkien himself interpreted it as referring to John the Baptist, but he believed that ‘Earendel’ had originally been the name for the star presaging the dawn, that is, Venus. He was strangely moved by its appearance in the Cynewulf lines. ‘I felt a curious thrill,’ he wrote long afterwards, ‘as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.’

He found even more to excite his imagination when he studied his special subject. Old Norse (or Old Icelandic: the names are interchangeable) is the language that was brought to Iceland by the Norwegians who fled from their native land in the ninth century. Tolkien was already moderately acquainted with Norse, and he now made a thorough study of its literature. He read the sagas and the Prose or Younger Edda. He also studied the Poetic or Elder Edda; and so it was that he came upon the ancient storehouse of Icelandic myth and legend.

‘The Elder Edda’ is the name given to a collection of poems, some of them incomplete or textually corrupt, whose principal manuscript dates from the thirteenth century. But many of the poems themselves are more ancient, perhaps originating at a period earlier than the settlement of Iceland. Some are heroic, describing the world of men, while others are mythological, treating of the deeds of gods. Among the mythological lays in the Elder Edda none is more remarkable than the Völuspa or Prophecy of the Seeress, which tells the story of the cosmos from its creation, and foretells its doom. The most remarkable of all Germanic mythological poems, it dates from the very end of Norse heathendom, when Christianity was taking the place of the old gods; yet it imparts a sense of living myth, a feeling of awe and mystery, in its representation of a pagan cosmos. It had a profound appeal to Tolkien’s imagination.

In the months following their reunion, the question of Edith’s religion caused some concern to her and Ronald. If their marriage was to be blessed by his church she would have to become a Catholic. She was in theory quite happy to do this – indeed she believed that her family had long ago been Catholic. But it was not a simple matter. She was a member of the Church of England, and a very active member. During her separation from Ronald a large proportion of her life had centred on the parish church at her Cheltenham home, and she had made herself useful in church affairs. She had in consequence acquired some status in the parish; and it was a smart parish, typical of the elegant town. Now Ronald wanted her to renounce all this and to go to a church where nobody knew her; and looking at it from that point of view she did not relish the prospect. She was also afraid that her ‘Uncle’ Jessop in whose house she lived might be very angry, for like many others of his age and class he was strongly anti-Catholic. Would he allow her to go living under his roof until her marriage if she ‘poped’? It was an awkward situation, and she suggested to Ronald that the matter might be delayed until they were officially engaged or the time of their marriage was near. But he would not hear of this. He wanted her to act quicky. He despised the Church of England, calling it ‘a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs’. And if Edith were persecuted for her decision to become a Catholic, why then, that was precisely what had happened to his own dear mother, and she had endured it. ‘I do so dearly believe,’ he wrote to Edith, ‘that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.’ (He himself was once more attending mass regularly and had perhaps chosen to forget his lapses of the previous year.) Clearly the question of Edith becoming a Catholic was an emotional matter to him; perhaps it was also in part, though he would not have admitted it, a test of her love after her unfaithfulness in becoming engaged to George Field.

So she did what he wanted. She told the Jessops that she intended to become a Catholic, and ‘Uncle’ reacted just as she had feared, for he ordered her to leave his house as soon as she could find some other accommodation. Faced with this crisis, Edith decided to set up home with her middle-aged cousin Jennie Grove, a tiny determined woman with a deformed back. Together they began to look for rooms. There seems to have been some suggestion that they might come to Oxford so that Edith could be near Ronald, but she does not appear to have wanted this. Perhaps she was resentful of the pressure he had brought to bear on her over the matter of Catholicism, and certainly she wanted to maintain an independent life until they were married. She and Jennie chose Warwick, which was not far from their native Birmingham but was far more attractive than that city. After a search they managed to find temporary rooms, and Ronald joined them there in June 1913.

He found Warwick, its trees, its hill, and its castle, to be a place of remarkable beauty. The weather was hot and he went punting with Edith down the Avon. Together they attended Benediction in the Roman Catholic church, ‘from which’ (he wrote) ‘we came away serenely happy, for it was the first time that we had ever been able to go calmly side by side to church’. But they also had to spend some time searching for a house for Edith and Jennie, and when a suitable one was found there were innumerable arrangements to be made. Ronald found the hours that passed in domestic concerns to be rather irritating. Indeed he and Edith were not always happy when they were together. They no longer knew each other very well, for they had spent the three years of their separation in two totally different societies: the one all-male, boisterous, and academic; the other mixed, genteel, and domestic. They had grown up, but they had grown apart. From now on each would have to make concessions to the other if they were to come to a real understanding. Ronald would have to tolerate Edith’s absorption in the daily details of life, trivial as they might seem to him. She would have to make an effort to understand his preoccupation with his books and his languages, selfish as it might appear to her. Neither of them entirely succeeded. Their letters were full of affection but also sometimes of mutual irritation. Ronald might address Edith as ‘little one’ (his favourite name for her), and talk lovingly of her ‘little house’, but she was far from little in personality, and when they were together their tempers would often flare. Part of the trouble lay in Ronald’s self-chosen role of sentimental lover, which was quite unlike the face he showed to his male friends. There was real love and understanding between him and Edith, but he often wrapped it up in amatory cliché; while if he had shown her more of his ‘bookish’ face and had taken her into the company of his male friends, she might not have minded so much when these elements loomed large in their marriage. But he kept the two sides of his life firmly apart.

After his visit to Warwick Ronald set out for Paris with two Mexican boys to whom he was to act as tutor and escort. In Paris they met a third boy and two aunts, who spoke virtually no English. Ronald was ashamed that his own Spanish was only rudimentary, and he found that even his French deserted him when he was faced with the necessity of speaking it. He loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own, but he disliked the Frenchmen he saw in the streets, and wrote to Edith about ‘the vulgarity and the jabber and spitting and the indecency’. Long before this expedition he had conceived a dislike of France and the French, and what he now saw did not cure him of his Gallophobia. Certainly he had some justification for hating France after what happened next. The aunts and the boys decided to visit Brittany, and the prospect appealed to him, for the true Breton people are of Celtic stock and speak a language that is in many respects similar to Welsh. But in the event their destination proved to be Dinard, a seaside resort like any other place. ‘Brittany!’ Ronald wrote to Edith. ‘And to see nothing but trippers and dirty papers and bathing machines.’ There was worse to come. A few days after their arrival he was walking in the street with one of the boys and the older aunt. A car mounted the pavement and struck the aunt, running her over and causing acute internal injury. Ronald helped to take her back to the hotel but she died a few hours later. The holiday ended in distraught arrangements for the body to be shipped back to Mexico. Ronald brought the boys back to England, telling Edith: ‘Never again except I am in the direst poverty will I take any such job.’