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Among them was a reproduction of a painting by a German artist, J. Madlener. It is called Der Berggeist, the mountain spirit, and it shows an old man sitting on a rock under a pine tree. He has a white beard and wears a wide-brimmed round hat and a long cloak. He is talking to a white fawn that is nuzzling his upturned hands, and he has a humorous but compassionate expression; there is a glimpse of rocky mountains in the distance. Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: ‘Origin of Gandalf’.
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.
When Tolkien showed this and other poems to Wiseman, his friend remarked that they reminded him of Symons’s criticism of Meredith, ‘when he compared M. to a lady who liked to put on all her jewelry after breakfast’. And Wiseman advised: ‘Don’t overdo it.’
Early in 1915 he turned back to his original Earendel verses and began to work their theme into a larger story. He had shown the original Earendel lines to G. B. Smith, who had said that he liked them but asked what they were really about. Tolkien had replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’ Not try to invent: try to find out. He did not see himself as an inventor of story but as a discoverer of legend. And this was really due to his private languages.
‘My “Sam Gamgee” is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.’
yet always I had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere: not of “inventing”
These, then, are the elves of The Silmarillion, and of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself summed up their nature when he wrote of them: ‘They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire.’
he did not say of an apparent contradiction in the narrative or an unsatisfactory name: ‘This is not as I wish it to be; I must change it.’ Instead he would approach the problem with the attitude: ‘What does this mean? I must find out.’
Of all his legends, the tale of Beren and Lúthien was the one most loved by Tolkien, not least because at one level he identified the character of Lúthien with his own wife.
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.’
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.’
‘I’ve always been impressed,’ he once said, ‘that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.’
‘What really happens,’ he wrote, ‘is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.’
Perhaps the wisest remark came from the Oxford Times reviewer who declared: ‘The severely practical will have no time for it. Those who have imagination to kindle will find themselves completely carried along, becoming part of the eventful quest and regretting that there are only two more books to come.’
On the whole Tolkien himself did not mind this very much; indeed it amused him. He wrote of it: The Lord of the Rings is one of those things: if you like you do: if you don’t, then you boo!
As for Tolkien himself, writing to his colleague Norman Davis he referred to the widespread enthusiasm for his books as ‘my deplorable cultus’ and to a reporter who asked him if he was pleased by the enthusiasm of the young Americans he replied: ‘Art moves them and they don’t know what they’ve been moved by and they get quite drunk on it. Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I’m not.’
But perhaps most gratifying of all was the award in June 1972 of an honorary Doctorate of Letters from his own University of Oxford; not, as was made clear, for The Lord of the Rings, but for his contribution to philology.
