J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

by Humphrey Carpenter

But he sometimes wrote poems in it, and the more he worked at it the more he felt that it needed a ‘history’ to support it. In other words, you cannot have a language without a race of people to speak it. He was perfecting the language; now he had to decide to whom it belonged.

‘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.’

She sang and danced for him in the wood, and from this came the story that was to be the centre of The Silmarillion: the tale of the mortal man Beren who loves the immortal elven-maid Lúthien Tinúviel, whom he first sees dancing among hemlock in a wood.

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. After Edith’s death more than fifty years later he wrote to his son Christopher, explaining why he wished to include the name ‘Lúthien’ on her tombstone: ‘She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien. I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths – someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives – and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed the memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.’

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.

It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’

To put it another way, the hobbits represent the combination of small imagination with great courage which (as Tolkien had seen in the trenches during the First World War) often led to survival against all chances. ‘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.’

But the name ‘Bladorthin’ was retained for some time, and it was not until the draft was well advanced that the chief dwarf was renamed ‘Thorin Oakenshield’ and the name ‘Gandalf’ (taken, like all the dwarf-names, from the Elder Edda) was given to the wizard, for whom it was eminently suitable on account of its Icelandic meaning of ‘scorcerer-elf’ and hence ‘wizard’.

But the map in itself was not enough, and he made endless calculations of time and distance, drawing up elaborate charts concerning events in the story, showing dates, the days of the week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the wind and the phase of the moon.

Long afterwards he said: ‘I wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it (in a sense) as actual history.’

In the following months The Lord of the Rings at last reached its conclusion. Tolkien recalled that he ‘actually wept’ when writing the account of the heroes’ welcome that is given to the hobbits on the Field of Cormallen. Long ago he had resolved to take the chief protagonists across the sea towards the West at the end of the book, and with the writing of the chapter that describes the setting sail from the Grey Havens the huge manuscript was nearly complete. Nearly, but not quite. ‘I like tying up loose ends,’ Tolkien once said, and he wished to make sure that there were no loose ends in his great story. So he wrote an Epilogue in which Sam Gangee told his children what happened to each of the principal characters who did not sail West. It ended with Sam listening to ‘the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth’.

Besides money, The Lord of the Rings was bringing Tolkien a large number of fan-letters. Those who wrote included a real Sam Gamgee, who had not read The Lord of the Rings but had heard that his name appeared in the story. Tolkien was delighted, explained how he had come by the name, and sent Mr Gamgee a signed copy of all three volumes. Later he said: ‘For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed “S. Gollum”. That would have been more difficult to deal with.’

They sent him a copy, and he was astonished by the picture on the cover. Ace Books for all their moral ‘piracy’ had employed a cover artist who knew something about the story, but Ballantine’s cover picture seemed to have no relevance whatever to The Hobbit, for it showed a hill, two emus, and a curious tree bearing bulbous fruit. Tolkien exploded: ‘What has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs?’ When the reply came that the artist hadn’t time to read the book, and that the object with pink bulbs was ‘meant to suggest a Christmas tree’ Tolkien could only answer: ‘I begin to feel that I am shut up in a madhouse.’

Tolkien took every letter seriously, especially if it came from a child or an elderly person. Sometimes he would make two or three drafts of his reply – and then be dissatisfied with the result, or so undecided as to what he should say that he never sent anything. Or he would lose a letter after writing it, and spend hours turning out the garage or his study-bedroom until he had found it. The search might reveal other forgotten things, an unanswered letter or an unfinished story, and he would abandon what he had set out to do, and sit down and read (or rewrite) whatever he had discovered. Many days passed in this fashion.