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He explains it all in great detail, talking about his book not as a work of fiction but as a chronicle of actual events; he seems to see himself not as an author who has made a slight error that must now be corrected or explained away, but as a historian who must cast light on an obscurity in a historical document.
It is rather as if some strange spirit had taken on the guise of an elderly professor. The body may be pacing this shabby little suburban room, but the mind is far away, roaming the plains and mountains of Middle-earth.
The boy’s first name will be ‘John’ after its grandfather, probably John Ronald Reuel altogether. Mab wants to call it Ronald and I want to keep up John and Reuel…
But his favourite lessons were those that concerned languages. Early in his Sarehole days his mother introduced him to the rudiments of Latin, and this delighted him.
It seemed rather as if words took the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost regardless of what they meant.
‘There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that.’
‘I desired dragons with a profound desire,’ he said long afterwards.
But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.’
I longed to devise a setting by which the trees might really march to war.’
And certainly the loss of his mother had a profound effect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist.
Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.
This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.
he had begun, in fact, to study philology, the science of words.
And as a result of this love of words, he had started to invent his own languages.
It’s so extraordinarily common, I once did think that there ought to be some organised research into it.’
a girl of nineteen who lived on the first floor beneath the boys’ bedroom and spent most of her time at her sewing-machine. Her name was Edith
Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: ‘Origin of Gandalf’.
Lo! young we are and yet have stood like planted hearts in the great Sun of Love so long (as two fair trees in woodland or in open dale stand utterly entwined, and breathe the airs, and suck the very light together) that we have become as one, deep-rooted in the soil of Life, and tangled in sweet growth.
Tolkien had replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’ Not try to invent: try to find out.
O! West of the Moon, East of the Sun Lies the Haven of the Star; The white town of the Wanderer And the rocks of Eglamar: There Wingelot is harboured While Earendel looks afar On the magic and the wonder ‘Tween here and Eglamar – Out, out beyond Taníquetil In Valinor – afar.
‘These grey days,’ he wrote, ‘wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing, are not enjoyable.’
‘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.’
May you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them. G. B. Smith’s words were a clear call to Ronald Tolkien to begin the great work that he had been meditating for some time, a grand and astonishing project with few parallels in the history of literature. He was going to create an entire mythology.
When Tolkien began to write he drew upon some deeper, richer seam of his imagination than he had yet explored; and it was a seam that would continue to yield for the rest of his life.
‘Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing – and dance.’ 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.
You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.
