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Tallness is a quality of which he makes much in his books, so it is a little surprising to see that he himself is slightly less than the average height
This proves to be the garage, long abandoned by any car – he explains that he has not had a car since the beginning of the Second World War – and, since his retirement, made habitable and given over to the housing of books and papers formerly kept in his college room. The shelves are crammed with dictionaries, works on etymology and philology, and editions of texts in many languages, predominant among which are Old and Middle English and Old Norse;
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slight error that must now be corrected or explained away, but as a historian who must cast light on an obscurity in a historical document.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 occurs to me that in all externals he resembles the archetypal Oxford don, at times even the stage caricature of a don. But that is exactly what he is not. 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.
When he was an adult his intimates referred to him (as was customary at the time) by his surname, or called him ‘Tollers’,
She alleged that the family name had originally been ‘von Hohenzollern’, for they had emanated from the Hohenzollern district of the Holy Roman Empire. A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against the Turks and capturing the Sultan’s standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname Tollkühn, ‘foolhardy’; and the name stuck.
through the daily worries of the family’s poverty-stricken existence there shone his love for his mother and for the Sarehole countryside, a place for adventure and solace. He revelled in his surroundings with a desperate enjoyment, perhaps sensing that one day this paradise would be lost. And so it was, all too soon.
More precisely, and more closely related to his mother’s death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. 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.
Philology: ‘the love of words’. For that was what motivated him. It was not an arid interest in the scientific principles of language; it was a deep love for the look and the sound of words, springing from the days when his mother had given him his first Latin lessons.
But this term, spurred on by a new-found confidence, he made his maiden speech on a motion supporting the objects and tactics of the suffragettes.
There was a custom at King Edward’s of holding a debate entirely in Latin, but that was almost too easy for Tolkien, and in one debate when taking the role of Greek Ambassador to the Senate he spoke entirely in Greek. On another occasion he astonished his schoolfellows when, in the character of a barbarian envoy, he broke into fluent Gothic; and on a third occasion he spoke in Anglo-Saxon.
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’.
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.
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.
Mirkwood, a name taken from ancient Germanic geography and legend.
This notion of the star-mariner whose ship leaps into the sky had grown from the reference to ‘Earendel’ in the Cynewulf lines. But the poem that it produced was entirely original. It was in fact the beginning of Tolkien’s own mythology.
Here is part of a poem written in it, and dated ‘November 1915, March 1916’. No translation survives, although the words Lasselanta (‘leaf-fall’, hence ‘Autumn’) and Eldamar (the ‘elvenhome’ in the West) were to be used by Tolkien in many other contexts: Ai lintulinda Lasselanta Pilingeve suyer nalla ganta Kuluvi ya karnevalinar V’ematte singi Eldamar.
Nor did he care for the majority of his fellow officers. ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors,’ he told Edith, ‘and even human beings rare indeed.’ He spent some of his time reading Icelandic – he was determined to keep up with his academic work during the war – but the time passed slowly. ‘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.’
So he learnt Morse code, flag and disc signalling, the transmission of messages by heliograph and lamp, the use of signal-rockets and field-telephones, and even how to handle carrier-pigeons (which were sometimes used on the battlefield). Eventually he was appointed battalion signalling officer.
Worst of all were the dead men, for corpses lay in every corner, horribly torn by the shells. Those that still had faces stared with dreadful eyes. Beyond the trenches no-man’s-land was littered with bloated and decaying bodies. All around was desolation. Grass and corn had vanished into a sea of mud. Trees, stripped of leaf and branch, stood as mere mutilated and blackened trunks. Tolkien never forgot what he called the ‘animal horror’ of trench warfare.
My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.
I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
Like many others who were employed at the Dictionary he was expected to fill out his time and his income by teaching in the University. He made it known that he was willing to accept pupils, and one by one the colleges began to respond – chiefly the women’s colleges, for Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s badly needed someone to teach Anglo-Saxon to their young ladies, and Tolkien had the advantage of being married, which meant that a chaperon did not have to be sent to his home when he was teaching them.
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.
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.
From adolescence to the end of his life he was notable, almost notorious, for the speed and indistinctness of his way of talking.
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 Orc gets hold of a ring of power – and then we get and are getting slavery.’
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.’
The statutes called upon Tolkien to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or classes 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 classes.
‘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.’
For this reason they are a fitting conclusion to the work of a man who believed that the prime function of a linguist is to interpret literature, and that the prime function of literature is to be enjoyed.
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.’
‘He has only two reactions to criticism,’ he remarked. ‘Either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.’
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.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. 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. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
More than this, she had lost a good deal of her independence. She had been set for a career as a piano teacher and just possibly as a soloist, but this prospect had simply faded away, first of all because there had been no immediate need for her to earn a living, and then because she had married Ronald Tolkien. In those days there was in normal circumstances no question of a middle-class wife continuing to earn her living after marriage, for to do so would have been an indication that the husband could not earn enough by himself. So piano playing was reduced to a mere hobby, although she
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But a number of other wives who, like Edith, did not have university degrees could by their expert management of the household make their home into something of a social centre for their husbands’ friends, and so participate in much of their lives. Unfortunately everything worked out rather differently for Edith. She was inclined to be shy, for she had led a very limited social life in childhood and adolescence, and when she came to live in Oxford in 1918 she was unnerved by what she found.
He persuaded her to return one call, to Lizzie Wright, who although very learned was not at all like most dons’ wives, having a great deal of her husband’s openness and common sense; but even then Ronald had to take her to the Wrights’ front door himself and ring the bell before hurrying away round the corner.
Even then, family life never entirely regained the equilibrium it had achieved in Leeds. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald. In terms of actual hours he was certainly in the house a great deal: much of his teaching was done there, and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was really a matter of his affections. He was very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was about his) and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the company of men of
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He worked late, partly because he was short of time in the day, but also because it was not until she had gone to bed that he could stay at his desk without interruption. During the day he could not work for long before she summoned him to some domestic duty, or called him to come and have tea with a friend. These frequent interruptions, themselves no more than an understandable demand from Edith for affection and attention, were often an irritant to him, though he bore them patiently.
Yet it would be wrong to picture her as excluded totally from his work. During these years he did not share his writing with her anything like as fully as he had done long before at Great Haywood; not since then had she been encouraged to participate in his work, and of his manuscripts only the early pages of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ are in her handwriting. Yet she inevitably shared in the family’s interest when he was writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and although she was not well acquainted with the details of his books and did not have a deep understanding of them, he did not
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Those friends and others who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible both in the small things, the almost absurd degree to which each worried about the other’s health, and the care with which they chose and wrapped each other’s birthday presents; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years at Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree to which she showed pride in his fame as an author.
Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.
After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm. At various times during the journey ‘Jo’ sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall near Chipping Norton, with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later – not entirely without justification, for Tolkien’s driving was daring rather than skilful.
Tolkien perceived the damage that the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing to the landscape, and after the war he did not buy another car or drive again.
he had now invented a new alphabet which he first called ‘Quenyatic’ and then ‘Fëanorian’, and after 1926 he wrote his diary in it.
On many evenings in the early nineteen-thirties Christopher, huddled for warmth by the study stove, would listen motionless while his father told him (in impromptu fashion, rather than reading aloud) about the elvish wars against the black power, and of how Beren and Lúthien made their perilous journey to the very heart of Morgoth’s iron stronghold. These were not mere stories: they were legends that came alive as his father spoke, vivid accounts of a grim world where foul orcs and a sinister Necromancer guarded the way, and a dreadful red-eyed wolf tore the elvish companions of Beren to
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‘The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination – not the small reach of their courage or latent power.’ 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.’
