J.R.R. Tolkien

A Guide for the Perplexed

Toby Widdicombe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350092150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

With his richly detailed world of Middle Earth and the epic tales he told around it, J.R.R. Tolkien invented the modern fantasy novel. For readers and students getting to grips with this world for the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Guide for the Perplexed is an essential guide to the author's life and work. The book helps readers explore: · Tolkien's life and times
· Tolkien's mythical world
· The languages of Middle Earth
· The major works – The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
· Posthumously published writings – from The Silmarillion to the recently discovered The Fall of Gondolin With reference to adaptations of Tolkien's work including the Peter Jackson films, notes on Tolkien's sources and surveys of key scholarly and critical writings, this is an accessible and authoritative guide to one of the 20th century's greatest and most popular writers.

1

Tolkien’s Life and Art

Tolkien’s life can be summarized in just two paragraphs, largely as a succession of dates.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (known as “John Ronald” or, more familiarly, as “Tollers”) was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. A younger brother (Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien) was born in February 1894. His father, Arthur Tolkien, died in February 1896 when Tolkien was barely four years old. Between 1900 and 1911, Tolkien went to King Edward’s School, Birmingham. His mother, Mabel Tolkien, died in November 1904, so Tolkien was brought up by a guardian, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, chosen by his mother. In 1908, Tolkien met his future wife, Edith Bratt. In 1910, Tolkien was awarded an exhibition (a partial scholarship) to Exeter College at Oxford University. Between 1911 and 1915, he went to Exeter College and graduated with first-class honors in English language and literature. In 1915, he was commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers regiment. In March 1916, he married Edith Bratt and between July and November of that year he saw action in the Great War (1914–18) at the battle of the Somme. Also in November of that year, he was invalided out with trench fever. He saw no more action in the war. In November 1917, his oldest son, John, was born. In 1918 and 1919, he worked for the New English Dictionary (what would later become the Oxford English Dictionary).

And now his academic career began. In 1920, he was appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University, and his second son, Michael, was born. In 1924, he was appointed Professor of English Language at Leeds University, and his third son, Christopher, was born. In 1925, he was elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. In 1929, his fourth child and only daughter, Priscilla, was born. In 1937, The Hobbit was published. In 1945, Tolkien was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University. In 1954–5, the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings were published. In 1971, Edith Tolkien (née Bratt) died from complications from an inflamed gallbladder. She and Tolkien had been married for fifty-five years. On September 2, 1973, Tolkien died at the age of eighty-one from an acute bleeding ulcer.

A life described in fewer than two dozen dates.

The first question that perplexes so many readers of Tolkien’s extraordinary work is this: How did someone who led an apparently ordinary life (birth, education, career, family, death) create something as remarkable and beloved as the legendarium? The answer to this question is both an easy and crucial one with which to begin any study of Tolkien’s life and work. However, the question itself stems from a profound misunderstanding of the life, a misunderstanding that begins with the first (and only authorized) biography of Tolkien—written by Humphrey Carpenter and titled simply J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography.¹ It was first published by George Allen & Unwin in 1977, only four years after Tolkien’s death. The misunderstanding begins early in Carpenter’s work. Before he gets to the biography proper, he begins with a description of meeting Tolkien in 1967 at Tolkien’s house in Headington, just outside Oxford. There, he reduces Tolkien (despite The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) to “the archetypal Oxford don, at times even the stage caricature of a don” (2000: 14). That misunderstanding is to think or imagine that Tolkien’s life was ordinary or uninteresting or dull. Carpenter repeatedly depicts Tolkien’s life in this way, as “dull and uneventful” (2000: 162). Later biographers have adopted the same reading of Tolkien’s life. So, for example, almost a quarter of a century after Carpenter’s book came out, Michael White, in Tolkien: A Biography (2003; originally published in 2001 as Critical Lives: J. R. R. Tolkien), talks of Tolkien as an “obscure professor” with “in many ways, [a] completely unremarkable, almost plain” family background (2003: 10) and a “conventional” life (122).

Before answering the crucial question of how someone such as Tolkien could have created the legendarium, it is necessary to counter this widely held but mistaken view that Tolkien led an obscure and humdrum life. I’ll do so by rehearsing again the facts of Tolkien’s life, but this time it will not be in the form of a succession of dates but as a brief discussion of the life that lies behind those dates.

Tolkien’s father, Arthur, died when John Ronald was just four years old. His parents were already physically separated, with his father remaining in South Africa and his mother now living in England. His mother, Mabel, died when Tolkien was twelve. So, Tolkien lost both of his parents before he was even a teenager. No one who has not been orphaned can comprehend how deeply unmooring and confusing having no parents can be as one grows up. His mother, Mabel, chose in 1899 to switch from Protestantism (her father had been a Methodist and later became a Unitarian) to Roman Catholicism. The consequence of this decision was that she was ostracized by nearly all her family and went from being a poor mother with two children (surviving off the interest from her late husband’s capital in Bonanza Mines and the largesse of her brother-in-law) to being nearly destitute. She moved her family from place to place based on cost and proximity to Catholic churches: from her family’s home in Birmingham to Sarehole (a village just outside Birmingham); to slum housing in Mosley (a suburb of Birmingham); to a small place near King’s Heath Station; to a small house on Oliver Road (both in Birmingham). At one point, because she had been hospitalized for complications from diabetes, her two sons (John Ronald and Hilary) were separated and went to live with different members of her extended family. Then when they were all reunited it was in a sub-let in Rednal, Worcestershire: just a couple of rooms in a tiny cottage rented by the local postman from its owners, the Oratory. So, before John Ronald was a teenager, he had experienced real poverty in the days before there was any idea of a welfare state.

After his mother’s death in 1904—she was only thirty-four—Tolkien was placed under the formal guardianship of her priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan. Now Tolkien lived with his stern and unloving and widowed maternal aunt, Beatrice, in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. Morgan, however, realized that such an environment was not conducive to growing up happy, and so, in 1908, he moved the two brothers into one room in a large house owned by some friends of his, the Faulkners. By the age of sixteen, then, Tolkien had moved almost ten times from one temporary arrangement to another: sometimes with his mother (before she died young) and brother and sometimes without. In almost anyone, that would breed feelings of acutest uncertainty about at least four of the foundation stones of life: security, modest material wealth, shelter, and affection.

When Tolkien moved into the Faulkners’ house in 1908, he met there his future wife, Edith Bratt. She was almost three years older than him, very attractive (as her photograph attests (photo 5: Carpenter, 2000, p. 144–5)), an orphan (like Tolkien), and illegitimate. In a sense, they saved each other from the material and social deprivations of their lives until that time. However, Tolkien’s guardian, Father Morgan, found out about their relationship and forbade his ward from seeing her again until Tolkien came of age (at that time, twenty-one)—in part because she was distracting Tolkien from his studies and in part because she was not Catholic. Father Morgan also moved the brothers out of the Faulkners’ house to lodgings nearby. Tolkien took his guardian’s command seriously—because he admired him and because Morgan supported him financially. Tolkien did not see or communicate with Edith between early March 1910 and January 3, 1913. By the time he did talk with her again, Edith had become affianced to someone else (George Field, the brother of one of her school friends, Molly). It took a train trip to Cheltenham (where Edith was now living) and a lot of talking back and forth before they finally agreed to marry. Father Morgan reluctantly but politely accepted what was almost a fait accompli. John Ronald and Edith married in March 1916, but only after Edith had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and been received into the Roman church in January 1914. Tolkien’s relation to religion was, then, a fraught and complicated one.

In the meantime, Tolkien’s education prospered. While at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, he became a member of an intellectual and bookish clique of several senior boys: the “Tea Club and Barrovian Society” (TCBS). This group was extraordinarily influential in his life; his friendship with the members of the club, Christopher Wiseman, Rob. Q. Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith (often known as GBS), proved formative in his long life. He won an exhibition to Exeter College at Oxford University in 1911 and graduated with the highest degree possible (first-class honors) in 1915. In a sense, then, his intellectual achievements and their certainty compensated for all the ways in which as he grew up his life was anything but certain and secure. With that achievement behind him and his love for Edith sealed by a wedding, he went off to war, and between July and November he took part in the battle of the Somme. It is impossible to exaggerate how awful the Great War was for those who fought. For Tolkien, the Somme was so appalling as to be almost beyond direct description. He simply said that trench warfare was an “animal horror” (quoted in Carpenter 2000: 91) and war itself an “utter stupid waste” (75). History records that in the five-month battle, the Allies advanced just six miles across a sixteen-mile front at the cost of 650,000 casualties. Of Tolkien’s three best friends from the TCBS, only one survived: Christopher Wiseman. Rob Gilson died at La Boiselle on July 1 (the first day of the battle of the Somme) and GBS on December 3 from injuries caused by shrapnel. Tolkien himself was fortunate indeed to be invalided back to England in November 1916 for the rest of the war with trench fever (a potentially fatal infection carried by lice). It was during his long convalescence that Edith sang and danced for him in a wood near Roos in Yorkshire, a magical moment that was transformed into a central moment in the myth of Beren and Lúthien.

After the war, there was the job at the New English Dictionary and the spectacular rise to the eminence of an Oxford professorship at the remarkably young age of thirty-two; there was the long marriage and four children; there was the sustained effort to balance his love of creative writing with his academic work and his family life as sole breadwinner and devoted father. As I suggested earlier, it has become accepted as a biographical fact that these were dull and ordinary years in Tolkien’s life. They were not, for several reasons. First, the marriage of John Ronald and Edith was a complex and difficult one in part because of his preoccupation with his work, in part because of her shyness around his academic colleagues and friends, in part because of his idealizing of Edith, and in part because the relationship was founded on coercion. Tolkien had forced Edith to convert to Catholicism when her social roots were in Protestantism, and she had been about to marry someone else when Tolkien came back onto the scene just in time. Second, it was an extraordinary achievement to continue his creative writing when either a strictly academic career or family life would have been enough in itself for most mortals. Such focus had its consequences, however, and in this case the result was that Tolkien and Edith led rather separate lives. Third, as a professor, Tolkien was sometimes criticized by his colleagues for not producing enough strictly academic work, yet at the same time he managed to win a remarkable number of disciplinary and curricular battles while at Oxford. These may seem rarefied as skirmishes to the general public, but when you are in the midst of them and you care about the outcome they are not. And then there is that wonderful inscription on the headstone the Tolkiens share at their gravesite in Wolvercote Cemetery:

Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973.

Above all things, that inscription enshrines idealism as well as love and hints at the complexity of the relation between life and mythology for Tolkien.

And how does this life, then, inform his art? Tolkien himself wrote this deeply moving comment about his married life (to his son Christopher in 1972), shortly after Edith’s death:

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 the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began—all of which (over and above our 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 our 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. (Tolkien 2000: 420–1)

What this moving statement suggests is that the legendarium is very much a substitute for autobiography, with Tolkien expressing himself “about things deepest felt in tales and myths” (that is, putting his most important life experiences into creative narrative) rather than in conventional autobiography. This letter also suggests that his life was not the dull and routine existence it is conventionally argued to have been. For example, on at least one occasion, it can be gleaned from his published letters that Tolkien suffered a nervous breakdown in the first part of 1938. For this he was given the standard treatment at the time: absolute rest.

So, how could someone such as Tolkien produce the wonderful and haunting legendarium (principally The Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales (1980), The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin (2007), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and The Fall of Gondolin)? The cheeky answer is that it is hard to imagine anybody else doing so. Tolkien worked on his legendarium from 1913 or 1914 until his death sixty years later. That shows tenacity of purpose as a natural characteristic especially as Tolkien was not a professional creative writer but an academic. He had, then, to sandwich into that stressful, salary-paying occupation the creating of his mythology in the early hours of the morning night after night, year after year, decade after decade. Tolkien had tremendous difficulty finishing anything because (among other reasons) he was such a perfectionist. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings, for example, show how much more he would have tinkered with the epic if only the publisher and its deadlines had allowed him to. The Silmarillion in its condensed and fragmentary form shows how much he had to say if only his life had not been cut short, and yet his inability to finish The Silmarillion in the eighteen years between the publication of The Lord of the Rings and his death in 1973 suggests less diminished energies than it does perfection writ large across this most ambitious piece of his legendarium.

The legendarium is the means to create a society and a history and a culture to give literary expression to Tolkien’s invented languages, particularly Elvish. Language first; story after. As Tolkien put it: “mythology is language and language is mythology” (2016a: 96). Only a philologist could imagine such an arrangement. Tolkien was an academic linguist for thirty-nine years (1920–59) and a philologist by inclination long before he became a professor. He was a lover of language ever since he first saw, as a boy of nine, some coal trucks on the railway sidings at the bottom of the garden at the King’s Heath house, coal trucks with Welsh place names such as Nantyglo, Senghenydd, Blaen-Rhondda, Penrhiwceiber, and Tredegar. To Tolkien, and to very few others, would such words speak movingly. And to only Tolkien (as an undergraduate at Oxford) would two lines from Cynewulf’s Anglo-Saxon poem Christ dazzle as much if not more because of how they sounded rather than because of what they meant:

Ēala Ēarendel engla beorhtast

ofer middangeard monnum sended. (The Christ of Cynewulf, ll. 104–5)

Yes, “Ēarendel” may be glossed as a bright light, but what else does it mean? Only a committed philologist would have spent a lifetime finding out. It is also surely accurate that only someone as committed to his career and to creative self-expression would have been able to produce not only the legendarium in all its variety but also academic books and articles of importance when first published and even now. The list of such academic works is a long one, but primary among his notable academic works is his 1925 edition—with E. V. Gordon—of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2nd edn, 1967), his 1936 seminal essay on Beowulf titled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1997), his 1939 lecture “On Fairy-Stories” (1997), and his 1962 edition of the Ancrene Wisse.

If one turns from his character and achievements to his life considered more directly, it is possible that Tolkien’s orphaned childhood (with his father—far away in South Africa—dying when Tolkien was only four) may plausibly be seen as the source of repeated father figures sometimes high-handed or abusive or evil in their behavior (Gandalf, Saruman, Elrond, Denethor, and so on). It would be surprising, too, if Father Morgan’s efforts to quash Tolkien’s romance with Edith Bratt did not show up in his mythology. One need think only of the efforts of Lúthien’s father, Tinwelint/Thingol to prevent Beren from furthering his romance or of Elrond’s attempts to dissuade Arwen from choosing a mortal life with Aragorn to see how life may be re-expressed in art.

It is also startling that the legendarium rarely includes complete functional families, or, to put it another way, it is remarkable how often the legendarium includes fragmentary familial groupings at a time (the early to mid-twentieth century) when nuclear families were thought of as the norm. And Tolkien could not have looked to Edith for some model of normative family life, for she herself was an orphan and illegitimate as well. So, there are Galadriel and Celeborn without offspring; there is Elrond without a wife and with only a daughter with whom his relationship is contentious; there is Denethor mistreating his two sons, Boromir and Faramir, by putting unreasonable expectations on them both; and there is Frodo who has no living parents and so is adopted by Bilbo. And this list could be extended to include other Tolkien-created orphans, in one case outside the strict scope of the legendarium: Kullervo, Túrin, and Beren. Again, it is not surprising to see such narrative elements repeated, for Tolkien himself had no personal, experiential model on which he could base a family in his legendarium. He had almost no memories of his father because he had died when Tolkien was so young. His mother, Mabel, did not remarry, so when she died when Tolkien was twelve and his chosen guardian was a Catholic priest there could be no more mothers in his life.

It is also important to point out that in addition to Tolkien and Edith having no typical family life as they grew up, Tolkien’s mother was largely ostracized by both her own family and that of her dead husband once she decided to become a Catholic. In a fairy tale, perhaps, she would have been accepted back into the fold by both her family (the Suffields) and her ...