J. R. R. Tolkien

The Making of a Legend

Colin Duriez

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780745957098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Long before the successful The Lord of the Rings films, J.R.R. Tolkien's creations, imagination, and characters had captured the attention of millions of readers. But who was the man who dreamt up the intricate languages and perfectly crafted world of Middle-earth?

Tolkien had a difficult life, for many years: orphaned and poor, his guardian forbad him to communicate with the woman he had fallen in love with, and he went through the horrors of the First World War. An intensely private and brilliant scholar, he spent over fifty years working on the languages, history, peoples and geography of Middle-earth, with a consistent mythology and body of legends inspired by a formidable knowledge of early northern European history and culture. J.R.R. Tolkien became a legend by creating an imaginary world that has enthralled and delighted generations. This delightful and accessible biography brings him to life. Colin Duriez has appeared as a commentator on DVDs of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, and BBC television's The Worlds of Fantasy. He is also the author of The Inklings Handbook (with the late David Porter), J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Story of Their Friendship, and Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, and has contributed to definitive reference works, The Tolkien Encyclopedia and a number of other tomes relating to Tolkien.

1

“I am in fact a Hobbit…”

There was turmoil in the Tolkien household. Baby Ronald had disappeared. It was usual for the infant to be resting in the cool of the house throughout the middle hours of the day. There were grounds for many fears, not least of prowling beasts such as jackals or wolves who might wander into the town from the dust of the desolate expanse of grassland that opened nearby beyond the houses.

The Tolkiens treated their two black servants, a maid and a young man called Izaak, fairly. Mabel Tolkien disliked many settlers’ attitudes to the natives in the Orange Free State, and though considerably upset, seems to have accepted Izaak’s simple explanation that he had carried off Ronald to his village to proudly demonstrate a white baby. Later, when he had his own son, Izaak named him, in appreciation of the Tolkiens, “Izaak Mr Tolkien Victor” – “Victor” added to honour Queen Victoria.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, to give the infant his full name,¹ had been born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, southern Africa, the first son of English citizens Arthur Reuel and Mabel Tolkien. The parents were from Birmingham, in the Midlands, and Mabel Suffield, as she then was, had sailed to Cape Town to marry Arthur, a banker who had preceded her to Africa to seek better prospects in the mineral-rich country. The Bank of Africa had promoted him to be their manager in Bloemfontein, at the heart of the Orange Free State, around 700 miles from Cape Town; discoveries of gold and diamonds had expanded the banking business there. Mabel Suffield left England in March 1891. The wedding ceremony took place the following month in Cape Town Anglican Cathedral.

In Bloemfontein the family lived “over the bank in Maitland Street: beyond were the dusty, treeless plains of the veldt”. Mabel described her firstborn in a letter home to her mother-in-law: “Baby does look such a fairy when he’s very much dressed-up in white frills and white shoes. When he’s very much undressed I think he looks more of an elf still.” That baby would grow to become a brilliant scholar and storyteller who, decades later, reintroduced marvellous and formidable Elves of European folklore and legend to new generations of rapt readers. They were far from the saccharine, dainty fairies of his Victorian childhood. However, Mabel never was to know of her son’s global celebrity.

The scare over baby Ronald’s disappearance was only one of Mabel’s worries about her infant, whom she saw as delicate. There was an occasion, of which Ronald carried dim memories in later life, when as a toddler he ran through long, dry grass in their large garden and disturbed a tarantula spider (they can be the size of a man’s hand), which bit its venom into him. Crying, he ran into the house, where his nurse calmly sucked out the poison. Ronald remembered running and crying, but nothing of the huge spider. It may however have been the seed of many references to giant spiders in his stories, not least Ungoliant, the ancient creature who gobbled up the light of the world in the earliest age of Middle-earth, and of course her descendant Shelob, whom the Hobbits Frodo and Sam encountered on their perilous way into the dark land of Mordor, the realm of the Dark Lord, Sauron.

Even deeper than these dangers to Ronald, however, was the worry of the child’s health in the oppressive heat of much of the year, and from the dust swept from the windy veldt. As Mabel’s concern deepened, she became increasingly anxious about Arthur’s lack of interest in returning to England at some stage. To her it was obvious that he was reluctant even to have a break in England, though leave was due to him. Unlike Mabel, Arthur was in his element in Africa as he faced the tough challenges of building his bank’s client base in the harsh environment of the Boer heartland, with its general antipathy to the British. His wife felt fear when she read what Arthur had written to his father in Birmingham one day: “I think I shall do well in this country and do not think I should settle down well in England again for a permanency.” Then Mabel found herself also having to put off thoughts of a visit home: she was pregnant with their second son, Hilary, born 17 February 1894.

Hilary turned out to be sturdier than his older brother, who became increasingly sickly in that harsh climate. It became evident to the couple that the relentless heat was damaging Ronald’s health. Mabel was desperate. In November of 1894, she took baby Hilary and Ronald to the cooler air of the coast, hundreds of miles away near Cape Town. Years later Ronald could summon up dim memories of the endless train journey and a broad sandy shore. In a BBC radio interview he once said: “I can remember bathing in the Indian Ocean when I was not quite two.”² Upon the return of Mabel and the children to Bloemfontein later that month, Arthur made arrangements for their journey to England. He would follow later, he said. Ronald’s last memory of his father was a vivid image of him painting “A.R. Tolkien” on their cabin trunk as Mabel and the boys prepared to leave – a trunk Ronald kept and treasured in later years. In one unfinished story written almost half a century later, “The Notion Club Papers”, he gave himself the fictional name of “John Arthurson”.

While Arthur remained, absorbed in his work responsibilities, Mabel and the children sailed for England at the beginning of April 1895. The three, at first, stayed with Mabel’s parents and one of her sisters, Jane, in their small family house in Ashfield Road, King’s Heath, Birmingham. Ronald was confused by the change and sometimes expected to see the verandah of his home in Bloemfontein protruding from the Suffield home. Many years later he recalled: “I can still remember going down the road in Birmingham and wondering what had happened to the big gallery, what happened to the balcony.” Also novel and strange was seeing for the first time a real Christmas tree after the “barren, arid heat”.

During this visit, when the three were about to return to southern Africa, Arthur was taken ill with rheumatic fever and then unexpectedly died after severe haemorrhaging. He was only thirty-nine. A few days after his death on 15 February 1896, he was buried in the Anglican graveyard in Bloemfontein. His passing closed the chapter of the Tolkiens’ life in southern Africa. It meant however that they were not caught up in the upheaval of the Boer War that happened relatively soon after (1899–1902).

Mabel was now a single parent, with very limited means. Soon the three moved to Sarehole, in the more healthy countryside. Their new home, 5 Gracewell, was a smart and good-sized semi-detached cottage almost opposite the pond side of Sarehole Mill, then about a mile south of the city of Birmingham. Though so near to the metropolis, they were, in fact, in the very heart of rural Worcestershire. With only horses and carts, it was “long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green” (to use words from Tolkien’s The Hobbit describing the Shire in Middle-earth). Mabel, a highly talented and resourceful woman, educated her boys until they entered formal schooling. Among other things, Mabel taught Ronald to read, and later introduced him to calligraphy, drawing, Latin, French, piano (unsuccessfully), and botany.

The quiet Worcestershire village (which later became part of Warwickshire through boundary changes) was soon, for Ronald, his heart-home, associated with memories of the mother he was so soon to lose: “the Shire is very like the kind of world in which I first became aware of things.… If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus and if you’re normally troubled by heat and sand – then… just at the age when imagination is opening out, suddenly [to] find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midlands English countryside, based on good water stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers and so on, and of course rustic people about.”³ The “rustic” local children derided the Tolkien boy’s long hair (the custom for middle-class little boys).

Sarehole Mill made a particular impression on Ronald’s imagination: “There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill.”⁴ Sarehole Mill was an old brick mill with a tall chimney. Though it was powered by a steam engine, a stream still ran under its great wheel. The mill, with its frightening miller’s son, made a deep impression on Ronald’s and also Hilary’s imaginations.

Ronald and his younger brother nicknamed the terrifying miller’s son “the White Ogre”. Hilary remembered a farmer, nicknamed “the Black Ogre”, who terrorized the local children. (He once chased Ronald for picking mushrooms.) In a letter much later Tolkien speaks of the old miller and his son bringing terror and wonder to him as a little child. In another letter he wrote of living his early years “in ‘the Shire’ in a pre-mechanical age”. He added that he was a Hobbit in fact, though not in size. Like Hobbits he relished gardens, trees, and farmlands that were not mechanized. He too smoked a pipe and liked his food plain. In the drab mid twentieth century when the popularity of his stories exploded, he dared to wear ornamental waistcoats. He was fond of mushrooms fresh from the field and liked expressing his very basic sense of humour, which some found tiresome. He also recorded that as an adult, he went to bed late and, if he could, got up late. Like Hobbits, he travelled little. In The Lord of the Rings he wrote of a mill in Hobbiton, located on the Water, which was torn down and replaced by a brick building that polluted both the air and water. There is a resemblance between the view up the rural lane in which the family lived in Sarehole, with the Mill to the right, and a detailed illustration Tolkien made of Hobbiton for The Hobbit, the forerunner to his The Lord of the Rings.

Sarehole Mill survived the brick tsunami of Birmingham’s urban spread and is now preserved as a visitor’s centre. Visitors are able to catch a glimpse of Tolkien’s childhood world and an important historical monument of the industrial revolution that changed the world. The large, deep pond that Ronald and Hilary knew so well is there, and the mill buildings, with their large chimney, are still recognizable from those lost days. Nearby, in recognition of Tolkien, is the Shire Country Park, and Moseley Bog, possibly inspiration for the Old Forest on the edge of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings.

It may have been around this time in Sarehole when another important feature of Ronald’s teeming imagination was born: his recurring dream of a great flood, a green wave surging across the lands. Eventually, after a long gestation, this part of his memory was incorporated into the same imagined world in which the Shire was a part – Middle-earth. The dream became Tolkien’s fictional account of the destruction of Númenor, his own version of the ancient story of the drowned land of Atlantis.

In 1900, five years after leaving Africa, Ronald entered King Edward’s School, Birmingham’s top grammar school, then located near New Street Station, in the city centre. His fees were paid by an uncle. Its buildings (now demolished) bore the mark of its architect, Sir Charles Barry, who also designed the current Houses of Parliament in London. At this time Mabel Tolkien, along with her sister May, was received into the Roman Catholic Church, despite painful opposition from her Unitarian father and Tolkien in-laws, who were Baptist. They cut off financial support to the single mother, resulting in a deepening poverty. Mother and sons moved from their rural setting to just inside the city, to Moseley, to be somewhat nearer to the Birmingham Oratory in Edgbaston. Founded by Cardinal Newman in the 1850s, this had become Mabel’s spiritual home after trying other more local Roman Catholic churches. The visionary John Henry Newman (1801–90) had done much to revitalize Roman Catholicism, bringing his Oxford learning, imagination, and independence into the life of that Church. Moseley was on the tram route to the city centre, making it easier for Ronald to commute to school.

The next year they had to move again, to a nearby terrace close by King’s Heath station. Behind their new home was a railway embankment, full of wild flowers and grasses (another love of Ronald’s). By now he was about nine years of age, and his brother, Hilary, around seven. They were becoming used to the squeal of coal wagons being shunted in the coal yard a short way up the railway tracks. Trains came from the mining valleys of South Wales over a hundred miles away, dragging coal wagons for Birmingham’s thriving industries. Ronald noticed the names on the sides of the wagons: Welsh places like Blaen-Rhondda, Maerdy, Nantyglo, and Tredegar.

In the BBC interview in 1971, mentioned earlier, Tolkien revealed something of the significance of this encounter with Welsh place names. In many ways, this boyhood experience marks the early seeds of the tales of his invented world of Middle-earth, a world of Hobbits, Elves, and darker beings like goblins and dragons. In that interview Tolkien explained his fascination: “Welsh has always attracted me by its style and sound more than any other; even though I first only saw it on coal trucks, I always wanted to know what it was about.” He went on to say that his stories almost always began with a name. “Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.” He says that of modern languages, Welsh, and later Finnish, had been the greatest inspiration for his writing, including the creation of The Lord of the Rings. Welsh, in fact, was to inspire one of the two main branches of the languages of Elves that he created and, as a result, many of the names in his invented world of Middle-earth, such as Arwen the Elven Queen, the River Anduin, the Rohirrim people and Gwaihir the giant eagle.

Later the Tolkien family moved to a plain house in Oliver Road, which was almost a slum (now demolished as part of inner-city improvements). It was in the generally prosperous Edgbaston district, a short walk from the Birmingham Oratory and close by a spacious reservoir. For a time the Tolkien brothers were taken out of King Edward’s School by Mabel and enrolled at the Oratory’s own school, St Philip’s, where fees were much lower. In 1903 however Ronald gained a scholarship for King Edward’s, just two miles away from his Edgbaston home, and resumed study there in the autumn. Ronald took his first communion at Christmas that year, marking his fervent devotion to his mother’s Roman Catholic faith.

During the Christmas holidays that year, Mabel wrote to her mother-in-law, Mary Jane Tolkien, enclosing some drawings by Ronald and Hilary:

You said you like one of the boys’ drawings better than anything bought with their money so they’ve done these for you. Ronald has really done his [drawing] splendidly this year – he has just been having quite an exhibition in Father Francis’ room – he has worked hard since he broke up [from school] on December 16^th, and so have I to find fresh subjects: – I haven’t been out for almost a month – not even to The Oratory! – but the nasty wet muggy weather is making me better and since Ronald broke up I have been able to rest in the mornings. I keep having whole weeks of utter sleeplessness, which added to the internal cold and sickness have made it almost impossible to go on.

I found a postal order for 2/6 which you sent the boys some time ago – a year at least – which has been mislaid. They’ve been in town all afternoon spending this and a little bit more on things they wanted to give. – They’ve done all my Xmas shopping – Ronald can match silk lining or any art shade like a true “Parisian Modiste”. Is it his Artist or Draper ancestry coming out? – He is going along at a great rate at school – he knows far more Greek than I do Latin – he says he is going to do German with me these holidays – though at present I feel more like Bed.

One of the clergy, a young, merry one, is teaching Ronald to play chess – he says he has read too much, everything fit for a boy under fifteen, and he doesn’t know any single classical thing to recommend him.⁵

Through their contact with St Philip’s School Mabel and her sons had met Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who was steeped in Cardinal Newman’s ideals of education. Francis Morgan was a parish priest attached to the Oratory, and he had served under Newman. Father Francis provided friendship, counsel, and money for the fatherless family. With the boys often ill and the mother developing diabetes, he enabled them to lodge in a pretty Oratory cottage in 1904. Woodside Cottage⁶ was close by the Oratory’s rural retreat in nearby Rednal village, deep in the Worcestershire countryside and on the Lickey Hills. The rural atmosphere there was like that of Sarehole and delighted the three. Despite the setting, Mabel continued to decline, forcing Father Francis to seek some respite for her from caring for her sons. Ronald spent the summer term in Hove, on the south coast, with his aunt Jane Neave and her husband Edwin, while Hilary stayed with his Suffield grandparents.

After the boys returned, Mabel reported to her mother-in-law: “Boys look ridiculously well compared to the weak white ghosts that met me on train 4 weeks ago!!! Hilary has got tweed suit and his first Etons today! and looks immense. – We’ve had perfect weather. Boys will write first wet day but what with Bilberry-gathering – Tea in Hay – Kite-flying with Fr Francis – sketching – Tree Climbing – they’ve never enjoyed a holiday so much.”⁷

While Mabel continued to be confined, Ronald, when school was back after the summer holiday, would catch a train to school, walking more than a mile to the station. He started off early, and returned late, with Hilary sometimes mee...