Tolkien

Raymond Edwards

• Publisher: Robert Hale Non Fiction
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780719831058
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

J.R.R. Tolkien arguably changed the sort of things we read and write more profoundly than any other twentieth-century writer. When The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien was in his early sixties; beneath the outwardly unremarkable life of an Oxford don, his imaginative life was richly nourished by his professional interests. Now in paperback, this is the first biography to deal fully with the wealth of Tolkien's posthumously published material. It sets his writing firmly in the context of his academic life, shows the great personal and professional difficulties he overcame to complete The Lord of the Rings, and charts his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to complete the great cycle of legends that appeared, after his death, as The Silmarillion. Despite the precipitous decline of Tolkien's academic discipline, philology, his imaginative achievement may claim to vindicate his academic career.

Part I – The Making of a Philologist

‘I’m a philologist,’ said Lowdham, ‘which means a misunderstood man.’¹

Chapter 1 – Early Years

I – Family

It may surprise some to learn that Tolkien, in many ways a quintessentially English writer, was born in South Africa.

Despite his surname, the German in his background was minimal; the family told stories of how their ancestors were originally Saxon nobility, given the soubriquet tollkühn or ‘foolhardy’ after heroism at the 1529 siege of Vienna, and driven to England by one invasion or other. Many middle-class families preserve similar aristocratic origin stories, which may contain smaller or larger elements of truth. Tolkien himself may have believed it, or allowed himself to entertain it on occasion; he repeated it to C.S. Lewis in 1939. Certainly there are Tolkiehns and Tolkiens in Lower Saxony and Hamburg today. It has however been suggested the surname comes, instead, from the village of Tolkynen (now Tołkiny) near Rastenburg in what is now Poland; and that derives not from tollkühn but from the extinct Old Prussian language, a (West) Baltic tongue akin to (East Baltic) Latvian and Lithuanian, in which tolkien means ‘broker’ or ‘translator’.² In later life, Tolkien himself was aware of the suggestion, and scorned it: Slavonic tolk, ‘interpreter, spokesman’, and its cognates were found in Low German dialects and in Dutch, but not in English, he declared; but this is rather to dodge the question, since the claim is presumably that his German surname came from this root, not that it had any sense as an English word.³

Whatever the now undiscoverable truth, the Tolkiens’ eponymous ancestor had come to England in the mid-eighteenth century, probably from Saxony, but seems to have retained no significant ties to his homeland, or none at least that were passed to his children. They soon became ‘intensely English’, and whilst keeping their foreign surname, the Tolkiens were solid Birmingham middle class; his mother’s family, the Suffields, were originally Worcestershire farming stock. The Tolkiens seem to have dropped their (presumed) ancestral Lutheranism, and are first recorded as Baptists, although (as was not unusual) some of them, particularly those with social position or aspirations, will have worshipped as, and considered themselves, Anglicans. The Suffields, on the other hand, seem to have been Methodist, although John Suffield, Tolkien’s maternal grandfather, had at some point become a Unitarian. This type of fluid religious identity, varying between nonconformity and the Established Church, was not unusual in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury England, where the Church of England still considered itself the exclusive religious body for the whole nation. In any case, although the precise details are now beyond recovery, it is clear that Tolkien came of sound Protestant background on both sides.

The Tolkiens had been involved in piano making and dealing in music for generations (legend claimed the original Tolkien immigrant had been, amongst other things, an accomplished harpsichordist). Tolkien’s grandfather, John Tolkien, had been a piano maker; his business had failed, and he turned to selling music. He had four children; his wife died, and he then remarried. Arthur, Tolkien’s father, was the eldest child of this second marriage. Arthur Tolkien had been working for Lloyds Bank in Birmingham for some years when, in 1888, aged thirty-one, he met Mabel Suffield and they became engaged. She was only eighteen, however, and her father (once a prosperous draper, now, after his business had failed, a commercial traveller for Jeyes Fluid) forbade her to marry for two years.

It has been argued that, in the late nineteenth century, Jeyes Fluid was a new and exciting product (it was given a Royal Warrant in 1896), and this may not have been the down-at-heel recourse we might suppose; although to most ears ‘commercial traveller’ is not a prestigious calling. At any rate, John Suffield’s fortunes seem to have recovered; by 1892, he also owned an iron foundry in Birmingham. He was similarly protective of his youngest daughter, (Emily) Jane. He had at least seven children, five of whom were daughters. Unitarian preacher, deft calligrapher, accomplished doggerel versifier, intrepid traveller and fearsomely bearded patriarch, he may easily stand as the model for the Old Took of The Hobbit, father of ‘three remarkable daughters’.

The following year, 1889, Arthur Tolkien sailed for South Africa, where he had got a job with the Bank of Africa in Cape Colony; the year after, he was made manager of their branch in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State. This gave significantly more responsibility, and better pay, than he could have hoped for at home. This made marriage possible; in March 1891, Mabel, who was now twenty-one, took ship for South Africa. On 16 April, she and Arthur were married in the Anglican cathedral in Cape Town. They lived in Bloemfontein, in a house attached to the bank where Arthur was manager.

The Orange Free State was not a British colony but an independent republic, founded and run by the Boers, settlers of originally Dutch extraction who were fiercely attached to their independence. Together with the neighbouring Transvaal, the Boers of the Orange Free State had defeated a British attempt at annexation a decade before (the First Boer War). Greatly expanded mining operations, however, had since brought many tens of thousands of mainly English-speaking immigrants, like the Tolkiens, into the two Boer republics; these immigrants, known in Afrikaans (the local Dutch-derived dialect) as uitlanders (‘foreigners’), were allowed no part in the political process or the governance of the country. The Afrikaner population was convinced, not unreasonably, that once in a majority, the uitlanders would, if granted civil rights, vote for incorporation alongside the British Cape Colony (which, indeed, had itself begun as a Dutch outpost before the English took over) in a confederation of British South African colonies. The existing Boer states were hidebound, oligarchical and stubbornly opposed to any further British encroachment, and in 1881 had fought a sharp and successful little war to resist it. The authorities in the neighbouring British territories (Cape Colony, Natal, Bechuanaland, the newly established Rhodesia) were understandably concerned at this situation, and made repeated and fruitless efforts to persuade the Boer republics to extend their franchise; there was also much concern at the often brutal and contemptuous attitude of the Boers towards the black population, which (it was claimed) lived in conditions little different from slavery. Arthur Tolkien’s wife Mabel was certainly shocked by the treatment of black servants, and was herself at pains to behave in a different and more humane manner. It is likely Arthur would have shared these sentiments. In later life, his son had a profound horror of apartheid and other forms of racial discrimination: this certainly derived from his mother’s early example.⁴ There was a growing and vocal lobby amongst English speakers across southern Africa for more energetic, which meant military, action. For the moment, however, there was uneasy peace. Matters in the Orange Free State were less tense than in the neighbouring Transvaal, however.

Still, although Bloemfontein was the capital of a Boer republic, Arthur Tolkien’s business would have been overwhelmingly amongst his fellow uitlanders; his bank, the Bank of Africa, was an Anglophone import from Cape Colony operating under special permission from the government, whilst their main competitor, the National Bank, was wholly Afrikaner. The Anglophone population of the Boer republics was both substantial and growing, and there would have been no sense of isolation; rather, the expatriate life, with its usual appurtenances of dinner parties, drinks parties, cricket and (for those so inclined) game shooting, was much as it was in dozens of other places across the Empire.

There, in Bloemfontein, on 3 January 1892, their first child was born, a couple of weeks early. He was christened John Ronald Reuel in the Anglican cathedral in Bloemfontein.

John and Reuel were Tolkien family names;⁵ Ronald, Tolkien later declared, because his mother had been convinced she was carrying a girl and had settled on Rosalind as a name, for which Ronald was the first male analogue she could come up with. Compare the character Alboin Errol in Tolkien’s unfinished novel The Lost Road, whose father tells him ‘mother had meant to call you Rosamund, only you turned up a boy’;⁶ in the Lombardic history of Paul the Deacon, Rosamund is wife to the Lombardic king Alboin. Their subsequent history is a grim one. Alboin Errol is one of several characters in Tolkien’s unpublished fiction who stands, or begins at least, as a close historical analogue to its author.

His family called him Ronald; two years later, his brother Hilary was born. Arthur Tolkien enjoyed the African climate; his wife did not, and was moreover concerned that Ronald was suffering from the persistent heat. In April 1895, accordingly, after the end of the summer season (which runs from November until April) she took both boys home to England for an extended leave.

In later life, Tolkien cherished his few memories of South Africa; the first Christmas he remembered, he said, was ‘a blazing hot day’, the Christmas tree a ‘drooping eucalyptus’.⁷ Arthur stayed in South Africa; he could not afford to leave his job for any amount of time, but hoped to come and join them before long. That November, he fell ill with rheumatic fever, and could not face the rigours of a voyage and the English winter. Mabel and the boys spent Christmas with her family. In January, after a short recovery, Arthur fell ill again; Mabel decided she must return to South Africa to look after him. Before she could make arrangements, however, Arthur suddenly deteriorated. On 14 February 1896, Mabel received a telegram saying he had had a haemorrhage and she should expect the worst; the next day, he died. Arthur Tolkien was only thirty-nine. Mabel Tolkien was twenty-six; her sons, four and two.

Ronald had, or spoke of, few memories of his father; he remembered him painting his name on a cabin trunk which accompanied his wife and children on their last voyage to England, and which Ronald kept all his life. For the rest, there are a couple of fugitive hints in his writings, nothing more.

Many years later, he began a poem called The Fall of Arthur, his only essay in ‘the Matter of Britain’; it is unfinished and has only recently been published. Unfortunately the action of the poem does not extend as far as Arthur’s death, so Freudians will need to be more than usually creative to make anything of this. Unfinished works are (as we shall see) not uncommon in Tolkien’s life as a writer. Later still, ‘John Arthurson’ is one of several Tolkien-analogues in his unfinished novel The Notion Club Papers.

Had Mabel not returned to England, she and her boys would have likely been caught up in the accelerating political crisis that finally, in 1899, led to the Boer republics declaring war on Britain. As it was, she found herself a young widow, in Birmingham, with a minimal income from her late husband’s estate and two small boys to raise.

They lodged in a semi-detached cottage in the small village of Sarehole, then a mile or so outside Birmingham. It is now a suburb of the city, but in 1896 was a real country village with a watermill, a river and strong thickets of trees.

Mabel had always been an active churchgoer; she became involved, now, in a ‘high’ Anglo-Catholic parish. This led her to Catholicism; in 1900, along with her sister, she became a Catholic, and was summarily disinherited by her family.

Her sister had also just returned from South Africa with two small boys; her husband, like Arthur Tolkien, stayed behind. Unlike Arthur, he survived to make the journey to England, and on his arrival forbade his wife to enter a Catholic church again. She instead took up with spiritualism.

II – Orphaned and educated

Mabel was an intelligent and highly literate woman; rather than send her boys to school, she taught them herself (according to her granddaughter Priscilla, Mabel Tolkien had been a governess before her marriage). This also helped her financially; she had only a small income from some shares left by Arthur. As well as conventional subjects, she taught them botany, the elements of drawing (both of which were interests that stayed with Ronald throughout his life), and gave them a grounding in languages: French, German and Latin. From the first, it was clear that Ronald had a strong talent in this area.

He and two of his Incledon cousins, like many children, made up a code language, christened ‘animalic’, in which names of animals stood in for common nouns and verbs; later, when they had their first taste of consciously foreign languages (French and Latin), they (or at least Tolkien and the younger of the two cousins) substituted a grammatically more complex jargon called Nevbosh, the ‘new nonsense’.⁸ Tolkien himself did not think this making of invented languages an unusual activity; it was his mature opinion that many or most children indulged in something similar, but were educated or corrected out of it. He, for some reason, never quite was.

He was a precocious reader, but mostly, at this stage, of botany and natural history rather than imaginative literature; he was, however, given most or all of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (or those at least that had then been published) and (probably) Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse. The Red Fairy Book of 1890 was the most momentous; it concludes with a retelling of the tale of Sigurd the Völsung and the dragon Fáfnir, heavily abridged by Lang from William Morris’s translation of the Norse Völsunga Saga. Tolkien later declared this was his ‘favourite without rival’.⁹ We may suppose that at some point, perhaps years later, Tolkien would have read the Morris translation in full. Almost the most striking thing about that is its translator’s introduction; Morris confesses himself puzzled no one has previously put it into English:

For this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks – to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been – a story too – then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.

Tolkien found in Lang’s Sigurd a number of resonant themes and images that clearly lodged deep in his imagination: the shards of an ancestral sword, famous in its day, whose reforging opens the way to a hero’s fate; lovers ruined by englamoured forgetfulness; cunning avaricious dwarves, steeped in skill and crooked with gold-lust; and the dragon itself, bestial, devious in speech, enwreathed in poison-clouds, greedy of gems. The story was finely illustrated by the artist Lancelot Speed, and Tolkien’s own dragon-pictures, when they came to be drawn, are closely reminiscent of Speed’s Fáfnir.

As Mark Atherton has noticed, the Red Fairy Book also includes a version of a Norwegian story, ‘The Master Thief’, where a young man falls in with brigands and discovers a remarkable talent for thievery.¹⁰ Both this theme, and a dragon, were to figure large in the first story that Tolkien himself published; but that was decades in the future. To look even further forward, the Green Fairy Book of 1892 also contains ‘The Enchanted Ring’, in which a young man is given a ring that confers both invisibility and supreme power, if only it is not used for ill; overborne by the temptation, he renounces the ring.¹¹

In 1900, Ronald was sent to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, one of the ancient grammar schools that were the backbone of English education, and probably the best school in the area. It was also where his father had been educated. The fees were paid by a Tolkien uncle. The school was founded in 1552, like many grammar schools from the proceeds of suppressed religious houses; it was at that time based in an impressive neo-Gothic building on New Street, designed by Charles Barry (later the architect of the reb...