A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien

Stuart D. Lee, Stuart D. Lee

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118517482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is a complete resource for scholars and students of Tolkien, as well as avid fans, with coverage of his life, work, dominant themes, influences, and the critical reaction to his writing.

• An in-depth examination of Tolkien's entire work by a cadre of top scholars
• Provides up-to-date discussion and analysis of Tolkien's scholarly and literary works, including his latest posthumous book, The Fall of Arthur, as well as addressing contemporary adaptations, including the new Hobbit films
• Investigates various themes across his body of work, such as mythmaking, medieval languages, nature, war, religion, and the defeat of evil
• Discusses the impact of his work on art, film, music, gaming, and subsequent generations of fantasy writers

Part I
Life

1
A Brief Biography

John Garth

Famous photographs have frozen J. R. R. Tolkien in his seventies. This is ironic: the photographers only came calling when fame was actively distracting him from writing. He wrote The Hobbit during his forties and most of The Lord of the Rings in his fifties; his most productive periods were between 23 and 58. Even the idea of the family man and professor, distilling his medievalist expertise into fiction, gives only half the picture. His grand creative project, the Middle-earth legendarium, was begun in his early twenties, during formative years marked by shocks and griefs, and by the violent advent of the modern age.¹

The painful collisions between his faith and the fragility of life were highly productive. So was the encounter between his medievalism and the modern age, the violent birth throes of which engulfed his generation. Middle-earth emerged during World War I, which exposed Tolkien to almost unspeakable horror and killed most of his friends. No wonder he then pursued a life of calm, solid security. When a further World War threatened everything Tolkien held dear, it powered and colored The Lord of the Rings, partly by reawakening memories of the earlier war.

Ancestry and Childhood: 1892–1904

Imaginative and conflicting family legends emerged to explain why Tolkien's German paternal ancestors left Saxony in the mid-eighteenth century; and to the origins of the surname Tollkühn, meaning “foolhardy.” An ancestor was said to have fought the Turks at the Siege of Vienna and captured the Sultan's standard. Anyway, in nineteenth-century London and then Birmingham the family trade had been music: teaching, making pianos, or selling sheet music. However, Arthur Reuel Tolkien (b. 1857) left Birmingham in 1889 to work for the Bank of Africa; in 1890 he became branch manager in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic. His Birmingham fiancée Mabel Suffield (b. 1870) married him in Cape Town in April 1891.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, where he was baptized in the Anglican cathedral (for a detailed chronology of his life, see Scull and Hammond 2006). He became known to friends as Ronald, John Ronald, JRRT, Tollers, or just Tolkien. In 1894 a brother was born, Hilary Arthur Reuel (d. 1976). But the stovetop climate did not suit Ronald, so in 1895 Mabel took the boys to visit her parents in King's Heath near Birmingham. That autumn Arthur contracted rheumatic fever and in February 1896 he died, so the single-parent family stayed in England.

Even this early on, Middle-earth was perhaps brewing: giant spiders engendered by the tarantula bite he suffered in Bloemfontein, the recurrent sea awe awakened by seeing the Indian Ocean while not yet two years old, and the pivotal voyages of Eärendil and others prefigured by his own voyage to England. The Shire was shaped by his “particular love of central Midlands English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers”² – and especially by Sarehole, a village outside Birmingham where Mabel and the boys moved in summer 1896. In stories told to Hilary, Ronald made ogres out of the big people in their little world – the miller's son and the local farmer (see Hilary Tolkien 2009). Ronald came to identify closely with his mother's Suffield family and their roots in the West Midlands – so closely that he even felt he had inherited an aptitude for the English dialect of the region, from the Old English of Mercia to the language of the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain poet (see chs. 15 and 16).

Living frugally and supplemented by aid from relatives, Mabel taught the boys at home, introducing Ronald to drawing, calligraphy, botany, French, and Latin. She fueled his imagination with children's literature including George MacDonald, as well as mythology and Arthuriana. He enjoyed fairy-stories (notably the Andrew Lang fairy books) but they were not his favorites. He particularly “desired dragons” but when he wrote about “a green great dragon” at the age of seven, and was told “green great” was bad English, it led to an interest in language which distracted him for years from further attempts at fiction (Carpenter 1977, 30–31; Letters 221).

School began in fits and starts. Ronald enrolled in September 1900 at King Edward's, and they moved into Birmingham to be nearer the school. Here, behind the new house in King’s Heath, he observed names on coal trucks which kindled his love for Welsh. But after Mabel embraced Catholicism and instructed the boys in the faith, most of the family distanced themselves, including the uncle who had been paying Ronald's school fees. In 1902 the boys started at St Philip's Grammar School, attached to the Catholic Oratory; but Ronald quickly outstripped his peers and Mabel resumed teaching the boys at home. By the age of ten Ronald was learning Greek, reading Chaucer, and imbibing Mabel's interest in etymology. A scholarship enabled him to return to King Edward's in spring 1903.

The following year Mabel fell ill from diabetes and they moved to Rednal in rural Worcestershire so she could convalesce. When she died in November 1904, Ronald felt she had martyred herself to keep her sons in the faith. He remembered “vainly waving a hand at the sky saying ‘it is so empty and cold’ ” (Letters 416). Yet he remained a lifelong Catholic, and later used Middle-earth to explore the consolations of mortality.

Youth: 1904–1911

The Oratory's Father Francis Morgan (1857–1935), who had arranged and subsidized the cottage, now became the boys' legal guardian. A strict but flamboyant and kind man, he spent his own money supplementing the returns from Mabel's invested capital to provide for Ronald and Hilary. He moved them into a rented room in the Edgbaston home of their mother's sister Beatrice. They spent much time at the Oratory and Father Francis took them for holidays at Lyme Regis, where Ronald found a fossilized jawbone and pretended it was a dragon's.

At King Edward's Tolkien started German; but the headmaster and classics tutor Robert Cary Gilson also encouraged him to look at the history of Latin and Greek, while another teacher lent him an Anglo-Saxon primer, and in 1908 he discovered Joseph Wright's grammar of Gothic. And as if the world did not hold enough languages to learn, he started inventing new ones. Nevbosh or “new nonsense” was a hodgepodge of mostly classical words.³ In due course he began devising codes and learning the artificial language Esperanto, creating the Spanish-influenced Naffarin, and supplementing the slim vocabulary of long-dead Gothic by reconstructing lost words from cognates in its kindred Germanic languages.

Translating classical verse also awoke a taste for poetry: it was Homer that first gave him “the sensation of literary pleasure” (Letters 172). He acquired a taste for the Catholic mystic poet Francis Thompson and the verse and prose romances of medieval revivalist William Morris. By now he was reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English, Beowulf in Old English, and the story of Sigurd in Old Norse.

The boys were unhappy with Aunt Beatrice so in early 1908 Father Francis moved them to nearby Duchess Road. It was a fateful move. Here they befriended a fellow lodger and orphan, Edith Mary Bratt (b. 1889), who hoped to be a piano teacher; she and Ronald fell in love, reckless of differences. She was three years older than him, and an Anglican. By autumn 1909, when Father Francis got wind of the secret romance and forbade it, Ronald had neglected his studies, and in December he failed the Oxford University entrance exam. In January 1910 he was moved with Hilary to new Edgbaston lodgings and banned from all contact with Edith. She quickly moved to Cheltenham to stay with family friends.

The loss of his mother and the forced break with Edith led to periodic introspection and despair which clashed with Ronald's natural energy and geniality. It eventually proved a fertile brew. He turned in on himself, writing an unhappy diary but also a smattering of poetry that shows for the first time some interest in Faërie – perhaps due to seeing J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan in April 1910. Another building block of Middle-earth fell into place during the next school year – his last – when he discovered W. H. Kirby's translation of the Kalevala, Finland's mythological verse cycle (see ch. 18). But Ronald was not instantly turned into a mythmaker. His first published verse, “The Battle of the Eastern Field” (King Edward's School Chronicle, March 1911), is not as epic as it sounds: it is a parody of epic, about a rugby match. Rugby proved important, nevertheless. It was on the school rugby pitch that he befriended Christopher Luke Wiseman (1893–1987) and Vincent Trought (b. 1893). Th...