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J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth
Understanding Middle-earth
By Bradley J. Birzer ISI Books
Copyright © 2009 ISI Books
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4891-3
CHAPTER 1
The Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien
When Denis and Charlotte Plimmer interviewed J. R. R. Tolkien in 1968, they met with him in his garage-turned-study. "Not that the garage itself is any cave of wonders," the Plimmers admitted. "Jammed between the Professor's own house and the one next door, in an undistinguished Oxford suburb, it would be no more than a banal little room, filled with files and a clutter of garden chairs, if it were not for the man." A normal man in a normal world, but with something profoundly and almost indescribably different. For the Plimmers, Tolkien's very being transformed the drab office into something and somewhere else. As he did with his family, his classroom, and his fiction, Tolkien turned his normal, middle-class setting into the enchanted world of Middle-earth. Those who met Tolkien often noted that graces seemed to follow and flow from him, lifting up the lives of all those they touched. That same grace reached his readers, as raw numbers alone demonstrate. By one estimate, The Lord of the Rings has sold over 150 million copies since its publication in the mid-1950s. More than any other author of the twentieth century, Tolkien resuscitated the notion that the fantastic may tell us more about reality than do scientific facts. When the army asked Michael Tolkien to list his father's profession, it should surprise no one that he answered "wizard."
John Ronald Reuel was born to Mabel and Arthur Tolkien in Bloem-fontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892. When the climate caused Ronald to become ill in 1895, his mother moved him and his brother Hilary back to England. A year later, his father died. With aid from her family, Mabel raised the two children as a single parent. When she joined the Roman Catholic Church in June 1900, her family withdrew its financial support, leaving Mabel to fend for herself. Four years later, in November 1904, Mabel died of a form of diabetes, leaving Ronald and Hilary in the care of Father Francis Morgan, a Roman Catholic priest at the Birmingham Oratory, which had originally been founded by John Henry Newman.
In 1908, Tolkien met his future wife, Edith Bratt. Father Morgan forbade Tolkien's relationship with Edith, but the two became engaged when the priest's legal status as guardian ended when Tolkien turned twenty-one in 1913. With the strong encouragement of Tolkien, Edith joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1914, and the two married on March 22, 1916. They would have four children: John (b. 1917); Michael (b. 1920); Christopher (b. 1924); and Priscilla (b. 1929).
In 1915, after taking his degree from Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien joined the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, one of the most decorated English regiments of World War I. A year later, he saw battle at the Somme, one of the bloodiest of the war. On the first day alone, Germans slaughtered over 20,000 French and British soldiers. "One didn't expect to survive, you know. Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute," Tolkien told an interviewer nearly sixty years after the war. "Parting from my wife then—we were only just married— it was like a death." After several months on the front lines, Tolkien contracted what was generally referred to as "trench fever" and returned permanently to England. Though he spent less than a year in the war, it affected him deeply. Tolkien had lost several of his closest friends, and their loss, he believed, gave him an even greater duty to carry on their jointly conceived project, which was to do God's will in the world. It was also during the war that Tolkien began to combine his conception of faerie—i.e., fairyland, that realm of magical beauty and charm that for Tolkien served as an analogue for a sacramental understanding of the world—with the urgent need for new myths to reinvigorate the twentieth century. "The war made me poignantly aware of the beauty of the world I remember," Tolkien said in 1968. "I remember miles and miles of seething, tortured earth, perhaps best described in the chapters about the approaches to Mordor. It was a searing experience."
Upon returning to civilian life, Tolkien first took a job on the Oxford English Dictionary, where he took great pride in his work. Two years later, in 1920, he accepted his first teaching position at Leeds University. Though Leeds awarded him the prestigious title of "Professor of English Language" in 1924, Tolkien accepted an even more eminent position as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University in 1925. His academic sub-speciality was the literature and language of Mercian, an Anglo-Saxon dialect. He remained at Oxford for the rest of his academic career. The only significant change in his position there came in 1945, when he was named Merton Professor of English Language. In 1959, Oxford awarded him emeritus status.
Most of his students thought Tolkien a mumbling lecturer. "The first professor to harrow me with the syntax and morphology of Old English had a speech impediment," Guy Davenport wrote in reference to Tolkien in 1979, and "wandered in his remarks." Tolkien had mumbled for a long time, and it had often caused him problems. As an interviewer from the American Library Association told him in 1957, "I do appreciate your coming up from Oxford so that I might record you Professor Tolkien, but I can't understand a word you say." In typically self-deprecating fashion, Tolkien responded, "A friend of mine tells me that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it." When invited to give a guest lecture at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Tolkien responded, "I should not, of course, object to lecturing several times. I am quite hardened by it, and even enjoy it—more than my audience." Students reported that he spoke too quickly, hurrying through parts Tolkien himself found boring. Lewis, Tolkien's closest friend, could be blunt when describing Tolkien's speaking abilities.
He is scholarly, and he can be brilliant though perhaps rather recondite for most undergraduates. But unfortunately you may not be able to hear what he says. He is a ba lecturer d. All the same I advise you to go. If you do, arrive early, sit near the front and pay particular attention to the extempore remarks and comments he often makes. These are usually the best things in the lecture. In fact one could call him an inspired speaker of footnotes.
As Lewis conceded, though, if Tolkien often mumbled, moments of brilliance and clarity revealed themselves equally often, especially when he recited poetry. "I remember one [lecture I] attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien," poet W. H. Auden wrote. "I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound." A student in a 1926 class was equally enthralled with Tolkien's reading of Beowulf: "He came in lightly and gracefully, I always remember that, his gown flowing, his fair hair shining, and he read Beowulf aloud. We did not know the language he was reading, yet the sound of Tolkien made sense of the unknown tongue and the terrors and the dangers that he recounted—how I do not know—made our hair stand on end. He read like no one else I have ever heard."
Students most remembered Tolkien's kindness and his endless efforts to make them learn. He always approached his subject with "appealing jollity." Anthony Curtis contrasted Tolkien and Lewis's teaching styles:
At the end of the hour with Lewis I always felt a complete ignoramus; no doubt an accurate impression but also a rather painful one; and if you did venture to challenge one of his theories the ground was cut away from beneath your feet with lightning speed. It was a fool's mate in three moves with Lewis smiling at you from the other side of the board in unmalicious glee at his victory. By contrast Tolkien was the soul of affability. He did all the talking, but he made you feel you were his intellectual equal. Yet his views beneath the deep paternal charm were passionately held.
Other students compared Tolkien to his medieval counterparts. "With Tolkien you were in the meadhall in which he was the bard and we were the drinking, listening guests," detective writer Michael Innes said. Oxford professors rarely received standing ovations, but Tolkien frequently did, despite his speech impediments. Another student, now a famous lexicographer, remembered, "He made acute observations. I followed them all up. He beamed when I made some discoveries."
Tolkien's habit of treating his students as his equals was a trait that socially conscious Oxford students must have found appealing. Female students especially appreciated Tolkien, since he treated them just as he did the men. Indeed, while he certainly had his angry moments, Tolkien seems to have treated nearly everyone well. John Lawlor wrote that his "first and abiding impression [of Tolkien] was of immediate kindness." Walter Hooper labeled Tolkien a "deeply sympathetic man." "I resemble a hobbit," Tolkien wrote George Sayer, "at any rate in being moderately and cheerfully domesticated." His children have said similar things. Michael wrote that his father always talked to, rather than at, him. "I have simply looked upon my father as a far more interesting, far more kindly, and even far more humble man than any other I knew, and whose intimate friendship I was privileged to enjoy." Michael noted that his father especially listened intently to his children, and he took what they said to heart. Despite his harried schedule, Tolkien rarely put his work above his family. "Our father's study at home was in some ways the hub of the house," Priscilla remembered. "It was never forbidden territory to us, except when he was teaching." When Tolkien needed to work to make deadlines, he usually did so late at night, after his children were asleep.
Tolkien's jovial personality led him to thoroughly enjoy playing pranks. With C. S. Lewis, he once dressed as a polar bear for a non-costume party, wearing "an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug" and painting "his face white." As Tolkien and Lewis walked home heavily covered in fur, they claimed convincingly, according to another Inkling, "to be two Russian bears." At a lecture in the 1930s, Tolkien told his audience that leprechauns really existed and pulled out a green, four-inch long shoe to prove it. Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter notes that Tolkien would chase neighbors away dressed as "an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe." As an elderly man, Tolkien often included his false teeth when paying store clerks. And he loved the slapstick humor of the Marx Brothers.
It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance to Tolkien of C. S. Lewis and the "Inklings," the professor-student literary group they helped make famous. In turn, it would be equally wrong to suggest that the relationship was not reciprocal, as Tolkien also greatly influenced Lewis and the Inklings. It was with the Inklings that Tolkien read his own works and criticized those read by others. The Inklings also served as an extrafamilial social outlet. "He was a man of 'cronies' rather than of general society," Lewis wrote of him, "and was always best after midnight (he had a Johnsonian horror of going to bed) and in some small circle of intimates where the tone was at once Bohemian, literary, and Christian (for he was profoundly religious)."
Tolkien first met Lewis at Oxford in 1926. After a faculty tea, Lewis approached Tolkien to discuss the latter's ideas on a revised English curriculum. After the meeting, Lewis offered a mixed reaction in his diary. "No harm in him," Lewis recorded, he "only needs a smack or two." Soon, though, Lewis joined Tolkien's academic club, the Kolbitár, which was dedicated to reading the Icelandic Sagas in Old Norse. The two remained merely academic colleagues until the autumn of 1929, when they realized that their love for Old Norse and the sagas represented more than mere academic subjects to each of them. For Tolkien and Lewis, the northern myths contained within the sagas revealed much about lost truths in the world. "One week I was up till 2.30 on Monday talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien," Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, "who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing on the gods & giants & Asgard for three hours." It proved a major moment for both of them, the real beginning of their long-lasting friendship. Tolkien must have especially regarded the late-night discussion as important, for he afterwards lent to Lewis parts of The Silmarillion, a work he regarded as intensely personal. In what must have been a great relief to Tolkien, Lewis responded positively to Tolkien's work.41 After that, Tolkien read other parts of The Silmarillion to Lewis, and Lewis continued to critique these pieces favorably. Their friendship grew almost unabated from 1929 to 1940.
Lewis, who would become the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, was a magnetic figure. As numerous people have testified, he served as the heart and soul of Oxford during his years there. Lewis had his eccentricities: he drank frequently and heavily and smoked up to sixty cigarettes a day, in addition to smoking a pipe regularly. One of his students, John Wain, wrote: "The thickset body, the red face with its domed forehead, the dense clouds of smoke from a rapidly puffed cigarette or pipe, the brisk argumentative manner, and the love of debate kept the conversation going at the pace of some breathless game." Lewis had, according to Wain and most other students who knew him, a "dramatic personality." Anthony Curtis recorded an interesting incident with Lewis: "I arrived [as a student to a class with C. S. Lewis] before the others and he was staring out of the window at the deer. 'A deer has only two concepts,' he told me, 'the concept of food which they approach and the concept of danger from which they retreat. Now what interests me is how a deer would react to the idea of poison ... which is both food and dangerous.'6 Unlike their more moderate responses to Tolkien, students either loved the rather intense Lewis or they hated him.
Religion proved both a major unifier and a point of contention between Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis had been raised as a strong Irish Protestant Ulsterman. From an early age, he had heard much from his relatives about the wickedness of Roman Catholics. His maternal grandfather, a preacher, stressed frequently that Roman Catholics were the "devil's own children." As a young child, Lewis had taken his faith very seriously, chastising those who flirted with Catholicism. During his teenage years, however, Lewis had lost his faith, substituting for it a pure rationalism.
Tolkien played a fundamental role in bringing Lewis back to Christianity. On September 19, 1931, Tolkien, Lewis, and another friend, Hugo Dyson, talked until three in the morning about the meaning of Christianity. "We began," Lewis noted, "on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing." Tolkien used arguments regarding the truth of myth to discuss the story of Christ as the true myth. "Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there," Lewis explained a month later, "while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things.'" In the fall of 1931, Lewis found himself a Christian.
In addition to their participation in the Kolbitár, Lewis and Tolkien also belonged to the Inklings, which had been founded and named by an Oxford undergraduate. When that student graduated in 1933, Tolkien and Lewis remained the club's only two original members. Unintentionally combining the Kolbitár and the Inklings, Tolkien and Lewis formed a new group but maintained the Inklings name. As Tolkien explained, the Inklings really consisted of "the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about [Lewis], and met in his rooms in Magdalen." By the end of 1933, the Inklings still consisted only of the Lewis brothers and Tolkien. Humphrey Havard (a (a.k.a., "the Useless Quack") and Hugo Dyson both joined in 1934. Charles Williams became a member in 1940, and Charles Wrenn, Nevill Coghill, and Owen Barfield attended irregularly beginning in the 1930s. Other irregular members and attendees included Christopher Tolkien, John Tolkien, Lord David Cecil, J. A. W. Bennett, James Dundas-Grant, Adam Fox, Colin Hardie, Gervase Mathew, R. B. McCallum, Tom Stevens, and John Wain.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth by Bradley J. Birzer. Copyright © 2009 ISI Books. Excerpted by permission of ISI Books.
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