Part 4 (1/2)

Chambers of London, and Kenneth Sisam. However Mawer decided not to apply and Chambers refused the chair, so it was whittled down to a fight between Tolkien and his old tutor Sisam. Kenneth Sisam was now in a senior position at the Clarendon Press, and though he was not engaged in full-time scholars.h.i.+p he had a good reputation in Oxford and a number of supporters. Tolkien was backed by many people, including George Gordon, a master hand at intrigue. But at the election the votes came out equal, so Joseph Wells the Vice-Chancellor had to make the decision with his casting vote. He voted for Tolkien.

Part Four.

1925-1949(i): In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'

And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon for twenty years, was then elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one. It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that - apart from the strange fact that during these years when nothing happened' he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.

Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that a man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-cla.s.s watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?

Perhaps in his years of middle age and old age we can do no more than observe, and puzzle; or perhaps, slowly, we shall see a pattern emerge.

Until the late nineteenth century the holders of most college fellows.h.i.+ps at Oxford, that is the majority of teachers in the University, had to take holy orders and were not permitted to marry while they remained in office. The reformers of that era introduced non-clerical fellows.h.i.+ps and abolished the requirement of celibacy. In so doing they changed the face of Oxford, and changed it visibly; for in the years that followed a tide of brick flowed steadily northwards from the old boundary of the city, covering the fields along the Banbury and Woodstock Roads as the speculators erected hundreds of homes for the new married dons. By the beginning of the twentieth century North Oxford was a concentrated colony of academics, their wives, their children and their servants, its inhabitants occupying a variety of mansions ranging from the gothic and palatial (complete with turrets and stained gla.s.s) to the frankly suburban villa. Churches, schools, and cl.u.s.ters of shops were erected to serve the needs of this strange community, and soon few acres were left unoccupied. There was, however, a small amount of building still in progress during the nineteen-twenties; and in one of the North Oxford streets Tolkien found and bought a modest new house, L-shaped and of pale brick, with one wing running towards the road. The family travelled down from Leeds at the beginning of 1926 and moved in.

Here, in Northmoor Road, they remained for twenty-one years. Later in 1929 a larger neighbouring house was vacated by Basil Black-well the bookseller and publisher, and the Tolkiens decided to buy it, moving from number twenty-two to number twenty early in the next year. This second house was broad and grey, more imposing than its neighbour, with small leaded windows and a high Slate roof. Shortly before the move a fourth and last child was born, the daughter that Edith had long hoped for, and was christened Priscilla Mary Reuel.

Apart from these two incidents, the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the change of houses in 1930, life at Northmoor Road was without major event; or rather it was a life of pattern, almost of routine, in which there were minor interruptions but no significant change. So perhaps the best way to describe it is to follow Tolkien through a typical (though entirely imaginary) day in the early nineteen-thirties.

It is a saint's day, so it begins early. The alarm rings at seven in Tolkien's bedroom, a back room that looks east over the garden. It is really a bathroom-c.u.m-dressing-room, and there is a bath in one comer of it, but he sleeps here because Edith finds his snoring tiresome, and because he keeps late hours that do not harmonise with her habits. So they have their own rooms and do not disturb one another.

He gets up unwillingly (he has never been an early riser by nature), decides to shave after ma.s.s, and goes in his dressing-gown along the pa.s.sage to the boys' bedrooms to wake Michael and Christopher. John, the eldest boy, is now aged fourteen and away at a Catholic boarding-school in Berks.h.i.+re, but the two younger sons, aged eleven and seven respectively, are still living at home.

Going into Michael's bedroom, Tolkien nearly trips over a model railway engine that has been left in the middle of the floor. He curses to himself. Michael and Christopher have a pa.s.sion for railways at the moment, and they have devoted a complete upstairs room to a track layout. They also go to watch engines, and draw (with impressive precision) pictures of Great Western Railway locomotives. Tolkien does not understand or really approve of what he calls their railway-mania'; to him railways only mean noise and dirt, and the despoiling of the countryside. But he tolerates the hobby, and can even be persuaded on occasions to take them on expeditions to a distant station to watch the Cheltenham Flyer pa.s.s through.

When he has woken the boys, he gets dressed in his usual weekday outfit of flannel trousers and tweed jacket.

Then he and his sons, who are wearing their dark blue Dragon School jackets and shorts, get their bicycles out of the garage and set off along the silent North-moor Road, where the bedroom curtains are still drawn in other houses, up Linton Road, and into the broad Banbury Road where the occasional car or bus pa.s.ses them on its way into the city. It is a spring morning and there is a fine display of blossom on the cherry-trees that hang over the pavements from the front gardens.

They bicycle three-quarters of a mile into the town, to St Aloysius' Catholic Church, an unlovely edifice next to the hospital in the Wood-stock Road. Ma.s.s is at seven-thirty, so by the time they get home they are just a few minutes late for breakfast. This is always served punctually at eight - strictly speaking at seven fifty-five, since Edith likes to keep the clocks in the house five minutes fast. Phoebe Coles, the daily help, has just arrived in the kitchen and is clattering about with dishes. Phoebe, who wears a housemaid's cap and works in the house all day, has been with the family for a couple of years and shows every sign of staying for many more; which is a great blessing, since before her arrival there were endless difficulties over servants. During breakfast, Tolkien glances at the newspaper, but only in the most cursory fas.h.i.+on. He, like his friend C. S. Lewis, regards news' as on the whole trivial and fit to be ignored, and they both argue (to the annoyance of many of their friends) that the only truth' is to be found in literature. However, both men enjoy the crossword.

When breakfast is over, Tolkien goes into his study to light the stove. It is not a warm day and the house (like most middle-cla.s.s English houses at this time) has no central heating, so he will need to get a good blaze going to make the room habitable. He is in a hurry, for he has a pupil coming at nine and he wants to check his lecture notes for the morning, so he clears out the ashes from the previous night's fire rather hastily; they are still warm, for he did not finish work and go to bed until after two o'clock. When he has lit the fire he throws a good deal of coal on to it, shuts the doors of the stove, and opens the draught regulator to full. Then he hurries upstairs to shave. The boys go off to school.

He has not finished shaving when the front door bell rings. Edith answers it, but she calls him and he comes downstairs with half his face still covered in lather. It is only the postman, but he says that there is a great deal of smoke coming out of the study chimney, and ought Mr Tolkien to see if everything is all right? Tolkien rushes into the study and finds that, as so often happens, the fire has blazed up in the stove and is about to set the chimney alight. He damps it down, thanks the postman, and exchanges some remarks I with him about the growing of spring vegetables. Then he begins to open the post, remembers that he has not finished shaving, and only makes himself presentable just in time for the arrival of his pupil. This is a young woman graduate who is studying Middle English.

By ten past nine she and Tolkien are hard at work in the study discussing the significance of an awkward word in the Ancrene Wisse. If you were to put your head around the study door you would not be able to see them, for inside the door is a tunnel of books formed by a double row of bookcases, and it is not until the visitor emerges from this that the rest of the room becomes visible. There are windows on two sides, so that the room looks southwards towards a neighbouring garden and west towards the road. Tolkien's desk is in the south-facing window, but he is not sitting at it; he is standing by the fireplace waving his pipe in the air while he talks. The pupil frowns slightly as she puzzles over the complexities of what he is saying, and the difficulty of hearing all of it clearly, for he is talking very fast and sometimes indistinctly. But she begins to see the shape of his argument and the point to which he is leading, and scribbles enthusiastically in her notebook. By the time her hour' of supervision finishes, late, at twenty to eleven, she feels that she has been given a new insight into the way in which a medieval author chose his words. She leaves on her bicycle, reflecting that if all Oxford philologists could teach in this fas.h.i.+on, the English School would be a livelier place.

When he has seen her to the gate, Tolkien hurries back to his study and gathers up his lecture notes. He did not have time to check through them after all, and he hopes that everything he needs is there. He also takes a copy of the text that he is to lecture on, the Old English poem Exodus, knowing that if the worst happens and his notes do fail him, he can always expound directly from it extempore. Then, with his briefcase and his M.A. gown in the basket of his bicycle, he rides down to the town.

Sometimes he lectures in his own college, Pembroke, but this morning (as is more often the case) his destination is the Examination Schools, an oppressively grandiose late Victorian building in the High Street. Lectures on popular subjects are allocated a large hall, such as the East School, where today C. S. Lewis will be drawing a large audience for his series on medieval studies. Tolkien himself gets a good attendance for his general lectures on Beowulf, which are intended for the non-specialist undergraduates; but today he is talking about a text that is required reading only for those few men and women in the English School who have opted for the philological course, and consequently he goes along the pa.s.sage to a small dark ground-floor room where a mere eight or ten undergraduates, knowing his punctual habits, are already waiting for him in their gowns. He puts on his own gown and begins to lecture exactly as the deep bell of Merton clock a quarter of a mile away strikes eleven.

He lectures fluently, chiefly from his notes, but with occasional impromptu additions. He works through the text line by line, discussing the significance of certain words and expressions, and the problems raised by them. The undergraduates in the audience know him well and are faithful followers of his lectures, not only because he provides an illuminating interpretation of the texts but also because they like him: they enjoy his jokes, are used to his quick-fire manner of speaking, and find him thoroughly humane, certainly more humane than some of his colleagues, who lecture with a total disregard for their audience.

He need not have worried that his notes will run out. The chimes for twelve o'clock and the noise of people in the pa.s.sage bring him to a halt long before he can finish his prepared material. Indeed for the last ten minutes he has departed entirely from his notes, and has been talking about a particular point of relation between Gothic and Old English that was suggested by a word in the text. Now he gathers up his papers, converses briefly with one of the undergraduates, and then departs to make way for the next lecturer.

In the pa.s.sage he catches up for a moment with C. S. Lewis, and has a brief conversation with him. He wishes it were a Monday, on which day he regularly has a pint of beer with Lewis and talks for an hour or so, but neither man has time today, and Tolkien has to do some shopping before going home for lunch. He leaves Lewis and bicycles up the High Street to the busy arcade known as the Covered Market, where he has to collect sausages from Lindsey the butcher; Edith forgot to include them in the week's order that was delivered the day before. He exchanges a joke with Mr Lindsey, and also calls in at the stationer on the corner of Market Street to buy some pen nibs. Then he bicycles home up the Banbury Road, and manages to fit in fifteen minutes at a long-overdue letter to E. V. Gordon about their plans to collaborate on an edition of Pearl. He begins to type the letter on his Hammond typewriter, a big machine with interchangeable typefaces on a revolving disc; his model has italics and the Anglo-Saxon letters p, o, and ae. Edith rings the handbell for lunch before he can finish.

Lunch, at which all the family is present, is chiefly taken up with a discussion about Michael's dislike of swimming lessons at school, and whether or not a septic toe should be allowed to prevent the boy from bathing. After the meal, Tolkien goes into the garden to see how the broad beans are coming along. Edith brings Priscilla out to play on the lawn, and discusses with him whether they should dig up the remainder of the old tennis court, to increase the size of the vegetable plot. Then, leaving Edith to feed the canaries and budgerigars in her aviary at the side of the house, he gets on his bicycle once more and pedals down to the town, this time for a meeting of the English Faculty.

The meeting is in Merton College, for the Faculty has no premises of its own other than a cramped library in the attic of the Examination Schools, and Merton is the college most closely a.s.sociated with it Tolkien himself is a Fellow of Pembroke, but he is not much involved with his college, and like all professors his first responsibility is towards his Faculty. The meeting begins at half past two. Besides the other professors - Wyld, who holds the chair of English Language and Literature, and Nichol Smith, the professor of English Literature - there are about a dozen dons present, several of them women. Sometimes these meetings can be acrimonious, and Tolkien himself has attended many when, while trying to initiate reforms of the syllabus, he has been the target for bitter attacks from the literature' camp. But those days are pa.s.sed, and his reforms have been accepted and put into practice.

Today's meeting is mostly concerned with routine business such as the dates of examinations, minor details of the syllabus, and the question of funds for the Faculty library. It all takes time, and the meeting does not break up until nearly four, which just gives Tolkien a few minutes to call in at the Bodleian Library and look up something in a book that he ordered from the stack the previous day. Then he rides home again in time for the children's tea at half past four.

After tea he manages to put in an hour and a half at his desk, finis.h.i.+ng the letter to E. V. Gordon and beginning to arrange his lecture notes for the next day. When life goes according to plan he manages to prepare an entire course of lectures before the beginning of term, but too often pressure of time forces him to leave the work until the last minute. Even now he does not get very much done, for Michael wants help with his Latin prose homework, and this occupies twenty minutes. All too soon it is half past six and he must change into a dinner-jacket. He does not dine out more than once or twice a week, but tonight there is a guest night at his college, Pembroke, and he has promised to be there to meet a friend's guest. He ties his black tie hastily and again mounts his bicycle, leaving Edith to an early supper at home.

He reaches college in time for sherry in the Senior Common Room. His position at Pembroke is somewhat anomalous, thanks to the confused and confusing administrative practices of Oxford. It could almost be said that the colleges are the University, for the majority of the teaching staff hold college fellows.h.i.+ps, and their primary responsibility is to instruct undergraduates in their own college. But professors are in a different position. They are primarily outside the collegiate system, for they teach on a faculty basis, irrespective of what college their pupils may belong to. However, so that a professor shall not be deprived of the social facilities and other conveniences of college life, he is allocated to a college and given a fellows.h.i.+p in it ex officio. This sometimes leads to bad feeling, for in all other circ.u.mstances colleges elect their own fellows, whereas Professorial Fellows' such as Tolkien are to some extent wished upon them. Tolkien thinks that Pembroke resents him a little; certainly the atmosphere in the common room is unfriendly and austere. Fortunately there is a junior fellow, R. B. McCallum, a lively man several years younger than Tolkien, who is an ally; and he is waiting now to introduce his guest. Dinner proves to be enjoyable - and edible, since the food is plain without any suggestion of that tiresome French cooking which (Tolkien reflects with disgust) is beginning to invade the high tables of several colleges.

After dinner he makes his excuses and leaves early, crossing the town to Balliol College where there is to be a meeting of the Coal-biters in John Bryson's rooms. The Kolbitar, to give it the Icelandic t.i.tle (meaning those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal'), is an informal reading club founded by Tolkien somewhat on the model of the Viking Club in Leeds, except that its members are all dons. They meet for an evening several times each term to read Icelandic sagas. Tonight there is a good turn-out: George Gordon, now the President of Magdalen, Nevill Coghill of Exeter, C. T. Onions from the Dictionary, Dawkins the Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek, Bryson himself, and - Tolkien is glad to note - C. S. Lewis, who chides him noisily for being late. They are currently reading the Grettis Saga, and Tolkien himself begins, which is customary as he is easily the best Norse scholar of anyone in the club. He resumes at the point where they left off last time, improvising a fluent translation from the text that is spread open on his knees.

After he has done a couple of pages Dawkins takes over. He too is fluent, though not quite as fluent as Tolkien, but when the others take their turn they proceed much more slowly, each of them translating no more than half a page, for none of them professes to be more than a beginner at the language. This however is the whole purpose of the Coalbiters, for Tolkien started the club to persuade his friends that Icelandic literature is worth reading in the original language; and he encourages their somewhat halting steps and applauds their efforts.

After an hour or so they reach a good stopping-place, and the whisky bottle is opened while they discuss the saga.

Then they listen to a scurrilous and very funny poem that Tolkien has just written about another member of the English Faculty. It is after eleven when they break up. Tolkien walks with Lewis to the end of Broad Street, and then they go their separate ways, Lewis down Holywell Street towards Magdalen (for he is a bachelor and usually sleeps in college in term-time) and Tolkien on his bicycle back to Northmoor Road.

Edith has gone to bed and the house is in darkness when he gets home. He builds up the fire in the study stove and fills his pipe. He ought, he knows, to do some more work on his lecture notes for the next morning, but he cannot resist taking from a drawer the half-finished ma.n.u.script of a story that he is writing to amuse himself and his children. It is probably, he suspects, a waste of time; certainly if he is going to devote any attention to this sort of thing it ought to be to The Silmarillion. But something draws him back night after night to this amusing little tale - at least it seems to amuse the boys. He sits down at the desk, fits a new relief nib to his dip pen (which he prefers to a fountain pen), unscrews the ink bottle, takes a sheet of old examination paper (which still has a candidate's essay on the Battle of Maldon on the back of it), and begins to write: When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! ...

We will leave him now. He will be at his desk until hah* past one, or two o'clock, or perhaps even later, with only the scratching of his pen to disturb the silence, while around him Northmoor Road sleeps.

These, then, were some of the externals of his life: domestic routine, teaching, preparation for teaching, correspondence, an occasional evening with friends - and it would in truth be a rare evening that included both a dinner in college and a meeting of the Coalbiters; these and other irregular events such as the Faculty meeting are here put under the umbrella of the same imaginary day simply as an indication of the range of his activities. A truly average day would be more dull.

Or perhaps to the reader the events here described are all dull, unredeemed by a flicker of excitement: the trivial activities of a man enclosed in a narrow way of life that holds no interest for anyone outside it. All this, says the reader, this account of lighting the stove and bicycling to lectures and feeling unwelcome in a college common room, all this says nothing about the man who wrote The Silmarillion and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, does nothing to explain the nature of his mind and the way in which his imagination responded to his surroundings.

Certainly Tolkien himself would have agreed with this. It was one of his strongest-held opinions that the investigation of an author's life reveals very little of the workings of his mind. Maybe; but before we abandon our task as utterly hopeless, we could perhaps move in a little closer than the viewpoint we adopted for the imaginary day, move in and observe, or at least hazard a few guesses about some of the more obvious aspects of his personality. And if after this we may not have any better idea why he wrote his books, then at least we should know a little more about the man who did write them.

Perhaps we could start with photographs. There are plenty of them, for the Tolkiens took and kept endless snapshots. At first we get nowhere. Photographs of Tolkien in middle age reveal virtually nothing. Facing the camera is an ordinary middle-cla.s.s Englishman of light build and moderate height. He is mildly handsome, with a long face; and that is about all that can be said. Admittedly there is a keenness in the eyes which suggests a lively mind, but nothing else reveals itself - nothing except his clothes, which are exceptionally ordinary.

His manner of dressing was of course partly the result of circ.u.mstances, the necessity of bringing up a large family on a relatively small income that left nothing over for personal extravagances. Later, when he became a wealthy man, he did indulge in coloured waistcoats. But his choice of clothes in middle age was also the sign of a dislike of dandyism. This he shared with C. S. Lewis. Neither could abide any manner of affectation in dress, which seemed to them to smack of the unmasculine and hence of the objectionable. Lewis took this to extremes, not only buying indifferent clothes but wearing them indifferently; Tolkien, always the more fastidious, at least kept his trousers pressed. But fundamentally both men had the same att.i.tude to their appearance, an att.i.tude that was shared by many of their contemporaries. This preference for plain masculine clothing was in part perhaps a reaction to the excessive dandyism and implied h.o.m.os.e.xuality of the aesthetes', who had first made their mark on Oxford in the age of Wilde and whose successors lingered on in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, affecting delicate shades of garment and ambiguous nuances of manner. Theirs was a way of life of which Tolkien and the majority of his friends would have none; hence their almost exaggerated preference for tweed jackets, flannel trousers, nondescript ties, solid brown shoes that were built for country walks, dull-coloured raincoats and hats, and short hair. Tolkien's manner of dress also reflected some of his positive values, his love of everything that was moderate and sensible and unflorid and English. But beyond that his clothes gave no idea of the delicate and complex inner nature of the man who wore them.

What else can we discover from photographs of him? There is in most of them something so obvious that we are likely to miss it: the almost unvarying ordinariness of the backgrounds. In one picture he is sitting in his garden having tea; in another, standing in the sunlight in the angle of his house; in another, digging with his children in the sands at some coastal resort. One begins to get the idea that he was entirely conventional in the places that he lived in, even in the places that he visited.

And this is true. He occupied a North Oxford house that was both inside and outside almost indistinguishable from many hundreds of others in that district - it was less flamboyant, indeed, than many of its neighbours. He took his family on holiday to ordinary places. During the central years of his life, the richest period of creativity, he made no journeys outside the British Isles. Again this was partly the product of circ.u.mstances, of limited means; nor did he entirely lack the desire to travel: for instance he would have liked to follow E. V. Gordon's example and visit Iceland.

Later in life when he had more money and fewer family ties he did make a few journeys abroad. But travel never played a large part in his life - simply because his imagination did not need to be stimulated by unfamiliar landscapes and cultures. What is more surprising is that he also denied himself many of the stimuli of familiar and loved places nearer home. It is true that during the years when he owned and drove a car (from 1932 to the beginning of the Second World War) he loved to explore the villages of Oxfords.h.i.+re, particularly those in the east of the county; but he was not by habit a long-distance walker, and only once or twice did he join C. S. Lewis for the cross-country walking tours that were such an important part of his friend's life. He knew the Welsh mountains, but he rarely visited them; he loved the sea, but his only expeditions to it took the form of conventional English family holidays at ordinary resorts. Here again pressure of domestic responsibility is one explanation, and here again it does not provide the whole answer. Gradually one forms the idea that he did not altogether care very much where he was.

In one sense this is not true, and in another sense it is. Certainly he was not indifferent to his surroundings, for man's destruction of the landscape moved him to profound anger. Here, from his diary, is his anguished description of a return to his childhood landscape of Sarehole Mill in 1933, when he was driving his family to visit relatives in Birmingham: I pa.s.s over the pangs to me of pa.s.sing through Hall Green - become a huge tram-ridden meaningless suburb, where I actually lost my way - and eventually down what is left of beloved lanes of childhood, and past the very gate of our cottage, now in the midst of a sea of new red-brick. The old mill still stands, and Mrs Hunt's still sticks out into the road as it turns uphill; but the crossing beyond the now fenced-in pool, where the bluebell lane ran down into the mill lane, is now a dangerous crossing alive with motors and red lights. The White Ogre's house (which the children were excited to see) is become a petrol station, and most of Short Avenue and the elms between it and the crossing have gone. How I envy those whose precious early scenery has not been exposed to such violent and peculiarly hideous change.'

He was similarly sensitive to the damage that was inflicted on the Oxfords.h.i.+re countryside by the construction of wartime aerodromes and the improvement' of roads. Later in life, when his strongest-held opinions began to become obsessions, he would see a new road that had been driven across the comer of a field and cry, There goes the last of England's arable!' By this time of his life he would maintain that there was not one unspoilt wood or hillside left in the land, and if there was, then he would refuse to visit it for fear of finding it contaminated by litter.

The converse of this is that he chose to live in almost excessively man-made surroundings, in the suburbs of Oxford and later of Bournemouth, themselves almost as meaningless' as the red-brick wilderness that had once been Sarehole. How can we reconcile these viewpoints?

Again, part of the answer lies in circ.u.mstance. The places where he lived were not really chosen by him at all: they were simply the places where, for a number of reasons, he found himself. Maybe, but in this case why did not his soul cry out against them? To which th6 reply comes, sometimes it did, aloud to a few close friends or privately in his diary. But for much of the time it did not, and the explanation for this would seem to lie in his belief that we live in a fallen world. If the world were unfallen and man were not sinful, he himself would have spent an undisturbed childhood with his mother in a paradise such as Sarehole had in memory become to him. But his mother had been taken from him by the wickedness of the world (for he believed ultimately that she had died through the cruelty and neglect of her family), and now even the Sarehole landscape itself had been wantonly destroyed. In such a world, where perfection and true happiness were impossible, did it really matter in what surroundings one lived, any more than it really mattered what clothes one wore or what food one ate (providing it was plain food)? They were all temporary imperfections, and though imperfect were merely transient. It was in this sense a profoundly Christian and ascetic att.i.tude to life.

There is another explanation for his apparently careless approach to the externals of existence. By the tune he reached middle age his imagination no longer needed to be stimulated by experience; or rather, it had received all the stimulus it required in the early years of his life, the years of event and changing landscapes; now it could nourish itself upon these acc.u.mulated memories. Here is how he himself explained this process, when describing the creation of The Lord of the Rings: One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.'

Vegetable matter has to decompose for a long time before it has broken down sufficiently to be used to enrich the soil, and Tolkien is saying here that it was almost exclusively upon early experience, sufficiently broken down by time, that he nourished the seeds of his imagination. Further experience was not necessary, and it was not sought.

We seem to have found out a little about him as a result of looking at old photographs; so perhaps it might be worth our while to pa.s.s on from regarding his appearance and his surroundings to considering another external characteristic, his voice and his manner of speaking. From adolescence to the end of his life he was notable, almost notorious, for the speed and indistinctness of his way of talking. Actually it is easy to exaggerate this, to make him into a caricature of the comic professor muttering inaudibly to himself. In reality it was not much like that.