Part 5 (1/2)

Since the lecture was first published, many readers of Beowulf have dissented from Tolkien's view of the poem's structure. But even one of the severest critics of his interpretation, his old tutor Kenneth Sisam, admitted that the lecture has a fineness of perception and elegance of expression' which distinguish it from so much else in this field.

The Beowulf lecture and the paper on the Reeve's Tale were the only major pieces of philological work published by Tolkien in the nineteen-thirties. He planned to do much more: besides his work on the Ancrene Wisse he intended to produce an edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem Exodus, and indeed he nearly completed this task, but it was never finished to his satisfaction. He also planned further joint editions with E. V. Gordon, in particular of Pearl (a natural companion-piece to their Gawain) and of the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer. But Gordon and Tolkien were now geographically far apart. In 1931 Gordon, who had been appointed Tolkien's successor as professor at Leeds, moved from there to take up a chair at Manchester University, and though the two men met and corresponded frequently, collaboration proved technically less easy than when they had been in the same place. Gordon did a great deal of work on all three projects, using Tolkien as a consultant rather than as a full collaborator, but nothing had reached print by 1938.

In the summer of that year, Gordon went into hospital for an operation for gall-stones. It seemed to be successful, but his condition suddenly deteriorated, and he died from a previously unsuspected kidney disorder, at the age of forty-two.

Gordon's death robbed Tolkien not only of a close friend but also of the ideal professional collaborator; and by now it was clear that he needed a collaborator, if only to make him surrender any material to the printer.1 As it happened, he had made the acquaintance of another philologist who proved to be a good working partner. This was Simonne d'Ardenne, a Belgian graduate who studied Middle English with him for an Oxford B.Litt. early in the nineteen-thirties. Tolkien contributed much to her edition of The Life and Pa.s.sion of St Juliene, a medieval religious work written in the Ancrene Wisse dialect. Indeed the d'Ardenne Juliene paradoxically contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he ever published under his own name. Mile d'Ardenne became a professor at Liege, and she and Tolkien planned to collaborate on an edition of Katerine, another Western Middle English text of the same group. But the war intervened and made communication between them impossible for many years, and after 1945 nothing was achieved by them beyond a couple of short articles on topics concerned with the ma.n.u.script of the text. Although Tolkien was able to work with Mile d'Ardenne when he was in Belgium to attend a philological congress in 1951, she realised sadly that collaboration with him was now impossible, for his mind was entirely on his stories.

But even if one is to regard his failure to publish more in his professional field as a matter for regret, one should not fail to take account of his wide influence, for his theories and deductions have been quoted (with or without due acknowledgement) wherever English philology is studied.

Nor should one forget the translations he made of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo. The Pearl translation was begun at Leeds in the nineteen-twenties; Tolkien was attracted to the task by the challenge of the poem's complex metrical and verbal structure. He had finished it by 1926, but he did nothing about publis.h.i.+ng it until Basil Blackwell offered to put it into print in the 1 Tolkien intended to complete the Pearl edition, but he found himself unable to do so (by this time he was absorbed in writing The Lord of the Rings). It was eventually revised and completed for publication by Ida Gordon, the widow of E. V. Gordon, and herself a professional philologist nineteen-forties, in return for a sum to be credited to Tolkien's heavily overdue account at Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford. The translation was set into type, but Blackwell waited in vain for Tolkien to write the introduction to the volume, and eventually the project was abandoned. The translation of Gawain, probably begun during the nineteen-thirties or forties, was finished in time for it to be broadcast in dramatised form by the BBC in 1953, Tolkien himself recording a short introduction and a longer concluding talk. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings his publishers Alien & Unwin determined to issue the Gawain and Pearl translations in one volume. With this in view, Tolkien made extensive revisions of both translations, but once again an introduction was required, and he found it extremely difficult to write one, being uncertain as to what ought to be explained to the non-scholarly reader for whom the book was intended. Again the project lapsed, and it was not until after his death that the two translations were published, together with a modern English rendering of a third poem of the same period, Sir Orjeo, which Tolkien had originally translated for a wartime cadets' course at Oxford. The introduction to the volume was a.s.sembled by Christopher Tolkien out of such materials as could be found among his father's papers.

These translations were in effect Tolkien's last published philological work, for although they are accompanied by no notes or commentary they are the result of sixty years' minute study of the poems, and in many places they provide an informed and illuminating interpretation of hard and ambiguous pa.s.sages in the originals. Most important of all, they bring these poems to an audience that could not have read them in Middle English. For this reason they are a fitting conclusion to the work of a man who believed that the prime function of a linguist is to interpret literature, and that the prime function of literature is to be enjoyed.

When Tolkien returned to Oxford in 1925 there was an element missing from his life. It had disappeared with the breaking of the T.C.B.S. in the Battle of the Somme, for not since those days had he enjoyed friends.h.i.+p to the same degree of emotional and intellectual commitment. He had continued to see something of the other surviving T.C.B.S. member, Christopher Wiseman, but Wiseman was now heavily involved with his duties as the headmaster of a Methodist public school,1 and when the two men did meet they now found very little in common.

On 11 May 1926 Tolkien attended a meeting of the English Faculty at Merton College. Among the familiar faces a new arrival stood out, a heavily-built man of twenty-seven in baggy clothes who had recently been elected Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. This was Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as Jack'.

At first the two men circled warily around one another. Tolkien knew that Lewis, though a medievalist, was in the Lit.' camp and thus a potential adversary, while Lewis wrote in his diary that Tolkien was a smooth, pale, fluent little chap', adding No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.' But soon Lewis came to have a firm affection for this long-faced keen-eyed man who liked good talk and laughter and beer, while Tolkien warmed to Lewis's quick mind and the generous spirit that was as huge as Lewis's shapeless flannel trousers. By May 1927 Tolkien had enrolled Lewis into the Coal-biters to join in the reading of Icelandic sagas, and a long and complex friends.h.i.+p had begun.

Anyone who wants to know something of what Tolkien and Lewis contributed to each other's lives should read Lewis's essay on Friends.h.i.+p in his book The Four Loves. Here it all is, the account of how Queen's College Taunton, which Tolkien's grandfather John Suffield had attended as one of its earliest pupils. The two companions become friends when they discover a shared insight, how their friends.h.i.+p is not jealous but seeks out the company of others, how such friends.h.i.+ps are almost of necessity between men, how the greatest pleasure of all is for a group of friends to come to an inn after a hard day's walking: Those are the golden sessions,' writes Lewis, when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim or responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life - natural life - has no better gift to give.'1 This is what it was about, those years of companions.h.i.+p, the walking tours, the friends gathered in Lewis's rooms on Thursday nights. It was partly the spirit of the tunes - you may find something of the same sense of male companions.h.i.+p in the writings of Chesterton; and it was a feeling shared, though with less self-awareness, by many men of the day. It has precedents in ancient civilizations, and closer at hand it was in part the result of the First World War, in which so many friends had been killed that the survivors felt the need to stay close together.

Friends.h.i.+p of this kind was remarkable, and at the same time entirely natural and inevitable. It was not h.o.m.os.e.xual (Lewis dismisses that suggestion with deserved ridicule), yet it excluded women. It is the great mystery of Tolkien's life, and we shall understand little of it if we try to a.n.a.lyse it. At the same time if we have ever enjoyed a friends.h.i.+p of that sort we shall know exactly what it was about. And even if that fails us, we can find something of it expressed in The Lord of the Rings.

How did it begin? Perhaps Northernness' was the shared insight that started it. Since early adolescence Lewis had been captivated by Norse mythology, and when he found in Tolkien another who delighted in the mysteries of the Edda and the complexities of the V61-sung legend it was clear that they would have a lot to share. They began to meet regularly in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen, sometimes sitting far into the night while they talked of the G.o.ds and giants of Asgard or discussed the politics of the English School. They also commented on each other's poetry.

Tolkien lent Lewis the typescript of his long poem' The Gest of Beren and Luthien', and after reading it Lewis wrote to him: I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend's work had very little to do with it -1 should have enjoyed it just as well if I'd picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author.' He sent Tolkien detailed criticisms of the poem, which he jestingly couched in the form of a mock textual criticism, complete with the names of fict.i.tious scholars (Pumpernickel', Peabody', and Schick') who suggested that weak lines in Tolkien's poem were simply the result of scribal inaccuracies in the ma.n.u.script, and could not be the authentic work of the original poet. Tolkien was amused by this, but he accepted few of Lewis's suggested emendations. On the other hand he did rewrite almost every pa.s.sage that Lewis had criticised, rewrote so extensively, in fact, that the revised Gest of Beren and Luthien' was scarcely the same poem.

Lewis soon discovered this to be characteristic of his friend. He has only two reactions to criticism,' he remarked.

Either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.'

By this time - the end of 1929 - Lewis was supporting Tolkien's plans for changes within the English School. The two men intrigued and discussed. Lewis wrote conspiratorially to Tolkien: Forgive me if I remind you that there are disguised orcs behind every tree.' Together they waged a skilful campaign, and it was partly thanks to Lewis's support on the Faculty Board that Tolkien managed to get his reformed syllabus accepted in 1931.

In Surprised by Joy Lewis wrote that friends.h.i.+p with Tolkien marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both'. Soon after the second prejudice had been overcome, the friends.h.i.+p moved into the area of the first Lewis, the son of a Belfast solicitor, had been brought up as an Ulster protestant. During adolescence he had professed agnosticism; or rather he had discovered that for him the greatest delight was to be found not in Christianity but in pagan mythologies. Yet already he had receded a little from this standpoint. During the middle nineteen-twenties, after taking a First Cla.s.s in the English School (and earlier a double First in Cla.s.sics) and while making a precarious living as a tutor, he had arrived at what he called his New Look', the belief that the Christian myth' conveys as much truth as most men can comprehend. By 1926 he had moved further and had come to the conclusion that in effect his search for the source of what he called Joy was a search for G.o.d. Soon it became apparent to him that he must accept or reject G.o.d. At this juncture he became friends with Tolkien.

In Tolkien he found a person of wit and intellectual verve who was nevertheless a devout Christian. During the early years of their friends.h.i.+p there were many hours when Tolkien would lounge in one of Lewis's plain armchairs in the centre of the big sitting-room in Magdalen New Buildings while Lewis, his heavy fist grasping the bowl of his pipe and his eyebrows raised behind a cloud of smoke, would pace up and down, talking or listening, suddenly swinging round and exclaiming Distinguo, Tollers! Distinguo!' as the other man, similarly wreathed in pipe smoke, made too sweeping an a.s.sertion. Lewis argued, but more and more in the matter of belief he was coming to admit that Tolkien was right. By the summer of 1929 he had come to profess theism, a simple faith in G.o.d. But he was not yet a Christian.

Usually his discussions with Tolkien took place on Monday mornings, when they would talk for an hour or two and then conclude with beer at the Eastgate, a nearby pub. But on Sat.u.r.day 19 September 1931 they met in the evening. Lewis had invited Tolkien to dine at Magdalen, and he had another guest, Hugo Dyson, whom Tolkien had first known at Exeter College in 1919. Dyson was now Lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, and he paid frequent visits to Oxford. He was a Christian, and a man of feline wit. After dinner, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson went out for air. It was a bl.u.s.tery night, but they strolled along Addison's Walk discussing the purpose of myth.

Lewis, though now a believer in G.o.d, could not yet understand the function of Christ in Christianity, could not perceive the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. He declared that he had to understand the purpose of these events - as he later expressed it in a letter to a friend, how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now - except in so far as his example could help us'.

As the night wore on, Tolkien and Dyson showed him that he was here making a totally unnecessary demand.

When he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination since he had read the story of the Norse G.o.d Balder. But from the Gospels (they said) he was requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not. And, indicating the great trees of Magdalen Grove as their branches bent in the wind, he struck out a different line of argument.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

We have come from G.o.d (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with G.o.d. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology, Tolkien had laid bare the centre of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion.

Lewis listened as Dyson affirmed in his own way what Tolkien had said. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened! In that case, he said, I begin to understand.

At last the wind drove them inside, and they talked in Lewis's rooms until three a.m., when Tolkien went home.

After seeing him out into the High Street, Lewis and Dyson walked up and down the cloister of New Buildings, still talking, until the sky grew light.

Twelve days later Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves: I have just pa.s.sed on from believing in G.o.d to definitely believing in Christ - in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.'

Meanwhile Tolkien, invigilating in the Examination Schools, was composing a long poem recording what he had said to Lewis. He called it Mythopoeia', the making of myths. And he wrote in his diary: Friends.h.i.+p with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual - a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher - and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.'

Lewis and Tolkien continued to see much of each other. Tolkien read aloud to Lewis from The Silmarillion, and Lewis urged him to press on and finish writing it. Tolkien later said of this: The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience.

Only from him did I ever get the idea that my stuff could be more than a private hobby.'

Lewis's conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of a new stage in his friends.h.i.+p with Tolkien. From the early nineteen-thirties onwards the two men depended less exclusively on each other's company and more on that of other men. In The Four Loves Lewis states that two, far from being the necessary number for Friends.h.i.+p, is not even the best', and he suggests that each friend added to a group brings out some special characteristic in the others. Tolkien had experienced this in the T.C.B.S.; and the knot of friends which now began to come together was the ultimate expression of the T.C.B.S. principle, the clubbable' urge which Tolkien had felt since those adolescent days. This group was known as The Inklings.

It began to form itself at about the tune (in the early nineteen-thirties) when the Coalbiters ceased to meet, having fulfilled their aim of reading all the princ.i.p.al Icelandic sagas and finally the Elder Edda. The Inklings' was originally the name of a literary society founded in about 1931 by a University College undergraduate named Tangye Lean.

Lewis and Tolkien both attended its meetings, at which unpublished compositions were read and criticised. After Lean left Oxford the club lived on; or rather its name was transferred half jestingly to the circle of friends who gathered at regular intervals around Lewis.

The Inklings have now entered literary history, and a good deal has been written about them, much of it over-solemn. They were no more (and no less) than a number of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature. Numbers of people have been stated to have been members' at this or that period, whereas in truth there was no system of members.h.i.+p. Some men attended more or less regularly at various periods, while others were only occasional visitors. Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable. A list of other names gives little idea of what the Inklings really were; but if names matter, besides Lewis and Tolkien (who was almost invariably present) among those who attended in the years before and during the war were Major Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis's brother, known as Warnie'), R. E. Havard (an Oxford doctor who attended the Lewis and Tolkien households), Lewis's long-standing friend Owen Barfield (although, being a London solicitor, Barfield rarely came to meetings), and Hugo Dyson.

It was a thoroughly casual business. One should not imagine that the same people turned up week after week, or sent apologies if they were to be absent. Nevertheless there were certain invariable elements. The group, or various members of it, would meet on a weekday morning in a pub, generally on Tuesdays in the Eagle and Child (known familiarly as The Bird and Baby'); though during the war when beer was short and pubs crowded with servicemen their habits were more flexible. On Thursday nights they would meet in Lewis's big Magdalen sitting-room, congregating some time after nine o'clock. Tea would be made and pipes lit, and then Lewis would boom out: Well, has n.o.body got anything to read us?' Someone would produce a ma.n.u.script and begin to read it aloud - it might be a poem, or a story, or a chapter. Then would come criticism: sometimes praise, sometimes censure, for it was no mutual admiration society. There might be more reading, but soon the proceedings would spill over into talk of all kinds, sometimes heated debate, and would terminate at a late hour.

By the late nineteen-thirties the Inklings were an important part of Tolkien's life, and among his own contributions to gatherings were readings from the still-unpublished ma.n.u.script of The Hobbit. When war broke out in 1939 another man was recruited to the group of friends. This was Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press at their London office and who with the rest of their staff was now transferred to Oxford. Williams was in his fifties; his thought and writings - he was a novelist, poet, theologian, and critic - were already known and respected, albeit by a small circle of readers. In particular his' spiritual thrillers' (as they have been called), novels which deal with supernatural and mystical events in a mundane setting, had found a small but enthusiastic public. Lewis had known and admired Williams for some time, but Tolkien had only met him once or twice. Now he came to develop a complex att.i.tude to him.

Williams, with his curious face (half angel, half monkey, Lewis called it), his very un-Oxford-like blue suit, the cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a bundle of proofs wrapped in Time & Tide tucked under his arm, was a person of great natural charm. Tolkien recalled twenty years later: We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest).' But he added: We had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.' This was partly because, while Williams enjoyed the chapters from The Lord of the Rings that were then being read to the group, Tolkien did not like Williams's books, or those which he had read. He declared that he found them wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous'. And perhaps his reservations about Williams, or Williams's place in the Inklings, were not entirely intellectual. Lewis believed, and declared in The Four Loves, that true friends cannot be jealous when another comes to join them. But here Lewis was talking about Lewis, not about Tolkien.

Clearly there was a little jealousy or resentment on Tolkien's part, and not without cause, for now the limelight of Lewis's enthusiasm s.h.i.+fted almost imperceptibly from himself to Williams. Lewis was a very impressionable man,'

Tolkien wrote long afterwards, and elsewhere he talked of the dominant influence' that he believed Williams had come to exercise over Lewis, especially over his third novel, That Hideous Strength.

So Williams's arrival in Oxford marked the beginning of a third phase in Tolkien's friends.h.i.+p with Lewis, a faint cooling on Tolkien's part which even Lewis probably hardly noticed as yet. Something else made him cooler, something even more subtle: the matter of Lewis's growing reputation as a Christian apologist. As Tolkien had played such an important part in his friend's return to Christianity he had always regretted that Lewis had not become a Catholic like himself, but had begun to at tend his local Anglican church, resuming the religious practices of his childhood. Tolkien had a deep resentment of the Church of England which he sometimes extended to its buildings, declaring that his appreciation of their beauty was marred by his sadness that they had been (he considered) perverted from their rightful Catholicism. When Lewis published a prose allegory telling the story of his conversion under the t.i.tle The Pilgrim's Regress, Tolkien thought the t.i.tle ironical. Lewis would regress,' he said.

He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up again, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant.'

By the mid nineteen-forties Lewis was receiving a good deal of publicity (too much,' said Tolkien, for his or any of our tastes') in connection with his Christian writings, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. Tolkien perhaps felt, as he observed his friend's increasing fame in this respect, rather as if a pupil had speedily overtaken his master to achieve almost unjustified fame. He once referred to Lewis, not altogether flatteringly, as Everyman's Theologian'.

But if these thoughts were at all in Tolkien's mind in the early nineteen-forties they were well below the surface. He still had an almost unbounded affection for Lewis - indeed perhaps still cherished the occasional hope that his friend might one day become a Catholic. And the Inklings continued to provide much delight and encouragement to him. Hwaet! we Inklings,' he wrote in parody of the opening lines of Beowulf, on aerdagum searopancolra snyttru gehierdon.' Lo! We have heard in old days of the wisdom of the cunning-minded Inklings; how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations, skillfully reciting learning and song-craft, earnestly meditating. That was true joy!'

What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea.' So writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves while speculating on the history of male friends.h.i.+p. This is the inevitable corollary of a life that centres on the company of men, and on groups such as the Inklings: women get left out of it.

Edith Tolkien had only been given a limited education at a girls' boarding-school which, while good in music, was indifferent in other subjects. She had spent a few years in a Birmingham lodging-house, then a period at Cheltenham in a markedly non-intellectual middle-cla.s.s household, and then a long time living with her poorly educated middle-aged cousin Jennie. There had been no chance either to continue her education or to improve her mind. More than this, she had lost a good deal of her independence. She had been set for a career as a piano teacher and just possibly as a soloist, but this prospect had simply faded away, first of all because there had been no immediate need for her to earn a living, and then because she had married Ronald Tolkien. In those days there was in normal circ.u.mstances no question of a middle-cla.s.s wife continuing to earn her living after marriage, for to do so would have been an indication that the husband could not earn enough by himself. So piano playing was reduced to a mere hobby, although she continued to play regularly until old age, and her music delighted Ronald.

He did not encourage her to pursue any intellectual activity, partly because he did not consider it to be a necessary part of her role as wife and mother, and partly because his att.i.tude to her in courts.h.i.+p (exemplified by his favourite term for her, little one') was not a.s.sociated with his own intellectual life; to her he showed a side of his personality quite different from that perceived by his male friends. Just as he liked to be a man's man among his cronies, so at home he expected to live in what was primarily a woman's world.