Part 5 (2/2)

Despite this, Edith might have been able to make a positive contribution to his life in the University. A number of Oxford dons' wives managed to do this. A few lucky ones such as Joseph Wright's wife Lizzie were themselves expert in their husband's subjects, and could a.s.sist in their work. But a number of other wives who, like Edith, did not have university degrees could by their expert management of the household make their home into something of a social centre for their husbands' friends, and so partic.i.p.ate in much of their lives.

Unfortunately everything worked out rather differently for Edith. She was inclined to be shy, for she had led a very limited social life in childhood and adolescence, and when she came to live in Oxford in 1918 she was unnerved by what she found. She and Ronald and the baby (and her cousin Jennie, who was still with them, remaining until they moved to Leeds) lived in modest rooms in a side-street in the town; and, from her viewpoint as someone who did not know Oxford, the University seemed an almost impenetrable fortress, a phalanx of imposing buildings where important-looking men pa.s.sed to and fro in gowns, and where Ronald disappeared to work each day. When the University deigned to cross her threshold it was in the person of polite but awkward young men, friends of Ronald's who did not know how to talk to women, and to whom she could think of nothing to say, for their worlds simply did not overlap. Worse still, the visitors might be dons' wives, such as the terrifying Mrs Farnell, wife of the Rector of Exeter, whose presence even frightened Ronald. These women only confirmed Edith in her belief that the University was unapproachable in its eminence. They came from their awesome college lodgings or their turreted mansions in North Oxford to coo condescendingly at baby John in his cot, and when they departed they would leave their calling-cards on the hall tray (one card bearing their own name, two cards bearing their husband's) to indicate that Mrs Tolkien was of course expected to return the call after a short interval. But Edith's nerve failed her.

What could she say to these people if she went to their imposing houses? What possible conversation could she have with these stately women, whose talk was of people of whom she had never heard, of professors' daughters and tided cousins and other Oxford hostesses? Ronald was worried, for he knew what a solecism would be committed if his wife did not follow the strict Oxford etiquette. He persuaded her to return one call, to Lizzie Wright, who although very learned was not at all like most dons' wives, having a great deal of her husband's openness and common sense; but even then Ronald had to take her to the Wrights' front door himself and ring the bell before hurrying away round the corner. All the other calling-cards gathered dust, the calls were left unreturned, and it became known that Mr Tolkien's wife did not call and must therefore be quietly excluded from the round of dinner parties and At Homes.

Then the Tolkiens moved to Leeds, and Edith found that things were different there. People occupied ordinary modest houses, and there was no nonsense about calling-cards. Another university wife lived a few doors down in St Mark's Terrace and often called for a chat. Edith also began to see a good deal of Ronald's pupils who came in for tutorials or tea, and she liked many of them very much. Many of these pupils became family friends who kept in touch with her in later years and often came to visit. There were informal university dances which she enjoyed.

Even the children (there were now John, Michael, and, at the end of their time in Leeds, Christopher) were not forgotten, for the university organised splendid Christmas parties at which the Vice-Chancellor used to dress up as Father Christmas. Later, Ronald managed to afford to buy a larger house in Darnley Road, away from the smoke and dirt of the city. They employed a maid and a nurse for the children. On the whole Edith was happy.

But then suddenly they were back in Oxford. The first house in Northmoor Road was bought by Ronald while Edith was still in Leeds, without her ever having seen it, and she thought it was too small. The older boys had caught ringworm from a public comb at a photographer's studio in Leeds, and they had to be given lengthy and expensive treatment. When they were sufficiently recovered to go to the Dragon School they were at first unhappy there among the rough-and-tumble of other boys. Then Edith became pregnant again. Not until after the birth of Priscilla in 1929 and the move to the larger house next door in 1930 could she feel settled.

Even then, family life never entirely regained the equilibrium it had achieved in Leeds. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald. In terms of actual hours he was certainly in the house a great deal: much of his teaching was done there, and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was really a matter of his affections. He was very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was about his) and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the company of men of his own kind. More specifically she noticed and resented his devotion to Jack Lewis.

On the occasions when Lewis came to Northmoor Road, the children liked him because he did not talk condescendingly to them; and he gave them books by E. Nesbit, which they enjoyed. But with Edith he was shy and ungainly. Consequently she could not understand the delight that Ronald took in his company, and she became a little jealous. There were other difficulties. She had only known a home life of the most limited sort in her own childhood, and she therefore had no example on which to base the running of her household. Not surprisingly she cloaked this uncertainty in authoritarian-ism, demanding that meals be precisely on time, that the children eat up every sc.r.a.p, and that servants should perform their work impeccably. Underneath all this she was often very lonely, frequently being without company other than the servants and the children during that part of the day when Ronald was out or in his study. During these years Oxford society was gradually becoming less rigid; but she did not trust it, and she made few friends among other dons' families, with the exception of Charles Wrenn's wife, Agnes. She also suffered from severe headaches which could prostrate her for a day or more.

It quickly became clear to Ronald that Edith was unhappy with Oxford, and especially that she was resentful of his men friends. Indeed he perceived that his need of male friends.h.i.+p was not entirely compatible with married life. But he believed that this was one of the sad facts of a fallen world; and on the whole he thought that a man had a right to male pleasures, and should if necessary insist on them. To a son contemplating marriage he wrote: There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss. Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out - or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently - the gla.s.s of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc., etc. If the other side's claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and fuss than subterfuge.'

There was also the problem of Edith's att.i.tude to Catholicism. Before they were married, Ronald had persuaded her to leave the Church of England and to become a Catholic, and she had resented this a little at the tune. During the subsequent years she had almost given up going to ma.s.s. In the second decade of marriage her anti-Catholic feelings hardened, and by the time the family returned to Oxford in 1925 she was showing resentment of Ronald taking the children to church. In part these feelings were due to Ronald's rigid, almost medieval, insistence upon frequent confession; and Edith had always hated confessing her sins to a priest. Nor could he discuss her feelings with her in a rational manner, certainly not with the lucidity he demonstrated in his theological arguments with Lewis: to Edith he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding.

Occasionally her smouldering anger about church-going burst into fury; but at last after one such outburst in 1940 there was a true reconciliation between her and Ronald, in which she explained her feelings and even declared that she wished to resume the practice of her religion. In the event she did riot return to regular church-going, but for the rest of her life she showed no resentment of Catholicism, and indeed delighted to take an interest in church affairs, so that it appeared even to friends who were Catholics that she was an active church-goer.

To some extent Ronald and Edith lived separate lives at North-moor Road, sleeping in different bedrooms and keeping different hours. He worked late, partly because he was short of time in the day, but also because it was not until she had gone to bed that he could stay at his desk without interruption. During the day he could not work for long before she summoned him to some domestic duty, or called him to come and have tea with a friend. These frequent interruptions, themselves no more than an understandable demand from Edith for affection and attention, were often an irritant to him, though he bore them patiently.

Yet it would be wrong to picture her as excluded totally from his work. During these years he did not share his writing with her anything like as fully as he had done long before at Great Haywood; not since then had she been encouraged to partic.i.p.ate in his work, and of his ma.n.u.scripts only the early pages of The Book of Lost Tales' are in her handwriting. Yet she inevitably shared in the family's interest when he was writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and although she was not well acquainted with the details of his books and did not have a deep understanding of them, he did not shut her out from this side of his life. Indeed she was the first person to whom he showed two of his stories, Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major, and he was always warmed and encouraged by her approval.

He and Edith shared many friends. Among these, some had academic connections, such as Rosfrith Murray (daughter of the original Oxford Dictionary editor Sir James Murray) and her nephew Robert Murray, and former pupils and colleagues such as Simonne d'Ardenne, Elaine Griffiths, Stella Mills, and Mary Salu. All these were family friends, as much a part of Edith's life as of Ronald's, and this itself was a binding force between them. She and Ronald did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his and her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild's measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with.

Those friends and others who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible both in the small things, the almost absurd degree to which each worried about the other's health, and the care with which they chose and wrapped each other's birthday presents; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years at Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree to which she showed pride in his fame as an author.

A princ.i.p.al source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family. This bound them together until the end of their lives, and it was perhaps the strongest force in the marriage. They delighted to discuss and mull over every detail of the lives of their children, and later of their grandchildren. They were very proud when Michael won the George Medal in the Second World War for his action as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes in the Battle of Britain; and they felt similar pride when John was ordained a priest in the Catholic Church shortly after the war. Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love.

If to us, reading about it so many years later, life at Northmoor Road seems dull and uneventful, we should realise that this was not how the family felt it to be at the time. To them it was full of event There was the unforgettable occasion in 1932 when Tolkien bought his first car, a Morris Cowley that was nicknamed Jo' after the first two letters of its registration. After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm. At various times during the journey Jo' sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall near Chipping Norton, with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later - not entirely without justification, for Tolkien's driving was daring rather than skilful. When accelerating headlong across a busy main road in Oxford in order to get into a side-street, he would ignore all other vehicles and cry Charge em and they scatter!' - and scatter they did. Jo' was later replaced by a second Morris which did duty until the beginning of the Second World War, when petrol rationing made it impractical to keep it. By this time Tolkien perceived the damage that the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing to the landscape, and after the war he did not buy another car or drive again.

What else remained in the children's memories? Long summer hours digging up the asphalt of the old tennis-court at 20 Northmoor Road to enlarge the vegetable-plot, under the supervision of their father, who (like their mother) was an enthusiastic gardener, though he left much of the practical work of cultivating vegetables and pruning trees to John, preferring to concentrate his own attention on the roses and on the lawn, from which he would remove every possible weed. The early years at 22 Northmoor Road when there were a succession of Icelandic au pair girls, who told folk-tales about trolls. Visits to the theatre, which their father always seemed to enjoy, although he declared he did not approve of Drama. Bicycling to early ma.s.s at St Aloysius', or at St Gregory's up the Woodstock Road, or at the Carmelite convent nearby. The barrel of beer in the coal-hole behind the kitchen which dripped regularly and (said their mother) made the house smell like a brewery. July and August afternoons boating on the river Cherwell (which was only just down the road), floating in the family punt hired for the season down past the Parks to Magdalen Bridge, or better still poling up-river towards Water Eaton and Islip, where a picnic tea could be spread on the bank. Walks across the fields to Wood Eaton to look for b.u.t.terflies, and then back along by the river where Michael would hide in the crack of an old willow, walks when their father seemed to have a boundless store of knowledge about trees and plants. Seaside summer holidays at Lyme Regis when old Father Francis Morgan came down from Birmingham to join them, embarra.s.sing the children with his loud and boisterous ways just as he had embarra.s.sed Ronald and Hilary at Lyme twenty-five years before. The family holiday at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall in 1932 with Charles Wrenn and his wife and daughter, when Wrenn and Tolkien held a swimming race wearing panama hats and smoking pipes while they swam. This was the holiday about which Tolkien later wrote: There was a curious local character, an old man who used to go about swapping gossip and weather-wisdom and such like. To amuse my boys I named him Gaffer Gamgee, and the name became part of family lore to fix on old chaps of the kind. The choice of Gamgee was primarily directed by alliteration; but I did not invent it. It was in fact the name when I was small (in Birmingham) for cotton-wool.' Then there were the later holidays at Sidmouth, where there were hill walks and marvellous rock-pools by the sea, and where their father was already beginning to write The Lord of the Rings; the drives on autumn afternoons to the villages east of Oxford, to Worminghall or Brill or Charlton-on-Otmoor, or west into Berks.h.i.+re and up White Horse Hill to see the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland's Smithy; the memories of Oxford, of the countryside, and of the stories that their father told them.

These stories had begun during the Leeds years. John, the eldest son, often found difficulty in getting to sleep.

When he was lying awake his father would come and sit on his bed and tell him a tale of Carrots', a boy with red hair who climbed into a cuckoo clock and went off on a series of strange adventures.

In this fas.h.i.+on Tolkien discovered that he could use the imagination which was creating the complexities of The Silmarillion to invent simpler stories. He had an amiably childlike sense of humour, and as his sons grew older this manifested itself in the noisy games he played with them - and in the stories he told Michael when the younger boy was troubled with nightmares. These tales, invented in the early days at Northmoor Road, were about the irrepressible villain Bill Stickers', a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything. His name was taken from a notice on an Oxford gate that said BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and a similar source provided the name of the righteous person who was always in pursuit of Stickers, Major Road Ahead'.

The Bill Stickers' stories were never written down, but others were. When he was on holiday with the family at Filey in the summer of 1925, Tolkien composed a full-length tale for John and Michael. The younger boy lost a toy dog on the beach, and to console him his father began to invent and narrate the adventures of Rover, a small dog who annoys a wizard, is turned into a toy, and is then lost on the beach by a small boy. But this is only the beginning, for Rover is found by the sand-sorcerer Psamathos Psamathides who gives him the power to move again, and sends him on a visit to the Moon, where he has many strange adventures, most notably an encounter with the White Dragon. Tolkien wrote down this story under the t.i.tle Roverandom'. Many years later he offered it to his publishers, very tentatively, as one of a number of possible successors to The Hobbit, but it was not thought suitable on that occasion, and Tolkien never offered it again.

The children's enthusiasm for Roverandom' encouraged him to write more stories to amuse them. Many of these got off to a good start but were never finished. Indeed some of them never progressed beyond the first few sentences, like the tale of Timothy t.i.tus, a very small man who is called Tim t.i.t' by his friends. Among other stories begun but soon abandoned was the tale of Tom Bombadil, which is set in the days of King Bonhedig' and describes a character who is clearly to be the hero of the tale: Tom Bombadil was the name of one of the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom; but he was a hale and hearty fellow. Four foot high in his boots he was, and three feet broad. He wore a tall hat with a blue feather, his jacket was blue, and his boots were yellow.'

That was as far as the story ever reached on paper, but Tom Bombadil was a well-known figure in the Tolkien family, for the character was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael. The doll looked very splendid with the feather in its hat, but John did not like it and one day stuffed it down the lavatory. Tom was rescued, and survived to become the hero of a poem by the children's father, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil', which was published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934. It tells of Tom's encounters with Gold-berry, the River-woman's daughter', with the Old Man Willow' which shuts him up in a crack of its bole (an idea, Tolkien once said, that probably came in part from Arthur Rackham's tree-drawings), with a family of badgers, and with a Barrow-wight', a ghost from a prehistoric grave of the type found on the Berks.h.i.+re Downs not far from Oxford. By itself, the poem seems like a sketch for something longer, and when possible successors to The Hobbit were being discussed in 1937 Tolkien suggested to his publishers that he might expand it into a more substantial tale, explaining that Tom Bombadil was intended to represent the spirit of the (vanis.h.i.+ng) Oxford and Berks.h.i.+re countryside'. This idea was not taken up by the publishers, but Tom and his adventures subsequently found their way into The Lord of the Rings.

The purchase of a car in 1932 and Tolkien's subsequent mishaps while driving it led him to write another children's story, Mr Bliss'. This is the tale of a tall thin man who lives in a tall thin house, and who purchases a bright yellow automobile for five s.h.i.+llings, with remarkable consequences (and a number of collisions). The story was lavishly ill.u.s.trated by Tolkien in ink and coloured pencils, and the text was written out by him in a fair hand, the whole being bound in a small volume. Mr Bliss' owes a little to Beatrix Potter in its ironical humour and to Edward Lear in the style of its drawings, though Tolkien's approach is less grotesque and more delicate than Lear's. Like Roverandom'

and the Bombadil poem it was shown to Tolkien's publishers in 1937, and it was received with much enthusiasm.

Preliminary arrangements were made to publish it, not so much as a successor to The Hobbit but as an entertaining stop-gap until the true sequel was ready. However its multi-coloured pictures meant that printing would be very expensive, and the publishers asked Tolkien if he would re-draw them in a simpler style. He agreed, but he could not find the time to undertake the work, and the ma.n.u.script of Mr Bliss' was consigned to a drawer, where it remained until many years later it was sold to Marquette University in America, along with the ma.n.u.scripts of Tolkien's published stories.1 The fact that Mr Bliss' was so lavishly ill.u.s.trated - was constructed indeed around the pictures - is an indication of how seriously Tolkien was taking the business of drawing and painting. He had never entirely abandoned this childhood hobby, and during his undergraduate days he ill.u.s.trated several of his own poems, using watercolours, coloured inks or pencils, and beginning to develop a style that was suggestive of his affection for j.a.panese prints and yet had an individual approach to line and colour. The war and his work interrupted him, but in about 1925 he began to draw again regularly, one of the first results being a series of ill.u.s.trations for Roverandom'. Later, during holidays at Lyme Regis in 1927 and 1928, he drew pictures of scenes from The Silmarillion. These show how clearly he visualised the landscapes in which his legends were set, for in several of the drawings the scenery of Lyme itself is absorbed into the stories and invested with mystery.

He was by now a very talented artist, although he had not the same skill at drawing figures as he had with landscapes. He was at his best when picturing his beloved trees, and like Arthur Rackham 1 Mr Bliss' was not the only composition by Tolkien owing its inspiration to motor transport. The Bovadium Fragments' (perhaps composed early in the nineteen-sixties) is a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode. (whose work he admired) he could give to twisted root and branch a sinister mobility that was at the same time entirely true to nature.

Tolkien's talents as a storyteller and an ill.u.s.trator were combined each December, when a letter would arrive for the children from Father Christmas. In 1920 when John was three years old and the family was about to move to Leeds, Tolkien had written a note to his son in shaky handwriting signed Yr loving Fr. Chr.'. From then onwards he produced a similar letter every Christmas. From simple beginnings the Father Christmas Letters' expanded to include many additional characters such as the Polar Bear who shares Father Christmas's house, the Snow Man who is Father Christmas's gardener, an elf named Ilbereth who is his secretary, snow-elves, gnomes, and in the caves beneath Father Christmas's house a host of troublesome goblins. Every Christmas, often at the last minute, Tolkien would write out an account of recent events at the North Pole in the shaky handwriting of Father Christmas, the rune-like capitals used by the Polar Bear, or the flowing script of Ilbereth. Then he would add drawings, write the address on the envelope (labelling it with such superscriptions as By gnome-carrier. Immediate haste!') and paint and cut out a highly realistic North Polar postage stamp. Finally he would deliver the letter. This was done in a variety of ways. The simplest was to leave it in the fireplace as if it had been brought down the chimney, and to cause strange noises to be heard in the early morning, which together with a snowy footprint on the carpet indicated that Father Christmas himself had called. Later the local postman became an accomplice and used to deliver the letters himself, so how could the children not believe in them? Indeed they went on believing until each in turn reached adolescence and discovered by accident or deduction that their father was the true author of the letters. Even then, nothing was said to destroy the illusion for the younger children.

Besides being entertained by their father's own stories, the Tolkien children were always provided with full nursery bookshelves. Much of their reading-matter consisted of Tolkien's own childhood favourites, such as George Macdonald's Curdie' stories and Andrew Lang's fairy-tale collections; but the nursery also housed more recent additions to children's literature, among them E. A. Wyke-Smith's The Marvellous Land of Snergs, which was published in 1927. Tolkien noted that his sons were highly amused by the Snergs, a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength'.

Tolkien himself only found the time or the inclination to read a limited amount of fiction. In general he preferred the lighter contemporary novels. He liked the stories of John Buchan, and he also read some of Sinclair Lewis's work; certainly he knew Babbitt, the novel published in 1922 about a middle-aged American businessman whose well-ordered life gradually comes off the rails.

Odd ingredients go into literary melting-pots, and both the Land of Snergs and Babbitt played a small part in The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that the former was probably an unconscious source-book: for the Hobbits, not of anything else', and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit might have been a.s.sociated with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.'

There is less mystery about the origins of another story that Tolkien wrote at some time during the nineteen-thirties, perhaps in part to amuse his children, but chiefly to please himself. This is Farmer Giles of Ham, whose territory, The Little Kingdom', is Oxfords.h.i.+re and Buckinghams.h.i.+re, and which clearly grew from the implications of the place-name Worminghall (meaning reptile-hall' or dragon-hall'), a village a few miles to the east of Oxford. The first version of the story, considerably shorter than that eventually published, is a plain tale that draws its humour from the events rather than from the narrative style. It too was offered to Tolkien's publishers as a possible successor to The Hobbit, and like its companions was considered excellent but not exactly what was wanted at that moment.

Some months later, early in 1938, Tolkien was due to read a paper to an undergraduate society at Worcester College on the subject of fairy-stories. But the paper had not been written, and as the day approached Tolkien decided to read Farmer Giles instead. When he reconsidered it, he decided that he could make some improvements, and in the rewriting that followed he turned it into a longer story with sophisticated humour. A few nights later he read it at Worcester College. I was very much surprised at the result,' he recorded afterwards. The audience was apparently not bored - indeed they were generally convulsed with mirth.' When it became apparent that the sequel to The Hobbit would not be ready for some considerable time, he offered the revised Farmer Giles to his publishers, and it was accepted with enthusiasm; but wartime delays and Tolkien's dissatisfaction with the original choice of ill.u.s.trator meant that the book did not appear until 1949, with pictures by a young artist named Pauline Diana Baynes. Her mock-medieval drawings delighted Tolkien, and he wrote of them: They are more than ill.u.s.trations, they are a collateral theme.' Miss Baynes's success with Farmer Giles led to her being chosen as ill.u.s.trator for C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories, and she later drew the pictures for Tolkien's anthology of poems and for Smith of Wootton Major, she and her husband became friends with the Tolkiens in later years.

Farmer Giles did not attract much notice at the time of its publication, and it was not until the success of The Lord of the Rings had reflected upon the sales of Tolkien's other books that it reached a wide public. At one time Tolkien considered writing a sequel to it, and he sketched the plot in some detail; it was to concern Giles's son George Worming and a page-boy named Suet, as well as re-introducing Chrysophylax the dragon, and it was to be set in the same countryside as its predecessor. But by 1945 the war had scarred the Oxfords.h.i.+re landscape that Tolkien loved so much, and he wrote to his publishers: The sequel (to Farmer Giles) is plotted but unwritten, and likely to remain so. The heart has gone out of the Little Kingdom, and the woods and plains are aerodromes and bomb-practice targets.'

Though sometimes touching on deep feelings, the short stories that Tolkien wrote for his children in the nineteen-twenties and thirties were really jeux d' esprit. His real commitment was to grander themes, both in verse and prose.

He continued to work on his long poem The Gest of Beren and Luthien' and on the alliterative verses telling the story of Turin and the dragon. In 1926 he sent these and other poems to R. W. Reynolds, who had taught him English literature at King Edward's School, and asked for his criticism. Reynolds approved of the various shorter pieces that Tolkien sent, but only gave lukewarm praise to the major mythological poems. Undeterred, and encouraged by C. S. Lewis's approval of the Beren and Luthien poem, Tolkien continued to work at them both. But though the Turin verses reached more than two thousand lines and the Gest' more than four thousand, neither poem was completed; and by the time Tolkien came to revise The Silmaril-lion (after he had written The Lord of the Rings) he had perhaps abandoned any intention of incorporating them into the published text of the cycle.

Nevertheless both poems were important in the development of the legends, particularly the Gest', which contains the fullest version of the Beren and Luthien story.

The poems were also important for Tolkien's technical development as a writer. The rhyming couplets of the early stanzas of the Gest' are occasionally monotonous in rhythm or ba.n.a.l in rhyme, but as Tolkien became more experienced in the metre the poem grew much surer, and it has many fine pa.s.sages. The Turin verses are in an alliterative measure, a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon verse form; and in them Tolkien displays great skill. This pa.s.sage describes Turin's childhood and adolescence in the elven kingdom of Doriath: Much lore he learned, and loved wisdom, but fortune followed him in few desires; oft wrong and awry what he wrought turned; what he loved he lost, what he longed for he won not; and full friends.h.i.+p he found not easily, nor was lightly loved for his looks were sad.

He was gloomy-hearted, and glad seldom for the sundering sorrow that seared his youth.

On manhood's threshold he was mighty hoi den in the wielding of weapons; and in weaving song ?

he had a minstrel's mastery; but mirth was not in it.

In adapting and modernising this ancient poetic style for his own purposes Tolkien was achieving something quite unusual and remarkably powerful. It is a pity that he wrote - or at least published -so little alliterative verse, for it suited his imagination far more than did modern rhyme-schemes.

He wrote other poems of some length during the nineteen-thirties. by no means all of them directly connected with his own mythology. One, inspired by the Celtic legends of Brittany, was Aotrou and Itroun' (Breton for Lord and Lady'), of which the earliest ma.n.u.script is dated September 1930. The poem tells the story of a childless lord who obtains a potion from an enchantress or Corrigan' (the generic Breton term for a person of fairy race). As a result of the philtre, twins are born to the lord's wife, but the Corrigan demands in payment that the lord should wed her, and his refusal has tragic consequences. Aotrou and Itroun' was published some years later by Tolkien's friend and fellow philologist Gwyn Jones, in the Welsh Review. It is in alliterative verse, and also incorporates a rhyme-scheme.

Another major poem from this period has alliteration but no rhyme. This is The Fall of Arthur', Tolkien's only imaginative incursion into the Arthurian cycle, whose legends had pleased him since childhood, but which he found too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repet.i.tive'. Arthurian stories were also unsatisfactory to him as myth in that they explicitly contained the Christian religion. In his own Arthurian poem he did not touch on the Grail but began an individual rendering of the Morte d'Arthur, in which the king and Gawain go to war in Saxon lands' but are summoned home by news of Mordred's treachery. The poem was never finished, but it was read and approved by E. V. Gordon, and by R. W. Chambers, Professor of English at London University, who considered it to be great stuff - really heroic, quite apart from its value as showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English'. It is also interesting in that it is one of the few pieces of writing in which Tolkien deals explicitly with s.e.xual pa.s.sion, describing Mordred's unsated l.u.s.t for Guinever (which is how Tolkien chooses to spell her name): His bed was barren; there black phantoms of desire unsated and savage fury in his brain had brooded till bleak morning.

But Tolkien's Guinever is not the tragic heroine beloved by most Arthurian writers; instead she is described as lady ruthless, fair as fay-woman and fell-minded, in the world walking for the woe of men.

Although The Fall of Arthur' was abandoned in the mid nineteen-thirties, Tolkien wrote as late as 1955 that he still hoped to complete it; but in the event it remained unfinished.

Once or twice he decided to move away from the mythical, legendary, and fantastic, and wrote a conventional short story for adults, in

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