J. R. R. Tolkien

The membership of this curious and unofficial body fluctuated a little, but it soon achieved a constant nucleus in the persons of Tolkien, Wiseman, and Robert Quilter Gilson. ‘R. Q.’ had inherited from his father a lively face and a quick brain, but perhaps in reaction to the paternal enthusiasm for scientific invention he devoted his private energies to drawing and design, at which he displayed a talent. He was quiet-spoken but witty, fond of Renaissance painting and the eighteenth century. Here his tastes and expertise contrasted with those of the other two. Wiseman was knowledgeable about natural sciences and music; he had become an excellent mathematician and an amateur composer. ‘John Ronald’, as they called Tolkien, was versed in Germanic languages and philology, and had immersed himself thoroughly in Northern writings. Yet common to these three enthusiastic schoolboys was a thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek literature; and from this balance of similar and dissimilar tastes, shared and unshared knowledge, friendship grew.

Tolkien’s contribution to the ‘T.C.B.S.’, as they came to call it, reflected the wide range of reading he had already encompassed. He delighted his friends with recitations from Beowulf, the Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and recounted horrific episodes from the Norse Völsungasaga, with a passing jibe at Wagner whose interpretation of the myths he held in contempt. These erudite performances in no way struck his friends as odd; indeed, in Wiseman’s words, ‘the T.C.B.S. accepted it as yet another instance of the fact that the T.C.B.S. itself was odd’. Perhaps it was; though such coteries were (and are) not uncommon among well-educated adolescents, who are going through a stage of enthusiastic intellectual discovery.

Later a fourth member was added to the group. This was Geoffrey Bache Smith, a year younger than Gilson and nearly three years junior to Tolkien. He was not a classicist like the others, but came from the Modern side of the school. He lived with his brother and their widowed mother in West Bromwich and possessed what his friends considered to be a Midland wit. The T.C.B.S. took him into its ranks partly for this and partly because he had a qualification all too rare at King Edward’s: he was knowledgeable about English literature, especially poetry; indeed he himself was a practising poet of some competence. Under the influence of ‘G.B.S.’ the T.C.B.S. began to wake up to the significance of poetry – as indeed Tolkien was already doing.

Only two masters at King Edward’s made any serious attempt to teach English literature. One was George Brewerton and the other was R. W. Reynolds. Once a literary critic on a London journal, ‘Dickie’ Reynolds tried to instil into his pupils some idea of taste and style. He was not particularly successful with Ronald Tolkien, who preferred Latin and Greek poetry to Milton and Keats. But Reynolds’s lessons may have had something to do with the fact that when he was eighteen Tolkien began tentatively to write verse. He did not write much, and it was not very good, certainly no better than the average juvenile efforts of the time. Indeed, there was only one sign of anything even faintly unlikely, and that came in July 1910 when he wrote a descriptive piece about a forest scene, entitled ‘Wood-sunshine’. It included these lines:

Come sing ye light fairy things tripping so gay,

Like visions, like glinting reflections of joy

All fashion’d of radiance, careless of grief,

O’er this green and brown carpet; nor hasten away.

O! come to me! dance for me! Sprites of the wood,

O! come to me! Sing to me once ere ye fade!

Fairy spirits dancing on a woodland carpet seem a strange choice of subject for a rugger-playing youth of eighteen who had a strong taste for Grendel and the dragon Fafnir. Why should Tolkien want to write about them?

J. M. Barrie may have had a little to do with it. In April 1910 Tolkien saw Peter Pan at a Birmingham theatre, and wrote in his diary: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E. had been with me.’ But perhaps of more importance was his enthusiasm for the Catholic mystic poet Francis Thompson. By the end of his school career he was familiar with Thompson’s verse, and later he became something of an expert on him. In ‘Wood-sunshine’ there is a distinct resemblance to an episode in the first part of Thompson’s ‘Sister Songs’ where the poet sees first a single elf and then a swarm of woodland sprites in the glade; when he moves, they vanish. It may be that this was a source of Tolkien’s interest in such things. Whatever their origins, dancing elves were to appear many times in his early poems.

His principal concern during 1910 was to work hard in preparation for a second attempt at the Oxford scholarship. He put in as many hours of private study as he could manage, but there were numerous distractions, not least Rugby football. He spent many afternoons on the muddy school sports ground in Eastern Road, from which there was a long ride home, often in the dark with the oil-lamp flickering on the back of his bicycle. Rugby sometimes led to injuries: he broke his nose in one match, and it never entirely regained its original shape; on another occasion he cut his tongue, and though the wound healed satisfactorily he later ascribed to it much of his indistinctness of speech. (Though in truth he was known as an indistinct speaker before he cut his tongue, and his poor articulation was really due to having too much to say rather than to experiencing any physical difficulty in saying it. He could and did recite poetry with the greatest clarity.) He was also spending a good deal of time working at languages, both historical and invented. In the Lent term of 1910 he delivered to the First Class at King Edward’s a lecture with the weighty title: ‘The Modern Languages of Europe – Derivations and Capabilities’. It took three one-hour lessons to read, and even then the master in charge stopped him before he could reach the ‘Capabilities’. He also devoted much time to the Debating Society. There was a custom at King Edward’s of holding a debate entirely in Latin, but that was almost too easy for Tolkien, and in one debate when taking the role of Greek Ambassador to the Senate he spoke entirely in Greek. On another occasion he astonished his schoolfellows when, in the character of a barbarian envoy, he broke into fluent Gothic; and on a third occasion he spoke in Anglo-Saxon. These activities occupied many hours, and he could not say that he had really spent long enough preparing for the scholarship. Nevertheless he set out for Oxford in December 1910 with rather more confidence in his chances.

This time he was successful. On 17 December 1910 he learnt that he had been awarded an Open Classical Exhibition to Exeter College. The result was not as pleasing as it might have been, for he was sufficiently accomplished to have won a valuable scholarship, and this Exhibition (a slightly inferior award) was worth only sixty pounds a year. However it was no mean achievement, and with the aid of a school-leaving bursary from King Edward’s and additional help from Father Francis it would be possible for him to go up to Oxford.

Now that his immediate future was assured he was no longer under pressure in his school-work. But there was still plenty to occupy him in his final terms at King Edward’s. He became a prefect, Secretary of the Debating Society, and Football Secretary. He read a paper to the school Literary Society on Norse Sagas, illustrating it with readings in the original language. And at about this time he discovered the Finnish Kalevala or Land or Heroes, the collection of poems which is the principal repository of Finland’s mythology. Not long afterwards he wrote appreciatively of ‘this strange people and these new gods, this race of unhypocritical lowbrow scandalous heroes’, adding ‘the more I read of it, the more I felt at home and enjoyed myself’. He had discovered the Kalevala in W. H. Kirby’s Everyman translation, and he determined to find an edition in the original Finnish as soon as possible.

The summer term of 1911 was his last at King Edward’s. It ended as was usual with the performance of a Greek play with the choruses set to music-hall tunes. This time the choice was Aristophanes’ The Peace, in which Tolkien took the part of Hermes. Afterwards (another King Edward’s custom) the National Anthem was sung in Greek, and then the curtain dropped on his school career. ‘The school-porter was sent by waiting relatives to find me,’ he recalled years later. ‘He reported that my appearance might be delayed. “Just now,” he said, “he’s the life and soul of the party.” Tactful. In fact, having just taken part in a Greek play, I was clad in a himation and sandals, and was giving what I thought a fair imitation of a frenzied Bacchic dance.’ But suddenly it was all over. He had loved his school, and now he hated leaving it. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘like a young sparrow kicked out of a high nest.’

In the summer holiday that followed, he made a journey to Switzerland. He and his brother Hilary were among a party organised by a family named Brookes-Smith, on whose Sussex farm Hilary was now working, having left school early to take up agriculture. There were about a dozen travellers: the Brookes-Smith parents, their children, Ronald and Hilary Tolkien and their Aunt Jane (now widowed), and one or two unattached schoolmistresses who were friends of Mrs Brookes-Smith. They reached Interlaken and set out, walking. Fifty-six years later Ronald recalled their adventures:

‘We went on foot carrying great packs practically all the way from Interlaken, mainly by mountain paths, to Lauterbrunnen, and so to Mürren and eventually to the head of the Lauterbrunnenthal in a wilderness of morains. We slept rough – the men-folk – often in hayloft or cowbyre, since we were walking by map and avoided roads and never booked, and after a meagre breakfast we fed ourselves in the open. We must then have gone eastward over the two Scheidegge to Grindelwald, with Eiger and Münch on our right, and eventually reached Meiringen. I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue.

‘We reached Brig on foot, a mere memory of noise: then a network of trams that screeched on their rails for it seemed at least twenty hours of the day. After a night of that we climbed up some thousands of feet to a “village” at the foot of the Aletsch glacier, and there spent some nights in a châlet inn under a roof and in beds (or rather under them: the bett being a shapeless bag under which you snuggled).

‘One day we went on a long march with guides up the Aletsch glacier – when I came near to perishing. We had guides but either the effects of the hot summer were beyond their experience, or they did not much care, or we were late in starting. Anyway at noon we were strung out in file along a narrow track with a snow-slope on the right going up to the horizon, and on the left a plunge down into a ravine. The summer of that year had melted away much snow, and stones and boulders were exposed that (I suppose) were normally covered. The heat of the day continued the melting and we were alarmed to see many of them starting to roll down the slope at gathering speed: anything from the size of oranges to large footballs, and a few much larger. They were whizzing across our path and plunging into the ravine. They started slowly, and then usually held a straight line of descent, but the path was rough and one had also to keep an eye on one’s feet. I remember the party just in front of me (an elderly schoolmistress) gave a sudden squeak and jumped forward as a large lump of rock shot between us. About a foot at most before my unmanly knees.

‘After this we went on into Valais, and my memories are less clear; though I remember our arrival, bedraggled, one evening in Zermatt and the lorgnette stares of the French bourgeoises dames. We climbed with guides up to a high hut of the Alpine Club, roped (or I should have fallen into a snow-crevasse), and I remember the dazzling whiteness of the tumbled snow-desert between us and the black horn of the Matterhorn some miles away.’

Before setting off on the return journey to England, Tolkien bought some picture postcards. Among them was a reproduction of a painting by a German artist, J. Madlener. It is called Der Berggeist, the mountain spirit, and it shows an old man sitting on a rock under a pine tree. He has a white beard and wears a wide-brimmed round hat and a long cloak. He is talking to a white fawn that is nuzzling his upturned hands, and he has a humorous but compassionate expression; there is a glimpse of rocky mountains in the distance. Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: ‘Origin of Gandalf’.

The travelling-party returned to England early in September. Back in Birmingham, Tolkien packed his possessions. Then at the end of the second week in October he accepted a generous lift from his old schoolmaster ‘Dickie’ Reynolds, who owned a motor car, and was driven to Oxford for the start of his first term.

CHAPTER V OXFORD

Already as the car bowled into Oxford he had decided that he would be happy there. This was a city that he could love and revere after the squalor and the drabness of Birmingham. Admittedly, to the eyes of a casual observer his own college, Exeter, was not the loveliest in the University. Its insipid frontage by George Gilbert Scott and its chapel, a tasteless copy of the Sainte Chapelle, were in truth no more remarkable than Barry’s mock-gothic school in Birmingham. But a few yards away was the Fellows’ Garden where the tall silver birch rose above the roof-tops and the plane and horse-chestnut stretched their branches over the wall into Brasenose Lane and Radcliffe Square. And to Ronald Tolkien it was his own college, his home, the first real home he had known since his mother’s death. At the foot of his staircase was his name painted on a board, and up the uneven wooden steps with the broad black banister were his rooms, a bedroom and a plain but handsome sitting-room looking down to the narrow Turl Street. It was perfection.

The majority of undergraduates at Oxford in 1911 were from prosperous upper-class families. Many of them were members of the aristocracy. It was for this class of young man that the University (at this time) primarily catered; hence the comparatively luxurious lifestyle, with ‘scouts’ (college servants) waiting on undergraduates in their rooms. But besides the rich and aristocratic there was quite a different group of students: the ‘poor scholars’ who if not actually poor did not come from rich families, and who could only come to the university thanks to financial aid from scholarships. The first group did not always make life pleasant for the second, and had Tolkien (as a scholar from a middle-class background) found himself at one of the more fashionable colleges, he would probably have been the victim of a good deal of snobbery. By contrast, and fortunately for him, there was no such tradition of social distinction at Exeter College.

Yet it was as well for Tolkien that among the second-year men at his college were a couple of Catholics, who sought him out and made sure that he settled in. After that, he made friends quickly, though he had to be careful about money, for he only had a tiny income, and it was not easy to live economically in a society designed for the tastes of the rich. His ‘scout’ brought breakfast to his rooms every morning, and this could be restricted to a frugal meal of toast and coffee; but there was a tradition of entertaining one’s friends to breakfast, and this demanded that something more substantial should be provided at one’s own expense. Lunch was a mere ‘commons’ of bread, cheese, and beer, again brought to his rooms by the scout; while dinner, taken formally in Hall, was not an expensive meal; but it was pleasant at dinner to accept an offer of beer or wine from one’s friends, and of course this gesture had to be returned. When the ‘battel’ or college account was presented for payment each Saturday morning it could be unpleasantly high. Then there were clothes to be bought, and a few pieces of furniture to be found for his rooms, for the college provided only the bare necessities. The cost soon mounted, and although Oxford tradesmen were accustomed to allowing almost unlimited credit they had to be paid in the end. After a year Tolkien wrote that he had ‘a good few bills unaccounted for’, and added: ‘Money matters are not very cheerful.’

He had soon thrown himself wholeheartedly into university activities. He played rugger, though he did not become a leading figure in the college team. He did not row, for that sport above all at Oxford was the preserve of public-school men, but he joined the college Essay Club and the Dialectical Society. He also took part in the Stapeldon, the college debating society; and for good measure he started his own club. It was called the Apolausticks (‘those devoted to self-indulgence’) and it was chiefly composed of freshmen like himself. There were papers, discussions, and debates, and there were also large and extravagant dinners. It was one degree more sophisticated than the teas in the school library, but it was an expression of the same instinct that had helped to create the T.C.B.S. Indeed Tolkien was at his happiest in groups of cronies where there was good talk, plenty of tobacco (he was now firmly dedicated to a pipe, with occasional excursions into expensive cigarettes), and male company.

At Oxford the company had to be male. Admittedly there were a number of women students attending lectures, but they lived in ladies’ colleges, grim enclaves on the outskirts of the city; and they had to be severely chaperoned whenever they approached a young man. In any case the men really preferred each other’s company. The majority of them were fresh from the male preserves of the public school and they gladly accepted the masculine tone of Oxford.

They also used among themselves a curious slang, which converted breakfast to brekker, lecture to lekker, the Union to the Ugger, and a sing-song and a practical joke to a sigger-sogger and a pragger-jogger. Tolkien adopted this manner of speech, and he also joined enthusiastically in the Town versus Gown ‘rags’ that were popular at the time. Here is his account of a not untypical evening’s entertainment:

‘At ten to nine we heard a distant roar of voices and knew that there was something on foot so we dashed out of College and were in the thick of the fun for two hours. We “ragged” the town and the police and the proctors all together for about an hour. Geoffrey and I “captured” a bus and drove it up to Cornmarket making various unearthly noises followed by a mad crowd of mingled varsity and “townese”. It was chockfull of undergrads before it reached the Carfax. There I addressed a few stirring words to a huge mob before descending and removing to the “maggers memugger” or the Martyr’s Memorial where I addressed the crowd again. There were no disciplinary consequences of all this!’

This kind of behaviour, noisy, brash, and boorish, was more common among the upper-class undergraduates than among the ‘poor scholars’ like Tolkien, the majority of whom avoided such pranks and devoted themselves to their studies; but Tolkien was too sociable to be left out of anything lively that was happening. Partly as a result, he was not doing much work.

He was reading Classics, and he had to go to regular lectures and tutorials, but Exeter College had no resident classical tutor in his first two terms, and by the time the post was filled (by E. A. Barber, a good scholar but a dry teacher) Tolkien had got into slack ways. By now he was bored with Latin and Greek authors and was far more excited by Germanic literature. He had no interest in lectures on Cicero and Demosthenes and was glad to escape to his rooms where he could go on working at his invented languages. Yet there was one area of the syllabus that interested him. For his special subject he had chosen Comparative Philology, and this meant that he attended classes and lectures given by the extraordinary Joseph Wright.

Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology. He had been employed in a woollen-mill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and rising again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a night-school in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition. When he was twenty-one he decided to use his savings to finance a term’s study at a German university, so he took a boat to Antwerp and walked stage by stage to Heidelberg, where he became interested in philology. So this former mill-hand studied Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old English, eventually taking a doctorate. Returning to England he established himself in Oxford, where he was soon appointed Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology. He could afford the lease of a small house in Norham Road, where he engaged a housekeeper. He lived with the native economy of a true Yorkshireman: he used to drink beer which he bought in a small barrel, but he thought that it went too quickly, so he arranged with Sarah the housekeeper that she should buy it and he should pay for each glass as he consumed it. He continued to work without ceasing, beginning to write a series of language primers, among which was the Gothic book that proved such a revelation to Tolkien. Most important of all, he began his English Dialect Dictionary that was eventually published in six huge volumes. He himself had never lost his Yorkshire accent, and he remained fluent in the dialect of his native village. Nightly he sat up into the small hours working. His house was semi-detached, and in the other half of the building lived Dr Neubauer, Reader in Rabbinical Literature. Neubauer’s eyes were bad and he could not work by artificial light. When Joe Wright went to bed at dawn he would knock on the wall to wake his neighbour, calling out ‘Good morning!’, and Neubauer would reply ‘Good night!’

Wright married a former pupil. Two children were born to them, but both died in childhood. Nevertheless the Wrights carried on a stoic and lively existence in a huge house built to Joe’s design in the Banbury Road. In 1912 Ronald Tolkien came to Wright as a pupil, and ever afterwards remembered ‘the vastness of Joe Wright’s dining-room table, when I sat alone at one end learning the elements of Greek philology from glinting glasses in the further gloom’. Nor was he ever likely to forget the huge Yorkshire teas given by the Wrights on Sunday afternoons, when Joe would cut gargantuan slices from a heavyweight plum cake, and Jack the Aberdeen terrier would perform his party trick of licking his lips noisily when his master pronounced the Gothic word for fig-tree, smakka-bagms.

As a teacher, Wright communicated to Tolkien his huge enthusiasm for philology, the subject that had raised him from penniless obscurity. Wright was always a demanding teacher, which was just what Tolkien needed. He had begun to feel a little superior to his fellow-classicists, with his wide-ranging knowledge of linguistics. But here was somebody who could tell him that he had a long way to go. At the same time Joe Wright encouraged him to show initiative. Hearing that Tolkien had an embryonic interest in Welsh, he advised him to follow it up – though he gave that advice in a characteristically Yorkshire manner: ‘Go in for Celtic, lad; there’s money in it.’

Tolkien followed this advice, though not exactly in the way that Joe Wright had intended. He managed to find books of medieval Welsh, and he began to read the language that had fascinated him since he saw a few words of it on coal-trucks. He was not disappointed; indeed he was confirmed in all his expectations of beauty. Beauty: that was what pleased him in Welsh; the appearance and sound of the words almost irrespective of their meaning. He once said: ‘Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is “beautiful” ‘, especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.’ Tolkien was so enthusiastic about Welsh that it is surprising that he did not visit Wales during his undergraduate days. But in a way this characterised his life. Though he studied the ancient literature of many countries he visited few of them, often through force of circumstance but perhaps partly through lack of inclination. And indeed the page of a medieval text may be more potent than the modern reality of the land that gave it birth.