The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (10 page)

In or around the same
mensis mirabilis
, Tolkien found a second wine cellar stocked with unsuspected, heady possibilities—in this instance not those of words but of pencil, ink, and watercolor. Since learning to draw under his mother’s direction, his subjects had been mostly landscapes and seascapes, many sketched or painted while on vacation in Lyme Regis or Whitby, displaying a good if stiff sense of design (his drawings never entirely escaped this architectural rigidity, reminiscent of the formal symmetries of Art Nouveau; traces exist even in his best paintings of Middle-earth). In December 1911, however, he broke lose from naturalism, beginning a series of abstract or “visionary” sketches. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, preeminent Tolkienists who have written about Tolkien’s art with great sensitivity, frequently use the latter term. Tolkien, however, was a visionary only in a very restricted sense. With one or two exceptions, most notably his 1944 vision of God’s light in Sts. Gregory & Augustine Church (see chapter 12), he did not enjoy—or suffer from—waking visions, unlike many famous Christian mystics and that earlier English mythologist, writer, and watercolorist, William Blake. Tolkien’s “visions” usually arrived in dreams, notably the recurring image of a towering wave that threatened to engulf him, from which he would awaken “gasping out of deep water,” and which he translated into fiction in the Atlantis-like drowning of the island of N
ú
menor. Other visions came to him in the same way that melody comes to a composer or metaphor to a poet, as the fruit of that mysterious artistic process we call, obscurely, inspiration.

Tolkien’s new art shared with dream imagery a remoteness from the scenes of ordinary life. Many of his pictures depict no scenery at all. They bear sometimes playful abstract titles like
Before
,
Afterwards
,
Thought
,
Grownupishness
, and
Undertenishness
, the suffixes of the last two titles lending their name to the entire group, which Tolkien called “Ishnesses.” In these images, one spies hints of the great creations to come.
Wickedness
, drawn in black and red pencil, suggests Melkor (later Morgoth, the prince of evil in Tolkien’s mythology), with its skull surmounted by innumerable eyes behind a cauldron spewing flames.
Before
, too, has the cyclopean architecture and flaming braziers of a primordial temple dedicated to death.
End of the World
is, by contrast, whimsical, with an impossibly long-legged man striding off a cliff into a swirl of sea beneath a starry sky topped by a looming sun.
Thought
discloses a third mood, neither nightmarish nor comical but monumental, with a robed figure seated outdoors on a chair or throne, head lowered, deep in meditation. Light, emanating from the head, fans across the sky. This drawing resembles Blake’s depictions of Los, archetypal poet and prophet, embodiment of the imagination—an appropriate antecedent image for a young man on the verge of unleashing his own creative daemon. One senses, in these early pictures, no organized artistic or intellectual program, no deliberate project to explore the possibilities of abstraction, simply a young mind expanding beyond the confines of realism, energetically sending out root and branch into black soil and bright sunlight.

Tolkien needed to make the same bold leap in his academic studies. Learning new languages and cultivating his own invented ones brought frissons of joy but failed to assuage his disappointed tutors or his own conviction that he could (and must) do better. Flubbing the Honour Mods had been a severe blow; the saving grace was the splendid “pure alpha” that he had earned for his exam in comparative philology. With this in hand, he successfully petitioned, with the support of his tutors and the classicist Lewis Richard Farnell, rector of Exeter, to switch into the English Honours School, with a concentration in language.

It was a brilliant move, flinging open the gates to his scholarly career. Now he could study Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse “lang. and lit.” along with the more standard fare of Chaucer and Shakespeare. He came under the influence of Rhodes Scholar Kenneth Sisam, a New Zealander who would become his tutor in Old and Middle English. Sisam was not an easygoing man, and Tolkien and he would butt heads on many occasions in subsequent decades, competing in 1925 for the Professorship in Anglo-Saxon and disputing in the 1960s over aspects of the Beowulf epic. But Sisam was a splendid scholar and Tolkien, as an undergraduate, benefited greatly from his ideas.

In the spring of 1914, Tolkien won Exeter College’s Skeat Prize for excellence in English. He spent the five-pound prize on a Welsh grammar and three books by William Morris: a translation of the Völsunga saga and two narrative poems,
The Life and Death of Jason
and
The House of the Wolfings
. Purchasing the Morris volumes proved to be another watershed, profoundly affecting Tolkien’s understanding of what literature could do. Most likely, he had been aware of Morris while still at King Edward’s School, where in 1909 the Literary Society sponsored a talk on his work, or perhaps even earlier, for Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and its neomedieval sensibility were much discussed in late Victorian and early Edwardian society and it is likely that both Tolkien and Edith, with their shared interest in calligraphy and other decorative arts, came under its spell. In Oxford, at any event, the great Pre-Raphaelite’s presence was unavoidable. Along with Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris had painted the tempera murals, now fading like old ghosts, that adorn the Oxford Union library, and his magnificent tapestry, the
Adoration of the Magi
, with its Catholic theme, elflike angel, and haunting forest backdrop, hung in the chapel of Exeter College.

Tolkien was thrilled by his purchases, in particular by
The House of the Wolfings
, with its blend of prose and poetry recounting an epic war between Goths (a Germanic people) and Romans. From it he drew nomenclature that will be familiar to his readers—in Morris’s tale, the Goths inhabit the Mark, in Mirkwood—and, more significantly, the overarching structure of a bitter clash between a bucolic, peaceful people and an imperialist military power, which would become the framework for
The Lord of the Rings
. Catholicism had already nudged him toward a belief in lost Edens and an associated love of nature as the imperfect mirror of God; Sarehole had given him faith in the moral integrity of simple agrarian folk. Morris now taught him how these values could be expressed in hauntingly beautiful, elaborately constructed fantasy fiction. Unfortunately, Morris also taught Tolkien a deliberately archaic style, filled with inverted syntax and outmoded expressions. This “heigh stile” (the expression comes from Chaucer) permeates both
The House of the Wolfings
and, to the chagrin of many of Tolkien’s readers, large portions of
The Silmarillion
and more than a few passages in
The Lord of the Rings
(“Name him not!” says Gandalf, describing his battle with the Balrog in
The Lord of the Rings
; “Long time I fell … Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone … Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him…”). Tolkien considered the neomedieval affectations of “heigh stile” essential to the atmosphere of ancient myth and legend he wished to convey. Many critics disagree, but it is worth noting that C. S. Lewis defended Morris’s archaisms, calling this approach “incomparably easier and clearer than any ‘natural’ style could be.” This defense appears in his 1939 essay collection,
Rehabilitations
; as the title suggests, Morris’s reputation was sinking at the time. But then, Lewis always enjoyed a good fight against received opinions.

Tolkien’s ability to absorb Morris’s experiments in decorative arts proved far more successful. Many of Tolkien’s sketches, especially those that Hammond and Scull term “patterns and devices”—doodles and designs on letters, envelopes, napkins, newspapers, and the borders of paintings—show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite’s exuberant ornamentation, and Tolkien’s 1960 drawing of a N
ú
menorean carpet, with red, yellow, and blue geometric symmetries, could pass for a Morris tapestry seen through a kaleidoscope.

Tolkien immediately set to work applying the lessons he had learned at Morris’s feet. In a letter to Edith in late 1914, he announced, while speaking of the tales in the Finnish epic the
Kalevala
, that “I am trying to turn one of the stories—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between.” His interest was not idle, but an attempt to supply a sorely felt need: to restore to England some remnant of its scattered and ruined mythological tradition. To a meeting of Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society on November 22, 1914, he declared his admiration for “that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries,” and added, “I would that we had more of it left.” Many years later, he would tell Auden that his legendarium (as he liked to call it, borrowing a Latinism found in medieval collections of saints’ lives) began in “an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.” Kullervo’s story, a seething stew of mass murder, revenge, involuntary servitude, incestuous seduction, and talking swords, eventually would become the tale of T
ú
rin Turambar, a key part of the
Silmarillion
mythos.

The retelling of the Kullervo tale began in October 1914. Just a few weeks before, Tolkien had had another literary epiphany with an even more momentous result. In late September, he, Hilary, and their aunt Jane had visited a farm owned by family friends in Gedling, Nottinghamshire. While there he had made a pencil-and-ink sketch of the slate-roofed, three-story farmhouse. It is a lovely but unremarkable building, yet it looms large in Tolkien’s life, for within it he wrote the first lines of what would become the seed of his mythology of Middle-earth; it was here, in a register yet dimly understood, that his imaginary cosmos first found voice. Tolkien had been reading—without much interest—the Anglo-Saxon poem
Crist
(formerly attributed to the poet Cynewulf) from the tenth-century Exeter Book, when his attention was caught by the following line, which evoked in him “a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep”:

é
ala
é
arendel, engla beorhtast
,

ofer middangeard monnum sended

Hail
É
arendel, brightest of angels

Sent unto men upon Middle-earth

The poem itself is based upon the fifth of the Latin “O” Antiphons sung at Vespers during the season of Advent, and familiar to modern churchgoers from John Mason Neale’s nineteenth-century rendition in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” But who is
É
arendel
? This mysterious Old English word looks like a proper name; Albert Cook, in his 1900 edition of
Crist
, which Tolkien would have known, translates it as “rising sun,” which would seem to point to Christ. Yet in the tenth-century Blickling Homilies, as Tolkien would note later,
eorendel
(as it is spelled there) refers to John the Baptist in his role as herald of Christ, the rising sun. The image has biblical roots (Luke 1:68–79); John the Baptist is “brightest of angels” by virtue of being the messenger (in Greek,
angelos
) of Christ, and he is the morning star—namely, Venus—by virtue of being forerunner of the dawn. Tolkien thought he could see, in these associations, the baptized version of an astral myth.

With hints like these in the back of his mind—though without conscious Christian intent, since it was mainly the sound of the words that enchanted him—Tolkien composed a poem, “The Voyage of
É
arendel the Evening Star
,
” in which
É
arendel steers his ship of burning light across the sky in pursuit of the sun, in endless round, until cold and age end his quest. The poem’s creation seems to have been a matter of serendipity, or inspiration, without much conscious design on Tolkien’s part, for when his TCBS pal G. B. Smith asked him what the poem meant, he confessed that he didn’t know but intended to find out. It took him decades to do so. Eventually “The Voyage of
É
arendel the Evening Star,” the spearhead of the entire legendarium, became part of
The Silmarillion
, telling of E
ä
rendil the Mariner, half Elf, half human, who pleads with the Valar—Tolkien’s immortal godlike beings—to show mercy upon both Elves and Men, and who rides his ship Vingilot through the sky, bringing hope to all of Middle-earth. E
ä
rendil is, as the pioneering Tolkien authority and Old English scholar Tom Shippey points out, “not a Redeemer, but an Intercessor,” thus akin to a third New Testament figure, Mary, to whom Tolkien had throughout his life a fierce devotion. The keen-eyed reader will also note, in the original lines from
Crist
that gave rise to Tolkien’s poem, the word
middangeard
, cognate with the Old Norse
Mi
ð
gar
ð
r
(Midgard), the middle “yard” where humans dwell, linked by its similar sound to the Old English
eor
ð
e
, “earth”: hence Middle-earth, which Tolkien would adopt for his mythology.

La Vita Nuova

During these years of discovery, Tolkien’s love life blossomed apace. Edith was now openly his fianc
é
e. At the stroke of midnight on his twenty-first birthday, January 3, 1913, the ban put in place by Father Francis officially ended, and immediately Tolkien wrote to Edith, still living in Cheltenham with family friends, to proclaim his undiminished, undying love. He emerges here as a young man in command, with the integrity to wait until the midnight hour and the alacrity to wait not one second more before reclaiming his heart’s desire. When Edith replied with the potentially stupefying news that during Tolkien’s enforced silence she had become engaged to someone else, he rushed to Cheltenham and won her back. He then demanded—further evidence of his newfound imperiousness—that Edith convert to Catholicism. This was not strictly necessary, according to canon law, but the Church (and Tolkien) preferred an all-Catholic wedding, and it ensured that the couple’s children would be raised in the fold. Edith agreed. At the time, she was a practicing Anglican, faithful but without fervor; according to at least one family friend, she agreed to switch altars largely in order to marry the man she loved.