The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (3 page)

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If we would picture Mabel, however, only one published photograph is available, taken November 16, 1892, in the garden of the house in Bloemfontein. It shows her at the center of a conventional Victorian family portrait, seated in a wicker chair, surrounded by a corona of relatives and servants. Arthur stands to her right, slouching with studied nonchalance in a white summer suit, the hard brim of his straw hat echoing the soft curve of his handlebar mustache. A trio of uniformed servants cluster in the background; one holds Ronald (as he was called), ten months old, looking like a plaster doll with his frilly petticoat, button eyes, and bright red mouth. Everyone seems at ease under the blazing African sun, pleased to pose in their Sunday finest. Everyone, that is, except Mabel. Something is amiss in her expression. She is dressed like the rest, in formal tropical wear: flowered hat, puff-shouldered blouse, long patterned skirt. But she sits erect, tense, her long fingers gripping the arms of her chair, her lean face turned to one side, her hawklike eyes looking quizzically toward the camera, as if watching some unwelcome thing loom up behind the photographer. Perhaps she glimpses the future, the catastrophe to come. For within a dozen years, everything in this photograph—father, mother, the Bloemfontein household, the great African adventure, the dreams of idyllic family life—would vanish, erased by exile, illness, and death, proving as ephemeral as Arthur’s boater or Mabel’s leg-of-mutton sleeves.

The dismantling of Mabel’s life commenced immediately upon her arrival in Africa. From the start, she had felt out of place in this dry, merciless land, with its racism, its stifling weather, its un-British ways, its marauding animals. Monkeys, snakes, and locusts invaded the garden and a large spider, perhaps a tarantula, bit baby Ronald. Tolkien would later deny any connection between this childhood spider bite and the spider-monsters of his fiction; yet it is tempting to imagine that this horrific creature nestled in his subconscious until it reemerged, swollen to gigantic size, as the spiders of Mirkwood in
The Hobbit
, the insatiable Shelob in
The Lord of the Rings
, and Shelob’s mother, Ungoliant, in
The Silmarillion
, the primary collection of Tolkien’s mythopoeic tales.

Above all, it was the intense heat that proved intolerable; as one blast-furnace day followed another, Mabel began to fear for her older boy’s life. By 1895 she had had enough and retreated to England with both children in tow. She moved in with her parents, pledging to return to Arthur as soon as possible. It was not to be. Mired in Bloemfontein, he fell ill with rheumatic fever, and by the following February he hovered on the brink of death. News of his illness arrived via telegram on the same day that Ronald, barely four years old, was preparing to post his first letter—his first literary production of any sort—a rapturous note to his father anticipating their reunion. Arthur, only thirty-nine, died of a hemorrhage the next day. The poignancy of hope denied is acute, as is the circumstantial intertwining of literature and tragedy, touchstones of much of Tolkien’s later work.

Mabel, fighting fate, resettled with her children in a two-story semidetached house in Sarehole, a rural community near Birmingham. This was an inspired choice. Memories of the benign hamlet, with its old mill, bogs, forests, swan ponds, and sandpits, loomed large in her elder son’s imaginative universe and would become, in time, the landscape of the Shire, the idyllic homeland of the Hobbits. Here Ronald encountered the dialects that so fascinated him as a mature philologist, local variations on the King’s English, including
gamgee
, a regional term for cotton wool, from a surgical dressing devised by the Birmingham physician Joseph Sampson Gamgee (a name that would descend by a complicated philological route to Tolkien’s hobbit hero, Sam Gamgee, as we shall see in chapter 17).

Mabel gave Ronald more than a lovely world in which to grow up; she gave him an array of fascinating tools to explore and interpret it. We know little of her own education, but she clearly valued learning and vigorously set about transmitting what she knew to Ronald. She instructed him in Latin, French, German, and the rudiments of linguistics, awakening in him a lifelong thirst for languages, alphabets, and etymologies. She taught him to draw and to paint, arts in which he would develop his own unmistakable style, primitive and compelling, Rousseau with a dash of Roerich. She passed on to him her peculiar calligraphy; he would later master traditional forms and invent his own. She tried to teach him piano, although that proved a failure. And she introduced him to children’s literature, including
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
,
The Princess and the Goblin
,
The Princess and Curdie
, and Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy tales. In George MacDonald he encountered goblins and, although he did not realize it at the time, Christian mythopoesis; in Lang’s retelling of bits of the Old Norse V
ö
lsunga saga he met F
á
fnir the dragon, a creature that excited his imagination like no other, and the prototype of Smaug of
The Hobbit
: “The dragon had the trade-mark
Of Fa
ë
rie
written plain upon him … I desired dragons with a profound desire.” It was his first baptism into the enchantments of Fa
ë
rie, an otherworldly realm just touching the fringes of ordinary life and leading, in its farthest reaches, to the outskirts of the supernatural.

Bequeathing interests and skills to offspring is a means of ensuring continuity in the face of death, and we can read in Mabel’s intense tutoring of her children a response to her husband’s early demise. She may have sensed, too, that her own life would not last long. But Mabel wished to give her children more than the metaphorical immortality of transmitted gifts; she wished to give them true eternity. This she accomplished in 1900, by bringing herself and her two boys into the Roman Catholic Church.

It is difficult for us, surveying the past from our comfortably pluralistic aerie, to grasp what Mabel’s conversion signified in England at the end of the nineteenth century. Anti-Catholicism ruled the land, the legacy of Henry VIII’s lusts, Elizabeth I’s ambitions, Pope Pius V’s machinations, and Guy Fawkes’s treason, mixing with misplaced nationalism and fear of Irish immigration. To be Catholic was, in the lurid popular understanding, to be blatantly un-English and probably a fifth columnist for the Roman pope, himself possibly the Antichrist. During the height of anti-Catholic paranoia, first in the “Catholic emancipation” debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then in the “Papal Aggression” of 1850, when the Catholic hierarchy returned to England, political cartoonists such as James Gillray and John Tenniel fanned the flames of civic alarm, and one regularly heard advice of the sort proffered by Charlotte Bront
ë
in 1842, that anyone favorable to the Catholic Church should “attend mass regularly for a time to note well the mummeries thereof also the idiotic, mercenary, aspect of
all
the priests and
then
if they are still disposed to consider Papistry in any other light than a most feeble childish piece of humbug let them turn papists at once that’s all.”

Yet against this general backdrop of patriotic bigotry, we have to envision the counterfascination exerted by the Roman Catholic tradition among a small but influential group of British intellectuals, for whom it offered an alternative England that remained united to the broad central current of Christianity flowing from Rome. Nineteenth-century British Roman Catholics, whether of recusant families or converts, included a dazzling array of names such as John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, Nicholas Wiseman, Coventry Patmore, and Augustus Pugin—to be followed, in the years after Mabel’s entry into the Church, by G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, Eric Gill, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Anscombe, and a host of others. This brilliant Catholic stream fascinated the unchurched as well; Virginia Woolf has one of her characters wonder “why, if people must have a religion, they didn’t all become Roman Catholics.”

We have no record of why Mabel decided to join the Roman church; some will read in it a longing for hierarchy or authority, perhaps a replacement for a missing husband; others will see it as a genuine conversion of mind and soul. Whatever the motive, the act was not taken lightly. She had begun as an ardent high church Anglican but soon felt herself drawn from that confession’s aesthetic splendor to the liturgy of the modest Roman Catholic church of St. Anne’s on Alcester Street, in the impoverished Digbeth district. St. Anne’s was in all respects a convert’s church, having been transformed by John Henry Newman in 1849 from a gin distillery into the first chapel and residence for his fledgling congregation. Joined by her sister May Incledon, Mabel was received into the Roman Catholic Church there in June 1900.

A further unraveling of her life instantly ensued. This time, she must have anticipated it: the Baptist Tolkiens and the Unitarian and Methodist Suffields united in furious denunciation of the conversions. Only one or two family members supported the sisters. May’s staunchly Anglican husband commanded her to renounce her new faith (she turned, instead, to Spiritualism) and severed the small allowance he had been sending Mabel. The next few years proved bitterly hard for Mabel, as she and her children moved into a succession of dreary residences, struggling to survive on the paltry remains of Arthur’s estate, the result of his amateur investments in South African mining ventures.

There were, during these dark days, a few solaces. The first was King Edward’s School, founded in 1552, a day school, one of the best in the nation, where Tolkien began his formal education, the costs underwritten initially by the handful of relatives who remained friendly to Mabel and later by academic scholarships. Another was the Birmingham Oratory, founded by Newman in 1848. Among the many benevolent Oratorians who befriended the beleaguered family, Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan (1867–1935) stands out. This bespectacled, pipe-smoking, dog-loving priest descended like a fairy godfather upon Mabel and the boys, filling their straitened lives with hope and joy. He paid regular visits to their home, vacationed with them, offered financial help and paternal counsel, and generally brightened their days with his unrestrained bearlike warmth and goodwill. In later life, Ronald would credit Father Francis with teaching him the meaning of charity and forgiveness, and in his honor he named his first child John Francis Reuel. But not even Oratorian love could stave off the doom hovering over the family, and in 1904 Mabel fell desperately ill from diabetes. There was no effective treatment—insulin would not be available for medical use until the 1920s—and on November 14, 1904, in the presence of Father Francis and May Incledon, she died.

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Leon Edel, speaking of one of Tolkien’s contemporaries, Leonard Woolf, who lost his father when he was eleven, commented that “there is no hurt among all the human hurts deeper and less understandable than the loss of a parent when one is not yet an adolescent.” Tolkien was twelve when Mabel died. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, he remembered her as a “gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith.” These notes of admiration and bitterness accompanied his memories of his mother all his life. At age seventy-three, he reiterated the theme, describing, again to Michael, her death “worn out with persecution” in “rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal.” In Tolkien’s mind, the cruel shunning that Mabel suffered after her conversion led inexorably to her fatal disease, and she thus became for him not just a beloved mother but a Job figure, a saint, and a martyr, even a type of Christ, a selfless victim whose death gave life to those whom she loved and who loved her. Mabel appears in his fiction in countless sacrificial figures, a gallery of quasi Christs: Galadriel the Elven queen, who willingly surrenders her power for the good of Middle-earth; Gandalf the wizard, who submits to death to save his companions; Aragorn the king, who puts his rightful rule and very life to the ultimate test; Arwen (and her ancestor L
ú
thien Tinuviel), who gives up her immortality for love; and the hobbits Frodo and Sam, companions in sacrifice. The bitterness of death, the sweetness of faith, the ransom to be paid in blood; thanks in large measure to Mabel’s indelible presence in his consciousness, these would become keynotes of Tolkien’s imaginative world.

Perhaps the greatest of Mabel’s legacies to Tolkien, however, was love of the Catholic Church. He became a lifelong believer, and in later years he recalled with shame those times when other pursuits—clubs, romance, art—tempted him away from prayer and Mass. He had a passionate love for the Eucharist and counseled his children to memorize important devotional prayers such as the Magnificat and the Litany of Loreto. “If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy.” In later life, he translated Catholic prayers—the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Gloria Patri, Sub Tuum Praesidium, and the Litany of Loreto—into Quenya, the High Elvish tongue of his devising. He was, as one friend summed it up, “a devout and strict old-fashioned Catholic” with a special regard for Mary and her motherly ministrations; she became for him a kind of muse, the source, he believed, of all goodness and beauty in his work. The Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter argues that after Mabel’s death, the Church became Tolkien’s new mother. Carpenter means this in the ordinary psychological sense, that the Church filled in for a missing parent, but it is true also in a deeper sense. There is nothing idiosyncratic about embracing the Church as mother; as early as the third century, St. Cyprian declared that “no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother,” a saying appended, in the 1994 Vatican-sponsored
Catechism of the Catholic Church
, to the declaration, “The Church is the mother of all believers.” Throughout his life, Tolkien would draw comfort, courage, and artistic inspiration from this second mother, who, unlike Mabel, would never die (“Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”).