The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (32 page)

In sum, the Inklings resembled an intellectual orchestra, a gathering of sparkling talents in common cause, each participant the master of his own chosen instrument, be it literature, theology, philosophy, history, or medicine. Who was the conductor? Many would say Lewis: the group usually met in his rooms and almost never met without him, although now and then other Inklings might gather in twos or threes for food or chat. Yet this view needs amendment. Tolkien, who had dominated the Kolbítars, a club that included many nascent Inklings, also wielded his baton at the Magdalen meetings, doing much to set the tone with his wit, his reading—including prolonged excerpts from
The Lord of the Rings
—and his friendly critiques; Havard particularly admired Tolkien’s way of correcting his friends, noticing that his remarks “were always made by the way, and not [with a] knock you down, take them or leave them attitude,” the latter a dig at the pugilistic Lewis. The truth is that Lewis and Tolkien served as twin pillars, elevating the Inklings to greatness; the humble, welcoming, always genial Warnie was the necessary third support, providing balance and stability.

By Warnie’s account, each meeting began in the same way:

The ritual of an Inklings was unvarying. When half a dozen or so had arrived, tea would be produced, and then when pipes were well alight Jack would say, “well, has nobody got anything to read us?” Out would come a manuscript, and we would settle down to sit in judgement upon it—real unbiased judgement, too, since we were no mutual admiration society: praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work—or even not-so-good work—was often brutally frank. To read to the Inklings was a formidable ordeal.

Modest as usual, Warnie neglects to mention his own role as de facto host, greeting new arrivals, taking hats and coats, serving drinks. His report underscores, however, that first and foremost the Inklings was a literary club, with discussion frequently addressing the sort of technical problems any writer runs into, along with the intellectual merits or demerits of the work under analysis.

Apart from the ritual beginning, the Inklings had “no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections … Proceedings neither began nor terminated at any fixed hour, although there was a tacit agreement that ten-thirty was as late as one could decently arrive.” As Lewis recalled, “the talk might turn in almost any direction, and certainly skipped ‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe’” while always featuring “the cut and parry of prolonged, fierce, masculine argument and ‘the rigour of the game.’” Everyone had his quirk. Dyson would interrupt at will. Coghill excelled at puns; put off by H. G. Wells’s didacticism, he declared that Wells had “sold his birthright for a pot of message.” Lewis quoted long passages effortlessly, utilizing almost the entire canon of Western literature to hammer home his points. Tolkien danced from one idea to the next, nimble as a bird. “His whole manner was elusive rather than direct,” said Havard. “The word ‘flighty’ crosses my mind in connection with Tolkien. It’s misleading, because I don’t mean it in the ordinary sense at all. But he would hop from subject to subject, in an elusive sort of way.” Lewis summed up the meetings in this way: “We smoked, talked, argued, and drank together.”

His list omits one key activity. The Inklings, as recounted above, also read works in progress to one another. A partial listing of writings read aloud, in whole or in part, would include Lewis’s
Perelandra
,
That Hideous Strength
,
The Great Divorce
,
The Problem of Pain
,
Miracles
, and
The Screwtape Letters
, Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
, Charles Williams’s
All Hallows’ Eve
, Warnie’s
The Splendid Century
, medical papers by Havard, and Owen Barfield’s verse drama
Medea
.

And there is one more book that the Inklings may have heard early in their history (clear evidence is lacking either way): Tolkien’s first full-length novel,
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.

The Hobbit

On February 4, 1933, Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves:

Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written … Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny—it is so exactly like what we wd. both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry. Whether it is really
good
(I think it is until the end) is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.

The “children’s story” to which Lewis refers is, unmistakably
, The Hobbit
, Tolkien’s classic children’s fantasy and the prelude to
The Lord of the Rings
.

The Hobbit
belonged, at the outset, to the endless stream of tales Tolkien invented to beguile his restless boys, stories like
Roverandom
and
Mr. Bliss
or the purely silly adventures of “Bill Stickers” and “Major Road Ahead.” Invented on the spot and crafted in the writing, these stories were intended at first solely for the family’s enjoyment, much like the annual Father Christmas letters. Composing for his own children proved to be a valuable exercise, a sine qua non for
The Hobbit
and for the high fantasy of
The Lord of the Rings
. It freed Tolkien to experiment with world making without worrying about what the public might think and without having, for the time being, to meet the high standards of consistency he demanded of himself where his serious mythology was concerned.

Favorite books by other authors also helped to prepare the way for
The Hobbit
, among them George MacDonald’s Curdie books with their mountain strongholds and perfectly realized goblins, and Edward A. Wyke-Smith’s 1927
The Marvellous Land of Snergs
, whose faintly preposterous, surprisingly resilient, perpetually feasting heroes, “only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength,” lead their young human friends on a series of perilous adventures.

No one really knows—or at least scholars cannot agree—when Tolkien first began to write down
The Hobbit.
The most that can be affirmed with confidence is that he commenced no later than the summer of 1930, possibly as early as the summer of 1926, and that he worked at it on and off for as long as six and a half years, in whatever hours he could carve out from lecturing, tutoring, advising, grading, agitating for the reform of the English syllabus, and other creative and scholarly work. Beyond that, though a raft of Tolkien experts have combed all the evidence, it is impossible to reconcile the varying accounts. John and Michael remembered sitting in their father’s study at 22 Northmoor Road and hearing him tell the story during long Christmas evenings beginning in 1926 or 1927, and Christopher wrote a letter to Father Christmas in December 1937, saying of
The Hobbit
that his father “wrote it ages ago, and read it to John, Michael, and me in our winter ‘reads’ after tea in the evening…” Tolkien believed that he first told his sons the story after they moved, in January 1930, to the large house at 20 Northmoor Road. It was there, on a summer day that year, as Tolkien later recalled, that he found himself scribbling “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a blank page of a School Certificate paper he was grading. That precious piece of paper has not survived. Whether or not Tolkien’s memory is reliable in this instance, his recollection illustrates his sense of being the discoverer rather than the manufacturer of his secondary world. Like Lewis, who said that Narnia came to him by way of a mental picture of a faun with an umbrella, Tolkien was convinced that genuine creative work originated somewhere beyond the individual creator’s conscious mind. At first he had no idea what a hobbit was or where it would lead him, but he was more than willing to be led. He had, as we have seen, a Romantic conception of artistic inspiration as sheerly
other
at its source, and he would build upon that conception, as many fantasy writers before and after him had done and would do, by casting himself as the mere editor or compiler of inherited texts and tales. Bilbo’s memoir,
There and Back Again, A Hobbit’s Holiday
, was the real source of
The Hobbit
, we are told; eventually Tolkien would extend this conceit into an increasingly complex scheme of serendipitously discovered, imperfectly compiled and edited, vast yet tantalizingly incomplete chronicles and florilegia of worlds and times and works long past.

As to the word “hobbit,” it’s not unreasonable to suppose, as Tolkien believed, that it did indeed just pop into his mind. Tolkien scholars have suggested a host of possible influences, from the rhyming but rather unlikely “Babbitt” (the bourgeois antihero of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel by that name), “habit” (as in “creature of”), and “rabbit” (an association Tolkien disliked), to an assortment of goblins and sprites, including “hobs,” “hobthrusts,” “hobyahs,” “hobbity-hoy,” “hobgoblin,” “hobyah,” “hubbit,” and the like. In 1977, a single instance of “hobbit” was discovered, buried deep in a long list of preternatural beings native to northern England, in a two-volume collection of folklore studies published in 1895. But hobbits are not preternatural beings—they are a branch of the human family, bearing no relation, Tolkien insisted, to spirits or to “fairy rabbits.” The existence of “hobbit” on a nineteenth-century folklorist’s word list demonstrates at most that Tolkien had an unconscious fully stocked with the shapes and sounds of early Germanic nomenclature; as Tom Shippey points out, it tells us very little about Tolkien’s creative process. Tolkien “had been inside language,” as Lewis put it, and could intuit where others could only laboriously reconstruct. So it was right, when “hobbit” made it into the
Oxford English Dictionary
, Second Supplement, that it should arrive naked, sans real-world etymology, as an artifact of Tolkien’s imagination
.

Several scholars have labored mightily to reconstruct the stages by which Tolkien created
The Hobbit
. We now know that in its earliest form, which survives as a six-page handwritten fragment and a twelve-page typescript/manuscript in the Tolkien papers at Marquette University,
The Hobbit
is a comic children’s fairy tale centering on the adventures of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who lives in comfortable lodgings at Bag End, Hobbiton Hill (a.k.a. “the Hill”), overlooking the village of Hobbiton in the imaginary land of the Shire. Like all hobbits, Mr. Baggins is a good-natured fellow. Somewhat smaller than a dwarf, beardless, round in the middle and hairy on the feet, he favors bright clothing, good company, cozy surroundings, and frequent meals, and is thoroughly ordinary and unmagical. Mr. Baggins is well-off and respected by his neighbors except for a touch of queerness he inherited from his mother’s side of the family, the notorious Tooks, who claim fairy folk among their ancestry and exhibit a certain adventurous streak.

The Tookish element in Bilbo’s nature lies dormant until a wandering wizard (known as Gandalf in later versions), a friend of the elder Tooks and master of fireworks, invites thirteen dwarves to a tea party under Mr. Baggins’s roof. There Bilbo is persuaded, through a combination of flattery and scorn, to help the dwarves avenge the destruction by a dragon of their treasure trove and ancestral homeland under the Lonely Mountain. This leads to a series of disconnected adventures, in which he encounters Elves (notably the wise Elrond of Rivendell), trolls (who speak with Cockney accents), goblins and wolflike Wargs, a were-bear named Beorn, the wretched Gollum skulking in deep caverns, giant spiders, human beings from a mercantile town of faded splendor, and a crafty, treasure-hoarding dragon.

Tolkien borrowed the names for the dwarves from the
Dvergatal
(dwarf list), a section of the Old Norse Eddic poem
V
ö
lusp
á
, which mentions Durin, Dvalin, Dain, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Thrain, Thorin, Fili, Kili, Eikinskjaldi (Oakenshield)—and Gandalf. In the earliest version of
The Hobbit
, Gandalf is the chief dwarf, while the wizard bears the unpleasant name of Bladorthin (drawn from Sindarin, Tolkien’s invented language for the Grey Elves). The dragon carries the vaguely Welsh name of Pryftan, revised in later versions to Smaug, from the Old English
sm
ú
gan
, to squeeze through a hole or “worm” one’s way in (“a low philological jest,” according to Tolkien, who extended the jest with his fanciful etymology for “hobbit,” from
hol-bytla
, “hole-dweller”). Bilbo Baggins is, from the very beginning, the inveterately bourgeois hobbit and reluctant burglar who by luck and ingenuity survives a series of unlooked-for adventures and, with nerves steeled by the possession of an invisibility ring, learns to live up to his burglar’s calling. Tolkien’s first plan—until he thought better of it—was to have Bilbo be the dragon-slayer, plunging his little sword into the sleeping beast’s chest, just as Sigurd does to F
á
fnir, the very Smaug-like dragon of the Norse Sigurd lays. In the scuttling of this plan, the Bilbo we know fully emerges: Tookish enough to engage in a battle of wits with a loquacious dragon, humble enough to stand aside while a human king strikes the death blow; seeking, in the end, not glory or riches but general well-being and a chance to retire safely to his armchair with his fourteenth share of the profits in hand.

Tolkien’s evolving conception of Bilbo was a watershed in his approach to storytelling. The glorious, solemn, violent, single-handed exploits of ancient Germanic heroes had weighed on his mind throughout the six or seven years during which he composed and revised his tale. Like the
Beowulf
poet, he wished to honor that heroic past, celebrating its memory while subtly Christianizing it. But Tolkien went a step further than his predecessor. While Beowulf is the Germanic hero transposed to a Christian key, preserving the pagan glory-seeking ethos with less swagger and self-absorption than his predecessors, Bilbo initiates a new kind of a hero altogether, exalted because first humbled, yet never exalted too far above his fellows. Tolkien came to realize that hobbits had given him a way to portray heroes “more praiseworthy than the professionals,” ordinary beings whose ennoblement epitomized, as he would explain in a letter to W. H. Auden, the
exaltavit humiles
theme (“He lifted up the lowly,” a reference to the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the Gospel according to Luke). Beowulf was a figure of sacrificial nobility overshadowed by fate, Bilbo a creature of ordinary decency who would sacrifice his homely pleasures when necessary yet return to them—“there and back again”—rejoicing in the kettle on the hearth and the tobacco jar by the hand, embracing a life, though forever touched by a certain queerness, in which he could reasonably expect to remain perfectly content.