The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (33 page)

As Lewis was among the first to note, and as Tolkien himself acknowledged, the atmosphere of
The Hobbit
changed in midstream “from fairy-tale to the noble and high” just as Tolkien changed, in midcourse, his conception of how one ought to write for children. The earlier chapters are peppered with silly props and pratfalls, as well as chatty parenthetical asides by the narrator (“And what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall without a word of explanation?”), that Tolkien regretted but never managed entirely to remove in the process of revision. Nor was he able to give the secondary world of
The Hobbit
the consistency that he felt a work of mythic stature ought to possess. The earliest drafts mention lands as distant as the Gobi Desert and objects as improbable as popguns, train whistles, and tomatoes; even in revision, anachronisms remain.

Yet the anachronisms are not without value. The hobbits are meant to seem parochially modern in their customs and outlook. One easily pictures Bilbo ensconced in the Bird and Baby, exchanging war stories over a pint, or reading drafts of his memoir,
There and Back Again, A Hobbit’s Holiday
, in the frayed comfort of Lewis’s Magdalen digs. It is an essential effect of Tolkien’s art that one should feel the strangeness of being pulled back from the familiar modern world into the archaic North, with its Mirkwood (Old Norse Myrkviðr) and Misty Mountains. It is this anachronism, this bridging of worlds—ours with the archaic past—that gives the story its power to enchant and to disturb.

Undigested elements from
The Silmarillion
, which are especially numerous in the earliest drafts, suggest that
The Hobbit
was, from the beginning, linked, though by no means integrated, with that never-ending, interlocking chain of myths. Tolkien was of two minds about how far to press and how openly to acknowledge these links
.
Now and then he dropped hints that
The Hobbit
was based on
The Silmarillion
, but more often he was at pains to insist that
The Hobbit
began as a children’s story unrelated to
The Silmarillion
, that as time went on it was drawn into his mythology—or, rather, invaded by it—and that it was only under the pressure of creating a sequel that he labored to bridge the gap.

He sent the manuscript around to friends and sympathetic colleagues, often with a self-deprecating note about how the book came to be written and accepted by Allen & Unwin for publication. To R. W. Chambers, professor of English at University College London, he said that the whole thing was an accident; he had written the story for his children, and an employee of his publisher happened to discover it “lying about in a nunnery” (of the Holy Child Sisters at Cherwell Edge). The first official reader’s report came from Stanley Unwin’s ten-year-old son Rayner, a precocious critic:

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit-hole and
never
went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins and wargs at last they got to the lonley mountain; Smaug, the dragon who gawreds it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home—rich!

This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.

Surely it was not lost on Tolkien that a ten-year-old reader saw the book as suitable for five-to-nine-year-olds. Better to downplay the
Silmarillion
elements and characterize
The Hobbit
as a don’s folly, lightly tossed off, than to expose his whole mythopoeic project to misunderstanding or ridicule. If
The Hobbit
failed, at least it need not take
The Silmarillion
down with it.

The Hobbit
was published in September 1937, lavishly furnished with Tolkien’s illustrations, to healthy sales and immediate (if not universal) critical acclaim. R. W. Chambers provided an ecstatically positive blurb. The novelist Richard Hughes, in a glowing review for the
New Statesman and Nation
, observed that Tolkien’s “wholly original story of adventure among goblins, elves, and dragons, instead of being a
tour-de-force
, a separate creation of his own, gives rather the impression of a well-informed glimpse into the life of a wide other-world; a world wholly real, and with a quite matter-of-fact, supernatural natural-history of its own.” Lewis, now that he had heard and read the finished work, with a more fully realized “there and back again” plot than the first version he had seen, was convinced that indeed it
was
really good and said so in an unsigned review in
The Times Literary Supplement
on October 2:

The publishers claim that “The Hobbit,” though very unlike “Alice,” resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own—a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with “Alice,” “Flatland,” “Phantastes,” “The Wind in the Willows.”

Lewis was also the author of the unsigned review in the London
Times
of October 8, declaring that

the truth is that in this book a number of good things, never before united, have come together; a fund of humour, an understanding of children, and a happy fusion of the scholar’s with the poet’s grasp of mythology. On the edge of a valley one of Professor Tolkien’s characters can pause and say: “It smells like elves.” It may be years before we produce another author with such a nose for an elf. The Professor has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity which is worth oceans of glib “originality.”

Tolkien was clearly delighted, telling Unwin that he had divined the authorship of the two anonymous reviews and that “I must respect his opinion, as I believed him to be the best living critic until he turned his attention to me.” Typically, though, he focuses attention in this high-spirited letter on something his best reviewers failed to notice: that
The Hobbit
contains the incorrect plural for “dwarf”—Tolkien’s “private bad grammar” preferred “dwarves” to “dwarfs”—along with the puckish observation that the “real” plural is “dwarrows,” which “I rather wish I had used.”

The Extraordinary Ordinary

Tolkien worked intensely on other projects before and during his plunge into hobbitry. He added to his legendarium, crafted his Elvish languages, and each year expanded, in complexity and size, the family’s portfolio of Father Christmas letters. The letter for 1931 features polar mountains in thick bold lines reminiscent of Rockwell Kent, purportedly drawn by “North Polar Bear”; 1932’s letter depicts Father Christmas in his sleigh swooping down on nighttime Oxford, along with a whimsical yet remarkably convincing mimicry of cave painting, probably modeled (as Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have discovered) on Gerard Baldwin Brown’s
Art of the Cave Dweller
(1928), with woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and goblins riding an imaginary, elongated horselike beast called a
drasil
(from
drasill
, Icelandic for “horse”). “Some” of these cave paintings, drily notes Father Christmas, “are very good (mostly of animals), and some are queer and some bad; and there are many strange marks, signs and scribbles, some of which have a nasty look…” The Father Christmas letters faded with the decade, as Priscilla, the youngest child, outgrew them.

The enormous outlay of time and artistic energy that Tolkien expended upon this family project, which went on for more than twenty years, highlights an aspect of his character that set him apart from many other Inklings. As we have seen, he was to a great extent a conventional family man, a lover of home and hearth. His life during the 1930s was typical in this regard. His domestic routine was admirable in its regularity and its devotion to others: whenever possible, he ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with wife and children, encouraged their hobbies—Edith’s aviary, his sons’ model railroading—told fairy tales to put the children to sleep, shopped for food at Oxford’s Covered Market, and enjoyed two-week family holidays at the shore, where he, Edith, and the kids would lounge on the beach, swim, shop, and collect shells. Even the occasional antic—such as in the summer of 1932, when he and C. L. Wrenn lit their pipes, donned their hats, and stepped into the waters of Cornwall’s Lamorna Cove for a swimming contest—was the joyous activity of a stable father and husband acting silly within prescribed and approved limits. He never gambled, womanized, drank to excess, or took drugs.

In many ways, he excelled as a parent. Late in life he would berate himself for failures (“I brought you all up ill and talked to you too little,” he told Michael in 1963), but many would be inclined to judge him more kindly. Certainly he entertained, encouraged, and enlivened his children, as a group and individually. “He would like to take us out for walks by ourselves separately,” Michael recalled, “because he felt each one of us had different needs and different kinds of interests … they were most wonderful experiences … he tried to make home for us somewhere where we wanted to go.” In 1937, while Christopher recovered from an appendicitis operation, Tolkien nursed him devotedly, and when Christopher was sent home from the Oratory School in 1938 with heart trouble and spent nearly a year in bed, his father bought him a telescope to idle away evening hours peering at the heavens. These acts typified Tolkien’s fatherly ministrations. He grew especially fond of Christopher, noting in his diary that his youngest son was “a nervy, irritable, cross-grained, self-tormenting, cheeky person. Yet there is something intensely loveable about him, to me at any rate, from the very similarity between us.” He stayed attentive to the needs of each child with a love that never flagged, even in his old age.

Edith’s problems proved more complex and difficult to solve. She was lonely and frustrated, too timid to forge many friendships within Oxford’s academic community (Agnes Wrenn, the wife of C. L.Wrenn, being one of the few exceptions). As a result, she passed many long days alone. She had no career, no passions apart from family and piano; she displayed exceptional skill at the keyboard and might have been a professional musician, but marriage and motherhood had put an end to that. Never an ardent Catholic, she resented her husband’s incessant churchgoing. Her frustrations mounted, sometimes erupting in heated argument.

Tolkien did what he could to assuage the situation, skipping lectures and Inklings gatherings to be at home and help with chores. His love for Edith ran deep, as did her love for him. He was, no doubt, hamstrung by views on marriage that offend many modern conventions. He believed that women are monogamous and men polygamous, and that fidelity in marriage requires, of the man, self-will and self-denial; that men require a career, women children; that men are aggressive, women “receptive”; and that, when differences arise—on “the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc. etc.”—the man must hold his ground, the woman must yield. And yet he knew, as his many sacrifices demonstrate, that sometimes the man must yield. It should be noted also that at times his views on marriage possess a startling originality, as when he asserts—this was not a popular view in England at the time—that “nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes,” as a better partner might easily have been found, but that, nonetheless, one’s spouse is one’s “real soul-mate,” chosen by God through seemingly haphazard events. Edith, despite her lack of intellectual depth, her religious recalcitrance, and her fading beauty, was his real soul mate, and to her he pledged his body, his energies, his life.

Why did Tolkien choose such a middle-class, conventional, well-regulated existence? Largely because he believed it was the right way to live. He had a deep admiration for ordinary people—butchers, police officers, mail carriers, gardeners—and a knack for befriending them. He valued their courage, common sense, and decency, all of which he had had ample opportunity to observe in the trenches. Love for the man and woman next door ran deep in Tolkien; it pervades his fiction and explains why he wrote tales of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Ordinariness carried, also, cultural implications that were important to him and many of the Inklings. The group wore their hair short, their pants baggy, and their Englishness on their sleeve (Tolkien added a fine waistcoat as a touch of elegance but avoided all signs of foppishness). As Humphrey Carpenter points out, this was a rebellion against the dandyism of Oxford aesthetes and a vote for traditional, middle-of-the-road cultural values. But there was more to it than this. A man in Rome may do as Romans do in order to savor the Roman experience or to make a statement about his admiration for Roman ways—or he may do it to disguise his non-Roman status. Ordinariness may be a uniform, or it may be camouflage. In his imaginative life, a vitally important part of the whole man, Tolkien was anything but ordinary. Elves, hobbits, goblins, giant spiders, dragons, wizards: these were the neighbors with whom he trafficked almost every day. Tolkien resembles closely, in this regard, other early twentieth-century fantasists, like David Lindsay or H. P. Lovecraft, who produced their best work around the same time Tolkien was dreaming up hobbits, and who similarly led conventional lives and held conservative views. Tolkien, like Lindsay and Lovecraft, kept his genie bottled in ordinary brown glass, letting it escape and take extravagant shape only in his art.

Was he happy, leading this sort of life? On the whole, yes. Some critics have suggested that his was a divided personality, that he inhabited a black-and-white world and veered wildly from despair to joy. Humphrey Carpenter speculates that the death of Tolkien’s mother “made him a pessimist,” that as a result of this devastating loss “he was never moderate” and became “a man of extreme contrasts.” The truth is that he was often depressed about his own work and the world about him, but he was also in many ways a profoundly contented man. He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him. His domesticity instilled a quiet stability that enabled him to navigate through life without the dramatic conversions and intellectual combativeness so characteristic of Lewis. He found at home a refuge that rarely failed him.