The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (34 page)

Catholicism continued to be another refuge, indefectible and invincible, the single most important element in Tolkien’s mental makeup. His faith shaped his domestic arrangements, his professional work, his art, his way of being. Having passed successfully through the spiritual doldrums of the 1920s, he remained an ardent Catholic for the rest of his life. He attended Mass daily at 7:30 a.m. He confessed regularly. He raised his children Catholic, befriended priests and nuns, and was president of the Oxford branch of the Catenian Association, an international fraternal order of Catholic professionals. Tolkien’s pessimism—if that is the right word to use—may be the shadow of his mother’s early death, but it came to fruition through his mature belief in the Fall, his conviction that man, left to his own devices, is prone to corrupt all that he touches, including his person, his culture, and his environment. Thus his strong distrust of mechanization and technology, and his passionate admiration and defense of the natural world, of plants and animals who are, by their nature, exempt from moral decay.

Yet underlying his pessimism about humanity was an indomitable hope, born, as surely as his pessimism, from his Catholic faith. Belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, logos over chaos, bestowed upon all the oppositions in his life—scholarship and art, male friendship and marriage, high spirits and despair—a final and satisfying unity, a deep and abiding joy. When Tolkien said of himself that “I am in fact a
Hobbit
(in all but size),” he spoke the truth, not only about his material likes (trees, farms, tobacco, mushrooms, plain English food) and dislikes (cars, French cooking, early rising) but also about the disposition of his soul. He, like a hobbit, was at home in his shire; he, like a hobbit, trusted the cosmos—but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

Hermits, Monsters, and Critics

Tolkien’s Catholicism also informed his professional research. He was naturally drawn toward the life of the church, especially of the English Catholic Church in its pre-Reformation state, as expressed in Old and Middle English texts. As early as his years in Leeds, he had begun intensive study of a Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, manuscript copy (MS402) of the
Ancrene Wisse
, a thirteenth-century rule for anchoresses (female hermits), who typically inhabited cells (anchorholds) attached to churches and devoted their lives to solitary contemplation. Tolkien was captivated by the language of the text, which he recognized as an important West Midland dialect, “in its day and to its users a natural, easy, and cultivated speech, familiar with the courtesy of letters, able to combine colloquial liveliness with a reverence for the already long tradition of English writing.” The manuscript appealed to him spiritually as well, for its account of the earthly struggles and heavenly rewards of the anchoress underwrote his own belief in the transformation, through grace, of suffering into joy, as this passage from part six of the
Ancrene Wisse
well expresses:

Vilitas et asperitas
—abjectness and hardship, these two, shame and suffering, as St. Bernard says, are the two ladder-uprights which are set up to heaven, and between these uprights are the rungs of all virtues fixed, by which one climbs to the joy of heaven … In these two things, in which is all penance, rejoice and be glad, for in return for these, twofold blisses are prepared: in return for shame, honour; in return for suffering, delight and rest without end.

In 1935, the Early English Text Society invited Tolkien to produce for publication a critical edition of the
Ancrene Wisse
. Tolkien accepted the commission, the first step in a long trail of starts, stumbles, and stops that typified his dilatoriness in academic labors. Family and medical problems, disputes over editorial matters, and the press of other academic work took their toll, but the real reason for delay was that his heart lay elsewhere, in the development of the legendarium and its offspring, including
The Hobbit
and what would become
The Lord of the Rings
. On July 31, 1960, he wrote to Rayner Unwin confessing his many “crimes of omission,” most notably his failure to complete work on the
Ancrene Wisse
: “My edition of the prime MS. should have been completed
many years
ago!” The book finally appeared in December 1962, twenty-seven years after inception, surely one of the longer runs from conception to publication in the annals of modern academic publishing.

But whatever crimes of omission Tolkien committed as a scholar in the 1930s, he more than atoned for in a single stroke on November 25, 1936, when he delivered to the British Academy in London the annual Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, “
Beowulf
: The Monsters and the Critics.”

Of Jabberwocks and Monsters

Beowulf
, the most celebrated of all Old English poems, dating from between the eighth and tenth centuries, recounts, in 3,182 lines of highly alliterative verse, the great battles between the titular hero of the Geats (a Germanic people) and a trio of marauding monsters. Tolkien probably encountered the poem long before entering Oxford. It appealed to him from the start, not only for the nobility of its characters and the romance of its bleak northern setting, but for the splendid monstrosities that Beowulf confronts, first the manlike but grotesque Grendel and his mother, descendents of Cain, and then an especially terrifying dragon. During the early 1930s, Tolkien wrote university lectures on the poem under the title of “The Historical and Legendary Tradition in
Beowulf
and other Old English Poems.” W. H. Auden, who was present at their delivery, declared them “an unforgettable experience,” no doubt in part because of the lecturer’s dramatic entrance, striding into the lecture hall and exclaiming in his most stentorian Anglo-Saxon voice the poem’s first line,
Hwaet, we Gar-Dena!
(“Hear, We the Spear-Danes”); Tolkien had a flair for theatrics, which would be revealed to the general public many years later in his audio recordings of excerpts from
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
.

Tolkien began his Memorial Lecture with a similar flourish, attacking without mercy the old guard of
Beowulf
studies. “It is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another.”
Beowulf
criticism, he contended, for centuries has been philistine, irrelevant, misdirected, insensitive to the poem’s true greatness. The critics have read
Beowulf
as a storehouse of philology, history, allegory, archaeology, “a history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic
Summa Theologica
,” anything but a great work of art, and yet above all
Beowulf
is a poem, noble and beautiful. Tolkien expressed his contempt by relating a now-celebrated allegory: A man builds a tower with the scattered stones of an ancient building; other men (critics) come along, see the antiquity of the stones, and fell the tower in their craven lust for the “carvings and inscriptions” they believe to be sequestered beneath it. Finding nothing, they turn away, declaring of the tower, “What a muddle it is in!” The tower-builder’s relatives join in the chorus, proclaiming “He is such an odd fellow! Imagine him using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower!” “But,” Tolkien wryly pointed out, “from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”

It is this newly revealed sea, this ocean of myth teeming with symbol, meaning, and loveliness, that Tolkien held dear. Past critics, indifferent to myth, blind to its beauty and force, complained that the
Beowulf
author had wasted his genius on a poem about trivialities like monsters and dragons, “as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse.” To Tolkien, however, monsters are not a secondary and unfortunate element in the poem but lie at its heart.
Beowulf
tells of men combating fundamental evils, “the hostile world and the offspring of the dark,” and the presence of monsters—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as embodiments of chaos bestows upon the poem “its lofty tone and high seriousness.” These fantastic beasts transform an adventure story into early England’s finest example of poetry that “glimpses the cosmic”; in
Beowulf
“we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world.”
Beowulf
is also a fundamentally Christian myth, revealing the truth that “a Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.”

Tolkien’s argument changed forever the landscape of
Beowulf
scholarship. He said what everyone wanted to hear but no one had mustered the courage to say: that
Beowulf
was a great poem, a joy to read, a masterpiece of mythopoeic art. And more: that the
Beowulf
author
liked
dragons, and so did Tolkien, and, as almost all Old English critics confessed to themselves then and since,
so did they
. A typically enthusiastic response came from R. W. Chambers, a
Beowulf
expert, who read the work in manuscript and wrote to Tolkien: “You must not delete a single word or line from your lecture. I have read it through twice over with the greatest enjoyment.”

The talk does have flaws. Tolkien’s structural analysis, in which he argues that the presentation of each line, divided into two balanced halves, echoes the design of the poem as a whole, has not convinced some scholars. Nor do all second his jejeune complaint that criticism can never grasp the mythic imagination, for “myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected,” a claim that his own brilliant discussion of myth contradicts. Nonetheless, Tolkien forever reclaimed
Beowulf
from its naysayers and returned it to those who love it. In the process, he produced the first of his two important manifestos upon the possibilities of mythic art (the second and greater would come in 1947 in the essay “On Fairy-Stories”). Few who have read “
Beowulf
: The Monsters and the Critics” and absorbed its arguments will agree with those who find
The Silmarillion
and
The Lord of the Rings
, with their wizards and dragons and magic rings, suitable only for children.

Barfield in Eclipse

As Tolkien expanded his literary powers, Barfield reined his in. Legal matters, for which he had little love or aptitude, occupied most of the day. Never the most important figure in the firm—when his father died, another lawyer by the name of Reynolds became the new senior partner—Barfield toiled in the background, mired in the drudgery of mortgages, transfers of property, and other real estate transactions. Sometimes shafts of sunlight broke the dreariness: he and Maud took pleasure in their young son, Alexander, and, a few years later, in a daughter, Lucy (b. 1935), also adopted, who would become Lewis’s godchild, “a very lively and happy child—apt for instance to be seen turning somersault-wheels in the garden immediately after a meal.”

Badly burned by his experience with
English People
, Barfield had given up writing long novels but mentioned to Lewis that he would like to attempt a play. “Why not take one of the myths and simply do your best with it—Orpheus for instance,” was his friend’s reply.
Orpheus
, the drama that resulted, displays an impressive array of poetic forms—Lewis spotted alliterative lines, trochaics, couplets, blank verse, and lyrics—and a exultant vision of Steinerian final participation in which the human race “shall ascend Parnassus awake and find his soul.” The Anthroposophical elements elevate the dialogue but weaken the dramatic flow; Lewis found act 2 “simply superb,” but other parts left him cold. Barfield also managed, during this largely fallow period, to write a handful of poems; he placed the melancholy “The Village Dance” in the
London Mercury
(June 1931), and “Habeas Corpus” in
G.K.’s Weekly
(February 27, 1932). In 1933 he coauthored, with Lewis, a comic souffl
é
, “Abecedarium Philosophicum” for
The Oxford Magazine
, skewering famous philosophers through rhymed couplets in alphabetical order (“H is for Hume, who awoke Kant from nappin’ / He said: ‘There’s no causes for things, they just happen’”). But as the Lewis scholar Don W. King points out, this conceit is borrowed—without improvement, one might add—from Lewis Carroll’s “Examination Statute,” a send-up of Oxford dignitaries (“A is for [Acland], who’d physic the masses / B is for [Brodie], who swears by the gases”). Barfield’s creative energies, so spirited in
The Silver Trumpet
and
Poetic Diction
, had fallen asleep. He was, in his own words, “under eclipse.”

It is the nature of a solar eclipse that the moon occults the sun. During these years, Barfield’s interests turned, more forcefully than ever, to the fringe, esoteric, and occult. He joined the executive council of the English Anthroposophical Society and churned out essays and reviews for Anthroposophical journals, and helped to translate texts like Hermann Poppelbaum’s
Man and Animal: Their Essential Difference
(1931) and, in 1936, Steiner’s own
World-Economy: The Formation of a Science of World Economics
. He became intrigued by C. H. Douglas’s controversial Social Credit movement, which favored a “national dividend” to supplement regular wages. The idea generated support among intellectuals and artists, including Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, and A. R. Orage, but failed to sway most economists and government leaders and soon faded from view. Douglas’s anti-Semitism—he began to point a finger at an international Jewish financial conspiracy—didn’t help matters. In the heat of his Social Credit enthusiasm, Barfield enrolled in a degree program in economics at London University but left early, after failing in geography. Things seemed to be falling apart everywhere. Steiner’s followers were splintering into factions; Hitler was on the move; Barfield was trapped in a stuffy law office in the Strand and his pen was running dry. His time had not yet come.