The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (38 page)

On March 11, Lewis wrote to Williams out of the blue, declaring “I never know about writing to an author … But I feel I must risk it,” and went on to say that
The Place of the Lion
was “one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris.” He then took a bold and fateful step: he described to Williams the Inklings, an “informal club … the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity,” and invited him to attend a meeting. Williams responded instantly, praising
The Allegory of Love
, which he had been reading in proofs for Amen House, and declaring it the first book since Dante to fathom the relation between love and religion: “If you had delayed writing another 24 hours, our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me.”

Mutual admiration had rarely commenced at such a high pitch; the Inklings would never be the same.

11

SECONDARY WORLDS

While Lewis and Williams swapped compliments, Tolkien enjoyed his own share of praise and laurels. The British Library Association nominated
The Hobbit
for the Carnegie Medal for 1937, and in 1938 it won the Children’s Spring Book Festival prize from the
New York Herald Tribune
. Friends and strangers continued to congratulate him and say how much they enjoyed the book. The accolade that most thrilled him, however, came from the children’s writer Arthur Ransome, adored by all the Tolkien offspring for his Swallows and Amazons tales (
Pigeon Post
, sixth in the series, had won the first Carnegie Medal). Ransome, in a nursing home after an operation for umbilical hernia, wrote to Tolkien on December 13, 1937, describing himself as “a humble hobbit-fancier.” He also ventured a small criticism, suggesting that Gandalf had misused the word “man” when speaking of Bilbo (who is, of course, a hobbit). Tolkien responded immediately, expressing his pleasure at the letter, welcoming the correction—“man” became “fellow” in the second edition—and asking after Ransome’s health. In reply, Ransome piled on the praise, assuring Tolkien that his book “has done a great deal to turn these weeks [of convalescence] into a pleasure,” lauding his “delicate skill,” and assuring him that his book would see “dozens” of editions. Such honeyed words from a famous author meant much to Tolkien, who lacked Lewis’s red-cheeked self-confidence and would have seconded Conrad’s celebrated (but possibly apocryphal) cry, “I don’t want criticism, I want praise!”

“Man, Sub-Creator”

Despite Ransome’s encouragement and that of others, however, Tolkien had difficulty moving on to another full-length tale. Instead, he refined his Elvish languages and worked on a novella,
Farmer Giles of Ham
, that had seen first light as a bedtime story for his kids; it would remain unpublished until 1949. One day in 1936 or 1937, Lewis said to him, “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” The two agreed on the spot that each would produce an “excursionary ‘Thriller,’” Lewis taking on space travel—resulting in the 1937 novel
Out of the Silent Planet
—while Tolkien tried his hand at time travel. He set about writing
The Lost Road
, the tale of a family that time-slips through dreams, an adventure culminating in the inundation of the great island of N
ú
menor. For many years now, as noted in chapter 3, Tolkien had suffered from nightmares of a great, deadly wave; perhaps
The Lost Road
would destroy the power of this terrifying oneiric image by transforming it into art. But the tale never gelled; the exasperated reader at Allen & Unwin, to whom he sent it as a possible sequel to
The Hobbit
, declared it “a hopeless proposition.”

Almost simultaneously, a heavier blow descended. Tolkien had added, to the package that contained
The Lost Road
, large chunks of
The Silmarillion
, including
The Lay of Leithian
, “The Fall of Númenor,” and the prose
Quenta Silmarillion
, the last a vastly expanded version of portions of
Sketch of the Mythology
and its immediate successor, the
Quenta Noldorinwa
. Tolkien’s publisher rejected the entire collection, explaining that the firm would much prefer a hobbit sequel.
The Lay of Leithian
, wrote an outside reader, was “of a very thin, if not always downright bad, quality.” Thankfully, the official report to Tolkien blunted the criticism, and he was able to write back that “my chief joy comes from learning that the Silmarillion is not rejected with scorn. I have suffered a sense of fear and bereavement, quite ridiculous, since I let this private and beloved nonsense out; and I think if it had seemed to you to be nonsense I should have felt really crushed.” He was feeling low, in any case, from a bout with the flu, and when an acquaintance wrote to point out inconsistencies in
The Hobbit
, he responded, with a note of exasperation, that “I don’t much approve of
The Hobbit
myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature … and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of V
ö
lusp
á
, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes.” In the event, Unwin’s magnanimity in sending a cushioned report proved providential, for Tolkien agreed that a direct sequel to
The Hobbit
did indeed make sense.

What sort of sequel, though? He told Stanley Unwin in October 1937 that his fount of hobbit ideas had run dry. “Goodness knows what will happen,” he continued on December 16. “… What more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental. But the real fun about orcs and dragons (to my mind) was before their time.” He cast about for a new story line, wondering if “Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?” He was riddled with doubts and hesitations, yet soon his marvelously fecund brain brimmed with new ideas, and on December 19 he informed C. A. Furth, a production staffer at Allen & Unwin, that he had completed the first chapter of the sequel, “A long expected party.”

This celebrated opening to
The Lord of the Rings
, describing Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday bash, would go through multiple rewrites before Tolkien was satisfied. Unlike Lewis, who composed with consummate ease, Tolkien scribbled and erased, cut and rewrote, and reworked again. The first version of “A Long Expected Party” has Bilbo celebrating his seventieth birthday; the second brings in Gandalf; in the third, Bilbo’s son Bingo organizes the party; in the fourth, a cousin, Bingo Bolger-Baggins, undertakes the task. In the months to come, the project advanced in imaginative leaps. Tolkien realized that the magic ring from
The Hobbit
would dominate the sequel, that a terrifying Necromancer would threaten global doom, that the new
Hobbit
would be painted in altogether darker pigments than the original. It would not be a book solely for children; perhaps it would not be for children at all.

He typed up the first chapter, sent it along to Furth, and shared the manuscript with his son Christopher and with Lewis. He was eager to press on, but academic obligations kept interfering—lectures, work on Old Norse and Old and Middle English texts—and for many months there was no additional progress. Frustrated, he complained to Furth in February 1938 that all his ideas had been “squandered” on
The Hobbit.
By July, blocked and disgusted, he declared that the sequel had “lost my favour” and that all work with hobbits would be set aside until
The Silmarillion
was complete. Thus was
The Lord of the Rings
nearly aborted—a crisis that would repeat itself more than once. Happily the muses and a few days of rest from academic labors worked their charms, and in late August he reported to Furth that the project was “flowing along, and getting quite out of hand.” By October, he began to grow seriously concerned that his new approach would prove too frightening for children—he was, after all, known as a children’s author; perhaps, he worried, the prewar gloom now permeating England had affected the tone. But he forged ahead at a steady pace and by the following February had produced over three hundred manuscript pages. His heart lifted; he might even be finished by June 1939! His estimate would prove to be off by nearly ten years.

“Story-Making in Its Primary and Most Potent Mode”

During 1938, when not engaged on the
Hobbit
sequel, Tolkien made progress on several projects, including his edition of the
Ancrenne Wisse
and one of the
Pearl
, a fourteenth-century Middle English poem by the anonymous author of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Tolkien’s theatrical skills, honed by reading during Inklings meetings, entranced a wide audience when, in response to a request from John Masefield and Nevill Coghill, he appeared in the Summer Diversions at the Oxford Playhouse. Robed in green, with a turban and false beard, he recited, without benefit of notes, almost all of Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest Tale.” A reporter from the
Oxford Mail
, beside himself with admiration, reported that “Prof. Tolkien spoke his lines magnificently” and that “one can only stand amazed at his bravery.” These accomplishments pale, however, beside a far more important event: Tolkien’s delivery, on March 8, 1939, while the shadows of war pressed ever closer, of the annual Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He called his talk “On Fairy-Stories.”

Andrew Lang, as George Stuart Gordon had pointed out when inaugurating the lecture series ten years earlier, was the great modern champion of folklore. His collections of folktales, published in a rainbow array—
The
Blue Fairy Book
,
The
Red Fairy Book
,
The
Green Fairy Book
, and so on, twelve in all—had taken Victorian and Edwardian England by storm. Tolkien and thousands of others devoured them while children, and adults enjoyed them, too. Not only did Lang make fairy tales popular, he made them academically respectable. His scholarship sharply rebutted the contention of Max M
ü
ller—whom Barfield had pilloried in
Poetic Diction
—that mythology is a “disease of language” (caused, M
ü
ller believed, by the personification of natural phenomena as gods and goddesses), and that folklore is its attenuated aftereffect. For Lang, folklore is not debased mythology but mythology’s very basis; fairy tales are the building blocks of the mythic imagination. Tolkien, staking his literary life on the intrinsic value of folktale and myth, was strongly sympathetic toward Lang’s view. However, he rejected Lang’s insistence, inspired by Edward Burnett Tylor and anticipating James George Frazer, that myth and folktale belonged to a primitive stage of human culture, now superseded by our more enlightened scientific epoch. When the University of St. Andrews extended its invitation, he seized the opportunity to counter Lang, Tylor, and Frazer by presenting a theory of folklore grounded, not in an account of cultural evolution, but in Christian theology and the religious underpinnings of literary art.

Tolkien commenced his address in high spirits, quipping that as an Englishman lecturing on fairies in Scotland, he felt like a conjuror before an Elvish court. He then plunged boldly in—good magicians excel at courage as well as sleight-of-hand—examining definitions of fairies, fairy stories, and the like, in the process puncturing several popular beliefs. Most fairies are not miniature (he laid this slur at the feet of William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton); nor is a fairy story identical to a beast fable (such as
Reynard the Fox
), a traveler’s tale (
Gulliver’s Travels)
, or a dream tale (
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
); nor do fairy stories reject reason (rational understanding of the difference between frogs and princes is necessary for the enjoyment of a tale in which a prince becomes a frog).

What, then, is a fairy story, and what is its use? A fairy story tells of Fa
ë
rie, “the realm or state in which fairies have their being”; Fa
ë
rie is the world itself—our world, but only “when we are enchanted.” A fairy tale’s essence is enchantment or magic: not the mechanical magic of the conjuror or the power-seeking magic of the magus, but the magic of Elvish enchantment that bares the mystery and beauty of creation. In a fairy story, enchantment is the result of applying adjectives in new and startling ways—in effect, rearranging the constitutive elements of the world—so that we have flying broomsticks or green suns or walking woods.

This process has two stages. First, the writer (or painter) employs imagination to produce images “not actually present”; then he or she turns to art to channel, tame, and refine these images. Through this process—and here we encounter the heart of Tolkien’s religio-aesthetic theory—the artist becomes a
subcreator
, echoing on a human scale God’s great work of creation. The power to subcreate lies within our grasp because we are stamped with the image of God: “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” We do not make miraculously, ex nihilo, as God does, but we have been given the power to subcreate, to bring into being secondary worlds, by means of the imaginative arts.

The theory of subcreation did not originate solely with Tolkien. Shakespeare famously celebrated, in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the tandem work of imagination and poet to conjure images “not actually present”: “as imagination / bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” In
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
(1711), the third Earl of Shaftesbury described the poet as “a second
Maker
, a just Prometheus under Jove”: this definition would circulate widely among the Romantics. Coleridge advanced the metaphor by positing a primary and secondary imagination—a terminology that surely influenced Tolkien’s account. The primary imagination, argued Coleridge, is the power of the mind to perceive, regulate, and give form to the inchoate raw data of perception, just as God brings order out of chaos: “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”; the secondary imagination takes the world perceived and shaped by the primary imagination, scatters it, and reassembles it as art: “The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will … it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.”