Tolkien

What would you think is the underlying theme of the myths of J.R.R. Tolkien, exemplified by The Lord of the Rings? Good versus evil; martial heroism; the virtue of trees? Tolkien’s answer, late in his career, was “Death! Inevitable death.”

There’s death in most fiction, and in everyone’s life, but it was prominent in Tolkien’s. Born in 1892 and orphaned of father then mother as a child, he married young in 1916 as the First World War drew him to mortal danger. “Parting from my wife then”, he wrote, “was like a death.” In his preface to The Lord of the Rings, he noted: “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

Working as an academic philologist he fell in love with a convention of poetry and behaviour that has been called the “Northern theory of courage”. Figuring in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature, its classic formulation is: “Defeat is no refutation.” If all human endeavour and even that of the gods are doomed to end in failure (as Norse myth claimed) it was still right to fight for truth and loyalty and honour.

Tolkien did not believe that in the end all would fail, for he was a Catholic by conviction, and the myths he wove admitted a “eucatastrophe”, a reversal of fortunes that thwarted defeat for the forces of good. In his idea of mythopoeia, human beings participate in the creative work of God, so that the stories they tell, particularly as they approach the high level of myth, inevitably express something of God’s truth. This faculty he called “sub-creation”.

That conception changed the life and work of a colleague of Tolkien’s whom he met in 1926: “a Belfast atheist, frustrated philosopher and aspirant poet”, C.S. Lewis. Their friendship and later alienation form a thread in Raymond Edwards’ brilliantly woven narrative of Tolkien’s life. The biographer, also a philologist by training, knows what he is talking about, his judgements are reasonable and he makes the reader anxious to discover whether Tolkien can win out against the enemies of his most original work. It would be hard to write a better life without access to the many letters and private papers in the Bodleian still not available to scholars. I suppose the readers need  a certain curiosity about Tolkien to appreciate the “inherent interest” of Oxford syllabus reform; but Edwards’ explanation of academic life there in the mid twentieth century is of real value, since that was Tolkien’s primary world, when he was not escaping it.

This escape was dear to Lewis too. They shared an idea of “joy” beyond this world and discerned by myth. After the success of The Hobbit in 1937, Tolkien got the publisher Stanley Unwin to place Lewis’ sci-fi myth Out of the Silent Planet. Later Tolkien found to his dismay that he detested Lewis’ Narnia stories, so easily turned out, with their arbitrary eclecticism that placed Father Christmas beside fauns and satyrs. Lewis in turn was hurt by Tolkien’s reaction. “The public,” he wrote to Tolkien in 1962, the year before Lewis died, “little dreaming of how much you dislike my work, bless you! – regard us as a sort of firm.”

It wasn’t just Lewis’ work that troubled Tolkien. In the early 1940s Lewis became the best friend of Charles Williams, whose writing Tolkien found baffling and distasteful, and of whose “moral adultery” and dabbling in the occult he disapproved. Worse came with Lewis’ marriage to Joy Davidman. Edwards follows a line very different from the comforting fiction of the play Shadowlands. Joy was pushy and mercenary, making Lewis “an American divorcée’s sugar daddy” in a phrase quoted by Alister McGrath. Even after Lewis’ death, Tolkien found the posthumous religious volume Letters to Malcolm “a distressing and in parts horrifying work”. He had long seen Lewis’ religious views as dominated by his childhood Ulster anti-Catholicism.

If the friends’ sundering brought sadness, sadness was written larger on Tolkien’s difficult 55-year marriage to Edith. He married her for love. She, like him, was an orphan. Edith was frequently ill and shared none of his Oxford interests. She felt the Catholicism to which she had converted was often uncongenial. Tolkien never stopped loving her. He followed her disastrous idea of moving in his retirement to Bournemouth, where she perked up and he was isolated. But when she died he wrote: “She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.” He was referring to a myth of two lovers, Beren and Lúthien, of his own creation, begun in 1917. On their gravestone the name Lúthien is under her name and Beren under his.

The autumn-leaf melancholy of Tolkien’s life would have been a true tragedy if he had got none of his mythic work published. For, in his academic writing, procrastination triumphed: an edition of the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, which he promised in 1935, was unfinished on his death in 1973. He was always overworked. Fruitful relations with the Oxford University Press foundered on a never-completed edition of Chaucer, which blocked all other projects. Chief among them was a series of medieval texts embodying what he saw as a continuous tradition of English literature from before the Conquest. His fiction had begun as an attempt to supply a mythology that England had lost, apart from hints in ancient names and fragments. He drifted from this surrogate English task into inventing languages and then weaving the myths that language must bring. Into one Elvish language that he invented, called Quenya, he translated a prayer he had recommended to his children, the early Christian petition to the Virgin Mary, the Sub Tuum Praesidium. For Tolkien, earthly love, myth-making and heavenly redemption were connected by a secret thread.