The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (21 page)

The most impressive of Tolkien’s early narratives is surely his creation myth, “The Music of the Ainur,” which tells how Il
ú
vatar creates all that is, ex nihilo. He sings “into being” the Ainur, builds them “dwellings in the void,” teaches them music, implants in them “the Secret Fire that giveth Life and Reality,” and, in what seems like a Neoplatonic variant on the Genesis account, presents them with musical themes to elaborate through their own heavenly instruments in “mighty melodies changing and interchanging, mingling and dissolving amid the thunder of harmonies greater than the roar of the great seas.” The Ainur’s celestial symphony, at first perfect in beauty and power, is soon marred by the jarring notes of the Satan-like Melko, who fashions his own discordant music, a cry of pride, cruelty, gloom, and decay. This act of musical high treason proves to be the prelude to a yet more astonishing work of creation, as Il
ú
vatar displays his omnipotence as sole creator by bringing into existence all that had been prefigured in the music of the Ainur: the earth, with its waters, winds, and light, and, in time, Elves and Men. For all the arresting strangeness, the implicit doctrine of creation is wholly compatible with Christian orthodoxy.

But the tales do not make easy reading. Tolkien’s decision to cast these first stories of ancient days in the pseudoancient heigh stile, with its ceremonious utterances, convoluted syntax, and nightmarish glossary of names (for which Il
ú
vatar, Ainur, and Melko/Melkor/Morgoth are fair examples), resulted, as noted in chapter 3, in a false archaism that bears no relation to any stage in the history of the English language and strains the patience of many—a decidedly odd contribution from a trained philologist and literary historian. Nonetheless, in these early tales we see the promise of a new mythopoeic cosmos, if sometimes little more than biblical mythology aslant, that would blossom into the vast canvas of
The Silmarillion
and
The Lord of the Rings
.

Waggle to Walrus … To Leeds

Tolkien had found his voice and vocation. But with an exhausted wife and bawling baby to support and unpublished manuscripts piled high on his desk, he desperately needed a job. In October 1918, he traveled to Oxford, hoping to land a university position but meeting one rebuff after another. Salvation came in the form of William Alexander Craigie, professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had tutored Tolkien in Old Norse before the war. Craigie was himself a proto-Tolkien of sorts, a small, wiry, energetic, and clever man, a philologist, a lover of northern tongues, folklore, and Fa
ë
rie, and the anonymous translator of many of the Nordic tales in Andrew Lang’s fairy books. It has been said of him that “facts seemed to run round and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern … to have made one’s first steps in the study of an Anglo-Saxon or an Old Norse text under Craigie, was to acquire almost imperceptibly the ambition to become a keen and exact puzzle-solver.” In addition to his academic post, Craigie was deeply immersed in what can fairly be described as the greatest philological puzzle-solving enterprise of all time: the construction of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. The brainchild of Victorian intellectuals like Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the great poet, and Richard Chenivix Trench, an Anglican archbishop, this prodigious project, which had been in progress for more than half a century by the time Tolkien knocked on Craigie’s door, aimed at nothing less than a comprehensive account of the definitions, etymology, pronunciations, and literary uses of every word in the English language, excluding only those that had died out before or during the first years of the Norman conquest.

Craigie had been at the
OED
since 1897 and had served, since 1901, as one of its three principal editors, and was thus in the perfect position to help his old pupil. He welcomed Tolkien with open arms and a tantalizing offer. How would Tolkien like to join the
OED
staff as a lexicographer, helping out Henry Bradley’s team on the letter
w
, coming up with Middle English and Anglo-Saxon derivations for words? Tolkien leaped at the chance. The position would provide a steady income, a return to Oxford, pleasant scholarship rummaging amidst the roots of language, and the chance to work closely with Bradley, whom Tolkien knew as the author of a celebrated history of the Goths and of a philological classic,
The Making of English
.

Tolkien commenced work in January 1919, strolling each morning from the family’s new residence on St. John Street, past the monument to the Reformation heroes Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley with its anti-Catholic slogan, to the dictionary’s offices in the Old Ashmolean brownstone building on Broad Street. His task, as one of four assistants to Bradley, was to prepare “dictionary slips,” each a six-by-four-inch bit of paper with definitions, variant spellings, and pronunciations for a single word, along with its etymology and one or more literary quotations demonstrating its use. Tolkien’s first assignment, pleasing to his puckish sense of humor, was to prepare slips for words from “waggle” to “waggly.” He came up with an acceptable definition for “waggle” (“to move [anything held or fixed at one end] to and fro with short quick motions, or with a rapid undulation”) but his etymology proved inadequate, requiring Bradley’s intervention. He soon got the hang of things, however, and successfully tackled “wait-a-bit,” “wake-robin,” “walnut,” “want,” “warlock,” and “wold.” Curiously, “walrus”—its etymology deriving from Old Norse
rosmhvalr
—vexed him mightily, occasioning six or seven draft slips and a packet of additional notes assembled after leaving the
OED
. But he savored the challenges and declared that he had “learned more” during his stint at the dictionary “than in any other equal period of my life.” Always he had loved the internal workings of language; now etymological fever raged within him, and when not occupied with
OED
slips, he toiled on Qenya, devising hosts of new words. He also invented a cursive script, written both horizontally and vertically, which he called the Alphabet of R
ú
mil. He used this to inscribe Qenya and to keep a diary; the alphabet evolved so rapidly that in time he found it difficult to read his earlier entries.

In June 1919, Kenneth Sisam, Tolkien’s former tutor, invited him to provide a glossary of Middle English for Sisam’s forthcoming volume,
Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose
. Tolkien gladly assented, admiring the scholarship and bibliographical expertise of the man who had taught him “not only to read texts but to study second-hand book catalogues.” Unfortunately, this relatively simple project would set a baleful precedent for almost all of Tolkien’s academic writings, ballooning, as a result of his perfectionism, to monstrous proportions with labyrinthine complications, expressed in interminable doubts, procrastinations, and rewritings. Tolkien was well aware of the problem, calling himself a “natural niggler” and an inveterate “beginner … and non-finisher,” and admitting that “I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting.” The degree of his fastidiousness, often indistinguishable from fussiness, may be gleaned from his conviction that the Middle English glossary must cover “the ordinary machinery of expression,” including idiomatic phrases and “the uses of such innocent-looking little words as the prepositions
of
and
for
,” considerations that demanded “exceptionally full treatment to what may rightly be called the backbone of the language.” The result, as he admitted, was “a mole-hill glossary (grown into a mountain…),” although he preferred to ascribe the delay to “accumulated domestic distractions,” by which he meant, above all, the birth in October 1920 of a second son, Michael, with all its attendant disruptions.

Needless to say, he missed the deadline. Sisam’s book was published, bereft of its glossary, in October 1921. The following May, Tolkien’s glossary appeared on its own as
A Middle English Vocabulary
; four weeks later, the two works came out in a single volume as originally intended. Tolkien’s snail-like pace, he confessed to Elizabeth Wright, Joseph’s wife, had brought “curses on my head.” Thus began his widespread academic reputation as a time waster and dreamer, a man who would rather write a fairy tale than a scholarly study of Fa
ë
rie. To the reading public this may be a badge of honor, but to many of Tolkien’s Oxford colleagues, who lacked the ability to write fiction and any sympathy for the effort, it was a badge of shame. Some accused Tolkien of indolence; this charge is unwarranted. He worked indefatigably, often toiling long past midnight on his projects (including scholarship, about which he could be, sporadically, passionate). He dithered but never dallied. His priorities, however, remained firm: art trumped academia. He was a poet and storyteller by nature, a scholar by profession.

A Middle English Vocabulary
soon became a minor classic. As the first comprehensive Middle English glossary, with more than 4,700 entries, it ably filled a void, and
The Year’s Work in English Studies 1920–1921
commended it as “a piece of work which can hardly be praised too highly,” lauding in particular its “exhaustive textual references.” The praise cost Tolkien dearly, however, for the project had consumed months that might have been devoted to his legendarium, and he had shelved
The Book of Lost Tales
in order to complete it. The loss of creative opportunity was “terrible to recall.”

On March 10, 1920, in the midst of his labors on the
Vocabulary
, Tolkien crossed a personal Rubicon, for the first time exposing his private mythology to public view by reading portions of “The Fall of Gondolin” to the Exeter College Essay Club. The talk, he told his audience, came from a “complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse of my own imagining” that “has for some time grown up (rather than been constructed) in my mind.” The presentation was a roaring success, despite Tolkien’s rapid, often incomprehensible delivery, with the Club minutes applauding his tale as “very graphically and astonishingly told … with a wealth of attendance to detail interesting in extreme.” In the audience were Henry Dyson and Nevill Coghill, two future Inklings; Coghill later remembered losing several days at the Bodleian fruitlessly trying to pin down “what Gondolin was.”

Tolkien must have been delighted by this successful unveiling, but he held no illusions about making a living by his pen. He still longed for and needed a secure academic post, one with greater earning potential than the
OED
could offer. In 1920 he found it, landing the Readership in English Language at the University of Leeds, a position paying six hundred pounds per annum. His professional future was now, if not assured, at least well launched. In September, he moved to Leeds for the autumn term. Edith, again pregnant, remained in Oxford until the birth. The baby arrived on October 22 and was christened with the usual garland of family names as Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien. The family separation, a painful trial for everyone concerned, continued for several months more; not until March did Tolkien find suitable lodgings and Edith sufficient strength to permit relocation of mother and children to Leeds. As a result, this year’s Christmas reunion took on heightened importance, marked by one of Tolkien’s merriest concoctions. John, now an inquisitive three-year-old, had been quizzing his father about Father Christmas and his North Pole hideaway, and Tolkien responded by handing him an envelope, addressed in a wobbly hand to “Mrs. Tolkien & Master John Francis Reuel Tolkien” and postmarked “North Pole, 22 Dec. 1920.” The envelope contained, in the same shaky hand, a letter from Father Christmas announcing that he was setting off for Oxford with his bag of toys and enclosing pictures of himself and his house. The self-portrait shows a surprisingly slender Santa toting a large sack bulging with gifts, his long white beard blown nearly horizontal by the snow-flecked wind; another drawing depicts his igloolike polar redoubt, surrounded by mysterious snow towers and—a botanical anomaly—high firs. The Father Christmas letter would become an annual tradition, delighting the Tolkien children for the next twenty-three years.

In the spring, Edith and the boys joined Tolkien in Leeds, moving into a house owned by a niece of John Henry Newman. They soon relocated to new lodgings closer to the university, but these did not suit, either: the polluted air of Leeds “rotted the curtains” and required Tolkien to “change his collar three times a day”—an annoying problem for a natty dresser. He could not afford much in the way of new clothing, however; his salary was low, and he began to spend his summers grading exams to supplement the family funds, further eroding his precious writing time.

Happily, the School of English at Leeds proved a congenial place to work. Tolkien fell under the spell of its head, George Stuart Gordon, Professor of English Language and Literature, a brilliant scholar who had broad literary tastes, from Greek classics to Shakespeare, and, like Tolkien, a scrupulous diligence often mistaken for procrastination. Gordon, beloved by students and fellow teachers for his kindness and wit—Lewis, who also knew him, called him “more like a man and less like a don than any I have known”—went out of his way to befriend Tolkien and make him a key player in his campaign to enlarge and strengthen English studies at Leeds. “It is not often in ‘universities,’” wrote Tolkien, “that a Professor bothers with the domestic difficulties of a new junior in his twenties; but G. did. He found me rooms himself, and let me share his private room at the University … I do not think that my experience was peculiar.
He was the very master of men.
”

Tolkien shouldered, while at Leeds, a heavy teaching load. Over several semesters, he taught the history of English, Old and Middle English philology, Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, Medieval Welsh, and more. To his relief, the department expanded by adding a second bright light, the Canadian scholar E. V. (Eric Valentine) Gordon (“his name is a disadvantage,” wryly observed George Stuart Gordon, who was unrelated to his new hire). E. V. was a former Rhodes scholar, a dashing fellow with a mop of dark hair and a goatee. Tolkien, who had tutored him at Oxford, knew him as an “industrious little devil”; at Leeds he soon became “my devoted friend and pal.” E. V. held Tolkien in equally high regard. Together they founded the Viking Club, dedicated to the study of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon letters and manners, a goal that entailed many nights of beer swilling and singing. Tolkien composed poems and songs for the revels, including an Anglo-Saxon lyric, “Syx Mynet,” to be sung to the tune of “I Love Sixpence,” while Gordon contributed “When I’m Dead Don’t Bury Me at All, Just Pickle My Bones in Alcohol” in Old English, Gothic, and Scottish dialect. Soon the entire English faculty began to sing as one. To the delighted George Stuart Gordon, his cohorts made up “not so much a staff as a Club!” while to Tolkien, the faculty was a “team fired not only with a departmental esprit de corps, determined to put ‘English’ at the head of the Arts departments, but inspired also with a missionary zeal.” After two years of hard labor, Gordon’s “Club” had so enlarged its enrollment that an ebullient Tolkien could write to Elizabeth Wright that “the proportion of ‘language’ students is very high, and there is no trace of the press-gang!” Philology was a major beneficiary. At the time Tolkien arrived in Leeds, one student in twelve studied philology; by 1925, the ratio had changed to nearly one in three.