The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (22 page)

In addition to teaching, Tolkien toiled away at his legendarium and began an alliterative translation of
Beowulf
(finally published in 2014, long after Tolkien’s death). He and E. V. Gordon collaborated on an edition of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, Tolkien handling the text, Gordon the notes. United in their distaste for pedantry, both editors hoped the volume would “provide the student with a text which, treating the unique manuscript with all due respect, is yet pleasant for the modern reader to look at, and is free (as are few Middle English texts) from a litter of italics, asterisks, and brackets, the trail of the passing editor.” They succeeded admirably.
The Modern Language Review
praised the book, in unconscious echo of the poem’s alliteration, for its “clearness, conciseness, scholarship, and commonsense,” although the reviewer went on to indulge in the sort of scholarly nitpicking that Tolkien and Gordon despised, raising nearly a hundred quibbles over seven pages.

The happy team assembled by George Stuart Gordon did not last. Its dismantling was not due, as is so often the case in academia, to internal dissent, but rather to external allurements. In the late summer of 1922, George Stuart Gordon left for Oxford to become the Merton Professor of English Literature, one of the more prestigious academic positions in England. Tolkien applied for his vacated professorship, but the position went to Lascelles Abercrombie, one of the Georgian poets. As a result of this and other blows, Tolkien soon felt ready to depart himself. The city of Leeds, with its belching factories and ungainly architecture, held little appeal. In his brief tenure there, the family had suffered from more than its share of illnesses: Edith and the boys had contracted measles, Michael appendicitis, and Tolkien himself pneumonia, a severe bout that brought him close to death. He remembered his grandfather John Suffield, who visited at the height of Tolkien’s fever, “standing by my bedside, a tall thin black-clad figure, and looking at me and speaking to me with contempt—to the effect that I and my generation were degenerate weaklings.” Some months after Tolkien’s recovery, the house was burglarized—an inside job that involved the maid—and Edith’s coat and engagement ring were stolen. But there were compensatory domestic joys, above all the birth of a third boy, Christopher Reuel, named for Christopher Wiseman, on November 21, 1924 (a fourth child, Priscilla, would arrive in 1929), and public accomplishments, especially Tolkien’s appointment to the newly created position of Professor of English Language. He had managed to publish some undistinguished poems, too, mostly in local venues, such as
Yorkshire Poetry
and the university’s own magazine,
The Gryphon
. Yet he longed for greater things. Edith, although fond of the university’s casual atmosphere, was willing to move as well.

In 1925, Tolkien’s opportunity arrived, when he learned that William Craigie, his old benefactor, planned to vacate the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Tolkien had already looked into other teaching venues, applying for posts in Manchester and at Cape Town; he won the latter but turned it down, fearing that the requisite travel and African climate would prove too exhausting for Edith and the children. But to teach at Oxford—that would be a dream fulfilled! The Anglo-Saxon chair was a choice position with a venerable history, bequeathed in 1755 by Richard Rawlinson, bishop and bibliophile, first occupied in 1795, and filled throughout the nineteenth century by a series of first-rate scholars, not least Joseph Bosworth, author of the pioneering
Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar
(1823), whose name was added to the professorship in 1916. Tolkien prepared an outstanding application, including a twelve-page pamphlet containing his own summary of his qualifications, along with warm endorsements by leading Anglo-Saxonists and other scholars. The enthusiasm for his candidacy can be gauged by the testimony of Lascelles Abercrombie, who wrote that “I have never consulted him without gaining an illumination that can penetrate as well as expatiate. But I must not omit to mention that I have gained at least as much from the keen artistic sensibility as from the science of his scholarship.” George Stuart Gordon went even further, declaring that “there is no philological (or literary) scholar of his generation from whom I have learned so much, with whom I have worked more happily, or from whom, in my opinion, greater things may be expected.” Henry Bradley and Joseph Wright also wrote in his favor. Notably absent among his endorsers was Kenneth Sisam. But then Sisam, by now assistant secretary—an exalted post, despite the name—at Oxford University Press, was his chief rival for the position. The board of electors split the vote evenly; Tolkien triumphed when the university vice-chancellor, either impressed by Tolkien’s youthful zeal (he was only thirty-three at the time) or put off by Sisam’s reputation as a martinet, cast the deciding vote for Tolkien. The victory sat poorly with Sisam’s supporters, who interpreted it as an upstart displacing his better; after all, it wasn’t long ago that Tolkien had sat at Sisam’s feet in Oxford lecture halls. The resentment simmered for decades; nearly a half century later, the Arthurian scholar Eug
è
ne Vinaver would declare that “for many years I have felt strongly that much less than justice had been done to Sisam the scholar and the model of scholarship. Everyone knows what a terrible mistake Oxford made when they by-passed him for the Chair of Anglo-Saxon.” Despite the kerfuffle, however, Tolkien’s friendship with Sisam remained more or less intact, albeit strained, as it had been during Tolkien’s tardiness while completing his Anglo-Saxon glossary. Whatever his faults, Sisam—unlike his supporters in the battle against Tolkien—was capable of dropping a grudge.

Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini

The move to Oxford was a strain. Contractually obliged to remain at Leeds University until the end of 1925, Tolkien spent many autumn weekends shuttling between Leeds and Oxford’s Pembroke College, where he delivered his first set of lectures. This exhausting regimen ended in January 1926, when the family moved to a new brick house at 22 Northmoor Road, in a neighborhood thickly populated by dons and their families. The Tolkiens enjoyed the location and remained on Northmoor Road until 1947, ensuring their children the stable, secure, two-parent childhood that both of them had lacked. Tolkien’s enlarged income—he was now earning a thousand pounds a year—permitted extravagances: John and Michael attended the Dragon School, a prestigious prep school founded to educate children of university faculty, and an Icelandic au pair girl was brought in to supervise them when at home.

Not all was well, however. Tolkien had begun, while in Leeds, to slacken his religious observances, and this lassitude continued at 22 Northmoor Road. He ascribed his failure to “wickedness and sloth,” a stinging self-indictment that must be taken seriously. We don’t know what caused this falling-off, although a heavy workload, added to the stress of two moves in six years, likely played a part; Tolkien may also have been distracted by the pomp and prestige of his professorships. The memory rankled, even forty years later; in 1963 he would tell Michael that “I regret those days bitterly (and suffer for them with such patience as I can be given); most of all because I failed as a father. Now I pray for you all, unceasingly, that the Healer (the
Hælend
as the Saviour was usually called in Old English) shall heal my defects, and that none of you shall ever cease to cry
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini
[‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’].” In any event, he overcame the trial, spiritual fervor returned, and he began to attend Mass daily, often accompanied by the boys—Edith would join in on Sundays—walking on the Woodstock Road to St. Aloysius, a Jesuit church with a Victorian Gothic exterior and a rich Italianate interior, including a relic chapel, an imposing black marble altar, and flocks of brightly painted angels and saints crowding the reredos, elements that suited well his heigh-stile aesthetic and traditional Catholic bent.

He spent much time at home—an anomaly among Oxford professors, many of whom, during this era, lived in bachelor quarters at college—and enjoyed playing with his boys in the garden or thrilling them with tales of fantastic beings, including Tom Bombadil, a merry creature who represented “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.” Tolkien was well-placed to watch the countryside shrink, as new houses filled up North Oxford and his beloved local trees—poplar, quince, apple, hawthorn—fell right and left, a denudation that cut him to the bone. In 1930, the family moved next door to 20 Northmoor Road, a large eight-bedroom house vacated by the bookseller Basil Blackwell; Tolkien took advantage of his new grounds to plant trees and transform the tennis court into a vegetable garden, while Edith erected an aviary filled with canaries and parakeets, bringing some of the spirit of the countryside back into the encroaching city.

Even as a youth, trees had captured Tolkien’s heart. In his writings they represent the Platonic virtues of beauty, truth, and goodness; as early as 1916, he had imagined Kortirion, the fairy city on the enchanted Lonely Isle, as girdled by “a thousand whispering trees.” In “The Coming of the Valar,” two trees, Laurelin and Silpion (later Telperion) shed golden and silver light over the land of the immortals, and when a foul beast destroys them, their fruit and flower give rise to the sun and moon. His ardor for trees was intense, even eccentric; he despised the wanton destruction of any tree and did not hesitate to label normal horticultural practices like pruning and felling as “torture” and “murder.” In the late 1930s, he would be especially fond of “a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls.”

In 1926, however, Tolkien was too busy to mourn for long any arboreal amputations. The new position at Oxford severely taxed his time and energy. Sometimes he managed to spend mornings after Mass sequestered in his book-lined office. A photo shows him, in tweed jacket and tie, poring over a pile of manuscripts, notes, and examination papers that nearly overwhelm his tobacco jar and pipe-filled Toby jug (a pottery jug in human shape). His children remember, too, “a row of coloured Quink and Stevenson inks, and sets of sealing-wax in different shades to match his large supply of stationery … [and] wonderful boxes of Koh-i-Noor coloured pencils, and tubes of paint with magical names like Burnt Sienna, Gamboge and Crimson Lake.” He was still drawing and painting at this time, although his tight schedule drastically limited his output.

On other days, however, he would dash off after Mass on his high-seated bicycle to the university, his academic gown trailing in the wind. The typical professorial contract of the time required at least thirty-six lectures a year, but Tolkien soon exceeded this number. Students flocked to his
Beowulf
talks, though few stayed the course. He talked rapidly, slurring and swallowing his words, and his speech was often incomprehensible, especially to students not seated in the front row. By the third or fourth class, his voice and his erudition had frightened away all but a small coterie of devotees. The circle that remained included W. H. Auden, who said of one lecture that “I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of
Beowulf
. I was spellbound.” Another student, J.I.M. Stewart, who would become a mystery novelist under the name of Michael Innes, remembered that Tolkien “could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.” Barfield’s stutter vanished when singing or reciting poetry; so, too, did speaking in Anglo-Saxon turn Tolkien’s leaden tongue to gold.

In addition to lecturing, Tolkien oversaw postgraduate work and graded School Certificate exam papers (administered to all British students at the age of sixteen). The latter was torture, but he kept it up for years despite the trickle of money it produced; he once estimated that earning one hundred pounds by grading exams consumed the same energy as writing a novel. At this time, he also began serious work on an edition of the
Ancrene Wisse
(or
Ancrene Riwle
), a Middle English rule for West Midland anchorites that he had started to study while at Leeds. But as always, his heart lay in telling stories, and he devoted every spare moment to his craft. In 1925, while on vacation at Filey, an old-fashioned beach resort in North Yorkshire, his son Michael lost a little leaden toy dog on the sand; Tolkien dried the boy’s sobs with a tale about the dog come to life, and a sand-magician named Psamathos Psamathides (modeled closely upon Edith Nesbit’s Psammead, or sand-fairy, who first appears in her 1902 novel,
The Five Children and It
). In 1927, Tolkien turned his tale into a written narrative entitled
Roverandom
, which would remain unpublished until 1988.
Roverandom
shows the influence not only of Nesbit but of Lewis Carroll, Howard Pyle, Norse and Welsh mythology, and late Victorian and Edwardian whimsical fairy lore. Although not a very original or cohesive tale—it reads like a series of set pieces—it does offer two exciting voyages, to the moon and to the depths of the sea, with fantastic characters (a wizard, the Man in the Moon, a Great White Dragon, merfolk), lyric prose (“the great indiarubber trunks of the trees bent and swayed like grasses, and the shadow of their endless branches was thronged with goldfish, and silverfish, and redfish, and bluefish, and phosphorescent fish like birds. But the fishes did not sing…”), labored humor, and a hint or two of the legendarium, as Roverandom espies “the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves.” The best part of the production may be Tolkien’s illustrations, especially his watercolor of
The Gardens of the Merking’s Palace
, a rich fantasia of underwater life, in which a white whale, a writhing octopus, a jellyfish, and other sea beasts swim through a dazzling pink, green, and blue seascape of weed, fronds, and domed palaces. Tolkien’s art at this time outstripped his stories in beauty and elegance.