A Guide to Middle Earth E-Book

Colin Duriez

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 449

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

This absorbing insight into the mind behind Middle-earth will introduce or remind readers of the abundance that exists in Tolkien's thought and imagination. Interweaving sections explore The Lord of the Rings and its history; the key themes, concepts and images in Tolkein's work; the people and places in his life, and his other writings. At the heart of the book is an indispensible A-Z of middle-earth, with detailed entries on Beings, Places, Things and Events.

Leseprobe

TOLKIENAND THE LORDOF THE RINGS

By the same author

The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia (Crossway Books, 2000)

The Inklings Handbook (with David Porter, Chalice Press, 2001)

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (Sutton, 2003)

A Field Guide to Narnia (forthcoming, Sutton 2005)

TOLKIENAND THE LORDOF THE RINGS

A GUIDE TO MIDDLE-EARTH

COLIN DURIEZ

This book was first published in 2001 by Azure

This edition first published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing Limited

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© Colin Duriez, 2001, 2013

The right of Colin Duriez to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9562 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Foreword by Brian Sibley

Preface

Part One The Mind Behind Middle-earth

1  The Life and Work of J.R.R. Tolkien

2  A Brief Chronology

Part Two ‘The Book of the Century’

3  Introducing The Lord of the Rings

4  A Guide to The Lord of the Rings and Its History

5  How The Lord of the Rings Relates to The Silmarillion

Part Three An A–Z of Tolkien’s Middle-earth

6  Beings, Places, Things and Events

Part Four A Look Behind Tolkien’s Life and Work

7  Key Themes, Concepts and Images in Tolkien

8  People and Places in His Life

9  Tolkien’s Writings

Bibliography

The Tolkien Society

To my mother, Madge

Anar kaluva tielyanna

FOREWORD

The Reality of the Fantastic

If you’ve paid good money for this book, then the chances are you’ll be fairly keen on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Therefore, it may come as something of a shock to you to know that there are those who are left absolutely cold by The Lord of the Rings and the other tales of Middle-earth.

Some people simply can’t get to grips with an author who goes to such elaborate lengths in creating an entire history, geography, literature and language as background to a work of fiction.

Ironically, it is just this feature of The Lord of the Rings that others find most appealing. For them – and, I might as well own up and say, for me as well – the real strength of Tolkien’s writing doesn’t rest on such conventional elements of good fiction as story and character, excellent though he is at both, but on a skilfully created sense of fantastic realism.

Few other writers, before or since, have attempted anything on quite so grand a scale, and even fewer have created other worlds that – whether in those insouciant tales of The Hobbit or Farmer Giles of Ham, or in that complex fantasy epic, The Silmarillion – are so beguilingly convincing.

Why then did Tolkien labour so intently and take such meticulous care over something which isn’t, in the literal sense of the word, ‘true’? Essentially, he saw no conflict between the fantastic and those things which could be verified by reason, logic or science; indeed, he firmly believed that if the fantasy writer approached his subject with the same degree of reason as would be expected of the non-fiction writer, the better the resulting fantasy would be.

It was a belief that stemmed from Tolkien’s Christian view of the creative artist. Man, he said, had a natural desire to create because he was himself a created being ‘made in the image and likeness of a Maker’.

Tolkien went so far – some may say too far and too fancifully – as to suggest that a writer’s creations might actually become, in some sense, part of God’s greater Creation. ‘All tales may come true,’ he hazarded, ‘and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.’

For a great many readers, Tolkien’s worlds don’t have to come true—they seem true already. It doesn’t matter to them why this should be; it is enough that it is. So what then is Tolkien saying in his stories? Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, he was not fond of allegory (and only once wrote in that genre, with his short story Leaf by Niggle); but he did passionately believe in what he referred to as the ‘applicability’ of fantasy.

Tolkien knew that the most fantastical adventure remains a hollow artifice if it fails to engage its readers on an emotional level. Though we and Tolkien’s characters are worlds apart, we identify with their feelings, share their dreams and fears. Which is why, heart in mouth, we follow Frodo and Sam on their struggle through the ash-pits of Mordor towards Mount Doom; or why real tears start in our eyes when we read of the ill-starred romance of Beren and Lúthien.

And the presiding virtue in so many of Tolkien’s tales is hope. Always, even in the longest and darkest night of Middle-earth, there glimmers a light – however small and flickering – of humanity, compassion and courage.

These and many other aspects of the fantasy realms of J.R.R. Tolkien are discussed by Colin Duriez in this book. Here you will find a listing of all the people, places and things of importance in Tolkien’s writings. This, of course, is extremely useful if, for example, you can’t quite remember who Amras was; what you would do with lembas; where in Middle-earth you would find Caras Galadon; or what you might expect to see in the Halls of Mandos.

The book also contains details of Tolkien’s life, his friends and colleagues and the writers and thinkers who influenced his work; and – most importantly – summarises his beliefs and the way in which they are revealed in his books.

This volume will prove a welcome addition to any Tolkien reader’s bookshelf, since wherever you dip into its pages you can reckon on gaining some new understanding of Middle-earth or the man of extraordinary vision who created it. Apart from which, it is impossible to read Mr Duriez’s book without wanting to read – or reread – Professor Tolkien’s books, which is an undoubted compliment to both authors.

Brian Sibley

Preface

J.R.R. Tolkien is such a widely read author that it is difficult to believe that, once upon a time, his publishers were convinced that The Lord of the Rings‡ might well make a financial loss for them. In those unenlightened days, the learned Professor could mutter the word ‘orc’ at uncouth behaviour, or exclaim ‘Mordor in our midst’ at an ugly example of modern life, without his meaning being known to the general public. Now the very word ‘hobbit’ has entered the English language, with its own place in dictionaries. The readership of his books is well over 100 million (the print run of the first US paperback edition of The Silmarillion‡ alone was reportedly over 2 million). He is read throughout the world in many languages.

Several polls of readers have made The Lord of the Rings their first choice. In 1996 the British bookshop chain, Waterstones, and a network TV programme, Book Choice, commissioned a poll of readers to determine the five books ‘you consider the greatest of the century’. The response was impressive. Around 26,000 readers responded, with 5,000 giving the first place to The Lord of the Rings, placing it in the number one position as the book of the century. Other polls repeated this preference. In 2000 Tom Shippey published J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. He is a literary scholar who like Tolkien has held the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds University. His book opens with the increasingly plausible claim, ‘The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic’, a claim he defends rigorously in the book. He speculates:

When the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians … will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow.

Not only is Tolkien read on a vast scale, but his work is present in many media – on audiotape and CD, in computer and board games, in illustration (by such as Rodney Matthews, John Howe, Ted Naismith, and Alan Lee), in drama adaptations, and on film. Tolkien’s status as a global phenomenon has been reinforced by the appearance of the three-part film by Peter Jackson (2001–3), each part representing a volume of The Lord of the Rings. Using the latest computer techniques, and filmed in the unspoiled landscapes of New Zealand, it employs actors of the calibre of Cate Blanchett as Galadriel,* Christopher Lee as Saruman,* Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins,* Liv Tyler as Arwen,* Ian McKellan as Gandalf,* and Bernard Hill as Théoden.* Peter Jackson described the work as

the holy grail of cinema…. I really think it would have been impossible to do The Lord of the Rings before the advent of computers…. With computers, we’ve arrived at a time when anything you can imagine can be put on to film, and … anything Tolkien could imagine can be put on film.

Explorations of virtual reality, particularly in film, has opened up the big philosophical and theological questions about the scope of reality. Does it extend beyond what can be measured, and beyond what can be seen, touched and heard? The denials of modernism, which tried to put reality into a closed box, seem increasingly hollow. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy about actual reality. Underpinning it is Tolkien’s carefully worked out idea of sub-creation† (seeChapter 7), in which the human maker imagines God’s world after him, just as the early scientists – and today’s cosmologists like Stephen Hawking – think God’s thoughts after him. For Tolkien, the moral and spiritual world is as real as the physical world – indeed, each is part of one creation, and a successful sub-creation like the linguistic world of Middle-earth* captures them all in an organic whole. The result is an image of reality that is making a claim to reliable knowledge.

Even readers who have ventured into Middle-earth through reading The Hobbit‡ or The Lord of the Rings may not realize the full treasures to be found in Tolkien’s other writings, and in his thinking. This book tries to explain the relationship between the two familiar works and Tolkien’s less well-known life work The Silmarillion. This is a work Tolkien never finished, and which was reconstructed and published by his son, Christopher Tolkien, after his death. I argue that it provides a necessary backdrop to the adventures of the Ring.† Furthermore I try to show that the relationship between Tolkien’s life, his work as an Oxford‡ scholar, his close friends (especially C.S. Lewis‡) and his fiction is itself fascinating.

There are of course many readers of Tolkien who may have travelled in The Silmarillion. Many find this book strangely different from the other, more popular works. Some are overwhelmed by the proliferation of new names and places, yet attracted by a sense of depth and richness – and of even more of a world to explore.

My book hopes to introduce, or remind readers of, the abundance that exists in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. It makes no claim to be exhaustive, but to provide helpful pointers. Selection was the most difficult of my tasks. The book is made up of interweaving sections, relating to his life, thought and writings, with the main focus upon The Lord of the Rings and its background – Middle-earth itself. To allow readers to follow through themes and subjects, fictional and actual, which capture their interest I have used asterisks, and other symbols, within articles and entries to show other references. If this omits a significant cross-reference I give it at the article’s end. Where appropriate, I have added further reading. At the end of the book is a list of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works (most of which are described within Chapter 9). For descriptions of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, the reader is referred to Part Two.

The key to symbols of reference is:

* Entry in Part Three: An A–Z of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Chapter 6: Beings, Places, Things and Events

† Entry in Part Four: A Look Behind Tolkien’s Life and Work, Chapter 7: Key Themes, Concepts and Images in Tolkien

‡ Entry in Part Four: A Look Behind Tolkien’s Life and Work, Chapter 8: People and Places in His Life Chapter 9: Tolkien’s Writings

Significant works of art and literature – like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and the background of its invented mythology,† set in his world of Middle-earth – challenge the human understanding and imagination.† The challenge is just as real, I believe, as when a new philosophy or scientific theory is thought out. Human beings are always in the process of being shaped. Without challenge, we specialize and stagnate. Tolkien, significantly, was particularly antagonistic to mechanization, represented in Sauron, Mordor,* Saruman, and the despoiling of the Shire.*

We are all on a journey – for which the quest to destroy the Ring in The Lord of the Rings is an image, with applicability to us. Tolkien, by challenging us, helps us to go in a right direction, and arrive at a certain destination. One of the songs of Middle-earth characteristically speaks of the road going ever on and on, a seminal image in the stories. As Bilbo said to Frodo, ‘It’s a dangerous business … going out of your door.’

Tolkien’s portrayal of new possibilities helps us to have the refreshment and moral strength to persevere over what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable. Tolkien challenges the spirit of our age, which says that there is no meaningful journey – either because there is no road, or because all roads lead to the same destination. The fact that Tolkien is so popular with readers in numerous countries shows that many people are attracted by the hope that shines through his work.

This book is enlarged and substantially reworked from my The Tolkien and Middle-earth Handbook (1992). My thanks are due, in writing this new book, to many people, far too many to acknowledge. The ideas started out as a paper given at L’Abri in Switzerland in 1969, and slowly grew, with the encouragement of Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker (whose pioneering ideas on symbolism and reality opened up many vistas). My many friends in the Tolkien Society have helped to keep me exploring Tolkien’s writings and context, and given me the opportunity to try out on them my attempts to understand Middle-earth. I am most thankful for the friendships gained through Tolkien’s legacy. It has also been my privilege to meet notable and inspiring literary scholars who were big enough to take Tolkien’s writings seriously, such as Professor Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, Colin Manlove, Professor Jakub Lichanski of Warsaw University, and Chris Garbowski at various Conferences held to explore the work of Tolkien or his friend C.S. Lewis or the literary mode of the fantastic. Their labours have helped to make my little book possible. My thanks as well to Alison Barr for all her encouragement, and to Claire Sauer for her much-appreciated and cheerful editorial work on my typescript. My thanks too must go to Sarah Flight for taking my book to a wider readership through Sutton Publishing. Also, The Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton provided invaluable resources, although my visit there was, alas, all too brief.

Colin Duriez

PART ONE

The Mind Behind Middle-earth

ONE

The Life and Work of J.R.R. Tolkien

I was born in 1892 and lived for my early years in ‘the Shire’ in a pre-mechanical age. Or more important, I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter ‘fact’ perhaps cannot be deduced…. I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe and like good plain food…. I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much. (Letter, 25 October 1958)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s most familiar creation, the hobbits* of Middle-earth,* belonged only to his private world until September 1937. Before then they were known only to his children, to his great friend C.S. Lewis,‡ and to a few other people. The print run of what is now a children’s classic – The Hobbit, or There and Back Again‡ (1937) – in its first edition was fifteen hundred copies. Forty years later, in 1977, the initial print run for the first US edition of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion‡ was over 300,000 copies, and two years later the run for the first US paperback edition was reportedly over two and a half million copies.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, the first son of English citizens Arthur Reuel‡ and Mabel Tolkien.‡ At the time of his father’s death in 1896, Ronald Tolkien and his brother Hilary were in England with his mother because of his health. They remained in England after his father’s death and occupied a rented house in Sarehole,‡ Warwickshire, outside Birmingham.‡ In Sarehole there was an old brick mill with a tall chimney. Though it was powered by a steam engine, a stream ran under its great wheel. The mill, with its frightening miller’s son, made a deep impression on Tolkien’s imagination. In The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) he wrote of a mill in Hobbiton,* located on the Water, which was torn down and replaced by a brick building which polluted both the air and water.

In his letters Tolkien remembered his mother as ‘a gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith.’ Her non-conformist family was opposed to her move to Roman Catholicism, which took place in 1900. ‘It is to my mother,’ wrote Tolkien, ‘who taught me (until I obtained a scholarship) that I owe my tastes for philology, especially of Germanic languages, and for romance.’ The boys’ education required that the family move into Birmingham.

Father Francis Morgan‡ was a Roman Catholic parish priest attached to the Birmingham Oratory, founded by John Henry Newman. He provided friendship and counsel for the fatherless family. Half-Spanish, Father Morgan was an extrovert whose enthusiasm helped the Tolkien family. With the boys often ill and the mother developing diabetes, Father Morgan helped to move them to Rednal, in the countryside, for the summer of 1904. The feeling there was like that of Sarehole. Mabel Tolkien died here later that year, and Father Morgan was left with the responsibility of the boys. He helped them financially, found them lodgings in Birmingham, and took them on holidays.

In 1908 Father Morgan found better lodgings for the orphaned brothers on Duchess Road in Birmingham. Here Tolkien fell in love with another lodger, Edith Bratt, who was slightly older than him. She was attractive, small and slender, with grey eyes. Father Morgan (like King Thingol in Tolkien’s tale of Beren* and Lùthien*) disapproved of their love. He was fearful that Tolkien would be distracted from his studies, and ordered him not to see Edith until he was 21. It meant a long separation, but Tolkien was loyal to his benefactor, the only father he had really known. When Tolkien wrote of their eventual engagement, Father Morgan accepted it without a fuss. The two were formally engaged when Tolkien was 22, after Edith was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Edith was ever associated in Tolkien’s mind with a fictional character he created early on in the development of The Silmarillion – Lúthien. The story had such a personal meaning for Tolkien, that Lúthien and her lover Beren were pet names for Edith and himself. The conception of the story was tied up with an incident where the two of them had wandered in a small wood in Roos, north of the Humber estuary. There, among hemlock, she danced and sang to him. Beren, in the story, encounters Lúthien dancing among hemlock in the woods of Neldoreth.* For both Beren and Tolkien it was a time of memories of danger: Tolkien was on leave from the battles of the First World War. When Edith died in 1971, he included ‘Lúthien’ on her gravestone.

While Tolkien was a schoolboy in King Edward VI Grammar School, he formed a club with several friends, the key members aside from Tolkien being G.B. Smith,‡ R.Q. ‘Rob’ Gilson,‡ and Christopher Wiseman.‡ Only Wiseman and Tolkien survived World War I. The group was called the Tea Club (TC) at first, and then later the Barrovian Society (BS), the last because the tearoom in Barrow’s Stores on Corporation Street in Birmingham became a favourite place to meet. Gilson was the son of the head teacher at King Edward’s School. G.B. Smith was also a close friend who commented on some of Tolkien’s early poems, including his original verses about Eärendil (then written ‘Earendel’). Smith was killed on active service in the winter of 1916. He wrote to Tolkien shortly before his death, speaking of how the TCBS‡ – the ‘immortal four’- would live on, even if he died that night. Smith concluded: ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.’

Though he was from a Methodist family, Wiseman found a great affinity with the Roman Catholic Tolkien. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Wiseman and Tolkien shared an interest in Latin and Greek, Rugby football, and a zest for discussing anything under the sun. Wiseman was also sympathetic with Tolkien’s experiments in invented language, as he was studying the hieroglyphics and language of ancient Egypt. Tolkien and Wiseman continued to meet after Wiseman entered Cambridge University. Wiseman served in the Royal Navy during World War I and later became head of Queen’s College, a private school in Taunton. Although the two men did not meet frequently, the friendship with Wiseman was never entirely forgotten.

Tolkien’s friends enjoyed his interest in Norse sagas and medieval English literature. After leaving school the four continued to meet occasionally, and to write to each other, until the war destroyed their association. The TCBS left a permanent mark on Tolkien’s character, which he captured in the idea of ‘fellowship’, as in the Fellowship of the Ring. Friendship, later, with C.S. Lewis helped to satisfy this important side of his nature.

After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford,‡ in 1915 and marrying Edith in 1916, Tolkien had his share of bitter action at the front lines. It was during the years of World War I that Tolkien began working on The Silmarillion (1977), writing ‘The Fall of Gondolin’* in 1917 while convalescing. In fact most of the legendary cycle of The Silmarillion was already constructed before 1930 – before the writing and publication of The Hobbit, the forerunner of The Lord of the Rings. In the latter books there are numerous references to matters covered by The Silmarillion: ruins of once-great places, sites of battles long ago, strange and beautiful names from the deep past, and elven swords made in Gondolin,* before its fall, for the Goblin Wars.

In a letter written many years later, Tolkien outlined to an interested publisher the relationship between his life and his imaginary world. He emphasized that the origin of his fiction was in language. ‘I do not remember a time,’ he recalled, ‘when I was not building it. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped, and of course, as a professional philologist (especially interested in linguistic aesthetics), I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in craft. Behind my stories is now a nexus of languages (mostly only structurally sketched)…. Out of these languages are made nearly all the names that appear in my legends. This gives them a certain character (a cohesion, a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity) to the nomenclature.’

Tolkien’s lifelong study and teaching of languages was the source of his imaginative creations. Just as science-fiction writers generally make use of plausible technological inventions and possibilities, Tolkien used his deep and expert knowledge of language in his fiction. He created in his youth two forms of the Elvish* tongue, inspired by his discovery of Welsh and Finnish, starting a process which led to the creation of a history and a geography to surround these languages, and peoples to speak them (and other tongues). He explains: ‘I had to posit a basic and phonetic structure of Primitive Elvish, and then modify this by a series of changes (such as actually do occur in known languages) so that the two end results would have a consistent structure and character, but be quite different.’ In a letter to W.H. Auden‡ Tolkien confessed that he always had had a ‘sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music’.

Equally important to language in Tolkien’s complicated make-up was a passion for myth† and for fairy story,† particularly, he says in his letters, for ‘heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history’. Tolkien revealed that he was an undergraduate before ‘thought and experience’ made it clear to him that story and language were ‘integrally related’. His imaginative and scientific interests were not on opposite poles. Myth and fairy story, he saw, must contain moral and religious truth, but implicitly, not explicitly (as allegory†). Both in his linguistic and his imaginative interests he was constantly seeking ‘material, things of a certain tone and air’. Myths, fairy stories, and ancient words constantly inspired and sustained the unfolding creations of his mind and imagination – his elven languages and the early seeds of The Silmarillion. The tone and quality he sought, he identified with northern and western Europe, particularly England. He sought to embody this quality in his fiction and invented languages.

The stories he invented in his youth – such as ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ – came to him as something given, rather than as conscious creation. This sense of givenness and discovery remained with him throughout his life. Paradoxically, The Silmarillion belongs to this period even though a full and developed version was not published until after Tolkien’s death. The mythology, history, and tales of Middle-earth are found in unfinished drafts dating over half a century, with considerable developments and changes in narrative structure.

The seeds of The Silmarillion lay in his childhood, his schooldays, and his undergraduate fascination with language. As a schoolboy Tolkien was delighted to acquire a second-hand copy of Joseph Wright’s‡Primer of the Gothic Language (1892). As a student at Oxford, Tolkien chose comparative philology as his special subject, so he had Wright as a lecturer and tutor. One of Wright’s achievements was his six-volume English dialect dictionary. Wright communicated to Tolkien his love for philology and was a demanding teacher and a formative influence on his life. After the interruptions of war, Tolkien returned to Oxford, working on a new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Over the years Tolkien was associated with three Oxford colleges: Exeter, Pembroke and Merton. Between 1911 and 1915 he was an undergraduate at Exeter College, studying at first classics and then English language and literature. In 1925 he returned from Leeds University to become Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. After he changed chairs to become Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945, he became a fellow of Merton College.

It was at Leeds, not Oxford, however, that Tolkien began his distinguished career as a university teacher. E.V. Gordon,‡ a Canadian who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, was appointed soon after Tolkien to teach in the English department at Leeds University. The two men became firm friends and were soon collaborating on a major piece of scholarship, a new edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight‡ (1925). This presentation of the text of the finest of all the English medieval romances helped to stimulate study of this work, much loved by Tolkien. The edition also contains a major glossary.

In 1975, two years after Tolkien’s death, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, including Tolkien’s own translations of three major medieval English poems, was published. Both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are thought to be by the same unknown author from the West Midlands, an area of England with which Tolkien identified and upon which he based the Shire. Tolkien’s area of teaching at Leeds University, and later Oxford, was essentially philology. According to T.A. Shippey, in his book The Road to Middle-earth (1982), Tolkien’s fiction results from the interaction between his imagination and his professional work as a philologist. In his science-fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), C.S. Lewis put something of his friend into the fictional character of the philologist Elwin Ransom. In 1944 Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher‡: ‘As a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions Lewisified in him.’

The name Elwin means ‘elf friend’ and is a version of the name of the central character in Tolkien’s unfinished story, ‘The Lost Road’.‡ In that story he is named Alboin. From a child he has invented, or rather discovered, strange and beautiful words, leading him to the theory that they are fragments from an ancient world. This slightly autobiographical story tells us much about the love which motivated Tolkien’s work in philology, and how it was intimately tied up with his invented mythology of Middle-earth. Owen Barfield said of Lewis that he was in love with the imagination. It could be said of Tolkien that he was in love with language.

When he moved south from Leeds to Oxford in 1925, Tolkien taught mostly Old English, Middle English, and the history of the English language. This work was intimately related to his construction of the languages, peoples and history of the three Ages of Middle-earth. He commented in a letter that he sought to create a mythology for England, but it might be argued that he also tried to create a mythology for the English language. The earliest expression of the mythology embodied in The Silmarillion, a poem written in 1914 about the voyage of Eärendil, was inspired by a line from Cynewulf’s Old English poem ‘Christ’, Eala Earendel engla beorhtost (‘Behold Earendel brightest of angels’).

In the year Tolkien took up the chair of Anglo-Saxon, the distinguished poet W.H. Auden came to Oxford as an undergraduate. There Auden developed a particular liking for Old English literature. Like Tolkien, Auden had a deep interest in northern mythology and was influenced by Tolkien while at Oxford. In later years Tolkien was greatly encouraged by Auden’s enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings. He wrote on the quest hero in Tolkien’s work, corresponded about and discussed with him the meaning of his work, and counteracted through reviews some of the negative criticism of the trilogy. In Carpenter’s biography of Auden (1981) there is a photograph from the 1940s of him absorbed in reading The Hobbit.

It was in 1926 that Tolkien met C.S. Lewis, who had been teaching at Magdalen College for nearly a year. They met at the English faculty meeting on 11 May, and Lewis was not amused, recording in his diary his first impression of Tolkien:

He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap. Can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks language is the real thing in the English School – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we are honest…. No harm in him: only needs a smack or two.

Any initial antipathy, however, was soon forgotten. Within a year or so they were meeting in each other’s rooms and talking far into the night. Tolkien eventually moved from being among Lewis’ second order of friends to his first.

These conversations proved crucial both for the two men’s writings and for Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. As Lewis remarked in Surprised by Joy (1955):

Friendship with Tolkien … marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.

A typical note of the time occurs in a letter from Lewis to his Ulster friend Arthur Greeves in December 1929: ‘Tolkien came back with me to college and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours.’

It is to this period that the origins of the Inklings‡ belongs. This literary group of male friends centred around the friendship of the two men, and other friends of Lewis’. In a letter to Donald Swann on 14 October 1966, Tolkien explains that the title originally belonged to an undergraduate group (of a type common in Oxford in those days). He speaks of reading an early version of his poem, ‘Errantry’, to them (later set to music by Swann):

I read it to an undergraduate club that used to hear its members read unpublished poems or short tales, and voted some of them into the minute book. They invented the name Inklings, and not I or Lewis, though we were among the few ‘senior’ members. (The club lasted the usual year or two of undergraduate societies; and the name became transferred to the circle of C.S. Lewis when only he and I were left of it.)

This poem was linked into Tolkien’s developing stories of Middle-earth in a complex way. Similarly, he recalled sharing with Lewis other elements of his work on The Silmarillion. The pattern of their future lives, including their later club, the Inklings, was being formed. Tolkien remembered that ‘In the early days of our association Jack used to come to my house and I read aloud to him The Silmarillion so far as it had then gone, including a long poem: ‘Beren and Lúthien’. Lewis was given the unfinished poem to take home to read and was delighted by it, offering Tolkien suggestions for improvement.

Also important in Tolkien’s life at this time was the Kolbitar,‡ an informal reading club he initiated soon after beginning to lecture at Oxford. Its purpose was to explore Icelandic literature such as the Poetic Edda. The name referred to those who crowd so close to the fire in winter that they seem to ‘bite the coal’. Lewis attended meetings, as did Nevill Coghill.‡ In some ways it was a forerunner of the Inklings, though more focused than the Inklings meetings ever were.

The gist of one of the long conversations between Lewis and Tolkien was recorded in October 1931 by Lewis in another letter to Arthur Greeves, and in Tolkien’s poem to Lewis, ‘Mythopoeia’. It was a crucial factor in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. Tolkien argued that human stories tend to fall into certain patterns and can embody myth. In the Christian Gospels there are all the best elements of good stories, including fairy stories, with the astounding additional factor that everything is also true in the actual, primary world. They combine mythic and historical, factual truth, with no divorce between the two. Lewis’ conversion deepened the friendship, a friendship only later eclipsed by Lewis’ acquaintance with Charles Williams‡ and what Tolkien called his ‘strange marriage’ to Joy Davidman.

In 1936 Tolkien published his seminal essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’.‡ On 8 March 1939 Tolkien gave his equally significant Andrew Lang lecture at Saint Andrews University. ‘On Fairy Stories’‡ was later published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947) – the Inklings’ tribute to the writer who had a great deal in common with Tolkien and Lewis. It set out Tolkien’s basic ideas concerning imagination,† fantasy, fairy story,† and sub-creation.† By being tales of elves, Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth fall into the category of fairy story.

Also belonging to this period of Tolkien’s life – it was not in fact published until 1982 – was the writing of Mr Bliss.‡ This is a children’s story, illustrated throughout by Tolkien in colour. He was an accomplished illustrator (see Pictures‡).

Of more abiding significance from this period is his creation of the strange figure of Tom Bombadil,* ‘Master of wood, water and hill’. He was a nature spirit, a name-giver, mastered by none and refusing possession† himself. Tom Bombadil was well known to Tolkien’s children. He was a Dutch doll belonging to Michael Tolkien as a young child. He became the hero of a poem, ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, published in 1934 in the Oxford Magazine. Tom Bombadil eventually re-emerged in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s The Hobbit was eventually published on 21 September 1937. It had long been familiar to Lewis and to Tolkien’s children. The writing of the book probably began in 1930 or 1931. Lewis was shown a draft before the end of 1932. Tolkien’s eldest sons remember the story being told to them before the 1930s. At first the story was independent of his burgeoning mythological cycle, The Silmarillion, and only later became drawn into the single invented world and history. The tale introduced hobbits into this mythological world and its history, dramatically affecting the course of the greater structure. The Hobbit belongs to the Third Age* of Middle-earth and chronologically precedes The Lord of the Rings.

Bilbo’s discovery of the Ring† provided Tolkien with the link between The Hobbit and its large sequel, The Lord of the Rings. However, it proved necessary for Tolkien substantially to rewrite chapter 5 of the former book to provide proper continuity between the two works over the great significance of the ruling Ring. This involved Bilbo deceiving his friends over crucial details about how he acquired the Ring. He drafted this in 1947, in the midst of composing The Lord of the Rings. The new edition, incorporating the revised chapter, first appeared in 1951.

What is striking about The Hobbit is Tolkien’s skill in adjusting the scale of his great mythology of the earlier ages of Middle-earth to the level of children. Names are simple, in complete contrast to the complexities of The Silmarillion. Erebor* is simply the Lonely Mountain.* Esgaroth* is usually called Lake-town. Elrond’s home in Rivendell* is described as the Last Homely House, west of the Mountains.

Tolkien continued with the adult sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, more and more leaving aside his first love, The Silmarillion. The writing of the sequel was a long, painstaking task. In the midst of it he wrote ‘Leaf by Niggle’‡ and ‘Farmer Giles of Ham’‡ (1949). ‘Leaf by Niggle’, a short allegory, was first published in January 1945 in the Dublin Review and was republished in Tree and Leaf‡ (1964). The allegory, an unusual form for Tolkien, is also atypical in that it has autobiographical elements, concerning the nature and dilemmas of imaginative creation.

Tolkien’s little story suggests the link between art and reality. Even in heaven there will be a place for the artist to add his or her own touch to the created world. The allegorical element could be interpreted with Niggle the painter signifying Tolkien the writer, and Niggle’s leaf the tales of Middle-earth (or perhaps just The Hobbit).

‘Farmer Giles of Ham’ is a lighthearted short story more obviously of interest to children, but full of a philologist’s playfulness. It is set before the days of King Arthur, in the valley of the Thames. The Little Kingdom has similarities with the Shire, particularly the sheltered and homely life of Ham. Farmer Giles is like a complacent Hobbit, with unexpected qualities.

Meanwhile, work continued slowly on The Lord of the Rings. Some of it was written and sent in installments to one of his four children, Christopher, on service in World War II with the Royal Air Force. At one point Tolkien did not touch the manuscript for a whole year. He wrote it in the evenings, for he was fully engaged in his university work and other matters. During the World War II years, and afterwards, he read portions to the Inklings, or simply to Lewis alone, or to Lewis and Charles Williams.

From the early to mid-1930s the Inklings had played an increasingly important part in Tolkien’s life. They were particularly important during the writing of The Lord of the Rings. The group did not have any consistent documentation such as the careful minuting of the fictional Notion Club, Tolkien’s unfinished portrait of an Inklings-type group of friends, set in the future.

Tolkien was undoubtedly a central figure in the literary group of friends held together by the zest and enthusiasm of Lewis. Tolkien described it in a letter as an ‘undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered around C.S.L[ewis]., and met in his rooms in Magdalen…. Our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!).’

Lewis gives a rare insight into the Inklings, in his preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, to which Tolkien contributed. Lewis points out that three of the essays in the collection are on literature, and, specifically, one aspect of literature, the ‘narrative art’. That, Lewis says, is natural enough. Williams’

All Hallows Eve and my own Perelandra (as well as Professor Tolkien’s unfinished sequel to The Hobbit) had all been read aloud, each chapter as it was written. They owe a good deal to the hard-hitting criticism of the circle. The problems of narrative as such – seldom heard of in modern critical writings – were constantly before our minds.

Later, near the end of its life as a reading group, the Inklings swelled to include Colin Hardie, Lord David Cecil, John Wain and others. Christopher Tolkien attended as soon as he returned from war service with the RAF in South Africa, and he became a significant member. It was upon this larger group that Tolkien drew inspiration for his unfinished ‘The Notion Club Papers’,‡ and it is likely that he read it all to them. Warren Lewis records in his diary of 22 August 1946 about ‘Tollers’ reading ‘a magnificent myth which is to knit up and concludes his Papers of the Notions Club’. This would have been ‘The Drowning of Anadûnê’ (published with the Notion Club Papers in Sauron Defeated).

There were two patterns of Inklings meetings: Tuesday mornings in ‘The Bird and Baby’ pub (The Eagle and Child, St Giles) – except when Lewis took the chair in Cambridge, when Monday mornings were more suitable – and Thursday evenings, usually in Lewis’ rooms in Magdalen but sometimes in Tolkien’s rooms in Merton College. The Thursday evenings were of more literary interest, as here members would read to each other work in progress, receiving criticism and encouragement. Much of the ‘new Hobbit’, The Lord of the Rings, was read in this way, sometimes by Christopher instead of his father. After 1949 the term the Inklings no longer appears in the diaries of Warren (‘Warnie’) Lewis,‡ the brother of C.S., and it is probable that sometime around 1950 the Thursday meetings ended, though the Tuesday meetings (or Monday ones) continued until 1962. The key years of the Inklings, in terms of their literary significance, were probably from the early 1930s until near the end of 1949.

The death of Williams in 1945 was a great blow to the group, particularly Lewis. There was a gradual cooling of the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien, which was the heart around which the Inklings formed and grew. The situation was not helped by Hugo Dyson exercising a veto against Tolkien reading from the unfinished Lord of the Rings at Inklings meetings. A later complexity was introduced by Lewis’ at first only intellectual friendship with Joy Davidman. Not all of Lewis’ friends appealed to Tolkien, or at least not to the same extent, as in the case of Charles Williams. Tolkien however influenced Lewis deeply, and Lewis was of great importance to Tolkien.

The central influence on Lewis was Tolkien’s Christianity. Lewis was originally an atheist, and Tolkien helped him come to faith. The pattern of his persuasion is vividly captured in the poem ‘Mythopoeia’, published in Tree and Leaf.‡ The second, related element of Tolkien’s influence was his view of the relation of myth and fact. The view can be seen as a theology of story (see Story, Tolkien’s theology of†). Tolkien had worked out a complex view of the relation of story and myth to reality. Tolkien saw the Gospel narratives – a story created by God himself in the real events of history – as having broken into the ‘seamless web of story’. Story – whether preceding or subsequent to the Gospel events – is joyfully alive with God’s presence. The importance of story became central to Lewis, expressed for example in his An Experiment in Criticism (1961).

The third element, also related, is Tolkien’s distinctive doctrine of sub-creation,† the view that the highest function of art is the creation of convincing secondary or other worlds. Without the impact of Tolkien’s view of sub-creation on Lewis we may not have had Malacandra, Perelandra, or Glome, particularly Perelandra, one of his most successful creations, or even Narnia.

Turning the other way, what was Lewis’ importance to Tolkien? Lewis clearly did not influence Tolkien’s writing in the way Tolkien influenced his. In Lewis, rather, Tolkien found a ready listener and appreciator. This listening was institutionalized in the Inklings’ Thursday night gatherings, where much of The Lord of the Rings was read. In fact, Tolkien confesses that without Lewis’ encouragement it is unlikely that he would have finished The Lord of the Rings. We might speculate that if the Thursday meetings had continued, with the associated dynamic of Tolkien’s and Lewis’ friendship, there would exist today tellings of the tales of Beren and Lúthien, and perhaps also of Túrin Turambar, and other key stories of the First Age, nearer the scale of The Lord of the Rings.

The two friends had a great number of shared beliefs. These convictions derived from shared tastes, and particularly from their common faith which, though orthodox, had an original cast. They saw the imagination† as the organ of meaning rather than of truth (which made their romanticism distinctive). Imaginative invention was justifiable in its own right – it did not have to serve in a didactic medium and did not have the burden of carrying conceptual truths. Though Lewis was more allegorical and explicit than Tolkien, both writers valued a symbolic perception of reality. A further central preoccupation of Lewis and Tolkien was imaginative invention (most obviously expressed in Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation†). This was related to their view of the function of imagination as the organ of meaning rather than of truth. Products of the imagination were a form of knowledge, but knowledge discovered by making, essentially not accessible in any other way.

They also shared a sense of the value of otherness – or otherworldliness. Great stories take us outside the prison of our own selves and our presuppositions about reality. Insofar as stories reflect the divine maker, they help us face the ultimate Other – God himself, distinct as creator from all else, including ourselves. The well of fantasy and imaginative invention is every person’s direct knowledge of the Other. In Of This and Other Worlds (1982) Lewis writes that ‘To construct plausible and moving “other worlds” you must draw on the only real “other world” we know, that of the spirit.’ For both men this all-pervasive sense of the other was focused in a quality of the numinous.† Both successfully embodied this quality in their fiction.

Both Tolkien and Lewis were preoccupied with pre-Christian paganism, particularly what might be called enlightened paganism. Most of Tolkien’s fiction is set in a pre-Christian world, as was his great model, Beowulf, according to his own interpretation of that poem. Even while an atheist, Lewis was attracted by pagan myths of the north and the idea of a dying god. In one of his Latin Letters, Lewis speculates that some modern people may need to be brought to pre-Christian pagan insights in preparation for more adequately receiving the Christian gospel. Tolkien undoubtedly shared this view of pre-evangelism. To point out these shared concerns is not to downplay important differences, often of emphasis, between Tolkien and Lewis. Their differences gave a dynamic to their friendship.

Tolkien was also influenced by Owen Barfield, who is considered one of the core Inklings, such was his impact on the group, even though he rarely was able to attend meetings. Barfield’s distinction between allegory and myth rings true of Tolkien’s perception, leading to his dislike of allegory and his concern, for example, about Lewis’ fondness for allegory. We can also find Tolkien-like concepts in Barfield’s view of prehistoric human consciousness, which he saw as unitary, not fragmented into subject and object. It was, as Barfield notes in Poetic Diction (1952),

a kind of thinking which is at the same time perceiving – a picture-thinking, a figurative, or imaginative, consciousness, which we can only grasp today by true analogy with the imagery of our poets, and, to some extent, with our own dreams.

Such an attention to dreams, and to shifts in consciousness that happen with developments in language, is typical also of Tolkien, highlighted in his unfinished ‘Notion Club Papers’.

In 1945 Tolkien was appointed to a new chair at Oxford, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, reflecting his wider interests. He was not now so cool to the idea of teaching literature at the university as he had been previously. Tolkien retained the chair until his retirement in 1959. In 1954 he played a key role in securing a Cambridge literary Professorship for C.S. Lewis, who had been passed over by his own university. The scholarly storyteller’s retirement years were spent revising The Lord of the Rings, brushing up and publishing some shorter pieces of story and poetry, and intermittently working on various drafts of The Silmarillion. Tolkien also spent much time dodging reporters and youthful Americans, as the 1960s marked the exploding popularity of his fantasies, when his readership went in numbers from thousands to millions, all over the world.

An interviewer at the time of this new popularity, Daphne Castell, tried to capture his personal manner:

He talks very quickly, striding up and down the converted garage which serves as his study, waving his pipe, making little jabs with it to mark important points; and now and then jamming it back in, and talking round it…. He has the habits of speech of the true story-teller…. Every sentence is important, and lively, and striking….

His voice is captured on several recordings of poems and other extracts from his fiction.

Out of this period of consolidation, however, came Smith of Wootton Major (1967), a profound story which is written simply enough for a child to enjoy. This short story was Tolkien’s last finished work and complements his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ in tracing the relationship between the world of faerie and the primary world. The story seems deceptively simple at first, and though children can enjoy it, it is not a children’s story. Tolkien described it as ‘an old man’s book, already weighted with the presage of “bereavement”.’ It was as if, like Smith in the story with his elfen star, Tolkien expected his imagination to come to an end. He was also preoccupied in this story with a theme associated with George MacDonald,‡ but which permeates all his work – ‘good’ death.†

Tolkien’s great achievement and life work is the invention, or sub-creation, of Middle-earth. Strictly speaking, Middle-earth is only part of the world. It is an old name for the world, taken from northern mythology and occurring in Old English literature. Much of Tolkien’s invention concerns the history, annals, languages, chronology, and geography of Middle-earth. He was concerned to make an inwardly consistent sub-creation. The History of Middle-earth‡ (1983–96) is the title of a series of twelve volumes of unfinished or preliminary material edited and published after Tolkien’s death by his son, Christopher, who also provided a valuable, detailed commentary (seeChapter 5: How The Lord of the Rings Relates to The Silmarillion).