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Herausgeber: Robert Hale Non Fiction
Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

J.R.R. Tolkien arguably changed the sort of things we read and write more profoundly than any other twentieth-century writer. When The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien was in his early sixties; beneath the outwardly unremarkable life of an Oxford don, his imaginative life was richly nourished by his professional interests. Now in paperback, this is the first biography to deal fully with the wealth of Tolkien's posthumously published material. It sets his writing firmly in the context of his academic life, shows the great personal and professional difficulties he overcame to complete The Lord of the Rings, and charts his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to complete the great cycle of legends that appeared, after his death, as The Silmarillion. Despite the precipitous decline of Tolkien's academic discipline, philology, his imaginative achievement may claim to vindicate his academic career.

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Leseprobe

Tolkien

About the author

Raymond Edwards is a freelance writer. He worked for some years for the Oxford English Dictionary whilst completing doctoral research into medieval manuscripts. Before this he followed the Oxford undergraduate course originally devised by Tolkien. He has written for, amongst others, The Tablet and The Times Literary Supplement. He translated Henry Harclay’s Ordinary Questions, and has written short books on various religious and historical subjects. He lives in north London with his wife, children and an improbable number of books.

Tolkien

RAYMOND EDWARDS

First published in 2014 by Robert Hale, an imprint of The Crowood Press Ltd, Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2020

Paperback edition 2020

All rights reserved. This e-book 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.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 71983 105 8

The right of Raymond Edwards to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

To Allison with love

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I – The Making of a Philologist

Chapter 1 – Early Years

Chapter 2 – University and Edith

Chapter 3 – War

Chapter 4 – The Young Scholar

Part II – Philology in Practice

Chapter 5 – Oxford and Storytelling

Chapter 6 – Delays and Frustrations

Chapter 7 – A Wilderness of Dragons: Beowulf and The Hobbit

Part III – Achievement

Chapter 8 – In the Background, War

Chapter 9 – Peace, Not Rest

Chapter 10 – Hyde and Jekyll

Chapter 11 – Finished, at Last

Chapter 12 – Philology at Bay

Chapter 13 – ‘My heart, to be shot at’

Part IV – Last Years

Chapter 14 – Silmarillion and Scholarship?

Chapter 15 – Unfinished Tales

Part V – Niggle’s Parish

Chapter 16 – Posthumous Publications

Chapter 17 – A Cinematic Afterlife

Epilogue

Appendix – Tolkien the Catholic

References

Further Reading and Bibliography

Index

Plates I – VIII

Acknowledgements

In one sense, no one writes a book like this alone; in another, of course, it is an intensely solitary activity, and arguably a selfish one. I am grateful to Stratford Caldecott and to Alexander Stilwell for, in different ways, prompting me to write it, and for their advice and practical help; and to Glynn MacNiven-Johnston for her care and attention to my prose style, and for tireless encouragement. Lucy Lethbridge and Brendan Walsh have indulged my preoccupation with Tolkien and his circle for years; they have my hearty thanks. My parents encouraged and enabled my first interest in Tolkien, after a sensible schoolmaster made me and my ten-year-old classmates read The Hobbit. They, and he, have my gratitude.

An early version of some parts of this book appeared in a short introduction to Tolkien published by the Catholic Truth Society; I am grateful for their permission to re-use this material.

I also thank HarperCollins, and the copyright holders listed below, for allowing me to reproduce passages from Tolkien’s work.

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1981

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1983

Mythopoeia © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1988

Smith of Wootton Major © The Tolkien Trust 1967

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil © The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1961

The Lord of the Rings © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966

The Book of the Lost Tales, Part One © The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate Limited and C.R. Tolkien 1983

The Book of the Lost Tales, Part Two © The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate Limited and C.R. Tolkien 1984

The Lost Road and Other Writings © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and C.R. Tolkien 1987

Sauron Defeated © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and C.R. Tolkien 1992

Morgoth’s Ring © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and C.R. Tolkien 1993

Excerpts from Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien. © 1964 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. © Renewed 1992 by John F.R. Tolkien, Christopher R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. © 1988 by The Tolkien Trust.

Excerpts from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. © 1954, 1955, 1965, 1966 by J.R.R. Tolkien. © renewed 1982, 1983 by Christopher R. Tolkien, Michael H.R. Tolkien, John F.R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien. © renewed 1993, 1994 by Christopher R. Tolkien, John F.R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M.A.R. Tolkien.

Most of all my wife Allison has been unfailingly supportive of my curious obsessions, endless piles of books, and patient of my persistent distraction: this is her book as much as mine. The publisher and author wish to thank copyright holders for permission to reproduce images. Images for the plates were sourced as detailed below:

Plate I (top), Oosoom (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KES_Free_Grammar_School_Charles_Barry.jpg)

Plate I (bottom), Gavin Warrins (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ User:GavinWarrins#mediaviewer/File:BirminghamOratoryDome.jpg)

Plate II (top), James Bradley (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Plate II (bottom), Oosoom (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Plate III (top), chensiyuan (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ legalcode)

Plate III (bottom), Simon Q (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode)

Plate IV (top), mcselede (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode)

Plate IV (bottom), (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacob_Grimm.jpg)

Plate V (top), (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumont-Hamel#mediaviewer/ File:Beaumont-Hamel_-_General_view_of_the_battlefield.jpg)

Plate V (bottom), Gavin Warrins (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User: GavinWarrins#mediaviewer/File:BirminghamUniversityChancellors Court.jpg

Plate VI (top), JREL (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode)

Plate VI (bottom), Michael Pätzgold (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/legalcode)

Plate VII (top), © Toby Ord (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxford_Botanic_Garden_in_Autumn_2004.jpg)

Plate VII (bottom), ©Ozeye (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merton_College_as_viewed_from_due_south_over_the_Meadows.jpg)

Plate VIII (top), Twooars (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tolkien__s_grave,_Wolvercote_Cemetery.jpg)

Plate VIII (bottom): © Julian Nitzsche (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode)

Abbreviations

ATB

J.R.R. Tolkien,

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other verses from The Red Book

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1962

Carpenter,

Biography

Humphrey Carpenter,

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1977

Carpenter,

Inklings

Humphrey Carpenter,

The Inklings

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1978

Duriez and Porter,

Handbook

Colin Duriez and David Porter,

The Inklings Handbook

. London, Azure, 2001

EETS

Early English Text Society

Garth

John Garth,

Tolkien and the Great War.

London, HarperCollins, 2003

GCCS

Government Code and Cipher School

H&S

Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond,

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide

, vol. 1:

Chronology

[H&S 1]; vol. 2,

Reader’s Guide

[H&S 2]. London, HarperCollins, 2006

HME

J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien,

The History of Middle Earth

, 12 vols. London, George Allen & Unwin/ HarperCollins, 1983–96. References to individual volumes are in the form

HME

1.123, referring to volume 1, page 123

Interpreters

Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain

, ed. Michael Lapidge. Oxford, OUP for the British Academy, 2002

Letters

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981; frequently reprinted

LOTR

J.R.R. Tolkien,

The Lord of the Rings

M&C

J.R.R. Tolkien,

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1983; frequently reprinted

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

OFS

J.R.R. Tolkien,

Tolkien On Fairy-Stories

, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London, HarperCollins, 2008

OHEL

Oxford History of English Literature

OTC

Officer Training Corps

OUP

Oxford University Press

Shippey,

Author

Tom Shippey,

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

. London, HarperCollins, 2000

Shippey,

Road

Tom Shippey,

The Road to Middle-Earth

(3rd edition). London, HarperCollins, 2005

SWM

J.R.R. Tolkien,

Smith of Wootton Major

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1967

TEnc

J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment

, ed. Michael D.C. Drout. New York and London, Routledge, 2007

J.R.R. Tolkien,

Tree and Leaf

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1964; frequently reprinted

TLeg

Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth

, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2000

TLS

Times Literary Supplement

TMed

Tolkien the Medievalist

, ed. Jane Chance. New York and London, Routledge, 2003

UCL

University College, London

Unfinished Tales

. London, George Allen & Unwin, 1980

Introduction

It is late in the year; under the vast domed Great Hall of the new university of Birmingham, rows of temporary beds are set up, filled with sick men, most newly back from France. One of them is writing in a small school exercise book.

The year is 1916, and he has been some months with his battalion on the Somme. Already many of his school and university friends have been killed. Compared with them, he is lucky; he has been struck down by a debilitating persistent fever, spread through the trenches by the ubiquitous lice. He is getting better, now, although still weak and exhausted and unfit to return to his unit. Soon, he will be discharged, and able to go to a Staffordshire village to stay with the wife he married only eight months ago, two months before he was sent to France. Meanwhile, he is writing: stories of an age of myth, of elves and dragons and love and despair and hope lost and renewed. His name is Ronald Tolkien.

The stories he wrote at this time were not published for another seventy years; but the themes and characters he described in them gradually found shape and led directly to his famous books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Here, whilst first recovering in hospital, then on a series of home service postings, began his life’s work: a corpus of imaginative writing whose overmastering theme, he declared late in life, was Death.

Tolkien is now best known as an author – his published writings run to twenty or so thick volumes – but he was many other things beside: husband, father to four children, professor of ancient language at Oxford, devout Catholic. How did he combine all of these things? How did his writing connect with the rest of his life, and his work? What sort of man was he, who arguably changed forever the sort of books that are written, and read? It is probably impossible to answer all of these questions; but I hope to make some suggestions.

I assume that anyone reading this book has read, or at least seen the film versions of, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Accordingly I presume some knowledge of what happens in the books, and have not given extensive discussions of them. There are plenty of good books that already do this; some are listed in the section on ‘Further reading’.

My fundamental aim in writing this book is to look at Tolkien’s life in the round: to try to understand how his academic interests (which are also to some extent my own) informed his imaginative work, and to give as best I can a clear and full account of the various stages in his life and writing. It is not that the one defines or determines the other; but it may give us a new respect for the man who wrote The Lord of the Rings to learn something of the circumstances under which he wrote it, and the real and protracted difficulties against which he constantly fought. He was a remarkable man, and what interested and moved him is likely to be worth looking at, independent of its influence on his fiction; so I make no apology for discussing intellectual interests that some, who have never tried to share them, may suppose are forbiddingly dry or technical. They are not. All that is needed is an open mind, and a readiness to work or think a little harder than usual. It is worth it. If at times, as I suspect, I have fallen into what Tolkien’s sometime tutor, Kenneth Sisam, condemned as ‘an inclination to follow interest beyond the limits of relevance’, I can offer only apology and the hope that, for some readers at least, interest cancels irrelevance.

There are no scandals here, no secrets (at least none that I have found), no obvious interventions in public life; but, amidst an outwardly ordinary life, or as ordinary a life as an Oxford don might have, an imaginative achievement which can hardly be paralleled, and has (I would say) made an incalculable alteration in the nature and scope of literary endeavour. An ordinary life, then: nothing, in fact, like the archetypal ‘writer’s life’ as popularly conceived, all garrets, or villas in the sun. Perhaps there are some men (they would need to be men, I think) who live like this and still manage to write books (Somerset Maugham at one end of the spectrum, or Joseph Roth at another, might be instances), but they cannot be usual. The normal companions of literary achievement would appear to be the bourgeois virtues, and their concomitant worries – houses, children, money, sexual fidelity, ‘being settled’. Literary composition usually needs routine, and some measure of peace and quiet; most who live the ‘Bohemian’ life never manage to publish a word. But hope and exaltation and misery and despair are found as richly and as varied in middle-class life as on the Left Bank (or wherever), although not, maybe, so highly coloured.

In one sense, Tolkien is one of the purest cases of literary vocation that one can imagine: his was a life where, despite a busy job, the responsibility of four children to raise and a difficult wife, plus indifferent health, chronic despondency, and the myriad interruptions of mid-twentieth-century life, he persevered, wrote, and continued to write despite strong (and reasonable) fears that none of it would ever be published, or publishable. Of itself, certainly, persistence is not an index of literary virtue; no one who has ever seen, much less read, the typical contents of a publisher’s pile of unsolicited manuscripts could ever be under that illusion. But it is, without doubt, a necessary companion to literary achievement. Another is the courage to risk, and to show what has been written with (it may be) difficulty and stolen effort, knowing it may be rejected, even with derision; and to endure such rejection, and not give up. All of these are moral qualities as much as they are literary; and Tolkien had them.

Incidentally, it might be argued that the very things – marriage, children, domesticity – that according to some pundits (Cyril Connolly, for example) are notorious barriers to literary creativity, were in Tolkien’s case the very key that unlocked his imaginative writing to the public.

Tolkien’s gift was to recover imaginatively the great literary monuments of the unrecorded heroic past, and create in modern English a world-story that allowed him to share his delight in this recovered legendry: to write tales that when read convey the precise joy and yearning that he, and some few like him, could find in bare word-forms and tables of sound-changes, but for most would remain otherwise opaque, closed, a cipher. He gives us access to a world we might otherwise never know existed, although it is there, in unread volumes by Grimm and Chambers and Ker and dozens of others even less known: the key, in fact, to faërie, at least for a while.

A friend who read a draft of Chapter 2 remarked, ‘You make his studies more interesting than his life’, and it may well be that some parts of the story as I have told it are duller than they might be: but in one strong sense, his studies were his life: the great adventure of Tolkien’s life was in fact an intellectual one, and the humdrum details of school, university, house and home are in some ways incidental, almost irrelevant – backcloth rather than landscape. But these humdrum surroundings are themselves the field of moral action and endeavour as much as, and in one sense decidedly more than, the intellectual canvas is in its fashion; and although we do not and probably cannot know as much about how Tolkien negotiated the empirical problems of the moral life of a husband and father as we do about how he tackled the narrative problems of The Lord of the Rings, we may reasonably infer that, in some way, his approach to the two things was not unconnected. But much further than this we cannot go. Without access to his unpublished diaries and letters, much of his inner life must remain unknown to us. We can guess, but only if we admit we are guessing. Life, too, has a way of concealing facts and events that cannot be predicted or inferred from their context; it is entirely likely that surprises of one sort or another would result if we could know all that is there to be known; but not, I suggest, of a quality to falsify the picture we can draw from what we do know. And to this now we should turn.

Part I – The Making of a Philologist

‘I’m a philologist,’ said Lowdham, ‘which means a misunderstood man.’1

Chapter 1 – Early Years

I – Family

It may surprise some to learn that Tolkien, in many ways a quintessentially English writer, was born in South Africa.

Despite his surname, the German in his background was minimal; the family told stories of how their ancestors were originally Saxon nobility, given the soubriquet tollkühn or ‘foolhardy’ after heroism at the 1529 siege of Vienna, and driven to England by one invasion or other. Many middle-class families preserve similar aristocratic origin stories, which may contain smaller or larger elements of truth. Tolkien himself may have believed it, or allowed himself to entertain it on occasion; he repeated it to C.S. Lewis in 1939. Certainly there are Tolkiehns and Tolkiens in Lower Saxony and Hamburg today. It has however been suggested the surname comes, instead, from the village of Tolkynen (now Tołkiny) near Rastenburg in what is now Poland; and that derives not from tollkühn but from the extinct Old Prussian language, a (West) Baltic tongue akin to (East Baltic) Latvian and Lithuanian, in which tolkien means ‘broker’ or ‘translator’.2 In later life, Tolkien himself was aware of the suggestion, and scorned it: Slavonic tolk, ‘interpreter, spokesman’, and its cognates were found in Low German dialects and in Dutch, but not in English, he declared; but this is rather to dodge the question, since the claim is presumably that his German surname came from this root, not that it had any sense as an English word.3

Whatever the now undiscoverable truth, the Tolkiens’ eponymous ancestor had come to England in the mid-eighteenth century, probably from Saxony, but seems to have retained no significant ties to his homeland, or none at least that were passed to his children. They soon became ‘intensely English’, and whilst keeping their foreign surname, the Tolkiens were solid Birmingham middle class; his mother’s family, the Suffields, were originally Worcestershire farming stock. The Tolkiens seem to have dropped their (presumed) ancestral Lutheranism, and are first recorded as Baptists, although (as was not unusual) some of them, particularly those with social position or aspirations, will have worshipped as, and considered themselves, Anglicans. The Suffields, on the other hand, seem to have been Methodist, although John Suffield, Tolkien’s maternal grandfather, had at some point become a Unitarian. This type of fluid religious identity, varying between nonconformity and the Established Church, was not unusual in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury England, where the Church of England still considered itself the exclusive religious body for the whole nation. In any case, although the precise details are now beyond recovery, it is clear that Tolkien came of sound Protestant background on both sides.

The Tolkiens had been involved in piano making and dealing in music for generations (legend claimed the original Tolkien immigrant had been, amongst other things, an accomplished harpsichordist). Tolkien’s grandfather, John Tolkien, had been a piano maker; his business had failed, and he turned to selling music. He had four children; his wife died, and he then remarried. Arthur, Tolkien’s father, was the eldest child of this second marriage. Arthur Tolkien had been working for Lloyds Bank in Birmingham for some years when, in 1888, aged thirty-one, he met Mabel Suffield and they became engaged. She was only eighteen, however, and her father (once a prosperous draper, now, after his business had failed, a commercial traveller for Jeyes Fluid) forbade her to marry for two years.

It has been argued that, in the late nineteenth century, Jeyes Fluid was a new and exciting product (it was given a Royal Warrant in 1896), and this may not have been the down-at-heel recourse we might suppose; although to most ears ‘commercial traveller’ is not a prestigious calling. At any rate, John Suffield’s fortunes seem to have recovered; by 1892, he also owned an iron foundry in Birmingham. He was similarly protective of his youngest daughter, (Emily) Jane. He had at least seven children, five of whom were daughters. Unitarian preacher, deft calligrapher, accomplished doggerel versifier, intrepid traveller and fearsomely bearded patriarch, he may easily stand as the model for the Old Took of The Hobbit, father of ‘three remarkable daughters’.

The following year, 1889, Arthur Tolkien sailed for South Africa, where he had got a job with the Bank of Africa in Cape Colony; the year after, he was made manager of their branch in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State. This gave significantly more responsibility, and better pay, than he could have hoped for at home. This made marriage possible; in March 1891, Mabel, who was now twenty-one, took ship for South Africa. On 16 April, she and Arthur were married in the Anglican cathedral in Cape Town. They lived in Bloemfontein, in a house attached to the bank where Arthur was manager.

The Orange Free State was not a British colony but an independent republic, founded and run by the Boers, settlers of originally Dutch extraction who were fiercely attached to their independence. Together with the neighbouring Transvaal, the Boers of the Orange Free State had defeated a British attempt at annexation a decade before (the First Boer War). Greatly expanded mining operations, however, had since brought many tens of thousands of mainly English-speaking immigrants, like the Tolkiens, into the two Boer republics; these immigrants, known in Afrikaans (the local Dutch-derived dialect) as uitlanders (‘foreigners’), were allowed no part in the political process or the governance of the country. The Afrikaner population was convinced, not unreasonably, that once in a majority, the uitlanders would, if granted civil rights, vote for incorporation alongside the British Cape Colony (which, indeed, had itself begun as a Dutch outpost before the English took over) in a confederation of British South African colonies. The existing Boer states were hidebound, oligarchical and stubbornly opposed to any further British encroachment, and in 1881 had fought a sharp and successful little war to resist it. The authorities in the neighbouring British territories (Cape Colony, Natal, Bechuanaland, the newly established Rhodesia) were understandably concerned at this situation, and made repeated and fruitless efforts to persuade the Boer republics to extend their franchise; there was also much concern at the often brutal and contemptuous attitude of the Boers towards the black population, which (it was claimed) lived in conditions little different from slavery. Arthur Tolkien’s wife Mabel was certainly shocked by the treatment of black servants, and was herself at pains to behave in a different and more humane manner. It is likely Arthur would have shared these sentiments. In later life, his son had a profound horror of apartheid and other forms of racial discrimination: this certainly derived from his mother’s early example.4 There was a growing and vocal lobby amongst English speakers across southern Africa for more energetic, which meant military, action. For the moment, however, there was uneasy peace. Matters in the Orange Free State were less tense than in the neighbouring Transvaal, however.

Still, although Bloemfontein was the capital of a Boer republic, Arthur Tolkien’s business would have been overwhelmingly amongst his fellow uitlanders; his bank, the Bank of Africa, was an Anglophone import from Cape Colony operating under special permission from the government, whilst their main competitor, the National Bank, was wholly Afrikaner. The Anglophone population of the Boer republics was both substantial and growing, and there would have been no sense of isolation; rather, the expatriate life, with its usual appurtenances of dinner parties, drinks parties, cricket and (for those so inclined) game shooting, was much as it was in dozens of other places across the Empire.

There, in Bloemfontein, on 3 January 1892, their first child was born, a couple of weeks early. He was christened John Ronald Reuel in the Anglican cathedral in Bloemfontein.

John and Reuel were Tolkien family names;5 Ronald, Tolkien later declared, because his mother had been convinced she was carrying a girl and had settled on Rosalind as a name, for which Ronald was the first male analogue she could come up with. Compare the character Alboin Errol in Tolkien’s unfinished novel The Lost Road, whose father tells him ‘mother had meant to call you Rosamund, only you turned up a boy’;6 in the Lombardic history of Paul the Deacon, Rosamund is wife to the Lombardic king Alboin. Their subsequent history is a grim one. Alboin Errol is one of several characters in Tolkien’s unpublished fiction who stands, or begins at least, as a close historical analogue to its author.

His family called him Ronald; two years later, his brother Hilary was born. Arthur Tolkien enjoyed the African climate; his wife did not, and was moreover concerned that Ronald was suffering from the persistent heat. In April 1895, accordingly, after the end of the summer season (which runs from November until April) she took both boys home to England for an extended leave.

In later life, Tolkien cherished his few memories of South Africa; the first Christmas he remembered, he said, was ‘a blazing hot day’, the Christmas tree a ‘drooping eucalyptus’.7 Arthur stayed in South Africa; he could not afford to leave his job for any amount of time, but hoped to come and join them before long. That November, he fell ill with rheumatic fever, and could not face the rigours of a voyage and the English winter. Mabel and the boys spent Christmas with her family. In January, after a short recovery, Arthur fell ill again; Mabel decided she must return to South Africa to look after him. Before she could make arrangements, however, Arthur suddenly deteriorated. On 14 February 1896, Mabel received a telegram saying he had had a haemorrhage and she should expect the worst; the next day, he died. Arthur Tolkien was only thirty-nine. Mabel Tolkien was twenty-six; her sons, four and two.

Ronald had, or spoke of, few memories of his father; he remembered him painting his name on a cabin trunk which accompanied his wife and children on their last voyage to England, and which Ronald kept all his life. For the rest, there are a couple of fugitive hints in his writings, nothing more.

Many years later, he began a poem called The Fall of Arthur, his only essay in ‘the Matter of Britain’; it is unfinished and has only recently been published. Unfortunately the action of the poem does not extend as far as Arthur’s death, so Freudians will need to be more than usually creative to make anything of this. Unfinished works are (as we shall see) not uncommon in Tolkien’s life as a writer. Later still, ‘John Arthurson’ is one of several Tolkien-analogues in his unfinished novel The Notion Club Papers.

Had Mabel not returned to England, she and her boys would have likely been caught up in the accelerating political crisis that finally, in 1899, led to the Boer republics declaring war on Britain. As it was, she found herself a young widow, in Birmingham, with a minimal income from her late husband’s estate and two small boys to raise.

They lodged in a semi-detached cottage in the small village of Sarehole, then a mile or so outside Birmingham. It is now a suburb of the city, but in 1896 was a real country village with a watermill, a river and strong thickets of trees.

Mabel had always been an active churchgoer; she became involved, now, in a ‘high’ Anglo-Catholic parish. This led her to Catholicism; in 1900, along with her sister, she became a Catholic, and was summarily disinherited by her family.

Her sister had also just returned from South Africa with two small boys; her husband, like Arthur Tolkien, stayed behind. Unlike Arthur, he survived to make the journey to England, and on his arrival forbade his wife to enter a Catholic church again. She instead took up with spiritualism.

II – Orphaned and educated

Mabel was an intelligent and highly literate woman; rather than send her boys to school, she taught them herself (according to her granddaughter Priscilla, Mabel Tolkien had been a governess before her marriage). This also helped her financially; she had only a small income from some shares left by Arthur. As well as conventional subjects, she taught them botany, the elements of drawing (both of which were interests that stayed with Ronald throughout his life), and gave them a grounding in languages: French, German and Latin. From the first, it was clear that Ronald had a strong talent in this area.

He and two of his Incledon cousins, like many children, made up a code language, christened ‘animalic’, in which names of animals stood in for common nouns and verbs; later, when they had their first taste of consciously foreign languages (French and Latin), they (or at least Tolkien and the younger of the two cousins) substituted a grammatically more complex jargon called Nevbosh, the ‘new nonsense’.8 Tolkien himself did not think this making of invented languages an unusual activity; it was his mature opinion that many or most children indulged in something similar, but were educated or corrected out of it. He, for some reason, never quite was.

He was a precocious reader, but mostly, at this stage, of botany and natural history rather than imaginative literature; he was, however, given most or all of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (or those at least that had then been published) and (probably) Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse. The Red Fairy Book of 1890 was the most momentous; it concludes with a retelling of the tale of Sigurd the Völsung and the dragon Fáfnir, heavily abridged by Lang from William Morris’s translation of the Norse Völsunga Saga. Tolkien later declared this was his ‘favourite without rival’.9 We may suppose that at some point, perhaps years later, Tolkien would have read the Morris translation in full. Almost the most striking thing about that is its translator’s introduction; Morris confesses himself puzzled no one has previously put it into English:

For this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks – to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been – a story too – then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.

Tolkien found in Lang’s Sigurd a number of resonant themes and images that clearly lodged deep in his imagination: the shards of an ancestral sword, famous in its day, whose reforging opens the way to a hero’s fate; lovers ruined by englamoured forgetfulness; cunning avaricious dwarves, steeped in skill and crooked with gold-lust; and the dragon itself, bestial, devious in speech, enwreathed in poison-clouds, greedy of gems. The story was finely illustrated by the artist Lancelot Speed, and Tolkien’s own dragon-pictures, when they came to be drawn, are closely reminiscent of Speed’s Fáfnir.

As Mark Atherton has noticed, the Red Fairy Book also includes a version of a Norwegian story, ‘The Master Thief’, where a young man falls in with brigands and discovers a remarkable talent for thievery.10 Both this theme, and a dragon, were to figure large in the first story that Tolkien himself published; but that was decades in the future. To look even further forward, the Green Fairy Book of 1892 also contains ‘The Enchanted Ring’, in which a young man is given a ring that confers both invisibility and supreme power, if only it is not used for ill; overborne by the temptation, he renounces the ring.11

In 1900, Ronald was sent to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, one of the ancient grammar schools that were the backbone of English education, and probably the best school in the area. It was also where his father had been educated. The fees were paid by a Tolkien uncle. The school was founded in 1552, like many grammar schools from the proceeds of suppressed religious houses; it was at that time based in an impressive neo-Gothic building on New Street, designed by Charles Barry (later the architect of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster).12 The school’s list of alumni is an impressive one; it includes Ronald Knox’s brother Edmund, who was a few years senior to Tolkien, and Field Marshal Lord Slim, his exact contemporary in age. There is no record of any notable contact between Tolkien and Slim whilst at school, however.13 Even if they barely overlapped and did not know each other, it is impressive for one school in a decade to have produced two such disparate but in their own ways striking figures. Nor was this an unusual generation: two decades before Tolkien, Housman had been a pupil; two decades after him, King Edward’s also educated Enoch Powell, a man who after a double-starred Classical First (admittedly from Cambridge) was made Professor of Greek at Sydney aged twenty-five (the youngest professor in the Empire, at the time). Earlier still, the school had educated the painter Burne-Jones and a string of Anglican scholar-bishops (Lightfoot, Westcott) as well as Edward White Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury and father to a remarkable if odd brood of children best known by their initials (E.F., A.C., R.H.). More recent alumni include Mark Steyn, sturdy polemicist and international music critic.

Now that Ronald was at school, Mabel moved the household from rural Sarehole to a rented house in Moseley in the city centre, near a Catholic church. Ronald was desolate at the move, and was at first unhappy at school, but after a term settled in well enough. After two years, Mabel moved them again, this time to be closer to the Birmingham Oratory, as she had grown to dislike the church they had been attending. One of the Fathers of the Oratory, Fr Francis Xavier Morgan, half Welsh, half Anglo-Spanish (his family were in the wine trade), became a family friend and (we would probably say today) spiritual director to Mabel.

The Oratory also ran a school, St Philip’s; Ronald and Hilary were enrolled there in 1902, but after a year, it became clear that although the education was Catholic and the fees were lower than those of King Edward’s, the schooling was not of the same quality; and Ronald needed to be stretched. His mother took the boys out of school and taught them at home. With the help of coaching from his mother, and from his aunt Jane (who was a mathematics teacher14), Ronald won a scholarship to King Edward’s, and returned there in 1903.

At the start of 1904, both Ronald and Hilary were ill with measles and whooping cough; then Hilary contracted pneumonia. Mabel exhausted herself nursing them, and in April was admitted to hospital. She was diagnosed with diabetes. This was before the discovery of insulin, and there was no effective treatment except rest. Ronald and Hilary were sent to stay with relatives; by June, however, Mabel had recovered enough to leave hospital. Fr Francis Morgan arranged for her and the boys to stay in a cottage near the Oratory retreat house at Rednal, in the Worcestershire countryside. They stayed at Rednal for the summer and autumn; it was a welcome return to the country, although when school began Ronald had to walk a mile to catch a train into Birmingham.

At the start of November, after five months of country life, Mabel’s illness suddenly and catastrophically returned. She fell into a diabetic coma; six days later, on 14 November 1904, aged only thirty-four, Mabel Tolkien died. Ronald was twelve, Hilary ten.

It is probably fair to say Ronald Tolkien never got over his mother’s death. His first biographer noted that, thereafter, his naturally cheerful and outgoing manner was counterbalanced by periods of intense despondency, when he felt ‘a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.’15 Tolkien remembered many years later talking to one of his cousins at this time and ‘vainly waving a hand at the sky saying “it is so empty and cold”’.16 The interests his mother had given him – botany, drawing, the English countryside, and language – were now charged with a strong memory of her; so, too, was the Catholic religion.

Her boys became wards of Fr Francis Morgan. Some of their Tolkien and Suffield relatives wanted to contest Mabel’s will, and raise the boys Protestant; Fr Francis arranged for them to live with the one Suffield aunt-by-marriage who was content for them to stay Catholic. He ensured that both brothers’ education continued (at King Edward’s). He also supplemented the Tolkiens’ meagre patrimony from his own private income, and continued to do so for some years. Many years later, Tolkien said his example outweighed that of all the disagreeable or even plain bad priests he had met: ‘and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him …’17

Francis Morgan was born in 1857, the same year in fact as Tolkien’s father, in Puerto de Santa Maria in southern Spain, headquarters of the sherry trade. His father, also Francis Morgan, had moved there in the 1840s to represent his family business, wine and spirit import and distribution (although the Morgans were originally from Tredegar, they had lived in London since the eighteenth century). There, Francis Morgan senior married a daughter of the Anglo-Spanish Osborne family, which even today remains one of the great sherry houses. Their four children were all brought up Catholic; the third child, and youngest son, was named Francisco Javier, or Francis Xavier. There had been significant involvement of English Catholics in the sherry trade for generations, but the Osbornes had only become Catholic recently; the Morgans were solidly Protestant. Nevertheless anyone in the wine-shipping business would likely have been more familiar with English Catholicism than was usual.

For many years Francis Morgan senior managed the Osborne business. Like many expatriate children, Francis junior was sent to England for schooling, at the Oratory School in Edgbaston;18 he then attended Manning’s short-lived Catholic University College in Kensington, which folded after systematic mismanagement (and probable embezzlement) by its Rector, one Mgr Capel, a plausible Irish crook and reputed ladies’ man who had made a name for himself as a preacher to fashionable invalids in Le Touquet before persuading Manning he was the man to run his Catholic rival to the then dogmatically Anglican ancient Universities. Francis Morgan’s time at this patchy institution was supplemented with some terms at Louvain, before, in 1877, he entered the Birmingham Oratory (where Newman, its founder, still lived) as a novice. In 1882, aged twenty-five, he was ordained priest.

There is no doubt these bare facts give little of the man who was, as Tolkien saw it, to be his ‘second father’. He was by all accounts loud and ebullient, a pastor rather than one of the Oratory’s intellectuals. Children found Francis Morgan embarrassing at first, but soon warmed to him, his incurable fondness for practical jokes, his invariable pipe-smoking; the same is said of Tolkien in later life. Certainly, Tolkien later recalled ‘the sudden miraculous experience of Fr Francis’s love and care and humour’ amidst the desolation after his mother’s death.19

Orphans are prominent in Tolkien’s fiction: Frodo Baggins lost his parents as a child, and was raised by Bilbo, his older cousin; Aragorn’s father died when he was two, his mother when he was young, and he was brought up in the household of Elrond, whose hidden house at Rivendell has, not wholly fancifully, been linked to the Oratorian enclave at Rednal; in The Silmarillion, orphaned heroes abound: Fëanor, Túrin, Tuor, Beren, Eärendil: all lose their fathers young, many are raised by sometimes strict substitutes. Clearly no single equation between any one of these fictional characters and Tolkien himself, or Francis Morgan, is wholly satisfactory or indeed appropriate: Tolkien is too subtle a writer to be happy with any such simplistic roman à clef. But it is not unfair, I suggest, to think that his own experience of being caught in a web of obligation and emotional ties enriched his fiction, and gave him a particular sympathy both for orphaned children and for their wise, well-meaning but humanly (or elvishly) limited guardians.

Moreover, it is not illegitimate, surely, to think that since writers, by the popular adage, write best on what they know, Tolkien’s repeated portrayals of orphans and fosterage, although it may owe something to Norse models, where fosterage was usual (conversely, of course, one might cite this as an additional reason for Tolkien’s attraction to Norse literature), is related in a strong sense to his own life: this had been his experience of childhood, and it was natural to him to describe it in fiction, and, because it had been his own experience, to do so sympathetically and well.

As we have seen, Ronald and Hilary, after a brief time living in the Oratory itself (which could not be a permanent arrangement as all spare space was taken up by boys from St Philip’s), and then some weeks staying with a Tolkien uncle in nearby Kings Norton, went in January 1905 to stay with their aunt (by marriage) Beatrice Suffield, who had married Mabel’s younger brother William and lived in Stirling Road, Edgbaston, close by the Oratory. She was recently widowed, and the house was gloomy; like many widows, she took paying lodgers.20 Ronald discovered one day that she had, without consulting him, burnt the great bulk of his mother’s letters and private papers. Beatrice Suffield was not especially fond of children, and the brothers were hardly happy (Tolkien later called it a ‘sad and troublous time’, and may have found solace in rereading fairy tales21), but the monthly stipend Fr Francis gave her for their board and lodging (£4 16s.) was presumably welcome. Even though they could not live there, the Tolkien brothers stayed close to the Oratory. They usually went there, most mornings, to serve Francis Morgan’s early Mass, and then eat breakfast in the refectory before going to school; Tolkien said later he had been ‘virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house, which contained many learned fathers (largely “converts”)’.22

Amongst the other Oratorian Fathers, Tolkien’s closest friend seems to have been Fr (Francis) Vincent Reade. One of the younger men (born in 1874, he was eighteen years Tolkien’s senior), he was a convert from a family of Cornish gentry: his father was an Anglican clergyman, his brother a Fellow of Keble and expert on Dante and medieval philosophy.23 He was a connexion of the novelist Charles Reade (now known, if at all, only for The Cloister and the Hearth) and of William Winwood Reade, atheist and historian, the Richard Dawkins of late Victorian England, whom readers of Conan Doyle will recognize (from The Sign of Four) as author of The Martyrdom of Man, an otherwise largely forgotten piece of ‘psycho-history’ (and, amongst much else, the wholly forgotten The Veil of Isis, or The Mysteries of the Druids, one of whose chapters is intriguingly titled ‘Vestiges of Druidism: In the Ceremonies of the Church of Rome’). Fr Vincent does not seem to have shared his family’s literary bent to any great degree, although he was probably well read beyond the norm for Catholic clergy. He later became Headmaster at St Philip’s; he was probably at this time already involved in the school, and may have known the Tolkien brothers from their time there.

Tolkien’s piety was of a traditional cast, and was (in later life, at any rate) heavily focussed on the Blessed Sacrament; but his theology is typically expansive and generous, hidebound neither by Thomist categorizing nor by Ultramontane triumphalism. We may look to Francis Morgan, and the humane atmosphere of the Oratory, for this formation.

Each summer, Fr Francis took the boys to Lyme Regis in Dorset for a seaside holiday; he also quietly supplemented their tiny income. They were involved to some extent in the life of the Oratory parish: in May 1909, the parish organized three troops of scouts, under the charge of ‘the Brothers Tolkien’, who by that time were seventeen and fifteen, and so presumably supervising younger boys rather than scouting themselves.

Tolkien’s life was now almost wholly urban. There were occasional trips to the Oratory house in still-rural Rednal (Tolkien remembered this as the only place where Fr Francis would smoke a pipe, and attributed his own later habitual pipe-smoking to this example), and, we should remember, the city of Birmingham was then smaller than it is now; but for the most part Tolkien’s schooldays and early youth were spent in the vaunting, grimy surroundings of this busy commercial and Imperial city (Joseph Chamberlain, expansionist Colonial Secretary and advocate of the protectionist ‘imperial preference’ tariff reform, was a local magnate who had been Mayor of Birmingham before he was returned to Parliament).

All this, of course, only made his memories of rural living, and occasional exposure to it, all the more precious: he could no longer take the countryside for granted. It also, or so some have thought, cast a glamour over the rare eccentricities of the urban landscape: prominent on the skyline were the chimney-tower of the Edgbaston Waterworks, and an odd building called Perrott’s Folly, a tower built by a local landowner in the mid-eighteenth century for an uncertain purpose but subsequently used as an observatory. These ‘two towers’ were a daily part of the young Tolkien’s horizon, and have been claimed as the seeds of later imaginings. Tolkien himself never mentioned them, but we may think the connexion suggestive. The great clock-tower of nearby Birmingham University (a memorial, in fact, to Joseph Chamberlain) was then recently built; it too may have made an impression.

III – Schooldays

School now assumed a large part in Tolkien’s life. Greek and Latin were the backbone of the curriculum, but he was also taught a good deal of English literature, including Chaucer in the original. He was academically strong, and was soon placed regularly at the top of his class. He was also, although slightly built, a keen rugby player. In 1907, the Headmaster, Cary Gilson, established an army cadet force for the boys;24 at first, this was an ad hoc body of volunteers such as had been common since the 1860s. Tolkien was amongst the 130 boys who became cadets, in what later became the school’s Officer Training Corps (OTC).25

Tolkien’s first close friend at school was Christopher Wiseman, son of a Methodist minister. Tolkien and Wiseman were together in the same class from 1905; Tolkien was placed first, Wiseman (who was a year younger) second. They were academic rivals as well as friends, and vied for these places for the rest of their school careers. Both played rugby energetically and well; they took to calling themselves ‘the Great Twin Brethren’, a phrase borrowed from Macaulay’s ‘Battle of Lake Regillus’. Wiseman was a mathematician, and an amateur musician and composer. Both he and Tolkien took their religion seriously, and were convinced of the necessity of a moral framework for artistic and social endeavour; this, although surrounded by a variety of shared interests, remained at the core of their friendship.

Doubtless it helped that their respective father-figures were both ministers of religion; it is likely Francis Morgan and Christopher Wiseman’s father, Frederick Luke Wiseman, knew each other, although we have no record of it. When Wiseman senior was appointed President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, Fr Francis used to refer to him as ‘the Pope of Wesley’.26 Tolkien in later life spoke highly of Wiseman senior – ‘one of the most delightful Christian men I have met’;27 it is probably not fanciful to see in this early contact a seed of Tolkien’s later sympathy for ecumenical initiatives between Christians.

Tolkien at this time began dabbling in what was to become an abiding interest: making up his own languages, what he called ‘private lang’. We saw above how, as a boy, he and two of his cousins had made up code languages. Now he was armed with a formidable battery of actual languages: as well as Latin, Greek, French (which he disliked) and German, he also had some Spanish (via Fr Francis), some Welsh, some Old Norse and, thanks as we shall see to one of his schoolmasters, Old and Middle English. He began to devise a properly structured language, somewhat after the phonetic model of Spanish, that he called ‘Naffarin’. Wiseman, who was interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was an occasional confidant. Later, a schoolfellow and would-be missionary bought, by mistake, A Primer of the Gothic Language (by an Oxford professor named Joseph Wright), under the impression it might be useful for his proposed avocation; he passed this on to Tolkien. Gothic is the most ancient Germanic language still preserved; Tolkien was instantly bowled over by it.

Wright’s Gothic Primer is not simply a bare grammar of Gothic; Wright prefixed his formal grammar with a brief but comprehensive history of Indo-European and Germanic sound-changes, which may have been Tolkien’s first real initiation into technical philology; it is followed by a substantial appendix of texts in Gothic, specifically extracts from the Gothic Bible, which is the only surviving evidence for the language. The character of these texts, incidentally, makes Tolkien’s schoolfellow’s mistake in buying it an understandable one: a grammar with an appendix of scripture was a familiar format for language primers for missionaries. The Bodleian Library in Oxford today holds Tolkien’s copy of Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary (bought, it seems, at some point during his schooldays, and kept throughout his life28), whose introduction had a philological section that became so worn by repeated reading that it fell out. This probably preceded Tolkien’s discovery of Wright’s Primer, and he described it (in a note pasted into the book) as the start of his interest in philology. Whilst this abbreviated discussion may have fired Tolkien’s interest, it seems reasonable, however, to see Wright’s Primer as his first real exposure to philology in the round. As well as the usual etymologies for each word, the Dictionary also contains an appendix of the etymology of place-names (which became a lifelong interest) and a brief stemma of the ‘divisions of the Aryan languages’.29

Tolkien’s other close friend from this time was a boy called Vincent Trought. Trought was a poet with a keen aesthetic sense and, by all accounts, a fondness for bizarre and extravagant rhetoric in debate. He was also a competent full-back on the rugby field, although his health had been much compromised by Birmingham’s polluted air. He and Wiseman became the heart of a small group whose friendship and collective influence defined much of Tolkien’s remaining time at school and for some years afterwards.

The bulk of Tolkien’s schooling was, as was customary, in the Greek and Latin classics and in history, mostly Greek and Roman although including some English (of, presumably, a Whiggish cast); two of Tolkien’s schoolmasters, however, were keen to introduce their pupils to English literature. One was George Brewerton, who had been Tolkien’s form-master in the Sixth Class, which, after a couple of terms in the Lower Remove, he was placed in when he went back to King Edward’s in 1903. Brewerton introduced his class to Shakespeare (whom Tolkien mostly disliked, especially Macbeth – he reckoned the device of the coming of Great Birnam Wood to Dunsinane ‘shabby’ and remembered ‘bitter disappointment and disgust’ at it 30) and Chaucer; he read Chaucer to them in the original, and Tolkien was spellbound. Brewerton encouraged his bent to historical linguistics, and some time later lent him an Old English primer (probably Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, which alongside an elementary grammar and phonology had an appendix of prose texts for translation31).

The other was R.W. ‘Dickie’ Reynolds, who after Balliol had been a literary critic for the National Observer in the 1890s, before returning to King Edward’s, his old school, as a master. Reynolds was Tolkien’s formmaster when he entered the Fourth Class, in 1906. Reynolds was not, Tolkien observed later, an especially good teacher, but he did make the boys read Milton, Keats and more contemporary poets (Kipling, Walter de la Mare) and carried with him something of the excitement and glamour of the literary life, which made him ‘immensely interesting as a person’.32 Reynolds moved easily in the world of publishers and poets, and may have had some part in prompting Tolkien’s interest in writing. He was also in charge of the school’s Literary and Debating Societies; the latter at any rate became one of Tolkien’s diversions.

As much as anything, though, Tolkien was excited by language – by the forms of words, in addition to (and to an extent separable from) their meaning. In each language he knew, he found a unique element of aesthetic pleasure that, somehow, chimed with his own innate preferences. In later years, he proposed the theory that we each of us have a ‘native language’ (whether an actually existing language or one ‘invented’ or ‘recovered’) which satisfies all our particular linguistic predilections, and that this language is not our ‘first-learned language’ or mothertongue.33 Much of Tolkien’s life can be seen, from one angle, as a search for, and an attempt to recover, this ‘native language’.

Tolkien made steady progress up the school, usually being placed first or second in the form; by his sixteenth birthday, he entered the First Class, which was under the direct supervision of the headmaster (‘Chief Master’ in King Edward’s School parlance).

In the First Class (which, by a curious inversion, was what King Edward’s then called its Sixth Form; it now has the more usual name) Tolkien was given permission by Francis Morgan to attend the headmaster’s classes in New Testament Greek; this was a significant concession from Fr Francis.

These were the early years of Pius X’s Pontifical Biblical Commission, whose pronouncements (including blanket, and frankly bizarre, prohibitions of modern critical scholarship) embarrassed Catholic scriptural scholarship for a generation; it was also in the immediate aftermath of Pius X’s decrees against ‘Modernism’ (a synthetic catch-all heresy, cooked up by a diligent Vatican official from a conspectus of heterodox views drawn indiscriminately from a range of contemporary historians and theologians), and Rome had encouraged Catholic clergy to denounce it wherever they plausibly detected it. This is not to dispute that some trends in and dogmas of contemporary critical scholarship, when applied indiscriminately, were potentially corrosive of Christianity as traditionally understood; but to compound from these things a catch-all heresy and encourage its delation was in another way just as unhelpful.34

To an anti-Modernist zealot, having Catholic boys taught scripture by a Protestant would have been unthinkable. Fortunately there were few of these amongst English Catholics. The exception was the diocese of Southwark, whose bishop, the Gibraltarian Peter Amigo, was privately convinced his episcopal colleagues (especially his arch-enemy, Archbishop Bourne of Westminster) were all closet Modernist sympathizers. None of this had penetrated into the diocese of Birmingham, however, and Oratorians, as non-diocesan priests, had in any case a degree more leeway than would most clergy. Tolkien later commented, ‘I certainly took no “harm”, and was better equipped ultimately to make my way in a non-Catholic professional society.’35

Tolkien was to stay at King Edward’s for another three years, until he was almost twenty. This may seem odd to us now, who are used to rigid correlations between age and scholastic progression; but it was quite usual at the time. Boys would stay at their school until they found a university place, or their parents tired of paying fees and found them a job or a trade instead. Tolkien was clearly clever enough to go to Oxford, but was too poor to do so without financial help; and this meant studying hard for a scholarship examination (these, we should remember, were the days before nationally recognized public qualifications: all university entrance was achieved not by a comparison of grades but by the private decision of the university).

IV – First love

Our next topic requires a small step back in time. In 1907, on their annual summer holiday to Lyme Regis, Fr Francis finally discovered from Tolkien and Hilary quite how miserable they were living with their aunt. He arranged for them to move, although he quietly continued paying a stipend to Aunt Beatrice.

At the start of 1908, Tolkien, now sixteen, and his brother Hilary moved from Beatrice Suffield’s house to live as lodgers with the Faulkners, a wine merchant and his wife, in Duchess Road also in Edgbaston, one block away from the Oratory. The Faulkners were active in the Oratory parish, and hosted musical evenings which some of the Fathers attended. The Tolkiens found they had as a fellow lodger a nineteen-year-old girl, Edith Bratt. She and Tolkien became friends, and allies against Mrs Faulkner’s constricting household regime (Edith persuaded the housemaid to smuggle extra food from the kitchen to the boys). By the following summer, they decided they were in love. They began to meet in secret.

Like Tolkien, Edith was an orphan; her mother had died when she was fourteen. Unlike him, she was illegitimate; her mother had been a governess in her father’s house, and Edith had never been recognized as his daughter by him or his family. Edith’s father has been identified as Alfred Warrilow, a paper dealer in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth. He was married with a five-year-old daughter, and Frances Bratt, Edith’s mother, was her governess. In 1888, Warrilow’s wife divorced him; Edith was born in 1889. Alfred Warrilow died in 1891, aged forty-nine.36 Frances Bratt was named sole executrix of Alfred Warrilow’s will. Warrilow’s estate was valued at just over £8,700, a fair sum, but we know nothing of the liabilities on it, which may have diminished it considerably, nor indeed how it was disposed. Any money or property left for Edith and her mother will hardly have amounted to the full sum proved.37

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