Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like first to thank Brandon Vogt and Word on Fire for their enthusiasm about publishing this book, and my editors, Matt Becklo and Dan Seseske, for their thoughtful and attentive work.

I gratefully acknowledge the receipt of the Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant from the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.

Research would not be possible without the labor and assistance of archivists. I particularly wish to thank Laura Schmidt of the Wade Center, William Fliss of the Marquette University Department of Special Collections and University Archives, and Catherine McIlwaine of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

I also wish to thank, within the United States, Barry Anderson for access to the Memphis C.S. Lewis Society archives, and Roger White, archivist of the Inklings collection, Azusa Pacific University; and, within the United Kingdom, Clare Broomfield of the Historic England Archive; Jonathan Bush and Mike Harkness of the Palace Green Library at Durham University; W. Graeme Clark-Hall, Archivist of the Oxford Union; Helen Drury, Photographic & Oral History Officer of the Oxfordshire History Centre; Katharine Spackman, Lead Librarian of the Oxfordshire Libraries; the staff of the British Library Manuscripts department; the Bodleian Library Scan and Deliver team; and the library staff of Merton College, Oxford.

My thanks to Owen Barfield for permission to access his grandfather’s papers at the Bodleian Library, and to Michael Foster for permission to quote from Dr. Clyde S. Kilby Recalls The Inklings.

All scholars of Tolkien owe a great debt to those who have made available previously unpublished draft material, letters, and biographical information, especially (but not limited to) Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D.C. Drout, Dimitra Fimi, Verlyn Flieger, John Garth, Diana Glyer, Wayne G. Hammond, Andrew S. Higgins, Stuart Lee, Christina Scull, John D. Rateliff, and, above all, the late Christopher Tolkien. Diana Glyer’s work on the Inklings as collaborators was significant both for my conceiving of this book and the process of its writing.

My work has been strengthened by helpful feedback from readers of the draft manuscript. I particularly wish to thank Richard Jeffery for his extensive and careful comments. I also give thanks to Lisa Coutras, Ryan Grube, Jason Lepojärvi, Rebekah Valerius, and Richard C. West for their comments.

Many people gave their time and attention to answer questions and render assistance, including Simon Berry, Leonie Caldecott, Oronzo Cilli, Jeremy Edmonds, John Garth, Carl F. Hostetter, Alex Lloyd, the late Jared Lobdell, John Magoun, Marjorie Mead, Dale Nelson, Alan Reynolds, B. Daniel Speake, David Wolcott, and members of the Tolkien Society and George MacDonald Facebook groups.

I am grateful for the assistance of Fr. Guy Nicholls of the Birmingham Oratory, and the support of the parishioners of Hinksey Parish, Oxford (Holy Rood and Our Lady of the Rosary).

My thanks to Tommy Crawford, Joe Fortey, and Tim Motte for technical assistance, and to Lucas Holt for help with researching copyrights and for proofreading, and to Eleanor Parker for drawing my attention to the Feast of the Ordination of St. Dunstan. I have benefited from the encouragement of many people, including Ashley Canter, Jennifer Kulzer, and Rachel Motte.

Special thanks go to Annie Crawford for her tireless and invaluable assistance in the preparation of the Photo Gallery.

I appreciate the opportunities that I have had to give public lectures on my research as it developed. I particularly wish to express my gratitude to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society for repeated invitations to speak, and insightful discussion, as this book was unfolding. My thanks also for opportunities to speak about my research to the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union; the C.S. Lewis Society of Madison; the Tolkien Society of Madison; the Wheaton College Tolkien Society; the Institute for Theology in the Arts at the University of St. Andrews; the Second Spring Centre for Faith and Culture, Oxford; the Canadian Roundtable in Cambridge, England; and Thorneloe University, Ontario.

Lastly, and most importantly, I joyfully acknowledge an unpayable debt to my friend Michael Ward for his steadfast encouragement and his invaluable feedback on the drafts of this book. Without his unfailing support over the last ten years, I might never have completed this work; and whatever its merits, they are the greater for his generous and insightful comments. With gratitude and affection, I dedicate Tolkien’s Modern Reading to him.

La Crosse, Wisconsin

October 21, 2020

Feast of the Ordination of St. Dunstan

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)

CONTENTS

PRELUDE

CHAPTER 1

Tolkien the Medievalist: Turning Over a New Leaf

CHAPTER 2

The Scope of This Study: Beating the Bounds

CHAPTER 3

Victorian Children’s Literature: A Professor at Play

CHAPTER 4

Post-Victorian Children’s Literature: Snergs, Rabbits,

and the Problem of Narnia

CHAPTER 5

George MacDonald: The Tarnished Key

CHAPTER 6

Boys’ Own Adventure: Coming of Age

CHAPTER 7

William Morris: Fellowship with the Brotherhood

CHAPTER 8

Rider Haggard: Fresh Ore from Old Mines

CHAPTER 9

Science Fiction: From Asimov to Zimiamvia

CHAPTER 10

Fine Fabling: Beyond the Walls of the World

CHAPTER 11

Tolkien’s Catholic Taste: Here Comes Everybody

CHAPTER 12

Tolkien’s Modern Reading

Photo Gallery

Appendix

A Comprehensive List of Tolkien’s Modern Reading

List of Bibliographical Abbreviations

Author’s Notes

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

PRELUDE

THAT’S THE INGLESANT HOUSE, HIS MOTHER HAD SAID when she stood with him on this spot back in the summer of 1904, her last summer. "The house where John Inglesant was written. But Ronald hadn’t then read that celebrated novel and knew nothing about it or its author. He had now remedied the omission. Five years had passed since his mother’s death, exactly five years (five summers with the length of five long winters" he whispered to himself). He had read a lot of books, an awful lot of books, since that terrible day. At the Oratory the priests said he read too much. He glanced along the road to his left, admiring for the umpteenth time the dome of Birmingham’s newest church, just visible against the pre-dawn November sky. He would still make it in time to serve at Mass for Fr. Francis. But how could you read too much? he asked himself, returning his gaze to the Inglesant house. He recalled how his mother had held the handle of the garden gate on that summer’s afternoon, a playful look in her eye, as if suggesting they should knock on the front door and demand to be shown round. He hadn’t risen to her dare. He touched the gate now, ruminatively. The house was silent, asleep amid the gloom—yes, the encircling gloom—its inhabitants like the holy souls in purgatory, still waiting for morning. Too much for what, for whom?

John Inglesant, as it turned out, was a florid, sprawling, philosophical romance set in the English Civil War. A young man fights on the Royalist side, travels widely in Italy, struggles between loyalty to Anglicanism and the call of Rome, and finally learns to forgive the wretch who killed his brother. It was not quite like anything else Ronald had read. Take a sensational plot by Rider Haggard, fill it with gallant heroes from Herbert Hayens, mix in historical color à la William Morris, garnish with The Hound of Heaven’s religious fervor, and you’d still only have a rough approximation. There was nothing else even by the same author that could have prepared him for what he found in the novel, or not that was worth reading. Henry Shorthouse was in essence a one-book wonder, like Emily Brontë with Wuthering Heights, like Anna Sewell with Black Beauty. Shorthouse had written John Inglesant painstakingly, passionately, by the light of an old oil lamp, over the course of ten years in that front parlor just a few feet away. There he is, still scribbling, Mrs. Warner would say to herself each night, from her door opposite, as she let the cat out. She had told young Ronald many times about her nocturnal glimpses of the great man. Just seeing the novel being written was a claim to fame.

Ronald nodded to Mrs. Warner now in the thinning gloom as she got herself through her front gate at number 19 and made a start for the Oratory. He would easily beat her to the seven o’clock Mass. She would have to stump all the way round past The Plough and Harrow and out onto the main road, whereas he could just slip in through the side door of the cellar and so up to the sacristy. He was an old hand now as an acolyte and knew precisely how long it would take to prepare the altar, and he’d be even quicker today without his little brother getting in the way. Hilary was laid up in bed, back in the top room they shared at Mrs. Faulkner’s. What was it this time? Whooping cough again? Scarlet fever? Chicken pox? And today of all days. St. Hilary, pray for him!

Ronald shivered in the early air. Perhaps he had caught something himself. He looked weak and white as a ghost: tense of face, narrow-shouldered, a scrawny seventeen-year-old not yet begun to fill out. But for all his pallor he was strong enough and tough on the rugby pitch, daring, even reckless in his tackles, his body exulting in the sprints and impacts, a welcome relief from the life he lived behind his high forehead, all words and worlds, words that made worlds.

He sighed and noticed his breath. What was he going to do with his life? The imminent scholarship exam at Corpus Christi College reared up in his mind yet again. Oxford! He simply must get into Oxford! And ‘Corpus Christi’—the Body of Christ: what could be better? But he had little hope; somehow something wasn’t quite right about it. He shook his head deeper into his scarf.

A light suddenly showed behind the curtain of an upstairs room in the house before him. Who lived there now, he wondered? The Inglesant author had died the year before his mother, and all the local papers loudly lamented his demise. For if Henry Shorthouse was highly regarded on the national stage, he was virtually deified in Birmingham. But did he really deserve such attention? Ronald’s mother had once pointed out a strange little man exiting St. John’s, Ladywood, whom he had eyed with a curiosity that was two parts admiration, three parts suspicion. A small, fabulously bewhiskered businessman with something of the renaissance count about his costume—was he a poseur or merely eccentric? He was Anglican, of course—the high church kind, despite his Quaker roots, a votary of the Oxford Movement, yet unable to bring himself to embrace the final lunacy of Romanism. How ironic that his house should have stood, should still stand, in the shadow of Newman’s Oratory! So close and yet so far…

His novel was such a palpable hit that Shorthouse had even found himself discussing it with Prime Minister Gladstone in Downing Street, and Lord Acton had called John Inglesant the most thoughtful and suggestive novel since Middlemarch. There’s glory for you! He was lionized, fêted, venerated—a nice change, no doubt, from the family firm and that dull career in chemical manufacturing he’d made do with till then. Goodbye, vitriol; hello, soft soap! Even the occasional American reader was brought to his door, earnestly voicing enthusiasm. Or so said Ronald’s old maths teacher at King Edward’s School, Mr. Levett. My dear Levett, I dedicate this volume to you, Shorthouse had written, upon the novel’s release in 1881, that I may have an opportunity of calling myself your friend.

Friendship, fame, fortune, freedom…all flowing from fiction. Real things could come, somehow, from imaginings, and the Inglesant house embodied them all. Here it stood—curtains still closed, chimneys unsmoking, one lamp now showing downstairs—almost on his own doorstep; he could see its roof from the attic window at Mrs. Faulkner’s. A mere four hundred yards separated his cramped, decayed lodgings there in Duchess Road from this temple of fame: Number 6, Beaufort Road, where the great work first saw the light of day. So close.…He shook his head, bumping his fist on the gate-post. Something was not as it should be. He glanced to his left again. There, at the end of the road stood the real temple. It was time—oops, it was past time—to get to Mass. Corpus Christi beckoned.

As the tall, pale, wiry boy hastened to the Oratory, his mind began to churn. Modern literature could be so strange, exciting, debatable. For what was Shorthouse’s novel really about? Its title was a nod to St. George, the Patron Saint of England (the Ingle sant), but its story suggested that Englishmen shunned popery if they were wise. Yet St. George had been adopted as the national saint when England was still a Catholic realm, ‘Mary’s Dowry,’ on good terms with the rest of the Church. It didn’t make sense. Where were the modern novelists who understood the old religion and the soul of the country, yet could also tell an epic tale that gripped the reader and wouldn’t let go? MacDonald was too dreamy; Kipling too gung-ho; Conan Doyle too cut-and-dried. Who among them would ever be able to write a true mythology for England, for the world?

Loosening his scarf, Ronald strode across the Plough and Harrow Road, let himself carefully into the damp cellar, then hopped up the steps to the sacristy where he found Fr. Francis waiting, tapping his thumb against the thurible stand. He had done all the preparations himself.

No Hilary?

Ill. Again. Plague, I think. Or cholera.

Sorry to hear it. And what a day for it, too. Five years on…

Yes. I know. Sorry I’m late, Father.

A prayer. Ronald rings the bell, takes a dip of holy water from the stoup, pausing to wet the fingers of his guardian in turn, as the two cross themselves and process to the side altar.

Introibo ad altare Dei, says the priest.

But Ronald’s mind is on Greek, not Latin. That epigraph to Inglesant—how did it run? Something from the First Epistle of St. John:

Ἀγαπητοί, νῦν τέκνα Θεοῦ ἐσμεν, καὶ οὔπω ἐφανερώθη τί ἐσόμεθα…

"Beloved, we are God’s children now: it does not yet appear what we shall be."

CHAPTER 1

Tolkien the Medievalist

Turning Over a New Leaf

JOHN RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN WAS BORN A VICTORIAN, at the height of British hope and glory, when the Empire covered one quarter of the globe, that Empire upon which the sun never set. He died in the reign of Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth, whose coronation he watched on television, the Empire now a thing of the past.

Men of his vintage saw more change than any other generation in human history: an observation so often made that it has become a commonplace. But this commonplace is true and worth restating as we assess Tolkien’s modern reading and the role it played in his personal formation and creative sense. For that very word ‘modern’—and its cognates, modernity, modernist, modernize—took on new connotations and new significance during his lifetime. At his birth, public transport went little faster than the speed of a trotting horse; by his death, supersonic flight was the modern reality. The British army still conducted cavalry charges when he was born in 1892; it possessed a nuclear arsenal when he died in 1973. He witnessed the rise of brutalism in architecture, of atonalism in music, of logical positivism in philosophy. He saw massive changes in attitudes to marriage, divorce, and the role of women. The Catholic liturgy he grew up on was transformed by the Second Vatican Council. The very coins in his pocket were different after decimalization of the pound sterling. He came into being alongside The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; he passed away as Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama was released.

And during these years and decades, as young John Ronald grew into manhood and maturity, stretching his imaginative muscles…slowly but surely, Middle-earth was coming into existence.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium—of which The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion form only a part—was the work of a lifetime. What inspired its creation? What was the soil that nourished the imagination of its author? How did Middle-earth come to be?

The most common and widely accepted answer has been that Tolkien was fundamentally rooted and grounded in the past, partaking only minimally of the modern world, and that we should therefore look to medieval literature for an understanding of his literary creations.

Many of the earliest readers thought so. Consider the words of praise on the dust-jacket of the second edition of The Lord of the Rings: He has instilled elements of Norse, Teutonic and Celtic myth to make a strange but coherent world of his own; One takes it completely seriously: as seriously as Malory; If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness.¹ Early reviewers concurred. Its genre, W.H. Auden declared, was the Heroic Quest; one writer affirmed that in the depths of Middle-earth we hear Snorri Sturluson and Beowulf, the sagas and the Nibelungenlied, and another described it as perhaps the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages.²

Yet here we find something puzzling. This apparently thoroughgoing medieval work has gone on to have enduring popularity, both in its own right as a piece of literature and also as adapted into a critically and commercially successful trilogy of feature films. Not only that, both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have an international reach, finding huge readerships well beyond the Anglophone world. They have been translated into several dozen languages, including Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. The popularity of Tolkien’s posthumously published tales from the legendarium is also astonishing: twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, featuring drafts and revisions of the published works, and unfinished writings in various stages of completion, were released not as academic titles for a niche audience but by a mainstream publisher. Not only are these volumes of seemingly specialist interest still in print, but the stand-alone books drawn from this body of material (such as The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin) have become best-sellers in their own right, reviewed in major newspapers. This abiding, global popularity seems to require explanation; it is not quite what one would expect of works produced in the Western European medieval tradition by an author who deliberately isolated himself from the modern world.n1

Can we really suppose that Middle-earth is simply a rehash of the Middle Ages? How many people read Malory these days? Who has even heard of Ariosto? Do people take Beowulf to the beach? Indeed, once we press beyond immediate reactions to the work and canvass more considered responses, we find that the picture quickly becomes much more complex. Two contributors to an early critical study of The Lord of the Rings described the novel as anomalous and genreless.³ The label that reviewers first reached for—medieval—soon showed itself to be not precisely germane.

Nonetheless, the popular image of Tolkien presents him as averse to modernity, firmly (and by his own choice) stuck in the past. Didn’t he think even Shakespeare was too modern? This is the point of view taken, for instance, by the BBC radio drama Tolkien in Love (2017), in which the Tolkien character says that everything after 1066 should be excised from schools. The Dome Karukoski biopic (2019) likewise implies that Tolkien’s interests were thoroughly pre-modern. It is routinely assumed by cultural commentators that Tolkien was a backward-looking person⁴ n2 and that he valued nothing beyond the boundaries of his professional interest in medieval literature. We need not bother, therefore, to consider his modern reading; it must have been minimal, something he dismissed as worthless, just as he rejected anything that smacked of the modern day.

After all, wasn’t he an arch-conservative? Witness his curmudgeonly attitude to the twentieth century in which he regrettably found himself: he opposed the abandonment of liturgical Latin; objected to Americo-cosmopolitanism; described gasoline-powered chainsaws as one of the greatest horrors of our age; and deplored the present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars.⁵ Clyde Kilby recalled, One day while sitting in the back yard of Tolkien’s house a loud motorcycle came by and totally interrupted our conversation. Tolkien said ‘That is an Orc.’⁶ All these stances and statements contribute to the popular impression that he had little knowledge of or taste for anything more up-to-date than Chaucer. Although he wasn’t actually responsible for the quip Literature stops in 1100; after that there’s only books, it has often been attributed to him because it is so clearly the reactionary sort of the thing he might have said. Clearly. Clearly.

The idea that Tolkien was immune to influence by his contemporaries is another part of this standard picture. His great friend C.S. Lewis famously remarked, as for anyone influencing Tolkien, you might as well (to adapt the White King) try to influence a bandersnatch.⁷ Tom Shippey remarks that When it comes to modern writers, Tolkien was notoriously beyond influence.⁸ John D. Rateliff says that Tolkien’s response to suggestions of influence was to steadfastly deny any post-medieval source.⁹ (Whether he in fact did habitually deny post-medieval sources, as is generally taken for granted, is a question to which we will attend in the next chapter.)

Early scholarship on Tolkien’s work reinforced this image of him as an isolated, medieval-focused writer. Humphrey Carpenter’s account of Tolkien’s creative life, as presented in his 1977 biography (the only one as yet to be authorized by the Tolkien family), along with his 1978 group study of the Inklings, seemed definitive, and has had a powerful impact for many years—tending to squelch further study of Tolkien’s modern reading. We will have more to say about Carpenter’s work shortly. For now let us quote his highly inaccurate statement: the major names in twentieth-century writing meant little or nothing to [Tolkien]. He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.¹⁰

According to the general consensus, then, Tolkien was clearly, notoriously, steadfastly medieval—but was he?

He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it?

It is true, as Tom Shippey argues in his magisterial The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology, that the power of Tolkien’s writing almost self-evidently had something to do with his job¹¹ n3—that job being, of course, his work as a philologist, specializing in medieval language and literature. Jane Chance notes that Where Tolkien turned to find the stuff and fabric of this ‘mythology for England’ was clearly the medieval world he knew so well from his scholarly studies.¹² In making these points, Chance and Shippey, and the other critics whom they represent in this approach, are correct in what they assert but, I believe, mistaken in what, by omission, they appear to deny. As Verlyn Flieger recognizes, there is a very common tendency to conflate Tolkien’s medieval scholarship with his creative work: Because we know that Tolkien was a scholar of medieval literature and language…we assume that he must necessarily have written his fiction in the same mode in which he studied and taught. We are partly right.¹³

We are partly right. Flieger defines the situation nicely. Middle-earth evidently owes much to the Middle Ages, and Tolkien’s deep and broad debts to medieval source material in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion have been amply and rightly acknowledged by scholars. Yes, Tolkien was, above all things, a medievalist. That is obvious, and it cannot be gainsaid, but it does not follow that he had no interest in literature beyond the Middle Ages. Too many critics have stopped with his medieval interests, making scant attempt to trace his engagement with subsequent literature—or they have merely noted it, assuming that it must be an exception to the rule and not worth more than a passing mention.

It is the aim of this book to provide a fresh view, and to correct the critical imbalance that has affected Tolkien scholarship. His modern reading was both more far-reaching than people have realized, and more significant for his creative imaginationn4 than has been assumed. If we recognize this, our understanding of and appreciation for Middle-earth—and of Tolkien himself—will be enriched.

Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings that such a story grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.¹⁴

Out of all that has been read. As we will discover, Tolkien read a great deal of modern literature, and in a variety of different genres, including children’s stories, historical fiction, fantastic romances, adventure, science fiction, detective stories, literary fiction, and poetry. He did so throughout his life, from childhood and youth (where he favored authors such as Edith Nesbit, Francis Thompson, and William Morris), up until right before his death (when we find him enjoying Sterling Lanier, Dylan Thomas, and Mark Twain). From the care with which he recorded his opinions it is evident that he engaged modern literature with his critical faculties in gear. This was not just holiday reading, undertaken to fill up tedious train journeys or as a distraction while recovering from illness. No, he read thoughtfully, discerningly, and receptively. To be sure, the other elements of his fertile ‘leaf-mould’—principally his medieval reading, but also the study of languages, his personal friendships with the Inklings and other formative experiences, especially in the Great War—occupy a more important place in his creative imagination. My argument in this book is that they are not the only materials upon which he drew. Tolkien knew modern literature, and was oriented toward the modern world, to a greater degree than we have hitherto realized.n5 Acknowledging this aspect of his creative process will enhance our ability to interpret and enjoy his work.

Let me not be misunderstood: I shall not be arguing that his modern reading is more important than his medieval reading, nor even that it is equally important. Given his professional work as well as his personal interests, his modern reading is undoubtedly a relatively minor element in the total picture. But it is present and should not be overlooked.

As we will see in this study, the modern writers whose work was important to Tolkien included not only still-famous names such as Beatrix Potter and C.S. Lewis, but figures who will be only dimly known to many readers: Lord Dunsany, Herbert Hayens, E.H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, Wilfred Childe, Roy Campbell. Some of the authors whom Tolkien read were best-sellers at the time, but who now has heard of J.H. Shorthouse? Yet Shorthouse’s novel John Inglesant was widely read, admired, and discussed in Tolkien’s day and may have had an important influence on The Lord of the Rings (as we will discuss in Chapter 10). Shorthouse and others are no longer household names, but they were once very much in fashion, and Tolkien knew their works well. The fact that today they have largely disappeared from the public consciousness, and even the consciousness of literary critics by and large, means that it takes strenuous mental effort to recapture his perspective.

However, before we start to make that strenuous effort, we should first ask an important preliminary question, so that we may survey the whole situation with fresh eyes. How did this oversimplification of Tolkien as nostalgic and un-influenceable become so firmly embedded in the popular and scholarly view? Four points are worth considering.

It’s a challenge to try and tarnish: Carpenter on Tolkien

First, certain statements by Humphrey Carpenter, in his life of Tolkien and in his group biography of the Inklings, have profoundly shaped views on Tolkien’s attitudes. Carpenter, as we noted above, summed up Tolkien’s reading with the terse statement: He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.¹⁵ Since Carpenter is to date the only biographer to have enjoyed unfettered access to the Tolkien papers, naturally his opinion carries weight. However, before we place any great trust in this verdict, we would do well to investigate Carpenter and see what claim he has to being an objective and unbiased reporter.n6

Carpenter freely confessed that he brought certain very strong preconceptions to his project. In a revealing interview, he admits:

The first biography I did in book form was the life of Tolkien, and I thought, here is this rather comic Oxford academic—the stereotype absent-minded professor—who would be lecturing on Beowulf with a parcel of fish from the fishmongers sticking out of his pocket. And the first draft of the book was written very much in that mode, treating him as slightly slapstick. At least it began that way. But as the book went on, I realized he wasn’t like this at all. He had had a very strange childhood. His mother had died early (his father was already dead) and he was brought up by a Roman Catholic priest—an unlikely parent-figure. Consequently he acquired certain uptight Pauline moral values. And my caricature of the Oxford academic clashed with his [sic], and I never resolved it properly.¹⁶

By Carpenter’s own admission, then, he began this, his first ever formal biography, in a slapstick mode.n7 He came to realize, however, that the caricature he was drawing had to be complexified by his discovery that Tolkien had experienced a strange childhood and had thereby acquired uptight values. Finally, he never resolved the two perspectives.

And it was not only the biographer himself who had mixed feelings about the work. Carpenter reveals that the first draft of his book was deemed unacceptable by the Tolkien family.¹⁷ Rayner Unwin, whose firm published the Biography, confirms that Tolkien’s son, Christopher, carefully and critically tore Humphrey’s draft to pieces; Carpenter then retreated to his bedroom for a week or two and re-wrote the whole book which, in its revised form, Christopher approved and it was given to us to publish.¹⁸

It seems almost incredible that Carpenter would have been able to address such a thorough critique in a mere fortnight, and in fact he said later, What I’d actually done was castrated the book, cut out everything which was likely to be contentious.¹⁹ A revision that omitted the most egregious passages would indeed have been feasible to complete in just a week or two—but Carpenter didn’t have the time, even if he had the inclination, to address more subtle flaws of interpretation or misrepresentation.n8

Carpenter also admitted that he had convinced the Tolkien family to appoint him official biographer by charm and by playing on their fears: I went to them one by one and said, ‘Look, I don’t know much about writing biography, but I did know your father a little, and I know Oxford, I know the milieu in which he operated, and I think if you don’t get somebody who has those advantages, you’ll probably find a worse biographer coming along.’²⁰ Better the devil you know…

There is a certain roguish honesty in these disclosures, and they comport with Carpenter’s own self-image as someone who knows ‘the establishment’ from the inside but is not part of it. Indeed, he saw himself as somewhat anti-establishment: I am always looking for idols to demolish, because I’m that sort of person, he said. Upsetting the loyal fans is one of my main aims. I’ve always explained this aggression to myself by saying that around each figure there’s an absurd cult of admirers, people who want the great person to remain untarnished. And it’s a challenge to try and tarnish them.²¹

Elsewhere, Carpenter reveals a dismissive attitude regarding Tolkien’s academic work with the back-handed compliment: Tolkien was probably the greatest scholar of Anglo-Saxon who ever lived; but it’s a dead subject, having been replaced by structuralism.²² In Carpenter’s mind, then, Tolkien’s professional career was wasted on an irrelevant and out-of-date topic, and it was his duty as an iconoclast aggressively to expose his subject’s feet of clay. He came not to praise Tolkien, but to bury him, an approach that is more or less summed up in the title of his 1992 BBC radio play: In a Hole in the Ground, There Lived a Tolkien.n9

With all these facts in mind, we would be wise to approach Carpenter’s judgments with caution. And I am not the first to raise such doubts about his reliability. Hammond and Scull note that the Biography, useful as it is, has problems of emphasis or interpretation. Nicole M. duPlessis has carefully analyzed Carpenter’s biases regarding Tolkien’s marriage.²³

The deficiencies in the Biography have been, until recently, difficult to detect, let alone challenge or correct. Omission of information, and interpretation in the guise of reportage, can sometimes have a stronger and more persistent distorting effect than outright error. When it comes to Tolkien’s taste for and interest in contemporary literature, Carpenter’s bold claim that he read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it needs to be approached with extreme circumspection.

Letters in the shadow of the Biography

Second, this mistaken ‘conventional wisdom’ about Tolkien was able to take a firmer hold because for years Carpenter had effectively cornered the market in Tolkien scholarship. Not only had he written the first biography (1977) and the first major study of the Inklings (1978), he was also responsible for the publication of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981). Admittedly, this project was undertaken with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, but that very phrasing (which appears on the front cover of the book)—a most unusual way of describing editorial collaboration—suggests an uneasy relationship. The awkward phraseology indicates that something of a strain had developed between Carpenter and the Tolkien family, after his biography draft was deemed unacceptable and hastily revised.n10

The volume of letters undoubtedly reflects something of Carpenter’s unsympathetic attitude toward his subject.n11 Both in his selection of letters and in his editing of them we can observe an agenda at work that serves to make Tolkien seem impatient, defensive, and uninterested in anything modern.

For instance, the extract presented from a 1958 letter to Deborah Webster begins baldly with Tolkien saying, I do not like giving facts about myself… After nonetheless giving various details about himself, he concludes abruptly with I hope that is enough to go on with.²⁴ Although the extract itself contains interesting details, the tone appears brusque, even irritated, as if Tolkien only reluctantly discloses personal information. A different perspective appears when we consult the full text of his remarks.²⁵ His reply in fact begins by thanking Webster for her letter and a book of prayers that she had sent him, and noting that he wished she had visited Oxford during the summer, when he would have been more likely to be able to meet with her in person. He then writes, But I do not like giving ‘facts’ about myself other than ‘dry’ ones…²⁶ The word ‘But’ (omitted by Carpenter without ellipsis) after the friendly opening gives his autobiographical reticence an apologetic rather than curmudgeonly flavor. He signs off with gratitude for appreciation²⁷ —again, omitted in the Letters. The warm tone indicates that he is not at all bothered by her inquiry, but feels complimented by her interest and is happy to respond. Carpenter’s subtle nips and tucks present us with a different face: less friendly, more forbidding.

Another example of tendentious editing appears when Carpenter presents long extracts from a letter in which Tolkien criticizes a proposed cinematic treatment of The Lord of the Rings. Carpenter omits the passage in which Tolkien discusses a recent film version of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines—a passage that shows Tolkien’s interest in and knowledge about both cinema (still then a cutting-edge new medium) and the modern literature that could be adapted for it.²⁸ From the picture Carpenter provides, the reader could be forgiven for assuming that Tolkien had little or no exposure to film versions of contemporary fiction and that he had a reactionary objection to his own work being given the silver-screen treatment.

Possibly because of the conditioning effects of Carpenter’s editorializing, readers of the Letters have tended to pay more attention to Tolkien’s negative statements about his reading than his positive ones. For instance, in a review of the volume, J.I.M. Stewart comes away with the impression that Tolkien was a reader of limited sympathies:

About other people’s books he says little, and that little is commonly unfavourable.…[He] admits with some complacency to not being specially well read in modern English.…there is a certain quirkiness in all this reiteration of a theme (I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention…Certainly I have not been nourished by English literature) which knits with similarly persistent quirkinesses in other fields to an effect that is not exactly that of breadth of view.²⁹

Stewart highlights Tolkien’s negative remarks about modern authors such as Browning, Graves, and Sayers, but curiously makes no mention whatsoever of his praise for Joyce Gard, Kenneth Grahame, David Lindsay, and so on. Why such one-sidedness? It would seem that the popular idea of Tolkien as the arch-medievalist, uninterested in modern literature, had already set in sufficiently that Stewart could cherry-pick those bits from the Letters that supported this image without noticing his bias in doing so. An amusing side note to his derisive remarks about these supposedly narrow tastes is that Tolkien had read at least one of Stewart’s own mystery novels, published under his nom de plume Michael Innes.³⁰

We must also keep firmly in mind the fact that Tolkien wrote many more letters than are included in the volume. Carpenter noted that he had to sift through literally thousands of letters. I mean thousands, and that Tolkien was one of the last great letter-writers in the great English tradition of letter-writers³¹ —so we must be aware that what he presents is only a small portion of the total correspondence, not a comprehensive ‘collected letters.’ Out of the thousands, Carpenter presents a mere 354, most of which are incomplete.n12

The mythical Tollewis

We just noted Tolkien’s discussion of King Solomon’s Mines and its recent cinematic treatment. He may well have gone to see the movie with his friend C.S. Lewis; at any rate, in giving his view of the film, Tolkien reports that he shares some of Lewis’s objections to it. Tolkien and Lewis were colleagues and friends, a friendship that was especially close during the 1930s, and they had a common outlook on many things, including this particular movie. But they definitely did not see eye-to-eye about everything or live identical sorts of lives. Tolkien was Catholic, Lewis was Anglican; Tolkien was married and a father of four, Lewis was a bachelor for all but three years of his life; Tolkien played rugby and squash enthusiastically, Lewis was uninterested in sport. And we could go on. We make these observations to highlight a third distorting influence on the popular image of Tolkien’s attitude toward the modern world : namely, the tendency to conflate him with his fellow Inkling, making a composite figure whom we could call ‘Tollewis’ along the lines of the famous description of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc as the ‘Chesterbelloc.’

For instance, Carpenter pictures Tolkien sitting at the breakfast table, where he glances at the newspaper, but only in the most cursory fashion. He, like his friend C.S. Lewis, regards ‘news’ as on the whole trivial and fit to be ignored.…However, both men enjoy the crossword.³² The imagined scene is extremely close to a description of Lewis that appears in the first biography of him,³³ where Lewis is described (accurately) as someone who didn’t read newspapers and derided journalism as mostly not true.³⁴ It seems likely that Carpenter, on seeing this account of Lewis—in which Tolkien is never mentioned—simply assumed that such a dismissive attitude to the news was equally true of his friend, and attached it to the subject of his own biography, even down to the breakfast table setting. But as we will see later in this chapter, Tolkien did read the newspapers and followed current events closely. He was attuned to the modern world in ways his friend was not.

Michael Ward cautions against this tendency toward an unreflective pairing-off of Lewis and Tolkien: it is important to recognize, he argues, that each was a unique individual and not one half of a pair of conjoined twins.…The two men must be allowed to attempt different things in different ways.³⁵ The point applies equally well to their attitudes toward modern reading. It was Lewis, not Tolkien, who declared, It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. Now, Tolkien may in fact not have demurred much from the basic point Lewis was making—about the importance of escaping the prejudices of one’s time—but, still, it was not Tolkien but Lewis who bothered to pontificate on the matter in public and lay down a rule about it. It was not Tolkien but Lewis who highlighted the need to oppose chronological snobbery (the unreflective assumption that the values of one’s own day are superior to those of the past). It was not Tolkien but Lewis, or one side of Lewis, who was described (by their mutual friend Owen Barfield) as a "laudator temporis acti [praiser of times past]."³⁶ Lewis and Tolkien did have a great deal in common, but what can be said about one is not automatically applicable to the other. We must weigh the evidence and allow Tolkien’s own preferences, interests, and habits of mind to emerge unshadowed by what we know of his friend. It is not equally true of them both that they were fighting a constant rearguard campaign against whatever smacked of the modern age.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot abide in his age

Fourth and finally, the image of Tolkien as irredeemably anti-modern has been shaped by a too-frequent disregard of context and chronology.

He certainly did have a generally negative view of industrialization, but we must remember his historical context. A man who fought in the First World War and who had two sons fighting in the Second, who experienced such air-pollution in Leeds that chemicals in the air rotted the curtains within six months,³⁷ and who was living in Oxford during the destructive imposition of the ring-road (and the obliteration of the historic neighborhood of St Ebbe’s),³⁸ may be allowed to make the occasional biting comment about modernity as symbolized by machines, industrialization, and urbanization. For all that, his views on technology were surprisingly nuanced, as we shall see in Chapter 9.n13

Furthermore, Tolkien lived a long life, and some of the interviews and letters in which he speaks dismissively of modern authors come from his later years. Hammond and Scull point out that Tolkien’s thoughts sometimes changed with the years and his memories varied, so that a comment at one moment may be contradicted by another written at a different time.³⁹ Critics have not always been as attentive as they ought to have been to the chronology of his opinions.n14 Carpenter, for instance, on occasion draws general conclusions about Tolkien’s preferences or attitudes (such as his alleged dislike of France) that may in actuality have reflected only a certain period in his life, or even a certain mood.n15 Moreover, Carpenter’s decision to weight his selection of the Letters toward Tolkien’s later years, when he was dealing with a steady stream of fan mail about The Lord of the Rings, means that his earlier years are comparatively underrepresented, and we see relatively little of his imaginative formation. Such a focus is subtly conducive to a caricatured view of Tolkien as a man of narrow tastes and limited interests.

As an elderly man, Tolkien does seem to have had a reduced appreciation of different types of reading. This is, no doubt, due partly to the natural contraction of tastes and habits of mind in old age and partly to the fact that, after the success of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien found himself subject to what we might call ‘death by a thousand lit. crits.’ Everyone seemed to have an idea about what gave rise to his masterpiece and often these ideas were not only inaccurate, but wildly inaccurate. As a result, Tolkien’s curmudgeonly streak seems to have increased and, late in life, according to his friend George Sayer, he was not inclined to admit to the influence on him of any other writers at all⁴⁰ —the key word in Sayer’s description being admit. Tolkien was a bit of a contrarian to begin with, likely to disclaim the idea of being influenced simply because such a thing had been suggested. (We will return to this point in Chapter 12.) Furthermore, after years of answering fan mail full of questions about Middle-earth, he seems to have begun to think of his writings as something he had discovered, rather than made. Insofar as he came to consider The Lord of the Rings in this way, he would naturally tend less often to recollect (and talk about) the influences on its creation, whether or not those influences happened to be modern. Thus, we cannot securely judge his attitudes as a young and middle-aged man, when he was writing the main part of his legendarium, by those he developed late in life.

I take a strong interest in what is going on

We have seen, then, four reasons why this faulty popular image of Tolkien has taken hold, all of them traceable, in some measure, to Humphrey Carpenter.n16 But once we allow Tolkien to be more than a Carpenter caricature, and admit the possibility of a genuinely three-dimensional figure, we find that he confounds easy reduction to the cartoon image of a dusty bookworm in an ivory tower, out of touch with the present, and nostalgic for times before the Norman Conquest.

We must always bear in mind that Tolkien was an unusually complex man. In this connection, Clyde Kilby’s perspective is of interest. Kilby, who spent a summer assisting (or attempting to assist) Tolkien with the preparation of the Silmarillion for publication, remarked: I felt that Tolkien was like an iceberg, something to be reckoned with above water in both its brilliance and mass and yet with much more below the surface.⁴¹ Tolkien’s personality has a certain quality of elusiveness. What one observed on the surface, or at any particular moment, was true, but it was not the whole story.

His attitude toward the news, for instance, helps alert us to the unexpected dimensions of his personality. He read the newspaper every day, and to an interviewer who seemed surprised that Tolkien followed the news at all, he replied that indeed he subscribed to three newspapers, adding: I take a strong interest in what is going on, both in the university and in the country and in the world.⁴² n17 In 1949, he co-signed a letter to the London Times to protest the Soviet-inspired arrest of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary—an instance of his very up-to-the-minute concern about violations of religious freedom.⁴³ His interest in international events is mentioned several times in the diary of Warren Lewis, C.S. Lewis’s brother and a friend of Tolkien’s. In 1946, for example, Warren recalls a group lunch with Tolkien where they argued the morality of the Nuremburg trials, and another at which they discussed the moral aspect of atomic bombing and total war in general. A few years later, he recalled a gathering with Tollers very confidential and ‘in the know’ about the details of the Communist plot.⁴⁴ We would not expect any of this from someone stuck in the past, uninterested in the modern world.n18

Tolkien strongly disliked the heedless expansion of roads and industry, but he was not against technology per se; he learned to drive (again, unlike Lewis) and bought a car as early as 1932.⁴⁵ Later recollections of Tolkien referred to him as someone who did not drive a car, but this was a feature of his later years, and is not uncommon among elderly people, and particularly not in Oxford and southern England, where buses, trains, and taxis are widely available.

Much has been made of the supposed narrowness of his social circle (the male-only Inklings) and of his professional world (Oxford colleges only began to go coeducational the year after his death). But Tolkien, unlike some of the other Inklings, was married for over fifty years; Lewis once irritatedly called him the most married man I know.⁴⁶ Tolkien made a point of spending time with his wife, daughter, and granddaughters as well as with his brother, sons, and grandsons.⁴⁷ It is also worth noting his inclusion, in the 1927 ‘Father Christmas letter,’ not only of his wife Edith (which is to be expected), but also of her cousin Jennie, and their current au pair Aslaug: they all feature among the dear people to whom the letter is addressed.⁴⁸ He even found time to correspond with the eleven-year-old granddaughter of his next-door neighbors in Headington, providing a thoughtful assessment of her poetry.n19 His daughter Priscilla mentioned his many years of friendship with Dorothy Everett, his colleague on the English Faculty, as being among the reasons she chose Lady Margaret Hall as her Oxford college;⁴⁹ Everett and several other women colleagues were also members of a literary and social club, The Cave, which Tolkien co-founded in the 1930s.⁵⁰ n20 Another member of The Cave was Elaine Griffiths, whom Tolkien called my very old friend.⁵¹ He stayed in touch with Margaret Wiseman, the sister of his fellow T.C.B.S. member Christopher Wiseman; it was