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"A STAR SHINES ON THE HOUR OF OUR MEETING"
The story of the Inklings might begin with any of the company: Charles Williams, the first to be born, the first to publish, the first to die; Clive Staples Lewis, the most celebrated and execrated; Owen Barfield, the least known but, some say, the most profound; or any of the other brilliant figures who joined, reveled in, and (sometimes) quit the fellowship. We start, however, with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, for with Tolkien the Inklings constellation began its ascent into the English literary firmament; he was the first to create work that bears the group's special stamp of Christian faith blended with pagan beauty, of fantastic stories grounded in moral realism. And we start our portrait of Tolkien with his mother-a welcome surprise in this tale of a group that rigorously excluded women-because Mabel Tolkien set in motion her son's madly spinning top of a mind, from which epic poems, children's stories, fantasy novels, invented languages, literary essays, philological studies, songs, watercolors, and pen-and-ink sketches would take flight for the next eighty years.
Mabel
Mabel Tolkien was born an English Suffield, a family with roots in the West Midlands, an urbanized county flecked with green about one hundred miles northwest of London. Her father, John Suffield, an exuberant merchant with a luxuriant beard, looking rather like his grandson's future portraits of Father Christmas, enthralled Mabel with his many skills, which included jesting, punning, and inking the Lord's Prayer within a circle the size of a sixpence. He and his wife, the improbably named Emily Sparrow, had seven children. The family ran a drapery shop in downtown Birmingham. More distant ancestors had sold books and stationery; Tolkien would carry in his blood a love of paper and the words it bore.
From this cozy mercantile background emerged a woman with a taste for adventure, a streak of independence, and an iron will. Mabel's strong personality has given rise to many colorful legends; one, repeated in several biographies of her son, asserts that she and her sisters traveled as missionaries to Zanzibar, where they proselytized the sultan's wives and concubines. This makes a good tale but has no basis in truth. Mabel's brick-and-mortar life was, however, dramatic enough. She accepted, at eighteen, the ardent attentions of Arthur Tolkien, a thirty-one-year-old banker; their romance, conducted largely sub rosa, via clandestine correspondence and the occasional family gathering, survived a two-year parting begun in 1889, when Arthur quit England for southern Africa. He went to seek his fortune, a common enough event in this era of Victorian enterprise that produced a British empire that spanned the globe. Mabel followed him in 1891, sailing, with typical intrepidness, alone from Southampton on the Roslin Castle. The reunited couple married in Cape Town's Anglican cathedral and set out for Bloemfontein, the dusty, dreary capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic where Arthur, having mastered Dutch, had become the assistant manager of the local branch of the Bank of Africa. Two children came in rapid succession: John Ronald Reuel on January 3, 1892, and Hilary Arthur Reuel on February 17, 1894 (the reason for the curious third name "Reuel"-"friend of God," drawn from Exodus 2, where it is assigned to Moses' father-in-law-remains obscure; Tolkien believed it to be the surname of an old family friend and passed it on to his own children as well).
John Ronald Reuel had, from the start, something fey about him, a whiff of pixie, which Mabel relayed to Arthur's parents in a letter dated March 4, 1893. Addressing her in-laws with nineteenth-century formality as "My dear Mr. & Mrs. Tolkien," she reports on the challenges of life in this very un-English land ("the next door pet monkeys had been over & eaten 3 of Ronald's pinafores"; "the weather is still intensely hot & trying") and enthuses over her fifteen-month-old boy. Her baby, she reports in terms whose allusive prescience sends shivers of bliss down the spines of Tolkien aficionados, resembles "a fairy when he's very much dressed up in white frills & white shoes," but "when he's very much undressed I think he looks more of an elf still." The letter, suggesting a strong mental correspondence between mother and child, touches on many of Tolkien's favorite future motifs: voyages to strange lands, nostalgia for home, imaginary beings. We may even read, in Mabel's ornate calligraphy, with its curlicues and runic slashes, a hint of her son's eventual love of elaborate and invented scripts, alphabets, and languages. And while the adult Tolkien didn't resemble a fairy, he did approximate, with his long thin face and owlish eyes, one of his own fantastic inventions, a beardless Gandalf, perhaps. This is true of all the Inklings; they came to look like embodiments of their work. Lewis, with his red face, rotund figure, and bright bald pate, was the perfect model of the robust, full-bore (if not wholly muscular) Christian; Williams looked, so everyone said, like a monkey, with the wizened features of someone who has pored over too many magical tomes; Barfield was slender, soft-spoken, and ethereal, as if more at home in the rarefied atmosphere of the astral plane than the heavy miasma of the material world.
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If we would picture Mabel, however, only one published photograph is available, taken November 16, 1892, in the garden of the house in Bloemfontein. It shows her at the center of a conventional Victorian family portrait, seated in a wicker chair, surrounded by a corona of relatives and servants. Arthur stands to her right, slouching with studied nonchalance in a white summer suit, the hard brim of his straw hat echoing the soft curve of his handlebar mustache. A trio of uniformed servants cluster in the background; one holds Ronald (as he was called), ten months old, looking like a plaster doll with his frilly petticoat, button eyes, and bright red mouth. Everyone seems at ease under the blazing African sun, pleased to pose in their Sunday finest. Everyone, that is, except Mabel. Something is amiss in her expression. She is dressed like the rest, in formal tropical wear: flowered hat, puff-shouldered blouse, long patterned skirt. But she sits erect, tense, her long fingers gripping the arms of her chair, her lean face turned to one side, her hawklike eyes looking quizzically toward the camera, as if watching some unwelcome thing loom up behind the photographer. Perhaps she glimpses the future, the catastrophe to come. For within a dozen years, everything in this photograph-father, mother, the Bloemfontein household, the great African adventure, the dreams of idyllic family life-would vanish, erased by exile, illness, and death, proving as ephemeral as Arthur's boater or Mabel's leg-of-mutton sleeves.
The dismantling of Mabel's life commenced immediately upon her arrival in Africa. From the start, she had felt out of place in this dry, merciless land, with its racism, its stifling weather, its un-British ways, its marauding animals. Monkeys, snakes, and locusts invaded the garden and a large spider, perhaps a tarantula, bit baby Ronald. Tolkien would later deny any connection between this childhood spider bite and the spider-monsters of his fiction; yet it is tempting to imagine that this horrific creature nestled in his subconscious until it reemerged, swollen to gigantic size, as the spiders of Mirkwood in The Hobbit, the insatiable Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, and Shelob's mother, Ungoliant, in The Silmarillion, the primary collection of Tolkien's mythopoeic tales.
Above all, it was the intense heat that proved intolerable; as one blast-furnace day followed another, Mabel began to fear for her older boy's life. By 1895 she had had enough and retreated to England with both children in tow. She moved in with her parents, pledging to return to Arthur as soon as possible. It was not to be. Mired in Bloemfontein, he fell ill with rheumatic fever, and by the following February he hovered on the brink of death. News of his illness arrived via telegram on the same day that Ronald, barely four years old, was preparing to post his first letter-his first literary production of any sort-a rapturous note to his father anticipating their reunion. Arthur, only thirty-nine, died of a hemorrhage the next day. The poignancy of hope denied is acute, as is the circumstantial intertwining of literature and tragedy, touchstones of much of Tolkien's later work.
Mabel, fighting fate, resettled with her children in a two-story semidetached house in Sarehole, a rural community near Birmingham. This was an inspired choice. Memories of the benign hamlet, with its old mill, bogs, forests, swan ponds, and sandpits, loomed large in her elder son's imaginative universe and would become, in time, the landscape of the Shire, the idyllic homeland of the Hobbits. Here Ronald encountered the dialects that so fascinated him as a mature philologist, local variations on the King's English, including gamgee, a regional term for cotton wool, from a surgical dressing devised by the Birmingham physician Joseph Sampson Gamgee (a name that would descend by a complicated philological route to Tolkien's hobbit hero, Sam Gamgee, as we shall see in chapter 17).
Mabel gave Ronald more than a lovely world in which to grow up; she gave him an array of fascinating tools to explore and interpret it. We know little of her own education, but she clearly valued learning and vigorously set about transmitting what she knew to Ronald. She instructed him in Latin, French, German, and the rudiments of linguistics, awakening in him a lifelong thirst for languages, alphabets, and etymologies. She taught him to draw and to paint, arts in which he would develop his own unmistakable style, primitive and compelling, Rousseau with a dash of Roerich. She passed on to him her peculiar calligraphy; he would later master traditional forms and invent his own. She tried to teach him piano, although that proved a failure. And she introduced him to children's literature, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, and Andrew Lang's collections of fairy tales. In George MacDonald he encountered goblins and, although he did not realize it at the time, Christian mythopoesis; in Lang's retelling of bits of the Old Norse Völsunga saga he met Fáfnir the dragon, a creature that excited his imagination like no other, and the prototype of Smaug of The Hobbit: "The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him ... I desired dragons with a profound desire." It was his first baptism into the enchantments of Faërie, an otherworldly realm just touching the fringes of ordinary life and leading, in its farthest reaches, to the outskirts of the supernatural.
Bequeathing interests and skills to offspring is a means of ensuring continuity in the face of death, and we can read in Mabel's intense tutoring of her children a response to her husband's early demise. She may have sensed, too, that her own life would not last long. But Mabel wished to give her children more than the metaphorical immortality of transmitted gifts; she wished to give them true eternity. This she accomplished in 1900, by bringing herself and her two boys into the Roman Catholic Church.
It is difficult for us, surveying the past from our comfortably pluralistic aerie, to grasp what Mabel's conversion signified in England at the end of the nineteenth century. Anti-Catholicism ruled the land, the legacy of Henry VIII's lusts, Elizabeth I's ambitions, Pope Pius V's machinations, and Guy Fawkes's treason, mixing with misplaced nationalism and fear of Irish immigration. To be Catholic was, in the lurid popular understanding, to be blatantly un-English and probably a fifth columnist for the Roman pope, himself possibly the Antichrist. During the height of anti-Catholic paranoia, first in the "Catholic emancipation" debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then in the "Papal Aggression" of 1850, when the Catholic hierarchy returned to England, political cartoonists such as James Gillray and John Tenniel fanned the flames of civic alarm, and one regularly heard advice of the sort proffered by Charlotte Brontë in 1842, that anyone favorable to the Catholic Church should "attend mass regularly for a time to note well the mummeries thereof also the idiotic, mercenary, aspect of all the priests and then if they are still disposed to consider Papistry in any other light than a most feeble childish piece of humbug let them turn papists at once that's all."
Yet against this general backdrop of patriotic bigotry, we have to envision the counterfascination exerted by the Roman Catholic tradition among a small but influential group of British intellectuals, for whom it offered an alternative England that remained united to the broad central current of Christianity flowing from Rome. Nineteenth-century British Roman Catholics, whether of recusant families or converts, included a dazzling array of names such as John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, Nicholas Wiseman, Coventry Patmore, and Augustus Pugin-to be followed, in the years after Mabel's entry into the Church, by G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, Eric Gill, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Anscombe, and a host of others. This brilliant Catholic stream fascinated the unchurched as well; Virginia Woolf has one of her characters wonder "why, if people must have a religion, they didn't all become Roman Catholics."
We have no record of why Mabel decided to join the Roman church; some will read in it a longing for hierarchy or authority, perhaps a replacement for a missing husband; others will see it as a genuine conversion of mind and soul. Whatever the motive, the act was not taken lightly. She had begun as an ardent high church Anglican but soon felt herself drawn from that confession's aesthetic splendor to the liturgy of the modest Roman Catholic church of St. Anne's on Alcester Street, in the impoverished Digbeth district. St. Anne's was in all respects a convert's church, having been transformed by John Henry Newman in 1849 from a gin distillery into the first chapel and residence for his fledgling congregation. Joined by her sister May Incledon, Mabel was received into the Roman Catholic Church there in June 1900.
A further unraveling of her life instantly ensued. This time, she must have anticipated it: the Baptist Tolkiens and the Unitarian and Methodist Suffields united in furious denunciation of the conversions. Only one or two family members supported the sisters. May's staunchly Anglican husband commanded her to renounce her new faith (she turned, instead, to Spiritualism) and severed the small allowance he had been sending Mabel. The next few years proved bitterly hard for Mabel, as she and her children moved into a succession of dreary residences, struggling to survive on the paltry remains of Arthur's estate, the result of his amateur investments in South African mining ventures.
There were, during these dark days, a few solaces. The first was King Edward's School, founded in 1552, a day school, one of the best in the nation, where Tolkien began his formal education, the costs underwritten initially by the handful of relatives who remained friendly to Mabel and later by academic scholarships. Another was the Birmingham Oratory, founded by Newman in 1848. Among the many benevolent Oratorians who befriended the beleaguered family, Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan (1867-1935) stands out. This bespectacled, pipe-smoking, dog-loving priest descended like a fairy godfather upon Mabel and the boys, filling their straitened lives with hope and joy. He paid regular visits to their home, vacationed with them, offered financial help and paternal counsel, and generally brightened their days with his unrestrained bearlike warmth and goodwill. In later life, Ronald would credit Father Francis with teaching him the meaning of charity and forgiveness, and in his honor he named his first child John Francis Reuel. But not even Oratorian love could stave off the doom hovering over the family, and in 1904 Mabel fell desperately ill from diabetes. There was no effective treatment-insulin would not be available for medical use until the 1920s-and on November 14, 1904, in the presence of Father Francis and May Incledon, she died.
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Leon Edel, speaking of one of Tolkien's contemporaries, Leonard Woolf, who lost his father when he was eleven, commented that "there is no hurt among all the human hurts deeper and less understandable than the loss of a parent when one is not yet an adolescent." Tolkien was twelve when Mabel died. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, he remembered her as a "gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith." These notes of admiration and bitterness accompanied his memories of his mother all his life. At age seventy-three, he reiterated the theme, describing, again to Michael, her death "worn out with persecution" in "rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal." In Tolkien's mind, the cruel shunning that Mabel suffered after her conversion led inexorably to her fatal disease, and she thus became for him not just a beloved mother but a Job figure, a saint, and a martyr, even a type of Christ, a selfless victim whose death gave life to those whom she loved and who loved her. Mabel appears in his fiction in countless sacrificial figures, a gallery of quasi Christs: Galadriel the Elven queen, who willingly surrenders her power for the good of Middle-earth; Gandalf the wizard, who submits to death to save his companions; Aragorn the king, who puts his rightful rule and very life to the ultimate test; Arwen (and her ancestor Lúthien Tinuviel), who gives up her immortality for love; and the hobbits Frodo and Sam, companions in sacrifice. The bitterness of death, the sweetness of faith, the ransom to be paid in blood; thanks in large measure to Mabel's indelible presence in his consciousness, these would become keynotes of Tolkien's imaginative world.
Perhaps the greatest of Mabel's legacies to Tolkien, however, was love of the Catholic Church. He became a lifelong believer, and in later years he recalled with shame those times when other pursuits-clubs, romance, art-tempted him away from prayer and Mass. He had a passionate love for the Eucharist and counseled his children to memorize important devotional prayers such as the Magnificat and the Litany of Loreto. "If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy." In later life, he translated Catholic prayers-the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Gloria Patri, Sub Tuum Praesidium, and the Litany of Loreto-into Quenya, the High Elvish tongue of his devising. He was, as one friend summed it up, "a devout and strict old-fashioned Catholic" with a special regard for Mary and her motherly ministrations; she became for him a kind of muse, the source, he believed, of all goodness and beauty in his work. The Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter argues that after Mabel's death, the Church became Tolkien's new mother. Carpenter means this in the ordinary psychological sense, that the Church filled in for a missing parent, but it is true also in a deeper sense. There is nothing idiosyncratic about embracing the Church as mother; as early as the third century, St. Cyprian declared that "no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother," a saying appended, in the 1994 Vatican-sponsored Catechism of the Catholic Church, to the declaration, "The Church is the mother of all believers." Throughout his life, Tolkien would draw comfort, courage, and artistic inspiration from this second mother, who, unlike Mabel, would never die ("Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it").
Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis
Mabel's death transformed Tolkien's life. She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and to her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion. Ronald responded to the same afflictions-plus the additional discovery that he and Hilary must now live with Beatrice Suffield, Mabel's widowed sister-in-law, an insensitive woman who had no affection to spare for her young, bereft, and brooding Catholic charges-by closing in upon himself, by inventing private languages, landscapes, creatures, and worlds, eventually composing a personal mythology of exceptional richness and depth. Accompanying this inward movement, however, was an intense increase in knowledge and perception of the outer world. Inventing languages required learning the genetic code that governs all language; inventing fantastic landscapes meant learning the real landscapes of his boyhood: the Birmingham streets, the waters of Lyme Regis, the stones of Whitby Abbey.
When young, Tolkien excelled in nature studies: drawings of a flower, a starfish, and what look like oak leaves fill a juvenile notebook. The subject matter turns somber as his mother's illness progresses; a sketch from 1904, drawn while Mabel was in the hospital and Ronald had taken refuge in the house of Edwin Neave-an insurance clerk who would soon marry his aunt Jane-carries the heartrending title What Is Home Without a Mother (or a Wife). It depicts Ronald and Edwin sitting before the fire, mending clothes-rarely a man's pursuit back then. The drawing, with its close observation of Victorian furnishings and its symmetrical composition, shows considerable raw talent. Another early work, a watercolor depicting two boys, presumably Ronald and Hilary, on the beach, sustains this interest in symmetry: the boys mirror each other, with one, in red shirt and blue-black pants, facing the viewer, while the other, in blue-black shirt and yellow pants, turns away; two islands neatly divide the seascape. Throughout these early sketches, such symmetries of line and color, shape and movement, rule Tolkien's images, a visual analogue to the contrapuntal harmonics of Catholic scholasticism, and one might surmise, a deeply felt aesthetic response to the chaos of disaster and death that had ripped apart his childhood. This obsession with balance would recede in many of his subsequent sketches, such as one of Lyme Regis (where he stayed with Hilary and Father Francis in the summer of 1906), awhirl with swirling clouds, choppy seas, and moored boats, but would return in full force in his mature paintings for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings-books that contain a longing for peace and stability in the face of cosmic disorder and that speak, as we shall see, a distinctively Catholic idiom.
Language, however, held pride of place from the start in Tolkien's imagination. In Bloemfontein, he must have heard Afrikaans and perhaps Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and other native tongues, and soon after his return from South Africa, as noted above, his mother began to tutor him in European languages. French left him cold-indeed, he disliked throughout his life all things French, including haute cuisine and, later, existentialism. But he warmed to Latin, and came to delight in the shapes and sounds of its vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. In part this may be explained by his love of the Mass, celebrated in the ancient tongue until he was in his seventies; his grandson Simon recalls attending a Bournemouth Mass with his grandfather after the sea change of Vatican II and watching the old man make "all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English." Tolkien also felt the lure of Welsh, whose strange spellings he spied on the side of passing coal trucks. But it was German and Germanic languages that won his heart; he garnered prizes for German proficiency at King Edward's and began to study Anglo-Saxon (now commonly called Old English) and Gothic. The latter, a tongue that had flourished during the late Roman Empire and died out by the ninth century, he discovered through a secondhand copy of Joseph Wright's Primer of the Gothic Language. It utterly captivated him, "the first [language] to take me by storm, to move my heart ... a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman's Homer." Immediately, he peppered his other books with Gothic inscriptions and inscribed them with his Gothicized name, Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis.
Joseph Wright (1855-1930) would play a significant role in the growth of Ronald's intellect, not only through his celebrated Gothic grammar but as Ronald's instructor, friend, and mentor at Oxford, where he took the budding philologist under his wing, guiding his studies and inviting him to Sunday afternoon teas. Wright's is one of the great Cinderella stories in the annals of English philology. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a charwoman and a miner who drank himself to death, he went to work in Blake's dark Satanic mills at the age of seven, changing bobbins on spinning frames and, in his spare time, selling horse manure. A lifetime of illiteracy and drudgery beckoned, but-like Mabel Tolkien-Wright resisted fate, in his case successfully. When he was fifteen, a fellow mill worker taught him to read and write, using the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress for texts. Wright followed up by teaching himself Latin, French, and German through grammars purchased from his paltry income. Then he added Welsh, Greek, Lithuanian, Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, Old Bulgarian, and Old High German to his repertoire, acquiring a doctorate in the process at Heidelberg University. At thirty-three, he published his Middle High German Primer and later edited the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary. He became, upon the death of Max Müller, England's leading philologist, and was named professor of comparative philology at Oxford. In his breathtaking ability to master new languages, "Old Joe," as Tolkien referred to him, served as an inspiring professional model; in his moral goodness, fortitude, and kindness, combined with his rough Yorkshire ways, he was a prototype for Tolkien's Hobbits. When Wright died, Tolkien declared that "it was your works, that came into my hands by chance as a schoolboy, that first revealed to me the philology I love."
What was this discipline that so entranced the young Tolkien? Philology, defined by C. S. Lewis as "the love and knowledge of words," may also be usefully described as the zone where history, linguistics, and literature meet. The field began to take its modern form in 1786, when William Jones, a.k.a. "Asiatic" Jones, "Oriental" Jones, and "Persian" Jones, an Anglo-Welsh judge in the supreme court of Bengal and a linguistic prodigy of the first order-he mastered more than two dozen languages during his brief life-announced to the Asiatic Society of Bengal and to the world his discovery that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin share a common ancestry. Further progress came through two significant, far-ranging nineteenth-century enterprises: the application of linguistic analysis to Biblical studies and the ongoing decipherment of ancient tongues, including Assyrian and Egyptian. Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts. As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the nature of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that "exists to communicate whatever it can communicate" but also, as in That Hideous Strength, an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift ("O felix peccatum Babel!" he exclaimed in his essay "English and Welsh"), a supreme art, and, as "Word," a name for God.
Tolkien experienced words as a maddening liquor, a phonic ambrosia, tastes of an exquisite, rapturous, higher world. The sound of words affected him as colors or music do others; he complained to his aunt Jane, in later life, of adults who fail to hear the music of words but only grasp their meaning, and he recommended that when encountering a new word-for example, argent-one should first approach it as a "sound only ... in a poetic context" before thinking about its meaning. In "English and Welsh," he writes of the phrase "cellar door" (long celebrated as a striking word combination) that "most English-speaking people ... will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful,' especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful." He then adds that "in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent." Tolkien made similar declarations about Finnish, which he first encountered at Oxford, likening it to a wine cellar filled with bewitching new vintages. As these various cellar images suggest, languages became for Tolkien vaults of beauty and seeds for his fiction. He came to see language in mystical terms, claiming that each of us possesses a "native language" that is not our first tongue but rather our "inherent linguistic predilections," something deep in the soul, or perhaps the genes. And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me-'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow."
Tolkien's rapturous romance with words produced numerous offspring: his mythological fiction, of course, but before that, his invented languages. The first hint of things to come appeared in 1904, in an illustrated letter to Father Francis that uses the rebus principle, in which each syllable is indicated by a picture that suggests, without spelling out, its pronunciation (thus a map of France and a hissing snake add up to "Francis"). From now on, Tolkien would never approach words simply as dead lumps of information. At about the same time, he learned Animalic, a rudimentary language invented by his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon, in which the names of birds, fish, and animals replace standard English words. These early tastes of what he later termed his "secret vice" soon led to the invention of Nevbosh (i.e., "New Nonsense"), which he pieced together with Mary, and which included coinages like woc for "cow" and maino for "my." The vice grew more entrenched at King Edward's, where in 1907 he concocted Naffarin, a tongue heavily salted with Latin and Spanish and with, possibly, its own rudimentary grammar; it is difficult to assess, as only a snippet remains. A few years later he devised his first private alphabet, a mishmash of English letters, runic slashes, and "monographs" (i.e., ideographs), and inscribed its rules in a sixteen-page notebook written in English and Esperanto entitled "The Book of the Foxrook." But all this was prelude to the sophisticated language-creation, complete with invented grammar and syntax, of his later Elvish tongues, and to the mythos that grew up alongside it. In a largely autobiographical paper Tolkien wrote in 1931 for the Oxford Esperanto Society ("A Hobby for the Home," later entitled "A Secret Vice"), he would maintain that the making of a language necessitates the making of a mythology in which that language is spoken, that the two processes are intertwined, each giving rise to the other. People thought Tolkien was joking when he later said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to bring into being a world that might contain the Elvish greeting, so pleasing to his sense of linguistic beauty, Elen síla lúmenn' omentielmo ("A star shines on the hour of our meeting"). The remark is witty-but also deadly serious.
"Friendship to the Nth Power"
The grammar of Tolkien's outer life was evolving as well. He had lost both father and mother and needed, in loco parentis, more than art and wordplay. Father Francis helped to fill the void, counseling and consoling, entertaining in his gruff, exuberant way, taking the boys kite flying and catechizing them in the faith. But a middle-aged man cannot sate a teenager's hunger for companionship, and Tolkien soon turned to his fellow students at King Edward's, forming with three of them-Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith, and Christopher Wiseman-a club known as the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS for short), named after the shop (Barrow's Stores) in which they met and the beverage that they drank while debating, as most sensitive young people do, religion, art, and moral behavior. All four were bright, idealistic, and a tad prudish; perfectly fitted to each other, they remained a tight-knit band until the Great War unraveled the fellowship. Within the TCBS, Tolkien came into his own, reciting fromBeowulf, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, urging his friends on to great artistic and moral heights, finding his voice in the loud, exuberant, sometimes boorish thrust-and-parry of male camaraderie-the milieu in which he and all the future Inklings achieved much of their work. "Friendship to the Nth power," Tolkien called it.
There was nothing odd in this; exclusively or primarily male clubs-from the local lepidopterist circle to the gentleman clubs of London to the Royal Society-had dominated English social and intellectual life for centuries. Often these associations devoted themselves to pastimes such as gambling, drinking, or hunting, but nobler pursuits, literature in particular, inspired more than one celebrated private club. Early models for the TCBS (and for the Inklings), at least some of which Tolkien and his friends may have been aware of, include the seventeenth-century Friday Street Club at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, with its boisterous Elizabethan roster of Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Francis Beaumont, a paradise of male society immortalized two centuries later by John Keats in his "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern" ("Souls of poets dead and gone, / What Elysium have ye known, / Happy field or mossy cavern, / Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"); the early eighteenth-century Scriblerus Club, a Tory group led by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, and others, which Colin Hardie, himself an Inkling, identified as a prototype of the Oxford group; and, later in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson's dinner-and-discussion circle, generically entitled "The Club," with Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and "Asiatic" Jones among its members, which convened every Monday at Turk's Head Tavern in Soho and was designed, according to Bishop Thomas Percy, to "consist of Such men, as that if only Two of them chanced to meet, they should be able to entertain each other without wanting the addition of more company to pass the Evening agreeably"-a fair description, too, of the TCBS and the Inklings at their best. As Keats's poem and Bishop Percy's remarks suggest, these clubs offered grand things: escape from domesticity, a base for intellectual exploration, an arena for clashing wits, an outlet for enthusiasms, a socially acceptable replacement for the thrills and dangers of war, and, in the aftermath of World War I, a surviving remnant to mourn and honor fallen friends. Tolkien and his fellow Inklings made much of these opportunities, and clubs and fellowships loomed large in their lives and in their fiction.
But male company, however convivial and stimulating, could not meet all needs. Tolkien, sometimes accused of ignoring women in his fiction, sought them out in life, in their manifold roles as mother, lover, companion, guide: first Mabel, then the Blessed Virgin, then a young pianist with smoldering eyes by the name of Edith Bratt, who stole his heart. She was nineteen, he sixteen, when they met amid the drab hunting prints and overstuffed furniture of a middle-class boardinghouse. That she was older than he troubled them not at all; they shared an orphan's independent spirit and longing for love. Edith, born in Gloucester in 1889, the illegitimate child of a paper dealer and a governess, lost her mother at the age of fourteen; after some years at school, where she took to music with considerable skill, she moved to lodgings in Edgbaston, close by the Birmingham Oratory. At about this time, in one of those serendipitous acts that makes or breaks a life, Father Francis, casting about for a home for the boys more congenial than that offered by their unwelcoming aunt Beatrice, moved them into the very Edgbaston rooming house in which Edith Bratt resided.
It took Tolkien and Edith less than a year to fall in love. One wonders why it took a week. A photograph of Edith shows a young woman with dark, intense eyes looking directly at the camera, a mass of thick black hair framing her soft, full face; to someone as unfamiliar with young women as Tolkien, her beauty must have come as a shock and a revelation. In addition, she was lithe and musical, a singer and dancer. He, by contrast, was thin, average in height, athletic (he played rugby at King Edward's, coming away with a broken nose and a lacerated tongue, the source of his mumbling diction), a careful dresser, a tidy, attractive, but not handsome package; but what he lacked in physical presence, he made up for in kindness, intelligence, and romantic disposition. It was a good match and an early marriage might have been anticipated. There was, however, one insurmountable obstacle. Father Francis sniffed out the relationship and, concerned for Tolkien's studies and doubtful of any underage passion, separated the couple, forbidding them to meet again until Tolkien turned twenty-one. Despite some minor breaches, the wall Father Francis erected held firm. Edith moved to Cheltenham and Tolkien prepared for Oxford. Romance was in suspension, but the seeds of Tolkien's future had been sown: a Catholic faith, a love of words, a creative, artistic mind, the promise of connubial bliss.
Copyright © 2015 by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski
