Tolkien"s feelings towards his third son were perhaps one of the factors that made him begin a new book. More explicitly it owed its origins to C. S. Lewis who (Tolkien reported) one day said: Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves. We agreed" (said Tolkien) that he should try s.p.a.ce-travel, and I should try time-travel." They also decided that each story should lead to the discovery of Myth.
Lewis"s story was Out of the Silent Planet, which proved to be the first book of his Ransom" trilogy.1 Tolkien"s answer to the challenge was a story called The Lost Road", in which two time-travellers, father and son, find themselves discovering the mythology of The Silmarillion, as they journey back to the land of Numenor.
Tolkien"s legend of Numenor, the great island in the West that is given to the men who aided the Elves in the wars against Morgoth, was probably composed some time before the writing of The Lost Road", perhaps in the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties. It had one of its origins in the nightmare that had disturbed him since childhood, his Atlantis-haunting" in which he had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands". When the inhabitants of Numenor are beguiled by Sauron (the lieutenant of Morgoth who had already appeared in the long poem about Beren and Luthien) into breaking a divine commandment and sailing West towards the forbidden lands, a great storm rises, a huge wave crashes on Numenor, and the entire island is cast into the abyss. Atlantis has sunk.
The Numenor story combines the Platonic legend of Atlantis with the imaginative qualities of The Silmarillion. At the end, Tolkien tells how with the sinking of Numenor the shape of the world is changed, and the Western lands are removed for ever from the circles of the world". The world itself is bent, yet the Straight Road to the Ancient West still remains for those who can find it. This is the Lost Road" that gave the t.i.tle to the new story.
This and the subsequent books were read to the Inklings by Lewis as they were written. The first two books gained Tolkien"s almost wholehearted approval (though he did not admire all of Lewis"s invented names), and it was partly due to his support that Out of the Silent Planet, which had been rejected by two publishers, was accepted by The Bodley Head and published in 1938. He liked Perelandra even more than the first story, but when Lewis began to read That Hideous Strength to the Inklings, Tolkien recorded of it: Tripish, I fear"; and a better acquaintance with the book did not make him change his mind. He regarded it as spoiled by the influence of Charles Williams"s Arthurian-Byzantine mythology.
Tolkien recognised that the character of Ransom, the philologist hero of Lewis"s stories, was perhaps modelled in part on himself. He wrote to his son Christopher in 1944: As a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him."
The protagonists are a father and son. The father, a professor of history named Alboin (the Lombardic form of AElfwine"), invents languages, or rather he finds that words are transmitted to him, words that seem to be fragments of ancient and forgotten languages. Many of these words refer to the downfall of Numenor, and the story breaks off, unfinished, with Alboin and his son setting off on their journey through time towards Numenor itself. The story is rather cloying in its portrayal of the father-son relationship as Tolkien would have liked it to be; and it is notable that neither Alboin nor his own father (who appears at the beginning of the story) is enc.u.mbered with a wife, both men having been widowed at an early age. The story was probably read to the Inklings; certainly Lewis listened to the Numenor legend, for he refers to it in That Hideous Strength, mis-spelling it Numinor". (He also borrowed from Tolkien when he gave his hero Ransom the first name Elwin", which is a version of AElfwine"; and again when he named his Adam and Eve in Perelandra Tor and Tinidril", which Tolkien considered to be certainly an echo" of Tuor and Idril in The Fall of Gondolin".) The Lost Road" was abandoned (owing to my slowness and uncertainty", said Tolkien) shortly after the time-travellers in the story reached Numenor. But Tolkien returned to the time-travelling theme as a way of introducing the Numenor legend when, at the end of 1945, he began to write The Notion Club Papers". This uses the Inklings themselves (in thin disguise) as a setting, and this time it is two Oxford dons, members of the informal literary club that provides the tide, who set off on the time-journey. But like its predecessor the story breaks off at the end of the introductory narrative, before the actual time-travelling has been more than superficially described. The Notion Club Papers" captures much of the spirit of the Inklings, though Tolkien scarcely attempts any portraits of his friends. One part of the story did reach print, a poem about the medieval voyage of St Brendan, a legend that Tolkien adapted to fit his own mythology. Under the t.i.tle Imram" (Gaelic for voyage") the poem appeared in Time & Tide in 1955. On its own it is a little bare, a forlorn memorial to an unfinished and promising story.
So it was that during the nineteen-twenties and thirties Tolkien"s imagination was running along two distinct courses that did not meet. On one side were the stories composed for mere amus.e.m.e.nt, often specifically for the entertainment of his children. On the other were the grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually a.s.sociated with his own legends. Meanwhile nothing was reaching print, beyond a few poems in the Oxford Magazine which indicated to his colleagues that Tolkien was amused by dragons" h.o.a.rds and funny little men with names like Tom Bombadil: a harmless pastime, they felt, if a little childish.
Something was lacking, something that would bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same time tuned to the popular imagination. He was not aware of this lack, of course; nor did it seem particularly significant to him when suddenly the missing piece fell into place.
It was on a summer"s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I"d better find out what hobbits were like. But that"s only the beginning."
Part Five.
1925-194900: The Third Age
Enter Mr Baggins.
Really that missing piece had been there all the time. It was the Suffield side of his own personality.
His deep feeling that his real home was in the West Midland countryside of England had, since his undergraduate days, defined the nature of his scholarly work. The same motives that had led him to study Beowulf, Gawain, and the Ancrene Wisse now created a character that embodied everything he loved about the West Midlands: Mr Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit We can see certain superficial precedents for this invention: the Snergs, the name Babbitt, and in Tolkien"s own stories the original four-foot Tom Bombadil and the tiny Timothy t.i.tus. But this does not tell us very much. The personal element is far more revealing. In the story, Bilbo Baggins, son of the lively Belladonna Took, herself one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, descended also from the respectable and solid Bagginses, is middle aged and unadventurous, dresses in sensible clothes but likes bright colours, and has a taste for plain food; but there is something strange in his character that wakes up when the adventure begins. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, son of the enterprising Mabel Suffield, herself one of the three remarkable daughters of old John Suffield (who lived to be nearly a hundred), descended also from the respectable and solid Tolkiens, was middle aged and inclined to pessimism, dressed in sensible clothes but liked coloured waistcoats when he could afford them, and had a taste for plain food. But there was something unusual in his character that had already manifested itself in the creation of a mythology, and it now led him to begin this new story.
Tolkien himself was well aware of the similarity between creator and creation. I am in fact a hobbit," he once wrote, in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats.
I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much." And as if to emphasise the personal parallel, Tolkien chose for the hobbit"s house the name Bag End", which was what the local people called his Aunt Jane"s Worcestershire farm. Worcestershire, the county from which the Suffields had come, and in which his brother Hilary was at that time cultivating the land, is of all West Midland counties The Shire from which the hobbits come; Tolkien wrote of it: Any corner of that county (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable way home to me, as no other part of the world is." But the village of Hobbiton itself with its mill and river is to be found not in Worcestershire but in Warwickshire, now half hidden in the redbrick skirt of Birmingham but still identifiable as the Sarehole where Ronald Tolkien spent four formative years.
The hobbits do not owe their origins merely to personal parallels. Tolkien once told an interviewer: The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination - not the small reach of their courage or latent power." To put it another way, the hobbits represent the combination of small imagination with great courage which (as Tolkien had seen in the trenches during the First World War) often led to survival against all chances. I"ve always been impressed," he once said, that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds."
In some ways it is wrong to talk of hobbits as the missing piece" that was needed before the two sides of Tolkien"s imagination during the nineteen-twenties and thirties could meet and fuse; at least chronologically wrong, because Tolkien probably began to write The Hobbit quite early in this period. It would be more accurate to say that not until the book was finished and published - indeed not until he began to write the sequel - did he realise the significance of hobbits, and see that they had a crucial role to play in his mythology. In itself The Hobbit began as merely another story for amus.e.m.e.nt. Moreover it nearly suffered the fate of so many others and remained unfinished.
While we can see quite clearly why Tolkien began to write the story, it proves impossible to say exactly when. The ma.n.u.script gives no indication of date, and Tolkien himself was unable to remember the precise origins of the book.
In one account he said: I am not sure but I think the Unexpected Party (the first chapter) was hastily written before 1935 but certainly after 1930 when I moved to 20 Northmoor Road." Elsewhere he wrote: On a blank leaf I scrawled In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror"s Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early nineteen-thirties." This recollection that there was a hiatus between the original idea and the composition of the main body of the story is confirmed by a note that Tolkien scribbled on a surviving page of the original Chapter One: Only page preserved of the first scrawled copy of The Hobbit which did not reach beyond the first chapter." In 1937, shortly after the book was published, Christopher Tolkien recorded (in his letter to Father Christmas) this account of the book"s origins: Daddy wrote it ages ago, and read it to John, Michael and me in our Winter Reads after tea in the evening; but the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all; he finished it about a year ago." And writing to his publishers during the same year, Tolkien declared: My eldest boy was thirteen when he heard the serial. It did not appeal to the younger ones who had to grow up to it successively."
These statements lead to the conclusion that the book was begun in 1930 or 1931 (when John, the eldest boy, was thirteen); certainly there was a completed typescript in existence (lacking only the final chapters) in time for it to be shown to C. S. Lewis late in 1932. However John and Michael Tolkien do not believe this to be the entire picture, for they have a clear memory of certain elements in the story being told to them in the study at 22 Northmoor Road, that is, before 1930. They are not certain that what they were listening to at that time was necessarily a written story: they believe that it may well have been a number of impromptu tales which were later absorbed into The Hobbit proper.
The ma.n.u.script of The Hobbit suggests that the actual writing of the main part of the story was done over a comparatively short period of time: the ink, paper, and handwriting style are consistent, the pages are numbered consecutively, and there are almost no chapter divisions. It would also appear that Tolkien wrote the story fluently and with little hesitation, for there are comparatively few erasures or revisions. Originally the dragon was called Pryftan", the name Gandalf was given to the chief dwarf, and the wizard was called Bladorthin". The dragon"s name was soon changed to Smaug", from the Germanic verb smugan meaning to squeeze through a hole"; Tolkien called this a low philological jest". But the name Bladorthin" was retained for some time, and it was not until the draft was well advanced that the chief dwarf was renamed Thorin Oakenshield" and the name Gandalf" (taken, like all the dwarf-names, from the Elder Edda) was given to the wizard, for whom it was eminently suitable on account of its Icelandic meaning of scorcerer-elf" and hence wizard".
The story began, then, merely for personal amus.e.m.e.nt. Certainly ; Tolkien had at first no intention that the bourgeois comfortable world of Bilbo Baggins would be related in any way to the vast mythological landscape of The Silmarillion. Gradually, however, elements from his mythology began to creep in. Inevitably the dwarves suggested a connection, for dwarves" (spelt in that fashion) had played a part in the earlier work; and when in the first chapter of The Hobbit the wizard mentioned the Necromancer" there was a reference to the legend of Beren and Luthien. Soon it was apparent that the journey of Bilbo Baggins and his companions lay across a corner of that Middle-earth which had its earlier history chronicled in The Silmarillion. In Tolkien"s words this was the world into which Mr Baggins strayed". And if the events of the new story were clearly set long after those of The Silmarillion, then, since the earlier chronicles recorded the history of the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth, it appeared that The Hobbit was to be a tale of the Third Age.
One writes such a story," said Tolkien, out of the leaf-mould of the mind"; and while we can still detect the shape of a few of the leaves - the Alpine trek of 1911, the goblins of the Curdie" books of George Macdonald, an episode in Beowulf when a cup is stolen from a sleeping dragon - this is not the essential point of Tolkien"s metaphor. One learns little by raking through a compost heap to see what dead plants originally went into it. Far better to observe its effect on the new and growing plants that it is enriching. And in The Hobbit the leaf-mould of Tolkien"s mind nurtured a rich growth with which only a few other books in children"s literature can compare.
For it is a children"s story. Despite the fact that it had been drawn into his mythology, Tolkien did not allow it to become overwhelmingly serious or even adult in tone, but stuck to his original intention of amusing his own and perhaps other people"s children. Indeed he did this too consciously and deliberately at times in the first draft, which contains a large number of asides" to juvenile readers, remarks such as Now you know quite enough to go on with"
and As we shall see in the end". He later removed many of these, but some remain in the published text - to his regret, for he came to dislike them, and even to believe that any deliberate talking down to children is a great mistake in a story. Never mind about the young!" he once wrote. I am not interested in the child as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted)." But when he wrote The Hobbit he was still suffering from what he later called the contemporary delusions about fairy-stories and children" - delusions that not long afterwards he made a conscious decision to renounce.
The writing of the story progressed fluently until the pa.s.sage not far from the end where the dragon Smaug is about to die. Here Tolkien hesitated, and tried out the narrative in rough notes - something he was often to do in The Lord of the Rings but seems to have done only rarely in The Hobbit. These notes suggest that Bilbo Bag-gins might creep into the dragon"s lair and stab him. Bilbo plunges in his little magic knife," he wrote. Throes of dragon.
Smashes walls and entrance to tunnel." But this idea, which scarcely suited the character of the hobbit or provided a grand enough death for Smaug, was rejected in favour of the published version where the dragon is slain by the archer Bard. And then, shortly after he had described the death of the dragon, Tolkien abandoned the story.
Or to be more accurate, he did not write any more of it down. For the benefit of his children he had narrated an impromptu conclusion to the story, but, as Christopher Tolkien expressed it, the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all". Indeed they were not even written in ma.n.u.script. The typescript of the nearly finished story, made in the small neat typeface of the Ham-mond machine, with italics for the songs, was occasionally shown to favoured friends, together with its accompanying maps (and perhaps already a few ill.u.s.trations). But it did not often leave Tolkien"s study, where it sat, incomplete and now likely to remain so. The boys were growing up and no longer asked for Winter Reads", so there was no reason why The Hobbit should ever be finished.
One of the few people to be shown the typescript of The Hobbit was a graduate named Elaine Griffiths, who had been a pupil of Tolkien"s and had become a family friend. Upon his recommendation she was engaged by the London publishers George Alien & Unwin to revise Clark Hall"s translation of Beowulf, a popular undergraduate crib". One day in 1936 (some time after The Hobbit had been abandoned) a member of Alien & Unwin"s staff came down to Oxford to see Elaine Griffiths about the project. This was Susan Dagnall, who had read English at Oxford at the same time as Elaine Griffiths and indeed knew her well. From her she learnt of the existence of the unfinished but remarkable children"s story that Professor Tolkien had written. Elaine Griffiths suggested that Susan Dagnall should go to Northmoor Road and try to borrow the typescript. Susan Dagnall went, met Tolkien, asked for the typescript, and was given it. She took it back to London, read it, and decided that it was certainly worthy of consideration by Allen & Unwin. But it stopped short just after the death of the dragon. She sent the typescript back to Tolkien, asking him if he would finish it, and preferably soon, so that the book could be considered for publication in the following year.
Tolkien got down to work. On 10 August 1936 he wrote: The Hobbit is now nearly finished, and the publishers clamouring for it." He engaged his son Michael, who had cut his right hand badly on a school window, to help with the typing, using his left hand. The whole labour was finished by the first week in October, and the typescript was sent to Alien & Unwin"s offices near the British Museum, bearing the t.i.tle The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.
The firm"s chairman, Stanley Unwin, believed that the best judges of children"s books were children, so he handed The Hobbit to his ten-year-old son Rayner, who read it and wrote this report: Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins and wargs. at last they got to the lonley mountain; Smaug, the dragon who gawreds it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home - rich! This book, with the help of maps, does not need any ill.u.s.trations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.
The boy earned a shilling for the report, and the book was accepted for publication. Despite what Rayner Unwin had written, it was decided that The Hobbit did need ill.u.s.trations. Tolkien was modest about his talents as an artist, and when at the publishers" suggestion he submitted a number of drawings which he had made for the story he commented: The pictures seem to me mostly only to prove that the author cannot draw." But Alien & Unwin did not agree, and they gladly accepted eight of his black and white ill.u.s.trations.
Although Tolkien had some idea of the processes involved in the production of books, he was surprised by the number of difficulties and disappointments during the following months; indeed the machinations and occasionally the downright incompetence of publishers and printers continued to amaze him until the end of his life. The Hobbit maps had to be redrawn by him because his originals had incorporated too many colours, and even then his scheme of having the general map as an endpaper and Thror"s map placed within the text of Chapter One was not followed. The publishers had decided that both maps should be used as endpapers, and in consequence his plan for invisible lettering", which would appear when Thror"s map was held up to the light, had to be abandoned. He also had to spend a good deal of time on the proofs - though this was entirely his fault. When the page-proofs arrived at Northmoor Road in February 1937 he decided that he ought to make substantial revisions to several parts of the book, for he had let the ma.n.u.script go without checking it with his usual thoroughness, and he was now unhappy about a number of pa.s.sages in the story; in particular he did not like many of the patronising asides" to juvenile readers, and he also saw that there were many inconsistencies in the description of the topography, details which only the most acute and painstaking reader would notice, but which he himself with his pa.s.sion for perfection could not allow to pa.s.s. In a few days he had covered the proofs with a host of alterations. With typical consideration for the printers he ensured that his revisions occupied an identical area of type to the original wording - though here he was wasting his time, for the printers decided to reset the entire sections that he had revised.
The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937. Tolkien was a little nervous of Oxford reaction, especially as he was currently holding a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and he remarked: I shall now find it very hard to make people believe that this is not the major fruits of research 1936-7." He need not have worried: at first Oxford paid almost no attention.
A few days after publication the book received an accolade in the columns of The Times. All who love that kind of children"s book which can be read and re-read by adults", wrote the reviewer, should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation. To the trained eye some characters will seem almost mythopoeic." The eye in question was that of C. S. Lewis, at that time a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, who had managed to get this notice of his friend"s book into the parent journal. Naturally, he also reviewed the book in glowing terms in the Supplement itself. There was an equally enthusiastic reaction from many other critics, although some took a delight in pointing out the ineptness of the publisher"s blurb" that compared the book to Alice in Wonderland simply because both were the work of Oxford dons; and there were a few dissenting voices, among them that of the reviewer who wrote (somewhat puzzlingly) in Junior Bookshelf: The courageous freedom of real adventure doesn"t appear."
The first edition of The Hobbit had sold out by Christmas. A reprint was hurried through, and four of the five coloured ill.u.s.trations that Tolkien had drawn for the book were now included in it; he had apparently never offered them to Alien & Unwin, and it was not until they pa.s.sed through the publisher"s office on the way to Houghton Mifflin, who were to publish the book in America, that their existence was discovered. When the American edition was issued a few months later it too received approbation from most critics, and it was awarded the New York Herald Tribune prize for the best juvenile book of the season. Stanley Unwin realised that he had a children"s best-seller in his list. He wrote to Tolkien: A large public will be clamouring next year to hear more from you about Hobbits!"
A few weeks after The Hobbit had been published Tolkien went to London and had lunch with Stanley Unwin to discuss a possible successor to the book. He found that the publisher, small, bright-eyed, and bearded, looked exactly like one of my dwarves, only I don"t think he smokes". Unwin certainly did not smoke, nor did he drink alcohol (he came from a strict Nonconformist family), and each man found the other rather strange. Unwin learnt that Tolkien had a large mythological work called The Silmarillion that he now wanted to publish, though Tolkien admitted that it was not very suitable as a successor to the adventures of Bilbo Baggins; he also said that he had several short stories for children, Mr Bliss", Farmer Giles of Ham", and Roverandom"; and there was an unfinished novel called The Lost Road". Unwin asked Tolkien to send all of these ma.n.u.scripts to his office in Museum Street.
They were sent, and they were read. The children"s stories were all enjoyed, but none of them was about hobbits, and Stanley Unwin was certain that this was what the people who had enjoyed the first book wanted. As for The Lost Road", it was obviously unsuitable for a juvenile audience. But The Silmarillion presented a more complex problem.
The ma.n.u.script of this lengthy work - or rather, the bundle of ma.n.u.scripts - had arrived in a somewhat disordered state, and the only clearly continuous section seemed to be the long poem The Gest of Beren and Luthien". So this poem was pa.s.sed to a publisher"s reader. The reader did not think much of it; in fact in his report he was very rude about the rhyming couplets. But he hastened to say that he found the prose version of the Beren and Luthien story enthralling - Tolkien had presumably attached it to the poem for the purpose of completing the story, for the poem itself was unfinished. The tale here proceeds at a stinging pace," the reader reported to Stanley Unwin, and continued enthusiastically (albeit in rather nonsensical terms of praise): It is told with a picturesque brevity and dignity that holds the reader"s interest in spite of its eye-splitting Celtic names. It has something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in face of Celtic art."
There is no evidence that any other part of The Silmarillion was read by Alien & Unwin at this juncture.
Nevertheless Stanley Unwin wrote to Tolkien on 15 December 1937: The Silmarillion contains plenty of wonderful material; in fact it is a mine to be explored in writing further books like The Hobbit rather than a book in itself. I think this was partly your own view, was it not? What we badly need is another book with which to follow up our success with The Hobbit and alas! neither of these ma.n.u.scripts (the poem and The Silmarillion itself) quite fits the bill. I still hope that you will be inspired to write another book about the Hobbit.
In his letter Unwin also pa.s.sed on to Tolkien the reader"s enthusiastic if misguided compliments about the section of The Silmarillion that he had seen. Tolkien replied (on 16 December 1937): My chief joy comes from learning that The Silmarillion is not rejected with scorn. I have suffered a sense of fear and bereavement, quite ridiculous, since I let this private and beloved nonsense out; and I think if it had seemed to you to be nonsense I should have felt really crushed. But I shall certainly now hope one day to be able, or to be able to afford, to publish The Silmarillion! Your reader"s comments afford me delight. I am sorry the names split his eyes - personally I believe (and here I believe I am a good judge) they are good, and a large part of the effect. They are coherent and consistent and made upon two related linguistic formulae, so that they achieve a reality not fully achieved by other name-inventors (say Swift or Dunsany!). Needless to say they are not Celtic! Neither are the tales.
I did not think any of the stuff I dropped on you filled the bill. But I did want to know whether any of the stuff had any exterior or non-personal value. I think it is plain that quite apart from it, a sequel or successor to The Hobbit is called for. I promise to give this thought and attention. But I am sure you will sympathize when I say that the construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind, and the Silmarils are in my heart. So that goodness knows what will happen. Mr Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimm"s fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge. And what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental. But the real fun about orcs and dragons (to my mind) was before their tune.
Perhaps a new (if similar) line?
Stanley Unwin probably did not understand much of this letter; but in any case Tolkien was really thinking aloud and beginning to plan, for a mere three days later, on 19 December 1937, he wrote to Charles Furth, one of the editorial staff at Alien & Unwin: I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits - A long expected party."
The new story began rather like the first hobbit tale. Mr Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton gives a party to celebrate his birthday, and after making a speech to his guests he slips on the magic ring that he acquired in The Hobbit, and vanishes. The reason for his disappearance, as given in this first draft, is that Bilbo had not got any money or jewels left" and was going off in search of more dragon-gold. At this point the first version of the opening chapter breaks off, unfinished.
Tolkien had as yet no clear idea of what the new story was going to be about. At the end of The Hobbit he had stated that Bilbo remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long". So how could the hobbit have any new adventures worth the name without this being contradicted? And had he not explored most of the possibilities in Bilbo"s character? He decided to introduce a new hobbit, Bilbo"s son - and to give him the name of a family of toy koala bears owned by his children, The Bingos". So he crossed out Bilbo" in the first draft and above it wrote Bingo". Then another idea occurred to him, and he wrote it down in memorandum form (as he was often to do during the invention of this new story): Make return of ring a motive."
The ring, after all, was both a link with the earlier book and one of the few elements in it that had not been fully developed. Bilbo had acquired it accidentally from the slimy Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains. Its power of making the wearer invisible had been exploited fully in The Hobbit, but it might be supposed to have other properties. Tolkien made some further notes: The Ring: whence its origin? Necromancer? Not very dangerous, when used for good purpose. But it exacts its penalty. You must either lose it, or yourself." Then he rewrote the opening chapter, calling the hero Bingo Bolger-Baggins" and making him Bilbo"s nephew rather than his son. He typed it out, and at the beginning of February 1938 he sent it to Alien & Unwin, asking if Stanley Unwin"s son Rayner, who had written the original report on The Hobbit, would care to let him have an opinion on it Stanley Unwin wrote on 11 February that Rayner had read it and was delighted with it, and he told Tolkien: Go right ahead."
Tolkien was encouraged, but he replied: I find it only too easy to write opening chapters - and at the moment the story is not unfolding. I squandered so much on the original Hobbit (which was not meant to have a sequel) that it is difficult to find anything new in that world." Nevertheless he set to work again and wrote a second chapter which he called Three"s Company". It told how Bingo with his cousins Odo and Frodo set off to make a journey across the countryside under the stars.
Stories tend to get out of hand," Tolkien wrote to his publisher a few weeks later, and this has taken an unpremeditated turn." He was referring to the appearance, unplanned by him, of a sinister Black Rider" who is clearly searching for the hobbits. It was indeed the first of several unpremeditated turns that the story was to take.
Unconsciously, and usually without forethought, Tolkien was bending his tale away from the jolly style of The Hobbit towards something darker and grander, and closer in concept to The Silmarillion.
A third chapter was written, unt.i.tled but in essence the same chapter that was eventually published as A Short Cut to Mushrooms". Tolkien then typed out everything he had written (and rewritten), and once again sent it to Rayner Unwin for comment. Again the boy approved of it, though he said that there was too much hobbit talk", and asked what the book would be called.
What indeed? And, much more important, Tolkien still did not have a clear idea what it was all about. Nor did he have much time to devote to it. Besides the usual calls on his attention - lecturing, examining, administration, research - there was the additional worry of a mysterious heart condition that had been diagnosed in his son Christopher; the boy, who had recently followed his brothers to a Catholic boarding-school in Berkshire, was ordered to stay at home for many months and kept lying on his back, and his father devoted much time and care to him. Not for many weeks was the new story again considered. Tolkien had made a note at the end of the three chapters that he had already written: Bingo is going to do something about the Necromancer who is planning an attack on the Shire. They have to find Gollum, and find where he got the ring, for 3 are wanted." But promising as this may have seemed at first, it did not immediately produce results, and on 24 July 1938 he wrote to Charles Furth at Alien & Unwin: The sequel to The Hobbit has remained where it stopped. It has lost my favour, and I have no idea what to do with it."
Shortly afterwards news came of E. V. Gordon"s death in hospital, and this blow contributed further to delay with the new story. Yet at about this time Tolkien began to organise his thoughts on the central matter of the Ring, and began to write some dialogue between Bingo and the elf Gildor, explaining the nature of it. It is, says the elf, one of a number of rings that were made by the Necromancer, and it seems that he is looking for it. The Black Riders, explains the elf, are Ring-wraiths" who have been made permanently invisible by other rings. Now at last ideas began to flow, and Tolkien wrote a pa.s.sage of dialogue between Bingo and the wizard Gandalf in which it is determined that the Ring must be taken many hundreds of miles to the dark land of Mordor, and there cast into one of the Cracks of Earth" where a great fire burns. This was basis enough for the story to be continued, taking the hobbits to the house of Tom Bombadil. When this was done, on 31 August 1938, Tolkien wrote to Alien & Unwin that the book was flowing along, and getting quite out of hand. It has reached about Chapter VII and progresses towards quite unforeseen goals". Then he went off with the family, including Christopher who was now in much better health, for a holiday at Sidmouth.
There he did a good deal of work on the story, bringing the hob-bits to a village inn at Bree" where they meet a strange character, another unpremeditated element in the narrative. In the first drafts Tolkien described this person as a queer-looking brown-faced hob-bit", and named him Trotter". Later he was to be recast as a man of heroic stature, the king whose return to power gives the third volume of the book its t.i.tle; but as yet Tolkien had no more idea than the hobbits who he was. The writing continued, bringing Bingo to Rivendell; and at about this time Tolkien scribbled on a spare sheet: Too many hobbits. Also Bingo Bolger-Baggins a bad name. Let Bingo = Frodo." But below this he wrote: No -1 am now too used to Bingo." There was also the problem of why the Ring seemed so important to everyone - that had not yet been established clearly. Suddenly an idea occurred to him, and he wrote: Bilbo"s ring proved to be the one ruling Ring - all others had come back to Mordor: but this one had been lost."
The one ruling ring that controlled all the others; the ring that was the source and instrument of the power of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor; the ring that must be carried to its destruction by the hobbits, or else the whole world will come under Sauron"s domination. Now everything fell into place, and the story was lifted from the juvenile" level of The Hobbit into the sphere of grand and heroic romance. There was even a name for it: when next he wrote about it to Alien & Unwin, Tolkien referred to it as The Lord of the Rings".
What had happened was almost inevitable. Tolkien had not really wanted to write any more stories like The Hobbit; he had wanted to get on with the serious business of his mythology. And that was what he could now do. The new story had attached itself firmly to The Silmarillion, and was to acquire the dignity of purpose and the high style of the earlier book. True, the hobbits were still hobbits, small people with fur on their feet and funny names like Baggins and Gamgee (the family joke about Gaffer Gamgee" had led to the inclusion of a character of that name, and, more important, to the invention of his son Sam", who was to play a major part in the story). In a sense the hobbits had only been acquired by accident from the earlier book. But now, for the first time, Tolkien realised the significance of hobbits in Middle-earth. The theme of his new story was large, but it was to have its centre in the courage of these small people; and the heart of the book was to be found in the inns and gardens of The Shire, Tolkien"s representation of all that he loved best about England.
Now that the full nature of the story had become apparent, there were fewer false starts or reconsiderations. Home from the Sidmouth holiday, Tolkien spent many hours during the autumn of 1938 continuing the tale, so that by the end of the year it was well into what eventually became Book II. Usually he worked at night, as was his habit, warmed by the idiosyncratic stove in his study grate at Northmoor Road, and writing with his dip-pen on the backs of old examination answers - so that much of The Lord of the Rings is interspersed with fragments of long-forgotten essays by undergraduates. Each chapter would begin with a scribbled and often illegible draft; then would come a rewriting in a fairer hand; and finally a typescript done on the Hammond machine. The only major change still to be made was in the matter of the hero"s name. After a brief period in the summer of 1939 when he considered changing everything he had done so far and starting all over again with Bilbo as the hero -presumably on the principle that the hero of the first book ought to be the hero of the second - Tolkien went back to his intention of using the Bingo" character; but as the name Bingo" had now become quite unbearable to him in view of the serious nature the story had taken on, he changed it to Frodo", a name that already belonged to a minor character. And Frodo" it remained.
At about the time that Tolkien decided to call the book The Lord of the Rings, Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Hitler. Tolkien, like many others at the time, was suspicious not so much of German intentions as of those of Soviet Russia; he wrote that he had a loathing of being on any side that includes Russia", and added: One fancies that Russia is probably ultimately far more responsible for the present crisis and choice of moment than Hitler." However this does not mean that the placing of Mordor (the seat of evil in The Lord of the Rings) in the East is an allegorical reference to contemporary world politics, for as Tolkien himself affirmed it was a simple narrative and geographical necessity". Elsewhere he made a careful distinction between allegory and applicability: I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability** with allegory; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author." As C. S. Lewis wrote of The Lord of the Rings: These things were not devised to reflect any particular situation in the real world. It was the other way round; real events began, horribly, to conform to the pattern he had freely invented."
Tolkien hoped to continue work on the book in the early months of 1939, but there were endless distractions, among them his commitment to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews at the beginning of March. For his subject he had chosen the topic originally promised to the undergraduate society at Worcester College a year previously: fairy-stories. It was appropriate to the occasion, being a subject that had much concerned Lang himself, and it was also much in Tolkien"s mind while he was writing his new story. The Hobbit was clearly designed for children and The Silmarillion for adults, but he was aware that The Lord of the Rings was less easy to categorise. In October 1938 he wrote to Stanley Unwin that it was forgetting children and becoming more terrifying than The Hobbit. And he added: It may prove quite unsuitable." But he felt strongly that fairy-stories are not necessarily for children, and he decided to devote much of his lecture to the proof of this belief.
He had touched on the crucial point in the poem Mythopoeia" that he had written for C. S. Lewis many years before, and he decided to quote from it in the lecture: The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls Him. Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build G.o.ds and their houses out of dark and light, ;.
and sowed the seed of dragons - twas our right ?
(used or misused). That right has not decayed: we make still by the law in which we"re made.
Man, Sub-creator" was in one sense a new way of expressing what is often called the willing suspension of disbelief, and Tolkien made it the central argument of the lecture.
What really happens," he wrote, is that the story-maker proves a successful sub-creator. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is true: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside."
He made a good many points in the lecture, perhaps too many for an entirely cogent argument. But at the end he a.s.serted in powerful terms that there is no higher function for man than the sub-creation" of a Secondary World such as he was already making in The Lord of the Rings, and he gave expression to his hope that in one sense this story and the whole of his related mythology might be found to be true". Every writer making a secondary world,"
he declared, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it." Indeed he went so far as to say that it was a specifically Christian venture to write such a story as he was now engaged upon. The Christian," he said, may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually a.s.sist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation."
The lecture was delivered at St Andrews on 8 March 1939 (the date has been variously and erroneously given as 1938 and 1940); and afterwards Tolkien returned with a new enthusiasm to the story whose purpose he had justified. That story had been begun as a mere sequel" to The Hobbit, at the instigation of his publisher, but now, especially after the declaration of high purpose that he had made in the lecture, the Ring was as important to him as the Silmarils. In fact it was now clear that The Lord of the Rings was not so much a sequel to The Hobbit as a sequel to The Silmarillion. Every aspect of the earlier work was playing a part hi the new story: the mythology itself, which provided both a historical setting and a sense of depth, the elvish languages that he had developed so painstakingly and thoroughly over more than twenty-five years, even the Feanorian alphabet in which he had kept his diary from 1926 to 1933, and which he now used for elvish inscriptions in the story. Yet to his friends, Tolkien still referred to the story in modest terms as the new Hobbit" or the Hobbit sequel".
Under this t.i.tle it was read chapter by chapter to the Inklings, and was received with much enthusiasm; although not everyone who listened to the story was delighted by the high style" of prose that had begun to predominate in the book. Tolkien had moved from the comparatively colloquial approach of the opening chapters into a manner that was more and more archaic and solemn as he progressed. He was well aware of this; indeed it was entirely deliberate, and it was discussed by him at the time in print - just as the intentions of the book had been discussed in the St Andrews lecture. This time the context was his introduction to the revised Clark Hall translation of Beowulf.
Elaine Griffiths had found herself unable to complete the revision, and after failing to find the time to get it done himself Tolkien had handed the task over to his colleague Charles Wrenn, who was then at the University of London. Wrenn completed the work speedily, but Alien & Unwin had to wait for many months before Tolkien could be persuaded to marshal his thoughts sufficiently to write the introduction that he had promised for the volume.
When he did write it, this introduction proved to be a lengthy discussion of the principles of translation, and in particular an argument in favour of the adoption of a high style" when dealing with heroic matters. Consciously or unconsciously, he was really discussing The Lord of the Rings, which had at that time (the beginning of 1940) reached the middle of what was to become Book II.
In the introduction Tolkien declared, in justification of a high style: We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer striking and smiting; talk and chat and prefer speech and discourse; well-bred, brilliant, or polite n.o.blemen (visions of sn.o.bbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the worthy, brave and courteous men of long ago." From this time onwards he put these stylistic precepts more and more into practice in The Lord of the Rings. This was almost inevitable, for as the story grew grander in scale and purpose it adopted the style of The Silmarillion; yet Tolkien did not make any stylistic revision of the first chapters, which had been written in a much lighter vein; and he himself noted when reading the book again twenty-five years later: The first volume is really very different to the rest."
The outbreak of war in September 1939 did not have any immediate major effect on Tolkien"s life; but during this time, to his inevitable sorrow, family life changed as the boys left home. John, the eldest, who had read English at his father"s old college, Exeter, was training for the Catholic priesthood in Rome, and was later evacuated with his fellow-students to Lancashire. Michael spent a year at Trinity College and then became an anti-aircraft gunner.
Christopher, recovered from his illness, returned to school for a brief period before following his brother to Trinity.
Only Priscilla, the youngest of the family, was still living at home. There was some disruption of the regular pattern of life at Northmoor Road: domestic help became scarce, evacuees and lodgers were sometimes accommodated, hens were installed in the garden to increase the supply of eggs, and Tolkien took turns of duty as an air raid warden, sleeping in the damp little hut that served as the local headquarters. There were, however, no German air attacks on Oxford; nor was Tolkien required, as were a number of dons, to undertake work for the War Office or other government departments.
As the war progressed, the character of the University changed greatly, for large numbers of service cadets were drafted to Oxford for short courses" before they took up their duties as officers; Tolkien organised a syllabus for naval cadets in the English School, and modified many of his lectures to suit the less specialist audiences. But in general terms his life was much as it had been before the war, and his distress at the continuation of hostilities was almost as much for ideological as for personal reasons. People in this land," he wrote in 1941, seem not even yet to realise that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the ma.s.s. I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that n.o.ble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light*
Many years later, Tolkien recalled that the writing of The Lord of the Rings halted for almost a year late in 1940, when it had reached the point at which the Company discovers Balin"s tomb in Moria. If this is true - and other evidence would seem to confirm that there was a hiatus at about this time - it was only the first of several major delays or hesitations in the writing, none of them ascribable to any specific external cause.
When work was resumed, Tolkien drew up outlines for the end of the story - which he did not imagine was more than a few chapters away - and began to sketch the episode where two of the hobbits encounter Treebeard, the being who was the ultimate expression of Tolkien"s love and respect for trees. When eventually he came to ; write this chapter (so he told Nevill Coghill) he modelled Treebeard"s E way of speaking, Hrum, Hroom", on the booming voice of C. S. Lewis.
Alien & Unwin had originally hoped that the new story would be ready for publication a mere couple of years after they had issued The Hobbit. That hope had faded, and in 1942 even the original Hobbit had to go out of print when the warehouse stock of copies was burnt in the London blitz. But Stanley Unwin continued to take an interest in the progress of the new Hobbit", and in December 1942 he received a letter from Tolkien which reported: It is now approaching completion. I hope to get a little free time this vacation, and might hope to finish it off early next year. It has reached Chapter x.x.xI and will require at least six more to finish (these are already sketched)."
Yet Chapter x.x.xI (the original number of Flotsam and Jetsam") was only at the end of what became Book III; and in the event there were to be not six but thirty-one more chapters before the book was complete. Tolkien tried to tackle the story in the months that followed, and he wrote a little more of it. But by the summer of 1943 he had to admit that he was dead stuck".
One cause of the difficulty was his perfectionism. Not content with writing a large and complex book, he felt he must ensure that every single detail fitted satisfactorily into the total pattern. Geography, chronology, and nomenclature all had to be entirely consistent. He had been given some a.s.sistance with the geography, for his son Christopher helped him by drawing an elaborate map of the terrain covered by the story. Tolkien himself had been making rough sketch-maps since beginning work on the book; he once said: If you"re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you"ll never make a map of it afterwards." But the map in itself was not enough, and he made endless calculations of time and distance, drawing up elaborate charts concerning events in the story, showing dates, the days of the week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the wind and the phase of the moon. This was partly his habitual insistence on perfection, partly sheer revelling in the fun of sub-creation", but most of all a concern to provide a totally convincing picture. Long afterwards he said: I wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it (in a sense) as actual history." Name-making also involved much of his attention, as was inevitable, for the invented languages from which the names were constructed were both the mainspring of his mythology and in themselves a central activity of his intellect. Once again, the elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, now more sophisticated than they had been when he began The Silmarillion twenty-five years earlier, played a princ.i.p.al role in name-making, and were used in the composition of elvish poems and songs. The story also called for the invention of at least the rudiments of several other languages, and all this took time and energy.
Moreover he had reached a point where the story divided into several independent and in themselves complicated chains of events, and while he believed that it would only take him two or three chapters to get Frodo and Sam Gamgee to Mordor he could not yet face unravelling the complexities of the simultaneous events in Gondor and Rohan. It had taken him nearly six years to bring the story this far; how could he ever find the time and energy to finish it, let alone to complete and revise The Silmarillion, which still clamoured for attention? He was fifty-one, tired, and fearful that in the end he would achieve nothing. He had already gained a reputation for almost indefinite procrastination in his philological work, and this sometimes amused him, though it was often saddening to him; but as to never finishing his mythology, that was a dreadful and numbing thought.
One day at about this time Lady Agnew, who lived opposite in Northmoor Road, told him that she was nervous about a large poplar tree in the road; she said that it cut off the sun from her garden, and she feared for her house if it fell in a gale. Tolkien thought that this was ridiculous. Any wind that could have uprooted it and hurled it on her house", he said, would have demolished her and her house without any a.s.sistance from the tree." But the poplar had already been lopped and mutilated, and though he managed to save it now, Tolkien began to think about it. He was after all anxious about my own internal Tree", his mythology; and there seemed to be some a.n.a.logy.
One morning he woke up with a short story in his head, and scribbled it down. It was the tale of a painter named Niggle, a man who, like Tolkien, niggled" over details: He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a huge tree. There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out."
In the story, which he called Leaf by Niggle, Tolkien expressed his worst fears for his mythological Tree. Like Niggle he sensed that he would be s.n.a.t.c.hed away from his work long before it was finished - if indeed it could ever be finished in this world. For it is in another and brighter place that Niggle finds his Tree finished, and learns that it is indeed a real tree, a true part of creation.
The story was not published for many months, but the actual business of writing it helped to exorcise some of Tolkien"s fear, and to get him to work again on The Lord of the Rings; though the immediate impulse came from C.
S. Lewis.
By the beginning of 1944 The Lord of the Rings had lain untouched for many months, and Tolkien wrote: I do not seem to have any mental energy or invention." But Lewis had noticed what had happened, and he urged Tolkien to get going again and finish the story. I needed some pressure," said Tolkien, and shall probably respond." At the beginning of April he resumed work, beginning to write what eventually became Book IV, which takes Frodo and Sam Gamgee across the marshes towards Mordor where they hope to destroy the Ring by hurling it into the Cracks of Doom.
Christopher Tolkien had now been called up into the R.A.F., and had been sent to South Africa to train as a pilot (much to the regret of his father, who believed that aerial warfare was both immoral and excessively dangerous).
Tolkien was already writing long letters to Christopher, and now these letters carried a detailed account of progress on the book, and of reading it to the Lewis brothers and Charles Williams in the White Horse, a pub they favoured at the time. Here are a few extracts from the letters: Wednesday 5 April 1944: I have seriously embarked on an effort to finish my book, and have been sitting up rather late: a lot of rereading and research required. And it is a painful tricky business getting into swing again. A few pages for a lot of sweat; but at the moment they are just meeting Gollum on a precipice."
Sat.u.r.day 8 April: Spent part of day (and night) struggling with chapter. Gollum is playing up well on his return. A beautiful night with high moon. About 2 a.m. I was in the warm silver-lit garden, wishing we two could go for a walk.
Then went to bed."
Thursday 13 April: I miss you hourly, and am lonely without you. I have friends, of course, but can seldom see them. I did see C.S.L. and Charles Williams yesterday for almost two hours. I read my recent chapter; it received approbation. I have begun another. Shall have spare copies typed, if possible, and sent out to you. Now I will return to Frodo and Gollum for a brief spell."
Friday 14 April: I managed to get an hour or two"s writing, and have brought Frodo nearly to the gates of Mordor.