The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (65 page)

Mechanophobia aside, however, Tolkien had reason to rejoice. True, he was exhausted from moving house, overwhelmed by college chores, and afflicted by various ailments—including bouts of flu, neuritis, fibrositis, lumbago, laryngitis, and sciatica—and
The Silmarillion
remained in limbo. But nothing could suppress the exaltation of knowing that
The Lord of the Rings
would soon see print. And he was traveling more, enjoying different landscapes and cultures. He returned to Ireland in 1950 and 1951 (and would go again in 1958), serving again as an external examiner for the National University, which would grant him an Honorary D. Litt. in July 1954. In 1951 he summered with Edith and Priscilla in County Kerry, where he sketched nine landscapes.
Summer in Kerry
, in colored pencil, eschews the sharp contours and geometric patterns of his legendarium-based illustrations for soft, melting masses of olive-green cloud, daubed with white, lowering over a range of gray-green-yellow mountains. Unfortunately, this promising new direction was not followed up, and these Irish landscapes seem to have been his last. He also traveled to the Continent, visiting the University of Li
è
ge several times to attend academic festivities, delivering a paper on the Middle English word
losenger
(“deceiver,” “flatterer,” “liar”—i.e., the type of scoundrel that figures in many of his tales), and receiving another honorary doctorate.

Tolkien’s reputation as a Middle English scholar advanced yet more when he delivered the 1952–53 W. P. Ker Lecture at the University of Glasgow on
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. The lecture was scheduled for April 15, just two weeks after the disruptive move to Sandfield Road, and Tolkien rushed to complete the text as the train steamed toward Glasgow. He grumbled about the result, but the published version, which appeared posthumously, holds considerable interest for its stalwart defense of fairy story as the supreme vehicle for moral instruction.
Sir Gawain
, Tolkien argues, is at heart a moral study, in which Gawain’s temptation to adultery, his hesitation between courtly politesse and Christian virtue, and his final triumph over sin play out against a background of Fa
ë
rie that serves to “enlarge the scene and the actors,” transforming a bedroom tug-of-war between a befuddled knight and a lascivious lady into a battle for personal salvation.

Throughout his lecture, Tolkien quotes from his translation of
Gawain
, begun when he was a fledgling instructor at Leeds but only recently completed. In 1953 the novelist P. H. Newby, at this time a producer at the BBC, proposed that the translation might make a fine Christmas broadcast, especially if someone like Dylan Thomas read the text. Tolkien, perhaps still dazzled by his own performance while recording portions of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
on George Sayer’s tape recorder, suggested that he himself might be the right man for the job. He auditioned on September 1 and, with a glint of the vanity that sometimes peeped forth—as in his fondness for ornamental waistcoats—declared that “it sounded to me better than most things I have listened to of the sort—more
interesting
(more variable and unexpectable).” Tolkien’s delivery held little charm for others, however, and the BBC settled for a professional, multivoice presentation, to be broadcast in four segments over the course of December. The author was invited to introduce the first broadcast and discuss the poem at length in a special January program.

His translation of
Gawain
was published posthumously in 1975. It was not well received. Tolkien had argued in the W. P. Ker Lecture that a translation should retain “the original metre and alliteration, without which translation is of little value except as a crib” (a view also upheld by T. S. Eliot, who argued that Dante, for one, could only be properly translated in terza rima, for “a different metre is a different mode of thought … and a poem should be translated as nearly as possible in the same thought-form as the original”). But transforming into modern verse the long-abandoned thought-forms of the
Gawain
poet proved beyond Tolkien’s ability. To the American critic Roger Sale, writing in
The Times Literary Supplement
, the work suffered from “constructions that are straightforward in Middle English but awkward now,” forcing Tolkien to employ “an idiom that is neither medieval nor twentieth-century—just as he does in
The Lord of the Rings
.” In
The Times Higher Education Supplement
, the medievalist A. C. Spearing agreed, remarking that the “style and diction have an archaic quality that produces a quite different effect from that of the originals—not of ancient grandeur, but of faded romanticism laced with awkwardness.”

More successful was
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son
, a dramatic dialogue that Tolkien had worked on intermittently throughout the 1930s and ’40s and eventually published in the English Association’s
Essays and Studies 1953
. He based this short, dark work on the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” which celebrates the heroic ethos while telling of a crushing Anglo-Saxon defeat at the hands of Viking invaders in
A.D.
991 (in Lewis’s
Perelandra
, Ransom shouts out a line from the poem while throttling the demonic Unman). Tolkien, however, focuses on the battle’s aftermath, as two servants search the carnage for the body of the fallen hero Beorhtnoth (or Byrhtnoth: the name in Old English means “bright courage”). While the Old English poem lauds Beorhtnoth for his nobility in allowing the Vikings to move to a more advantageous location, Tolkien interprets this move as a disastrously foolhardy act prompted by
ofermod
, over-spirit, or “overmastering pride” (as Tolkien translates it). As in his
Gawain
translation, Tolkien retains the dense alliteration of the original, but here, unhampered by the strict requirements of translation, his method works, and the servants’ terse, gritty conversation offers a modern gloss upon the values of the original poem by emphasizing the violence, ugliness, confusion, and horror of war. Since its publication, the drama has received mixed notices from medievalists, some of whom challenge Tolkien’s interpretation of historical events. Nonetheless, the work enhanced his literary reputation. In early 1954, still enamored of his own thespian skills, he tape-recorded it in his study, assaying all the parts himself and adding home-brewed sound effects, and then proposed to P. H. Newby that the BBC mount a professional production. When the Third Programme broadcast the play some months later, Tolkien, always seeking perfection, criticized it harshly, but with the twin productions of
Gawain
and
Homecoming
, his Old English and Middle English labors had, against all expectations, reached a wide audience.

By then it scarcely mattered. A far more important event was unfolding: the great epic of Middle-earth was about to see the light of day. The production process had been long and arduous. Tolkien had promised Rayner Unwin that the book would be delivered in final form by March 25, 1953. This deadline he had failed to meet. He submitted the text as quickly as he could, adding maps and appendices, improving spelling, grammar, and chronological consistency. Various titles came and went, some of them smacking of old radio serials:
The Return of the Shadow
for what would become
The Fellowship of the Ring
;
The Shadow Lengthens
for
The Two Towers
. Finally the great labor came to a close, and on July 29, 1954, Unwin published
The Fellowship of the Ring
, followed on November 11, 1954, by
The Two Towers
, and on October 20, 1955, by
The Return of the King
: approximately 475,000 words in total, one of the longest novels in modern English literature.

On July 30, 1955, Tolkien and his daughter, Priscilla, set out by train and boat for Italy, while Edith departed for a Mediterranean cruise with friends. Husband and wife had long accepted their differing tastes and temperaments in the matter of friends and pastimes, and separate vacations of this sort seemed in order. For Tolkien, the voyage afforded an opportunity to step back for two weeks from the tensions and trials of guiding his masterwork into print, while also allowing him to set foot in a land he had admired from afar and to revel in a language that he found lovely but spoke haltingly, although he had studied it while recovering from gastritis during World War I. It came as a “linguistic shock,” when he arrived on Italian soil, to learn that Italians, contrary to reputation, “dislike exaggeration, superlatives, and adjectives of excessive praise. But they seem to answer to colour and poetic expression, if justified.” This opalescent language worked its magic: after his return, he wrote Christopher that “I remain in love with Italian, and feel quite lorn without a chance of trying to speak it! We must keep it up…”

Italy and magic seemed synonymous. Venice, the first significant stop, where the travelers were met by Christopher and his wife, Faith, proved bewitching, otherworldly, with its intersecting canals, crumbling palaces, and mysterious plazas, “elvishly lovely—to me like a dream of Old Gondor, or Pelargir of the N
ú
menorean ships, before the return of the Shadow.” The enchantment arose from more than the cityscape: Italy was saturated with Catholicism—a far cry from England, with its history of anti-Catholic murder and riot—and Tolkien felt like “an exile from the borders and far provinces returning home, or at least to the home of his fathers.” Especially welcoming were the many chapels that housed the Blessed Sacrament, buildings that emanated “a curious glow of dormant life and Charity.” Tolkien rejoiced also in Venice’s lack of cars, a brief respite from “the cursed disease of the internal combustion engine of which all the world is dying.” Assisi, too, was a revelation. He and Priscilla stayed in a convent, awoke to the “tremendous babel of bells” at 5:30 a.m., strolled around the church of San Damiano, “soaked with a sense of the personality of St Clare, and of St Francis,” and attended a Mass at the Basilica of San Francesco and a High Mass at the church of Santa Chiara, where, Tolkien thought, “the great choir of friars sang magnificently, to my thinking, with enormous controlled power—capable of lifting the roof even of Santa Chiara instantaneously and without effort.” Like all trips, this one also offered irritations and disappointments: too much rain, some architectural monstrosities, a friar who preached an interminable sermon, and clouds of mosquitoes, who savagely bit Tolkien’s face, hands, and legs, resulting in swellings and blisters.

Overall, however, the voyage proved an extraordinary success. Those lucky enough to read the
Giornale d’Italia
—which remains lamentably unpublished, languishing in a bin at the Bodleian—cannot help but be impressed by the extent to which Tolkien, on vacation, far away from the university, his great literary labor in its final stages, bursts loose in glorious descriptive passages, using words as splashes of paint to capture, impressionistically, the moods of this bewitching land. Tolkien was always more immersed in the visual arts than most of his readers realize. Here is Tolkien the watercolorist, registering the tones of Venice; Tolkien the art critic, passing judgment on medieval and Renaissance paintings. Of Venice: “it is much paler and less hard and clear in colour than I expected: black, white, pale pink, grey,” and “heartrendingly lovely after so short a stay, so soon to end. Still no hard or deep colours. Clear but pale sky, glass-grey glinting water, light olive-greenness.” As for Italian art, the famous frescoes ascribed, perhaps erroneously, to Giotto in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi struck him as too dependent upon shades of red (“ochre, brick-red, scarlet, crimson”), while in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia he admired the Tintorettos and was “much moved” by Bassano’s
St. Jerome
(1556), which depicts the elderly saint in a cave, wearing a loincloth, surrounded by books. Perhaps he read in Jerome’s suffering and scholarship something of his own life. To Titian’s
Assumption of the Virgin
(1516–18) in the Franciscan Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, also in Venice, he had a complicated response, approving its bright colors but put off by its histrionics, its startled Virgin and wildly gesticulating apostles, commenting that “it has nothing whatever to say to me about the Assumption: which means that with that in mind it is offensive (to me).”

This raised questions about the relation of religion to art: “Can a picture concerned with religion be satisfactory on one side only? Spiritual but bad art; great art but irreligious?” Many would answer positively, at least to the second clause—after all, Picasso, the most important artist of the twentieth century, was relentlessly irreligious, even in his
Crucifixion
(1930)—but to Tolkien, it was “impossible to disentangle the two. Easier perhaps for the irreligious.” For him religiosity in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly; in 1953 he had written to Fr. Robert Murray that “
The Lord of the Rings
is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

Lightning from a Clear Sky

Tolkien’s best argument that it is impossible to disentangle great art from religion is
The Lord of the Rings
itself; no other twentieth-century fiction comes close to Tolkien’s fusion of invented mythology, imagined history, high fantasy, and deep piety. His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable. Thus Lewis in “The Gods Return to Earth,” a review of
The Lord of the Rings
for
Time and Tide
: “This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as
Songs of Innocence
were in theirs … Nothing quite like it was ever done before…” To the “predestined readers” of Tolkien’s heroic romance—the only readers who would be prepared to understand—Lewis prophesied, “here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. They will know that this is good news, news beyond hope.”