For almost fifty
years fans and critics have attempted to read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien
through his biography. His devout Catholicism, his experiences in the trenches
of World War 1, and his connections with Birmingham and Oxford have all
provided inspiration for those seeking a more profound understanding of the
scale and diversity of his created world. His official biography was produced
by Humphrey Carpenter in 1977, and with The
Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, also edited by Carpenter, provides readers and
researchers with invaluable insights into the man and his creativity. The main
elements of Tolkien’s biography are reiterated in many other books, but the
facts nevertheless remain endlessly open to interpretation and speculation.
To some extent Tolkien invited an increasingly detailed identification
between himself and his work when he declared ‘I am in fact a hobbit’, thereby
locating his own love of beer, a pipe, and congenial company firmly in the
context of his own most famous creation. Less playfully, he also declared that
he disliked and distrusted allegory. Even so, readers have consistently
attempted to impose allegorical readings on The
Lord of the Rings, apparently ignoring, for the most part, his intensely
allegorical short story ‘Leaf by Niggle’, which demonstrates his consummate
skill in the use of this form as a means of depicting some of the basic tenets
of Roman Catholic eschatology. The difference in scale and topic between the
epic Lord of the Rings and the fable
of ‘Leaf by Niggle’ illustrates a distinction in the way Tolkien regarded the
use of allegory.
The appropriation of
Tolkien’s biography is frequently partial and convenient, and much of it
remains untouched, though it is fascinating and at times moving. Tolkien was
born of English parents of German extraction, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on
January 3rd 1892. He died in England on September 2nd
1973. As a consequence of ill health as an infant, his childhood was spent in
England although his father remained in South Africa. After the death of his
father in 1896, he then suffered the loss of his mother when he was only
twelve. Under the guardianship of a Catholic priest, he was educated at King
Edward's School, St. Philip's Grammar School, (both in Birmingham) and Oxford
University. He had already met his Luthien, Edith Bratt, before he left school,
but was prevented from seeing her until he came of age at twenty-one. After graduating
in 1915 he joined the army and saw action in the Battle of the Somme where he
was wounded. He was eventually discharged after spending most of 1917 in the
hospital. During this time he began The Book
of Lost Tales.
From an early age he
had been fascinated by language, particularly the languages of Northern Europe,
both ancient and modern. His love of mythology, fairy tales and folk-lore all
contributed to the creation of those early stories. His delight in creating
languages complete with detailed etymology and grammar provided the foundation
for his later creation of stories which gave those created languages a place
and a purpose. And so the development of the stories sprang from the languages.
Meanwhile, Tolkien’s
academic career was progressing. He held positions as Reader and later
Professor of English Language at Leeds from 1920 to 25; he was Rawlinson and
Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (1925-45); and Merton Professor of
English Language and Literature (1945-59). He taught and researched Anglo-Saxon
(Old English) and its relation to linguistially similar languages (Old Norse,
Old German, and Gothic), and from this area of expertise came his seminal
essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics. He also studied and edited other Old English works such as The Old English Exodus, which includes
the downing of Pharaoh’s army as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea
(a context for the drowning of the Black Riders at the Ford in The Fellowship of the Ring). The Old
English account of the Battle of Maldon also provided the basic material for
his verse drama The Homecoming of
Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son.
Besides his Old
English studies, Tolkien made important contributions to the study of Middle
English literature. He edited the important instructional text for anchoresses
(female hermits) known as Ancrene Wisse.
He also edited the medieval romances Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir
Orfeo, and the homiletic poems Patience
and Cleanness; and the beautiful
Dream Vision poem Pearl, all of which
belong to the alliterative revival, and so replicate in the Middle English
vernacular the structural form used for verse compositions in Old English such
as Beowulf.
From among these little-known texts, and from the other
forms of literature that delighted him, Tolkien garnered inspiration and
discovered themes, cultural markers, ideals, and character traits which he would
weave into his Middle-earth stories. His love of the English countryside
influenced, as he acknowledged, his creation of The Shire, but in his very
early work it also influenced to creation of Tirion, and some aspects of ‘The
Cottage of Lost Play’. Of course, for anyone intent on writing a Mythology for
England, linking that mythology into recognizable landscapes is an obvious
device. It means, however, that as part of a mythology, features such as The
Mill, based on Sarehole Mill near Birmingham, become archetypes as well as
symbols of nostalgia, and so attempts to define them solely in terms of places
or features known to Tolkien diminish the power of his declared intention.
Other features of
the landscape of Middle-earth cannot easily be associated with the modern
English landscape but can be linked to Tolkien’s understanding of England’s
Anglo-Saxon past. His accounts of ruined roads, fallen statues, and
particularly the Greenway that runs beside Bree hill suggest his understanding
of Anglo-Saxon wonder and surprise at being confronted with the remains of
Roman Britain. As the incoming Germanic tribes moved across the English
landscape, they too would have come across the straight lines of roads grassed
over. Their observations of the ruins of Roman towns and cities led to the
development of the theory often set down in Old English texts that these walls
were ‘orþanc enta geweorc’, ‘the skillful work of giants’. Tolkien’s
perceptive understanding of the wonder and interpretive strategies of the
earliest English people is picked up in The
Lord of the Rings through references to features such as the Greenway and
the ruined roads. The reuse of the Old English vocabulary provides the tower of
Orthanc with an additional signification as it becomes inflected with old
meaning ‘skillful work’. The keepers of the trees in Fangorn forest, and
perhaps also up beyond the North Downs of The Shire, are given additional
mythological size and significance as ‘enta’ – ‘giants’. These imagistic and
linguistic reverberations then enable him to fit his story into, or at least
alongside, the real history of the English people. And this bears out his own
assertion that he preferred history to allegory.
Unlike his academic
career, it seems that marriage was not a major influence in Tolkien’s writing.
Edith helped with copying some early manuscripts, but little trace of
conventional domesticity is to be found in any of Tolkien’s major works, and
almost all of his family relationships in his major books reveal tension between
parents and children, or the fostering and plight of orphaned children. This
may relate to his own experiences, and it may be that he regarded the married
state as kind of corporeal ‘Eucatastrophe’ – the happy ending he analysed in
his lecture ‘Tree and Leaf’. Representations of marriage in his works, if happy
and uncomplicated, require no further attention. Farmer Maggot and his wife are
domestically ‘settled’, Lobelia and Otho Sackville-Baggins seem well matched!
Even Aragorn and Arwen’s story only demands attention before they are able to
marry, and when that marriage has to be terminated by relinquishing life in
extreme old age. Maybe the prohibition placed on Tolkien’s initial relationship
with Edith made the overcoming of interdicted love particularly attractive to
him as a theme, but so many folk and fairy stories as well as myths and legends
deal with this, that his own experience cannot be given too much priority.
There is a great
deal in Tolkien’s personal and academic biography that offers insights into his
creativity, and we are fortunate that we are able to consult his letters and
interviews and so gain a closer understanding of his desires, agendas, and
preferences. However, these should not and cannot dictate nor prevent critics
from exploring and exposing a wide range of possible interpretations of
Tolkien’s works, which, because of their vast eclectic range of sources of
inspiration, are intensely polysemous. While Tolkien’s biography sheds light on
the relationship between the author and his works, the effect of his works: The Silmarillion and The Hobbit no less than The Lord of the Rings has passed beyond
authorial control, and we must continue to interrogate our own responses to the
richness and diversity of his created world.