Smoky, begrimed, hung about with a thick industrial fog, crowded with factories and terraced houses, Leeds offered little prospect of a good life. The late Victorian university buildings, constructed of variegated brick in the mock-Gothic style, were a sad contrast to what Tolkien had been used to. He had serious misgivings about his decision to accept the post, and to move to the north of England.
At first life was difficult for him. Just after the Leeds term began in October 1920, Edith gave birth to a second son, who was christened Michael Hilary Reuel; Tolkien, living in a bedsitter in Leeds during the week, had to make a journey to Oxford at weekends to see his family. Not until the beginning of 1921 were Edith and the baby ready to move north, and even then Tolkien could only find temporary accommodation for them in furnished rooms in Leeds. However, at the end of 1921 they took the lease of 11 St Mark’s Terrace, a small dark house in a side-street near the university, and here they established their new home.
The English Department at Leeds University was still small, but George Gordon was building it up. Gordon was an organiser rather than a scholar, but Tolkien found him ‘the very master of men’; moreover Gordon displayed great kindness to his new assistant, making space for him in his own office, a bare room of glazed bricks and hot-water pipes already shared with the Professor of French, and showing concern for his domestic arrangements. More important, he handed over to Tolkien virtual responsibility for all the linguistic teaching in the department.
Gordon had decided to follow the Oxford pattern and divide the Leeds English syllabus into two options, one for undergraduates wishing to specialise in post-Chaucerian literature and the other for those who wanted to concentrate their attention on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. This latter course had only just been established, and Gordon wanted Tolkien to organise a syllabus that would be attractive to undergraduates and would provide them with a sound philological training. Tolkien immediately threw himself into the work. He was at first a little glum at the sight of solid and dour Yorkshire students, but he soon came to have a great admiration for many of them. He once wrote: ‘I am wholly in favour of the “dull stodges”. A surprisingly large proportion prove “educable”: for which a primary qualification is the willingness to do some work.’ Many of his students at Leeds worked very hard indeed, and were soon achieving excellent results.
Yet Tolkien very nearly did not remain at Leeds. During his first term there, he was invited to submit his name as a candidate for two professorships of the English Language: the Baines Chair at Liverpool and the new De Beers Chair at Cape Town. He sent in his applications. Liverpool turned him down, but at the end of January 1921 Cape Town offered him the post. In many ways he would have liked to accept. It would have meant a return to the land of his birth, and he had always wanted to see South Africa again. But he refused the job. Edith and the baby were in no fit state to travel, and he did not want to be separated from her. Yet he wrote in his diary twelve months later: ‘I have often wondered since if that was not our chance that came then, and we had not the courage to seize it.’ Events were to prove this fear unfounded.
Early in 1922 a new junior lecturer was appointed to the language side of the English Department at Leeds, a young man named E. V. Gordon. This small dark Canadian (who was unrelated to George Gordon) had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and Tolkien had tutored him during 1920. Now he made him very welcome in Leeds. ‘Eric Valentine Gordon has come and got firmly established and is my devoted friend and pal,’ he wrote in his diary.
Soon after Gordon’s arrival the two men began to collaborate on a major piece of scholarship. Tolkien had been working for some time at a glossary for a book of Middle English extracts that his former tutor Kenneth Sisam had edited. This meant in effect compiling a small Middle English dictionary, a task that he undertook with infinite precision and much imagination. The glossary took a long time to complete, but it reached print early in 1922, by which time Tolkien wanted to turn his hand to something that would give greater scope to his scholarship. He and E. V. Gordon decided to compile a new edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as there was none in print that was suitable for university students. Tolkien was to be responsible for the text and glossary while Gordon would provide the greater part of the notes.
Tolkien found that his collaborator was ‘an industrious little devil’, and he had to work fast to keep up with him. They finished the book in time for publication by the Clarendon Press early in 1925. It was a major contribution to the study of medieval literature – though Tolkien himself would often in later years entertain his audience at lectures by making disparaging references to some point of interpretation in the edition, as if he himself had nothing to do with it: ‘Tolkien and Gordon were quite wrong, quite wrong when they said that! Can’t imagine what they were thinking of!’
E. V. Gordon shared Tolkien’s sense of humour. Together the two men helped to form a Viking Club among the undergraduates, which met to drink large quantities of beer, read sagas, and sing comic songs. These were mostly written by Tolkien and Gordon, who made up rude verses about the students, translated nursery rhymes into Anglo-Saxon, and sang drinking songs in Old Norse. Several of their verses were printed privately some years later as Songs for the Philologists. Not surprisingly, the Viking Club helped to make Tolkien and Gordon popular as teachers, and through this and the excellence of their teaching the language side of the English Department attracted more and more pupils. By 1925 there were twenty linguistic specialists among the undergraduates, more than a third of the total number in the department, and a far higher proportion than was usually enrolled at Oxford for the equivalent course.
Home life for the Tolkiens was generally happy. Edith found the atmosphere in the university refreshingly informal, and she made friends with other wives. Money was not plentiful and Tolkien was saving to buy a house, so family holidays were few, but in the summer of 1922 there was a visit of some weeks to Filey on the Yorkshire coast. Tolkien did not like the place; he called it ‘a very nasty little suburban seaside resort’, and while he was there he had to spend a good deal of time marking School Certificate examination papers, a chore that he now undertook annually to earn some extra money. But he also wrote several poems.
He had been composing a good deal of verse over the last few years. Much of it was concerned with his mythology. Some found its way into print in the Leeds university magazine The Gryphon, in a local series called Yorkshire Poetry, and in a book of verses by members of the English Department entitled Northern Venture. Now he began a series of poems that he called ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’. One, suggested by his feelings about Filey, complains of the sordid noisy character of modern urban life. Another, ‘The Dragon’s Visit’, describes the ravages of a dragon who arrives at Bimble Bay and encounters ‘Miss Biggins’. A third, ‘Glip’, tells of a strange slimy creature who lives beneath the floor of a cave and his pale luminous eyes. All are glimpses of important things to come.
In May 1923 Tolkien caught a severe cold which lingered and turned into pneumonia. His grandfather John Suffield, then aged ninety, was staying with the family at the time, and Tolkien recalled a vision of him ‘standing by my bedside, a tall thin black-clad figure, and looking at me and speaking to me in contempt – to the effect that I and my generation were degenerate weaklings. There was I gasping for breath, but he must now say goodbye, as he was off to catch a boat to go a trip by sea around the British Isles!’ The old man lived for another seven years, spending much of his time with his youngest daughter, Tolkien’s Aunt Jane. She had left Nottinghamshire and had taken a farm at Dormston in Worcestershire. It was at the end of a lane that led no further, and the local people used sometimes to refer to it as ‘Bag End’.
When Tolkien had recovered from pneumonia he went with Edith and the children to stay with his brother Hilary, who after his war service had bought a small orchard and market garden near Evesham, ancestral town of the Suffields. The family were pressed into service to help on the land, and there were also hilarious games with giant kites, which the two brothers flew from the field opposite the house to amuse the children. Tolkien also managed to find time to do some work, and to turn again to his mythology.
‘The Book of Lost Tales’ was almost complete. At Oxford and at Leeds Tolkien had composed the stories that tell of the creation of the universe, the fashioning of the Silmarils, and their theft from the blessed realm of Valinor by Morgoth. The cycle still lacked a clear ending – it was to conclude with the voyage of Earendel’s star-ship that had been the first element of the mythology to arise in Tolkien’s mind – and some of the stories were only in synopsis; but a little more effort would bring the work to a conclusion. Nevertheless Tolkien did not press on towards this objective, but began instead to rewrite. It was almost as if he did not want to finish it. Perhaps he doubted whether it would ever find a publisher; certainly it was a most unconventional work. But it was no odder than the books of Lord Dunsany, which had proved very popular. So what was holding him back? Principally his desire for perfection, but perhaps it was also something that Christopher Wiseman had once said about the elves in his early poems: ‘Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them. When you have finished creating them they will be as dead to you as the atoms that make our living food.’ In other words, Tolkien did not want to finish because he could not contemplate the thought of having no more creating to do inside his invented world; ‘sub-creation’, he was later to call it.
So he did not complete The Silmarillion (as he came to call the book) but went back and altered and polished and revised. He also began to cast two of the principal stories as poems, an indication that he still aspired as much towards verse as towards prose. For the story of Túrin he chose a modern equivalent of the type of alliterative measure that is found in Beowulf, and for the story of Beren and Lúthien he elected to work in rhyming couplets. This latter poem he called ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’; later he renamed it ‘The Lay of Leithian’.
Meanwhile his career at Leeds took an important step forward. In 1922 George Gordon had left to go back to Oxford as Professor of English Literature, and Tolkien was a candidate for the Leeds chair that Gordon had occupied. In the event Lascelles Abercrombie was appointed, but Michael Sadler the Vice-Chancellor promised Tolkien that the University would soon be able to create a new Professorship of the English Language especially for him. Sadler kept his word, and Tolkien became a professor in 1924 at the age of thirty-two, remarkably young by the standards of British universities. In the same year, he and Edith bought a house on the outskirts of Leeds, at 2 Darnley Road, West Park. It was a great improvement on St Mark’s Terrace, being of some considerable size, and it was surrounded by open fields where Tolkien could take the children for walks.
At the beginning of 1924 Edith was upset to find that she was pregnant again. She hoped that it might be a daughter, but when the child was born in November it proved to be a boy. He was baptised Christopher Reuel, the first name being in honour of Christopher Wiseman. The baby prospered and became an especial delight to his father, who wrote in his diary: ‘Now I would not go without what God has sent.’
Early in 1925 came word that the Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford was shortly to fall vacant; Craigie, the holder, was leaving to go to America. The post was advertised, and Tolkien applied. In theory he did not stand a good chance, for there were three other candidates with excellent credentials: Allen Mawer of Liverpool, R. W. Chambers of London, and Kenneth Sisam. However Mawer decided not to apply and Chambers refused the chair, so it was whittled down to a fight between Tolkien and his old tutor Sisam.
Kenneth Sisam was now in a senior position at the Clarendon Press, and though he was not engaged in full-time scholarship he had a good reputation in Oxford and a number of supporters. Tolkien was backed by many people, including George Gordon, a master hand at intrigue. But at the election the votes came out equal, so Joseph Wells the Vice-Chancellor had to make the decision with his casting vote. He voted for Tolkien.
And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon for twenty years, was then elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one. It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that – apart from the strange fact that during these years when ‘nothing happened’ he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.
Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that a man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-class watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?
Perhaps in his years of middle age and old age we can do no more than observe, and puzzle; or perhaps, slowly, we shall see a pattern emerge.