These stories had begun during the Leeds years. John, the eldest son, often found difficulty in getting to sleep. When he was lying awake his father would come and sit on his bed and tell him a tale of ‘Carrots’, a boy with red hair who climbed into a cuckoo clock and went off on a series of strange adventures.
In this fashion Tolkien discovered that he could use the imagination which was creating the complexities of The Silmarillion to invent simpler stories. He had an amiably child-like sense of humour, and as his sons grew older this manifested itself in the noisy games he played with them – and in the stories he told Michael when the younger boy was troubled with nightmares. These tales, invented in the early days at Northmoor Road, were about the irrepressible villain ‘Bill Stickers’, a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything. His name was taken from a notice on an Oxford gate that said BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and a similar source provided the name of the righteous person who was always in pursuit of Stickers, ‘Major Road Ahead’.
The ‘Bill Stickers’ stories were never written down, but others were. When he was on holiday with the family at Filey in the summer of 1925, Tolkien composed a full-length tale for John and Michael. The younger boy lost a toy dog on the beach, and to console him his father began to invent and narrate the adventures of Rover, a small dog who annoys a wizard, is turned into a toy, and is then lost on the beach by a small boy. But this is only the beginning, for Rover is found by the sand-sorcerer Psamathos Psamathides who gives him the power to move again, and sends him on a visit to the Moon, where he has many strange adventures, most notably an encounter with the White Dragon. Tolkien wrote down this story under the title ‘Roverandom’. Many years later he offered it to his publishers, very tentatively, as one of a number of possible successors to The Hobbit, but it was not thought suitable on that occasion, and Tolkien never offered it again.
The children’s enthusiasm for ‘Roverandom’ encouraged him to write more stories to amuse them. Many of these got off to a good start but were never finished. Indeed some of them never progressed beyond the first few sentences, like the tale of Timothy Titus, a very small man who is called ‘Tim Tit’ by his friends. Among other stories begun but soon abandoned was the tale of Tom Bombadil, which is set in ‘the days of King Bonhedig’ and describes a character who is clearly to be the hero of the tale: ‘Tom Bombadil was the name of one of the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom; but he was a hale and hearty fellow. Four foot high in his boots he was, and three feet broad. He wore a tall hat with a blue feather, his jacket was blue, and his boots were yellow.’
That was as far as the story ever reached on paper, but Tom Bombadil was a well-known figure in the Tolkien family, for the character was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael. The doll looked very splendid with the feather in its hat, but John did not like it and one day stuffed it down the lavatory. Tom was rescued, and survived to become the hero of a poem by the children’s father, ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, which was published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934. It tells of Tom’s encounters with ‘Goldberry, the River-woman’s daughter’, with the ‘Old Man Willow’ which shuts him up in a crack of its bole (an idea, Tolkien once said, that probably came in part from Arthur Rackham’s tree-drawings), with a family of badgers, and with a ‘Barrow-wight’, a ghost from a prehistoric grave of the type found on the Berkshire Downs not far from Oxford. By itself, the poem seems like a sketch for something longer, and when possible successors to The Hobbit were being discussed in 1937 Tolkien suggested to his publishers that he might expand it into a more substantial tale, explaining that Tom Bombadil was intended to represent ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’. This idea was not taken up by the publishers, but Tom and his adventures subsequently found their way into The Lord of the Rings.
The purchase of a car in 1932 and Tolkien’s subsequent mishaps while driving it led him to write another children’s story, ‘Mr Bliss’. This is the tale of a tall thin man who lives in a tall thin house, and who purchases a bright yellow automobile for five shillings, with remarkable consequences (and a number of collisions). The story was lavishly illustrated by Tolkien in ink and coloured pencils, and the text was written out by him in a fair hand, the whole being bound in a small volume. ‘Mr Bliss’ owes a little to Beatrix Potter in its ironical humour and to Edward Lear in the style of its drawings, though Tolkien’s approach is less grotesque and more delicate than Lear’s. Like ‘Roverandom’ and the Bombadil poem it was shown to Tolkien’s publishers in 1937, and it was received with much enthusiasm. Preliminary arrangements were made to publish it, not so much as a successor to The Hobbit but as an entertaining stop-gap until the true sequel was ready. However its multi-coloured pictures meant that printing would be very expensive, and the publishers asked Tolkien if he would re-draw them in a simpler style. He agreed, but he could not find the time to undertake the work, and the manuscript of ‘Mr Bliss’ was consigned to a drawer, where it remained until many years later it was sold to Marquette University in America, along with the manuscripts of Tolkien’s published stories.1
The fact that ‘Mr Bliss’ was so lavishly illustrated – was constructed indeed around the pictures – is an indication of how seriously Tolkien was taking the business of drawing and painting. He had never entirely abandoned this childhood hobby, and during his undergraduate days he illustrated several of his own poems, using watercolours, coloured inks or pencils, and beginning to develop a style that was suggestive of his affection for Japanese prints and yet had an individual approach to line and colour. The war and his work interrupted him, but in about 1925 he began to draw again regularly, one of the first results being a series of illustrations for ‘Roverandom’. Later, during holidays at Lyme Regis in 1927 and 1928, he drew pictures of scenes from The Silmarillion. These show how clearly he visualised the landscapes in which his legends were set, for in several of the drawings the scenery of Lyme itself is absorbed into the stories and invested with mystery.
He was by now a very talented artist, although he had not the same skill at drawing figures as he had with landscapes. He was at his best when picturing his beloved trees, and like Arthur Rackham (whose work he admired) he could give to twisted root and branch a sinister mobility that was at the same time entirely true to nature.
Tolkien’s talents as a storyteller and an illustrator were combined each December, when a letter would arrive for the children from Father Christmas. In 1920 when John was three years old and the family was about to move to Leeds, Tolkien had written a note to his son in shaky handwriting signed ‘Yr loving Fr. Chr.’. From then onwards he produced a similar letter every Christmas. From simple beginnings the ‘Father Christmas Letters’ expanded to include many additional characters such as the Polar Bear who shares Father Christmas’s house, the Snow Man who is Father Christmas’s gardener, an elf named Ilbereth who is his secretary, snow-elves, gnomes, and in the caves beneath Father Christmas’s house a host of troublesome goblins. Every Christmas, often at the last minute, Tolkien would write out an account of recent events at the North Pole in the shaky handwriting of Father Christmas, the rune-like capitals used by the Polar Bear, or the flowing script of Ilbereth. Then he would add drawings, write the address on the envelope (labelling it with such superscriptions as ‘By gnome-carrier. Immediate haste!’) and paint and cut out a highly realistic North Polar postage stamp. Finally he would deliver the letter. This was done in a variety of ways. The simplest was to leave it in the fireplace as if it had been brought down the chimney, and to cause strange noises to be heard in the early morning, which together with a snowy footprint on the carpet indicated that Father Christmas himself had called. Later the local postman became an accomplice and used to deliver the letters himself, so how could the children not believe in them? Indeed they went on believing until each in turn reached adolescence and discovered by accident or deduction that their father was the true author of the letters. Even then, nothing was said to destroy the illusion for the younger children.
Besides being entertained by their father’s own stories, the Tolkien children were always provided with full nursery bookshelves. Much of their reading-matter consisted of Tolkien’s own childhood favourites, such as George Macdonald’s ‘Curdie’ stories and Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale collections; but the nursery also housed more recent additions to children’s literature, among them E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs, which was published in 1927. Tolkien noted that his sons were highly amused by the Snergs, ‘a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength’.
Tolkien himself only found the time or the inclination to read a limited amount of fiction. In general he preferred the lighter contemporary novels. He liked the stories of John Buchan, and he also read some of Sinclair Lewis’s work; certainly he knew Babbitt, the novel published in 1922 about a middle-aged American businessman whose well-ordered life gradually comes off the rails.
Odd ingredients go into literary melting-pots, and both the Land of Snergs and Babbitt played a small part in The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that the former ‘was probably an unconscious source-book: for the Hobbits, not of anything else’, and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit ‘might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.’
There is less mystery about the origins of another story that Tolkien wrote at some time during the nineteen-thirties, perhaps in part to amuse his children, but chiefly to please himself. This is Farmer Giles of Ham, whose territory, ‘The Little Kingdom’, is Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and which clearly grew from the implications of the place-name Worminghall (meaning ‘reptile-hall’ or ‘dragon-hall’), a village a few miles to the east of Oxford. The first version of the story, considerably shorter than that eventually published, is a plain tale that draws its humour from the events rather than from the narrative style. It too was offered to Tolkien’s publishers as a possible successor to The Hobbit, and like its companions was considered excellent but not exactly what was wanted at that moment.
Some months later, early in 1938, Tolkien was due to read a paper to an undergraduate society at Worcester College on the subject of fairy-stories. But the paper had not been written, and as the day approached Tolkien decided to read Farmer Giles instead. When he reconsidered it, he decided that he could make some improvements, and in the rewriting that followed he turned it into a longer story with sophisticated humour. A few nights later he read it at Worcester College. ‘I was very much surprised at the result,’ he recorded afterwards. ‘The audience was apparently not bored – indeed they were generally convulsed with mirth.’ When it became apparent that the sequel to The Hobbit would not be ready for some considerable time, he offered the revised Farmer Giles to his publishers, and it was accepted with enthusiasm; but wartime delays and Tolkien’s dissatisfaction with the original choice of illustrator meant that the book did not appear until 1949, with pictures by a young artist named Pauline Diana Baynes. Her mock-medieval drawings delighted Tolkien, and he wrote of them: ‘They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme.’ Miss Baynes’s success with Farmer Giles led to her being chosen as illustrator for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and she later drew the pictures for Tolkien’s anthology of poems and for Smith of Wootton Major, she and her husband became friends with the Tolkiens in later years.
Farmer Giles did not attract much notice at the time of its publication, and it was not until the success of The Lord of the Rings had reflected upon the sales of Tolkien’s other books that it reached a wide public. At one time Tolkien considered writing a sequel to it, and he sketched the plot in some detail; it was to concern Giles’s son George Worming and a page-boy named Suet, as well as re-introducing Chrysophylax the dragon, and it was to be set in the same countryside as its predecessor. But by 1945 the war had scarred the Oxfordshire landscape that Tolkien loved so much, and he wrote to his publishers: ‘The sequel (to Farmer Giles) is plotted but unwritten, and likely to remain so. The heart has gone out of the Little Kingdom, and the woods and plains are aerodromes and bomb-practice targets.’
Though sometimes touching on deep feelings, the short stories that Tolkien wrote for his children in the nineteen-twenties and thirties were really jeux d’esprit. His real commitment was to grander themes, both in verse and prose.
He continued to work on his long poem ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’ and on the alliterative verses telling the story of Túrin and the dragon. In 1926 he sent these and other poems to R. W. Reynolds, who had taught him English literature at King Edward’s School, and asked for his criticism. Reynolds approved of the various shorter pieces that Tolkien sent, but only gave lukewarm praise to the major mythological poems. Undeterred, and encouraged by C. S. Lewis’s approval of the Beren and Lúthien poem, Tolkien continued to work at them both. But though the Túrin verses reached more than two thousand lines and the ‘Gest’ more than four thousand, neither poem was completed; and by the time Tolkien came to revise The Silmarillion (after he had written The Lord of the Rings) he had perhaps abandoned any intention of incorporating them into the published text of the cycle. Nevertheless both poems were important in the development of the legends, particularly the ‘Gest’, which contains the fullest version of the Beren and Lúthien story.
The poems were also important for Tolkien’s technical development as a writer. The rhyming couplets of the early stanzas of the ‘Gest’ are occasionally monotonous in rhythm or banal in rhyme, but as Tolkien became more experienced in the metre the poem grew much surer, and it has many fine passages. The Túrin verses are in an alliterative measure, a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon verse form; and in them Tolkien displays great skill. This passage describes Túrin’s childhood and adolescence in the elven kingdom of Doriath:
Much lore he learned, and loved wisdom, but fortune followed him in few desires; oft wrong and awry what he wrought turnéd; what he loved he lost, what he longed for he won
not;
and full friendship he found not easily,
nor was lightly loved for his looks were sad.
He was gloomy-hearted, and glad seldom
for the sundering sorrow that seared his youth.
On manhood’s threshold he was mighty holden
in the wielding of weapons; and in weaving song
he had a ministrel’s mastery; but mirth was not in it.
In adapting and modernising this ancient poetic style for his own purposes Tolkien was achieving something quite unusual and remarkably powerful. It is a pity that he wrote – or at least published – so little alliterative verse, for it suited his imagination far more than did modern rhyme-schemes.
He wrote other poems of some length during the nineteen-thirties, by no means all of them directly connected with his own mythology. One, inspired by the Celtic legends of Brittany, was ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ (Breton for ‘Lord and Lady’), of which the earliest manuscript is dated September 1930. The poem tells the story of a childless lord who obtains a potion from an enchantress or ‘Corrigan’ (the generic Breton term for a person of fairy race). As a result of the philtre, twins are born to the lord’s wife, but the Corrigan demands in payment that the lord should wed her, and his refusal has tragic consequences. ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ was published some years later by Tolkien’s friend and fellow philologist Gwyn Jones, in the Welsh Review. It is in alliterative verse, and also incorporates a rhyme-scheme.
Another major poem from this period has alliteration but no rhyme. This is ‘The Fall of Arthur’, Tolkien’s only imaginative incursion into the Arthurian cycle, whose legends had pleased him since childhood, but which he found ‘too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive’. Arthurian stories were also unsatisfactory to him as myth in that they explicitly contained the Christian religion. In his own Arthurian poem he did not touch on the Grail but began an individual rendering of the Morte d’Arthur, in which the king and Gawain go to war in ‘Saxon lands’ but are summoned home by news of Mordred’s treachery. The poem was never finished, but it was read and approved by E. V. Gordon, and by R. W. Chambers, Professor of English at London University, who considered it to be ‘great stuff – really heroic, quite apart from its value as showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English’. It is also interesting in that it is one of the few pieces of writing in which Tolkien deals explicitly with sexual passion, describing Mordred’s unsated lust for Guinever (which is how Tolkien chooses to spell her name):
His bed was barren; there black phantoms
of desire unsated and savage fury
in his brain had brooded till bleak morning.
But Tolkien’s Guinever is not the tragic heroine beloved by most Arthurian writers; instead she is described as
lady ruthless,
fair as fay-woman and fell-minded,
in the world walking for the woe of men.
Although ‘The Fall of Arthur’ was abandoned in the mid nineteen-thirties, Tolkien wrote as late as 1955 that he still hoped to complete it; but in the event it remained unfinished.
Once or twice he decided to move away from the mythical, legendary, and fantastic, and wrote a conventional short story for adults, in a modern setting. The results were unremarkable, showing that his imagination needed myth and legend in order to realise its full potential. And indeed the greater part of his attention was still occupied by The Silmarillion. He made numerous revisions and recastings of the principal stories in the cycle, deciding to abandon the original sea-voyager ‘Eriol’ to whom the stories were told, and instead renaming him ‘Ælfwine’ or ‘elf-friend’. He also spent much time (probably more than he devoted to the actual stories) to working on the elvish languages and alphabets; he had now invented a new alphabet which he first called ‘Quenyatic’ and then ‘Fëanorian’, and after 1926 he wrote his diary in it. He also frequently turned his attention to geography and other subsidiary topics within the cycle of legends.
By the late nineteen-thirties all this work on The Silmarillion had resulted in a large body of manuscript, much of it in an exquisite hand. But as yet there was no move on Tolkien’s part to publish any of it. Indeed few people knew of its existence. Outside the Tolkien family the only person acquainted with it was C. S. Lewis. Within the family the most frequent listener to the stories was Tolkien’s third son, Christopher. The boy, wrote Tolkien in his diary, had grown into ‘a nervy, irritable, cross-grained, self-tormenting, cheeky person. Yet there is something intensely lovable about him, to me at any rate, from the very similarity between us’. On many evenings in the early nineteen-thirties Christopher, huddled for warmth by the study stove, would listen motionless while his father told him (in impromptu fashion, rather than reading aloud) about the elvish wars against the black power, and of how Beren and Lúthien made their perilous journey to the very heart of Morgoth’s iron stronghold. These were not mere stories: they were legends that came alive as his father spoke, vivid accounts of a grim world where foul orcs and a sinister Necromancer guarded the way, and a dreadful red-eyed wolf tore the elvish companions of Beren to pieces one by one; but a world also where the three great elvish jewels, the Silmarilli, shone with a strange and powerful light, a world where against all odds the quest could be victorious.
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 “space-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 Númenor.
Tolkien’s legend of Númenor, 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 Númenor are beguiled by Sauron (the lieutenant of Morgoth who had already appeared in the long poem about Beren and Lúthien) into breaking a divine commandment and sailing West towards the forbidden lands, a great storm rises, a huge wave crashes on Númenor, and the entire island is cast into the abyss. Atlantis has sunk.
The Númenor story combines the Platonic legend of Atlantis with the imaginative qualities of The Silmarillion. At the end, Tolkien tells how with the sinking of Númenor 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 title to the new story.
‘The Lost Road’ itself (as opposed to the Númenor tale it was designed to introduce) is clearly a kind of idealised autobiography. Its protagonists are a father and son. The father, a professor of history named Alboin (the Lombardic form of ‘Ælfwine’), 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 Númenor, and the story breaks off, unfinished, with Alboin and his son setting off on their journey through time towards Númenor 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 encumbered 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 Númenor legend, for he refers to it in That Hideous Strength, misspelling it ‘Numinor’. (He also borrowed from Tolkien when he gave his hero Ransom the first name ‘Elwin’, which is a version of ‘Ælfwine’; 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 Númenor. But Tolkien returned to the time-travelling theme as a way of introducing the Númenor 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 title, 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 title ‘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 amusement, often specifically for the entertainment of his children. On the other were the grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually associated 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’ hoards 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.’
1 ‘Mr Bliss’ was not the only composition by Tolkien owing its inspiration to motor transport. ‘The Bovadium Fragments’ (perhaps composed early in the nineteen-sixties) is a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode.
1 This and the subsequent books were read to the Inklings by Lewis as they were written. The first two books gained Tolkien’s almost whole-hearted 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.’