Professor J. R. R. Tolkien
Creator of Hobbits and inventor of a new
mythology
The Times
Monday, September 3, 1973, p. 15
Monday, September 3, 1973, p. 15
/
The Times
Monday,
September 3, 1973
OBITUARY
Professor
J. R. R. Tolkien
Creator of
Hobbits and inventor of a new mythology
Professor
J.R.R. Tolkien, C.B.E., Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at
Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and from 1945 to 1959 Merton Professor of English
Language and Literature, died yesterday at the age of 81.
J.R.R.
Tolkien He was the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, two much
loved and immensely popular books, which sold millions of copies and have been
translated into scores of languages. He was created CBE last year
John Ronald
Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, at Bloemfontein, South Africa, where
his father died in 1896. The family returned to England, where Tolkien's early
years were passed in what was then Worcestershire country, though now buried in
the red brick of outer Birmingham.
He was
taught by his mother, from whom he derived all his bents and early knowledge.
Linguistic, romantic, and naturalist. To his descent through her, from the
Suffields (originally of Evesham) he used to attribute that love for the
Western Marches which manifested itself alike in Mercian studies (his primary
philological interest)and in the elvish or "hobbity" strain in his
imagination. In those days he had an "almost idolatrous" love of
trees and flowers and a hunger for Arthurian romance, classical mythology, and
especially George McDonald. In 1903 he
went with a scholarship (gained by his mother's teaching) to King Edward's
School, Birmingham, of which he reported much good and little evil. His form
master, George Brewerton (a "fierce teacher"), introduced him to
Chaucer in the correct pronunciation and lent him an Anglo-Saxon grammar; and
R. W. Reynolds introduced him to literary criticism. In 1900 he had already,
with his mother and brother, been received into the Church of Rome, and on his
mother's death in 1904 Fr Francis Morgan, of the Birmingham Oratory, became his
guardian. Of Fr Morgan Tolkien always spoke with the warmest gratitude and
affection.
In 1910 he
won an exhibition at Exeter College, Oxford. By the high standards of King
Edward's School the award was tolerable rather than praiseworthy, and indeed
Tolkien used to describe himself as "one of the idlest boys Gilson (the
Headmaster) ever had". But"idleness" in his case meant private
and unaided studies in Gothic, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh, and the first attempt at
inventing a language - of which more hereafter.
He came
into residence in 1911. Dr Jackson was still Rector and the College had no
resident classical tutor until the appointment of E. A. Barber. He came too
late to be of much help and Tolkien took only a 2nd in Honour Moderations,
having somewhat neglected his studies in favour of "Old Norse, festivity,
and classical philology". "My love for the classics," he once
said, "took ten years to recover from lectures on Cicero and
Demosthenes."
It was at
this period that he first came under the influence of Joseph Wright; and he was
now busily engaged on the invention of the "Elvish language". This
was no arbitrary gibberish but a really possible tongue with consistent roots,
sound laws, and inflexions, into which he poured all his imaginative and
philological powers; and strange as the exercise may seem it was undoubtedly
the source of that unparalleled richness and concreteness which later
distinguished him from all other philologists.
He had been
inside language. He had not gone far enough with his invention before he
discovered that every language presupposes a mythology; and at once began to
fill in the mythology presupposed by Elvish.
In 1915 he
took a first in English. Sisam and Craigie had been his tutors and Napier his
professor. Immediately after Schools he entered the Lancashire Fusiliers. In
1916 he married Edith Bratt, whom he had known since boyhood. in 1918 he was
back at Oxford, invalided out of the Army, and began to teach for the English
School; E.V. Gordon was among his first pupils.
From 1920
to 1925 he worked at Leeds, first as Reader in English and later as Professor
of English Language. George Gordon, E.V. Gordon and Lascelles Abercrombie were
his colleagues, and some of his best work was done in building up a flourishing
department of English Philology from small beginnings.
In 1925 he
succeeded Craigie at Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon,
and in 1945 vacated that chair to become Merton Professor of English Language
and Literature.
His middle
English Vocabulary had appeared in 1922. His edition of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight (in collaboration with E.V. Gordon) followed in 1925; Beowulf:
the Monsters and the Critics in 1937: his Andrew Lang Lecture (on Fairy Tales)
in 1939. He became an Hon DLitt of University College, Dublin, and of Liège in
1954.
His most
extensive researches were in the West Midland dialect from the Anglo-Saxon
period to that of the Ancrene Riwie; in this work his most distinguished pupil
was Professor d'Ardenne. He retired from the Merton Professorship on reaching
the age limit in 1959 and was later elected an emeritus fellow of the college.
During the
years 1925-35 he was, more than any other single man, responsible for closing
the old rift between "literature" and "philology" in
English studies at Oxford and thus giving the existing school its
characteristic temper. His unique insight at once into the language of poetry
and into the poetry of language qualified him for this task.
Thus the
private language and its offshoot, the private mythology, were directly connected
with some of the most highly practical results he achieved, while they
continued in private to burgeon into tales and poems which seldom reached
print, though they might have won him fame in almost any period but the
twentieth century.
The Hobbit
(1937) was in origin a fragment from this cycle adapted for juvenile tastes but
with one all important novelty, the Hobbits themselves. It is doubtful how far
he realized that these comfort-loving, unambitious, and (in aspiration)
unheroic creatures embodied what he loved best in the English character and saw
most endangered by the growth of "subtopia", bureaucracy, journalism,
and industrialization. They soon demanded to be united with his heroic myth on
a far deeper level that The Hobbit had allowed, and by 1936 he was at work on
his great romance The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes (1954 and
1955) and often reprinted and translated. The ironic destiny which links the
humble happiness of Hobbits to the decision of vast issues which they would
gladly ignore, and which even makes civilization itself momentarily dependent
on their latent and reluctant courage, is its central theme. It has no
allegory.
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. Hence those who heard the growing work read chapter by
chapter in the months that followed the fall of France
found it as relevant, as stern, and as tonic, as Churchill's promise of blood,
sweat and tears. It cut right across all contemporary cannons of criticism, and
its success, when published, surprised and delighted the author and his
friends.
Tolkien's
spirited farce Farmer Giles of Ham (1954) was work of a wholly different type.
Only a tithe of the poems, translations, articles, lectures and notes in which
his multifarious interest found expression ever reached the printer. His
standard of self criticism was high and the mere suggestion of publication
usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas
occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old
work they actually got the first draft of a new one.
He was a
man of "cronies" rather than of general society and was always best
after midnight (he had a Johnsonian horror of going to bed) and in some small
circle of intimates where the tone was at once Bohemian, literary, and
Christian (for he was profoundly religious).
He
has been described as "the best and worst talker in Oxford" - worst
for the rapidity and indistinctness of his speech, and best for the
penetration, learning, humour and "race" of what he said. C.L.
Wrenn, R.B. McCallum of Pembroke, H.V.D. Dyson of Merton, C.S. Lewis of
Magdelen, and Charles Williams were among those who most often made his
audience (and interrupters) on such occasions.
