Carpenter, Humphrey - JRRTolkien A Biography

VIP免费
2024-12-07 0 0 568.12KB 99 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Contents
Part One A visit page 11
Part Two 1892-1916: Early years 15
1 Bloemfontein 17
2 Birmingham 25
3 ‘Private-lang.’ - and Edith 39
4 ‘T.C., B.S., etc.* 52
5 Oxford 60
6 Reunion 69
7 War 80
8 The breaking of the fellowship 88
Part Three 1917-1925: The making of a mythology 95
1 Lost Tales 97
2 Oxford interlude 107
3 Northern venture 110
Part Four 1925-1949(0: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ 117
1 Oxford life 119
2 Photographs observed 127
3 ‘He had been inside language* 136
4 Jack 147
5 Northmoor Road 156
6 The storyteller 164
Part Five 1925-1949(ii): The Third Age 177
1 Enter Mr Baggins 179
2 ‘The new Hobbit’ 187
Part Six 1949-1966: Success 209
1 Slamming the gates 211
2 A big risk 217
3 Cash or kudos 222
Part Seven 1959-1973: Last years 235
1 Headington 237
2 Bournemouth 248
3 Merton Street 254
Part Eight The Tree 259
Appendix A Simplified genealogical table 262
B Chronology of events 263 C The published writings of J. R. R. Tolkien 266 D Sources and acknowledgements
276
Index 280
Illustrations
between pages 144 and 145
1 Family group, Bloemfontein, November 1892.
2 Sarehole Mill.
3 Ronald and Hilary Tolkien in May 1905.
4 Father Francis Morgan (courtesy of the Birmingham Oratory).
5 Edith Bratt in 1906, aged seventeen.
6 Ronald Tolkien in 1911, aged nineteen.
7 and 8 Edith and Ronald Tolkien in 1916.
9 Family group in the garden at Northmoor Road circa 1936.
10 A page from the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings (by permission ofMarquette University, Milwaukee).
11 In the study at Merton Street, 1972 (photos: Billett Potter).
12 The last photograph of Tolkien, taken next to one of his favourite trees (Pinus Nigra) in the Botanic Garden,
Oxford, 9 August 1973 (photo: M. G. R. Tolkien).
Author’s note
This book is based upon the letters, diaries, and other papers of the late Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, and upon the
reminiscences of his family and friends.
Tolkien himself did not entirely approve of biography. Or rather, he disliked its use as a form of literary criticism.
‘One of my strongest opinions,’ he once wrote, ‘is that investigation of an author’s biography is an entirely vain and
false approach to his works.’ Yet he was undoubtedly aware that the remarkable popularity of his fiction made it
highly likely that a biography would be written after his death; and indeed he appears to have made some
preparation for this himself, for in the last years of his life he annotated a number of old letters and papers with
explanatory notes or other comments. He also wrote a few pages of recollections of his childhood. It may thus be
hoped that this book would not be entirely foreign to his wishes.
In writing it I have tried to tell the story of Tolkien’s life without attempting any critical judgements of his works of
fiction. This is partly in deference to his own views, but in any case it seems to me that the first published biography
of a writer is not necessarily the best place to make literary judgements, which will after all reflect the character of
the critic just as much as that of his subject I have however tried to delineate some of the literary and other
influences that came to bear on Tolkien’s imagination, in the hope that this may shed some light on his books,
H.C.
Oxford, 1976
A Visit
It is mid-morning on a spring day in 1967. I have driven from the centre of Oxford, over Magdalen Bridge, along the
London road, and up a hill into the respectable but dull suburb of Heading ton. Near a large private school for girls I
turn left into Sandfield Road, a residential street of two-storey brick houses, each with its tidy front garden.
Number seventy-six is a long way down the road. The house is painted white and is partially screened by a tall
fence, a hedge, and overhanging trees. I park the car, open the arched gate, go up the short path between rose
bushes, and ring the front door bell.
For a long time, there is silence, except for the rumble of distant traffic in the main road. I am beginning to think of
ringing again or of turning away when the door is opened by Professor Tolkien.
He is slightly smaller than I expected. Tallness is a quality of which he makes much in his books, so it is a little
suprising to see that he himself is slightly less than the average height - not much, but just enough to be noticeable.
I introduce myself, and (since (I made this appointment in advance and am expected) the quizzical and somewhat
defensive look that first met me is replaced by a smile. A hand is offered and my own is firmly grasped.
Behind him I can see the entrance-hall, which is small and tidy and contains nothing that one would not expect in
the house of a middle-class elderly couple. W.H. Auden, in an injudicious remark quoted in the newspapers, has
called the house ‘hideous’,but that is nonsense. It is simply ordinary and suburban.
Mrs. Tolkien appears for a moment, to greet me. She is smaller than her husband, a neat old lady wwith white hair
bound close to her head, and dark eyebrows. Pleasantries are exchanged, and then the Professor comes out of
the front door and takes me into his ‘office’ at the side of the house.
This proves to be the garage, long abandoned by any car - he explains that he has not had a car since the
beginning of the Second World War - and, since his retirement, made habitable and given over to the housing of
books and papers formerly kept in his college room. The shelves are crammed with dictionaries, works on
etymology and philology, and editions of texts in many languages, predominant among which are Old and Middle
English and Old Norse; but there is also a section devoted to translations of The Lord of the Rings into Polish,
Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Japanese; and the map of his invented ‘Middle-earth’ is pinned to the window-ledge.
On the floor is a very old portmanteau full of letters, and on the desk are ink-bottles, nibs and pen-holders, and two
typewriters. The room smells of books and tobacco smoke.
It is not very comfortable, and the Professor apologises for receiving me here, but he explains that there is no
space in the study-bedroom in the house where he actually does his writing. He says that in any case this is all
temporary: soon he will, he hopes, manage to finish at least the major part of the work promised to his publishers,
and then he and Mrs Tolkien will be able to move to more comfortable quarters and congenial surroundings, away
from visitors and intrusions. He looks slightly embarrassed after the last remark.
I climb past the electric fire and, at his bidding, seat myself in a wheel-back chair, as he takes his pipe from the
pocket of his tweed jacket and launches into an explanation of his inability to spare me more than a few minutes. A
shiny blue alarm clock ticks noisily across the room as if to emphasise the point. He says that he has to clear up an
apparent contradiction in a passage of The Lord of the Rings that has been pointed out in a letter from a reader; the
matter requires his urgent consideration as a revised edition of the book is about to go to press. He explains it all in
great detail, talking about his book not as a work of fiction but as a chronicle of actual events; he seems to see
himself not as an author who has made a slight error that must now be corrected or explained away, but as a
historian who must cast light on an obscurity in a historical document.
Disconcertingly, he seems to think that I know the book as well as he does. I have read it many times, but he is
talking about details that mean little or nothing to me. I begin to fear that he will throw some penetrating question at
me that will reveal my ignorance – and indeed now he does ask me a question, but fortunately it is rhetorical and
clearly requires no more than the answer ‘yes’.
I am still nervous that there will be other and harder questions, doubly nervous because I cannot hear everything
that he is saying. He has a strange voice, deep but without resonance, entirely English but with some quality in it
that I cannot define, as if he had come from another age or civilisation. Yet for much of the tune he does not speak
clearly. Words come out in eager rushes. Whole phrases are elided or compressed in the haste of emphasis. Often
his hand comes up and grasps his mouth, which makes it even harder to hear him. He speaks in complex
sentences, scarcely hesitating - but then there comes a long pause in which I am surely expected to reply. Reply to
what? If there was a question, I did not understand it. Suddenly he resumes (never having finished his sentence)
and now he reaches an emphatic conclusion. As he does so, he jams his pipe between his teeth, speaks on
through clenched jaws, and strikes a match just as the full stop is reached.
Again I struggle to think of an intelligent remark, and again he resumes before I can find one. Following some
slender connecting thread, he begins to talk about a remark in a newspaper that has made him angry. Now I feel
that I can contribute a little, and I say something that I hope sounds intelligent. He listens with courteous interest,
and answers me at some length, turning my remark (which was really very trivial) to excellent use, and so making
me feel that I have said something worth saying. Then he is off on some tangential topic, and I am once more out of
my depth, able to contribute no more than a monosyllable of agreement here and there; though it does occur to me
that I am perhaps valued just as much as a listener as a participant in the conversation.
As he talks he moves unceasingly, pacing about the dark little room with an energy that hints at restlessness. He
waves his pipe in the air, knocks it out in an ashtray, fills it, strikes a match, but scarcely ever smokes for more than
a few puffs. He has small, neat, wrinkled hands, with a plain wedding-ring on the third finger of the left hand. His
clothes are a little rumpled, but they sit well on him, and though he is in his seventy-sixth year there is only a
suggestion of tubbiness behind the buttons of his coloured waistcoat. I cannot for long keep my attention from his
eyes, which may wander about the room or stare out of the window, yet now and then will return to dart a glance at
me or rest a steady gaze as some vital point is made. They are surrounded by wrinkles and folds that change with
and emphasise each mood.
The flood of words has dried up for a moment and the pipe is being lit again. I perceive my opportunity, and state
my business, which now seems unimportant. Yet he turns to it immediately with enthusiasm, and listens to me
attentively. Then, when this part of the conversation is done, I get up to go; but for the moment my departure is
evidently neither expected nor desired, for he has started to talk again. Once more he refers to his own mythology.
His eyes fix on some distant object, and he seems to have forgotten that I am there as he clutches his pipe and
speaks through its stem. It occurs to me that in all externals he resembles the archetypal Oxford don, at times even
the stage caricature of a don. But that is exactly what he is not. It is rather as if some strange spirit had taken on the
guise of an elderly professor. The body may be pacing this shabby little suburban room, but the mind is far away,
roaming the plains and mountains of Middle-earth.
Then it is all over, and I am being ushered out of the garage and taken to the garden gate - the smaller one
opposite the front door: he explains that he has to keep the garage gates padlocked to stop football spectators
parking their cars in his drive when they attend matches at the local stadium. Rather to my surprise, he asks me to
come and see him again. Not for the moment, as neither he nor Mrs Tolkien has been well, and they are going on
holiday to Bournemouth, and his work is many years behind-hand, and letters are piling up unanswered. But some
time, soon. He shakes my hand and is gone, a little forlornly, back into the house.
Part Two
1892-1916: Early years
1 Bloemfontein
On a March day in 1891 the steamer Roslin Castle left dock to sail from England to the Cape. Standing on the stern
deck, waving to the family she would not see again for a long time, was a slim good-looking girl of twenty-one.
Mabel Suffield was going to South Africa to marry Arthur Tolkien.
It was in every way a dividing point in her life. Behind her lay Birmingham, foggy days, and family teas. Ahead was
an unknown country, eternal sunshine, and marriage to a man thirteen years her senior.
Although Mabel was so young, there had been a long engagement, for Arthur Tolkien had proposed to her and she
had accepted three years earlier, soon after her eighteenth birthday. However, her father would not permit a formal
betrothal for two years because of her youth, and so she and Arthur could only exchange letters in secret and meet
at evening parties where the family eye was upon them. The letters were entrusted by Mabel to her younger sister
Jane, who would pass them to Arthur on the platform of New Street Station in Birmingham, when she was catching
a train home from school to the suburb where the Suffields lived. The evening parties were generally musical
gatherings at which Arthur and Mabel could only exchange covert glances or at most the touch of a sleeve, while
his sisters played the piano.
It was a Tolkien piano, of course, one of the upright models manufactured by the family firm that had made what
money the Tolkiens once possessed. On the lid was inscribed: ‘Irresistible Piano-Forte: Manufactured Expressly for
Extreme Climates’; but the piano firm was in other hands now, and Arthur’s father was bankrupt, without a family
business to provide employment for his—sons. Arthur had tried to make a career in Lloyds Bank, but promotion in
the Birmingham office was slow, and he knew that if he was to support a wife and family he would have to look
elsewhere.
He turned his eye to South Africa, where the gold and diamond discoveries were making banking into an expanding
business with good prospects for employees. Less than a year after proposing to Mabel he had obtained a post
with the Bank of Africa, and had sailed for the Cape.
Arthur’s initiative had soon been justified. For the first year he had been obliged to travel extensively, for he was
sent on temporary postings to many of the principal towns between the Cape and Johannesburg. He acquitted
himself well, and at the end of 1890 he was appointed manager of the important branch at Bloemfontein, capital of
the Orange Free State. A house was provided for him, the income was adequate, and so at last marriage was
possible. Mabel celebrated her twenty-first birthday at the end of January 1891, and only a few weeks later she was
on board Roslin Castle and sailing towards South Africa and Arthur, their betrothal now blessed with her father’s
approval.
Or perhaps ‘tolerance’ would be a better word, for John Suffield was a proud man, especially in the matter of
ancestry which in many ways was all he had left to be proud of. Once he had owned a prosperous drapery
business in Birmingham, but now like Arthur Tolkien’s father he was bankrupt. He had to earn his living as a
commercial traveller for Jeyes disinfectant; yet the failure of his fortunes had only strengthened his pride in the old
and respectable Midland family from which he was descended. What were the Tolkiens in comparison? Mere
German immigrants, English by only a few generations - scarcely a fit pedigree for his daughter’s husband.
If such reflections occupied Mabel during her three-week voyage, they were far from her mind on the day early in
April when the ship sailed into harbour at Cape Town, and she caught sight at last of a white-suited, handsome,
and luxuriantly-moustached figure on the quay, scarcely looking his thirty-four years as he peered anxiously
through the crowd for a glimpse of his darling ‘Mab’.
Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel Suffield were married in Cape Town Cathedral on 16 April 1891, and spent their
honeymoon in a hotel at nearby Sea Point. Then came an exhausting railway journey of nearly seven hundred
miles to the capital of the Orange Free State, and the house which was to be Mabel’s first and only home with
Arthur.
Bloemfontein had begun life forty-five years earlier as a mere hamlet. Even by 1891 it was of no great size.
Certainly it did not present an impressive spectacle to Mabel as she and Arthur got off the train at the newly built
railway station. In the centre of the town was the market square where the Dutch-speaking farmers from the veldt
trundled in aboard great ox-wagons to unload and sell the bales of wool that were the backbone of the State’s
economy. Around the square were clustered solid indications of civilisation: the colonnaded Parliament House, the
two-towered Dutch Reformed church, the Anglican cathedral, the hospital, the public library, and the Presidency.
There was a club for European residents (German, Dutch, and English), a tennis club, a law court, and a sufficiency
of shops. But the trees that had been planted by the first settlers were still sparse, and the town’s park was, as
Mabel observed, no more than about ten willows and a patch of water. Only a few hundred yards beyond the
houses was the open veldt where wolves, wild dogs, and jackals roamed and menaced the flocks, and where after
dark a post-rider might be attacked by a marauding lion. From these treeless plains the wind blew into
Bloemfontein, stirring the dust of the broad dirt-covered streets. Mabel, writing to her family, summed up the town
as ‘Owlin’ Wilderness! Horrid Waste!’
However for Arthur’s sake she must learn to like it, and meanwhile the life she found herself leading was by no
means uncomfortable. The premises of the Bank of Africa, in Maitland Street just off the market square, included a
solidly built residence with a large garden. There were servants in the house, some black or coloured, some white
immigrants; and there was company enough -to be chosen from among the many other English-speaking residents,
who organised a regular if predictable round of dances and dinner-parties. Mabel had much time to herself, for
when Arthur was not busy in the bank he was attending classes to learn Dutch, the language in which all
government and legal documents were worded; or he was making useful acquaintances in the club. He could not
afford to take life easy, for although there was only one other bank in Bloemfontein, this was the National, native to
the Orange Free State; whereas the Bank of Africa of which Arthur was manager was an outsider, a uitlander, and
was only tolerated by a special parliamentary decree. To make matters worse, the previous manager of the Bank of
Africa had gone over to the National, and Arthur had to work doubly hard to make sure that valuable accounts did
not follow him. Then there were new projects in the locality which might be turned to the advantage of his bank,
schemes connected with the Kimberley diamonds to the west or the Witwatersrand gold to the north. It was a
crucial stage in Arthur’s career, and, moreover, Mabel could see that he was intensely happy. His health had not
been consistently good since he arrived in South Africa, but the climate seemed to suit his temperament; seemed,
as Mabel noticed with the faintest apprehension, positively to appeal to him, whereas after only a few months she
herself came to dislike it heartily. The oppressively hot summer and the cold, dry, dusty winter tried her nerves far
more than she liked to admit to Arthur, and ‘home leave’ seemed a very long way off, for they would not be entitled
to visit England until they had been in Bloemfontein for another three years.
Yet she adored Arthur, and she was always happy when she could entice him from his desk and they could go for
walks or drives, play a game of tennis or a round of golf, or read aloud to each other. Soon there was something
else to occupy her mind: the realisation that she was pregnant.
On 4 January 1892 Arthur Tolkien wrote home to Birmingham:
My dear Mother,
I have good news for you this week. Mabel gave me a beautiful little son last night (3 January). It was rather before
time, but the baby is strong and well and Mabel has come through wonderfully. The baby is (of course) lovely. It
has beautiful hands and ears (very long fingers) very light hair, ‘Tolkien’ eyes and very distinctly a ‘Suffield’ mouth.
In general effect immensely like a very fair edition of its Aunt Mabel Mitton. When we first fetched Dr Stollreither
yesterday he said it was a false alarm and told the nurse to go home for a fortnight but he was mistaken and I
fetched him again about eight and then he stayed till 12.40 when we had a whisky to drink luck to the boy. The
boy’s first name will be ‘John’ after its grandfather, probably John Ronald Reuel altogether. Mab wants to call it
Ronald and I want to keep up John and Reuel..,
‘Reuel’ was Arthur’s own second name, but there was no family precedent for ‘Ronald’. This was the name by
which Arthur and Mabel came to address their son, the name that would be used by his relatives and later by his
wife. Yet he sometimes said that he did not feel it to be his real name; indeed people seemed to feel faintly
uncomfortable when choosing how to address him. A few close school-friends called him ‘John Ronald’, which
sounded grand and euphonious. When he was an adult his intimates referred to him (as was customary at the time)
by his surname, or called him ‘Tollers’, a hearty nickname typical of the period. To those not so close, especially in
his later years, he was often known as ‘J.R.R.T.* Perhaps in the end it was those four initials that seemed the best
representation of the man.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was christened in Bloemfontein Cathedral on 31 January 1892, and some months later
he had his photograph taken in the garden of Bank House, in the arms of the nurse who had been engaged to look
after him. His mother was clearly in excellent health, while Arthur, always something of a dandy, posed in a
positively jaunty manner in his white tropical suit and boater. Behind stood two black servants, a maid and a house-
boy named Isaak, both looking pleased and a little surprised to be included in the photograph. Mabel found the
Boer attitude to the natives objectionable, and in Bank House there was tolerance, most notably over the
extraordinary behaviour of Isaak, who one day stole little John Ronald Reuel and took him to his kraal where he
showed off with pride the novelty of a white baby. It upset everybody and caused a great turmoil, but Isaak was not
dismissed, and in gratitude to his employer he named his own son ‘Isaak Mister Tolkien Victor’, the last being in
honour of Queen Victoria.
There were other disturbances in the Tolkien household. One day a neighbour’s pet monkeys climbed over the wall
and chewed up three of the baby’s pinafores. Snakes lurked in the wood-shed and had to be avoided. And many
months later, when Ronald was beginning to walk, he stumbled on a tarantula. It bit him, and he ran in terror across
the garden until the nurse snatched him up and sucked out the poison. When he grew up he could remember a hot
day and running in fear through long, dead grass, but the memory of the tarantula itself faded, and he said that the
incident left him with no especial dislike of spiders. Nevertheless, in his stories he wrote more than once of
monstrous spiders with venomous bites.
For the most part life at Bank House maintained an orderly pattern. In the early morning and late afternoon the child
would be taken into the garden, where he could watch his father tending the vines or planting saplings in a piece of
walled but unused ground. During the first year of the boy’s life Arthur Tolkien made a small grove of cypresses,
firs, and cedars. Perhaps this had something to do with the deep love of trees that would develop in Ronald.
From half past nine to half past four the child had to remain indoors, out of the blaze of the sun. Even in the house
the heat could be intense, and he had to be clothed entirely in white. ‘Baby does look such a fairy when he’s very
much dressed-up in white frills and white shoes,’ Mabel wrote to her husband’s mother. ‘When he’s very much
undressed I think he looks more of an elf still.’
There was more company for Mabel now. Soon after the baby’s first birthday, her sister and brother-in-law May and
Walter Incledon arrived from England. Walter, a Birmingham merchant in his early thirties, had business interests in
the South African gold and diamond mines, and he left May and their small daughter Marjorie at Bank House and
travelled on to the mining areas. May Incledon had arrived in time to keep her sister cheerful through the bitterness
of another wintry summer in Bloemfontein, a season more hard to bear because Arthur too was away for some
weeks on business. It was intensely cold, and the two sisters huddled around the dining-room stove while Mabel
knitted garments for the baby and she and May talked about Birmingham days. Mabel was making little secret of
her irritation with Bloemfontein life, its climate, its endless social calls, and its tedious dinner-parties. Home leave
could be taken soon now, in a year or so - though Arthur was always suggesting reasons for postponing their visit
to England. ‘I will not let him put it off too long,’ wrote Mabel. ‘He does grow too fond of this climate to please me. I
wish I could like it better, as I’m sure he’ll never settle in England again.’
In the end the trip had to be postponed. Mabel found that she was pregnant again, and on 17 February 1894 she
gave birth to another son. He was christened Hilary Arthur Reuel.
Hilary proved to be a healthy child who flourished in the Bloemfontein climate, but his elder brother was not doing
so well. Ronald was sturdy and handsome, with his fair hair and blue eyes - ‘quite a young Saxon’, his father called
him. By now he was talking volubly and entertaining the bank clerks on his daily visit to his father’s office
downstairs, where he would demand pencil and paper and scribble away at crude drawings. But teething upset bun
badly and made him feverish, so that the doctor had to be called in day after day and Mabel was soon worn out.
The weather was at its worst: an intense drought arrived, ruined trade, spoilt tempers, and brought a plague of
locusts that swarmed across the veldt and destroyed a fine harvest. Yet despite all this, Arthur wrote to his father
the words that Mabel had dreaded to hear: ‘I think I shall do well in this country and do not think I should settle
down well in England again for a permanency.’
Whether they were to stay or not, it was clear that the heat was doing a great deal of harm to Ronald’s health.
Something must be done to get him to cooler air. So in November 1894 Mabel took the two boys the many
hundreds of miles to the coast near Cape Town. Ronald was nearly three now, old enough to retain a faint memory
of the long train journey and of running back from the sea to a bathing hut on a wide flat sandy shore. After this
holiday Mabel and the children returned to Bloemfontein, and preparations were made for their visit to England.
Arthur had booked a passage and had engaged a nurse to travel with them. He badly wanted to accompany them
himself; but he could not afford to be away from his desk, for there were railway schemes on hand that concerned
the bank, and as he wrote to his father: ‘In these days of competition one does not like to leave one’s business in
the hands of others.’ Moreover tune spent away would be on half pay, and he could not easily afford this in addition
to the expense of the voyage. So he decided to stay in Bloemfontein for the time being and to join his wife and
children in England a little later. Ronald watched his father painting A. R. Tolkien on the lid of a family trunk. It was
the only clear memory of him that the boy retained.
The S.S. Guelph carried Mabel and the boys from South Africa at the beginning of April 1895. In Ronald’s mind
there would remain no more than a few words of Afrikaans and a faint recollection of a dry dusty barren landscape,
while Hilary was too young even to remember this. Three weeks later, Mabel’s little sister Jane, now a grown
woman, met them at Southampton; and in a few hours they were all in Birmingham and cramming into the tiny
family house in King’s Heath. Mabel’s father was as jolly as ever, cracking jokes and making dreadful puns, and her
mother was kind and understanding. They stayed on, and the spring and summer passed with a marked
improvement in Ronald’s health; but though Arthur wrote to say that he missed his wife and children very badly and
was longing to come and join them, there was always something to detain him.
Then in November came the news that he had contracted rheumatic fever. He had already partially recovered, but
he could not face an English winter and would have to regain his health before he could make the journey. Mabel
spent a desperately anxious Christmas, though Ronald enjoyed himself and was fascinated by the sight of his first
Christmas tree, which was very different from the wilting eucalyptus that had adorned Bank House the previous
December.
When January came, Arthur was reported to be still in poor health, and Mabel decided that she must go back to
Bloemfontein and care for him. Arrangements were made, and an excited Ronald dictated a letter to his father
which was written out by the nurse.
9 Ashfield Road, King’s Heath, February 14th 1896. My dear Daddy,
I am so glad I am coming back to see you it is such a long time since we came away from you I hope the ship will
bring us all back to you Mamie and Baby and me. I know you will be so glad to have a letter from your little Ronald
it is such a long time since I wrote to you I am got such a big man now because I have got a man’s coat and a
man’s bodice Mamie says you will not know Baby or me we have got such big men we have got such a lot of
Christmas presents to show you Auntie Gracie has been to see us I walk every day and only ride in my mailcart a
little bit Hilary sends lots of love and kisses and so does your loving
Ronald.
This letter was never sent, for a telegram arrived to say that Arthur had suffered a severe haemorrhage and Mabel
must expect the worst. Next day, 15 February 1896, he was dead. By the time a full account of his last .hours had
reached his widow, his body had been buried in the Anglican graveyard at Bloemfontein, five thousand miles from
Birmingham.
When the first state of shock was over, Mabel Tolkien knew that she must make decisions. She and the two boys
could not stay for ever in her parents’ crowded little suburban villa, yet she scarcely had the resources to establish
an independent household. For all his hard work and conscientious saving, Arthur had only amassed a modest sum
of capital which was chiefly invested in Bonanza Mines, and though the dividend was high it would not bring her an
income of more than thirty shillings a week, scarcely sufficient to maintain herself and two children even at the
lowest standard of living. There was also the question of the boys’ education. Probably she could manage this
herself for some years, for she knew Latin, French, and German, and could paint, draw, and play the piano. Later
when Ronald and Hilary were old enough they must take the entrance examination for King Edward’s School,
Birmingham, which Arthur had attended and which was the best grammar school in the city. Meanwhile she must
find cheap accommodation that she could rent. There were plenty of lodgings to be had in Birmingham, but the
boys needed fresh air and the countryside, a home that could make them happy despite their poverty. She began
to search through the advertisements.
Ronald, now in his fifth year, was slowly adjusting to life under his grandparents’ roof. He had almost forgotten his
father, whom he would soon come to regard as belonging to an almost legendary past. The change from
Bloemfontein to Birmingham had confused him, and sometimes he expected to see the verandah of Bank House
jutting out from his grandparents’ home in Ashfield Road; but as the weeks passed and memories of South Africa
began to fade, he took more notice of the adults around him. His Uncle Willie and his Aunt Jane were still living at
home, and there was also a lodger, a sandy-haired insurance clerk who sat on the stairs singing Polly-Wolly-
Doodle’ to the accompaniment of a banjo, and making eyes at Jane. The family thought him common, and they
were horrified when she became engaged to him. Ronald secretly longed for a banjo.
In the evening his grandfather would return from a day spent tramping the streets of Birmingham and cajoling
orders for Jeyes Fluid from shopkeepers and factory managers. John Suffield had a long beard and seemed very
old. He was sixty-three, and he vowed that he would live to be a hundred. A very jolly man, he did not seem to
object to earning his living as a commercial traveller, even though he had once managed his own drapery shop in
the city centre. Sometimes he would take a sheet of paper and a pen with an extra fine nib. Then he would draw a
circle around a sixpence, and in this little space would write in fine copperplate the words of the entire Iord’s Prayer.
His ancestors had been engravers and plate-makers, which was perhaps why he had inherited this skill; he would
talk with pride about how King William IV had given the family a coat of arms because they did fine work for him,
and how Lord Suffield was a distant relative (which was not true).
So it was that Ronald began to learn the ways of the Suffield family. He came to feel far closer to them than to the
family of his dead father. His Tolkien grandfather lived only a little way up the road, and sometimes Ronald was
taken to see him; but John Benjamin Tolkien was eighty-nine and had been badly shaken by his son’s death. Six
months after Arthur died, the old man was in his own grave, and another of the boy’s links with the Tolkiens was
severed.
There was, however, Ronald’s Aunt Grace, his father’s younger sister, who told him stories of the Tolkien
ancestors; stories which sounded improbable but which were, said Aunt Grace, firmly based on fact. She alleged
that the family name had originally been ‘von Hohenzollern’, for they had emanated from the Hohenzollern district
of the Holy Roman Empire. A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of Archduke
Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against
the Turks and capturing the Sultan’s standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname
Tollkuhn, ‘foolhardy’; and the name stuck. The family was also supposed to have connections with France and to
have intermarried with the nobility in that country, where they acquired a French version of their nickname, du
Temeraire. Opinion differed among the Tolkiens as to why and when their ancestors had come to England. The
more prosaic said it was in 1756 to escape the Prussian invasion of Saxony, where they had lands. Aunt Grace
preferred the more romantic (if implausible) story of how one of the du Temeraires had fled across the Channel in
1794 to escape the guillotine, apparently then assuming a form of the old name, ‘Tolkien’. This gentleman was
reputedly an accomplished harpsichordist and clock-repairer. Certainly the story -typical of the kind of tale that
middle-class families tell about their origins - gave colour to the presence of Tolkiens in London at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, making their living as clock and watch manufacturers and piano-makers. And it was as a
piano-maker and music-seller that John Benjamin Tolkien, Arthur’s father, had come to Birmingham and set up
business some years later.
The Tolkiens always liked to tell stories that gave a romantic colouring to their origins; but whatever the truth of
those stories the family was at the time of Ronald’s childhood entirely English in character and appearance,
indistinguishable from thousands of other middle-class tradespeople who populated the Birmingham suburbs. In
any case Ronald was more interested in his mother’s family. He soon developed a strong affection for the Suffields
and for what they represented. He discovered that though the family was now to be found chiefly in Birmingham, its
origins were in the quiet Worcestershire town of Evesham, where Suffields had lived for many generations. Being in
a sense a homeless child - for his journey from South Africa and the wanderings that now began gave him a sense
of rootlessness - he held on to this concept of Evesham in particular and the whole West Midland area in general
as being his true home. He once wrote: ‘Though a Tolkien by name, I am a Suffield by tastes, talents and
upbringing.’ And of Worcestershire he said: ‘Any corner of that county (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable
way “home” to me, as no other part of the world is.’
By the summer of 1896 Mabel Tolkien had found somewhere cheap enough for herself and the children to live
independently, and they moved out of Birmingham to the hamlet of Sarehole, a mile or so beyond the southern
edge of the city. The effect of this move on Ronald was deep and permanent. Just at the age when his imagination
was opening out, he found himself in the English countryside.
The house they came to was 5 Gracewell, a semi-detached brick cottage at the end of a row. Mabel Tolkien had
rented it from a local landowner. Outside the gate the road ran up a hill into Moseley village and thence on towards
Birmingham. In the other direction it led towards Stratford-upon-Avon. But traffic was limited to the occasional farm
cart or tradesman’s wagon, and it was easy to forget the city that was so near.
Over the road a meadow led to the River Cole, little more than a broad stream, and upon this stood Sarehole Mill,
an old brick building with a tall chimney. Corn had been ground here for three centuries, but times were changing. A
steam-engine had been installed to provide power when the river was low, and now the mill’s chief work was the
grinding of bones to make manure. Yet the water still tumbled over the sluice and rushed beneath the great wheel,
while inside the building everything was covered with a fine white dust. Hilary Tolkien was only two and a half, but
soon he was accompanying his elder brother on expeditions across the meadow to the mill, where they would stare
through the fence at the water-wheel turning in its dark cavern, or run round to the yard where the sacks were
swung down on to a waiting cart. Sometimes they would venture through the gate and gaze into an open doorway,
where they could see the great leather belts and pulleys and shafts, and the men at work. There were two millers,
father and son. The old man had a black beard, but it was the son who frightened the boys with his white dusty
clothes and sharp-eyed face. Ronald named him ‘the White Ogre’. When he yelled at them to clear off they would
scamper away from the yard, and run round to a place behind the mill where there was a silent pool with swans
swimming on it. At the foot of the pool the dark waters suddenly plunged over the sluice to the great wheel below: a
dangerous and exciting place.
Not far from Sarehole Mill, a little way up the hill towards Moseley, was a deep tree-lined sandpit that became
another favourite haunt for the boys. Indeed, explorations could be made in many directions, though there were
hazards. An old farmer who once chased Ronald for picking mushrooms was given the nickname ‘the Black Ogre’
by the boys. Such delicious terrors were the essence of those days at Sarehole, here recalled (nearly eighty years
later) by Hilary Tolkien:
‘We spent lovely summers just picking flowers and trespassing. The Black Ogre used to take people’s shoes and
stockings from the bank where they’d left them to paddle, and run away with them, make them go and ask for them.
And then he’d thrash them! The White Ogre wasn’t quite so bad. But in order to get to the place where we used to
blackberry (called the Dell) we had to go through the white one’s land, and he didn’t like us very much because the
path was narrow through his field, and we traipsed off after corncockles and other pretty things. My mother got us
lunch to have in this lovely place, but when she arrived she made a deep voice, and we both ran!’
There were few houses at Sarehole beside the row of cottages where the Tolkiens lived, but Hall Green village was
only a little distance away down a lane and across a ford. Ronald and Hilary would sometimes buy sweets from an
old woman with no teeth who kept a stall there. Gradually they made friends with the local children. This was not
easy, for their own middle-class accents, long hair and pinafores were the subject of mockery, while they in their
turn were unused to the Warwickshire dialect and the rough ways of the country boys. But they began to pick up
something of the local vocabulary, adopting dialect words into their own speech: ‘chawl’ for a cheek of pork, ‘miskin’
for dustbin, ‘pikelet’ for crumpet, and ‘gamgee’ for cotton wool. This last owed its origins to a Dr Gamgee, a
Birmingham man who had invented ‘gamgee-tissue’, a surgical dressing made from cotton wool. His name had
become a household term in the district.
Mabel soon began to educate her sons, and they could have had no better teacher - nor she an apter pupil than
Ronald, who could read by the tune he was four and had soon learnt to write proficiently. His mother’s own
handwriting was delightfully unconventional. Having acquired the skill of penmanship from her father, she chose an
upright and elaborate style, ornamenting her capitals with delicate curls. Ronald soon began to practise a hand that
was, though different from his mother’s, to become equally elegant and idiosyncratic. But his favourite lessons were
those that concerned languages. Early in his Sarehole days his mother introduced him to the rudiments of Latin,
and this delighted him. He was just as interested in the sounds and shapes of the words as in their meanings, and
she began to realise that he had a special aptitude for language. She began to teach him French. He liked this
much less, not for any particular reason; but the sounds did not please him as much as the sounds of Latin and
English. She also tried to interest him in playing the piano, but without success. It seemed rather as if words took
the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost
regardless of what they meant.
He was good at drawing too, particularly when the subject was a landscape or a tree. His mother taught him a great
deal of botany, and he responded to this and soon became very knowledgeable. But again he was more interested
in the shape and feel of a plant than in its botanical details. This was especially true of trees. And though he liked
drawing trees he liked most of all to be with trees. He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them. It
saddened him to discover that not everyone shared his feelings towards them. One incident in particular remained
in his memory: “There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on
the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never
forgot that.’
Outside the school-room hours his mother gave him plenty of story-books. He was amused by Alice in Wonderland,
though he had no desire to have adventures like Alice. He did not enjoy Treasure Island, nor the stories of Hans
Andersen, nor The Pied Piper. But he liked Red Indian stories and longed to shoot with a bow and arrow. He was
even more pleased by the ‘Curdie’ books of George Macdonald, which were set in a remote kingdom where
misshapen and malevolent goblins lurked beneath the mountains. The Arthurian legends also excited him. But
most of all he found delight in the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, especially the Red Fairy Book, for tucked away in
its closing pages was the best story he had ever read. This was the tale of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a
strange and powerful tale set in the nameless North. Whenever he read it Ronald found it absorbing. ‘I desired
dragons with a profound desire,’ he said long afterwards. ‘Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in
the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at
whatever cost of peril.’
Nor was he content merely to read about dragons. When he was about seven he began to compose his own story
about a dragon. ‘I remember nothing about it except a philological fact,’ he recalled. ‘My mother said nothing about
the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon”, but had to say “a great green dragon”. I
wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write
a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.’
The seasons passed at Sarehole. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated and the college on top of the
hill in Moseley was illuminated with coloured lights. Somehow Mabel managed to feed and clothe the boys on her
meagre income, eked out with occasional help from Tolkien or Suffield relatives. Hilary grew to look more and more
like his father, while Ronald developed the long thin face of the Suffields. Occasionally a strange dream came to
trouble him; a great wave towering up and advancing ineluctably over the trees and green fields, poised to engulf
him and all around him. The dream was to recur for many years. Later he came to think of it as ‘my Atlantis
complex’. But usually his sleep was undisturbed, and through the daily worries of the family’s poverty-stricken
existence there shone his love for his mother and for the Sarehole countryside, a place for adventure and solace.
He revelled in his surroundings with a desperate enjoyment, perhaps sensing that one day this paradise would be
lost. And so it was, all too soon.
Christianity had played an increasingly important part in Mabel Tolkien’s life since her husband’s death, and each
Sunday she had taken the boys on a long walk to a ‘high’ Anglican church. Then one Sunday Ronald and Hilary
found that they were going by strange roads to a different place of worship: St Anne’s, Alcester Street, in the slums
near the centre of Birmingham. It was a Roman Catholic church.
Mabel had been thinking for some time about becoming a Catholic. Nor did she take this step alone. Her sister May
Incledon had returned from South Africa, now with two children, leaving her husband Walter to follow when he had
completed his business. Unknown to him she too had decided to become a Catholic. During the spring of 1900 May
and Mabel received instruction at St Anne’s, and in June of the same year they were received into the Church of
Rome.
Immediately the wrath of their family fell upon them. Their father John Suffield had been brought up at a Methodist
school, and was now a Unitarian. That his daughter should turn papist was to him an outrage beyond belief. May’s
husband, Walter Incledon, considered himself to be a pillar of his local Anglican church, and for May to associate
摘要：

ContentsPartOneAvisitpage11PartTwo1892-1916:Earlyyears151Bloemfontein172Birmingham253‘Private-lang.’-andEdith394‘T.C.,B.S.,etc.*525Oxford606Reunion697War808Thebreakingofthefellowship88PartThree1917-1925:Themakingofamythology951LostTales972Oxfordinterlude1073Northernventure110PartFour1925-1949(0:‘Ina...

展开>> 收起<<
Carpenter, Humphrey - JRRTolkien A Biography.pdf

共99页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：99 页 大小：568.12KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 99
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注