The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ been very thin and underweight. Since my early sixties I have become “tubby”. Not unusual in men who took their exercise in games and swimming, when opportunities for these things cease’ (Letters, p. 373). In ‘The Man Who Understands Hobbits’ (Daily Telegraph Magazine, 22 March 1968) the Plimmers wrote that Tolkien had ‘grey eyes, firm tanned skin, silvery hair and quick decisive speech’ (p. 31).

      When Tolkien was a pupil at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham there was no uniform except for the school cap, but when he attended a function at the School in 1944 he found that some of his contemporaries remembered him for his taste in coloured socks. As an undergraduate at *Oxford, and later as a professor, he wore the appropriate gown when concerned with academic matters. Richard Plotz noted on his visit in 1966 that Tolkien ‘wore a conservative English suit which fitted impeccably’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks …’, p. 92). Clyde S. Kilby, who spent some time with Tolkien in the summer of 1966, noted that he ‘was always neatly dressed from necktie to shoes. One of his favorite suits was a herringbone with which he wore a green corduroy vest [waistcoat]. Always there was a vest, and nearly always a sport coat. He did not mind wearing a very broad necktie which in those days was out of style’ (Tolkien & the Silmarillion (1976), p. 24). He had a particular liking for decorative waistcoats: he told one correspondent that he had ‘one or two choice embroidered specimens, which I sometimes wear when required to make a speech, as I find they so fascinate the eyes of the audience that they do not notice if my dentures become a little loose with excitements of rhetoric’ (letter to Nancy Smith, 25 December 1963, Special Collections and University Archives, John P. Raynor, S.J., Library, Marquette University).

      Desmond Albrow recalled (‘A Brush with Greatness’, Catholic Herald, 31 January 1997) his first meeting with Tolkien at the latter’s home in 1943, when Albrow was an eighteen-year-old student at Oxford. Tolkien ‘was the first Oxford professor that I had ever met face to face and the delightful fact was that he had behaved to me like a true scholar-gentleman.’ ‘Here’, Albrow thought,

      was a professor who looked like a professor (C.S. Lewis looked more like an intellectual butcher). Tolkien wore cords [corduroy trousers] and a sports jacket, smoked a reassuring pipe, laughed a lot, sometimes mumbled when his thoughts outstripped words, looked in those days to my idealistic eyes like the young Leslie Howard, the film actor. There was a sense of civilisation, winsome sanity and sophistication about him.

      Adele Vincent, a student at Oxford in the mid-1950s who heard Tolkien lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, described his appearance thus: ‘He was a robust-looking man, with a kindly face. … He wore dull, academic tweeds rather than the brightly colored clothes that the Hobbits favored and he was quite a bit taller than they were. … Like the Hobbits he smoked a pipe and like them, too, he wore life lightly, enjoying a jest, scorning pedantry’ (‘Tolkien, Master of Fantasy’, Courier-Journal & Times (Louisville, Kentucky), 9 September 1973, reproduced in Authors in the News, vol. 1 (1976)).

      Interviewers have noted that Tolkien almost clung to his pipe, cradling it in his hand, or speaking with it in his mouth, sometimes making him difficult to understand. One of these, Richard Plotz, wrote that Tolkien ‘took out a pipe as he entered his study, and all during the interview he held it clenched in his teeth, lighting and relighting it, talking through it; he never removed it from his mouth for more than five seconds’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks …’, p. 92). See also *Smoking.

      LATER PHOTOGRAPHS

      Among the best known photographs of Tolkien are those in which he poses with trees. In May 1971 Lord Snowdon photographed him seated against the roots of a great tree in Branksome Chine, behind his home in *Poole. Billett Potter captured him seated on the ground and leaning against a tree trunk. And his grandson, Michael George, took a photograph of Tolkien in the Oxford Botanic Garden, standing by his favourite tree, a Pinus Nigra, only a few weeks before his death. Snowdon also photographed Tolkien standing on a cliff, silhouetted against the sea.

      Other photographs often show Tolkien with a pipe in his hand or mouth, or just lighting it, sometimes producing a waft of smoke: a 1972 sequence of such photos by Billett Potter, of Tolkien in his study in Merton Street, Oxford, is reproduced in Biography. Also in 1972, possibly on the same day, Potter photographed Tolkien in academic robes on the occasion of his award of an Honorary D.Litt. from Oxford University.

      Photographer *Pamela Chandler twice visited Tolkien at his home in Sand-field Road, Oxford. On the first occasion, in August 1961, she took a series of black and white photographs of Tolkien in his garage-study seated at his desk by the window with bookshelves behind him, and of Tolkien and his wife *Edith in their garden or at the gate to their house. In August 1966 she took more photographs, this time in colour, of Tolkien and Edith, mainly together but also separately, in the garage-study and in the garden.

      In 1968, not long before Tolkien moved from Oxford, John Wyatt photographed him in Merton College garden holding a copy of *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. In early 1972, soon after Tolkien’s return to Oxford, Athar Chaudry photographed him in the same garden for an article in the local newspaper.

An Application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds, June 25, 1925. Pamphlet, twelve pages privately printed for Tolkien, in which he conveys his credentials to the electors for the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair, accompanied by a list of his publications and testimonials by colleagues and university officials: *Lascelles Abercrombie, *Henry Bradley, *L.R. Farnell, *George S. Gordon, Allen Mawer, M.E. Sadler, and *Joseph Wright. Most of Tolkien’s statement was printed in Letters, pp. 12–13.

Art. Tolkien learned to draw and paint at an early age. Although never more than an amateur artist, with a limited ability to draw the human figure, nevertheless he had a talent for rendering trees, flowers, and mountains; and though he sometimes complained that he could not draw, some of the illustrations he made for his own stories rival in quality the work of professionals.

      His earliest art was inspired by places he visited, such as *Berkshire, *Cornwall, and *Lyme Regis, and reflects a concern for accuracy: some of the views and buildings he depicted can still be found today, almost exactly as he drew them. Between about December 1911 and summer 1913, however, while he was a student at the University of *Oxford, he made at least twenty ‘visionary’ pictures which he later collected into an envelope labelled Earliest Ishnesses. Although the derived word ishness appears as the final element in only two of the titles of his early drawings (Undertenishness and Grownupishness, see Artist and Illustrator, figs. 34–35), Tolkien applied it to all of his visual depictions of things symbolic and abstract, and later to any picture he drew from his imagination rather than from life. In January 1914 he wrote the title The Book of Ishness on the cover of a sketchbook, in which he continued his series of imaginative drawings. These now included The Land of Pohja (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 41), related to the *Kalevala, and pictures such as Water, Wind and Sand, Tanaqui, and The Shores of Faery (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 42–44), which are related to Tolkien’s *‘Silmarillion’ mythology. From this point painting and drawing became an additional outlet for his burgeoning imagination. Some aspects of his mythology emerged in writing and were then depicted in pencil, ink, and paints; but others began in pictorial form, and only later were put into words.

      With the birth of his children Tolkien also used his skills as an artist to complement the stories he invented for the entertainment of his sons and daughter. For many years he produced annual letters to his children, written, decorated, and illustrated as by Father Christmas and accompanied by facsimile stamps and envelopes from the ‘North Pole’ (*The ‘Father Christmas’ letters). He also illustrated some of his longer stories, such as *Roverandom, *The Hobbit, and the picture book *Mr. Bliss. When The Hobbit was accepted for publication Tolkien СКАЧАТЬ