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

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СКАЧАТЬ 1914 to 1917 he taught at St Paul’s, a preparatory school in Concord, New Hampshire, and from 1917 to 1919 was in the U.S. Army Infantry; as Captain Barnett, he was on the Argonne front when the Armistice was signed. Apart from one year in the department of History at Georgetown College, Barnett’s later career as a teacher of History, Greek, and English was in preparatory schools in Kentucky and Virginia and at the high school in his home town of Shelbyville, Kentucky.

      While at Oxford Barnett was a friend of Tolkien: both were members of clubs such as the Apolausticks and the Chequers (*Societies and clubs), and both were resident at one time in the ‘Swiss Cottage’ (*Oxford and environs). He appears in a group photograph of the Apolausticks taken in May 1912, reproduced in Biography, pl. 6b, and in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 14.

      Barnett’s diary suggests a friendly, even mischievous association with Tolkien (‘Went back to the jolly inn in the morning with Tolkien and we both got quite merry and made awful fols of ourselves when we got back to college …’, quoted in Daniel Grotta, The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1978), p. 42), and John Garth has documented (Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 18, with a photograph reproduced from the Daily Graphic) Tolkien and Barnett visiting together the charred ruin of Fred Rough’s Oxford boathouse, which in June 1913 had been burned to the ground by militant suffragettes. If Grotta’s account is correct (see *Biographies), Tolkien and Barnett kept up a correspondence until at least the late 1940s, and Barnett sent food parcels to Tolkien during Britain’s postwar years of austerity.

      In his obituary of Tolkien Guy Davenport reported a conversation with Barnett in which the latter told him that, during their time at Oxford, Tolkien ‘loved to hear [from Barnett] about the Kentuckians, their contempt for shoes, their fields of tobacco, their countrified ancient English names like Proudfoot and Baggins’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien R.I.P.’, National Review, 28 September 1973, pp. 1042–43). This was supposed by Davenport to be an influence on the Hobbits, a notion he later expanded (‘Hobbits in Kentucky’. New York Times, 23 February 1979) and which has conveyed to some of Tolkien’s readers (Daniel Grotta among them) that Hobbit surnames derive, as a matter of fact, from names in Kentucky tobacco-growing country. David Bratman has exploded this theory in ‘Hobbit Names Aren’t from Kentucky’, The Ring Goes Ever On (2008). Also according to Davenport, Barnett was unaware, until Davenport mentioned it, that Tolkien had become famous with his stories about Hobbits; but we would take this with a grain of salt.

      See also David Cofield, ‘The South and the Hobbits: The Friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien and Allen Barnett’, Beyond Bree, August 1992.

Barnsley, Thomas Kenneth (1891–1917). T.K. Barnsley, known as ‘Tea Cake’, entered *King Edward’s School, Birmingham in 1908 and became a friend of Tolkien. A fellow member of the Debating Society (*Societies and clubs), he was described in the King Edward’s School Chronicle as ‘a loyal upholder of the Society who has never failed to display his unusual fluency (as distinct from argument) and remarkable talent for personalities of amiable virulence’ (n.s. 26, no. 187 (June 1911), p. 46). With Tolkien, *G.B. Smith, and *Christopher Wiseman he performed in The Rivals as produced by *R.Q. Gilson; and with them too he was a member of the *T.C.B.S., though not in its inner circle. He went on to read History at *Cambridge, where his high spirits and clever wit seem not to have been tempered by the discipline of study.

      In the First World War Barnsley joined the 1st Birmingham Battalion (later known as the 14th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment), formed by his father, Lieutenant-Colonel (later Brigadier-General) Sir John Barnsley. In 1915 he transferred to the Coldstream Guards, in which he rose to the rank of captain. In August 1916 he was buried alive by a trench mortar at Beaumont-Hamel and evacuated to England. He returned to France, and on 31 July 1917 was killed in action in the Third Battle of Ypres while consolidating a captured position.

Barnt Green (Worcestershire). After *Mabel Tolkien’s death (1904) Ronald and *Hilary Tolkien spent some of their holidays with their *Incledon relatives in Barnt Green, a village south-east of *Birmingham. The area is now developed, and the Incledons’ cottage, if it still exists, has not been located. Tolkien was at Barnt Green during the Christmas vacation in 1912, when his play The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette was performed in the family’s seasonal theatricals, and when upon reaching his twenty-first birthday on 3 January 1913 he wrote to Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien) proposing marriage. On another visit, in July 1913, he made several paintings and drawings, including King’s Norton from Bilberry Hill, Foxglove Year, and The Cottage, Barnt Green (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 16–18). In July 1915 while at Barnt Green he worked on an early version of his poem *The Happy Mariners.

Barrie, James Matthew (1860–1937). J.M. Barrie was the ninth child of a Scottish weaver, David, and his wife Margaret Ogilvie. Having lost her own mother when she was only eight, Margaret had to become mistress of the house and mother herself to her younger brother. She compensated for the abrupt end of her schooling by becoming an avid reader, and with her encouragement young James read tales of adventure such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne, as well as ‘penny dreadfuls’, and began to write his own stories and plays. After attending various academies James graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1882. His subsequent career led to, among other honours, a knighthood in 1913.

      He was already a successful novelist and playwright in London when he met the Llewelyn Davies family, first the two eldest sons walking in Kensington Gardens with their nurse pushing baby Peter in a perambulator, then the boys’ parents, Arthur and Sylvia, and later two more boys, Michael and Nicholas. Barrie told the boys stories about pirates, Red Indians, and desert islands, and when they were orphaned took the main responsibility for their care. The family became models for, or at least lent their names to, characters in Barrie’s most famous play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, first performed in 1904. Barrie’s mother too was an inspiration (for Mrs Darling, along with Sylvia Llewellyn Davies), and underlying the play was Barrie’s pre-occupation with the idea of a boy who would never grow up: his elder brother David had died in an accident, and to their mother lived on perpetually as a boy of thirteen. Peter Pan had made his first appearance in Barrie’s 1902 novel for adults, The Little White Bird: in this Peter is a young child who flies out of his nursery window to live with fairies in Kensington Gardens. (Parts of the book were reissued in 1906 as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with pictures by Arthur Rackham.)

      In the play, the boy Peter enters the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael, and persuades them to journey to the Never Never Land, to an island with fairies, mermaids, bears, wolves, ‘redskins’, the Lost Boys (children who fall out of their prams and are not claimed), and pirates led by Captain Hook, Peter’s sworn enemy. They have many adventures, and Wendy acts as mother to her brothers and to the Lost Boys. On one occasion Peter and Wendy are marooned on a rock with a rising tide; Wendy escapes clinging to a kite, but Peter seems doomed and remarks, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’. He too is saved, however, when a bird’s nest floats by. One day Wendy suddenly remembers her parents and refuses to believe Peter when he assures her and the Lost Boys that their parents will have long forgotten them. All except Peter decide to return home, but as they leave are captured by the pirates.

      Meanwhile, Captain Hook has slipped poison into the medicine Wendy left for Peter; Tinker Bell, a fairy, tries to warn him, but he ignores her. To save him, she drinks the poison herself and is on the point of death. In the Darling nursery, Peter had said that whenever a child rejects belief in fairies, a fairy dies; now he appeals to the audience to clap if they believe in fairies, to save Tinker Bell – one of the most memorable moments of the play. Peter rescues his friends, and they continue their journey back to the Darlings’ house, where all are welcomed. But Peter refuses to stay, as he does not want to go to school or work in an office. Mrs Darling reluctantly agrees that Wendy may return to Never Never Land once a year for spring cleaning; but in the final scene, as she СКАЧАТЬ