The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends. Humphrey Carpenter

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СКАЧАТЬ Tolkien, who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain – who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good.’

      It was the beginning of a friendship: the moment, as Lewis once remarked, when someone who has till then believed his feelings to be unique cries out, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

      *

      Tolkien entirely shared Lewis’s love for ‘Northernness’. He too had first discovered the taste in childhood¹ when he found in a book of fairy stories the tale of Sigurd the Völsung who slew the dragon Fafnir. Reading it, the young Tolkien fell under the spell of what he called ‘the nameless North’. He ‘desired dragons with a profound desire’. At school in Birmingham he taught himself the Norse language and began to read the myths and sagas in their original words. Like Lewis, he fell under the spell of William Morris. And, just as Lewis during adolescence had begun to write his own Norse-style poetry and drama, Tolkien at about the age of eighteen conceived the idea of recreating the ‘Northernness’ that delighted him by writing a cycle of myth and legend. But it was a far more ambitious task than anything Lewis attempted, for whereas Lewis had merely written a pastiche of existing Norse stories, Tolkien began to create a whole new mythology out of his imagination. And while Lewis soon passed on from his adolescent ‘Northern’ writings to other kinds of poetry, Tolkien continued to work at his cycle year after year. It remained the centre of his imaginative life.

      During the First World War he began to write in prose form the tales which were the principal elements of his cycle, and by the time he moved from Leeds to Oxford in 1925 these tales had long since been sketched out. But he did not organise them into an entirely continuous or consistent narrative, partly because his attention was taken up with a series of invented languages which were closely related to the mythology, being spoken by ‘elvish’ peoples; in fact these languages and the need to provide a ‘history’ for them had been a major motive for beginning the whole project. Tolkien also delayed drawing up a finished version of The Silmarillion, as he came to call his cycle, because he wanted to recast two of the principal stories into verse. Like Lewis he regarded himself chiefly as a poet. During his time at Leeds he began to write two long narrative poems, one telling the story of Túrin Túram-bar the dragon-slayer and the other recounting the romantic tale of Beren and Lúthien, the mortal man and the elven maid whom he loves, and for whose sake he goes on a terrible quest.

      Tolkien kept this occupation a very private matter, rarely mentioning it to anyone. In 1925 he did send parts of the two poems to a retired schoolmaster who had once taught him, and he was disappointed when they were criticised rather severely. For a long time afterwards he consulted nobody.

      It was early in December 1929, a few days after their late-night conversation about the Norse gods and giants, that he decided to show the Beren and Lúthien poem to Lewis. It was very long and still unfinished; its title was ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’, and it was in rhyming couplets. Here is part of the description, in the version Tolkien showed to Lewis, of the ‘elder days’ of the elven kingdom of Doriath:

       There once, and long and long ago,

       before the sun and moon we know

       were lit to sail above the world,

       when first the shaggy woods unfurled,

       and shadowy shapes did stare and roam

       beneath the dark and starry dome

       that hung above the dawn of Earth,

       the silences with silver mirth

       were shaken, and the rocks were ringing –

       the birds of Melian were singing,

       the first to sing in mortal lands.

      On 7 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Tolkien:

      My dear Tolkien,

      Just a line to say that I sat up late last night and have read the geste as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of the ores above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf. I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it – I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader. So much at the first flush. Detailed criticisms (including grumbles at individual lines) will follow.

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis.

      When Lewis’s ‘detailed criticisms’ of the poem arrived, Tolkien found that Lewis had, in jest, annotated its text as if it were a celebrated piece of ancient literature, already heavily studied by scholars with such names as ‘Pumpernickel’, ‘Peabody’, ‘Bentley’, and ‘Schick’; he alleged that any weaknesses in Tolkien’s verses were the result of scribal errors or corruptions in the manuscript. Sometimes Lewis actually suggested entirely new passages to replace lines he thought poor, and here too he ascribed his own versions to supposedly historical sources. For example, he suggested that the lines about the ‘elder days’ quoted above could be replaced by the following stanza of his own, which he described as ‘the so called Poema Historiale, probably contemporary with the earliest MSS of the geste’:

       There was a time before the ancient sun

       And swinging wheels of heaven had learned to run

       More certainly than dreams; for dreams themselves

       Had bodies then and filled the world with elves.

       The starveling lusts whose walk is now confined

       To darkness and the cellarage of the mind,

       And shudderings and despairs and shapes of sin

       Then walked at large and were not cooped within.

       Thought cast a shadow: brutes could speak: and men

       Get children on a star. For spirit then

       Threaded a fluid world and dreamed it new

       Each moment. Nothing was false or new.

      Lines like these showed how greatly Lewis’s poetic imagination differed from Tolkien’s. Tolkien wrote unaffectedly and simply, sometimes lapsing into slack diction or banality but often producing lines that were terse and dramatic; his unadorned style showed no particular ‘influence’. Lewis’s lines – and indeed all his poems – were more complex philosophically and stylistically, and more sure in diction and metre, but they often hovered on the borders of pastiche. Perhaps it was Lewis’s enormous knowledge of English poetry through the centuries that encouraged him to copy earlier models rather than to find a style of his own; at all events this fondness for pastiche was arguably the major reason why his poetry was in the end a failure.

      Tolkien did not agree with all Lewis’s emendations of his poem. When Lewis suggested that Tolkien’s couplet ‘Hateful thou art, O Land of Trees!/My flute shall fingers no more seize’ would be better as ‘Oh hateful land of trees, be mute!/My fingers, СКАЧАТЬ