J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Humphrey Carpenter

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СКАЧАТЬ instance of the fact that the T.C.B.S. itself was odd’. Perhaps it was; though such coteries were (and are) not uncommon among well-educated adolescents, who are going through a stage of enthusiastic intellectual discovery.

      Later a fourth member was added to the group. This was Geoffrey Bache Smith, a year younger than Gilson and nearly three years junior to Tolkien. He was not a classicist like the others, but came from the Modern side of the school. He lived with his brother and their widowed mother in West Bromwich and possessed what his friends considered to be a Midland wit. The T.C.B.S. took him into its ranks partly for this and partly because he had a qualification all too rare at King Edward’s: he was knowledgeable about English literature, especially poetry; indeed he himself was a practising poet of some competence. Under the influence of ‘G.B.S.’ the T.C.B.S. began to wake up to the significance of poetry – as indeed Tolkien was already doing.

      Only two masters at King Edward’s made any serious attempt to teach English literature. One was George Brewerton and the other was R. W. Reynolds. Once a literary critic on a London journal, ‘Dickie’ Reynolds tried to instil into his pupils some idea of taste and style. He was not particularly successful with Ronald Tolkien, who preferred Latin and Greek poetry to Milton and Keats. But Reynolds’s lessons may have had something to do with the fact that when he was eighteen Tolkien began tentatively to write verse. He did not write much, and it was not very good, certainly no better than the average juvenile efforts of the time. Indeed, there was only one sign of anything even faintly unlikely, and that came in July 1910 when he wrote a descriptive piece about a forest scene, entitled ‘Wood-sunshine’. It included these lines:

      Come sing ye light fairy things tripping so gay,

      Like visions, like glinting reflections of joy

      All fashion’d of radiance, careless of grief,

      O’er this green and brown carpet; nor hasten away.

      O! come to me! dance for me! Sprites of the wood,

      O! come to me! Sing to me once ere ye fade!

      Fairy spirits dancing on a woodland carpet seem a strange choice of subject for a rugger-playing youth of eighteen who had a strong taste for Grendel and the dragon Fafnir. Why should Tolkien want to write about them?

      J. M. Barrie may have had a little to do with it. In April 1910 Tolkien saw Peter Pan at a Birmingham theatre, and wrote in his diary: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E. had been with me.’ But perhaps of more importance was his enthusiasm for the Catholic mystic poet Francis Thompson. By the end of his school career he was familiar with Thompson’s verse, and later he became something of an expert on him. In ‘Wood-sunshine’ there is a distinct resemblance to an episode in the first part of Thompson’s ‘Sister Songs’ where the poet sees first a single elf and then a swarm of woodland sprites in the glade; when he moves, they vanish. It may be that this was a source of Tolkien’s interest in such things. Whatever their origins, dancing elves were to appear many times in his early poems.

      His principal concern during 1910 was to work hard in preparation for a second attempt at the Oxford scholarship. He put in as many hours of private study as he could manage, but there were numerous distractions, not least Rugby football. He spent many afternoons on the muddy school sports ground in Eastern Road, from which there was a long ride home, often in the dark with the oil-lamp flickering on the back of his bicycle. Rugby sometimes led to injuries: he broke his nose in one match, and it never entirely regained its original shape; on another occasion he cut his tongue, and though the wound healed satisfactorily he later ascribed to it much of his indistinctness of speech. (Though in truth he was known as an indistinct speaker before he cut his tongue, and his poor articulation was really due to having too much to say rather than to experiencing any physical difficulty in saying it. He could and did recite poetry with the greatest clarity.) He was also spending a good deal of time working at languages, both historical and invented. In the Lent term of 1910 he delivered to the First Class at King Edward’s a lecture with the weighty title: ‘The Modern Languages of Europe – Derivations and Capabilities’. It took three one-hour lessons to read, and even then the master in charge stopped him before he could reach the ‘Capabilities’. He also devoted much time to the Debating Society. There was a custom at King Edward’s of holding a debate entirely in Latin, but that was almost too easy for Tolkien, and in one debate when taking the role of Greek Ambassador to the Senate he spoke entirely in Greek. On another occasion he astonished his schoolfellows when, in the character of a barbarian envoy, he broke into fluent Gothic; and on a third occasion he spoke in Anglo-Saxon. These activities occupied many hours, and he could not say that he had really spent long enough preparing for the scholarship. Nevertheless he set out for Oxford in December 1910 with rather more confidence in his chances.

      This time he was successful. On 17 December 1910 he learnt that he had been awarded an Open Classical Exhibition to Exeter College. The result was not as pleasing as it might have been, for he was sufficiently accomplished to have won a valuable scholarship, and this Exhibition (a slightly inferior award) was worth only sixty pounds a year. However it was no mean achievement, and with the aid of a school-leaving bursary from King Edward’s and additional help from Father Francis it would be possible for him to go up to Oxford.

      Now that his immediate future was assured he was no longer under pressure in his school-work. But there was still plenty to occupy him in his final terms at King Edward’s. He became a prefect, Secretary of the Debating Society, and Football Secretary. He read a paper to the school Literary Society on Norse Sagas, illustrating it with readings in the original language. And at about this time he discovered the Finnish Kalevala or Land or Heroes, the collection of poems which is the principal repository of Finland’s mythology. Not long afterwards he wrote appreciatively of ‘this strange people and these new gods, this race of unhypocritical lowbrow scandalous heroes’, adding ‘the more I read of it, the more I felt at home and enjoyed myself’. He had discovered the Kalevala in W. H. Kirby’s Everyman translation, and he determined to find an edition in the original Finnish as soon as possible.

      The summer term of 1911 was his last at King Edward’s. It ended as was usual with the performance of a Greek play with the choruses set to music-hall tunes. This time the choice was Aristophanes’ The Peace, in which Tolkien took the part of Hermes. Afterwards (another King Edward’s custom) the National Anthem was sung in Greek, and then the curtain dropped on his school career. ‘The school-porter was sent by waiting relatives to find me,’ he recalled years later. ‘He reported that my appearance might be delayed. “Just now,” he said, “he’s the life and soul of the party.” Tactful. In fact, having just taken part in a Greek play, I was clad in a himation and sandals, and was giving what I thought a fair imitation of a frenzied Bacchic dance.’ But suddenly it was all over. He had loved his school, and now he hated leaving it. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘like a young sparrow kicked out of a high nest.’

      In the summer holiday that followed, he made a journey to Switzerland. He and his brother Hilary were among a party organised by a family named Brookes-Smith, on whose Sussex farm Hilary was now working, having left school early to take up agriculture. There were about a dozen travellers: the Brookes-Smith parents, their children, Ronald and Hilary Tolkien and their Aunt Jane (now widowed), and one or two unattached schoolmistresses who were friends of Mrs Brookes-Smith. They reached Interlaken and set out, walking. Fifty-six years later Ronald recalled their adventures:

      ‘We went on foot carrying great packs practically all the way from Interlaken, mainly by mountain paths, to Lauterbrunnen, and so to Mürren and eventually to the head of the Lauterbrunnenthal in a wilderness of morains. We slept rough – the men-folk – often in hayloft or cowbyre, since we were walking by map and avoided roads and never booked, and after a meagre breakfast we fed ourselves in the open. We must then have gone eastward over the two Scheidegge to Grindelwald, with Eiger and Münch on our right, and eventually СКАЧАТЬ