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

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СКАЧАТЬ The occasion cemented Tolkien’s friendship with G. B. Smith. The friendship was to be lasting and productive, and Smith was henceforth regarded as a full member of the T.C.B.S.

      In the summer vacation of 1912 Tolkien went into camp for a fortnight with King Edward’s Horse, a territorial cavalry regiment in which he had recently enrolled. He enjoyed the experience of galloping across the Kentish plains – the camp was near Folkestone – but it was a wet and windy fortnight and the tents were often blown down in the night. This taste of life on horseback and under canvas was enough for him, and he resigned from the regiment after a few months. When the camp had concluded he went on a walking holiday in Berkshire, sketching the villages and climbing the downs. And then, all too soon, his first year as an undergraduate was over.

      He had done very little work and he was getting into lazy habits. At Birmingham he had attended mass several times a week, but without Father Francis to watch over him he found it all too easy to stay in bed in the mornings, particularly after sitting up late talking to friends and smoking in front of the fire. He recorded sadly that his first terms at Oxford had passed ‘with practically none or very little practice of religion’. He tried to mend his ways, and he kept a diary for Edith in which he recorded all his misdemeanours and failings. But though she was a shining ideal to him – had they not vowed their love to each other, and did this not commit them to each other? – he was still forbidden to write to her or see her until he was twenty-one, and this would not happen for many months. In the meantime it was easy to while away the terms in expensive dinners, late-night conversations, and hours spent poring over medieval Welsh and invented languages.

      At about this time he discovered Finnish. He had hoped to acquire some knowledge of the language ever since he had read the Kalevala in an English translation, and now in Exeter College library he found a Finnish grammar. With its aid he began an assault on the original language of the poems. He said afterwards: ‘It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.’

      He never learned Finnish well enough to do more than work through part of the original Kalevala, but the effect on his language-inventing was fundamental and remarkable. He abandoned neo-Gothic and began to create a private language that was heavily influenced by Finnish. This was the language that would eventually emerge in his stories as ‘Quenya’ or High-elven. That would not happen for many years; yet already a seed of what was to come was germinating in his mind. He read a paper on the Kalevala to a college society, and in it began to talk about the importance of the type of mythology found in the Finnish poems. ‘These mythological ballads,’ he said, ‘are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ And he added: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ An exciting notion; and perhaps he was already thinking of creating that mythology for England himself.

      He spent Christmas 1912 with his Incledon relatives at Barnt Green near Birmingham. As usual in that family, the season was enlivened with theatricals, and this time Ronald himself wrote the play that they performed. It was called ‘The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette’. Later in life he professed to despise drama, but on this occasion he was not only the author but the leading actor, playing ‘Professor Joseph Quilter, M.A., B.A., A.B.C., alias world-wide detective Sexton Q. Blake-Holmes, the Bloodhound’, who is searching for a lost heiress named Gwendoline Goodchild. She meanwhile has fallen in love with a penniless student whom she meets while they are living in the same lodging-house, and she has to remain undiscovered by her father until her twenty-first birthday in two days’ time, after which she will be free to marry.

      This piece of family nonsense was even more topical than the Incledons realised. Not only was Ronald due to celebrate his own twenty-first a few days after the performance, but he also intended to reunite himself with Edith Bratt, for whom he had waited for nearly three years, and who he was quite certain had waited for him. As the clock struck midnight and marked the beginning of 3 January 1913, his coming of age, he sat up in bed and wrote a letter to her, renewing his declaration of love and asking her: ‘How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the world?’

      But when Edith wrote in reply, it was to say that she was engaged to be married to George Field, brother of her school-friend Molly.

       CHAPTER VI REUNION

      He could have decided to forget all about her. His friends did not know of her existence and his aunts and uncles and cousins had never been told about her. Only Father Francis knew, and even though he was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian he had no wish that the affair with Edith should begin again. So Ronald could have torn up Edith’s letter and left her to marry George Field.

      Yet there had been declarations and promises in the Duchess Road days that Ronald felt could not be lightly broken. Moreover Edith had been his ideal in the last three years, his inspiration and his hope for the future. He had nurtured and cultivated his love for her so that it grew in secret, even though it had to be fed solely on his memories of their adolescent romance and a few photographs of her as a child. He now perceived only one course of action: he must go to Cheltenham, beseech her to give up George Field, and ask her to marry him.

      In truth he knew that she would say yes. She had hinted as much in her letter, explaining that she had only become engaged to George because he had been kind to her, and she felt ‘on the shelf’, and there was no other young man that she knew, and she had given up believing that Ronald would want to see her again after the three years had passed. ‘I began to doubt you, Ronald,’ she told him in her letter, ‘and to think you would cease to care for me.’ But now that he had written to renew his vow of love, she indicated that everything had changed.

      So on Wednesday 8 January 1913 he travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. They walked out into the country and sat under a railway viaduct where they talked. By the end of the day Edith had declared that she would give up George Field and marry Ronald Tolkien.

      She wrote to George and sent him back his ring; and he, poor young man, was dreadfully upset at first and his family was insulted and angry. But eventually the matter ceased to be alluded to, and they all became friends once more. Edith and Ronald did not announce their engagement, being a little nervous of family reaction and wanting to wait until Ronald’s prospects were more certain. But Ronald returned to his new term at Oxford in ‘a bursting happiness’.

      One of his first actions on arriving was to write to Father Francis explaining that he and Edith intended to be married. He was very nervous about this, but when Father Francis’s reply came it was calm and resigned if far from enthusiastic. This was as well, for although the priest was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian, he still gave him much-needed financial support; so it was essential that he tolerate the engagement.

      Now that Ronald had been reunited with Edith he had to turn his full attention to Honour Moderations,¹ the first of the two examinations that would earn him his degree in Classics. He tried to cram into six weeks the work that he should have done during the previous four terms, but it was not easy to break the habit of sitting up late talking to friends, and he found it difficult to get up in the morning – though like many others before him he blamed this on the damp Oxford climate rather than on his own late hours. When Honour Moderations began at the end of February he was still poorly prepared for many papers. On the whole he was relieved when he learnt that he had at least managed to achieve a Second Class.

      But he knew that he ought to have done better. A first in ‘Mods’ is not СКАЧАТЬ