The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ 321–2). A photograph of Tolkien, Priscilla, *Christopher, and Edith in the garden of 3 Manor Road in 1949 is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74. Austin and *Katharine Farrer were neighbours at 7 Manor Road.

      In May 1950 Tolkien, Edith, and Priscilla moved not far away to a larger Merton College house at 99 Holywell Street which dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘The house had a small step up from the street and lay back at an angle …. Its small garden contained a hawthorn tree that attracted nuthatches and tree creepers, and the high wall at the back, dividing it from the gardens of New College, was part of the medieval wall of the city’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74; photographs, pp. 74, 75). Tolkien again had room for a study, and could see his postgraduate students at home as well as in college. But by now Holywell Street, connecting Parks Road (near its intersection with Broad Street) and St Cross Road (near its intersection with Longwall Street), had become a major traffic route. On 24 October 1952 Tolkien wrote to *Rayner Unwin that his ‘charming house has become uninhabitable – unsleepable-in, unworkable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst’ (Letters, p. 165).

      On 30 March 1953 Tolkien and Edith moved to 76 Sandfield Road in Headington, east of the centre of Oxford; Priscilla by now had taken her degree and had left Oxford for Bristol. Holywell Street was abandoned in part on doctor’s orders: Edith’s increasing ill health required that she live in ‘a house on high dry soil and in the quiet’ (Tolkien, letter to Rayner Unwin, 24 March 1953, Letters, p. 166). Humphrey Carpenter describes 76 Sandfield Road in Biography as it looked in spring 1967: it was a long way down ‘a residential street of two-storey brick houses, each with its tidy front garden …. The house is painted white and is partially screened by a tall fence, a hedge, and overhanging trees.’ One entered through an arched gate – a photograph of Tolkien and Edith at the gate is reproduced in Biography, pl. 13 – and along a short path between rose bushes. The entrance hall was ‘small and tidy and contains nothing that one would not expect in the house of a middle-class elderly couple. *W.H. Auden, in an injudicious remark quoted in the newspapers, has called the house “hideous”, but that is nonsense. It is simply ordinary and suburban’ (Biography, pp. 3–4).

      The house was small; it could not hold comfortably all of Tolkien’s books, most of which he had kept at Merton College but which on his retirement in 1959 he was obliged to remove. When he had filled his upstairs study–bedroom, he converted the (unoccupied) garage into a library-office. Humphrey Carpenter described the latter:

      The shelves are crammed with dictionaries, works on etymology and philology, and editions of texts in many languages, predominant among which are Old and Middle English; but there is also a section devoted to translations of The Lord of the Rings …; and the map of his invented ‘Middle-earth’ is pinned to the window-ledge. On the floor is a very old portmanteau full of letters, and on the desk are ink-bottles, nibs and pen-holders, and two typewriters. The room smells of books and tobacco-smoke. [Biography, p. 4]

      Tolkien himself wrote about it to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer on 8 February 1967:

      May I say that it is not a ‘study’, except in domestic slang …. It was a hastily contrived necessity, when I was obliged to relinquish my room in college and provide a store for what I could preserve of my library. Most of the books of value have since been removed, and the most important contents are the rows of orderly files kept by my part-time secretary. She is the only regular user of the room. I have never written any literary matter in it. [Letters, p. 373]

      Since there were only two rooms on the ground floor besides the kitchen, Tolkien converted a smaller bedroom into a study where he did his writing. (Under later ownership, the property was much altered and modernized. When it was offered for sale in 2017 it was described as containing five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and six reception rooms.)

      The chief disadvantage of 76 Sandfield Road was that it was almost two miles from Oxford centre, a long journey for Tolkien while he was still the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature – and the same for family and friends to visit Sandfield Road. The size of the house was also a problem, demanding too many domestic chores of people in advanced years, even with daily help. Nor did the quiet that Tolkien and Edith found there in 1953 last more than a few years. As Tolkien wrote to Christopher Bretherton on 16 July 1964:

      Sandfield Road was a cul-de-sac when I came here, but was soon opened at the bottom end, and became for a time an unofficial lorry by-pass, before Headley Way was completed. Now it is a car-park for the field of ‘Oxford United’ at the top end. While the actual inhabitants do all that radio, tele, dogs, scooters, buzzbikes, and cars of all sizes but the smallest, can do to produce noise from early morn to about 2 a.m. In addition in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable …. [Letters, pp. 344–5]

      In mid-July 1968 Tolkien and Edith moved to a bungalow in *Poole, near *Bournemouth. Soon after Edith died in November 1971 Tolkien began to look for a place in Oxford, and in mid-January 1972 Christopher Tolkien wrote on behalf of his father to the Warden of Merton to ask if the College had any housing available. The Warden called a special meeting of Merton’s Governing Body, which unanimously voted that Tolkien should be invited to become a residential fellow. In this manner he was offered a set of rooms at 21 Merton Street, a road which runs south and west from the High Street past Merton College towards Corpus Christi and Christ Church Colleges. This proved an ideal arrangement, if short-lived: it was Tolkien’s final Oxford home before his death in 1973. On 24 January 1972 he wrote to his son Michael:

      Merton has now provided [me] with a very excellent flat, which will probably accommodate the bulk of my surviving ‘library’. But wholly unexpected ‘strings’ are attached to this! (1) The rent will be ‘merely nominal’ – which means what it implies: something extremely small in comparison with actual market-value. (2) All or any furniture required will be provided free by the college – and a large Wilton carpet has already been assigned to me, covering the whole floor of a sitting room …. (3) Since 21 M[erton] St. is legally part of the college, domestic service is provided free: in the shape of a resident care-taker and his wife as housekeeper [*Charlie and Mavis Carr]. (4) I am entitled to free lunch and dinner throughout the year when in residence: both of a very high standard. This represents – allowing 9 weeks absence – an actual emolument of between £750 and £900 a year which the claws of the I[ncome] Taxgatherers have so far been driven off. (5) The college will provide free of rent two telephones: (a) for local calls, and calls to extensions, which are free, and (b) for long distance calls, which will have a private number and be paid by me. This will have the advantage that business and private calls to family and friends will not pass through the overworked lodge; but it will have the one snag that it will have to appear in the Telephone book, and cannot be ex-directory …. (6) No rates, and gas and electricity bills at a reduced scale. (7) The use of 2 beautiful common-rooms (at a distance of 100 yards) with free writing paper, free newspapers, and mid-morning coffee. It all sounds too good to be true – and of course it all depends on my health …. [Letters, pp. 415–16]

      On 16 March 1972 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘I am now at last … IN but not “settled” in [at 21 Merton Street] …. The great bank in the Fellows’ Garden looks like the foreground of a pre-Raphaelite picture: blazing green starred like the Milky Way with blue anemones, purple/white/yellow crocuses, and final surprise, clouded-yellow, peacock, and tortoiseshell butterflies flitting about’ (Letters, p. 417).

      A photograph of the façade of 21 Merton Street is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 87.

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