J. R. R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 reached Meiringen. I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue.

      ‘We reached Brig on foot, a mere memory of noise: then a network of trams that screeched on their rails for it seemed at least twenty hours of the day. After a night of that we climbed up some thousands of feet to a “village” at the foot of the Aletsch glacier, and there spent some nights in a châlet inn under a roof and in beds (or rather under them: the bett being a shapeless bag under which you snuggled).

      ‘One day we went on a long march with guides up the Aletsch glacier – when I came near to perishing. We had guides but either the effects of the hot summer were beyond their experience, or they did not much care, or we were late in starting. Anyway at noon we were strung out in file along a narrow track with a snow-slope on the right going up to the horizon, and on the left a plunge down into a ravine. The summer of that year had melted away much snow, and stones and boulders were exposed that (I suppose) were normally covered. The heat of the day continued the melting and we were alarmed to see many of them starting to roll down the slope at gathering speed: anything from the size of oranges to large footballs, and a few much larger. They were whizzing across our path and plunging into the ravine. They started slowly, and then usually held a straight line of descent, but the path was rough and one had also to keep an eye on one’s feet. I remember the party just in front of me (an elderly schoolmistress) gave a sudden squeak and jumped forward as a large lump of rock shot between us. About a foot at most before my unmanly knees.

      ‘After this we went on into Valais, and my memories are less clear; though I remember our arrival, bedraggled, one evening in Zermatt and the lorgnette stares of the French bourgeoises dames. We climbed with guides up to a high hut of the Alpine Club, roped (or I should have fallen into a snow-crevasse), and I remember the dazzling whiteness of the tumbled snow-desert between us and the black horn of the Matterhorn some miles away.’

      Before setting off on the return journey to England, Tolkien bought some picture postcards. Among them was a reproduction of a painting by a German artist, J. Madlener. It is called Der Berggeist, the mountain spirit, and it shows an old man sitting on a rock under a pine tree. He has a white beard and wears a wide-brimmed round hat and a long cloak. He is talking to a white fawn that is nuzzling his upturned hands, and he has a humorous but compassionate expression; there is a glimpse of rocky mountains in the distance. Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: ‘Origin of Gandalf’.

      The travelling-party returned to England early in September. Back in Birmingham, Tolkien packed his possessions. Then at the end of the second week in October he accepted a generous lift from his old schoolmaster ‘Dickie’ Reynolds, who owned a motor car, and was driven to Oxford for the start of his first term.

       CHAPTER V OXFORD

      Already as the car bowled into Oxford he had decided that he would be happy there. This was a city that he could love and revere after the squalor and the drabness of Birmingham. Admittedly, to the eyes of a casual observer his own college, Exeter, was not the loveliest in the University. Its insipid frontage by George Gilbert Scott and its chapel, a tasteless copy of the Sainte Chapelle, were in truth no more remarkable than Barry’s mock-gothic school in Birmingham. But a few yards away was the Fellows’ Garden where the tall silver birch rose above the roof-tops and the plane and horse-chestnut stretched their branches over the wall into Brasenose Lane and Radcliffe Square. And to Ronald Tolkien it was his own college, his home, the first real home he had known since his mother’s death. At the foot of his staircase was his name painted on a board, and up the uneven wooden steps with the broad black banister were his rooms, a bedroom and a plain but handsome sitting-room looking down to the narrow Turl Street. It was perfection.

      The majority of undergraduates at Oxford in 1911 were from prosperous upper-class families. Many of them were members of the aristocracy. It was for this class of young man that the University (at this time) primarily catered; hence the comparatively luxurious lifestyle, with ‘scouts’ (college servants) waiting on undergraduates in their rooms. But besides the rich and aristocratic there was quite a different group of students: the ‘poor scholars’ who if not actually poor did not come from rich families, and who could only come to the university thanks to financial aid from scholarships. The first group did not always make life pleasant for the second, and had Tolkien (as a scholar from a middle-class background) found himself at one of the more fashionable colleges, he would probably have been the victim of a good deal of snobbery. By contrast, and fortunately for him, there was no such tradition of social distinction at Exeter College.

      Yet it was as well for Tolkien that among the second-year men at his college were a couple of Catholics, who sought him out and made sure that he settled in. After that, he made friends quickly, though he had to be careful about money, for he only had a tiny income, and it was not easy to live economically in a society designed for the tastes of the rich. His ‘scout’ brought breakfast to his rooms every morning, and this could be restricted to a frugal meal of toast and coffee; but there was a tradition of entertaining one’s friends to breakfast, and this demanded that something more substantial should be provided at one’s own expense. Lunch was a mere ‘commons’ of bread, cheese, and beer, again brought to his rooms by the scout; while dinner, taken formally in Hall, was not an expensive meal; but it was pleasant at dinner to accept an offer of beer or wine from one’s friends, and of course this gesture had to be returned. When the ‘battel’ or college account was presented for payment each Saturday morning it could be unpleasantly high. Then there were clothes to be bought, and a few pieces of furniture to be found for his rooms, for the college provided only the bare necessities. СКАЧАТЬ