Tolkien’s Oxford: Unearthing the Ghostly Traces of Middle-earth
I had vowed to take Dead Mans Walk – to sneak into Gothic-trimmed courtyards, to wander beside the shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien, the father of modern fantasy, and listen for remnants of his voice. I had come to see the dim pubs where he drank up inspiration and to visit the homes where he scribbled The Lord of the Rings, one of the biggest-selling and most-beloved books of all time.
Alas, I heard the trail was unmarked, shrouded in rumor and false steps. I would have to find my own path. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) lived in Oxford on and off for some 50 years – first from 1911-15 as a student, then from 1917-19 as a tutor and staff member of the New English Dictionary, and lastly as a professor of medieval languages and literature from 1925-59. Aside from spending some retirement years in the suburbs and the seaside town of Bournemouth, Tolkien haunted Oxford nearly his entire adult life.
For three decades, Oxford was also full-time home to Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), author of The Chronicles of Narnia and Christian writings like The Screwtape Letters. From 1917-1920, C.S. Lewis attended Oxford, then onward from 1925, taught as a Fellow at the university’s Magdalen College (pronounced ‘maudlin’) until his departure in 1954. Lewis and Tolkien first met in 1926 at a Merton College English Faculty meeting. Initially, Lewis noted some apprehension – “In his diary, he wrote of the ‘smooth pale fluent little chap’ that ‘there was no harm in him’ only ‘needs a smack or so.'” But the colleagues soon discovered they shared a like-minded interest in languages, poetry, myth, and storytelling.
They both avoided contemporary culture – neither had a car nor would drive one – and both largely ignored politics and the news. And in their fledgling efforts as novelists, they served as each other’s first readers. “The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence,” Tolkien wrote decades later, “but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience.” The two soon became fast friends, even though Lewis had established himself in the literature faction of the English faculty while Tolkien placed himself firmly on the linguistics and history of languages side.
Tolkien disliked most literature and found little use for any work penned after the medieval era. Together, they helped revise the English syllabus, and for the first time, the Oxford English School created a dialogue between the philology and literature camps. Intellectually, they craved each other’s companionship. But their relationship had emotional depth as well. They bonded over their harrowing experiences in the trenches of World War I and the loss of their parents, which they had both endured as children. Sorrow over their pasts and their retreat from modernity gave them nowhere to go but their imaginations. They lost themselves in anachronistic tales and created make-believe places, engaging in what today we might disparagingly call “escapism.”
Of course, the realms of Lewis’ Narnia and Tolkien’s Middle-earth are fraught with troubles, wars, and imperfections at least as much as our so-called “real world.” But their comradeship began out of necessity, ended decades later unresolved, marred by petty rivalries and burdened by unspoken resentment.
When Jack (Lewis, as he was known) began to publish in the 1930s and 1940s and lecture on Christian topics, Oxford quickly embraced him as a literary and religious celebrity. Yet the same institution never fully adopted its other reclusive literary anomaly, Tolkien. Even today, both town and university remain uncertain how to remember Tolkien’s contribution to letters. Only the faintest traces of his days here remain etched in the silhouettes of the eight Oxford homes and four colleges associated with his studies and scholarship.
Among his colleagues, Tolkien was somewhat of an oddball. His groundbreaking essay on Beowulf and his definitive translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight cemented his scholarly status. But the publication of The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955 clashed with his academic reputation. He could find respectability as a frumpy Oxford don and Anglo-Saxon expert, but harboring a “second life” telling stories of wizards, dragons, and rings of power was barely tolerable, even if the books sold well. “How is your hobbit?” Tolkien’s colleagues reportedly mocked.
For Lewis, his extra-curricular activities were more widely accepted. His sermons were entertaining and well-attended. In the 1940s, The Screwtape Letters were a best-seller, and their BBC broadcast made Lewis a household name. He graced the cover of Time magazine in 1947. By 1950, when the first book in his Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, appeared, Lewis’ fame had easily eclipsed Tolkien’s.
In the end, that success and other factors would eclipse their friendship as well.
The Eagle and Child: Stoking the Literary Embers
My visit to Oxford in the fall of 2003 fell just before the release of The Return of the King, the third and final installment in Peter Jackson’s well-received film trilogy. Tolkien mania was at an all-time high. But Tolkien and Lewis’ city, which at various times also hosted T.E. Lawrence, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Johnson, Iris Murdoch, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, seemed to barely recognize its literary pedigree. Surely, that would change, I wondered, especially when Lewis fever would rage again once The Chronicles of Narnia film hit theaters in 2005.
To be honest, Lewis didn’t interest me much. But I was an unabashed Tolkien freak. Susceptible to such things, I had sensed a quest swelling inside me to recover and record Tolkien’s legacy as best I could. He may have eschewed the spotlight, but I believed Tolkien – master map-maker and quest-taker – would have approved of my stumbling and peripatetic, if obsessive, path. I’d probably run into the specter of Jack Lewis along the way. Besides, Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth had once rescued me. I owed him.
So, charged with a mission high and mighty, I set off on my pilgrimage. Alone. Naturally, then, five minutes after my London train screeched into the Oxford railway station, I didn’t expect to run into David. But there he was, walking down George Street. “David?” “Ethan?” We stared at each other, flabbergasted. “What are you doing here?” we more-or-less blurted simultaneously. I explained my lofty undertaking. David, an Ontario resident when not flitting off to the Sudan or Bangladesh doing humanitarian good deeds, told me he was in town for an Oxfam meeting. “Amazing coincidence. Or something else?” I wondered. We hugged, regarded each other again, and agreed that after checking into our guest houses, we’d find each other that evening at The Eagle and Child, one of Tolkien and Lewis’ regular drinking spots.
I took David’s presence as an omen. And I wondered if a fellowship was enigmatically gathering for my Oxford quest.
Seven o’clock. I waited outside the “Bird and Baby.” That’s the name Tolkien, Lewis, and their cronies – Charles Williams, Nevill Coghill, Owen Barfield, and W.H. Lewis (Jack’s brother) – gave the seventeenth-century pub where The Inklings, their literary club, met from 1939 to 1962 on Tuesday mornings to discuss their writing.
Lewis had first joined Tolkien’s Kolbitars society in the 1920s, an informal group dedicated to reading Icelandic and Norse sagas, thus named because “coal biters” sit so close to the fire they virtually bite the coals. The Inklings arose when the club began trying their own hand at forging myths from the glowing embers. With Lewis at center stage, the members would read aloud to each other in weekly installments, chapters of novels or lines from epic works in progress.
The Inklings were bards, storytellers, and entertainers, but mainly for themselves. To our eyes, saturated with television, DVDs, e-mail, and instant messaging, the scene of full-grown men reciting myths and heroic poems around a fire seems quaint, and the men-only policy somewhat chauvinistic. Yet these cherished Beowulf and beer sessions served as an important refuge away from wives and children and serious scholarly matters. Many hours were spent wreathed in pipe smoke, drinking beer, discussing, and debating, developing the now-endangered art of male friendship which Tolkien went on to champion in The Lord of the Rings characters Frodo and Sam.
He modeled his walking-talking tree character of Treebeard after Lewis’ booming oratorical voice. Lewis probably based Dr. Ransom, a philologist from Out of the Silent Planet, on Tolkien. He also managed to celebrate his love of pub life – Ransom, after returning from Mars to Earth, immediately sought out a neighborhood bar: “A lighted door was open. There were voices from within, and they were speaking English. There was a familiar smell. He pushed his way in, regardless of the surprise he was creating in the bar. ‘A pint of bitter, please,’ said Ransom.”
The camaraderie between Jack and the man he called “Tollers” inspired the chapter on friendship in Lewis’ book The Four Loves. These literary meetings also helped cure their dissatisfaction with literature. Tolkien’s letters recount that Lewis once said to him, “If they won’t write the kinds of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves.” Tolkien agreed. So they wrote. And rewrote. And squabbled. And rivalries began.
Tolkien and Lewis didn’t see eye to eye on matters of literary taste. Tolkien admitted, “Narnia was outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his.” He found Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm “a distressing and in parts horrifying work.” He gently accused Jack of recycling Middle-earth nomenclature for his own stories. He called Lewis’ writing “creaking and stiff-jointed” and suggested it was unoriginal, saying Lewis was “a very impressionable man.” For his part, Lewis complained that “Tollers was a niggler and a perfectionist and never keen to accept advice.” His standard of self-criticism was high, and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon a revision, “in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old work, they actually got the first draft of a new one.”
Their differing writing paces also became a source of stress. While Tolkien wrestled over The Lord of the Rings for some 17 years, Lewis rushed his Narnia series to publication, composing the entire seven-part series in seven years and churning out book after book of what Tolkien considered “Christian apologist works” – Allegory of Love, Surprised by Joy – at what was to him an alarming rate, a sentiment fueled perhaps by Tolkien’s frustration with his own snail’s pace.
In 1967, four years after Lewis’ death, Tolkien wrote, “To tell the truth, Jack never really liked hobbits very much.” Still, despite their differences, the two Oxford professors helped each other at crucial points in their literary careers. Tolkien recommended a publisher for Lewis’ science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis favorably reviewed The Hobbit in The Times and both wrote a blurb for the back of The Lord of the Rings and gushed over it in the press. Apparently, this was before journalistic ethics considered friends reviewing each other a conflict of interest. “This book is like lightning from a clear sky,” Lewis said of The Fellowship of the Ring when it appeared in 1954. “It represents the conquest of new territory.” Lewis was right – it did. And in the end, Tolkien surpassed Lewis as one of the most popular writers worldwide.
Visiting the Landscapes of Middle-earth
Back at the Eagle and Child, waiting for David, I looked up at the pub’s sign, a raptor flying away with an infant. Seeing it flapping in the wind, I wondered if the image had inspired a famous scene from The Hobbit in which giant eagles rescue Bilbo and the company of dwarves.
David soon arrived, smiling, and together we pushed through the door. But the pub came as a disappointment – modern beer signs, a computer at the bar, and a plaque marking “The Inklings were here.” Alas, The Eagle and Child had been remodeled since Tolkien and Co. warmed their toes by the fire. However, pub food like bangers and mash hit the spot after a typically gloomy Oxford day.
We relocated to another literary hangout, just down the street – The White Horse, sandwiched between two wings of Oxford’s famous Blackwell’s bookshop. Ah, this was more like it – a low-ceilinged lair with rough wooden tables and a rougher clientele. Here in the 1940s, Tolkien received feedback on drafts of The Lord of the Rings. I ordered a pint, and David got a brandy. We raised our glasses. “To the Professor,” I said.
It was easy to see why Tolkien made pub life so central to his fictional milieu and characters’ lives. The White Horse may as well have been The Prancing Pony or The Green Dragon. That shady guy in the corner could have been Strider, hiding his kingly lineage behind a moustache of beer foam. David has known me since my Reagan-era adolescent days, back when places like Tolkien’s Middle-earth were enticing refuges for a Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerd too chicken to try out for basketball or kiss girls. He said he read the bootleg Ace paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings as a 1960s Canadian college kid, but not since. I admitted that my total immersion in Tolkien’s fantasy of fellowship among men, elves, hobbits, and dwarves now made me a tad uneasy. But swords-and-sorcery was important to me then. I had always wanted to understand why I’m drawn to wander the same backdrop of medieval streets that Tolkien did. And to try to understand what made “Tollers” tick.
David said he was leaving in the morning. We had another round, then bid farewell as we headed to our separate hotels. The fellowship was broken.
Tracing the Pathways of Tolkien’s Mind
On the walk back, marveling at the well-preserved masonry, high and low, I was reminded that Oxford had roots reaching into the eleventh century. The town grew up cheek-by-jowl with the university. But residents weren’t always synonymous with scholars, nor were the streets always this calm. A spate of thirteenth-century “town vs. gown” rioting resulted in private dormitories. Hence the fortress-like block walls and iron gates that guard students in each of the 39 independent colleges that make up Oxford University. The term “ivory tower” took on new meaning.
Before sleep, I speculated whether the university’s jagged skyline of church spires stirred Tolkien’s visions of cities like Minas Tirith. Or if the reproduction Venetian Bridge of Sighs led to the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, spanning the chasm that Frodo, Aragorn, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Legolas, Boromir, and Gimli cross while chased by orcs through the Mines of Moria. There, on this bridge, Gandalf the wizard strikes down the foul Balrog. “But even as it fell, it swung its whip and the thongs lashed and curled around the wizard’s knees, dragging him to the brink. ‘Fly, you fools!’ he cried, and was gone,” Tolkien wrote in The Fellowship of the Ring. And I slid off into sleep.
Piecing Together the Professor’s Puzzle
Quest day two. Map? Check. Umbrella? Check. Elvish lembas? Check. Actually, I ate an English breakfast, nearly as hardy as lembas, the food Frodo and Sam subsist on during their journey from the Shire to Mordor. And hangover? Check.
Off then into the mists. I assumed a chronology of residences that housed J.R.R., his wife Edith, and their four children would lead me to insight. But as I walked from home to home – from the plain facades at
