Two ways of being a Tolkien fanatic: pre- and post-Christian

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Presumably there are numerous other ways - but I underwent a transition between the way in which I was a Tolkien fan in my youth and pre-Christian adulthood, and what came afterwards - what is now.

The transition was gradual, over several years; and indeed fairly closely related to becoming a Christian - especially to reading and writing about the story The debate of Finrod and Andreth (‘Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’) - or the writing which I have dubbed "The marring of men": 

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/tolkiens-marring-of-men.html

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In my youth, Tolkien's world provided an alternative reality. It was a reality, of some kind, and it was something into which I projected myself.

Of course, at the same time as volitionally-projecting I was also passively absorbed-into this world.

The world of Tolkien in fact provided a thread running through my life - which was realler than most of my life - at least in memory and retrospect.

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This gave rise to the question of the status of this reality of Tolkien's world.

On the one hand the reality was not objective, not factual, because the world was imagined; on the other hand the world was solidly-subjective (therefore not just a matter of wishful thinking) and it seemed an error simply to reject the factual objectivity.

More needed to be said than that it was all imagination and fantasy.

But I could not see quite how to say it, short of considering the whole of human experience to be a matter of imagination (which brought other problems: not least relativism and solipsism - then nihilism).

Somehow - to be true to experience - Tolkien's fantasy world had to be real despite being imagined.

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When I became a Christian (the processes being gradual rather than instant), all this remained; but the nature of the reality of Tolkien's world was different - because my understanding of the nature of imagination changed.

I began to regard imagination of the kind displayed by Tolkien (that is, subcreation) to have properties akin to the divine revelation  of prophets. So, the Lord of the Rings was in fact true and real because it was divinely inspired: its truths were revelations.

Naturally, this does not make sense if the truths are seen as detachable facts (e.g. as providing information on the history of elves, hobbits, orcs etc.).

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So, the situation seems to be that Tolkien's world is in fact true, but not factually true: the truth is not in the facts, which are explicitly imagined but in something else behind the facts, linking the facts, or the form of the imagined world.

I cannot explain - even to myself, leave aside explain to other people - how this works; but I do know that it does work.

Reality - and I mean real-reality, objective - is communicated from God, via Tolkien, by means of imagination and fantasy; therefore, this world is not a delusion, nor wishful thinking, nor an assertion of subjectivity, not (ultimately) invented but instead something given; this is solid: something to build life on.

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Three possible but not-existing Inklings collections I would love

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1. A complete edition of the diaries of Warren Hamilton ('Warnie') Lewis - or if not complete then a selection at least treble the length of the current (absolutely wonderful, but far too brief) Brothers and Friends - edited by CS Kilby and ML Mead (1982).

2. A book named something like 'Walking tours of CS Lewis' - derived from his diaries and letters and lavishly illustrated with photographs and maps. 

3. A single volume, separate cover edition of The Notion Club Papers by JRR Tolkien.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/my-hopes-for-notion-club-papers.html

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Tolkien and the new moon, rising - a surprising recurrent error

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I tend to think of Tolkien as someone who was knowledgeable about the natural world, and the kind of person who (like myself) makes a point of looking at the moon when possible and following its phases. 

Certainly, it is known that the Lord of the Rings was interrupted for a prolonged spell in 1944-6 (when the Notion Club Papers were drafted) because of difficulty synchronizing the phases of the moon between different parts of the narrative. In fact he never quite managed to solve this problem - but it is a ather obscure matter, and doesn't mean much.

Yet Tolkien made the elementary mistake of recurrently describing his protagonists observing the New Moon Rising at night - when in fact the New Moon rises only during the day - after dawn, following the rising sun - indeed when it is newest the moon is invisible due to being lost in the light from the nearby sun.

(The time to see the New Moon is just after sunset, in the evening - when the New Moon is setting, not rising.)

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Three examples:

The first comes from The Hobbit where Bard shoots Smaug the Dragon at the rising of the moon when the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered [Smaug's] great wings... the waxing moon rose higher and higher.

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Then we see something similar in the drafts of The Lord of the Rings published in the History of Middle Earth as The Return of the Shadow when Christopher Tolkien notes:

Above the mists away in the East the thin silver rind of the New Moon appeared, and rising swift and clear out of the shadow it swung gleaming in the sky.
My father no doubt made this change on account of what he had said elsewhere about the Moon; for there was a waxing moon as the hobbits  approached Weathertop, and it was 'nearly half-full' on the night of the attack: the attack was on 5 October...
and there could not be a full or nearly full Moon on 24  September, the night passed with the Elves in the Woody End... On that night it must have been almost New Moon. … But it is an odd and uncharacteristic aberration that my father envisaged a New Moon rising late at night in the East.

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However, if this mistake was indeed odd it was not really uncharacteristic, because when, in the house of Tom Bombadil, Frodo dreams about Gandalf, imprisoned on the tower of Orthanc:

In the dead night, Frodo lay in a dream without light. Then he saw the young moon rising; under its thin light there loomed before him a black wall of rock, pierced by a dark arch like a great gate.

That new moon rising, yet again!

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Was Tolkien envious? - a bleg

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I keep coming across people ascribing envy to Tolkien, as if it were a sin to which he were particularly prone.

Especially people say Tolkien felt envy of C.S Lewis (e.g. Lewis's fluency as a writer, or his fame, or his friendship with Charles Williams) - but I cannot myself recall a single instance of Tolkien expressing envy about anything; and particularly not about his friend Jack Lewis. The emotion seems alien to him.

But please correct me if I am wrong - does anybody know of any instance in which Tolkien really was envious?

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A plausible non-explanation for why Tolkien and Lewis's friendship cooled...

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It is plausible that the cooling of the once-close friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, while real, may have been over-played and over-explained. 

After all, how many male friendships last longer than Tolkien and Lewis's? (Leaving aside those which begin in childhood and youth.)

Male friendship is usually based in an alliance, a collaboration, working on something together.

Hence men friends tend to grow apart when circumstances change and the no longer have a shared project.

Quite likely The Lord of the Rings was that shared project which held Lewis and Tolkien together - and the end of writing LotR simply reduced the strength of the main factor holding them close - rather than there being some other factor which drove them apart.

Perhaps their friendship weakened (it never disappeared) mostly due to the loss of a powerfully-attracting magnetic field (i.e. LotR) rather than the addition of a repellant force/s (such as Charles Williams, Narnia books or Joy Davidman). 

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H/T - This interpretation arose from an e-mail exchange with Dr Christopher Mitchell of Wheaton College, Illinois.

A random thought about NCPs

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There is, as it stands - as it comes to us, a gratuitous quality to the Notion Club Papers. Where is it coming from? Where is it going? It hasn't found its place. Yet it isn't a story. It is about things - almost like an essay.

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Tolkien travelling on a dream-meteor

This remarkable and strange passage from The Notion Club Papers is an instance where I infer that Tolkien is being - in essence - autobiographical.

Of course I cannot be sure, but Note 32 indicates one of several instances in the NCPs in which a very strange dream reported by Ramer is confirmed as autobiographical by Christopher Tolkien - and it seems reasonable to suppose there are others which Christopher either did not reference or which were not known to him (see references at the end).

For me, the extreme strangeness of these dreams (given that several are confirmed) is evidence towards their autobiographical nature - given the context of how and why the Notion Club Papers was written, and the intended audience of Inklings.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/a-companion-to-jrr-tolkiens-notion-club.html


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'But all the time, of course, I wanted to get off the Earth. That's how I got the notion of studying a meteorite, instead of mooning about with houses, ruins, trees, boulders, and all sorts of other things.

'There is a very large meteorite in a park, Gunthorpe Park in Matfield, where I lived as a boy, after we came back from abroad; even then it had a strange fascination for me. I wondered if it could have come from Malacandra. I took to hobnobbing with it again, in the vacs.

'Indeed, I made myself ridiculous and an object of suspicion. I wanted to visit the stone alone at night - to lessen the distractions; but I was not allowed to: closing hours were closing hours. So I gave that up. It seemed to be quite without results.'

'So the poor old stone was left all alone?' said Lowdham.

'Yes,' said Ramer. 'It was. It is a very long way indeed from home, and it is very lonely. That is, there is a great loneliness in it, for a perceiver to perceive.

'And I got a very heavy dose of it. In fact I can't bear to look at such things now. For I found, about the end of the long vac. two years ago, after my final visit, that there had been results. It had evidently taken some time to digest them, and even partially translate them. But that is how I first got away, out beyond the sphere of the Moon, and very much further.'

'Travelling on a dream-meteor!' said Frankley. 'Hm! So that's your method, is it?'

'No,' said Ramer. 'Not if you mean how I got the news of Emberu that I put into my tale. But I did work back into the meteorite's history, I think; though that sort of vehicle does not readily give any place or time references that can be related to our waking point.

'I did get, all the rest of that term, and I still do get occasionally, some very odd dreams or sleep-experiences: painful often, and alarming. Some were quite unpictorial, and those were the worst.

'Weight, for instance. Just Weight with a capital W: very horrible. But it was not a weight that was pressing on me, you understand; it was a perception of, or sympathy in, an experience of almost illimitable weight.(Note 34)

'And Speed too. Heavens! waking up from that one was like hitting a wall, though only a wall of light and air in my bedroom, at a hundred miles a second - or rather, like knowing about it.

'And Fire! I can't describe that. Elemental Fire: fire that is, and does not consume, but is a mode or condition of physical being. But I caught sight of blazing fire, too: some real pictures. One, I think, must have been a glimpse of the meteorite hitting our air. A mountain corroded into a boulder in a few seconds of agonizing flame.

'But above, or between, or perhaps through all the rest, I knew endlessness. That's perhaps emotional and inaccurate. I mean Length with a capital L, applied to Time; unendurable length to mortal flesh. In that kind of dream you can know about the feeling of aeons of constricted waiting.

'Being part of the foundations of a continent, and upholding immeasurable tons of rock for countless ages, waiting for an explosion or a world-shattering shock, is quite a common situation in parts of this universe. In many regions there is little or no "free will" as we conceive it. Also, though they are large and terrific, events may be relatively simple in plan, so that catastrophes (as we might call them), sudden changes as the end of long repeated series of small motions, are "inevitable": the present holds the future more completely. A perceiving but passive mind could see a collapse coming from an immense distance of time.

'I found it all very disturbing. Not what I wanted, or at least not what I had hoped for. I saw, anyway, that it would take far too much of a mortal human life to get so accustomed to this kind of vehicle that one could use it properly, or selectively, at will. I gave it up.

'No doubt, when any degree of control was achieved, my mind would no longer have been limited to that particular vehicle or chunk of matter. The waking mind is not confined to the memories, heredity, or senses, of its own normal vehicle, its body: it can use that as a platform to survey the surroundings from. 

'So, probably, it could, if it ever mastered another vehicle: it could survey, in some fashion, other things where the meteorite (say) came from, or things it had passed in its historical journey. But that second transference of observation would certainly be much more difficult than the first, and much more uncertain and inefficient.

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Note 34 (by Christopher Tolkien): My father once described to me his dream of 'pure Weight', but I do not remember when that was: probably before this time.

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See also 

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/ramer-as-tolkien-1_19.html

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/another-ramer-tolkien-parallel.html

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What is communicating in dreams? Self, divine, demonic?

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It is striking how pervasive is the idea of dreams as a potential source of enlightenment, of information, and especially of divine revelations.

This is found among 'shamans' in animistic religions; and other mystics in many religions. And also within the Bible, for example in the New Testament, Joseph (earthly father of Jesus) was one whose dreams repeatedly brought divine revelations:

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Matthew

1: 20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

2: 13-14 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt:

19-20 But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, Saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life.

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It seems that altered states of consciousness are conducive to divine revelations - but why would this be?

And are these revelations most likely to benign, divine and true; or may dream revelations also be the be evil, demonic and false?

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My current understanding is that most dreams, most of the time, for most people have no deep meaning - nor are they divine in origin.

What seems to happen during dreaming sleep is that the mind is cut-off from the environment - the senses are, more or less, ignored - and the  material generated during sleep - parts of which may be remembered as dreams - comes from our memory.

In sum - during dreaming sleep the content of consciousness comes from inside (memories) rather than outside (senses).

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But, most cultures, and most Christians in particular, would acknowledge that the material of dreams could, in principle, also come from divine, from spiritual sources.

And I think there is a kind-of-consensus that spiritual influences in dreams are mostly benign, divine and true; and that it is exceptional, unusual and extreme for spiritual influences during sleep to be evil, demonic and false.  

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This seems to have been the view held by JRR Tolkien, as expressed in the mouth of his alter ego Ramer in the The Notion Club Papers
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/evil-minds-attacking-during-sleep.html:

'Aren't some of the [dream] visitors malicious?' said Jeremy. 'Don't evil minds attack you ever in sleep?'

'I expect so,' said Ramer. 'They're always on the watch, asleep or awake. But they work more by deceit than attack. I don't think they are specially active in sleep. Less so, probably. I fancy they find it easier to get at us awake, distracted and not so aware. The body's a wonderful lever for an indirect influence on the mind, and deep dreams can be very remote from its disturbance...

'But there does come sometimes a frightening... a sort of knocking at the door: it doesn't describe it, but that'll have to do. I think that is one of the ways in which that horrible sense of fear arises: a fear that doesn't seem to reside in the remembered dream-situation at all, or wildly exceeds it...

'That situation may have various explanations here. But out (or down) there sometimes the mind is suddenly aware that there is a night outside, and enemies walk in it: one is trying to get in. But there are no walls,' said Ramer sombrely. 'The soul is dreadfully naked when it notices it, when that is pointed out to it by something alien. It has no armour on it, it has only its being.

'But there is a guardian. He seems to command precipitate retreat. You could, if you were a fool, disobey, I suppose. You could push him away. You could have got into a state in which you were attracted by the fear. But I can't imagine it.'

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The implication seems to be that 'secular dreams' are to do with the self, its experiences and memories; but in some people in some situations there may be revelatory dreams of divine origin.

While a revelation may be misinterpreted, perhaps only people of exceptional and deliberate depravity would be expected to experience revelatory dreams from malicious sources (demonic, evil-intending); and such people would usually bring the evil into the dream from their re-experienced memories.

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But why during sleep? Why should divine communications not happen more when people are awake and alert?

The answer is, I think, merely that sleep is the time when our mind is most closed off from its environment, this where other sources of 'noise' are at a minimum.

Spiritual communications are therefore clearer and stand-out better against the background in altered states of consciousness such as sleep - and relevant and significant divine revelation is usually remembered even during during sleep, despite that normal dream contents may rapidly be forgotten.

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Words versus pictures - Tolkien versus Lewis

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JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were both dreamers, who used dream material in their stories - but the way in which they did this was very different, just as the atmosphere and feel of their books is very different.

Tolkien was a philologist through-and-through, whose writings came from his reflections on words and their history and derivations (see TA Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth).

In other words, Tolkien's stories were generated by the narratives of the words and the relationship between words in different languages - his stories often originated in inferences about how a word came to means what it did in a particular time and place.

Some of these words and languages apparently came to Tolkien during sleep- at least, if we believe that the experiences of Tolkien's alter-egos Ramer and Lowdham of The Notion Club Papers were based on Tolkien's own personal experiences.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/native-language.html 

That is to say, Tolkien's writing was an elaboration of mini-narratives - and the basic unit of his stories was, if not words and their history, little sequences of events

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/creative-method-fo-jrr-tolkien.html

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By contrast, Lewis seems to have worked from single, snapshot-like pictures, which he often saw in nightmares and dreams, and remembered (even though he often wished he did not have to remember them)

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/cs-lewis-as-dreamer.html

Other examples I recall having been attributed to Lewis's dreams are the Faun and lamp post in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Floating Islands in Perelandra and (I think) the 'stinging man' in the unfinished Dark Tower.

Lewis then consciously 'manufactured' stories to link between the pictures.

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I think his may explain why Tolkien was the better and purer storyteller of the two.

Tolkien's stories were dynamic narratives in their essence and origin, while the story element of Lewis serves to link the primary entities which were either static pictures, or else arguments and philosophical ideas.

So, Lewis's novels tend to break up into collages of set pieces and mini-essays (particularly apparent in That Hideous Strength)

...while Tolkien's are true and multi-stranded narratives - as would be expected frm a philologist.

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Wildly inaccurate fantasy cover art

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I do not have a high opinion of publishers - and one of their worst attributes is to use cover art on fiction which is wildly inaccurate, and has either nothing to do with the text, or includes outright falsehoods - people, things and events that never happen in the story.

One of the most notorious was that Ballantine paperback cover of The Hobbit  - which deployed a talented artist, but one who had never read the book and was given such a ludicrously short time to produce the artwork that it was a miracle she completed the picture: there was zero possibility of painting the cover and also reading the book, as is very obvious:

Aside from the picture having nothing to do with anything in The Hobbit it is the pair of emus quietly grazing by the lake and reflected in its placid waters that really get me!

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But what gross, savage disrespect for a publisher to saddle an author with such irrelevant and misleading cover art.

(It should be pointed-out that Tolkien's British publishers were of a completely different mindset - and went to enormous lengths in trying to accommodate Tolkien's exacting requests.)

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Another example is the back cover of my copy of the the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone:

Who the heck is that supposed to be?

Don't say Dumbledore, who is described as: "tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were light, bright and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked, as though it had been broken at least twice."

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No, the fact is that the Philosopher's Stone illustration, which apparently survived for about a score of impressions of the first edition, is of some person who certainly does not appear anywhere in the novel - it is inaccurate simply because there has been no attempt whatsoever to be accurate.

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Usually, the worst excesses are practiced on novice authors; suggesting bullying as a motivation.

But another example is Josh Kirby's illustrations for Terry Pratchett's discworld novels (look them up for yourself, if you dare), which are just plain grotesque as well as inaccurate to the test - but which (since they appeared long after he became a huge seller) I presume were approved by the author; for hard-to-fathom reasons.

With people like this working for publishers, indeed the norm for publishers, it is a miracle of sorts that anything god ever comes from publishing books at all.

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But let's end with a counter-example from the Armada Lion's edition of Lloyd Alexander's Book of Three commencing the Prydain chronicles:

Which is a delightful and accurate illustration by the young and as-yet-unknown Brian Froud; who not long afterwards went-on to co-publish (with Alan Lee) the superb and influential Fairies, and became one of the most famous ever fantasy illustrators.

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Mapping the Notion Club onto the Inklings – a parodic melange featuring in-jokes and running jokes

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While some members are more-or-less based upon real life Inklings (such as Ramer on Tolkien and Dolbear on Havard), each member of the Notion Club in his origin contains playful elements of parodic melange, as appropriate for the status of the NCPs being designed to be read aloud to, and provoke discussion from, the Inklings.

As they progressed, as is usual for Tolkien, the NCPs became more serious, and pulled in (or were pulled-into) Tolkiens deepest concerns.

Yet the playful origins of the NCPs are clear in the earliest draft versions of the Foreword, and the first entry recording the club meetings.

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Preface to the Inklings

While listening to this fantasia (if you do), I beg of the present company not to look for their own faces in the mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your own, but belong to other members of the company – if to anybody.

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The Inklings were being told to look-out for characteristic features of group members, and parodic inversions of such features, but transposed between members.

In other words, the early drafts of the NCPs would have been stuffed with 'in jokes' – only some of which can now be decoded; yet the presence of an in joke is often implied by context, even when we cannot decode it.

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Just to recap the six main Inklings members in the period leading up to 1945-6 when the NCPs was written; and therefore those members whose identities were most probably the models to be listed, inverted and mashed-up; in no particular order they were:

Inklings

Jack Lewis

Warnie Lewis

Tolkien

Havard

Dyson

and Charles Williams

(who died about 6 months before NCPs were drafted)

Notion Club

Ramer

Lowdham

Frankley

Dolbear

Guildford

Jeremy

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There is apparently no character that is 'based upon' Charles Williams, at least not obviously; quite likely because his absence was too recent and too keenly felt to permit of jesting parody – but it is not hard to suppose that a few scattered references in relation to Jeremy and elsewhere may have raised a rueful reminiscent smile from the surviving Inklings.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/who-is-wilfrid-jeremy-cw-crt.html

As an example of parodic inversion, early notes indicate that the character Frankley was originally 'based on' Jack Lewis, yet he is described as suffering from 'horror borealis',  that is the supposed medical condition of being 'intolerant of all things Northern or Germanic' – which is the opposite preference from Lewis's own well-known Nordic preferences.

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The first entry in the NCPs, part one, is Night 54:

A wet night. Only Frankley and Dolbear arrived (Dolbear's house).

Dolbear reports that Philip never said a word worth recording, but read him an unintelligable poem about a Mechanical Nightingale (or he thought that was the subject).

Frankley reports that Rufus was drowsy and kept on chuckling to himself. The only clearly audible remark that he made was 'going off the deep end I think'. This was in reply to an enquiry about Michael Ramer, and whether D had seen him lately.

After F had read a poem (later read again) called The Canticle of Artegall they parted.

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Aside from the single 'plot point' regarding Ramer possibly going off the deep end (i.e. going crazy); night 54 reads very much like an in-joke, as if it was based on an actual incident – presumably a meeting between Jack Lewis and Havard, and perhaps based on the fact that afterwards each gave a very different account of the proceedings.

The entry is written in a droll style, yet it is not clear what the actual jokes are. Possibly these include a mishearing of a poem title (maybe even Keats 'ode to a' nightingale being misheard as 'mechanical', and the drowsiness of Dolbear/ Havard.

As noted elsewhere on this blog, I have asked the real-life Havard's eldest son John whether it was characteristic of his father to be drowsy or nod off to sleep in company, and John says he has no recollection that this was the case.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/how-similar-are-dolbear-humphrey-havard.html

Yet, of course, it would only need a single such incident of doziness (plausibly, since Havard was a doctor, after being kept awake all the previous night by on-call medical work), an incident quite likely unknown to his son, for the doziness of Havard to become an established stereotype and a 'running joke' among the Inklings – that is exactly the way things often work in groups of men (or boys).

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As for the Canticle of Artegall, Christopher Tolkien has drawn a blank in unravelling the meaning of Artegall beyond noting that the Irish for article is arteagal.

My guess at the in-joke here is that Jack Lewis, at some point in an Inklings meeting, slipped into his Ulster accent and pronounced article as phonetically transcribed by 'artegall' – provoking first incomprehension then jocularity – and that this also became a running joke such that the 'song of artegall' was an amusing title for a poem by the parody Lewis.

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Whether I have guessed right about these NCP in-jokes is probably unknowable, and not as important as the internal evidence that they are indeed in-jokes; and can be understood as intended to refer to some kind of running-joke of the Inklings.

(If the NCPs had ever reached the stage of being prepared for publication, these bits of private humour would most likely have been deleted.)

Such in-jokes and running jokes were entirely characteristic of the Inklings, as we know from other sources such as the Lewis brothers' letters and journals - although by no means restricted to the Inklings, but indeed to be found wherever men (or boys) gather for extended periods.

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The best book which, otherwise than my recommending it, you would be unlikely to buy

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Is the collection of essays Roots and Branches: selected papers on Tolkien by Tom Shippey (Walking Tree Publishers, 2007).

Assuming you are a Tolkien fan, so that you can appreciate the medium of discussion, this is just one of the best books I have ever read that is not a classic; it is, indeed, virtually unknown.

Replete with gems, such as:

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Extracts from Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien's images of evil:

...it becomes clear that though the Ringwraiths do have physical capacities, their real weapon is psychological: they disarm their victims by striking them with fear and despair.

This at least is a suggestive concept. Many people during the course of the twentieth century, and authors as different from Tolkien and from each other as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and William Golding, have been surprised, even baffled, by the strange passivity of the Western world (a phrase Tolkien would have accepted) in the face of deadly dangers coming out of the East. 

Whole communities seem again and again to have gone to their deaths in a sleepwalking state, abandoning thoughts of resistance when it would have been entirely feasible. In contests between the strong and the weak, the weak (wraiths) have often won. 

...The obvious wraith in [That Hideous Strength] is Wither, the Deputy Director of NICE. On one level he is an obvious example of the bureaucrat, that characteristic twentieth century figure. His language is elaborate, polished, utterly evasive. He is master of getting his own way... without committing himself to any statement at all. It is impossible to argue with him since he never says anything which contains any substance; nor does he appear to remember anything he has said before.

All this is familiar enough to those who work in large organizations.

...[Lewis and Tolkien] demonstrate between them that one of the major advantages of fantasy in the modern world is that it effectively addresses the major threats of the modern world, like work, tedium, despair and bureaucracy, so often a closed book to modern mainstream authors without real-life work experience. 

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Roots and Branches by Tom Shippey.

If you a) like Tolkien and b) trust my judgment (...?): then buy it!
 
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What would happen, exactly, if the goodies tried to wield the One Ring

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The following useful and interesting explanation is found in The History of Middle Earth volume 8 The War of the Ring (page 401), in the context of an early draft of 'The Last Debate' chapter .

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'But if we should find the Ring and wield it, how would it give us victory?' asked Imrahil.

 'It would not do so all in a day,' answered Gandalf. 'But were it to come to the hand of some one of power [?or] royalty, as say the Lord Aragorn, or the Steward of this City, or Elrond of Imladrist, or even to me, then he being the Ringlord would wax ever in power and the desire of power; and all minds he would cow or dominate so that they would blindly do his will.

'And he could not be slain.

'More: the deepest secrets of the mind and heart of Sauron would become plain to him, so that the Dark Lord could do nothing unforseen. The Ringlord would suck the very power and thought from him, so that all would forsake his allegiance and follow the Ringlord, and they would serve him and worship him as a God.

'And so Sauron would be overthrown utterly and fade into oblivion; but behold, there would be Sauron still...

'but upon the other side, [a tyrant brooking no freedom, shrinking from no deed of evil to hold his sway and to widen it].'

**

A striking phrase is that the Ringlord would suck the very power and thought from Sauron, so that all would forsake his allegiance and follow the Ringlord.

* 

Tolkien fandom then and now: Tolkien-based or meta-Tolkien - the Litmus Test of re-reading

*

As a young teen in the early 1970s and a Tolkien fan, the essence of fandom was re-reading.

There was very little published material by Tolkien, even less about him - all of it was expensive and most of it was inaccessible on a pocket-money budget.

Therefore, I read and re-read Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.

*

Nowadays, a fan need never re-read because there is so much secondary and tertiary material - there are the movies and their fandom - so many web sites, so much chat-about Tolkien-related matters.

There is no need to re-read - and anyway re-reading is quantitatively swamped by all the other stuff.

For the modern Tolkien fan, therefore, Tolkien is mostly a mass media phenomenon: the modern Tolkien fan is actually a meta-Tolkien fan: a fan of Tolkienish stuff of which Tolkien is a part, but by no means the dominant part.

*

I doubt whether the modern Tolkien fan experiences those years upon Years of aching desire for more of the same; only satiated (and only partly) by returning again and again to the books: to Tolkien's own words.

*

Why is it important to recognize that Tolkien was not exactly a niggler?

*

In the previous post I argued that Tolkien was not fundamentally a niggler - against which Troels produced some robust arguments.

Now he has been joined in his pro-niggling onslaught by Tom Shippey, no less, who wrote me in an e-mail: 

Well, I have to agree with Troels. I've recently written the chapter on T as editor for Stuart Lee's forthcoming Companion, and honestly, how did he get away with it? Oxford professor, of course, which helps when it comes to dealing with OUP, but of the 11 projects he took up, only one was completed satisfactorily and more or less on time, which was the SGGK edition - and Gordon was the motor who drove that. Tolkien didn't really have a lot to do. 

The Sisam Glossary is full of niggling, in the sense of quite unnecessary detail - I bet the majority of his entries have never been looked at once in all the years since 1921, nor did they need to be - and that was what sank the Clarendon Chaucer (which, by the way, has been recently rediscovered under the urging of John M. Bowers from Las Vegas). 

Another failure was the Ancrene Wisse edition, which took 33 years to come out, and was not only delayed by totally unnecessary fussing over presentation, but appeared, quite against normal procedure, without the usual introduction and notes, which Tolkien was ideally suited to produce. If I had been the OUP editor responsible I would have handed the job over to G T Shepherd, who did many of the things Tolkien should have done, with far less backing.

I admit that I have known several academics who were EVEN WORSE, and that it is a professional deformation. And Tolkien was good about helping other people, like Simone d'Ardenne.

Also that he had an all-purpose excuse, which is that his mind was on other and more important things. He could indeed write quickly and directly once he saw his way clear.

Alas that he was not relieved of academic duties and put on permanent sabbatical, say about 1940. And maybe he would have been better-off to stay in Leeds and continue working with Gordon. But then he would not have had the stimulus of Lewis, without whom LotR would not have been finished, by all accounts.

So, why don't I just throw in the towel and admit defeat?

*

The reason is that we importantly need to recognize that Tolkien was not a niggler pure and simple, in order properly to understand his character and achievement.

Most nigglers - by which I mean those with an over-scrupulous attention to 'minor' details which other people regard as trivial - are highly conscientious characters, dutiful, able to grind away at any job until it is done.

If we have known nigglers in our own lives, the chances are that they were of this highly conscientious type.

*

Yet Tolkien was not of this type. His over-scrupulous attention to microscopic detail was (from his youth, and throughout adult and professional life) combined with an inability to stick to what he was 'supposed to do' but did not actually want to do.

This was what led to his failure to get a Scholarship to Oxford (and having to settle for a lower Exhibition award at the second attempt) and to his nearly disastrous performance in the first part of his Classics degree (only just avoiding a third class rank - which would probably have finished any realistic chance of an academic job).

Lack of conscientiousness also accounts for other aspects of his later professional performance - as one example that he apparently 'always' failed to complete the subject matter of his lecture courses, because of spending too much time on the early parts, until he ran out of time.

*

What we see with Tolkien is in fact is a much stranger mixture of extreme attention to detail and perfectionism with an ability to work hard and with close attention for long hours - yet combined with an almost endless ability to put off working on things he was not fundamentally interested by; leading to an apparent selfishness and willfulness of behaviour whereby he could not make himself complete, but would not abandon, projects.

*

Like most creative geniuses (according to H.J Eysenck), Tolkien was relatively high in the personality trait called Psychoticism.

(Word search this term in this blog for further information, and see http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/a-companion-to-jrr-tolkiens-notion-club.html).

Psychoticism is associated with high creativity - especially 'schizotypal' creativity of the dream-like type: widely-associative and insightful (in novel ways).

But Psychoticism is also associated with low conscientiousness, and a certain independence from the opinion/ approval of others that borders on selfishness (in other words low Agreeableness, in one of the modern terminologies of personality traits).

So the typical creative genius, who is high in Psychoticism, is someone whose hard work is channelled into their avocation - their self chosen hobby - rather than their vocation (appointed job): to use the words of Robert Frost from Two Tramps in Mud Time:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes. 

*

Tolkien certainly succeeded in uniting his avocation and his vocation - but ruthlessly, at the expense of his vocation.

With respect to his vocation Tolkien was a prevaricator, a putter-offer and a delayer  - yet would not cancel because, in a sense, he needed the 'cover' of having these projects which he was 'working on'. The way he put-off working-on or completing these tasks was the most natural to him - that is niggling; but niggling without urgency or purpose.

Therefore I would regard Tolkien's 1961 comment to Rayner Unwin, that he was a 'natural niggler' to be essentially an excuse; a self-justifying but not complete and accurate explanation of frequent endless delays.

Meanwhile, no effort was too great for his avocation - yet the niggling was disciplined, kept in bounds by the need to complete and publish his beloved hobbies - as soon as he saw the way ahead, by which he could fulfil his distinctive purposes through writing, the work flowed swift and sure to completion.

*

So Tolkien was either at most a partial-niggler; or else the word 'niggler' needs to be redefined to exclude merely conscientious, dutiful attention to detail.

*

Was Tolkien not a niggler?

*

"I am a natural niggler, alas!" said JRR Tolkien in a letter to Rayner Unwin of December 30 10961 - he was, of course, referring to his story Leaf by Niggle in which the protagonist with the name of Niggle is so delayed by his niggling-away at minutiae of his Big Painting, then death takes him before the work is completed.

*

Leaf by Niggle was written in 1938-9, during the time Tolkien was working on the Hobbit-sequel that ultimately became Lord of the Rings - and working on that particular book at that particular time, Tolkien was indeed a niggler par excellence.

*

I have been slowly re-reading volume six of The History of Middle Earth devoted to the early stages in composing Lord of the Rings (The Return of the Shadow, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 1988); and sure enough there is a vast amount of niggling going on.

But the context is that Tolkien was (more or less) forcing himself to write this Hobbit-sequel - it was not what he spontaneously wanted to write, it was being done 'to order' following the success of The Hobbit and a request from the publisher for another book about hobbits.

*

As I read Return of the Shadow for something like the third time, and more carefully than before, I am struck by how poor (by Tolkien's own standards) some parts of it are - just about the worst fiction writing of  Tolkien's that I have seen: worse than the Hobbit, worse than Farmer Giles, and worse than the drafts of The Lost Road.

The problem is that so much of the writing lacks spontaneity and seems contrived and at times just silly. Clearly the story wasn't flowing forth, and was having to be squeezed out.

Consequently, the Hobbit-sequel was coming-out wrong, with gross incoherences of plot and tone, and vacillations on key principles - in other words the text needed an awful lot of 'niggling' in order to try and 'fix' the inconsistencies.

*

But later on in the writing of Lord of the Rings (I am not sure of the timing, but certainly from after Tolkien broke off in 1945-6, during which he began the aborted Notion Club Papers) the LotR text flows easily, and the first draft is typically very similar to the final published version.

The later portions of LotR thus emerged quite rapidly and without need of much revision.

*

And this seems to have been the norm for Tolkien.

Most of Tolkien's books were composed quickly, and the first drafts are both high in literary quality, and requiring very little revision and not much 'niggling'.

Thus Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wooton Major were all produced quickly with good first drafts. Both the Lost Tales, and the 1920s and 30s versions of The Silmarillion were composed quite quickly, and with an immediately-attained high quality of both literary finish and factual cohesion.

Even unrevised and only posthumously-published works like Roverandom and the Father Christmas Letters were written quickly, and with a high level of literary finish at the first (and only) attempt.

Tolkien's letters were also often of superb literary quality and organization.  

*

So, when Tolkien was writing what he wanted to write, for reasons of inner motivation - he worked quickly and attained excellent first drafts.

Tolkien was therefore not by nature a niggler

- except when he was being forced to work at externally-imposed projects, or work faster than he wanted to go.

*

At what precise point did The Hobbit-sequel change into Lord of the Rings

*

According to Professor Tom Shippey (the greatest-ever Tolkien scholar who is not also Tolkien's son) this point occurred on 9.Feb.1942 and is described on page 424 of The Treason of Isengard (volume seven of the History of Middle Earth edited by Christopher Tolkien, 1992).

Shippey makes this claim in an essay entitled "Tolkien and Iceland: the philology of envy" in the (superb) collection of essays Roots and Branches (2007).

**

The context is this paragraph:

We know now that Tolkien had great difficulty in getting his story going. In my opinion, he did not break through until, on February 9th 1942, he settled the issue of languages.

Think about the dwarves, with their Old Norse names. Clearly it was not possible for the dwarves really to have had Old Norse names, they lived long long ago, long before Old Norse was a language.

So the names Tolkien had given them, in a work written in modern English, must be there just to show that the dwarves, for convenience, spoke a language which related to the hobbits language in the same sort of way as Old Norse to modern English, or modern Icelandic to modern English - these things do happen in reality.

But if that was the case, then it was possible to imagine, in Middle Earth, a place where people were still speaking English, or even Gothic, a place where the poem Beowulf was still alive. 

Once Tolkien allowed himself to think this - and we can see him doing so on page 424 of The Treason of Isengard - then he could immediately, and with great ease, imagine the society of the Riders of Rohan, or the Riddermark, contrast them with the post Imperial society of Gondor, and allow his story to expand in entirely new and to Tolkien quite unexpected directions. 

The linguistic correspondences freed Tolkien's imagination. They made the book three times as long as it was supposed to be...

**

So what exactly is written on page 424 of TToI?

Language of Shire = modern English
Language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region)
Language of Rohan = Old English

'Modern English' is lingua franca spoken by all people (except a few secluded folk like Lorien) - but little and ill by orcs. 

*

Thus is answered the puzzle of why the dwarves in the Hobbit had Norse names (they came from near Dale) - and potentially also why Gandalf has a Norse name (taken from the same Icelandic source as the dwarves names - indeed Gandalf was originally the name of Thorin).

Shippey (himself a philologist) was able to intuit how much such apparent inconsistencies in nomenclature bothered Tolkien; and how important it was that they should be resolved. And, as is usual with Tolkien, the language led to the story - new elements in the history of Middle Earth.

*

So I am pretty confident Shippey is right about this solution releasing Tolkien to let the story flow; although (as I have argued elsewhere on the blog) there remained a more spiritual/ religious problem about the 'purpose' of the story; which - together with a period of Psychological stress or illness - blocked the Lord of the Rings for a sustained period from 1944 until the late summer of 1946; when the experience of working on The Notion Club Papers seems to have finally enabled Tolkien to proceed without further major gaps in composition to finish Lord of the Rings in the form we have it.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/a-companion-to-jrr-tolkiens-notion-club.html

*

Tolkien nods: The saga of Trotter's feet

*

In reading The History of Middle Earth, and the early drafts of Lord of the Rings, there are some 'cold sweat moments' when you realize how horribly wrong it all might have gone - or perhaps it is just that a genius needs to make mistakes en route to a masterpiece.

Many of these relate to the character called Trotter - a friend of Gandalf whom the hobbits met at the Prancing Pony in Bree and who guides them to Rivendell.

*

Trotter eventually became the noble Numenorean heir to the throne of Gondor and Arnor we know as Aragorn - but he began as a brown skinned hobbit who wore wooden shoes.

The wooden shoes - whose clopping sound on the road explains the nickname of 'trotter' - seem (for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom) to have been taken by Tolkien as an immovable necessity to the story, and he expended considerable ingenuity in devising explanations for why a hobbit should be wearing clogs...

*

These matters come to a head in the draft chapter for the Council of Elrond (page 401 of The Return of the Shadow - volume 6 of The History of Middle Earth) :

Gandalf spoke long, making clear to those who did not already know the tale in full the ancient history of the Ring, and the reasons why the Dark Lord so greatly desired it.

Bilbo then gave  an account of the finding of the Ring in the cave of the Misty Mountains, and Trotter described his search for Gollum that he had made with Gandalf's help, and told of his perilous adventures in Mordor. 

Thus it was that Frodo learned how Trotter had tracked Gollum as he wandered southwards, through Fangorn Forest, and past the Dead Marshes, until he had himself been caught and imprisoned by the Dark Lord.

'Ever since I have worn shoes,' said Trotter with a shudder, and though he said no more Frodo knew he had been tortured and his feet hurt in some way...  

[Reference 20]

*

Well, all this is bad. After all this build-up about the clogs we get the phrase 'Hurt in some way...

Lame, one might say. 

*

But worse is yet to come.

The real, twenty-four carat cold sweat moment comes in Reference 20, where Christopher Tolkien reveals:

My father bracketed the passage from 'Ever since I have worn shoes' to 'hurt in some way', and wrote in the margin (with a query) that it should be revealed later that Trotter had wooden feet.

Go back and read that last sentence again...

*

Clogs would have been bad enough; but instead of the noble Aragorn, we very nearly had a mahogany-footed halfling.


Phew! (Wipes brow with large spotted handkerchief.)

*

Review of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain

*

Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007) - published between1964-1968:

The Book of Three
The Black Cauldron
The Castle of Llyr
Taran Wanderer
The High King

Rating Four Stars (from a total of five)

*

These books are among my favourite fantasy books. I came across them via a reference in Lin Carter's A look behind the Lord of the Rings and bought the first three volumes in the middle 1970s - only completing the set when the last two volumes were published in the UK in the 1980s. They are among my very favourite of the post-Tolkien fantasies that I have come across (but I don't read very widely in this genre).

*

In terms of difficulty the books are pitched at about the same level as the first two volumes of the Harry Potter series - age about 8-11 yars old.

I freely acknowledge that there is a certain 'corniness' about the structure of the books, with frequent 'cliffhangers' at the ends of chapters, for instance, and a somewhat low plausibility of action (especially battles - despite the author having seen active service in the US army during the European invasion of WWII); and an element of sentimentality concerning the main characters. this hold them back from the highest level of attainment.

However, these are good hearted books, and there is always a very appealing earnestness and seriousness about them - the author was really doing his best and trying to put his deepest convictions into this series. And they are extremely enjoyable - full of humour, adventure and pathos.

*

The world of Prydain is loosely based on the 'Mabinogion' legends of ancient Wales - a world of approximately Ancient Briton technology - but of course one where there is magic: enchanters (good and evil) magical swords, cauldrons, foresight, incantations etc; and several races and types of being - dwarves and other fairy 'Fair Folk', undead warriors and so on - including the one and only Gurgi who seems to be a 'missing link' between Orang Utans and humans. In sum, it is a very satisfying subcreation.

*

I have just finished (at least) my fourth read through of the series (and I have dipped into it at other times) - and I always feel better for having read it.

It is one of those books I like party because the author seems such a good and decent man.

(Most authors are not good and decent men - and I have a special fondness for those who are. Another example of g-ness and decency is Jerome K Jerome as evidenced by his autobiography My Life and Times (1926) which is also one of the best autobiographies I have ever read.)

There is a delightful three segment interview/ visit with Lloyd Alexander recorded in 1994 and currently available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jln9VPoP3Tw

*

Tolkien or Lewis - who was the most intelligent?

*

There is not much in it - and we must remember that 'general intelligence' ('g', measured as IQ) is only one dimension of cognitive ability - and creativity (in particular) is a separate dimension. In terms of creativity, Tolkien excelled Lewis -

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/personality-of-jrr-tolkien-classic.html

(General intelligence is that concept - constructed statistically as IQ - which was hypothesized to explain why all cognitive abilities co-correlate in population samples - to a greater or lesser extent. In groups, being good at one cognitive task - memory, general knowledge, mathematics, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, vocabulary, reading age etc... any one and all such tasks - correlates with being good at any and all others.)

*

In terms of approximations, general intelligence can roughly be measured in terms of speed of learning and capacity for abstract reasoning.

And in traditional educational systems, where ability is measured in supervised and time limited exams that require on the spot thinking as well as memory, there is a high correlation between exam results and intelligence.

(This correlation is much lower now due to the non-validity of examinations and endemic cheating - a.k.a. 'coursework'.)

*

So, we can compare Tolkien and Lewis head to head on examinations.

1. Oxford scholarship examinations. Lewis got a Scholarship (the largest financial award) at the first attempt; but Tolkien only got an Exhibition (a lower level of award) at the second attempt.

2. Both Tolkien and Lewis began by studying the same course (Classics, or Literae Humaniores) at much the same time (Tolkien 'went up' to Oxford in 1911, Lewis in 1917) - in the first set of exams in that course Tolkien (only just) got a second class while Lewis got a First.

3. Tolkien switched his degree to English in which he got a First class degree; Lewis stayed in Classics where he also got a First. But Lewis's L.H. degree was Oxford's oldest and highest-status degree (a four year course) while English was a lower ranked 'upstart' (and a three year course).

(Just one year after completing his classics degree, Lewis did the English degree (a three year degree completed in one year) - and got yet another First... A Triple First!)

*

After this point there is a wide divergence, because Tolkien had a precocious academic career in which - with the assistance of good fortune - a few items of high quality early scholarship led to a very early Oxford Professorship - after which his published productivity declined substantially.

Lewis, on the other hand, published almost nothing except poetry until his mid-thirties and it was not until his late thirties when The Allegory of Love made his academic reputation, after which was unleashed a veritable tidal wave of published scholarship - plus of course the other work in fiction and apologetics for which he became famous among the general public -  and it was not until Lewis's fifties that he became a Professor (in Cambridge).

*

But on head-to-head comparisons, Lewis beat Tolkien clearly on the entrance exam and the interim Classical Moderations exam - and Lewis's performance in general is better.

I conclude that Lewis was more intelligent than Tolkien in the sense of having a higher IQ. 

(Although both were clearly very intelligent, in the top less-than-one-percent of the population!)

*

The idea that Lewis has higher IQ than Tolkien fits with Lewis being famous for his memory, ability to quote, and swiftness of assertion and response in conceptual argument.

Having said that, Lewis did recognize other people as superior in intelligence to himself - for example he certainly regarded the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe as more intelligent than himself.

*

So, Tolkien and Lewis were both exceptionally intelligent and creative: but Tolkien was more creative and Lewis was more intelligent.

*

Review of the Father Christmas Letters Audiobook

*

JRR Tolkien. Letters from Father Christmas - Audiobook read by Derek Jacobi (plus John Moffatt, Christian Rodska). 1997. Two CD set - 2:08 hours.

Four Stars (from maximum of Five)

*

Due to excellent personal service from an Amazon marketplace seller, who enclosed a specialized printout catalogue with the book, I came across Richard Johnson's Qoheleth Resources

www.qohelethresources.co.uk

from which I bought a secondhand audiobook of Tolkien's Father Christmas letters read by Derek Jacobi - presumably the fruit of the same recording sessions which left us Jacobi's  superb versions of Farmer Giles, Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) which I have owned and loved for several years.

I had no idea about the existence of this recording of Father Christmas; and perhaps I would not have been very interested by it if I had been aware; since it does not seem obvious that the work would transfer well to audiobook in the absence of Tolkien's illustrations.

But it does transfer, very well - and of course I can either recall the illustrations or look at the book while listening.

*

Indeed, I take away from this audiobook a greatly enhanced evaluation of the Father Christmas letters, since I discovered how interesting and enjoyable they are for listening.

The great writer as father is a topic inevitably neglected by biographers - since it was not Fatherhood which made Tolkien famous - yet Tolkien comes across the years as a wonderful father - inspiring, even.

It is not just the sheer sustained effort which went into preparing these annual letters and paintings for his children - from 1920 to 1943 - twenty four years! But the details of love and concern within them.

This example of loving Fatherhood provides a 'depth' to the Letters, which underpins their more obvious storytelling charm - little comedy and adventure tales from the North Pole - usually featuring the North Polar Bear as either the cause or cure of these troubles.

Here, the Bear's voice is interjected by a deep voiced actor, John Moffatt, very effectively. Some of the later letters also have sections by the elf secretary Ilbereth (not Elbereth!) voiced by the ubiquitous and excellent English radio/audiobook character actor Christian Rodska.

*

I have only two complaints - there is a somewhat-excessive amount of music between the letters - often an instrumental arrangement of Joy to the World, and done on synthesizers: tastefully, but still...

Also, Derek Jacobi makes a complete Horlicks of reading-out the verse letter from 1938. I find it peculiar but true that most actors, even great actors like Sir Derek, are naturally very bad at reading verse - unless they are given detailed direction by somebody who can read verse.

*

What is most remarkable, considering these are letter written for private family consumption, serially over more than two decades, and spanning a time from Tolkien as young academic to a successful published author - is how well they work as a whole.

There is a definite sense of spanning the arc from the young childhood of his youngest son John to the leaving of childhood by Priscilla, his daughter and the youngest - with a bittersweet feeling about the leaving-behind of innocence and the prospects ahead.

The last letter is indeed a formal goodbye, a signing-off.

*

In sum, anyone who loves Tolkien's minor works (Farmer Giles, Smith, Niggle, Adventures of Tom Bombadil etc) is likely to love this recording; if you can get hold of a copy...

*

The essence of The Inklings: idea for an Inklings Reader

*

How could someone 'get' the essence of The Inklings, and what they were 'about'?

Well, not from reading Humphrey Carpenter's group biography, where the group are seen merely as C.S Lewis's friends. And not quite from Diane Pavlac Glyer's The Company they Keep - which sees them as a writers' group.

To understand the Inklings in their primary importance, as the last influential group of English Christian traditionalists or reactionaries, requires a different - and idiosyncratic - programme of reading; one which focuses on a set of texts that are mostly non-canonical.

1. Charles Williams The Place of the Lion. I see this is the primary text which - from 1936 when they first read it - inspired both Lewis and Tolkien to their greatest achievement; specifically in terms of reconnecting modern man with mythic history. I do not think anything else by CW had significant influence, thus Williams' influence on Lewis and Tolkien was essentially complete before he began attending the Inklings in person from 1939. 

2. JRR Tolkien The Lost Road/ Notion Club Papers. These two unfinished novels, begun in 1936 and finished-with in 1946, represent Tolkien's most direct representation and expression of what The Inklings was about.

3. CS Lewis The Dark Tower and That Hideous Strength. The short fragment of an unfinished novel and the climax of Lewis's science fiction trilogy form the culmination and fullest expression of The Inklings ethos.

*

As secondary literature, there is not much - but of particular relevance are John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War for its description of Tolkien's early pre-Inkling group - the TCBS; and my own rambling compilation published on this blog: the Companion to the NCPs

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/a-companion-to-jrr-tolkiens-notion-club.html

*

Charles Williams' adulterous love, and his apostasy

*

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/can-love-be-bad-lessons-from-life-of.html

*

The Place of the Lion: apex of Charles Williams' work?

*

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-essence-of-religious-mind.html

*

Was Tolkien jealous of Charles Williams friendship with Lewis? Certainly NOT

*

It is an error, although very commonly repeated, that Tolkien was jealous of Williams' friendship with Lewis.

*

There is not a scrap of contemporary evidence to support the idea, indeed everything written during Williams' life supports the idea that Tolkien was very fond of Williams (and of his participation in the Inklings), and that this fondness extended until after Williams death with the preparation of Essays Presented to Charles Williams (in which On Fairy Stories first appeared).

I have argued elsewhere that Tolkien's Notion Club Papers, the attempted-novel of 1945-6 (after Williams death), was heavily influenced by Williams 

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/notion-club-papers-are-tolkiens-charles.html

Yet later on, from around 1960, there were several retrospective comments from Tolkien (e.g. in letters now published) about him not having much liked Williams, and that Williams was Lewis's friend.

*

The most plausible explanation for this sequence is that Tolkien read one or both of two books which contained biographical material on Williams and which were published at the end of the 1950s: Anne Ridler's Image of the City and other Essays (1958), or Alice Mary Hadfield's An Introduction to Charles Williams - both of which revealed aspects of Williams biography of which Tolkien had probably been unaware, and of which Tolkien strongly disapproved.

Thus, Tolkien retrospectively changed his opinion of Charles Williams, and 're-wrote' the history of their relationship in correspondence etc. published post-1960.

*

What aspects of Williams' life, revealed by Ridler and Hadfield, might have provoked this change?

A couple of candidates are 1. Williams involvement with occult magic societies (related to the Golden Dawn); and/ or Tolkien may have picked-up on the hints about Williams' adulterous 'Platonic' or 'Tantric' philanderings with various young women.

For example, if Tolkien asked around William's close friends in Oxford, he may have heard about the Lois Lang-Sims episode (documented in Letters to Lalage) which actually happened in Oxford during the era of Inklings meetings - yet was surely concealed from Tolkien (and Lewis).

*

In sum, Tolkien was friendly with Williams for all of Williams life, and cherished his memory for more than a decade after Williams death; but Tolkien reacted to posthumous revelations concerning Williams biography (understandably - albeit somewhat dishonestly) by convincing himself that he had never much liked Williams, and suggesting that Williams had been forced into the Inklings by Lewis.

*

The retrospective comments on Williams make Tolkien sound as if he was jealous of Williams friendship with Lewis, and this has led to the myth of jealously being an early factor in the breakdown of Lewis and Tolkien's friendship.

But going from contemporary evidence written during William's life, Tolkien was exceptionally friendly with Williams - meeting him frequently in Inklings, regularly with Lewis on Monday mornings to read the emerging Lord of the Rings in draft, lending Williams the precious manuscript of Lord of the Rings, and sometimes going out for a drink with Williams - just the two of them.

And also there is abundant evidence that Tolkien remained great friends with Lewis until around the time that the Narnia books were written.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/timing-and-causes-of-breakdown-of.html

*

So, the evidence suggests that Tolkien was not jealous of Williams' friendship with Lewis, and Williams had nothing to do with the cooling of relationship between Tolkien and Lewis.

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New Peter Jackson Hobbit Movie review

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/hobbit-movie-review.html

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Quality of prose - Lost Road better than early drafts of Lord of the Rings

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Something which had escaped me before, but became clear on reading them on adjacent days: the prose of Tolkien's unfinished Lost Road (In Volume 5 of the History of Middle Earth) is far superior to the early drafts of Lord of the Rings (published in the Return of the Shadow volume 6 of HoME).

This is not a subtle matter either.

It emphasizes the point I made earlier. That the Lost Road (and its attempted revision in Notion Club Papers) was by far the most ambitious work Tolkien had attempted.

This was not only ambition but attainment - Tolkien must have been aware that it took him many years of work, and perhaps not until after the Notion Club Papers were abandoned in 1946, before he could be sure that the 'New Hobbit' had matched, and surpassed, what Tolkien had already achieved in his 1936 attempt at The Lost Road.

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Excerpt from The Lost Road :


On the whole he had been luckier than his father; in most ways, but not in one. He had reached a history professorship fairly early; but he had lost his wife, as his father had done, and had been left with an only child, a boy, when he was only twenty-eight.

He was, perhaps, a pretty good professor, as they go. Only in a small southern university, of course, and he did not suppose he would get a move. But at any rate he wasn't tired of being one; and history, and even teaching it, still seemed interesting (and fairly important). He did his duty, at least, or he hoped so. The boundaries were a bit vague. For, of course, he had gone on with the other things, legends and languages-rather odd for a history professor. Still, there it was: he was fairly learned in such book-lore, though a lot of it was well outside the professional borders.

*

And the Dreams.

They came and went. But lately they had been getting more frequent, and more-absorbing. But still tantalizingly linguistic.

No tale, no remembered pictures; only the feeling that he had seen things and heard things that he wanted to see, very much, and would give much to see and hear again-and these fragments of words, sentences, verses. Eressëan as he called it as a boy-though he could not remember why he had felt so sure that that was the proper name-was getting pretty complete.

He had a lot of Beleriandic, too, and was beginning to understand it, and it's relation to Eressëan. And he had a lot of unclassifiable fragments, the meaning of which in many cases he did not know, through forgetting to jot it down while he knew it. And odd bits in recognizable languages.

Those might be explained away, of course. But anyway nothing could be done about them: not publication or anything of that sort. He had an odd feeling that they were not essential: only occasional lapses of forgetfulness which took a linguistic form owing to some peculiarity of his own mental make-up.

*

The real thing was the feeling the Dreams brought more and more insistently, and taking force from an alliance with the ordinary professional occupations of his mind.

Surveying the last thirty years, he felt he could say that his most permanent mood, though often overlaid or suppressed, had been since childhood the desire to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship.

But in any case to see with eyes and to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic.

*

But nothing could be done about that desire, either.

He used to be able, long ago, to talk about it, a little and not too seriously, to his father. But for a long while he had had no one to talk to about that sort of thing. But now there was Audoin. He was growing up. He was sixteen...

Alboin had scattered tales and legends all down Audoin's childhood and boyhood, like one laying a trail, though he was not clear what trail or where it led.

Audoin was a voracious listener, as well (latterly) as a reader. Alboin was very tempted to share his own odd linguistic secrets with the boy. They could at least have some pleasant private fun. But he could sympathize with his own father now-there was a limit to time. Boys have a lot to do.

(...)

There came a night, and Alboin lay again in a room in a house by the sea: not the little house of his boyhood, but the same sea.

It was a calm night, and the water lay like a vast plain of chipped and polished flint, petrified under the cold light of the Moon. The path of moonlight lay from the shore to the edge of sight.

Sleep would not come to him, although he was eager for it. Not for rest-he was not tired; but because of last night's Dream. He hoped to complete a fragment that had come through vividly that morning. He had it in hand in a note-book by his bed-side; not that he was likely to forget it once it was written down...

I wish there was a 'Time-machine'," he said aloud. "But Time is not to be conquered by machines. And I should go back, not forward; and I think backwards would be more possible."

The clouds overcame the sky, and the wind rose and blew; and in his ears, as he fell asleep at last, there was a roaring in the leaves of many trees, and a roaring of long waves upon the shore. "The storm is coming upon Númenor!" he said, and passed out of the waking world.

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