We talked of love, death and fairy tales
J R R Tolkien hated publicity and little is known of his elusive family. Bill Cater, one of the few journalists who knew him, recalls their meetings.
BRASS bands playing, big drums thumping, the publicity circus for the mythology-movie Lord of the Rings draws near; but all I can hear is the chuckle of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 30 years ago, telling me that he had consented to a film rights deal with one of the big studios.
Regret: 'One didn't expect to survive. Parting from my wife then was like a death'
"Not that there's any chance of a film being made," he said. But the deal meant, at least, that film company lawyers would save him from the distraction of guarding his copyrights from people making Hobbit T-shirts or plastic Gandalf toys, and let him get on with his work.
Well, he was wrong; another company, New Line Cinema, has made the film and, no doubt, millions around the world will watch it.
The paradox of technology slaving away to show us myths of elves and enchanted lands might have amused Tolkien, but it is probably as well the pernickety author can no longer reach for his pen. Years ago, earlier hopefuls sent him a script outline for Lord of the Rings. His reply ran to several thousand words, none of them complimentary, winding up "a confusion that mounts almost to delirium"
I first sought to interview Tolkien in 1966, when academic and other critics were still disagreeing hotly about his three-volume best-seller. Every American campus had its Tolkien appreciation society and sales had reached 2.5 million (now, they are about 100 million). Mythology was fashionable.
The Lord of the Rings was a three-decker novel, something unheard of since Victoria died - 200,000 words, longer than War and Peace; not just history but invented history of an imaginary age of the world. It contained magic and talking trees and heroes, and no sex; chunks of verse - every publisher knows verse is disaster; seven learned appendices; invented languages. It was publishing lunacy, and it was a triumph - and now he was said to be working on another book.
His publishers, helpful but not hopeful, said that unlike most authors, JRRT was reluctant to be interviewed. Why, only the other day a great American magazine had flown a man here for just two interviews; the Prime Minister and Tolkien. The PM had said yes, Tolkien said no.
But, in due course, they replied: I might interview Professor Tolkien at his home in Oxford. For a maximum of one hour.
Tolkien with family 1936
It was a pleasant, ordinary suburban house; Tolkien answered the door and ushered me into his study, converted from the garage, bookfilled, untidy. He apologised for the old-fashioned alarm-clock ticking away noisily. "I have to ration my time, I've another appointment this morning," he said.
Some undergraduates who attended his lectures - on Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, language development - complained that he was a bad lecturer, hard to follow. But every now and again as we talked his voice would deepen and strengthen over some phrase he enjoyed, and I understood the other undergraduates who said that listening to Tolkien on Beowulf was like being in the mead hall with the table-thumping audience while bards recited heroic legends.
His stories grew out of words. "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me - 'cellar door', say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador', and from that a character, a situation begins to grow."
"Hobbit" came to him while he was marking exam papers; he scribbled the word on a blank page without then knowing what it meant. Hobbits became the rural, cheerful, tough inhabitants of the Shire, a landscape very like that of the West Midlands of his childhood.
His interest in words began in childhood and he learnt Latin at his mother's knee. "Later, I began inventing languages; but when I knew more about it, I realised they've got to exist in a culture, you've got to have people to speak them."
It annoyed him that elves and wizards made some people class him as a children's writer. Parts of The Lord of the Rings can be very dark and very deep. Power corrupts; even power for good ends is dangerous. Mortal men envy his elves, who are immortal. But his elves envy men's mortality which releases them from unending memories. Mythology is not always for children. But how did he come to write it?
"I was distressed that almost all the myths were Welsh or Scots or Irish, French or German. All we English seemed to have were a few things like Jack the Giant-Killer," he grinned. "So I thought I'd make one myself."
The alarm clock rang, but he talked on of books, of dwarves and wizards, academic life, trees, urban sprawl, love and death and fairy tales. Finally: "I'm afraid I really must go now," he said. "I have an appointment with my dentist. My mouth has shrunk, you see, so my false teeth no longer fit and are inclined to drop down unexpectedly, with a portcullis-like effect."
His wife, Edith, was the love of his life. They had met in their teens. Both were orphans - Tolkien's father died when he was three, his mother when he was 12, and he was brought up under the supervision of a Roman Catholic priest, the trustee of a small income left by his mother. With his younger brother, Hilary, Ronald was put up in lodgings near their school in Birmingham.
Their landlady was perhaps unaware of the size of schoolboy appetites, but the pretty, dark-haired piano student who was a year or two older than Ronald, and who had the room below theirs, persuaded the maid to smuggle little extras up to the boys.
Tolkien, leaning out of his window above, and Edith from her window below, would have long, whispered conversations. There were cycle rides, meetings at teashops. They fell in love, but gossip betrayed them and the priest laid down the law: Ronald was studying for an Oxford scholarship and could not afford any distraction. He must promise to give up all contact with the girl for the next three years. The priest held the purse strings, and perhaps teenagers were more biddable in 1910. Despairing, Tolkien promised. It was a very dark time.
Three years later, they were reunited. They married in 1916, by which time he was in the Army. They met briefly while he was on leave. "We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers" The scene appears in the book as a setting for the lovers Luthien and Beren.
"One didn't expect to survive, you know. Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then - we were only just married - it was like a death."
Fifty years had passed when he told me that, but the pain was still there. He had equally vivid memories of the battle of the Somme, where 20,000 British and French soldiers died in the first day, and men saw the dead faces staring up from the mud - an image that appears in The Lord of the Rings as the Dead Marshes.
After Edith's death in 1971, Tolkien, a lonely man, moved back from Bournemouth, where they had lived for a while, to Oxford. We met there on several occasions. I saw him for the last time at his rooms in Merton. As I walked in, he began declaiming in a language I could not identify, the words rolling and growling out like thunder in mountains.
"What do you think of that?" he said.
Here was an eminent scholar, capable of addressing me if he chose, in a dozen languages, ancient and modern, in all of which I am pig-ignorant. "It sounds Germanic, but it isn't German, is it?" I hazarded.
"That was the Lord's Prayer in Gothic," he said. "Do you realise that might have become the language of all Europe?"
And then we went off to a pub for steak and kidney pie, a drink - and more unforgettable talk. There are times, as he said, when men envy the elves' immortality.
Whatever the merits of the film, it can hardly fail to benefit the family trust, which Tolkien's will established. Sales of the book are running at six times their level before the movie brouhaha began. What the carve-up of film profits between film company, publishers and the Tolkien estate may be is obscure; inquiries produce the rare sight of marketing and publicity folk running for cover. Questions regarding the family are directed toward an Oxford solicitor's office.
What the family feels about the film or the deal we may never know, either. The beneficiaries are of an age and social group - academic, professional, well-mannered - which doesn't reveal feelings about anything unnecessarily. They choose to stay out of the public eye; one of them intends "slipping in quietly to see the film so that nobody notices".
The Tolkiens had four children: John, now 84, who became a Roman Catholic priest; Michael, a former master at Stonyhurst, the Catholic public school, who died in 1984; Christopher, who followed his father's path, becoming an Oxford academic, an expert in Anglo-Saxon; and Priscilla, the youngest, who became a social worker and probation officer and, though now retired, still lectures.
Christopher, the youngest son and the one most close to his father's work, was chosen by Tolkien as his literary executor, with complete control over all the mass of unpublished Tolkien manuscripts. The bulk of these made up what was to become his last major published work, The Silmarillion, which appeared in 1977, three years after his death.
This was not, as many expected, a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, but what Tolkien, telling me about it years before, had called a prequel - if a professor of English can't use neologisms, who can? It gives, in the form of a mass of legends, an earlier history of the world, setting the scene for The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien had been writing it (and re-writing, and re-re-writing it) at least since the First World War when, in his spare time while training as a Signals officer, he jotted down notes. There were sections on the origins of elves and orcs, on the creation of the Rings of Power, on the rise and fall of empires; notes even on the Creation and the Fall - not the Bible and Milton versions but Tolkien's own, in which the world is created from the music of the Valar (lesser gods; something like archangels) and into which evil comes because one of them is corrupted by desire for greater power.
Did this alternative creation worry Tolkien, a lifetime Roman Catholic? It did not seem to. I had remarked to him once that, despite the absence of organised religion in his mythical world - no priests, no temples - his peoples still behaved well. Yes, of course, he said, there was "what theologians call natural morality, natural duties and courtesies - when a man refuses to strike an enemy when he's down, that sort of thing".
He regarded artistic creativity, including his own, as a gift from God: we are created in the image of our Creator, and our own sub-creations, as he called them, were a pale reflection of that original.
When Christopher took up the task of editing The Silmarillion for publication, he found an enormous mass of material. His father, he said, "tended to work on a story by starting again at the beginning, so one might find a complete version of a very early date, and then another version in which part of that was re-written, and then another, layer upon layer. Some parts were so worked over that the styles didn't match."
Christopher had left Oxford and his academic career and moved with his family to France to work undisturbed - a contrast with his father who, asked if he wasn't tempted to escape high taxation by living abroad, replied that he wouldn't want to live where he couldn't understand people's jokes and they couldn't understand his. Translations of his books had demonstrated that finer shades of meaning often vanished in moving from one language to another.
Of the four children, Christopher was the one nearest to his father's academic and literary work. His academic speciality was the same, his academic life in Oxford very similar. His father had told him stories which became part of The Silmarillion when he was a child.
When Christopher trained in South Africa to become an RAF pilot during the war, he would receive letters from his father every few days detailing progress on The Lord of The Rings and, at intervals, bundles of the manuscript. The scores of those letters give some close-up pictures of Tolkien in the war years: mending the garden hen-house that added to the family's rations; cycling to college (and complaining about puncture-repairs); taking his turn as an air-raid warden; regretting the shortage of beer at the "Bird and Baby", Oxford's name for the Eagle and Child hostelry where he, C S Lewis and other Oxford friends would gather.
When I talked to Christopher at The Silmarillion's first appearance, he stressed that the work was his father's; his own role was not completing it but editing existing material, choosing which of many versions would fit with others.
"When I finished, I felt an enormous relief that I had survived - I had been afraid that, for some reason, I wouldn't be able to complete it. It had been a great responsibility."
Recalling our meeting in the Seventies, I wrote to Christopher recently, through those Oxford solicitors, asking him if he still found his father's works a source of scholarly as well as personal interest. Did he ever regret quitting Oxford? Was there anything more to be hewn from the quarry of manuscripts his father had left? And did he ever feel, rather like the inheritor of some great landed estate, that though his bequest was a source of pride and pleasure, it was also a wearying burden of responsibility?
His reply, through the solicitor, thanked me, said pleasant things about my contacts with his parents but refused to be interviewed.
"The forthcoming films and their attendant publicity have given rise to press interest in Mr Tolkien and members of his family on a scale and at a level of intrusion not previously known interest focuses almost exclusively on the success of Tolkien's writing in financial terms and the material benefits resulting to his family," said the letter.
Put briefly, there should be more interest in the work and less interest in the money.
I quite agree. It's a shame. But The Lord of the Rings is now a show. And that's show business.
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