The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski

presented. Eliot contends in his preface that “the Finnish language is still in so unsettled and fluid a condition, as regards both forms and style, that it is often hard to say what is correct and what not,” a description that must have appealed to Tolkien’s sense of whimsy, just as Finnish’s many difficulties (according to Eliot, it “deserves its undesirable reputation of being the most difficult language spoken in Europe, except perhaps Basque”) must have appealed to his sense of challenge. To W. H. Auden, forty-four years later, Tolkien likened his encounter with Finnish to the discovery of a wine cellar stocked with an exquisite new vintage that “quite intoxicated me.” In this state of philological inebriation, he began to flesh out his own invented languages with Finnish elements, leading in time to the formulation of Qenya (later “Quenya”), the most exalted of his Elvish tongues and a catalyst for his mythological inventions.
    In or around the same mensis mirabilis , Tolkien found a second wine cellar stocked with unsuspected, heady possibilities—in this instance not those of words but of pencil, ink, and watercolor. Since learning to draw under his mother’s direction, his subjects had been mostly landscapes and seascapes, many sketched or painted while on vacation in Lyme Regis or Whitby, displaying a good if stiff sense of design (his drawings never entirely escaped this architectural rigidity, reminiscent of the formal symmetries of Art Nouveau; traces exist even in his best paintings of Middle-earth). In December 1911, however, he broke lose from naturalism, beginning a series of abstract or “visionary” sketches. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, preeminent Tolkienists who have written about Tolkien’s art with great sensitivity, frequently use the latter term. Tolkien, however, was a visionary only in a very restricted sense. With one or two exceptions, most notably his 1944 vision of God’s light in Sts. Gregory & Augustine Church (see chapter 12), he did not enjoy—or suffer from—waking visions, unlike many famous Christian mystics and that earlier English mythologist, writer, and watercolorist, William Blake. Tolkien’s “visions” usually arrived in dreams, notably the recurring image of a towering wave that threatened to engulf him, from which he would awaken “gasping out of deep water,” and which he translated into fiction in the Atlantis-like drowning of the island of N ú menor. Other visions came to him in the same way that melody comes to a composer or metaphor to a poet, as the fruit of that mysterious artistic process we call, obscurely, inspiration.
    Tolkien’s new art shared with dream imagery a remoteness from the scenes of ordinary life. Many of his pictures depict no scenery at all. They bear sometimes playful abstract titles like Before , Afterwards , Thought , Grownupishness , and Undertenishness , the suffixes of the last two titles lending their name to the entire group, which Tolkien called “Ishnesses.” In these images, one spies hints of the great creations to come. Wickedness , drawn in black and red pencil, suggests Melkor (later Morgoth, the prince of evil in Tolkien’s mythology), with its skull surmounted by innumerable eyes behind a cauldron spewing flames. Before , too, has the cyclopean architecture and flaming braziers of a primordial temple dedicated to death. End of the World is, by contrast, whimsical, with an impossibly long-legged man striding off a cliff into a swirl of sea beneath a starry sky topped by a looming sun. Thought discloses a third mood, neither nightmarish nor comical but monumental, with a robed figure seated outdoors on a chair or throne, head lowered, deep in meditation. Light, emanating from the head, fans across the sky. This drawing resembles Blake’s depictions of Los, archetypal poet and prophet, embodiment of the imagination—an appropriate antecedent image for a young man on the verge of unleashing his