The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski Page B
Authors: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
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of many of Tolkien’s readers, large portions of The Silmarillion and more than a few passages in The Lord of the Rings (“Name him not!” says Gandalf, describing his battle with the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings ; “Long time I fell … Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone … Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him…”). Tolkien considered the neomedieval affectations of “heigh stile” essential to the atmosphere of ancient myth and legend he wished to convey. Many critics disagree, but it is worth noting that C. S. Lewis defended Morris’s archaisms, calling this approach “incomparably easier and clearer than any ‘natural’ style could be.” This defense appears in his 1939 essay collection, Rehabilitations ; as the title suggests, Morris’s reputation was sinking at the time. But then, Lewis always enjoyed a good fight against received opinions.
Tolkien’s ability to absorb Morris’s experiments in decorative arts proved far more successful. Many of Tolkien’s sketches, especially those that Hammond and Scull term “patterns and devices”—doodles and designs on letters, envelopes, napkins, newspapers, and the borders of paintings—show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite’s exuberant ornamentation, and Tolkien’s 1960 drawing of a N ú menorean carpet, with red, yellow, and blue geometric symmetries, could pass for a Morris tapestry seen through a kaleidoscope.
Tolkien immediately set to work applying the lessons he had learned at Morris’s feet. In a letter to Edith in late 1914, he announced, while speaking of the tales in the Finnish epic the Kalevala , that “I am trying to turn one of the stories—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between.” His interest was not idle, but an attempt to supply a sorely felt need: to restore to England some remnant of its scattered and ruined mythological tradition. To a meeting of Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society on November 22, 1914, he declared his admiration for “that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries,” and added, “I would that we had more of it left.” Many years later, he would tell Auden that his legendarium (as he liked to call it, borrowing a Latinism found in medieval collections of saints’ lives) began in “an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.” Kullervo’s story, a seething stew of mass murder, revenge, involuntary servitude, incestuous seduction, and talking swords, eventually would become the tale of T ú rin Turambar, a key part of the Silmarillion mythos.
The retelling of the Kullervo tale began in October 1914. Just a few weeks before, Tolkien had had another literary epiphany with an even more momentous result. In late September, he, Hilary, and their aunt Jane had visited a farm owned by family friends in Gedling, Nottinghamshire. While there he had made a pencil-and-ink sketch of the slate-roofed, three-story farmhouse. It is a lovely but unremarkable building, yet it looms large in Tolkien’s life, for within it he wrote the first lines of what would become the seed of his mythology of Middle-earth; it was here, in a register yet dimly understood, that his imaginary cosmos first found voice. Tolkien had been reading—without much interest—the Anglo-Saxon poem Crist (formerly attributed to the poet Cynewulf) from the tenth-century Exeter Book, when his attention was caught by the following line, which evoked in him “a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep”:
é ala é arendel, engla beorhtast ,
ofer middangeard monnum sended
Hail É arendel, brightest of angels
Sent unto men upon Middle-earth
The poem itself is based upon the fifth of the Latin “O”
Tolkien’s ability to absorb Morris’s experiments in decorative arts proved far more successful. Many of Tolkien’s sketches, especially those that Hammond and Scull term “patterns and devices”—doodles and designs on letters, envelopes, napkins, newspapers, and the borders of paintings—show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite’s exuberant ornamentation, and Tolkien’s 1960 drawing of a N ú menorean carpet, with red, yellow, and blue geometric symmetries, could pass for a Morris tapestry seen through a kaleidoscope.
Tolkien immediately set to work applying the lessons he had learned at Morris’s feet. In a letter to Edith in late 1914, he announced, while speaking of the tales in the Finnish epic the Kalevala , that “I am trying to turn one of the stories—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between.” His interest was not idle, but an attempt to supply a sorely felt need: to restore to England some remnant of its scattered and ruined mythological tradition. To a meeting of Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society on November 22, 1914, he declared his admiration for “that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries,” and added, “I would that we had more of it left.” Many years later, he would tell Auden that his legendarium (as he liked to call it, borrowing a Latinism found in medieval collections of saints’ lives) began in “an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.” Kullervo’s story, a seething stew of mass murder, revenge, involuntary servitude, incestuous seduction, and talking swords, eventually would become the tale of T ú rin Turambar, a key part of the Silmarillion mythos.
The retelling of the Kullervo tale began in October 1914. Just a few weeks before, Tolkien had had another literary epiphany with an even more momentous result. In late September, he, Hilary, and their aunt Jane had visited a farm owned by family friends in Gedling, Nottinghamshire. While there he had made a pencil-and-ink sketch of the slate-roofed, three-story farmhouse. It is a lovely but unremarkable building, yet it looms large in Tolkien’s life, for within it he wrote the first lines of what would become the seed of his mythology of Middle-earth; it was here, in a register yet dimly understood, that his imaginary cosmos first found voice. Tolkien had been reading—without much interest—the Anglo-Saxon poem Crist (formerly attributed to the poet Cynewulf) from the tenth-century Exeter Book, when his attention was caught by the following line, which evoked in him “a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep”:
é ala é arendel, engla beorhtast ,
ofer middangeard monnum sended
Hail É arendel, brightest of angels
Sent unto men upon Middle-earth
The poem itself is based upon the fifth of the Latin “O”
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