Rackham’s watercolor illustrations of the Ring legends (you can get them in a Dover Publications paperback) are autumnal, redolent of Lewis’s favorite of the four seasons, all stone and fallen leaves, white skies and gray water. In the early plates, Siegfried appears as a little savage, bare-legged, bare-armed, and shoeless, wearing only his animal skins, and until he discovers the sleeping Brünnhilde, he’s surrounded by nothing but caves, gnarled trees, and stunted, hairy dwarves. Rackham’s Fafnir is particularly earthy and well imagined, as much frog as lizard, with an amphibian’s thin, leathery skin and the nasty, flat head of a pike. The illustrations summon a hard, primitive world of cold nights and few comforts, and they filled Lewis with “a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity.”
Lewis always described “northernness” in such terms: it was cold, “severe,” even empty, yet beautifuclass="underline" not a widespread aesthetic taste, though not a rare one, either. But, tellingly, the language Lewis uses to characterize his rediscovery of the Norse myths, while also environmental, calls upon another, very different, set of images. When he first laid eyes on Rackham’s pictures, “It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water.” The Novemberish paintings, paradoxically, hit Lewis like the first day of spring. The result was a spiritual awakening of sorts, very much like the thaw that announces Narnia’s liberation from the White Witch.
“You will misunderstand everything unless you realize that, at the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. His long walks and bicycling excursions through counties Antrim and Down became a quest for settings that struck him as worthy haunts for Siegfried, the Niebelungs, and Fafnir. The landscape he inhabited became doubly enchanted. He had heard about the creatures of Celtic folklore — fairies, leprechauns, and giants — as a little child, from his Irish nurse, Lizzie Endicott; “northernness” added the suggestion of something less familiar and indigenous.
From Arthur Greeves, Lewis learned to appreciate the virtues of “homeliness,” the word the two of them used for the humble and comfortable, what Americans might call “cozy.” The two of them took long walks and sampled the scenery like oenophiles sipping wine: “Best of all,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “we liked it when the Homely and the unhomely met in sharp juxtaposition; if a little kitchen garden ran steeply up a narrowing enclave of fertile ground surrounded by outcroppings and furze, or some shivering quarry pool under a moonrise could be seen on our left, and on our right the smoking chimney and lamplit window of a cottage that was just settling down for the night.” However hearty and healthy their expeditions might appear to the casual observer, they were part of a dedicated pursuit of aesthetic rapture.
For Tolkien, northernness was a far more complicated proposition. The Norse culture that the young Lewis made the center of a semispiritual, imaginative, but mostly private inner life was, for him, tangled in feelings about his family, his religion, his ancestry, and his profession. Where Lewis’s Anglo-Irish national identity could be fluid, allowing him to be English or Irish as the spirit moved him, Tol- kien believed very strongly in his own Englishness. His father’s name, true, had come over from Saxony in the eighteenth century, but Tolkien insisted that his paternal forebears had been instantly absorbed into the English soil, and besides, it was his mother’s people he regarded as his real ancestors. “Barring the Tolkien (which must long ago have become a pretty thin strand),” he once wrote to his son Christopher, “you are a Mercian or Hwiccian (of Wychwood) on both sides,” referring, with a characteristic degree of specificity, to two of the kingdoms in what historians once called the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy.
To understand the significance of Tolkien’s deeply felt national identity, it helps to know a little of the ethnic history of Britain (a term that, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll use to include Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as England, acknowledging that there’s much controversy over that usage). The islands have been peopled for hundreds of thousands of years, apart from the Ice Age interludes during which glaciers and a frozen climate rendered them uninhabitable. Theirs is a history of successive migrations or invasions and settlements, with the loose grouping of British tribes we customarily call the Celts absorbing their nameless prehistoric predecessors, followed by a period of Roman occupation, an influx of Germanic tribes, including the Angles and Saxons, and finally the Norman Conquest in 1066, which installed a French-speaking elite. With each addition, the lingua franca of the islands changed and adapted.
The first time Tolkien encountered the language called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (a schoolmaster loaned him a primer when he was a boy), he felt that he recognized it immediately, not just as the basis of the English spoken all around him, but in his bones. Tolkien thought, as many do, that races and ethnicities have certain inherent traits, but he also believed, more firmly than most, that a people’s essence and history are captured in their language. Tolkien responded to languages intensely, as aesthetic objects — but, really, “objects” is not an adequate word for it. For Tolkien, languages were aesthetic realms, lovely (or not) in detail, on the level of particular words, and in the larger structures of grammar. As his skill in philology, the study of languages, grew, a single word in an old manuscript or the name of a place — what might seem like inert nuggets of letters or sound to most people — could tell Tolkien all kinds of stories: about a god who used to be worshipped at this stone, a Roman villa that used to stand in that hamlet, the history of how a certain animal first appeared in a certain region.
Tolkien admired several languages — Finnish, Spanish, and Welsh, for three — but Anglo-Saxon was his home. And home was a fragile construct for Tolkien, whose father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever when he was four, and whose mother succumbed to complications resulting from diabetes when he was twelve. Mabel Tolkien had converted to Roman Catholicism not long after her son was born, and she had been cut off financially and emotionally by her family as a result. She struggled to support herself and her two children (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had a younger brother named Hilary) on the limited funds left to her by her husband, but there were a few idyllic years spent in villages in Worcestershire. The area not only served as a model for the Shire in Middle-earth, but came to figure prominently in Tolkien’s sense of himself as an Englishman. He was, he maintained, “a West-Midlander, at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches,” and this, he felt, explained both his personality and his love of Anglo-Saxon.
For Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon was the heart of Englishness, and the Norman Conquest initiated the shameful decay of that noble tongue by introducing Continental borrowings and other forms of linguistic pollution. He felt the defeat of the Saxon King Harold by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 as a fresh wound, and he held this against the French language and culture to the end of his days.
Tolkien was acutely susceptible to viewing life in this fashion, to seeing it as a tragic drift away from some past ideal. He had lost his perfect country home when his mother was forced by her financial woes to move to the city of Birmingham. Then he lost Mabel herself, a catastrophe he blamed on her family, who in his view had subjected her to “persecution, poverty, and largely consequent, disease” because of her religion. For the rest of his life he would cling fiercely to his Catholicism, a commitment his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, attributes to loyalty to Mabel’s memory: “after she died his religion took the place in his affections that she had previously occupied.” (Tolkien was still invoking his mother’s sufferings in 1965, when reproaching his children for drifting away from the Church.)