But if Tolkien saw his Catholicism as an unbreakable bond with his lost, beloved mother, the religion also suited his disposition. It was the first, the most ancient, the Mother Church, from which the wayward, venal world insisted on straying; however, Tolkien (a man who knew the value of ancient things and of mothers) would remain true to it. There’s a certain gloomy strain in Catholicism, preoccupied with the Fall and the corruption of this earthly existence, that jibed with Tolkien’s own temperament. “It is a fallen world,” he wrote to his son Michael, sounding a theme that resonates through his letters, “and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls. However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.”
All this explains why Tolkien was inclined to envision the Anglo-Saxon language (and, by extension, Anglo-Saxon culture) as an embattled underdog, ebbing away into the past. He knew that many precious works of Old English literature, particularly from the first half of the six-hundred-year reign of the Anglo-Saxon kings in England — which would necessarily include most of the pre-Christian texts — had been lost. Of the culture’s heroic tradition, little more than Beowulf remains. “One sees,” writes Tom Shippey, a professor of Anglo-Saxon himself and a champion of the philological aspects of Tolkien’s work, “that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realize, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in a.d. 419.”
Passages in Beowulf and other surviving works allude to legends and entire epics that have vanished, in part because Christianizing Crusaders in the latter days of Anglo-Saxon rule ordered some materials destroyed, but also because the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition was primarily oral. The arrival of the French-speaking Normans eventually put an end even to that. “Modern English,” Tolkien wrote to the poet W. H. Auden of the language we speak today, this polyglot mixture of words adopted from many other tongues, “is very remote from my personal taste.” Whereas the conventional scholarly opinion is that English literature begins with Chaucer, Tolkien thought it ended with him (or a little later — Spenser was certainly a death knell!).
An entire body of heroic epics and legends, stories that were, in Tolkien’s opinion, purely English, had vanished, leaving his mother-land bereft. Unlike the Scandinavians, whose ancient stories had been preserved in the Eddas, and the Finns, whose oral traditions were collected in a book called the Kalevala (another favorite of Tolkien’s), the English had forgotten their native “mythology,” and even the humblest of folklore had been neglected; England had no equivalent to Germany’s Brothers Grimm, dedicated to preserving her fairy tales. Of the old, pre-Norman English world, only a handful of hints remain in the surviving Anglo-Saxon texts, primarily in the epic Tolkien loved and studied all his life, Beowulf.
Beowulf, the story of a great warrior who defeats a monster, the monster’s mother, and finally a dragon, is the oldest extant example of Germanic literature, the only intact remainder of a vanished world. A pagan tale related by a Christian poet, it was most likely composed sometime in the 700s, but the concentration of pagan elements in the mixture is strong. Although written in Old English, Beowulf describes events that happen in Denmark, and its eponymous hero is a Geat — that is, from a part of Scandinavia that would eventually become Sweden.
Tolkien’s conception of English identity revolved around language, and that made it essentially Germanic. Anglo-Saxon polytheism was derived from Norse mythology: the king of the Norse gods, Odin, was the Anglo-Saxon Woden; Thunor, a version of the Norse thunder god Thor, and so on. The Icelandic Eddas, the works that the Kolbitar was dedicated to reading, interested Tolkien in their own right, but their special value to him lay in the fact that they are the most extensive collection we have of Old Norse myth and legend and therefore offer us a shadow of what he thought his own ancestors believed.
While both Lewis and Tolkien were entranced by Norse myths, they came to the old stories with very different yearnings. For Lewis, “northernness” was something distant and austere, a call from far away that fed his appetite for transcendence. For Tolkien, the old tales had some of that frosty charm — “very remote and strange and beautiful” is how he described the passage in Anglo-Saxon that inspired his first imaginings of Middle-earth — but northernness was also “homely” to him, if not quite in the same way that Lewis defined that word; it was home, his roots, a fundamental part of his identity, even if he could see it only through a Scandinavian glass, and darkly. Still, what survived of Norse paganism did not really fill the gap Tolkien felt in his nation’s imaginative past — or in his own. And finally he felt the urge to supply the missing stories himself.
Chapter Nineteen
The Builder and the Dreamer
By 1929, Tolkien was meeting with Lewis in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen every Monday morning. They drank (tea and beer), talked, and read to each other from their work. Lewis loved to be read to, and excelled at off-the-cuff literary criticism; Tolkien needed someone with whom to share his love of Anglo-Saxon, Old England, and eventually, the secret, handmade world he had begun inventing during the war: Middle-earth. It was from the seed of these meetings that the informal institution of the Inklings would eventually grow.
The friendship between the two men was a complicated, fruitful affair; Tolkien would affirm to the end of his days, even after their connection had withered, that he never would have written The Lord of the Rings without Lewis’s constant nudging and encouragement. They had much in common, and several significant differences. It’s hard to contemplate their relationship without slipping into comparisons that would have distressed Lewis. He saw Tolkien and himself as cronies and collaborators — surely they fought for the same cause and in the same way? Lewis was the type to get swept up in a friendship, especially a new one, and to envision his friend as an ideal companion, brushing aside or simply ignoring any dissonance.
Tolkien, however, was a stickler by nature, the kind of person who feels compelled to raise objections to every observation and to dismiss every suggestion of influence on his own work, including that of Lewis. Not every one of Tolkien’s quibbles is completely convincing; at times, his protests seem more like a reflex than anything else. According to Carpenter, Tolkien’s children remember that, despite claiming to “disapprove” of drama, he seemed to enjoy the theater greatly. He was fond of saying that he disliked Shakespeare “cordially,” but his letters contain several Shakespearean analogies suggesting that he was on a familiar basis with the plays, comparing, for example, Sam Gamgee’s treatment of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings to the way Ariel behaves toward Caliban in The Tempest. (By contrast, Tolkien never makes such references to the artists he really hated, Wagner being the prime example.)