Articles

Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War

J.R.R. Tolkien arrived at Exeter College in 1911 at the age of 19 as an Exhibitioner — the holder of a scholarship worth £60 a year — after a summer spent partly in the Swiss Alps, on the walking holiday that ultimately gave him inspiration for Rivendell and the Misty Mountains.

But The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings lay far out of sight, and at this stage he had barely tapped into his creative potential. There was scant sign that Tolkien was anything more than a gifted young man in pursuit of a degree in Classics amid a host of sociable distractions.

By the time he left Exeter in the summer of 1915, the world had gone to war; Tolkien had outgrown his minority, become engaged, and abandoned Classics for English. He had also begun a sequence of visionary artworks, produced a spate of poetry, and — leaving now the creative pursuits of other students far behind — he had begun inventing both a language and a world for it to describe. During the years surrounding the First World War, this college witnessed the transformation of an undergraduate into the creator of Middle-earth. Read more...

Michael Cox and The Meaning of Night

In my Evening Standard review of The Meaning of Night (18 September 2006, reproduced here), I ought perhaps to have declared an interest. I knew the author, Michael Cox, though only slightly, and only by email and telephone.

Michael Cox (pictured right by Jerry Bauer) had been introduced to me in 2003 as the editor who would go over Tolkien and the Great War and save me from any errors and infelicities. HarperCollins rated him highly and felt he would be attuned to my subject because he had written a biography of M.R. James, the classic ghost story writer. He had also been an editor for Oxford University Press, producing The Oxford Anthology of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Anthology of Victorian Detective Stories detective fiction as well as the magisterial Oxford Chronology of English Literature.

Just as he was starting work on my final typescript in June 2003, Michael had to go into hospital for a serious operation. All I knew was that he had some kind of cancer. Read more...

Tolkien’s gift

Originally published in the London Evening Standard to mark the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Return of the King movie and the final of the BBC's Big Read, in which The Lord of the Rings was named Britain's best-loved book.

The Lord of the Rings must be one of the most comprehensively dismissed books ever written. Critics have queued up since its publication nearly 50 years ago to denounce it.

But J.R.R. Tolkien’s story has outlived one generation of critics, and will certainly outlive another. Of all the novels written in the last century, it now seems one of the most likely to be read for both entertainment and enlightenment in centuries to come. Like Homer’s Odyssey, it is for all time.

Why is it such a great and lasting work? Because Tolkien’s story bestrides the chasm between the ancient world and ourselves. His Middle-earth and the modern world are twins, born at the same time, in the First World War. Read more...

Tolkien fantasy was born in the trenches

This was originally published in the Evening Standard on 13 December 2001 just after the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and a week before the film went on general release. The article sketches some of the ideas underlying Tolkien and the Great War, which I was then writing.

Middle-earth was born in hospital in 1916 when J.R.R. Tolkien was invalided from the Somme with trench fever. He had been in battle twice: early in the campaign in a night attack on a ruined village, and again when a German trench was seized in the cold autumn daylight.

In between he had been made battalion signalling officer and spent long weeks in the trenches where he witnessed all the horrors of mechanised death. But just before his fellow soldiers were moved on to another ordeal at Ypres, Tolkien fell ill and was shipped home with his head full of powerful images that were to re-emerge more than two decades on in his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Read more...

Review: Smith of Wootton Major
J.R.R. Tolkien. Expanded edition edited by Verlyn Flieger.

‘Do not read this! Not yet.’ It is characteristic of J.R.R. Tolkien that he should tell readers to skip his introduction to a George MacDonald fairy-tale and to read the story itself first, without a road map.

But he might as well have said, ‘Read my story instead’ — for he quickly realised two things: he didn’t much like MacDonald’s moral allegory, and he would rather make his points about fairy-tales by creating one himself.

He never finished the introduction he had been asked to write. Instead, we have Smith of Wootton Major: a counter-story to cure us of the notion that fairy-tales are only for children. Read more...

Links to further articles can be found here.