Tolkien, Oxford's Eccentric Don

[Originally published in Le Monde, 6 September 1973]

In the September 4 edition of Le Monde we announced the death of the English writer J.R.R. Tolkien, whose greatest work, "The Lord of the Rings," is currently being translated into French. George Steiner, a professor at Cambridge University, provides us with the following account of Tolkien's attractive and original personality.

To comprehend Tolkien's character we must take into account two apparently contradictory psychological and intellectual traditions that co-exist in the English—or rather Anglo-Saxon, in the strictest sense of the term—mentality. One is the subterranean but still powerful force of myth. The other is the tradition of the eccentric Oxbridge Don, the erudite who displays a deliberately bizarre persona. In Tolkien and his work, these two currents came together.

Despite its role as the initiator of modern industrialism, England was still a largely regional and, dare I say, nocturnal country during the first half of the 20th Century. Outside the urban centres, the provinces kept their secrets. The North with the celebrated heaths of Yorkshire, Wales with its soaring mountains and narrow valleys, East Anglia with its misty sea, all retain an often archaic atmosphere. Not far from Cambridge, there are villages where traces of pre-Norman Danish can still be heard. Through a subtle mechanism which seeks to keep the balance of mutual trust between imperial and pragmatic England, this island, which remains turned towards the open sea, has gathered into itself the silences and burdens of its earthly past.

While there is certainly some mythology to be found in 20th century French literature, it is on the fringe of the main literary forces and is often reduced to the level of folklore. In the case of England, in contrast, the Celtic, Irish, Scottish and Saxon myths and the Arthurian cycle have made their presence felt in a number of the most significant works of contemporary poetry and prose. It is impossible to appreciate the lyrical genius of Robert Graves, the novelistic force of John Cowper Powys or William Golding, the bestiaries of Ted Hughes whose violent tones current dominate English poetry, without recognising the enduring and obsessive presence of ancient epics and legends in the current intellectual climate.

The language of the Elves

Mercia, "the Western Marches," the site of an ancient and fabulous kingdom during the dark centuries that followed the departure of the Roman legions, had fascinated Tolkien since his infancy. He had made a detailed study of the area's dialect (the West Midland dialect of the Anglo Saxon period). Like W.H. Auden, one of his most enthusiastic readers, Tolkien was convinced that the English language took its magical traits from its contact with these ancient lands. He was convinced—and this is one of the main features of his thinking—that all creation contains the vestiges of a mythology. He insisted on this idea in his teaching. To study the grammar of a language, particularly an ancient or partly-lost language, is to engage in mental archaeology. The philologist and the grammarian bring out to the light of day the conventions of dreams, the fundamental concepts of art, the historic memories of a buried world. For Tolkien, mythical invention was, above all, philological.

It was around 1911 at Exeter College in Oxford, which maintains close ties with the West of the country, that Tolkien tried to devise a secret language. This "Elvish tongue" was endowed with grammatical precision. It had its own phonetic laws, rules of declension and participle agreements. But very soon Tolkien made his great discovery: the basic design of a grammar is a lifeless thing without a mythological content, without the image of a partly real and partly imaginary world which gives human speech its vital mixture of communications and secrets.

The Hobbits, the world of Middle-earth, the quest for the magical ring which long after would bring Tolkien world-wide fame, all derived from an insight. It is on the basis of this philologist's vision that Tolkien, with the help of Beowulf, the Celtic legend of the Grail and the narrative...