New Biography of Father Francis

So, the news got posted on the MythSoc list this week (thanks, Juanito) that a new biography of Fr. Francis Morgan, Tolkien's guardian, has just been published: LA CONEXION ESPANOLA DE J. R. R. TOLKIEN ("Tolkien's Spanish Connection"). The author is Jose Manuel Ferrandez. This is great news -- Fr. Francis is one of the really important people in Tolkien's life --essentially his foster-father -- yet he's someone about whom we know relatively little, with most of that little being concentrated in the seven years or so between the death of Tolkien's mother (1904) and JRRT's departure for Oxford (1911).

Unfortunately, there's a catch. As befitting a book published in Spain about someone who was (half-) Spanish, the book itself is in Spanish.

Now, I took Spanish in junior high and high school. But that was the typical school-Spanish as taught in the U. S., which gives you some vocabulary but really only teaches you how to read Spanish lessons in textbooks. Still, I had a pretty good teacher (Mrs. Gatling), and it stuck for a few years.

  When I got to college (Southern Arkansas University or S.A.U.; formerly S.S., or Southern State College) they didn't teach Spanish, so I took French (from Mrs. Souter, who actually was French, having grown up in Brittany). Fayetteville didn't have a foreign language requirement for the Masters, but Marquette did for the doctorate. I asked if I cd do Spanish, since I already had several years' experience with it, if by now pretty rusty. To which I was told no, the choices were (a) French and (b) German.* The way my graduate school advisor (a Deconstructionist) put it, this requirement was so I cd read literary criticism in other languages, with the implication that most of the lit. crit. worth reading (e.g., Derrida) was French. Besides, he said, nothing had ever been written in Spanish I needed to read, except maybe DON QUIXOTE.  So I chose French, since I already had a grounding in that, and took a course (in reading, not speaking, the language) that enabled me to pass my exam. The end result of which being that though I can't exactly claim to read French, I am able to get the general gist of what a piece in French is saying. It helps that (a) I have a good vocabulary in English and can recognize a lot of French cognates to words in English, and (b) I've found I know the nouns and adjectives better than the verbs -- so I can read a review, for instance, and tell what the author is writing about but not what he or she thinks about it. It made for an interesting experience earlier this year when a piece of mine was published in French,** reading through a text I was v. familiar with (after all, I wrote it) and seeing how much of the detail I cd follow in another language.

Despite this, I've regretted having to make that choice. Already by that time (circa 1984, when I was evolving the ideas that became my first dissertation proposal) it was becoming clear that French was not a language I was likely to spend a lot of time working with. Had I chosen German, I cd have read the Grimms and Kafka in the original. Had I been able to choose Spanish, I cd have read Borges (and, now, Ferrandez). Perhaps it's time to see about freshening up the remains of my Spanish, with this book as a test case.

At any rate, I've ordered a copy, so more on that when it arrives.***



*And Old English, of course, which I took at both Fayetteville and Marquette.

**"Un Fragment Detache: Bilbo le Hobbit et le Silmarillion"

***it's not available on amazon.com, but abebooks lists it.

Here's the book's description from the original MythSoc list post. The link to the author's website is well worth following: he includes there more information about the book as well as several excerpts, both in English and in Spanish:

A biography of Fr. Francis Morgan, the guardian of Tolkien, is published in Spain. The book entitled "La Conexion Española de J.R.R. Tolkien" (J.R.R. Tolkien' Spanish Connection) have 262 pages and is published by Editorial Csed. The author is Jose Manuel Ferrández who already published articles on the relationship between Tolkien and Fr. Francis in Tolkien Studies or in Mallorn.

The book is about the familiar origins of Fr. Francis, his relationship with the Birmingham Oratory and the Cardinal Newman and  obviously on his personal and intellectual influence on Tolkien.

Unfortunately this book is only available in Spanish.

More info in the website of the author: 

http://www.josemanuelferrandez.com/ENconexion.html

As Catholic As The Day Is Long

So, just before heading out to Kalamazoo I ordered a copy of the new Joseph Pearce documentary about J. R. R. Tolkien as a Catholic writer. Originating as an hour-long show on Catholic TV (i.e., EWTN*), this had been discussed on the MythSoc list not long before, but I decided I'd like to see it for myself and also have a reference copy. And now I do, as it arrived here the day after I got back.

Unfortunately, I found it somewhat lacking. In format it went back and forth between three modes. First, we have narration by Pearce, who's standing in some woods wearing a backpack and carrying a walking stick. Occasionally we break away to a scene in which an actor playing Tolkien (and, in one scene, a second as C. S. Lewis) looks up from his desk, recites some snippet from JRRT's letters, and puts his pipe back in his mouth. Finally, rather too often we see a still picture of a piece of Tolkien-inspired art that serves as a backdrop to a voiceover reading of some passage from THE LORD OF THE RINGS or AINULINDALE.

As with any production, there are some minor errors (Fr. John Tolkien is referred to as "a Jesuit priest"), but on the whole they've done their homework and the biographical summary is fairly solid.

It's not the facts but the interpretation where this piece falls down for me. The argument is not just that Tolkien is a Catholic writer -- a self-evident truth -- but that a Cathl0centric point of view is the only valid one through which to interpret his work. To try to build his case, Pearce resorts to heavy allegorization of the evidence. Thus he asserts that "Tolkien's Melkor is merely another name for Satan" and "merely different words for the same thing: Melkor IS Satan". The Lord of the Ring himself is "Sauron, the greatest of Satan's servants".

But thinking through the consequences of its claims is not this documentary's strong point. Instead, its blurring of Tolkien's story and orthodox Catholic doctrine produces some odd effects and distortions to both. For example, Pearce claims that March 25th (the date of the Ring's destruction) is the most important holy day in the entire Xian calendar -- which shd come as a surprise to those of us who celebrate Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. Elsewhere, and rather bizarrely, Pearce claims The One Ring is Original Sin itself. One wd think this wd be good news -- if Original Sin got tossed into a volcano and destroyed for all time thousands of years ago at the end of the Third Age, then Satan has never been able to take physical form in historical time (Jesus must have been imagining his presence throughout the Temptation in the Wilderness of the Gospel account).

Pearce says quite bluntly at one point that a chain of allusions he constructs (Sauron > saurian > lizard-like > the Serpent in the Garden) has the effect of "rendering impossible, or at least improbable, any but a theistic interpretation of the book".

I cd not disagree more. Tolkien was a complex man. To seize upon one aspect of his life -- his medievalism, his faith, his love of trees, his language-creation, his status as a writer of fantasy or a survivor of the Great War or a mid-century writer, his compulsion to write even without hope of publication, his belonging to the Inklings or being a friend of Lewis's -- and insist it's the only one that's important is to seriously distort the picture.

Two final examples say a lot about this documentary.

First, one long scene (some fifteen minutes, out of a total running time over only about an hour) dramatizes the famous walk in which Tolkien and Lewis debated whether myths cd convey truth, which ended in Tolkien's assertion that Xianity was the one true myth. While v. well done, it contains two fairly major distortions. It presents Tolkien as doing almost all the talking while Lewis listens attentively, offering up a few respectful questions from time to time. This bears no resemblance to any account of Lewis as a conversationalist I've ever seen. It also portrays this as a dialogue, completely omitting Hugo Dyson, the third participant in that debate -- and assuming Dyson (a devout Xian but deeply bigoted against the Catholic church) held his tongue and had no influence on Lewis's decision to rejoin the Anglican church rather than become Catholic upon his return to Xianity is an iffy proposition.

Those changes can be defended on the grounds of dramatic license (after all, we only have Tolkien's account of this meeting, which doesn't include any indication of what Dyson said). But the second is far more problematic. Pearce has the actor playing Tolkien** repeat a passage from a 1958 letter to Deborah Webster Rogers: "I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic." But this is deeply deceptive, for the very next sentence goes on add "The latter 'fact' perhaps cannot be deduced". That is, Tolkien felt that his Xianity was obvious to an attentive reader but his Catholicism was not, and Pearce seems to be manipulating the evidence to hide this fact.

All in all, a missed opportunity. By overstating his case, Pearce has weakened it. I think it's one of those times when, having picked up a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Pearce's first book (TOLKIEN: A CELEBRATION) did a great job of pulling together pieces that argued for taking Tolkien's Catholicism seriously as an important part of his make-up; it was a genuine contribution to Tolkien studies. But by the time of his second book (TOLKIEN: MAN AND MYTH), Pearce had begun to claim that only Catholicism held the key to understanding Tolkien, granting it a sort of magical skeleton key status that cd unlock all doors. And this documentary belongs more in the latter category than the former.

--JDR

current reading: THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END (Kindle)

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*'Eternal Word Television Network': the 'Global Catholic Network'

**Kevin O'Brien, who does a wonderful job. Al Marsh, who plays CSL, does okay but has to struggle against type, being too tall, too well-dressed, and w. too much hair for the heavyset, chain-smoking, balding, disheveled Lewis.

Tolkien and the Catenians (revisited)

Now that Peter Lane's book THE CATENIAN ASSOCIATION 1908-1983: A MICROCOSM OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC MIDDLE CLASS [1982] has arrived and I've had a chance to skim it, I find that there are three references to Tolkien within:

(1) page 137: ". . . there was the call by Grand Presidents and Provincial Councils for Circles to be on their guard, when enrolling new men, to ensure that men of the right 'quality' were enrolled rather than men in 'quantity'. Certainly the Association enrolled some distinguished men in this dire period [1923-1939]: there were academics such as Bodkin of Birmingham, Tolkien of Oxford, Phillimore of Edinburgh and Dixon of North Lancs, which at a completely different level there were th Test cricketers Andy Sandham of Croydon and 'Patsy' (christened Elias) Hendren of West London, who entertained many a Circle with their cricketing stories."


(2) page 153: "So, although wartime difficulties led to some Circles . . . being deprived of their Charters [through lack of unevacuated members], those very difficulties in the shape of evacuation led to expansion elsewhere. And another Circle which owed its origin, in part, to evacuation was Oxford, where many Colleges were taken over by various government departments. The opening of the Oxford Circle in October 1944 was notable, at least with hindsight, for the initiation of Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) and Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, the Founder Vice-President. In the light of the current interest in Tolkien's work, one would have wished for a recording of the speeches at the second annual dinner of the Oxford Circle, February 1945, when Tolkien proposed the toast to Provincial Council 'in a most amusing way which included an actual toast in Anglo-Saxon'. He was a member of the Association until 1956."


(3) page 160: "In October 1950, the Brothers of the Oxford Circle congratulated their former President, J.R.R. Tolkien, on the publication of THE HOBBIT, but could not have known that they were witnesses to the beginnings of a cult."


--As for the Catenian Association itself, it was (and is) a fraternal order like the Lions Club, Rotary, Optimists, Kiwanis, et al., founded in Manchester in 1908. Members originally referred to each other as "Chums", which to me sounds rather Babbitty and which I find rather hard to picture in Tolkien's case; I'm not sure if the habit persisted into the days of his membership. They were particularly interested in getting Catholic schools started, since there were far too few of these to meet the demand early in the century.
The book does cast light on just how few Catholics there were in England at the time -- while the group reached Leeds as early as 1910 and Birmingham in 1912, before World War II there were too few middle-class Catholic businessmen in Oxford to achive critical mass