Evil in Ireland -- Tolkien and Warnie

So, back some time ago when I was asked to write a guest editorial for MALLORN, I pointed out that there are some things about Tolkien we know because of detailed contemporary evidence. Other things we have to piece together as best we can from fragmentary, sometimes contradictory, evidence. And still others we just have to more or less take on faith. An example of the last is Tolkien's statement that in Ireland you could feel the evil in the very ground, seeping up from below, held back only by the great piety of its people. I commented about this in a post from 2009
( http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2009/12/evil-emanating-tolkien-on-ireland.html ), in which I reproduced the following quote:

George Sayer tells a remarkable story 

about Tolkien describing Ireland as 

'naturally evil.' He could 'feel,' Sayer relates,

'evil coming up from the earth,

from the peat bogs, from the clumps of trees, 

even from the cliffs, and this evil

was only held in check by the great 

devotion of the southern Irish

to their religion.'

A year and a half later, 'BGC' posted a comment saying

I'm pretty sure I have read something of this kind said by, or attributed to, Warnie Lewis (who was, of course, himself Irish) - maybe in his journal or attributed in a letter to Jack - but I can't seem to locate it.

It is certainly more the sort of thing Warnie would have said, in one of his deporessive moods; and very unlike Tolkien.

And now just a few days ago 'Wurmbrand' (Dale Nelson) shared his discovery of that passage BGC had remembered:*

here is the passage that BGC was recalling:

"There is something wrong with this country -- some sullen brooding presence over it, a vague sense of something mean and cruel and sinister: I have felt the same feeling in the hills behind Sierra Leone, and once in 1919 at Doagh in Co. Antrim. A beastly feeling. On the merely physical side, it was most depressing country. I have never seen any place so enclosed before: wherever you go, the grey road is flanked by old stone walls, and banks on the top of which grow thick hedges, the whole overhung by heavy motionless foliage on old trees and lidded with a grey brown sky. After a time the longing for any sort of escape from these everlasting tunnels became acute, and one almost fancied it to be accompanied by a sensation of choking from trying to breathe air from which the oxygen was exhausted. The natives were as depressing as their landscape: during the whole morning I did not see anyone of any age or either sex who was not definitely ugly: even the children look more like goblins than earthborns....I wonder can it be possible that a country which has an eight hundred year record of cruelty and misery has the power of emanating a nervous disquiet? Certainly I felt something of the sort, and would much dislike to see this place again....[Later in the day, after leaving Waterford on our run down the Suir River, we passed Ballyhack, where there were some early Norman castles.] There was [also] a long succession of big houses, all very shut in and desolate, of which J remarked that Walter de la Mare could write detestable stories: and we talked for some time about horror and its treatment in fiction."  (BROTHERS & FRIENDS p. 111-112)

This was written in 1933, years before Tolkien himself first set foot in Ireland. And interestingly enough CSL seems to have disagreed with Warnie -- Warnie's entry for the next leg of their walking tour, in the Plymouth area recounts that

J[ack] and I argued briskly about the country [around Plymouth] we had walked through, J contending that not to like any sort of country argues a fault in oneself: which seems to me absurd . . . I suspect he was talking for victory. [ibid 112]

Congratulations to Dale N. for his connecting the dots and for sharing his discovery.

--John R.
current reading: more on Milne (who suffered badly from Conan Doyle syndrome)


*I've reposted it here because I think those who agree with me about the importance of Dale's discovery are more likely to come across it this way than if it only appeared as a comment on a post from eight years ago.

P.S.: Happy Tolkien Day, all.

A Proto-Inklings?

So, when I recently mentioned Tolkien and Lewis listening to Wagner together, I was operating off of memory. Going back now and looking it up, I see that I mixed together two separate events, the first of which was Lewis's early interest in Wagner, which included his listening to Wagner on gramophone records (i.e., 78rpms) back in 1912 (Hooper & Green, p.32). The second, and more interesting, is the Lewis-Tolkien-Warnie session of early 1934 which seems to me one of the rare glimpses into the interim steps in what turned out to be the coalescence of the Inklings -- or at least one thread of what came to be The Inklings (Lean's Inklings Club and Tolkien's Coalbiters being two others which played their part).

According to Carpenter's account in THE INKLINGS, as well as the passages from Warnie's diary he based this on, December 1933 found Warnie, who had retired and moved into the Kilns about a year before,* complaining about Tolkien intruding into his quality time with his brother ("Confound Tolkien! I seem to see less and less of J[ack] every day"**). Accordingly, as Carpenter puts it, "Knowing Warnie's feelings, Jack took a great deal of trouble not to leave his brother out of anything and, when Tolkien and he decided to spend an evening reading aloud the libretto of Wagner's Die Walkure, Warnie was asked to join them even though he knew no German and could only take part by using an English translation." (THE INKLINGS pages 55-56).

This is obviously directly based on the March 24th and 26th entries in Warnie's diary, the first of which reads "J and I have been for some time intending to ask Tolkien to dinner with us at the Eastgate and to read the Walkure in J's rooms afterwards."*** The event itself is described in terms which sound v. like Warnie's later write-ups of Inklings evenings: "Tolkien, J, and I met by appointment in College at four o'clock to read the Valkyrie . . . When we had had some tea we started on the play, I reading in English and T and J in German. I think our English version must be the acting version, for it fits the German syllable by syllable -- as a result it was I found very easy to follow the others' parts: I did not need prompting more than a couple times. Coming to it with the idea of an opera libretto in my mind, I got a very agreeable surprise. Even in this rather doggerel version it remains a fine play. We knocked off soon after six and T went home, meeting us again at the Eastgate where we had fried fish and a savoury omlette . . . We then returned to J's rooms and finished our play (and incidentally the best part of a decanter of very inferior whiskey). Arising out of the perplexities of Wotan we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven when the car called for us. A very enjoyable day."****

I think Carpenter is probably right here, and that by bringing Warnie into what had been their two-man meetings, Tolkien & Lewis essentially had the core of the group established but without the group itself. The timing is key: 'Humphrey' Havard told me that he'd joined the group shortly after his move to Oxford in 1934, and subsequent research bears out the timing of Havard's arrival on the scene and his incorporation into CSL's circle of friends. Among the other early members -- Coghill, Fox, and probably Wrenn -- Havard proved the one who stuck with the group longest, longer than Tolkien himself. More importantly, adding a non-academic like Havard***** would have helped prevent Warnie -- himself a gifted self-taught historian -- from being the odd man out among a gathering of dons.

So, one more piece in the puzzle, to help us get a better glimpse at the overall picture.

--JDR


*Brothers & Friends, p. 95 (entry for Dec. 21st 1932).

**Brothers & Friends, p. 127 (entry for Dec. 4th 1933).

***Brothers & Friends, p. 144 (entry for March 24th 1934). Interestingly enough, this entry reveals that Mrs. Moore had suggested the men meet on a Tuesday ("from her point of view Tuesday would be the best day for us to do it") but that the Tolkiens had other plans, suggesting that the selection of Tuesday as one of the two Inkling meeting days might have been Janie Moore's contribution to the group.

****Brothers & Friends, p. 145-146 (entry for March 26th 1934).

*****Though it's good to remember that Havard, while not an academic, was a learned man, with a background in biochemistry; he was later to spend much of WW II doing medical research to help protect British troops from tropical diseases.