The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Read Online Free PDF Page A

and bitterness accompanied his memories of his mother all his life. At age seventy-three, he reiterated the theme, describing, again to Michael, her death “worn out with persecution” in “rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal.” In Tolkien’s mind, the cruel shunning that Mabel suffered after her conversion led inexorably to her fatal disease, and she thus became for him not just a beloved mother but a Job figure, a saint, and a martyr, even a type of Christ, a selfless victim whose death gave life to those whom she loved and who loved her. Mabel appears in his fiction in countless sacrificial figures, a gallery of quasi Christs: Galadriel the Elven queen, who willingly surrenders her power for the good of Middle-earth; Gandalf the wizard, who submits to death to save his companions; Aragorn the king, who puts his rightful rule and very life to the ultimate test; Arwen (and her ancestor L ú thien Tinuviel), who gives up her immortality for love; and the hobbits Frodo and Sam, companions in sacrifice. The bitterness of death, the sweetness of faith, the ransom to be paid in blood; thanks in large measure to Mabel’s indelible presence in his consciousness, these would become keynotes of Tolkien’s imaginative world.
    Perhaps the greatest of Mabel’s legacies to Tolkien, however, was love of the Catholic Church. He became a lifelong believer, and in later years he recalled with shame those times when other pursuits—clubs, romance, art—tempted him away from prayer and Mass. He had a passionate love for the Eucharist and counseled his children to memorize important devotional prayers such as the Magnificat and the Litany of Loreto. “If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy.” In later life, he translated Catholic prayers—the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Gloria Patri, Sub Tuum Praesidium, and the Litany of Loreto—into Quenya, the High Elvish tongue of his devising. He was, as one friend summed it up, “a devout and strict old-fashioned Catholic” with a special regard for Mary and her motherly ministrations; she became for him a kind of muse, the source, he believed, of all goodness and beauty in his work. The Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter argues that after Mabel’s death, the Church became Tolkien’s new mother. Carpenter means this in the ordinary psychological sense, that the Church filled in for a missing parent, but it is true also in a deeper sense. There is nothing idiosyncratic about embracing the Church as mother; as early as the third century, St. Cyprian declared that “no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother,” a saying appended, in the 1994 Vatican-sponsored Catechism of the Catholic Church , to the declaration, “The Church is the mother of all believers.” Throughout his life, Tolkien would draw comfort, courage, and artistic inspiration from this second mother, who, unlike Mabel, would never die (“Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”).
    Ruginwaldus Dwalak ō neis
    Mabel’s death transformed Tolkien’s life. She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and to her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion. Ronald responded to the same afflictions—plus the additional discovery that he and Hilary must now live with Beatrice Suffield, Mabel’s widowed sister-in-law, an insensitive woman who had no affection to spare for her young, bereft, and brooding Catholic charges—by closing in upon himself, by inventing private languages, landscapes, creatures, and worlds, eventually composing a personal mythology of exceptional richness and depth. Accompanying this inward movement, however, was an intense increase in knowledge and perception of the outer world. Inventing languages required learning the genetic