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

code that governs all language; inventing fantastic landscapes meant learning the real landscapes of his boyhood: the Birmingham streets, the waters of Lyme Regis, the stones of Whitby Abbey.
    When young, Tolkien excelled in nature studies: drawings of a flower, a starfish, and what look like oak leaves fill a juvenile notebook. The subject matter turns somber as his mother’s illness progresses; a sketch from 1904, drawn while Mabel was in the hospital and Ronald had taken refuge in the house of Edwin Neave—an insurance clerk who would soon marry his aunt Jane—carries the heartrending title What Is Home Without a Mother (or a Wife) . It depicts Ronald and Edwin sitting before the fire, mending clothes—rarely a man’s pursuit back then. The drawing, with its close observation of Victorian furnishings and its symmetrical composition, shows considerable raw talent. Another early work, a watercolor depicting two boys, presumably Ronald and Hilary, on the beach, sustains this interest in symmetry: the boys mirror each other, with one, in red shirt and blue-black pants, facing the viewer, while the other, in blue-black shirt and yellow pants, turns away; two islands neatly divide the seascape. Throughout these early sketches, such symmetries of line and color, shape and movement, rule Tolkien’s images, a visual analogue to the contrapuntal harmonics of Catholic scholasticism, and one might surmise, a deeply felt aesthetic response to the chaos of disaster and death that had ripped apart his childhood. This obsession with balance would recede in many of his subsequent sketches, such as one of Lyme Regis (where he stayed with Hilary and Father Francis in the summer of 1906), awhirl with swirling clouds, choppy seas, and moored boats, but would return in full force in his mature paintings for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings —books that contain a longing for peace and stability in the face of cosmic disorder and that speak, as we shall see, a distinctively Catholic idiom.
    Language, however, held pride of place from the start in Tolkien’s imagination. In Bloemfontein, he must have heard Afrikaans and perhaps Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and other native tongues, and soon after his return from South Africa, as noted above, his mother began to tutor him in European languages. French left him cold—indeed, he disliked throughout his life all things French, including haute cuisine and, later, existentialism. But he warmed to Latin, and came to delight in the shapes and sounds of its vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. In part this may be explained by his love of the Mass, celebrated in the ancient tongue until he was in his seventies; his grandson Simon recalls attending a Bournemouth Mass with his grandfather after the sea change of Vatican II and watching the old man make “all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English.” Tolkien also felt the lure of Welsh, whose strange spellings he spied on the side of passing coal trucks. But it was German and Germanic languages that won his heart; he garnered prizes for German proficiency at King Edward’s and began to study Anglo-Saxon (now commonly called Old English) and Gothic. The latter, a tongue that had flourished during the late Roman Empire and died out by the ninth century, he discovered through a secondhand copy of Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language. It utterly captivated him, “the first [language] to take me by storm, to move my heart … a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer .” Immediately, he peppered his other books with Gothic inscriptions and inscribed them with his Gothicized name, Ruginwaldus Dwalak ō neis.
    Joseph Wright (1855–1930) would play a significant role in the growth of Ronald’s intellect, not only through his celebrated Gothic grammar but as Ronald’s instructor, friend, and mentor at Oxford, where he took the budding philologist under his wing,