When we were in Rome for a few days last week, I decided to check out “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author,” a new exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien.
In a way, it was a kind of pilgrimage. Tolkien has been a constant benign influence on my life. My parents read The Hobbit to me and my brothers when we were children, inspiring us all to read the Lord of the Rings and to attempt the Silmarillion (which my brothers managed but I did not). Peter Jackson’s filming of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand created a new kind of energy and excitement in the community. Then, as a university student, I studied Old English and, thanks to Tolkien, the alliterative, allusive, simple and strong prosody of Beowulf seemed an old friend. My husband is a Tolkien Ultra, as are several of my friends, one of whom has even translated it into another language. Then, in recent years of a peripatetic existence I have often found some cheer in the line from the Riddle of Strider “Not all who wander are lost.” It’s hard to think of another modern writer who has been so consistently present in the air in the course of my life.
It was a pleasant walk through Villa Borghese to get to the museum, which was tinged pink by the light of a winter sunset.
When I got inside, it took a surprisingly long time to find the exhibition and there was a lot of distracting stuff. A group of art students, for example, were gathered in front of an amazingly violent sculpture trying their hand at sketching it.
Finally, though, I found my way to the back of the gallery, climbed some stairs (past speakers emitting the sound of clopping horses hooves for some reason), and entered the exhibition hall.
The Man
It was interesting how effectively a few objects could bring home the fact that Tolkien was a living, breathing person and not just a linguistic magician. The first of these was a trunk that his parents Arthur Reuel and Mabel had brought with them to South Africa, where Arthur worked in the Bloemfontein branch of an English bank. John Ronald Reuel was born in 1892 and his brother Hilary in 1894, both in Bloemfontein.
Arthur died of rheumatoid fever in South Africa while the boys were visiting England with their mother. Suddenly without an income, Mabel brought up her sons alone. When Mabel converted to Catholicism in 1900, her Protestant family promptly cut off all financial assistance.
Mabel only lived another four years, dying at the age of 36 in 1904 having fallen into a diabetic coma (insulin would not be on sale as a medicine until the 1920s). She appointed her friend Father Francis Xavier Morgan, the parish priest of Edgbaston, as the guardian of her sons and he took charge of their finances and continuing education.
John Ronald seems to have been grateful to and fond of Fr. Francis, even if the priest did forbid him from fraternizing with Edith Bratt, an orphan who lived in their boarding house and with whom John Ronald fell in love.
As a teenager and student at King Edwards School, Tolkien amused himself by studying old languages and inventing new ones. One of the most important associations at this stage of his life was the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (T.C.B.S.), a group of four school friends who shared an interest in Art. In December 1914, after they’d all departed for college and university, the T.C.B.S. united for a “London Council” in which they pledged to “restore sanity, cleanliness, and the love of true and real beauty in the hearts of all.” This inspired Tolkien with a resolve to write poetry. In fact he did go on to write many poems, though most of these serve to ornament a narrative plot. One that incorporates Anglo Saxon internal rhyme is “Cat.”
In 1911 Tolkien had left school to study at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read English literature and graduated in 1915 with first-class honors. By that time the Great War was well underway and his family were increasingly shocked that he’d chosen to delay enlisting in order to finish his degree. Finally, he could no longer put it off and he went to training and then to France, where he served as a lieutenant and fought in the Battle of the Somme. In October 1916 he returned home suffering from (lice-borne) trench fever. Not long after his invaliding, his battalion was almost completely wiped out. All but one of his friends of the T.C.B.S. had been killed.
On the eve of his 21st birthday, in 1913, J.R.R. had declared his continuing love to Edith and she broke off her engagement to another man and agreed to marry him. In 1916, when he returned from the war, they married and had their first son John Francis (named in honor of John Ronald’s guardian). In fact, they eventually had four children and seem to have been a happy domestic entity.
The Professor
In 1920, Tolkien took up a position as reader at the University of Leeds, where he produced a Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
In 1925 he went to Oxford as an Anglo-Saxon professor and worked diligently on a number of projects. One of his most famous academic works is a lecture series he gave in 1936 entitled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1937), a work that was informed by his own translation of the work (which was not published until recently). In this series, he argues that it is not merely an adventure story but a serious poem:
“It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.”
My favorite academic essay by Tolkien is “On Fairy Stories,” originally a lecture delivered at the University of St. Andrews on March 8, 1939. This is a meditation on the fairy tale genre and to some extent an explanation of his own works:
“…[F]airy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”
One thing that the exhibition emphasized was Tolkien’s enviable sociability. He had an extensive network of colleagues, students, writers, scholars, and friends. These included Norse scholar Ursula Mariam Dronke (1920-2012), Chaucerian Nevill Henry Kendal Aylmer Coghill (1899-1980), co-creator of the Oxford English Dictionary Charles T. Onions (1873-1965), scholar of Icelandic literature Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre (1908-1978), Charles Williams (1886-1945) and C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). He was a member of the informal discussion group the Inklings, of the Oxford Dante Society, of the British Esperanto Association, of the Viking Club and many more.
One of his prominent Italian friends was Tomasso Gallarati Scotti (1878-1966), author of Vita di Dante and Italian ambassador in London from 1946 to 1951, one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals drafted by Benedetto Croce. Another was Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves (1902-1985), who held the position of Serena Professor of Italian Studies at Magdalen College.
Tolkien retired in 1959 and lived a life of increasing celebrity and continued scholarship at a more relaxed pace. He contributed, for example, to The Jerusalem Bible (1966) in the form of a translation of the Book of Jonah. He and Edith moved to Bournemouth, where they spent their final years together.
The Author
In a letter to W.H. Auden written in 1955, Tolkien said that he started writing The Hobbit early in the 1930s, while he was marking school certificate papers. On a blank piece of paper he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” By 1932 he’d finished the book and it was eventually published by George Allen & Unwin in 1937.
Starting from 1914, Tolkien had been working on the construction of a mythic world. He added to it piecemeal in the form of maps, poems, stories, and notes. Eventually his son Christopher would document this process in the 12-volume series The History of Middle Earth. Originally, The Hobbit was not connected to this mythopoeia or ‘legendarium’ but The Lord of the Rings was the culmination of it.
Another lesser known work, Leaf by Niggle (1945) is an allegory of his creative process. He said it came to him in a dream.
“He was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.”
―Leaf by Niggle
The Lord of the Rings in Italy
Princess Vicky Alliata di Villafranca (1950-) produced the first Italian translation of The Lord of the Rings while she was still a teenager.
She has since had a pretty interesting life. She abandoned post-graduate studies in Lebanon to travel around the Middle East, her experience culminating in the 1980 book Harem. Then she spent a couple of decades renovating her old family mansion in Sicily, shooing away mafiosi who wanted to turn it into a casino.
Mario Ubaldini (1908-1984) was the first publisher to publish one of Tolkien’s books—the first book of the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, in 1967. It was a flop, partly because Ubaldini’s publishing house Astrolabio-Ubaldini had a reputation for publishing non-fiction and partly because the craze for Sci-Fi and Fantasy was not then as strong in Italy as it was in the US or UK.
In 1970, under the direction of Alfredo Cattabiani (1937-2003), Rusconi Libri bought the rights and published the trilogy in its entirety. This was still Vicky Alliata’s translation, but extensively edited by Quirino Principe (1935-), a renowned translator and musicologist. It also featured an introduction by Elémire Zolla, a philosopher and historian of religion.
In 2020 there was a kerfuffle when people realized that the publisher Bompiani was discreetly withdrawing Vicky Alliata’s OG translation from sale. Rusconi was essentially a right-wing publisher and TLOR has been adopted by the Italian Far-Right, e.g. with the ‘Camp Hobbit’ events that originally doubled as rallies for right-wing youth, like fascist Woodstocks. Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, for example, attended such a camp dressed as a hobbit and regards the trilogy as a ‘sacred text’; she was the one who opened this exhibition in fact.
This odd political appropriation of Tolkien may have been Bompiani’s motivation for commissioning a new translation, wrought by Ottavio Fatica, who was closely associated with the leftist movement of Wu Ming Collective, a group that has successfully managed to remove some of the ideological scaffolding the Italian right built up around the novel. Meanwhile, as far as I know, Alliata is cheerfully suing Bompiani and Fatica.
