Tolkien: a Biography - Brossura

White, Michael J.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0451212428 ISBN 13: 9780451212429

Casa editrice: Berkley, 2003

Riassunto

Tolkien: A Biography by Michael White is a comprehensive, in-depth, and entertaining biography of one of the greatest and most influential fantasy authors of modern time, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Michael White is a former science editor of British GQ. In a previous incarnation he was a member of the Thompson Twins pop group, and then a science lecturer in Oxford. He is the author of twenty books including the international best-seller, Stephen Hawking: A Life In Science (with John Gribbin). Since then he has written an alternative biography of Isaac Newton, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, which was nominated by four British newspapers as "biography of the year" in 1997 and awarded "Book of the Year" in the science category by Bookman Associates in the United States.

His latest books are the international best-seller Leonardo: The First Scientist and Michael White's personal account of the '80s and his time in the music industry, titled: Thompson Twin: An '80s Memoir. His latest is Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers-a study of scientific rivalry from Newton to Gates published in 2001. He lives in Kent, England with his wife and three children.

Michael White is a former science editor of British GQ. In a previous incarnation he was a member of the Thompson Twins pop group, and then a science lecturer in Oxford. He is the author of twenty books including the international best-seller,Stephen Hawking: A Life In Science (with John Gribbin). Since then he has written an alternative biography of Isaac Newton,Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, which was nominated by four British newspapers as "biography of the year" in 1997 and awarded "Book of the Year" in the science category by Bookman Associates in the United States.

His latest books are the international best-seller Leonardo: The First Scientist and Michael White's personal account of the '80s and his time in the music industry, titled:Thompson Twin: An '80s Memoir. His latest is Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers-a study of scientific rivalry from Newton to Gates published in 2001. He lives in Kent, England with his wife and three children.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Tolkien: A Biography · Copyright 2003 by Michael White · 0-451-21242-8 · NAL Trade

Chapter 1

Childhood

Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is pedalling fast and he can feel the sweat under his collar. It’s a warm, early summer afternoon soon after the end of college term and the traffic along The High is light. By midday he has seen a post-graduate student and addressed the problems she had interpreting an Anglo-Saxon text, bought fresh ink and paper in a shop on Turl Street, returned a book to the college library and found the copy of a poem he was writing for The Oxford Magazine which he had lost among the papers in his college room a week earlier. He normally makes sure to be home for lunch with the family, but today he had to attend a faculty meeting and this meant he was obliged to lunch in college. Now he is returning home to begin ploughing through a daunting pile of School Certificate exam papers that has been on his desk since the beginning of the week.

As he passes Carfax Tower in the centre of Oxford the clock strikes three and he begins to peddle still faster; at best, he calculates, he may have just two hours in his study before he has to cycle back into town again for another meeting, this time in the Senior Common Room at Merton College over a late tea, and as he rides he calculates that he might at best manage to mark three exam papers.1

Up the Banbury Road he cycles, and turning right and then left, he emerges onto Northmoor Road where at Number 20, the Tolkien family have lived since early that year, 1930. As Tolkien swings his leg over the saddle and balances on one side of the still moving bike, he glides through the side gate and along the path. He greets his wife, Edith, by poking his head around the kitchen door and smiling. But then he sees that his baby daughter, five-month-old Priscilla is awake and gurgling merrily in her mother’s arms. He walks over and pecks his wife on the cheek and tickles Priscilla under the chin before heading back to the door and striding along the corridor to his study at the south side of the house.

Tolkien’s study is a cosy room lined with bookshelves that create a tunnel as you enter the room before they fan out to each side. The professor’s desk is positioned so he has a view southward toward a neighbour’s garden directly ahead of him, and to his right is another large window that faces the road across an expanse of well-manicured lawn. On his desk, Tolkien has a writing pad and a collection of pens in a container, and to each side, papers are piled. On the left are examination papers to be read (a tall pile) and to the right, papers already read (a significantly smaller stack).

Tolkien makes himself comfortable at the desk, pulls his pipe from the pocket of his jacket, stuffs it full with fresh tobacco and lights the pipe with exaggerated care. Sucking on the pipe, he leans over to pluck the top paper from the pile on his left, brings it in front of him and starts to read.

Marking School Certificate exam papers, the work of sixteen-year-olds, is tedious and almost always boring, but it helps pay the bills and with a wife and four children to support, Tolkien needs to augment his professor’s salary. Soulless as the work usually is, Tolkien takes pride in reading each piece of work carefully and pays attention to every detail. And so, for the next half hour he concentrates upon a single manuscript. Occasionally he scribbles a comment in the margin and once in a while he places a small tick at the end of a paragraph. He slowly turns the pages and all around is peace and silence broken only by the visit of a bird to the window ledge and a light breeze brushing leaves upon the study window.

After a while, Tolkien is satisfied he has judged the exam paper fairly and places it on the right-hand pile before plucking another from the pile to his left. For a further few minutes he reads the opening pages of this new paper and then, turning the page, he is surprised to see before him a blank sheet of paper. Pausing just for a moment and feeling as though he had been rewarded for his day’s labours – one fewer page to mark – he leans back in his chair and looks around the room. Suddenly, his eye is drawn to the carpet close to one of the desk legs. He notices a tiny hole in the fabric and stares at it for long moments, day-dreaming. Then, he turns back to the paper in front of him and begins to write: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ ...

Although Tolkien had no idea why he wrote this and even less awareness of how much this outpouring from his subconscious would mean for him, his family, and the future of English literature, he knew that with that single sentence he had written something interesting, so interesting in fact that he was then inspired to, as he later put it, ‘find out what hobbits are like’.

And in that moment, from a single sentence, generated perhaps by boredom, a sentence that maybe had been trying to find expression for a long time, came the impetus that would lead to the writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Along with The Silmarillion and a vast collection of miscellaneous notes on the mythology of Middle-earth, his work would, in the fullness of time, become globally famous, give pleasure and offer inspiration to millions and play a crucial role in creating an entire literary genre, that of fantasy fiction. Within a few years of that fateful afternoon, many thousands would know a great deal about hobbits and by the 1960s, hobbits and the world in which they lived would become as familiar as any Hollywood star or Royal figurehead. For many, Middle-earth is considered more than a fantasy realm. From what could have been a mere one-off line scribbled on a scrap of paper in the study of an obscure professor’s study, Tolkien’s writings took on a life of their own, they blossomed into heroic tales, self-contained, self-consistent and utterly absorbing; a mythology for the modern mind.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s family background was, in many ways, completely unremarkable, almost plain. His father, Arthur Tolkien, was a bank clerk who worked at Lloyds bank in Birmingham. Arthur’s father, John had been a piano manufacturer and sheet-music seller, but by the time Arthur Tolkien had come of age, Tolkien pianos had stopped selling, the business was liquidated and John Tolkien was made bankrupt.

Arthur was acutely aware of the dangers of self-employment, which in part accounts for his decision to opt for a safe job with the local bank. But promotion within the Birmingham branch of Lloyds was to prove slow, and in spite of his enthusiasm, Arthur knew the only chance of preferment would come from filling dead men’s shoes. So when, late in 1888, the offer of a position overseas came up, he did not have to think too long or too hard about whether or not to take it.

The job was in the outpost of Bloemfontein in South Africa working for the Bank of Africa. This, Arthur knew, offered huge potential for a young man with ambition. The Orange Free State of which Bloemfontein was the capital was becoming an important mining region with new gold and diamond discoveries encouraging investment from European and American venture capitalists. The only problem for Arthur was that a year before he set sail for the Cape, he had fallen in love and proposed to a rather pretty eighteen-year-old woman named Mabel Suffield, and making this career move would mean leaving her behind.

Mabel’s family, the Suffields, did not entirely approve of young Arthur and hoped for something better for their daughter. However, this was an opinion based upon snobbery rather than anything to do with the character of Arthur Tolkien. The Suffields considered the Tolkiens to be little more than impoverished immigrants (although they could trace back their English ancestry several centuries before looking further still to distant family roots in Saxony), but they had their own social inadequacies. Mabel’s father was the son of a draper who had managed his own shop but his business had crumbled and he was as bankrupt as Tolkien. By the time Arthur and Mabel met, John Suffield was working as a travelling salesman for a disinfectant company called Jeyes.

Little of this influenced Arthur or Mabel, except that Mr Suffield prohibited his daughter from marrying her sweetheart for at least two years after young Tolkien proposed to her, which meant that when Arthur took the posting abroad, Mabel was obliged to wait for news from her fiancé and hope that soon his prospects would allow her to travel out there to join him so they could be wed.

Arthur did not disappoint. By 1890, he had been made manager of the Bloemfontein branch of the Bank of Africa and was set for the fast track. Feeling suitably settled, he wrote to Mabel Suffield to ask her to join him so they could marry. Mabel was now twenty-one and the couple had kept their relationship blossoming past the two-year condition Suffield had imposed, so, ignoring any misgivings of her family, in March 1891, Mabel bought herself a ticket for the steamer Roslin Castle and was soon on her way to the Cape.

Today, Bloemfontein, set in the heart of the Orange Free State, is a rather nondescript city, but towards the end of the nineteenth century when Arthur Tolkien first arrived there, it was little more than a ramshackle collection of a few hundred buildings. Strong winds blow in from the desert and sweep through the town. Now, most residents can shelter in air-conditioned malls and homes; in the 1890s there were few creature comforts and life was little better for the white settlers than it is now for the black Africans who live in a shanty town that girdles the modern city centre of Bloemfontein.

The couple were married in Cape Town Cathedral on 16 April 1891 and they spent a brief honeymoon at a hotel in nearby Sea Point. But when the excitement and the novelty had passed, Mabel quickly realised that life in this place was not going to be easy.

She was soon desperately lonely and found it hard to make friends amongst the other settlers in the town. Most of the population were Afrikaans, descendants of Dutch settlers and they did not mix readily with the English population. The Tolkiens met other ex-pats from Britain, Mabel played hostess, but she found the town lacking in almost every respect. There was a tennis court, a few shops and a small park; it was a far cry from the bustle of Birmingham and the constant excitement of big city life. She also hated the climate, the scorching hot and humid summers and the freezing winters.

But she had no choice but to try to adapt. Arthur was working flat-out to make his mark in the Bank of Africa and was rarely at home. He seemed to be enjoying himself, which only exacerbated the situation. Arthur had his friends at work and was constantly busy, so there was not much time for him to ponder the less attractive aspects of life in Bloemfontein. He appears to have spared little thought on Mabel’s unhappiness and saw it as a passing depression she would get over soon enough.

Mabel did try to make the most of things and was clearly devoted to her husband. Sometimes she managed to drag him away from the bank and they would go off on long walks together or play tennis at the town’s single club. At other times the two of them simply sat and read to each other at home.

And if Mabel was merely bored then all that soon changed when she discovered she was pregnant with their first child. They were both delighted, but Mabel was also concerned that the town could not provide adequate health care for her and a new-born baby. She hinted that it might be best for them to take a break and return to England to have the baby, but Arthur constantly argued that he could not afford the time, and so Mabel decided that, on balance, she would rather stay and take her chances in Bloemfontein than face the long journey home and childbirth without a husband there to support her.

Their son was born on 3 January 1892. They called him John, but there was some debate over the boy’s full name. Arthur insisted they keep up the tradition of ‘Reuel’, a middle name that had been given to several of the Tolkien boys over the generations, whereas Mabel preferred Ronald. Eventually they agreed upon both, so the baby was christened in Bloemfontein Cathedral on 31 January 1892 with the names John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. However, he was never called John by anyone. His parents, and later his wife, called him Ronald. At school he was often referred to by his friends as John Ronald, and at university he was called ‘Tollers’, a rather gauche epithet typical of the time. To his colleagues, he was called J.R.R.T. or more formally Professor Tolkien. To the world, he became known as J.R.R. Tolkien, or most usually just plain Tolkien.

His earliest days, the start of his childhood in South Africa, was every bit as exotic as one would expect and a world away from what he would have experienced if those years had been spent in Birmingham. A few family tales have survived and were remembered into adulthood by Tolkien then related to his own children. There was the time the neighbour’s monkey escaped and leapt the fence to enter the family’s garden where it proceeded to rip asunder three of the boy’s pinafores hanging on the washing line. On another occasion, one of the servants, a house-boy named Isaak decided to take baby Ronald to show him off to his family who were living on the outskirts of the town. Amazingly, the Tolkiens did not sack him on the spot.

It was certainly a dangerous environment in which to raise a child. The weather went from extreme to extreme and the baby’s first South African summer was a trial for Mabel. The flies were incessant, the heat unrelenting. The garden harboured deadly snakes and dangerous insects aplenty and when the baby was little over a year old he was bitten by a tarantula. His life was saved only by the quick wits and skill of his nanny who located the bite and sucked out the venom.2

Life improved greatly for Mabel soon after the baby was born. Arthur was still deeply entrenched at the bank, but in the spring of 1892, Mabel’s sister and brother-in-law, May and Walter Incledon, arrived in Bloemfontein. Walter had business interests in South Africa and decided to spend some time surveying the gold mines of the area. Mabel now had plenty of company and some help with the baby, but even so, she was becoming homesick and more and more resentful of Arthur spending his entire time away from the family. Things were further complicated when she discovered she was pregnant again.

Hilary Tolkien was born on 17 February 1894, and not a moment too soon for Mabel who had had to endure a particularly brutal summer heavily pregnant. Not surprisingly, soon after the birth she hit a new low. Her sister and brother-in-law had returned to Europe and she had to face the prospect of raising two very young children in this hostile environment and with little help from her husband. She was lucky that Hilary turned out to be a healthy child, but Ronald was constantly ill with childhood complaints – a bad chest that was made worse by the heat and dust in the summer and the chill wind in winter, and later, a succession of skin complaints and eye infections. By November 1894, Mabel was de...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Berkley
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0451212428
• ISBN 13: 9780451212429
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 304