tassel and the teardrop that fell on Rivendell
On the eve of the centenary of Christopher Tolkien’s birthday (Born 21 November 1924) I wanted to highlight some of memorable anecdotes that Christopher and others have shared about his own life and memories of his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their family.
Note: I’m using easily accessible links from websites such as the Tolkien Gateway so fans can explore further without being gate-walled. I’ll also quote from various Tolkien-related books.
Photograph by Josh Dolgin. From: The New York Times, “Christopher Tolkien, Keeper of His Father’s Legacy,🖉 Worthy of name
“I became a close friend of the H[ead] M[aster] and his son, and also made the acquaintance of the Wiseman family through my friendship with Christopher Luke W. (after whom my Christopher is named).”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter 306: To Michael Tolkien, 11 October 1968?)
Christopher Tolkien was named after JRR Tolkien’s friend and the only surviving member of the “Tea Club, Barrovian Society” (T.C.B.S.), Christopher Wiseman.
🖉 A Bird and a Baby in Leeds
JRR Tolkien was Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925. During his time there he collaborated with E.V. Gordon to produce a new edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published in 1925. With Gordon he also founded the Viking Club.
The University of Leeds Library holds some Tolkien-related material in its Special Collections:
Christopher Tolkien was born whilst the Tolkien family lived in Leeds – between 1924 and 1925 they resided at 2 Darnley Road (West Park).
In 2012 a Blue Plaque was put up by at that house, sponsored by the University of Leeds, Leeds Civic Trust and the Tolkien Society. Baby Christopher would have spent his earliest moments here.
2 Darnley Road, West Park, Leeds on Wiki –
you can see the Blue Plaque. Source.
[Click for a larger image]
One curious potential, but probably unlikely, link is a (later) story about Christopher’s brother, Michael, and the Leeds Coat of Arms. In 1928 J.R.R. Tolkien drew a picture of a frightening owl called Owlamoo, based on a dream Michael had where “a large sinister owl-like figure that perched on high furniture or pictures and glared at you.” It’s interesting this is only three years after leaving Leeds because the Leeds Coat of Arms has three owls. Michael (and Faramir in LOTR) also shared the Atlantis dream (Tolkien Gateway: Atlantis-haunting) that often plagued J.R.R. Tolkien, fuelling the Notion Club story and the fall of Númenor. You can follow an Owl trail whilst in Leeds.
Librarian Antony Ramm has written about JRR Tolkien’s time in Leeds in two articles for the Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog, the Sec\ret Library: “Traces of Tolkien in Leeds” and “Tolkien in Leeds: Back again”.
🖉 How to train a Tolkien aka Dragon School
The Tolkien family moved back to Oxford in 1925. In 1932 Christopher was attending the Dragon School in Oxford. The School was founded in 1877 by a committee of Oxford Dons, one who was called Mr. George. The first cohort of pupils called themselves dragons in honour of St. George.
Christopher’s son, Simon Tolkien, also attended Dragon School in 1972.
Historian Lady Antonia Fraser, another ex-pupil (called Old Dragons), remembers when her mother bumped into J.R.R. Tolkien during the 1940s on her route along Chadlington Road to the school and Tolkien gifted her a copy of “The Hobbit” to read to her daughter.
🖉 “Damn the boy”
Possibly one of the most well-known incidents in Christopher Tolkien’s life is how his insistence on consistency helped shaped “The Hobbit”. This was recorded in the forward of “The Hobbit” by Christopher:
“He also remembered that I (then between four and five years old) was greatly concerned with petty consistency as the story unfolded, and that on one occasion I interrupted: ‘Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver’; at which point my father muttered ‘Damn the boy’, and then ‘strode across the room’ to his desk to make a note.”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Foreword by Christopher Tolkien)
After receiving a letter from a young fan listing necessary corrections in the published The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien employed Christopher to search for more:
“I then put my youngest son, lying in bed with a bad heart, to find any more at twopence a time. He did. I enclose the results”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter 22: To C.A. Furth, Allen & Unwin, 4 February 1938)
The Hobbit was the story Tolkien created for his family but ended up being gifted to the world. The success of the Hobbit led Tolkien’s publishers requesting a sequel which eventually became The Lord of the Rings. Christopher insisting on accuracy of detail, nudging his father to then write down these details, led to the sequence of events that gave fans Middle-earth.
🖉 “my chief critic and collaborator”
Christopher served in the RAF for some time during World War Two and was based in South Africa. J.R.R. Tolkien would send letters with parts of The Lord of the Rings for Christopher to view and comment on. It is in a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin that J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledges how important his son was in the creative process:
“But I made a very great effort to finish the Hobbit sequel, and chapters went out to Africa and back to my chief critic and collaborator, Christopher, who is doing the maps.”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter 105: To Sir Stanley Unwin, 21 July 1946)
🖉 Folca let his guard down: a boarish tale
The Tolkien family has over the years had a mixed relationship with the fame and the fans of J.R.R. Tolkien. From phone calls in the middle of the night to Priscilla hosting parties in the early days of the Tolkien Society, the success of Tolkien’s fictional work has impacted his family in various ways. One of the oddest things Christopher has had to deal with from fans is the rumour circulating around fandom about wild boars.
With the upcoming release of Peter Jackson’s soon-to-be successful The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the press approached the family for their opinion. Father John Tolkien, one of JRR Tolkien’s sons, was concerned that the film release would make life difficult for the family and that fans could overstep the boundaries set by the family.
In an article for the Daily Telegraph (07/01/2001), titled “Lord of Rings films 'will force Tolkien family into hiding'”, Daniel Foggo recorded John as saying:
“Christopher, who acts as literary editor for the Tolkien estate, doesn't live in England any more and when he comes to England he doesn't use his own name. Christopher lives in France and has had some trouble recently with people trying to get at him. He keeps wild boar in his garden, which is a little bit dangerous but they are useful when people become a nuisance."
John’s sarcastic remark became part of fan folklore even when across internet spaces fans tried to explain to those who fully believed the story that wild boars just aren’t good guard dogs.
In 2009 in an interview with the Guardian (05/05/2009) for the release of Sigurd and Gudrún, Christopher was asked by Alison Flood about the story and he dispelled the myth:
“No, this isn't true at all. It is a scaled-down version of a wholly unfounded piece of nonsense that gained currency, with much else of the same order, at the time of the films of The Lord of the Rings. In the full form of the story I keep not one, but a whole troop of wild boars, expressly in order to chase off Tolkien fans who are imagined to lurk in the woods that surround my house. There are indeed many wild boars in these parts, but I don't think they would be at all suitable as guardians even if I wanted them.”
🖉 The fearmarillion
In an article and interview by Raphaëlle Rérolle, “Tolkien, the Ring of Discord”, for Le Monde (05/07/2012), Christopher revealed he feared what his father would make of the Silmarillion publication*:
“At the time, he even had an unpleasant dream: "I was in my father's office in Oxford. He would come in and look for something with great anxiety. Then I realized with horror that it was the Silmarillion, and I was terrified that he would find out what I had done."
* Apologies if the translation isn’t great, I had to use Google translate with the article.
🖉 The Last Inkling
From the age of twenty-one Christopher had joined J.R.R. Tolkien’s friends, who formed the Inklings, at their meets. As World War Two came to a close, father and son received welcome news, as J.R.R. Tolkien records in a letter to Christoper (dated 9 October 1945):
“This is really only to inform you of a quite unprecedented honour that has befallen us: you in your own right, and mine by reflection. ‘The Inklings’ informed me today that they proposed to consider you a permanent member, with right of entry and what not quite independent of my presence or otherwise.”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded (Letter 102a: To Christopher Tolkien, 9 October 1945).
Christopher became the youngest of the members and also the last to join.
🖉 Bloemfontein
J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State (now South Africa) in 1892. When he travelled with brother and mother to visit relatives in England, he was fated never to return again. During World War Two, Christopher was stationed in South Africa and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:
“I wonder if you will ever get a chance to see Bloemfontein away down in the former ‘Free State’, where I was born …”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded (Letter 56: To Christopher Tolkien, 1 March 1944).
In a later letter to Christopher, J.R.R. Tolkien queried about his own father’s grave:
“If you fetch up at Bloemfontein I shall wonder if the little old stone bank-house (Bank of South Africa) where I was born is still standing. And I wonder if my Father’s grave is there still. I have never done anything about it, but I believe my mother had a stone-cross put up or sent out. (A. R. Tolkien died 1896). If not it will be lost now, prob., unless there are any records …”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded (Letter 63: To Christopher Tolkien, 24 April 1944).
According to an article on the official South Africa Tourism website, “JRR Tolkien and Bloemfontein: the famed fantasy author spent his earliest years in Free State province”,
“The grave of his father, Arthur Tolkien, is still identifiable in Bloemfontein’s President Brand Cemetery.”
One fan, David Tabb, visited Bloemfontein in 2017 and followed the trail of Tolkien, writing a blog about it here. According to David the house that Mabel and Arthur Tolkien lived in had been sadly destroyed in floods during the 1920s.
Tolkien tourism has reached Bloemfontein in the form of the Hobbit Boutique Hotel however with rooms named after Middle-earth characters! Sadly from J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters I do not believe Christopher was able to visit his father’s birthplace.
[Click image for larger version]
🖉 Tears at Rivendell
On 19 January 2019 Christopher Tolkien was invited to the Abbey of Thoronet in southeast France to view the “Aubusson weaves Tolkien” tapestries depicting scenes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s art.
During a speech given by Christopher, he revealed a moving story about the “Rivendell” painting and his encounter with it late one night. You can watch Christopher talk (in French, but with subtitles) here on YouTube. I’ve transcribed the subtitles below:
“I should explain that my father used to work very very late at night, for his painting and writing. And I, when I was very very young, at night I used to worry about my father, in that way: was he still alive? One night, when the whole house was silent, I went downstairs to find my father, and there he was. I was so relieved that, poor little idiot, I started to cry and one of the tears, one tear but a substantial one, fell on the painting. Imagine that! But my father wasn’t angry at all. What he did was he got his small paintbrush, and he rubbed out every trace of the tear. And he had to change the leaves in the tree a little bit. Because the tear had fallen on the beautiful tree in the foreground. The title of the painting is Rivendell. And in this house, Frodo said the words that are fundamental in the Lord of the Rings. He said: 'I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.' Thank you.”
Perhaps we can all shed a happy tear in Rivendell for the accessible material Christopher has left us from his father's legacy and appreciate that he spent his life doing this task.
Thank you to Professor Dimitra Fimi for sharing the story on Twitter here (and to the Tolkien Collector’s Guide for highlighting Professor Fimi’s tweet on their website here).
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Thank you for reading. This article will hopefully be the first in a series of blog posts celebrating the Christopher Tolkien centenary. I aim to run a short event on the Laurelin server of The Lord of the Rings Online to make a toast to Christopher on Thursday 21 November 2024. An upcoming blog post about Christopher Tolkien's connection to Heaton Park in Manchester is being written now.
📜 Note: Tolkien Trewsday celebrates the Christopher Tolkien Centenary
This blog article was created as part of the Tolkien Trewsday weekly event I organise and run across social media. Week 91 (19 November 2024) had the theme of “Christopher” to tie-in with Christopher’s birthday on 21 November.
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