I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early
west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it), but
perhaps a fact of my personal history may partly explain why the 'North-western
air' appeals to me both as 'home' and as something discovered. I was actually
born in Bloemfontein
I am afraid this is becoming a dreadful bore, and going on
too long, at any rate longer than 'this contemptible person before you' merits.
But it is difficult to stop once roused on such an absorbing topic to oneself
as oneself. As for the conditioning: I am chiefly aware of the linguistic
conditioning. I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning
Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except
Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were
when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of
introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its
history. I learned Anglo-Saxon at school (also Gothic, but that was an accident
quite unconnected with the curriculum though decisive — I discovered in it not
only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and
scientific side, but for the first time the study of a language out of mere
love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its
own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the 'vehicle
of a literature').
There are two strands, or three. A fascination that Welsh
names had for me, even if only seen on coal-trucks, from childhood is another;
though people only gave me books that were incomprehensible to a child when I
asked for information. I did not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate,
and found in it an abiding linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction. Spanish was
another: my guardian was half Spanish, and in my early teens I used to pinch
his books and try to learn it : the only Romance language that gives me the
particular pleasure of which I am speaking-it is not quite the same as the mere
perception of beauty: I feel the beauty of say Italian or for that matter of
modern English (which is very remote from my personal taste): it is more like
the appetite for a needed food. Most important, perhaps, after Gothic was the
discovery in Exeter College
That is of course long past now. Linguistic taste changes
like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. Latin and
the British type of Celtic have it now, with the beautifully co-ordinated and
patterned (if simply patterned) Anglo-Saxon near at hand and further off the
Old Norse with the neighbouring but alien Finnish. Roman-British might not one
say? With a strong but more recent infusion from Scandinavia and the Baltic. Well, I
daresay such linguistic tastes, with due allowance for school-overlay, are as
good or better a test of ancestry as blood-groups.
All this only as background to the stories, though
languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were
so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions
of linguistic taste could have a function. The stories were comparatively late
in coming.
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It
was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My
mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a
green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and
still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not
think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with
language.
I mentioned Finnish, because that set the rocket off in
story. I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala, even
in Kirby's poor translation. I never learned Finnish well enough to do more
than plod through a bit of the original, like a schoolboy with Ovid; being
mostly taken up with its effect on 'my language'. But the beginning of the
legendarium, of which the Trilogy is pan (the conclusion), was in an attempt to
reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless,
into a form of my own. That began, as I say, in the Honour Mods period; nearly
disastrously as I came very near having my exhibition taken off me if not being
sent down. Say 1912 to 1913. As the thing went on I actually wrote in verse.
Though the first real story of this imaginary world almost fully formed as it
now appears was written in prose during sick-leave at the end of 1916: The Fall
of Gondolin, which I had the cheek to read to the Exeter College Essay Club in
1918. I wrote a lot else in
hospitals before the end of the First Great War.
Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
#163 [To W.H. Auden – excerpt]
7 June 1955
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