Some Ponderings on Tolkien and the Inklings

In letter 131, Tolkien famously stated his desire to write a mythology for England. “There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing,” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 144. Clearly the end result of this was the creation of Middle Earth, and the whole cycle of tales starting with The Silmarillion, going through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and ending as it were, in various unfinished works such as The Notion Club Papers. But was this always Tolkien’s plan? Was his Middle Earth cycle the only thing Tolkien worked on or considered as a way to create this British mythology? Perhaps the answer to this question is no, and Tolkien once pondered, started, but eventually abandoned a different cycle of tales to become his “British mythology.” If so, what would it have been?

The clue to this mystery comes to us in the very words provided above from letter 131. What if he once considered doing a medieval cycle of tales which would end with Arthur? Verlyn Flieger, who once tried to publish Tolkien’s unfinished work on King Arthur, suggests that this might actually have been the case. “The very fact that he raised the issue of ‘the Arthurian world’ suggests that he was not just aware of its place in England’s literary heritage but of its place in his own as well, for Tolkien had already tried writing his own version of Arthurian legend. At some time in the mid-1930s, more than a decade before he wrote the letter, he had begun a long poem that he called The Fall of Arthur,” Verlyn Flieger, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), 34. Before then, Tolkien had worked on and helped translate Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E.V. Gordon. Moreover, if one looks at Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien specifically places it within an Arthurian perspective, happening after the time of Old King Coel and before the time of Arthur. Certainly Tolkien had an interest in Arthur and the Arthurian legend, even if he ultimately found it to be unsuitable to meet his needs. We can see influences of its cycle of stories and ideas consistently surrounding Tolkien and making its way into Tolkien’s stories (Gandalf is more than a little like Merlin, and one cannot discount the similarity between Aragorn with Arthur).

Yet, there seems to be something missing. While we have a few stories by Tolkien, some left unfinished, which show an Arthurian bias and might provide enough evidence to suggest Tolkien pondered the development of an Arthurian cycle to appease his own desire for a mythology for Britain, certainly it was not the only thing he wrote upon or worked on during the time he was writing these Arthurian stories. He was still working upon his own Middle Earth stories. He might have had plans to connect the two together, and to show how Middle Earth and its pre-history slowly became the Britain of history and especially of Arthurian legend. But it also seems if this was the case, he might have also desired other mythmakers to share in this task. And this is where the Inklings have a place in this story. Myths and legends clearly need more than one source and one author to develop properly and engage the psyche of a culture. While Tolkien tried to create a mythology which displayed the influence of many editors involved in its creation, for the most part it was all to do with his pre-historical world. However, this interest in Arthur and the possible development of an Arthurian mythology was an idea held not just by Tolkien but other Inklings, such as Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis. If we look at the literary efforts of the Inklings, we can see an interesting, over-arching legacy of stories which could be seen as connecting one to another: Adam Fox’s Old King Coel leads into Farmer Giles of Ham which then leads to all the Arthurian tales written by Williams and Tolkien, and finally ends in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (written, as it were, in the style of Williams to honor Williams after his death). And, somewhere within that history, one would have found a place for Tolkien’s Smith of Wooton Major.

While this might, at first, seem to be a fanciful reading of the Inklings, we must remember that Lewis’ Space Trilogy, begun with Out of the Silent Planet was originally meant to be followed by a time-travel tale written by Tolkien. The tale Tolkien began was clearly within his Middle Earth tradition. But Lewis was impatient with Tolkien and wrote the rest of the trilogy by himself. The last volume of the Space Trilogy contains the first published reference to Tolkien’s own Numenor, placing it side by side with the novel's own Arthurian references. And even if Tolkien would eventually make his Middle Earth cycle his claim to fame and use it to satisfy his own personal need for a British mythology, we must remember, the Old English texts he worked with as a philologist, consistently called the world in them “Middle Earth.” It could be said that, for Tolkien, the greatest problem with the Arthurian legend is that it was too recent, too Christianized, but it seems that there is always a place, even if it is a minor place, for it and the literature surrounding Arthur made by the Inklings to become a part of the greater story which forms Tolkien’s mythology.