Yet there had been declarations and promises in the Duchess Road days that Ronald felt could not be lightly broken. Moreover Edith had been his ideal in the last three years, his inspiration and his hope for the future. He had nurtured and cultivated his love for her so that it grew in secret, even though it had to be fed solely on his memories of their adolescent romance and a few photographs of her as a child. He now perceived only one course of action: he must go to Cheltenham, beseech her to give up George Field, and ask her to marry him.
In truth he knew that she would say yes. She had hinted as much in her letter, explaining that she had only become engaged to George because he had been kind to her, and she felt ‘on the shelf’, and there was no other young man that she knew, and she had given up believing that Ronald would want to see her again after the three years had passed. ‘I began to doubt you, Ronald,’ she told him in her letter, ‘and to think you would cease to care for me.’ But now that he had written to renew his vow of love, she indicated that everything had changed.
So on Wednesday 8 January 1913 he travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. They walked out into the country and sat under a railway viaduct where they talked. By the end of the day Edith had declared that she would give up George Field and marry Ronald Tolkien.
She wrote to George and sent him back his ring; and he, poor young man, was dreadfully upset at first and his family was insulted and angry. But eventually the matter ceased to be alluded to, and they all became friends once more. Edith and Ronald did not announce their engagement, being a little nervous of family reaction and wanting to wait until Ronald’s prospects were more certain. But Ronald returned to his new term at Oxford in ‘a bursting happiness’.
One of his first actions on arriving was to write to Father Francis explaining that he and Edith intended to be married. He was very nervous about this, but when Father Francis’s reply came it was calm and resigned if far from enthusiastic. This was as well, for although the priest was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian, he still gave him much-needed financial support; so it was essential that he tolerate the engagement.
Now that Ronald had been reunited with Edith he had to turn his full attention to Honour Moderations,1 the first of the two examinations that would earn him his degree in Classics. He tried to cram into six weeks the work that he should have done during the previous four terms, but it was not easy to break the habit of sitting up late talking to friends, and he found it difficult to get up in the morning – though like many others before him he blamed this on the damp Oxford climate rather than on his own late hours. When Honour Moderations began at the end of February he was still poorly prepared for many papers. On the whole he was relieved when he learnt that he had at least managed to achieve a Second Class.
But he knew that he ought to have done better. A first in ‘Mods’ is not easy to achieve, but it is within the range of an able undergraduate who devotes himself to his work. Certainly it is expected of someone who intends to follow an academic career, and Tolkien already had such a career in mind. However he had achieved a ‘pure alpha’, a practically faultless paper, in his special subject, Comparative Philology. This was partly a tribute to the excellence of Joe Wright’s teaching, but it was also an indication that Tolkien’s greatest talents lay in this field; and Exeter College took note. The college was disappointed that as one of its award-holders he had missed a First, but suggested that if he had earned an alpha in philology he ought to become a philologist. Dr Farnell who was Rector of Exeter (the head of the college) knew that he was interested in Old and Middle English and other Germanic languages, so would it not be sensible if he changed to the English School? Tolkien agreed, and at the beginning of the summer term of 1913 he abandoned Classics and began to read English.
The Honour School of English Language and Literature was still young by Oxford standards, and it was split down the middle. On one side were the philologists and medievalists who considered that any literature later than Chaucer was not sufficiently challenging to form the basis of a degree-course syllabus. On the other were the enthusiasts for ‘modern’ literature (by which they meant literature from Chaucer to the nineteenth century) who thought that the study of philology and Old and Middle English was ‘word-mongering and pedantry’. In some ways it was mistaken to try and squeeze both factions of opinion into the same Honours School. The result was that undergraduates who chose to specialise in ‘Language’ (that is, Old and Middle English and philology) were nevertheless compelled to read a good deal of modern literature, while those who wanted to read ‘Literature’ (the modern course) were also obliged to study texts in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and acquaint themselves with a certain amount of philology. Both courses were compromises, and neither side was entirely satisfied.
There was no question as to which side of the school would claim Tolkien. He would specialise in linguistic studies, and it was arranged that his tutor would be Kenneth Sisam, a young New Zealander who was acting as an assistant to A. S. Napier, the Professor of English Language and Literature. After meeting Sisam and surveying the syllabus Tolkien was ‘seized with panic, because I cannot see how it is going to provide me with honest labour for two years and a term’. It all seemed too easy and familiar: he was already well acquainted with many of the texts he would have to read, and he even knew a certain amount of Old Norse, which he was going to do as a special subject (under the Icelandic expert W. A. Craigie). Moreover Sisam did not at first appear to be an inspiring tutor. He was a quiet-spoken man only four years older than Tolkien, certainly lacking the commanding presence of Joe Wright. But he was an accurate and painstaking scholar, and Tolkien soon came to respect and like him. As to the work, Tolkien spent more time at his desk than he had while studying Classics. It was not as easy as he had expected, for the standard of the Oxford English School was very high; but he was soon firmly in command of the syllabus and was writing lengthy and intricate essays on ‘Problems of the dissemination of phonetic change’, ‘The lengthening of vowels in Old and Middle English times’, and ‘The Anglo-Norman element in English’. He was particularly interested in extending his knowledge of the West Midland dialect in Middle English because of its associations with his childhood and ancestry; and he was reading a number of Old English works that he had not previously encountered.
Among these was the Crist of Cynewulf, a group of Anglo-Saxon religious poems. Two lines from it struck him forcibly:
Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended.
‘Hail Earendel brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men.’ Earendel is glossed by the Anglo-Saxon dictionary as ‘a shining light, ray’, but here it clearly has some special meaning. Tolkien himself interpreted it as referring to John the Baptist, but he believed that ‘Earendel’ had originally been the name for the star presaging the dawn, that is, Venus. He was strangely moved by its appearance in the Cynewulf lines. ‘I felt a curious thrill,’ he wrote long afterwards, ‘as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.’
He found even more to excite his imagination when he studied his special subject. Old Norse (or Old Icelandic: the names are interchangeable) is the language that was brought to Iceland by the Norwegians who fled from their native land in the ninth century. Tolkien was already moderately acquainted with Norse, and he now made a thorough study of its literature. He read the sagas and the Prose or Younger Edda. He also studied the Poetic or Elder Edda; and so it was that he came upon the ancient storehouse of Icelandic myth and legend.
‘The Elder Edda’ is the name given to a collection of poems, some of them incomplete or textually corrupt, whose principal manuscript dates from the thirteenth century. But many of the poems themselves are more ancient, perhaps originating at a period earlier than the settlement of Iceland. Some are heroic, describing the world of men, while others