J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Humphrey Carpenter

was taking the place of the old gods; yet it imparts a sense of living myth, a feeling of awe and mystery, in its representation of a pagan cosmos. It had a profound appeal to Tolkien’s imagination.

      In the months following their reunion, the question of Edith’s religion caused some concern to her and Ronald. If their marriage was to be blessed by his church she would have to become a Catholic. She was in theory quite happy to do this – indeed she believed that her family had long ago been Catholic. But it was not a simple matter. She was a member of the Church of England, and a very active member. During her separation from Ronald a large proportion of her life had centred on the parish church at her Cheltenham home, and she had made herself useful in church affairs. She had in consequence acquired some status in the parish; and it was a smart parish, typical of the elegant town. Now Ronald wanted her to renounce all this and to go to a church where nobody knew her; and looking at it from that point of view she did not relish the prospect. She was also afraid that her ‘Uncle’ Jessop in whose house she lived might be very angry, for like many others of his age and class he was strongly anti-Catholic. Would he allow her to go living under his roof until her marriage if she ‘poped’? It was an awkward situation, and she suggested to Ronald that the matter might be delayed until they were officially engaged or the time of their marriage was near. But he would not hear of this. He wanted her to act quicky. He despised the Church of England, calling it ‘a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs’. And if Edith were persecuted for her decision to become a Catholic, why then, that was precisely what had happened to his own dear mother, and she had endured it. ‘I do so dearly believe,’ he wrote to Edith, ‘that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.’ (He himself was once more attending mass regularly and had perhaps chosen to forget his lapses of the previous year.) Clearly the question of Edith becoming a Catholic was an emotional matter to him; perhaps it was also in part, though he would not have admitted it, a test of her love after her unfaithfulness in becoming engaged to George Field.

      So she did what he wanted. She told the Jessops that she intended to become a Catholic, and ‘Uncle’ reacted just as she had feared, for he ordered her to leave his house as soon as she could find some other accommodation. Faced with this crisis, Edith decided to set up home with her middle-aged cousin Jennie Grove, a tiny determined woman with a deformed back. Together they began to look for rooms. There seems to have been some suggestion that they might come to Oxford so that Edith could be near Ronald, but she does not appear to have wanted this. Perhaps she was resentful of the pressure he had brought to bear on her over the matter of Catholicism, and certainly she wanted to maintain an independent life until they were married. She and Jennie chose Warwick, which was not far from their native Birmingham but was far more attractive than that city. After a search they managed to find temporary rooms, and Ronald joined them there in June 1913.

      He found Warwick, its trees, its hill, and its castle, to be a place of remarkable beauty. The weather was hot and he went punting with Edith down the Avon. Together they attended Benediction in the Roman Catholic church, ‘from which’ (he wrote) ‘we came away serenely happy, for it was the first time that we had ever been able to go calmly side by side to church’. But they also had to spend some time searching for a house for Edith and Jennie, and when a suitable one was found there were innumerable arrangements to be made. Ronald found the hours that passed in domestic concerns to be rather irritating. Indeed he and Edith were not always happy when they were together. They no longer knew each other very well, for they had spent the three years of their separation in two totally different societies: the one all-male, boisterous, and academic; the other mixed, genteel, and domestic. They had grown up, but they had grown apart. From now on each would have to make concessions to the other if they were to come to a real understanding. Ronald would have to tolerate Edith’s absorption in the daily details of life, trivial as they might seem to him. She would have to make an effort to understand his preoccupation with his books and his languages, selfish as it might appear to her. Neither of them entirely succeeded. Their letters were full of affection but also sometimes of mutual irritation. Ronald might address Edith as ‘little one’ (his favourite name for her), and talk lovingly of her ‘little house’, but she was far from little in personality, and when they were together their tempers would often flare. Part of the trouble lay in Ronald’s self-chosen role of sentimental lover, which was quite unlike the face he showed to his male friends. There was real love and understanding between him and Edith, but he often wrapped it up in amatory cliché; while if he had shown her more of his ‘bookish’ face and had taken her into the company of his male friends, she might not have minded so much when these elements loomed large in their marriage. But he kept the two sides of his life firmly apart.

      After his visit to Warwick Ronald set out for Paris with two Mexican boys to whom he was to act as tutor and escort. In Paris they met a third boy and two aunts, who spoke virtually no English. Ronald was ashamed that his own Spanish was only rudimentary, and he found that even his French deserted him when he was faced with the necessity of speaking it. He loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own, but he disliked the Frenchmen he saw in the streets, and wrote to Edith about ‘the vulgarity and the jabber and spitting and the indecency’. Long before this expedition he had conceived a dislike of France and the French, and what he now saw did not cure him of his Gallophobia. Certainly he had some justification for hating France after what happened next. The aunts and the boys decided to visit Brittany, and the prospect appealed to him, for the true Breton people are of Celtic stock and speak a language that is in many respects similar to Welsh. But in the event their destination proved to be Dinard, a seaside resort like any other place. ‘Brittany!’ Ronald wrote to Edith. ‘And to see nothing but trippers and dirty papers and bathing machines.’ There was worse to come. A few days after their arrival he was walking in the street with one of the boys and the older aunt. A car mounted the pavement and struck the aunt, running her over and causing acute internal injury. Ronald helped to take her back to the hotel but she died a few hours later. The holiday ended in distraught arrangements for the body to be shipped back to Mexico. Ronald brought the boys back to England, telling Edith: ‘Never again except I am in the direst poverty will I take any such job.’