Simon Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibition at the Morgan Library. Opening Speech.

Feb 7th, 2019

I would like to thank you all for coming today – many from faraway - to celebrate the first exhibition in America of my grandfather’s life and work. For me personally – as far as I know I am the first Tolkien to emigrate to this great country – it is a very special moment and I am grateful to the Bodleian and Morgan Libraries for making it possible.

I hope that most of you have now had the opportunity to tour the exhibition and see my grandfather’s wonderful pictures on display. He was a gifted artist. The picture of Bilbo and the dwarves hidden in their barrels as they come to the huts of the Raft-Elves that was on your invitations is a masterpiece of deep blues and greens subtly varied in tone as the forest gives way to the welcoming sunlight. No other great writer was a painter too and my grandfather’s pictures give us a unique opportunity to see his imaginary world through his eyes rather than those of his interpreters. And they also remind us of the well spring of his inspiration in the English countryside of his childhood. The intricate, beautifully constructed painting of Hobbiton Hill rising from the water mill past intensely cultivated fields divided by carefully tended hedgerows to Bag End and the famous Party Tree near the top, recalls the idyllic days of his childhood with his mother and his brother, Hilary, at the village of Sarehole where there was also a mill and a pond on which swans swam, and two millers nicknamed the White Ogre and the Black Ogre who fascinated and terrified the small boys in equal measure. My grandfather had a deep love of the natural world formed under his mother’s tuition at this time and he conveyed this in his art. The picture of Lothlorien in the Spring with the mallorn trees in flower is a vision of loveliness, but he knew too that nature could be threatening and cruel, as in the picture of Old Man Willow whose heart was rotten but whose strength was green, and who almost put an end to the ring bearer’s quest with his clutching roots and branches before it had even gotten under way.

My grandfather’s life changed forever when his mother died in 1904 when he was twelve and he had to leave the countryside for the ugliness of industrial Birmingham; a violent upheaval that was echoed a little more than a decade later when he exchanged the dreaming spires of Oxford for the horrors of the trenches in France where two of his great friends from school died. These violent moves from beauty into ugliness accompanied by the loss of those he loved infuses his vision in The Lord of the Rings where the natural world is under constant threat: Sauron and Saruman bring an industrial desolation to the land they take over, destroying trees and poisoning rivers and smashing all that is beautiful. This struggle in Middle Earth between the natural and the unnatural; between the fertile and the barren, the free and the enslaved, appealed to the many young Americans in the 1960s who began the Earth Day movement and is more inspiring than ever today when our planet is facing an existential threat from man-made climate change.

In the 1920s my grandfather painted pictures of landscapes and events in The Silmarillion on which he was hard at work when the rigorous demands of his academic work allowed. Perhaps the most famous of these shows the mountain of Taniquetil in Valinor, the land of the gods, where Manwe, King of the Valar, dwelt on the snow-capped summit in halls from which he could see across the seas to distant Middle Earth and so guard against the threat of Morgoth. In the picture the high mountain straddles night and day: from the star-studded black sky and brightly lit Hall at the peak down to the elves’ swan-prowed ships in the sea at the base lit by the light of the sun and the moon. It is a beautiful picture, a vision of a far-off land which is what The Silmarillion remained throughout my grandfather’s life. In 1937 my grandfather’s publisher, Sir Stanley Unwin, turned it down because he wanted another Hobbit (which became of course The Lord of the Rings) and in 1952 he wouldn’t countenance publishing both as The Lord of the Rings was an enormous financial risk just by itself. ‘Better something than nothing’, my grandfather wrote, and downhearted, he stopped work on a wonderful retelling of his 1917 story, The Fall of Gondolin, which appears in my father’s last book of my grandfather’s writings published last year. The First Age on which my grandfather had labored for longer than the Third remained like “the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist” as he described it, and this caused him untold sadness and disappointment. Since my grandfather’s death my father has worked for many years to edit and publish all his writings, but this has been a bittersweet experience, given that my grandfather was gone and could never see this happen.

My grandfather’s pictures and artefacts resonate with different aspects of his life and experience, and none more so than the facsimile leaves of The Book of Mazarbul which the Fellowship finds in Moria just before they are attacked by the orcs and the Balrog. The charred remains of the book are all that is left of Balin’s ill-fated attempt to restore the dwarf kingdom there and my grandfather worked hard to create three leaves that would replicate the original final pages of the book. He burnt the paper at the edges with his pipe and washed it with red paint to resemble bloodstains and looking at them, we can see Gandalf reading out the last lines scrawled by the terrified, doomed dwarves: ‘We cannot get out. The end comes … drums, drums in the deep … they are coming.’ Elsewhere in the Exhibition we experience this intent to create authenticity when we read the elaborately detailed maps of Middle Earth or see the postmarks and painted North Pole postage stamps on the letters from Father Christmas. These are manifestations of my grandfather’s ambition – so admirably accomplished - to forge a union of the believable and the imaginary. The extent of his achievement is measured by the fact that so many readers of The Lord of the Rings experience a world that is magical – populated by talking trees and wizards - and yet is also paradoxically more real than our own. What creates this? What is the secret of my grandfather’s alchemy? A genius for storytelling certainly, combined with a perfect internal mechanism: the ring that is the most powerful object in the world but also the smallest and which must be carried by the most insignificant person because he is the most invisible and which must be destroyed and never used. But beyond the storytelling there is that sense of unfathomable depth that is unique to my grandfather’s writing. This is engendered in part by the untold history - the unvisited island seen far off to which I have already alluded - that is an ever-present backdrop to the events in The Lord of the Rings, but it also arises from the well-known but extraordinary fact that my grandfather knew the languages that his characters spoke. In fact, he began with language and made stories to provide a world in which the languages could live. In The Lord of the Rings everything has a purpose; as much is left unsaid as what is said; and there are no facades without interiors, even if those interiors often remain hidden. 

Examples of Elvish script are to be found throughout the exhibition including in the sections related to calligraphy and heraldic devices. My grandfather would make these beautiful designs in colored pens while he was solving the crossword, and looking at them now takes me back 50 years as if on a time machine to when I was a small boy sitting opposite him at the Miramar Hotel in Bournemouth, impatiently waiting for him to finish so we could go down to the beach and skim pebbles into the English Channel: a game at which he was always much better than me.  And it was only a few weeks ago that my aunt, Priscilla who would have loved to be here today, told me of a similar but even more intense experience induced by the Exhibition in Oxford that I would like to end by sharing with you. She went to the Bodleian on the Exhibition’s last day for a final visit and the guide suggested that she might like to listen to the audio recording of the Professor reciting Namarie: Galadriel’s lament in the Elvish language Quenya that she sang to Frodo and the Fellowship as they departed Lothlorien. And so my aunt put on the headphones and heard her father’s voice again speaking to her from across the years, while all around she could see the last visitors utterly absorbed in looking at his work in the exhibit cases. It was as she described it to me a moment of great happiness.

I hope that other visitors in the weeks and months to come will enjoy the Exhibition as we have done, and through it come to a greater appreciation and understanding of my grandfather’s extraordinary work.

'Lost Without Lost'

Posted May 19 2010