Third of three postings about A Well of Wonder:
Third in the Tolkien section of Well of Wonder is the first of five chapters that, all together here, reprint virtually all of Tolkien and The Silmarillion, which was released by an evangelical publisher in 1976 and, I imagine, little noticed. “The Evolution of a Friendship and the Writing of The Silmarillion” is a real prize, one of the best, most vivid accounts we have of the elderly Tolkien. Kilby met Tolkien on 1 Sept. 1964 and was invited back for the 4th, before he would fly back to America. Once settled in what Tolkien said was the room in which LotR had been typed, Kilby found that, when Tolkien grew particularly excited, “he would sometimes come very close to me and put his face almost against mine, as though to make sure the point of some remark was completely understood.” Kilby and Tolkien hit it off right away.
Kilby eventually offered his services as a secretary for the summer of 1966, if that would help Tolkien to prepare The Silmarillion for publication at last. Tolkien accepted Kilby’s offer, offering an “honorarium” though he could not offer a room. Kilby arrived in London and met Rayner Unwin, who hoped the American’s assistance might help Tolkien to bring the manuscript to the point of submission for publication. He also begged Kilby to try to get Tolkien to write a preface for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo. Kilby writes ruefully, “in this I failed utterly. My various reminders and coaxings were accepted seriously, yet at the end of the summer Tolkien almost triumphantly said, ‘Well, I didn’t write it!’” Tolkien was then 74. He turned down Kilby’s offer of putting his papers in order.
Kilby went to the Tolkiens’ home two or three times a week during that summer, for one to three hours at a time, and read manuscripts of the legendarium. Tolkien liked to talk; “always there was an expression of both pose and genuineness revealed like a double exposure.” While Tolkien fretted about the Ace Books reprint (a matter that Kilby rightly felt should be handed over to a lawyer and dismissed from Tolkien’s mind), Kilby noted that some of the Silmarillion materials did not appear to have been looked at in a long time, and that when asked about details of his own legendarium, Tolkien sometimes didn’t have a ready answer. Kilby became convinced Tolkien would never finish The Silmarillion.
Kilby was surely one of very few people indeed who have read Tolkien’s still-unpublished satire “The Bovadium Fragments.” He discusses the dislike that Tolkien, at the time, was expressing toward George MacDonald’s fairy tales. He mentions the possibility, proposed by a third party (Rolland Hein?), that part of what moved Tolkien to talk this way might have been a desire to throw people off the scent, since MacDonald manifestly had influenced Tolkien. Also, I wish Kilby had probed Tolkien a bit and managed to get down to specifics. If Tolkien was objecting to didacticism ruining imagination in MacDonald, was the former thinking of a particular story? One doesn’t think that such outstanding tales as “The Golden Key” and “Photogen and Nycteris” are ruined stories. On the other hand, “The Wise Woman” seems to me, too, unlikable, a botch due to an oppressive and condescending moralizing. Tolkien had been asked to write an introduction to a collection of MacDonald tales and had agreed. Did he perhaps start with, or early on, encounter, the unfortunate “Wise Woman” and become turned off about the whole idea? In any event, the experience was the occasion of Tolkien beginning his own late tale, Smith of Wootton Major, which Kilby read a year before its publication.
The next article, “A Brief Chronology of the Writings,” is obsolete, but at the least of interest because it was an early attempt by a super-fan to get a handle, with the help of published and unpublished remarks of the professor, on when Tolkien started writing his Middle-earth works, also of the geographical correlates between the Third Age and our own.
Well of Wonder’s reprinting of Tolkien and The Silmarillion pauses for the fifth of the section’s seven chapters devoted to Tolkien. “The Lost Myth and Literary Imagination” comes from 1969, the last year of the “Craze” as I’ve dated it for this Beyond Bree series. “Lost Myth” was published that year in the University of Wisconsin’s journal Arts in Society, the issue theme being “Confrontation Between Art and Technology,” Kilby’s article didn’t make it into Richard West’s 1970 Tolkien bibliography that recorded critical works published into early 1969.
Kilby deals here with the contemporary unhappy sense of a disenchanted world. Nature is despoiled because it must serve man – ah, Kilby asks, “But which part of man?” To recover a richer understanding of the world and ourselves, Kilby the evangelical Christian mentions his own practice: “He has “practiced for many years looking upon the morning light as an unmerited and mysterious gift and on life in flora and fauna as worthy of a daily salute and even a bow. … More recognition of mystery and symbol in nature would, I think, contribute to our reacquisition of wholeness.” Next, he subtly invites the reader to find out about Charles Williams’s insights into co-inherence and exchange. Williams, still far less known that Lewis or Tolkien, was an obscure figure indeed almost fifty years ago. Kilby promises that Williams’s insights are conducive to “joy,” rather than the preoccupation of our present thought prison with “pseudo-events” and “artificial” fun. Man himself is a mystery; “by means of imagination man recognizes his real existence and exercises a metaphysical prophecy of things possible to him.”
Several pages of this substantial and passionate essay expound the relevance of LotR to the needs of our time. Kilby says, “No one is less ‘alienated’ than J. R. R. Tolkien. …Though he is not optimistic about our age, he has no existential angst.” “The Lost Myth” appears to be, or to be based on, the keynote address that Kilby gave in May 1968 at one of the first Tolkien-related gatherings to occur in an academic setting, the Secondary Universe Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (I chronicled the conference in Days of the Craze No. 20, Beyond Bree Feb. 2016.) I should think it was an excellent paper for such an occasion.
The remaining two chapters of Well of Wonder’s Tolkien section return to Tolkien and The Silmarillion. “Literary Form, Biblical Narrative, and Theological Themes” is, Wilkinson says, Kilby’s “extended reflection on the …Christian vision at the core of Tolkien’s whole mythology.” Tolkien himself brought to Kilby’s attention the passage from Cynewulf’s Christ about Eärendel, and told him that the “Secret Fire sent to burn at the heart of the World” was the Holy Spirit. Here Kilby reveals that in 1966 Tolkien asked him to read a “lengthy account,” a “conversation on soul and body and the possible purpose of God in allowing the Fall.” This can only have been the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, that strange and moving piece that Christopher Tolkien supposed was written in 1959, and that was not published until Morgoth’s Ring in 1993: a dialogue that is one of the true gems of the 12-volume History of Middle-earth. I wonder if anyone other than Tolkien himself had read this piece at the time Kilby perused it. Kilby speaks of “parallels” between persons and events in the Bible and in LotR. Elsewhere, I have argued that a key to Tolkien’s imagination is to see the latter as “types.” (See “Typology: The Lost Key to the Religious Dimension of The Lord of the Rings,” Beyond Bree November 2013.) Finally, “Death and Afterlife” speaks of Tolkien’s literary longevity – it’s too soon to say “immortality” – and his affirmation of the Christian hope of eternal life.
There’s a bit more for Tolkien aficionados. In the final section of Well of Wonder, Wilkinson has included “The Forming of a New Friendship,” from Tolkien and The Silmarillion, which is about Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. It notes Tolkien’s eventual denial of having been an intimate friend of Williams.
