(avg. read time: 39–78 mins.)
The movie opens with an appearance of a Black Rider on the battlefield of the Somme. And here we encounter our first issues in the storytelling of this movie. First, one can easily imagine Tolkien objecting to this movie in principle because of how it approaches his life in relation to his work. As Tolkien himself said in response to Deborah Webster in October 1958 (Letter #213):
I do not like giving 'facts' about myself other than ‘dry’ ones (which anyway are quite as relevant to my books as any other more Juicy details). Not simply for personal reasons; but also because I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author’s works (if the works are in fact worthy of attention), and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest. But only one’s guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author's works. Not the author himself (though he knows more than any investigator), and certainly not so-called ‘psychologists’.
This opening statement is rather an exaggeration on Tolkien’s part, since he goes on in the same letter to relate some facts about himself that he thinks are actually important for his work—although he does not himself attempt to unravel the complex relationship between his life and work—such as the fact that he is a Catholic Christian. In other words, while Tolkien does not dismiss the influence of his life on his work—which would surely be an absurd dismissal—he is rightly skeptical of the capacity of critics or even the author to convey this relationship well and accurately. There are links that one can be more confident in—whether it is generally between the theology and philosophy conveyed in Tolkien’s work and his Catholic theology or specifically in cases such as the references to the giant metal serpents in the Fall of Gondolin and the tanks that debuted in WWI—but it is best to tread carefully. The filmmakers generally rely on recognizable iconography from the books—specifically from The Hobbit and LOTR—to make the connections, but that is what makes their version of the psychological-biographical approach haphazard. The only perceivable reason to connect the imagery of a Black Rider with the Somme is because it is a recognizable Tolkien image, not because that connection clearly belongs, which it does in some other cases in this movie.
Second, because the filmmakers almost always keep these connections at the easily recognizable level, they do not take proper advantage of this approach in relation to WWI. The more obvious connections to Tolkien’s writing The Silmarillion do not appear, simply because not as many people will recognize the visual cues. Instead of inspiring the audience to read more of Tolkien’s work, the movie prefers to play it safe with what the makers are confident that at least most of the audience knows. At the same time, one of the more profound links to Tolkien’s experience in WWI is never portrayed. We never get that scene that parallels when Sam sees the dead enemy soldier in his first experience of battle of Men vs. Men: “He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace” (IV/4). It is not difficult to picture a young Tolkien engaging in this kind of reflection upon glimpsing the horrors of the bloodiest battlefield in the Great War. If we are going to relate Tolkien’s fantasy to the war, then we might as well get at least a sample of Tolkien’s perspective on war and such a scene would have accomplished both goals at once.
Third, this choice affects the movie as a whole. It is not always easy to figure out how to approach a biopic. Do you try to condense the person’s life in its entirety into the story (e.g., Malcolm X or Chaplin)? Do you focus on the known occupation of the subject and how it led to some climactic moment in the person’s life (e.g., Ali or Ed Wood)? Do you try to use a certain phase or event in the subject’s life as an interpretive frame for the rest of the subject’s life (e.g., Ray)? Do you focus on a specific episode in the subject’s life while still making some links to the rest of the life-story (e.g., Longford)? There are many approaches open to the biopic filmmaker and the implicit theses of the film will drive what approach one takes. The approach this film takes is to use the Battle of the Somme as a frame story with extensive flashbacks to the rest of Tolkien’s life until the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie. But it is not clear why this approach is the one taken when almost no attention is given to Tolkien the writer of The Silmarillion, but it is given to Tolkien the writer of The Hobbit and LOTR. The fact that this is taken as the definitive event, but it is related to Tolkien’s works when he was in his forties and beyond means that huge chunks of his life that are more directly relevant to those works have to be put off to the side. The audience meets the T.C.B.S., but never the Inklings. No light is shed on his friendship with another literary titan of the twentieth century: C. S. Lewis. We never see his struggles in publishing LOTR, not least because for a long time he insisted on publishing The Silmarillion alongside it, a work that one can in time and inspiration link more directly to Tolkien’s youth and experience in WWI (the filmmakers could have even put some emphasis on this connection through Tolkien’s emotional attachment to it). Tolkien’s love story with Edith is never explored for its inspiration of the story of Beren and Lúthien or (more indirectly) Aragorn and Arwen. Although there is a brief scene of her dancing in the woods for Tolkien, the visual cue is never given in the same way as on the Somme that this connects with Tolkien’s stories (it could be as simple as briefly seeing Collins with Elf ears and nightingales around her). Because the experience of the Somme is given undue weight as an impetus for Tolkien’s imagination, everything else in Tolkien’s life-story becomes distorted by making this episode the gravitational center. Naturally, I will be returning to comment on this frame story as the movie returns to it.
A small detail in this opening is that Tolkien is implied to have a superior rank to a corporal—since the man he is ordering is a corporal—but it is never said what his rank is. Like many academics, he had the rank of second lieutenant, and he had the official rank of Battalion Signaling Officer for the 11th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. Despite his language skills, the communications in which he took part involved flags and Morse code. Many of his fellow lieutenants and other members of the leadership class—at the rate of one in five—did not survive the war.
The first scene we see of a young Tolkien is from his days in Sarehole. We even see the Sarehole Mill that served as the inspiration for the Old Mill owned by Ted Sandyman in the Shire. I appreciate these little touches of detail that the filmmakers add to this story. However, there remains a significant missed opportunity here. Since the movie fails to highlight Tolkien’s love of the natural world, it also fails to tell us of when Tolkien returned to Sarehole with his family and found that his idyllic setting was becoming part of the suburban sprawl. The city was creeping in on the country and consuming it. The locals and fans inspired by Tolkien would stop it from becoming completely subjugated to industry, but the movie could have portrayed Tolkien’s objections to this sprawl and how he saw it as the roots of the Shire’s corruption at the end of the War of the Ring. Still, I like that the movie included this brief scene of a setting that Tolkien loved and remembered fondly until the end of his days.
Since this movie makes a matter out of names, I would like to address here the matter of Tolkien’s name. His mother calls him “Ronald” in their scene together and that is true to history. According to Tolkien’s own account in Letter #309 (written to Amy Ronald in January 1969), his father wanted to call him John Benjamin Reuel Tolkien while his mother wanted to name her first child Rosalind if the child were a girl. Since the first child turned out to be a boy, they combined the boy’s name “Ronald” with the other parts of the father’s preferred name. And, as is not unusual for some people (including this reviewer), Tolkien often did not go by his first name. Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized biography often refers to him as Ronald. Tolkien himself said that he was known as “Ronald” among his kin, though he always thought of himself by the name “John.” His friends often called him “John” or sometimes “John Ronald.” When he signed his letters, he often did so with his initials or with “Ronald [Tolkien].” The only letter in Carpenter’s and (Christopher) Tolkien’s collection that he signs as “John Ronald” is to Geoffrey Smith in the middle of WWI. The movie accurately reflects these points, as Geoffrey switches between calling Tolkien “John” or “John Ronald.” See, I can acknowledge when this movie gets the details right (even if I insist that it all must be put in the proper context).
However, I must say that I was confused about the age of Tolkien in the scene with his mother when I first saw this film. Tolkien was twelve when his mom died, but apparently at the time of filming this scene the actor was sixteen or seventeen. There is a significant difference between boys of these ages, so I am not sure why the filmmakers settled for a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old when they needed a twelve-year-old. Being accurate on this point would help the audience see more of his vulnerability as a youth on the cusp of being a teenager losing both of his parents with a little brother in tow. He was sixteen when he was moved into Mrs. Faulkner’s house (which the movie seems to imply happened soon after Mabel’s death), but he was twelve when his mother died.
There are a couple other more substantive aspects of the scene of Tolkien with his mother and brother at their shack that require comment. First, there is a reference to what has apparently become a motto for the Tolkiens to live by as they move from place to place (which actually happened, due to financial difficulties): “Wherever you are happy is home.” I am not sure why this motto was included in the movie as it is heavy on sentimentality but light on substance from Tolkien’s actual life. It is not reflective of Tolkien’s work, anything he remembers of his mother, or what Mabel actually inculcated in her sons. But with the limited run-time, this mawkish sentiment was given screen time, and not Mabel’s devotion to Catholicism? It is all the more an odd inclusion when one considers that this sentiment has no discernible effect on Tolkien for the rest of the movie. There is never a callback to it for any reason.
Second, as Mabel prepares to tell a story of fantasy about finding treasure, a twelve-year-old Tolkien responds with, “People don’t find treasure in real life, Mum.” This line really did not sit well with me. It implies that Tolkien is trying to be grown up at his age by moving past the fairy stories for kids. He presumably wants to be a modern rational realist who does not fall for the apparently false promises and premises of myths and fairy stories. This storyline may work for a generic modernist kid or for the early phases of a C. S. Lewis film, but it does not work for Tolkien. Tolkien never seems to have been such a person, at least not from any indication that we have. As noted in the last part, Hilary Tolkien’s collection of stories in Black & White Ogre Country indicate that his brother was a storyteller of fantasy from a young age, even some years before his mother died. He also liked the stories of fantasy writer George MacDonald (his distaste for them later in life had to do with his developing ideas of fantasy rather than with a rejection of it). Instead of trying to make Tolkien seem like anyone else of his age or time save for his mother’s inculcation of the love of fantasy, maybe the movie should try telling us the more interesting true story of Tolkien on this point.
Third, the story Mabel reads the boys is from the Völsunga Saga in which the hero Sigurd slays the dragon Fafnir and takes his treasure. This fact was a nice touch of detail because this saga and this story in particular surely were influential for Tolkien (to the point that Tolkien produced his own translation of the saga published posthumously as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún). Even with this inclusion, there remains a problem. The movie essentially tries to convey that Mabel’s influence was one of inculcating a love of myth and fairy story for Tolkien, even if it was against his objections. While it is reasonable to infer that his mother’s influence had something to do with this love, the fact is that this is not what Tolkien remembered her for (even if he did also mention that he owed his tastes for philology and romance ultimately to his mother, per Letter #165). If there was any aspect of his life that Tolkien most directly linked to his mother, it was his Catholic faith, but this is never even mentioned in their one scene together.
When the scene shifts back to the Somme, Tolkien catches a glimpse of a dragon in the gas deployed on the battlefield. Later in the movie, when it breathes fire, the snap back to reality shows that German soldiers have snuck up to Tolkien’s trench and have begun igniting the English soldiers with flamethrowers, the modern and portable version of which was another WWI innovation. This is actually one of the better links made, because the suggestion is not that this imagery was rooted in the war; rather it is an employment of something he was familiar with beforehand in a new setting. We have something of a glimpse of what could have been: instead of trying to find the impetus for the stories in the war, we could see Tolkien viewing the war through his established lens of fantasy. Of course, to do so, the movie would need more of these links of Tolkien’s knowledge of fairy stories and myths with his experience in the war. Such an exercise could have helped give the audience a peek into Tolkien’s worldview. Instead, these visions are often distorted in such a way as to be the origins and inspirations for aspects of Tolkien’s story rather than outworkings of his thought.
When the scene shifts back to Tolkien’s younger days, Fr. Morgan has brought the Tolkien boys to Mrs. Faulkner’s place, where they will lodge as they attend King Edward’s in Birmingham. This is the first time we see him in the movie, and it is the last time we will see him until around halfway through the movie, when he shows up to tell Tolkien he cannot continue seeing Edith, but that he is free to do as he wishes when he turns twenty-one and is no longer accountable to his guardian. It is not until that scene that we get any sense of his function as a father figure in anything other than his title. His only functions here are to drop off the boys at their new lodging and to tell Mrs. Faulkner a little bit about them. There was reportedly a Communion scene that was ultimately cut from the movie that probably would have been included somewhere around here. At least, this area of the film is where it should have appeared. It was around this time that the Tolkiens served the Mass at Morgan’s Oratory (Letter #306).
Otherwise, Fr. Morgan highlights to Mrs. Faulkner that the boys were homeschooled in languages. John Ronald had shown a particular aptitude for languages at an early age as—around the time most children were starting school—he was mastering English and learning both Latin and French. Such were merely a taste of the years to come, in which he would learn dozens of languages and create several more. Before he was a freshman at King Edward’s, he was also proficient in Greek, Spanish, German (and various forms thereof), and Old English. By the time he was sixteen, he was also reading Chaucer in Middle English and had taken to learning Anglo-Saxon and Gothic on his own. This reference to Mabel’s teaching them languages establishes one of the major themes of this biopic in Tolkien’s love for language and his developing depth in comprehending it. Unfortunately, since the movie foregoes emphasizing his love for nature, we do not hear that she also taught her boys some botany. This experience instilled a love for plant life in them that would shape both of their lives in different ways (John Ronald by his writing, Hilary by his farming, and both by their gardening).
Then we come to the scene that provided a snippet frequently shared on social media concerning the pronunciation of Tolkien’s name. Tolkien himself had some concern about this, as demonstrated in Letter #165 to Houghton Mifflin Co. (June 1955). It was likely so emphasized in the low-level advertisement of this movie because mispronunciation of his name is quite common. Properly, it is “Toll-keen,” not “Toll-kin,” “Toll-key-en,” “Toll-kine,” or “Toll-kun” (like most Americans, it took me a while to realize this as well). The movie saves the linguistic analysis of his name for later, when Professor Joseph Wright does it, but I think it would have helped the characterization for it to be here. Tolkien was already interested in the origins of words, and it is not a stretch to imagine that he would have looked into the origins of his name. The precocious teenager could have demonstrated his linguistic nerdiness by giving his teacher a mini-lecture on his name beyond its pronunciation (perhaps including a note for humor that the meaning of the root word, as he understood it, was equivalent to “foolhardy”). Oh well, at least the movie helps set the record straight on that matter.
The other part of this scene is the teacher’s assignment for the class after Tolkien’s pronunciation lesson, which involves the students reading Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales while pronouncing the Middle English in which he wrote. As a way both to establish Tolkien’s early—albeit frictional—relationship with the future members of the T.C.B.S. and to establish Tolkien’s linguistic ability in actual practice, the scenario plays out where Wiseman takes Tolkien’s copy of Chaucer because he misplaced his. This is also a typical story told in these settings: let’s be jerks to the new kid. After Wiseman reads his excerpt, the teacher puts Tolkien on the spot to read and correctly pronounce Chaucer. Rather than rat out his classmate, Tolkien shows off that he has memorized Chaucer and can recite it in the Middle English. While there may be some artistic license to this scene, it is true to the fact that Tolkien had a passion for Chaucer’s work. Indeed, a recent book—Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer—demonstrated this passion on a level never seen before from Tolkien’s works with Tolkien’s commentary and extensive glossary accompanying Chaucer’s work. This could have been a decent set-up for Tolkien to establish a friendship with Wiseman after Wiseman apologizes and expresses his admiration for Tolkien’s knowledge of Chaucer. They could bond over their shared love of language, in which Wiseman’s proficiency in his class was second only to Tolkien. But for whatever reason the movie decided to slight Wiseman, we do not go that route.
Instead, we move to the rugby field. This is only the first of the rugby scenes in the movie that accurately convey that Tolkien was an athletic chap who was an enthusiastic participant in rugby. When his son Michael mentioned that he was trying to get on his grade school’s rugby team, Tolkien described his own experience with rugby (Letter #16, October 1937):
But many a man ends up in it [the rugby team] and even with colours, who is rejected at first. It was so with me – and for same reason: too light. But one day I decided to make up for weight by (legitimate) ferocity, and I ended up a house-captain at end of that season, & got my colours the next. But I got rather damaged – among things having my tongue nearly cut out – and as I am on the whole rather luckier than you, I should really be quite happy if you remain uninjured though not in the team!
It also left other marks on him, particularly a broken nose that he didn’t get fixed that affected him into his old age (Letter #250, November 1963). It is fine for the movie not to get into the details of his rugby career, and it conveyed well enough his youthful passion for it.
It is also in this scene that we get the first interaction between Tolkien and Gilson. As there is no information to go on here in terms of historical accuracy—we have no evidence that it happened, but also no evidence that it did not happen—my opinion on this interaction is mixed. On the one hand, this scene is another irritatingly common tendency of these “be a jerk to the new kid” storylines wherein a significant character tries to hurt the new kid in a game or in practice. On the other hand, it sets up the fact that Gilson is the headmaster’s son and is thus held to an even stricter standard than the other boys at the school. This scene serves naturally enough for bringing up that bit of information and forcing Gilson and Tolkien together by the headmaster’s instruction. By itself, this whole process would not necessarily bother me. The reason why it does bother me is because, for whatever reason, the filmmakers have distorted the sequence of how Tolkien made friends. I know Trought has been excised from the movie, but Wiseman also does not initially become friends with Tolkien and Gilson is positively antagonistic. It is only when Smith reaches out to Tolkien that he becomes friends with anyone at the school, even though in reality Smith was the latest of the central T.C.B.S. members (Gilson does invite him to tea, but he does so in such a way that he is expressing it more like a requirement of their situation than as a friendly request). These odd choices make the movie worse as a biography, but not necessarily as a movie. Nevertheless, I have to wonder why these seemingly arbitrary decisions were made to change the story of Tolkien’s relationships from how they were in real life. Wiseman and Gilson are slighted in their different ways to put the emphasis on Smith, as I have already outlined. It is also strange because I do not see why Tolkien’s story needed any manufactured, but minor, conflicts with friends when these friendships served well as refuges of stability and dependability—alongside Tolkien’s Catholic upbringing—from Tolkien’s life that had been characterized by grief and transience. The filmmakers could have underscored the importance of friendship/fellowship with this contrast rather than through the all-too-familiar trope of friendship forged through initial hostility and awkwardness. That story can certainly be appropriate in some situations, but it is not Tolkien’s story (or, at least, we have no indication that it was Tolkien’s story).
From our introduction to Tolkien’s friends, we transition to our introduction to Tolkien’s lover, Edith Bratt. Edith lodges in the same house as the Tolkiens because, like them, she is an orphan, and it was on this shared experience as well as their common artistic personalities—which this film accurately conveys through its portrayal of her playing the piano—that Tolkien and Edith bonded. However, I am a bit surprised that the movie does not make clear that Edith is three years older than Tolkien. This difference in their ages was part of what affected their relationship later on, as they entered stages of their lives at different times. Tolkien met Edith when he was sixteen and she was nineteen. They tried to pursue their relationship (initially a friendship until roughly the summer of 1909) secretly, but not illicitly. While the movie does accurately note that Tolkien lived directly above Edith, it misses the opportunity to portray how they would talk to each other secretly at night by opening their windows. We could have seen a charming scene or two of this aspect of their relationship, perhaps being broken up by one of them as they hear Mrs. Faulkner bumping around in the night.
Tolkien and his friends then go for tea to the Moroccan tea room in Barrow’s Stores, which supplies the second part of the name for the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. Although they would sometimes meet, illegally, in the library of King Edward’s, they habitually occupied the alcove known as the “Railway Carriage” at Barrow’s. It is not made entirely clear to the audience for what purposes these boys would gather as they did. Besides the unifying force of rugby, the boys expressed interest in each other’s knowledge and gifts. For Tolkien, this group was the predecessor to the Inklings, as he shared with both of them his love for certain stories, especially of Norse mythology and Beowulf.
When the scene shifts back to the Somme, we see Tolkien feeling the effects of trench fever. This condition would ultimately result in him being transferred from the front lines to a hospital in France and eventually back to England. As the name implies, it was not an uncommon condition for the trench warfare of WWI (famously, both A. A. Milne and C. S. Lewis also suffered from it). As the armies were, quite literally, entrenched in unsanitary conditions, they were regularly exposed to the vermin attracted to the corpses on the battlefield. As with the Black Plague, these vermin carried insects that carried bacteria that caused diseases like trench fever. While it was not often fatal, the disease was debilitating, and Tolkien had a particularly severe form of it. The movie generally portrays this point well enough, though one scene is questionable when Tolkien runs around regularly on the battlefield looking for Geoffrey. Maybe this is due to the effects of adrenaline, but I am not qualified to make any definite judgment on the plausibility of this scenario.
When the scene shifts back to Barrow’s, Tolkien is once again lost in thought and Gilson mentions that what he does not like about all these legends and myths Tolkien reads is that there are no women in them. On one level, this criticism makes sense from a hormonally-driven teenager who likes to think about women, often in ways that are probably not wholesome (to say the least). On another level, I cannot help but wonder if this is an insertion of a common criticism of Tolkien’s work, that there are not enough women or significant female characters in his story. I cannot say for sure that the movie was intending this statement as a meta-comment, unlike another that I will get to later. In any case, Tolkien immediately pushes back with an example from a story he is reading at the moment. (And if anyone is interested in a good, popular-level piece on female characters in Tolkien’s stories, see the series starting here [although I disagree with some bits of character analysis].)
Tolkien cites the example of Hel from Norse mythology. Hel was the daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, one of three children produced by this adultery that the gods feared above all others (the other two children were Fenrir and Jörmungandr). She was put in charge of the underworld of the same name, where all the dead go who do not die in battle. She has a bifurcated appearance of looking like a regular living woman on one side and like a corpse on the other. Even though it seems odd that Tolkien does not mention Freya in this context, this movie does properly highlight Tolkien’s interest in Norse mythology. Of all the ancient myths Tolkien read, it was surely the Norse stories that had the most extensive influence on his own work.
Tolkien is also portrayed in this scene as the one who originally conceived of the T.C.B.S. Again, this is not entirely unlikely and is an acceptable bit of artistic license, especially as the other members join in the collaboration of what the group should be about. Their basic mission is described as changing the world through art. Although this description is a bit simple, it is not inaccurate as long as one contextualizes it well. As I have illustrated in Part 1 and here, each of them has artistic gifts: Tolkien tells and writes stories while also inventing languages; Wiseman composes music; Gilson draws and designs; and Smith writes poetry. Through their various gifts, they hoped to establish a sort of medieval renaissance in the modern age into which they could invite those unanchored in the world who were otherwise destined to mere disorientation, disillusionment, and despondence. They hoped to inspire—and, according to Tolkien in Letter #5 (quoted in Part 1), to testify for God and Truth—with clarity of vision, artistry of truth, and love of true beauty without necessarily telling people what to do (as John Garth observes in Tolkien and the Great War, a book which focuses on much of the same area of Tolkien’s life as this movie does). They aimed to pursue such ends together because they each inspired each other. Tolkien believed that God had granted them such fire to share with one another (he would likewise associate fire with creativity in his own mythology, as God—known as Eru Ilúvatar—creates and sustains all things with the Flame Imperishable). They could not have imagined at the time that, of the actual members, Tolkien would bear their legacy virtually alone.
Our next scene takes place in a Birmingham tea shop featuring Tolkien and Edith. As Tolkien tells Edith about his passion for languages (including his early linguistic inventions), he reaches the point where he describes “cellar door” as the most beautiful term in English. This quality has to do with how beautiful it sounds, meaning that it is phonaesthetically pleasing. He demonstrates this with Edith by having both of them say the word fluidly so that it runs together as one word (as it loses it some of its charm if one pronounces a hard “r” at the end of “cellar”) and sounds like selador. Tolkien was not the first to say this about “cellar door,” as by his time it was already a common illustration among philologists of language that sounded pleasing, as indicated in Tolkien’s 1955 lecture “English and Welsh” where he actually made this reference in the context of discussing people’s “native language” in terms of linguistic predilections:
Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.
Is it possible that a less developed version of this thought occurred to Tolkien at this less mature stage of his development as a philologist? Perhaps, it is not completely unreasonable to infer such. Still, this scene demonstrates a type of anachronistic artistic license in which features that properly belong to the later parts of a story are inserted into an earlier one in order to fit them into the scope of the story one wishes to focus on. Again, this approach is not inherently problematic for a biopic, but the fact that the filmmakers take this approach in some less important aspects of Tolkien’s story but not in a more important one creates problems that I save for later discussion.
In any case, after Tolkien finishes telling Edith about how he loves the term “cellar door” for how it sounds, Edith engages his idea by saying that things aren’t beautiful because of how they sound, but because of what they mean, which she then illustrates with a couple of words that increase the romantic tension between them. This scene is also a piece of artistic license used to give Edith a profound effect on Tolkien’s thinking about language, even though this particular expertise of Tolkien does not seem to have been an area of deep interest for Edith. It is a fine point to illustrate the depths of Tolkien’s philosophy of language and its developments over the years, considering how crucial such ideas were to his work. But it is admittedly a contrivance to give this insight to Edith and that she would act as his teacher in this particular respect.
Where I think this bit of license works better is in how Edith inspires Tolkien to tell her a story about this beautiful word Selador. I think this scene could have been reworked in such a way that Tolkien tells Edith all that he has told her about his work with languages and inventions thereof, but he could say something about how he has all the structural elements of such languages down, but he is missing the substance of language: meaning. He could then use “cellar door” as an illustration of language that sounds beautiful, but the lack of profundity in its meaning does not match the impactful profundity of its sound. At this point, the scene could continue as it does, with Edith signaling that she has an idea to help him through this challenge by demanding that he tell her a story about Selador. We can still see the seed of the idea that she functions as Tolkien’s muse. Tolkien initially tries to weave a story about Princess Selador, seemingly in a clumsy attempt to flatter Edith by connecting the word and its beauty to her, but she encourages him to keep going (even as we can tell she is not buying Tolkien’s initial tactic). Tolkien arrives at the conclusion that the word refers to a land called Selador, which he then describes vividly to Edith. This description includes an image of two trees intertwined in the middle of the land, which could conceivably be the imaginative predecessor to Tolkien’s central story of the Two Trees in The Silmarillion, although it is not clear that this was the filmmakers’ purpose. In any case, the imagery more directly connects with the union of Tolkien and Edith, as we see them holding hands in direct parallel to the trees.
Although I think the lead-up to this part could have been done better, I must say that I think it is the best part of the movie. It does well to illustrate Tolkien’s creative process, in which the language comes first, and all other aspects of sub-creation follow. As he wrote in a letter to W. H. Auden in June 1955 (Letter #163), after describing his extensive linguistic background, “All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function. The stories were comparatively late in coming.” Likewise, he wrote in the aforementioned letter to Houghton Mifflin Co. (Letter #165):
If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary ‘fact’ about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a ‘hobby’, pardonable because it has been (surprisingly to me as much as to anyone) successful. But it is not a ‘hobby’, in the sense of something quite different from one’s work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stones’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. I should have preferred to write in ‘Elvish’. But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much ‘language’ has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked more.) But there is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually ‘elvish’ names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in ‘linguistic aesthetic’, as I sometimes say to people who ask me ‘what is it all about?’
As such, this scene creatively conveys Tolkien’s sub-creative process, illustrates how Edith could function as his muse, demonstrates the centrality of language to Tolkien’s thought, and anticipates Tolkien’s process in writing The Hobbit, which is surely the most famous instantiation of the process portrayed here.
As the romantic tension is teased once again, the movie relieves it with Edith throwing a sugar cube into a posh woman’s garish hat on the level below them. This act is an accurate piece of characterization of a mischievous young Edith. In fact, a game that Edith and Tolkien used to play at this tea shop was that they would go up to the second floor and throw sugar cubes into the large and extravagant hats of the upper-class passersby on the street below. They would station themselves at a table and keep aiming for hats with the sugar cubes until they ran out of a supply, at which point they moved to the next table and started all over again. Tolkien was quite the rapscallion in his youth, of which the movie portrays only one or two cases.
Our next scene involves a merging of worlds that apparently did not happen in this fashion in Tolkien and Edith’s later life, as seems inexplicable given the conversation they have afterwards, but we will get to that. Edith comes with Tolkien to a meeting of the T.C.B.S. and he introduces her to everybody. She learns of their interests, their interactions with Tolkien, and their nickname of him as “Tollers.” This point seems to be a bit of anachronism because “Tollers” was C. S. Lewis’s long-time nickname for Tolkien and, unless Tolkien himself suggested it to Lewis, it is unlikely that both Lewis and the T.C.B.S. would come up with such an unusual nickname independently.
In any case, as Edith interacts with the T.C.B.S. she tells them of her enjoyment of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen). Again, there is no clear evidence that this was so, but it appears to be some artistic license on the part of the filmmakers to make a link to the opera and why Tolkien may have developed a story about a ring on the basis of Edith’s musical interests. Tolkien denied that there was much in common at all between his work and Wagner’s, as he said in Letter #229, “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases.” However, this remark seems to be an overreaction on the part of Tolkien based on his absolute distaste for Åke Ohlmarks’s introduction to the Swedish translation of LOTR, which he is responding to in this letter. We do know that Tolkien was interested in the opera and there was a time when he was working on a translation of the second part, Die Walküre. But it is more likely, based on the fact that both LOTR and the Ring Cycle were based on Norse mythology from sources such as the Edda and the Völsunga Saga, that the resemblances between the stories about rings come from their common source material. In concept, it is not a bad idea to include a reference to it here; I simply object to what they do with it, as I explain below.
We also get a kind of meta-joke thrown into the script here. I cannot remember who said it exactly (probably Gilson), but someone provides a contrast to Edith in his opinion of Wagner’s Ring by talking about how dreadfully boring he found it. He talks about how ridiculous it is that Wagner could take six hours to tell a story about a ring. The target(s) of the joke should be obvious. Personally, I am not a fan of these meta-jokes in historical or biographical films. I recall another example in the movie Glory Road when a character jokes about the idea that black players would be the future of basketball. While the joke in this movie was not as historically out of place as that one, I find both such jokes to be an especially hokey type of dramatic irony, a wink to the audience that is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. I dislike them as I dislike the rather forced connections that the Hobbit films made to the LOTR films.
The more significant problem that emerges as Edith talks about Wagner is that this proves to be a common interest with Wiseman. As this conversation carries on and Wiseman’s body language suggests that this conversation is something more than friendly to him, Tolkien visibly starts getting jealous and decides to put an abrupt end to this interaction and takes Edith home. What an awful idea this was. Just as the movie is starting to develop its own distinct rhythm and is slowly morphing into something resembling a proper Tolkienian biography, this generic subplot of jealousy between friends over one’s lover has to be dropped in here so that the story remains tethered to a formulaic biopic. This paranoid jealousy on Tolkien’s part is combined with the subplot that continues for two scenes after this one in which conflict develops between Wiseman and Tolkien over their mutual attraction to Edith. This conflict is completely unnecessary to the story, it is untrue to history, and the movie even fails to commit to it overtly, making it all the clearer that this subplot could have been removed without any damage done to the story. There are only two possible justifications for this subplot offered by the story—and not by an extra-narrative desire to manufacture conflict to add fake drama—1) both Edith and Wiseman have interest in music; 2) it sets up the argument between Edith and Tolkien in the subsequent scene. Since Wiseman and Tolkien get over their hostility rather easily in the resolution and since their lines contributing to this subplot could be removed without causing any problems for their larger scenes, I do not think this scene serves adequately as a set-up for a subplot. But it also does not serve 1) well either. So they have a common interest in music; why is that sufficient grounds for concocting this scenario, especially when it is clear to everyone involved—or at least it should be—that she is already in a relationship with Tolkien? Why is it necessary to degrade both Wiseman and Tolkien by having them participate in this story that never happened?
That leaves justification 2), which brings us to the next scene. As Tolkien and Edith are walking home, Edith chastises him for his conduct. Naturally, Tolkien does not say anything to indicate his motivation of jealousy, but it is readily apparent to Edith. In this manufactured subplot, Edith is the only character who is not damaged in the process, except for the fact that she expresses her frustration to him that he would not allow her to pursue deep conversations about her interest like he gets to do with the T.C.B.S. Unlike Tolkien, she does not have the outlet to pursue her interests at a deeper level beyond Mrs. Faulkner’s interest in her piano playing, which we see is rather restricted in its scope (as Faulkner is not interested in hearing anything beyond upbeat tunes). What makes this statement a problem is its discord with the real Edith and Tolkien. When they were married, Edith was initially frustrated by the lack of socialization commensurate to her interests like Tolkien had with his fellow academics. Of course, she was not interested in engaging in the topics that these academics conversed about, unlike what we see with her and the T.C.B.S. in the movie. While it is accurate to say that she had such frustrations, the fact that the movie portrays them as taking this form and being announced this early makes the real Tolkien appear all the worse. If he had known about her frustration and yet did nothing about it for long thereafter, that fact would move Tolkien from being negligent to being deliberately restrictive on Edith. In the setting of this movie, he would be acting merely to mollify her in the short-term while ignoring the possibility that she would have long-term problems from this frustration. In some cases, anachronism helps the quality of a biopic, but it undermines it here.
I would suggest these simple changes to make the movie progress smoothly without manufactured and superficial conflict. Excise the subplot of Wiseman and Tolkien both being attracted to Edith as well as Tolkien’s petty jealousy. When this is cut out, the scene of the argument will also need to be cut out. Tolkien can simply listen to Edith talk about Wagner’s Ring and you can see him starting to get lost in thought. The audience might expect, given the approach of the rest of the movie, that he is beginning to imagine the roots of his own Ring story, but that is not appropriate at this stage in his life. Instead, the scene cuts away while leaving what he was thinking about ambiguous, shifts to a scene in the war when Tolkien is barely conscious, almost like he is lost in thought again, and then shifts back to Tolkien knocking on her door with a pair of tickets to Wagner. No severe violence is done to the film’s story, it is more accurate to the real story, the flash-in-the-pan conflicts are removed, and this remains a positive story arc without arbitrary obstacles until Tolkien’s life hits a wall that he hit in real life. But I will get to that later.
I have already mentioned the movie’s link between the dragon and the use of flamethrowers in the Somme in this next scene when the perspective shifts back to WWI. However, I did not mention that this movie makes a more implicit, perhaps unintentional, connection to the stories that Tolkien wrote when it shows us what the war has made of the environment of the Somme. This scene reminded me of my experience watching Peter Jackson’s excellent They Shall Not Grow Old. As the audio of the British soldiers described the marsh-like conditions around the battlefield and how one person had sunk into the mud and never came up again, a black-and-white still of one such marsh that developed in WWI looked like a sketch of the Dead Marshes. Given Tolkien’s experience in WWI, it is hardly surprising that he should write of a marsh that unearths the dead as it expands (Tolkien himself suggested this possibility in Letter #226 to Professor L. W. Forster in December 1960, even if he found the chief source of the imagery elsewhere). As I said, I am not sure if the movie makes this association implicitly or if it did not aim to make it at all. I am not sure how one could draw more explicit connection without doing something outlandish, such as imagining the soldiers in Elvish or Númenórean armor. Perhaps all one can do is highlight the marshes—which the movie does not do directly—and mounds of corpses and then let the imagination do the work.
At the end of this flashforward, as Tolkien is left to lie on a pile of corpses as his feet rest at a pool of blood—surely as vivid a visual as anything else in this movie—we cut back to Tolkien showing up at Edith’s door to invite her to Wagner’s Ring show that night. Unfortunately, they arrive later than they should have, and the cheaper balcony seats are taken. It soon becomes clear that Tolkien cannot afford to pay for the ground level seats. This feature of Tolkien’s life is true to history. Although Tolkien was enrolled in an upper-class school, he was not born into the same socioeconomic class as his schoolmates. He did not have the financial resources that they did, and it is probable that there were times when he experienced embarrassing incidents such as the one portrayed here (although the embarrassment in this case derives primarily from him trying to treat Edith to a wonderful night out and realizing too late that he could not afford it).
Faced with the inability to gain entry into the show, Tolkien decides to try something more daring. He takes Edith’s hand and they attempt to sneak into better seats through a back way. But once again, they face an insurmountable obstacle of a locked door and they find themselves stuck on this lower level, no more able to see the show, but able to hear it, nonetheless. As Edith hears the opening, she takes up the idea that if they cannot see the show, then they will put on their own show. Although I find this movie generally lacking in the charm factor, I must admit that this playful enactment with the wardrobe stored in this area, which then leads to the couple’s first kiss, was a good example of the charm needed elsewhere in the movie. As this movie clearly enough respects its setting and the mores observed in those days in England by faithful youths like the future Mr. and Mrs. Tolkien, I must admit that I am not sure whether or not this kiss out of sight of everyone else would be considered appropriate behavior. I imagine that it is at least borderline for this stage in their relationship, but I cannot say for sure, as I neither grew up in that world nor have I studied its mores in any depth. I know that even today some religious communities would insist that there be no kissing before the wedding, but I do not know if this particular restriction was predominant in Tolkien’s time and place.
But then we go from this romantic high to an academic low. Tolkien takes his Oxford entrance exams and fails. Unlike the aforementioned manufactured conflicts, this actually happened to Tolkien. He may have been a linguistic genius, but he was bored of his classes and of studying the languages he would need for the exams—namely, Latin and Greek—because he had learned them long ago and was much more interested in other languages, including ones that King Edward’s did not teach. (This is merely a subjective note, but as a student of the New Testament, I would have liked to have seen a clip of Tolkien’s class with the headmaster on NT Greek as mentioned in Letter #306. This would not have made the movie better or worse, but I would have liked it.) He needed to devote himself to these subjects enough to do well on the exams to receive a necessary scholarship for Oxford (again, remember that Tolkien’s socioeconomic class made this scholarship more necessary for him than for his fellows). He also had his attention diverted with his relationship with Edith and his activities with his friends. As Tolkien himself explained (from the aforementioned Letter #43 to Michael Tolkien):
I was clever, but not industrious or single-minded; a large part of my failure was due simply to not working (at least not at classics) not because I was in love, but because I was studying something else: Gothic and what not. Having the romantic upbringing I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort. Naturally rather a physical coward, I passed from a despised rabbit on a house second-team to school colours in two seasons. All that sort of thing.
While his academic attention could be refocused relatively easily—and it was not a bad thing for him to learn other languages—this romantic affair proved to be a more difficult matter.
The second and longest scene Fr. Morgan appears in features him objecting to this relationship with Edith, which the priest has heard about by now despite their secrecy. Of course, Morgan’s problems with this relationship are simplified from real life. In the movie, it virtually exclusively concerns its detriment to Tolkien’s academic performance. Additionally, Morgan had a problem with the fact that Tolkien was three years her junior and that he was pursuing this relationship secretly while still in school, that he was doing so while they lived in the same house (with all the temptations thereby implied, whether or not entailed), and that the woman he was pursuing was a Protestant (specifically, an Anglican). The fact that she is a Protestant is never raised, despite being a chief objection from Morgan (as indicated in Tolkien’s letter). Morgan insisted that Tolkien end the relationship (which later evolved in specificity to say that Tolkien could neither see nor write to her any longer, save for his allowance to say goodbye to her when she moved away) and he made sure to move the Tolkiens to another lodging as further insurance that this relationship be broken up. As in real life, Morgan says that Tolkien can do as he wishes when he reaches the age of majority—twenty-one—but as long as Morgan was his legal guardian, Tolkien would abide by his authority. Although it is understandable why Tolkien is portrayed as combative with Morgan (to the point that he petulantly says that Morgan wants him to be single forever just like him as well as that Morgan is “jealous” of him and ignorant of love), this decision once again makes Tolkien’s story all too predictable and like anyone else’s. The fact is, Tolkien did follow Morgan’s instruction out of respect for, “a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers, but without any obligation,” and he broke off his relationship with Edith.
Instead of having Tolkien be so combative about this demand from Morgan, perhaps we could have a scene where Tolkien talks about this problem with the T.C.B.S. after he has broken off the relationship. This scene could improve on the movie’s equivalent of stating that it happened matter-of-factly, and it would in turn function to give us an explanation for how Tolkien is feeling and how he is thinking about this whole situation. At this point, Tolkien could say something about how all these myths and medieval romances he reads put heroes in tests that they would need to pass for the sake of their love and that this was his own test to prove his devotion to Edith. It would be made clear to the audience that Tolkien fully intends to pursue her again and that this situation was an aspect of his life that he was interpreting through the framework of fantasy. This important scene would thus provide the audience with a crucial window into Tolkien’s thinking—insofar as such is possible—and how stories had shaped it. And this scene would provide something more substantial in this regard than we get elsewhere in the movie. We could also see the roots here of Tolkien’s later statements on how essential self-denial is to love of one another (it is in this context that Tolkien has said what he has said about his relationship with Edith in Letter #43 to his son Michael):
However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.
As this statement and the rest of the letter shows, in addition to any fantasy framework Tolkien might have had for looking at this relationship, he surely had a Christian framework in his upbringing (even if it became more developed with time, as he wrote this letter over thirty years after the events in question). By this same framework, he concludes this letter by pointing his son to the Blessed Sacrament (the Eucharist) as the chief place to find what it means to love:
There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires.
Given the importance of Tolkien’s beliefs about the relationship of fantasy and reality, of myth and religion, it would also seem to be necessary to include a scene that would in some way explicate the importance of self-denial to Tolkien’s religion. Perhaps in a subsequent scene we could have a conversation between Tolkien and Morgan or a homily from Morgan about Jesus’s teaching and example on love through self-denial. Naturally, such is not what we get in the movie.
Before we move forward with what the movie does in place of this proposed storyline, the scene shifts back to the Somme for a brief moment as Tolkien’s companion comes back to retrieve him from the mound of corpses. Although Tolkien has mentioned this subordinate’s name before, this scene was the first time I could hear clearly that the man’s name is Sam (more precisely, Sam Hodges). Sam is an example of a rather typical character in a biopic or historical film: the fictional composite character that summarizes multiple (often unnamed) non-fictional individuals. The decision to name him “Sam” makes a rather obvious allusion. Indeed, the naming is in keeping with Tolkien’s basis for the character of Samwise Gamgee in his subordinates in the army that he regarded as his superiors, people who were of a lower class than the people with whom Tolkien attended school, but with whom Tolkien was more impressed.
After Sam tries to get his superior officer some medical attention, the scene shifts again back to Tolkien’s days in Oxford as he and the T.C.B.S. take up lodging in an abandoned bus. These vehicles were fairly new to the streets of England at this time and Tolkien would at times actually commandeer one and drive it around the streets of Oxford. For these and other acts of mischief, Tolkien never faced any disciplinary consequences. The movie does not portray this side of Tolkien, but instead settles for a more toned-down offense of just occupying an unattended bus. This act takes place after the T.C.B.S. leaves the Eagle and Child pub with women accompanying them. It is not entirely certain that Tolkien’s attendance here is an anachronism (it is possible that Tolkien came here during his days attending Oxford), but it seems rather clear that the filmmakers include visual reference to this pub because it has become a prime location for Tolkien pilgrims visiting Oxford, since it was the famed meeting place of the Inklings. This potential anachronism is not so much a problem in itself, but the other aspects of this scene are problematic.
Besides the manufactured conflict between Tolkien and Wiseman that I have already commented on at some length and its hasty resolution here, the other problematic aspect of this scene is the fact that Tolkien has brought along a new woman in the process. While it might fit a generic biopic for a young man to try halfheartedly to get over his lovesickness by seeking comfort in the arms of another woman, this does not fit Tolkien’s story and it seems like the filmmakers know it. Tolkien brings this woman along but does not pay much attention to her and she is quite offended when she finds out why, since his friends were fine both with allowing or encouraging Tolkien’s conduct up to this point (in either case, they do not look like good friends) and with throwing Tolkien under the bus by spilling the beans concerning why he is acting like he is. Given the mentality with which Tolkien approached his break-up with Edith as a temporary—but painfully long—obstacle, the idea that he would try to move on with a woman he met in a pub—especially when there is no evidence that such a thing ever happened—makes no sense as an action by Tolkien. The movie seems to realize this enough that it does not really commit to this move by Tolkien (he brings her along, but does not try to do anything else), but not enough to—wisely—abandon the idea altogether. If the audience is supposed to understand this action by Tolkien as being due to peer pressure, then his friends do not look good in the process either. Instead of being friends who understand the struggle of their friend and try to act in his best interest, they come off as generic “bro” types who think the solution to their friend’s romantic problems is to be found in the bottom of a bottle and/or the warm body of another woman. These decisions may be characteristic of how movies typically tell such stories today, but there is no need to conform Tolkien’s story to this Procrustean bed.
Another ill-fitting generic story beat appears in the next extended scene after Tolkien receives a wedding invitation from Edith and Tolkien responds by getting drunk and stumbling about the Exeter grounds blithering loudly. Again, there was no need to portray the sadness of this occasion by using the trope of “depressed character gets drunk” when this behavior did not fit even the young Tolkien. The move could have better punctuated the sadness of this moment by following the real-life script. Tolkien did not receive a random wedding invitation from Edith—as might happen in a typical romance/romantic comedy movie—it is actually sadder than that. As the day of Tolkien’s eagerly awaited twenty-first birthday arrived, he wrote Edith a letter that day declaring his love for her and proposing marriage to her. But Edith sent back a heart-breaking response: she was engaged.
The movie does not mention the fiancé’s name, and he is often treated as a minor side-character-obstacle in Tolkien biographies. But his name was George Field, the brother of one of Edith’s best friends at the time. This engagement was the result of Edith embedding herself in a different world from Tolkien, being an active participant in her Anglican church in Cheltenham. She had moved on from Tolkien, believing that their years apart would ultimately present a terminal condition, but as Tolkien never forgot about her, she had never forgotten about him and her letter to him indicated that she was only engaged to another man because she thought Tolkien himself had moved on in the intervening years. The story did of course have a happy ending with sacrifices that had a far shorter delay than the movie implies. He had sent the letter on January 3 and he himself traveled to Cheltenham on January 8 to persuade her to accept his proposal and to break off her current engagement. Although Edith knew that there would be challenges ahead—not least because she knew that she would need to convert to Catholicism and that this move combined with her breaking off the engagement would mean leaving her current social circle—she accepted Tolkien’s proposal and they were reunited and engaged on January 8, 1913. A year later, at Tolkien’s aforementioned urging, she officially converted to Catholicism and they would later be married in a Catholic church. Also as noted before, Tolkien’s admiration for her grew deeper as he saw his mother’s martyrdom playing out all over again in Edith’s conversion, but it would be many years before Tolkien realized the problems he himself contributed to Edith’s conversion, even if he would never regret his basic encouragement for her to convert. This is how the story played out in real life and if the movie had portrayed it in this fashion, the audience could have seen something other than a paint-by-numbers romance. They would have seen a real, powerful love story that involved sacrifice, tension, friction, and a bond of love that persevered through it all.
Anyway, let us get back to the movie’s poor decision that it masks as Tolkien’s poor decision. As Tolkien stumbles around drunkenly, there comes a point when he falls to the ground face-up looking at the stars. At this point, as he looks at one particular star, he speaks in tongues as he recites some lines about either “Éarendel” or “Eärendil” (I honestly could not tell on first viewing). In the first case, he would be reciting some lines from the Crist poem he thought to be by Cynewulf (also called Christ I today), wherein the term refers to John the Baptist as the morning star heralding the arrival of the Sun of Righteousness (a favorite form of referring to Christ in the early and medieval eras of the Church). This poem served as the inspiration for Tolkien’s own story of Eärendil, another figure associated with a star (it also provided a source for referring to “Middle-Earth”). But it appears that he is actually saying something resembling what would later become The Voyage of Eärendel the Evening Star (which he wrote in September 1914) since he later dismisses it as gibberish when Professor Joseph Wright talks with him about it. It is not clear how the professor heard this, since Tolkien is muttering and slurring, but I suppose the movie could not find a more natural way to introduce Tolkien and Wright than by this awkward first impression. The detection of a Finnish influence, however, is accurate to history, as Tolkien had immersed himself in Finnish and the myths of the Kalevala at this point (particularly the story of Kullervo, which would inspire his stories of Túrin Turambar told most fully in The Children of Húrin). Finnish was beginning to exert its influence on Tolkien’s invented languages and that influence first appears in this poem.
In the next scene, we get Tolkien’s first actual meeting with Professor Wright, a man who significantly influenced him in a way that only a beloved teacher can. It was thanks to Wright’s willingness to teach him that Tolkien switched his academic focus to English philology at Oxford, rather than being stuck with the Classics that he had much less passion for. As indicated in the movie, Tolkien knew the name of Joseph Wright for some time before he met him, as Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language awakened in Tolkien a yearning for knowledge and experience of Gothic, which in turn affected the development of his invented languages and the imaginative world that they formed. Tolkien actually received the book before he graduated from King Edward’s because of a happy accident. A friend of his picked it up, thinking that it was a work of a Bible Society, but he then sold it to Tolkien when he realized it was of no use to him. A few years later, Tolkien would become a student of this world-class philologist and under his tutelage would himself become a world-class philologist. Such was their relationship that Wright wrote a recommendation letter for Tolkien that got him a professorship chair at Oxford in 1925 and Tolkien became an executor of Wright’s will (Letter #63).
For its part, the movie utilizes a few different means of trying to specify how Wright influenced Tolkien. First, it attributes Tolkien’s example of trees as an illustration of how language and myth work in relation to reality to Wright in his conversation with Tolkien, wherein he rebukes Tolkien’s claim that his language in the poem that night before was mere gibberish. This tree example comes from Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia,” which reflects a conversation he had with C. S. Lewis (referred to in the poem as “Misomythus”) in 1931 that was instrumental in the latter’s conversion to Christianity (but I am not able to get into the details of that matter here). As Tolkien says in the poem, most people, including presumably Misomythus himself, look at trees, call them such, and think nothing of it. Such people act similarly toward stars. They dimly apprehend the function of the objects of the world and think of them as “just so”. Yet these names are not inherent to the objects themselves, they were discovered and given. The givers of those names were people participating in invention based on their judgment of what name is fitting for such an object (hence the discovery aspect). For the example of the tree, Tolkien cites its appellative origin in the determination of a fitting title from those people responding to a stirring,
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Similarly, stars were not so named, except in the context of a myth-woven song articulating their beauty. These names originated from language that is invention about an object. But the purpose of this language is to determine an appropriate title for the object in question around which subsequent language could properly accrete. It is invention, but not deceitful concoction.
In this same fashion, Wright draws out of Tolkien a statement resembling Tolkien’s actual thoughts on language when he is says that language is not only for naming things, but for communicating the lifeblood of culture. This statement is an acceptably simplified version of Tolkien’s realization of the connection between language, culture, and legend that shaped how he worked with his invented languages. As noted earlier, his linguistic work was the origin of his mythology. Language implies some kind of world in which that language is comprehensible. What type of world has a Hobbit in it? The same type of world dominated by the histories and languages of Elves and Men (as well as Dwarves), in which Hobbits were a curious, but generally ignored little feature of the world, until the time came when no one could ignore their existence any longer. Is it possible (or even probable) that Wright helped shape such thoughts? Certainly, not least because his work on Gothic shaped Tolkien’s vision of language and his own invented languages. Whether or not he derived the tree analogy from Wright is mere speculation, but I rather think that Tolkien came up with it through improvisation as Tolkien and Lewis walked about outside and he pointed to trees and stars as examples of his point.
Second, the movie attributes Tolkien’s deep interest in Beowulf—and his practice of reading/reciting it in class in the Old English—to his class with Wright, in which the audience gets a brief flash of Wright reading the epic. It may be possible that the movie is only suggesting that Tolkien’s interest in Wright grew as he heard him read Beowulf, but the audience has been given no other information to establish Tolkien’s interest in the story at this point. The fact is that Tolkien had been reading Beowulf for some time before he met Wright. He had reached a point in 1920–1926 of producing his own translation and commentary on the story, the former of which he finished but never published (until his son got his work published posthumously only a few years ago), likely due to his nagging perfectionism. Even so, the work he did on this translation and commentary provided the raw material from which Tolkien constructed his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which proved to be revolutionary in the field of Beowulf studies. Tolkien saw that much of Beowulf studies in his day had inverted the significance of the poem’s elements, focusing on the historical setting behind the work, the historicity of the same, and the various elements of philology, but neglecting the monsters and the larger realities in which they participated that the Beowulf poet had placed at the center. I would like to discuss this lecture further, but it would take this review too far afield and beyond the scope of time that the movie covers.
Third, the movie links Tolkien’s interest in The Battle of Maldon to Professor Wright. As far as I could tell, this is what Tolkien is reading to Wright when the announcement is made that Britain is going to war. Specifically, he is reading Beorhtwold’s words near the end of the story, which can be translated in a couple of ways: “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens” or “Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant, our spirits must be greater, though our strength grows less.” As Tolkien would observe, in a commentary he appended to a sequel story he wrote—“The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son”—the statement is often taken as,
the clearest statement of the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will.… Yet the doctrine appears in this clarity, and (approximate) purity, precisely because it is put in the mouth of a subordinate, a man for whom the object of his will was decided by another, who had no responsibility downwards, only loyalty upwards. Personal pride was therefore in him at its lowest, and love and loyalty at their highest.
He observed this same theme in Beowulf through the role of Wiglaf. In his own mythology, the clearest example of this theme appears in the character of Samwise Gamgee. As much as I like that the movie included this little detail of a story that was of great significance to Tolkien, I think this story could have been explored a bit further—and it would not require a lot of screen time, only a short conversation about the exemplary courage of a servant—to illustrate its link to Tolkien’s own stories. Instead, it seems as if these lines are only invoked here as a prelude to the war, which I think illustrates how misdirected some of the elements in this movie are.
The scene shifts to Tolkien at Folkestone, getting ready to ship out across the Channel to the war. It is here that he meets Edith again and they get back together in an awkward but stereotypically Hollywood fashion of a reunion scene that also functions as a “come back to me” scene that is a trope of war movies (but is usually better executed). I guess we are supposed to assume that she will attend to breaking up her engagement while Tolkien is away and have to deal with the fallout without even having the benefit of getting to talk to him that she had in the true story. But I guess the movie is not interested in the sacrifices she had to make for this relationship to work nor in giving a little development to the rekindled relationship. In real life, they had already been reunited for three years at this point and, after a long engagement, got married on March 22 of 1916, almost two-and-a-half months before Tolkien arrived in France. They were married in a Catholic church over two years after her conversion and they received a marriage service, but not yet the Nuptial Mass, since their wedding was during Lent. The movie did not need to portray all of these details, but it would have been nice if it could have stuck to the script of real life rather than the paint-by-numbers script it followed.
The last time we return to the Somme involves a charge into no-man’s land as Tolkien desperately searches for his friend Geoffrey. In the process, he sees the cloud, smoke, and dust of the battlefield forming a shadow in the shape of a Dark Lord while his shadowy servants—seemingly in Ringwraith shape—kill soldiers across the field. It is unclear if this Dark Lord was meant to be Sauron or Melkor/Morgoth, but I suspect that the shape more resembles drawings of Sauron because that is the Dark Lord the audience is most likely going to be more familiar with. I have also read from other viewers that it was in this moment that Tolkien sees a vision of a crucifix as well. I cannot confirm whether or not this is true, but it must have been incredibly brief, because I looked away from the screen just long enough to write about five or six words and I never saw the crucifix. In any case, this scene as it stands would have worked better if the audience had been primed for Tolkien’s thinking about such a Dark Lord and we then observe that Tolkien sees him at work on this battlefield. This works better than the suggestion that this war on its own inspired the imagery and the story.
Tolkien then drifts into unconsciousness and he awakes in a hospital, where he is being treated for his trench fever. Edith tells him that both Smith and Gilson have died. As noted before, the reaction to Gilson’s death is never explored, as the movie focuses on the processing of Smith’s death until the sudden shift forward in time in the last few minutes of the movie. But before we get to that, we get one last short scene with Fr. Morgan. He says something about how Tolkien was right to pursue Edith—although, again, nothing has been said about her conversion—while Tolkien does not say anything similarly semi-apologetic for what he had said to Morgan. If one restores the other facts to the story, such as the fact that Tolkien made sure to wait until he was twenty-one and that Edith converted to Catholicism, the reaction of Morgan is roughly similar to how he reacted to the news of their engagement in real life (although they are not engaged at this point in the movie, we never even see a proposal). Tolkien hesitated to tell Morgan about their engagement, but when he finally did, Morgan gave them his blessing and offered to officiate, as well as to give them the Oratory Church for the ceremony (he did not yet know that arrangements had already been made). This makes sense in light of how the story occurred in real life, but the movie equivalent is devoid of its substance.
One other aspect of this scene that is notable for how it hints at what the movie could have been is Morgan telling Tolkien that he has had to do a lot of consoling in these dark days of the Great War, and he finds that modern words are inadequate, but he observes that people find comfort in the liturgy and its ancient words. The movie hints at something that it has not developed, which it could have done through the scenes with the T.C.B.S. or with more of a focus on Tolkien’s Catholicism. Tolkien’s mythology reawakens something ancient for many people in the modern and postmodern world. Tolkien’s imagination that birthed these works of fantasy was itself sustained through engagement with the ancient works and through the ancient traditional faith of Catholicism. His experience in the Great War inspired him all the more to push back against the evil of the war and the great disillusionment and despair it brought with the fairy-story and the power of its eucatastrophe, which itself participated in the evangelium of the fairy-story made true that he saw in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ (for more on this point, see his “On Fairy-Stories”). However, the difficulty that the movie creates in trying to make links primarily with The Hobbit and LOTR is that these works were not immediate results of this project of Tolkien. That all began with his work on The Silmarillion, a work that has not been read as widely as the other two, but which this movie could have encouraged people to read.
We later see Tolkien reading a letter of Smith’s that functions as the latter’s last words to him. Indeed, Smith had written the letter not long before his death in December of 1916 and Tolkien only received it after his death. The letter is so moving, not least for how it truly inspired Tolkien, that I quote here the full version of what appears in Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien:
My chief consolation is, that if I am scuppered tonight—I am off on duty in a few minutes—there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off to-night. And do you write it also to Christopher. May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.
Tolkien would indeed carry on the vision and legacy of the T.C.B.S. almost singlehandedly. At the same time, one wonders if Tolkien’s perfectionism in writing was exacerbated by the fact that he saw his work as representing his departed friends as well as himself. He may have wanted his writing to be worthy of their memory as well and constantly found ways to revise his works so that most of it never saw the light of day until his son Christopher took on the task of publishing his father’s work for over forty years after Tolkien’s death. Of course, Christopher would have never gotten such a green light from publishers without what Tolkien did publish in his lifetime, the works for which he is still most recognized.
While I am on this scene, I might as well comment on a point I have seen pop up in reviews of this movie. Wild predictions—most notably by Joseph Pearce—that went around before this movie premiered were that Tolkien would be portrayed in such a way that he was at least open to homosexual conduct and that at least one of his close friends would be portrayed as gay. The movie did not actually portray such, but some have seen a queer subtext in the relationship between Smith and Tolkien, particularly in the scene where Smith tries to comfort Tolkien after he had received the news of Edith’s engagement. Anthony Boyle, who plays Smith in the movie, has supported this view because he thinks that Smith was secretly in love with Tolkien and that this is evidenced by the letters he wrote to Tolkien in the war, like the one I cited above. Regardless of what Boyle thinks, if such a subtext is present in the movie, it is buried so deeply that you cannot see it unless you really want to dig for it. There is nothing comparable to, say, the not-so-subtle subtext in a certain scene in Spartacus or to the complete lack of subtlety in Alexander. And as a matter of history, Boyle acknowledges that there is no direct evidence, and he should have stopped right there. Once he passes that point, he is leaping into the void, rather than setting his feet on anything solid.
Such interpretations of close male friendships seem to be a peculiar hang-up of our own time and especially in the Western world. Men are either criticized for being emotionally stunted in their ability to show affection to one another or, if they do show such affection, they are deemed as secret lovers with their close male friends. It is not uncommon for the friendship of Frodo and Sam to be treated in the same way without respect for how precisely Tolkien defines this relationship. Such claims often come from limited imaginations—shaped into tunnel vision by the obsessions of our time and place—and they tend to say more about the interpreter than they do about the text interpreted.
Anyway, let us move on to the movie’s conclusion of this subplot about Smith. Tolkien had previously met with Smith’s mother after a rugby game, and he had told her about Smith’s poetry. Nothing was done with that remark at the time, since it was simply a set-up for this scene, in which Tolkien meets with Mrs. Smith at Barrow’s. He tells her about the T.C.B.S. and where Smith used to sit as the lads all took their places. Finally, he gets to the point of why he invited her to their old tearoom, to convince her to publish Smith’s poems. This scene is a dramatization of the behind-the-scenes process of something that actually happened. Tolkien edited the collection of poems, wrote a short prefatory note, and got the collection published in 1918. Tolkien also credited Wiseman for editorial work, but Wiseman says he was not involved, that Tolkien only credited him because he saw this as a work commemorating the legacy of the T.C.B.S. and the surviving members needed to have their names on it. In principle, I have no objection to this scene. I only wish that the other members had gotten the attention of this film like Smith did.
After this interaction, the scene shifts forward into the 1930s. All of Tolkien’s four children have been born by now and he has taken up his professorship at Oxford. But there is one final problem for Tolkien to address before this movie ends: his literary output has been stifled. While Tolkien may have had trouble committing to the decision to publish something—for reasons already noted—he certainly did not have trouble conceiving of things to write, even in the immediate aftermath of his time in the Great War. Many of the stories that now make up The Silmarillion had their roots in this time between his return from the front and 1930. He had finished the first and longest draft of The Fall of Gondolin in 1917. He also wrote the initial version of the story of Beren and Lúthien around the same time. His reworked story of Kullervo, which would become the story of Túrin Turambar, was becoming more and more developed. All of these works, and others, would then be subject to perpetual revision over the decades ahead. His struggle was never in starting such work, but in finishing it. There does not seem to be any reason why the movie could not have focused on this problem, rather than the one it made up. (As a side-note, there were other stories that he did finish around this time, such as “Roverandom,” a story he wrote for Michael after he lost his toy dog at the beach, the “Letters from Father Christmas” that he wrote between 1920 and 1943, and “Farmer Giles of Ham.”)
The lead-up to the final shot is one where Tolkien is out in the woods with his family and he gets asked about his new story. Much like the scene with Edith in the tea shop, Tolkien is forced to improvise, and he makes the links between his imagination and his real life that, according to this movie at least, will finally enable him to write a new story. He describes to his kids what this story is going to be about. He says it is a story about journeys and adventures (or he might have said “quests,” but I am not going back to see the movie to make sure), the journeys we take to prove ourselves. It is about potent magic. It is about what it means to love and to be loved. It is about courage. It is about fellowship. As much as these descriptions may fit aspects of Tolkien’s life, they do not quite get at the essence of his work on his two most known publications. This description of his work would also imply either that he abandoned some of these ideas in the process of writing The Hobbit or, also erroneous, that he had the basic ideas for both The Hobbit and LOTR in his mind at this time in his life (when in fact there was no plan to write a sequel when he was writing The Hobbit). Magic was featured in The Hobbit, but it is debatable whether one can say that the story is about it in the way one can say such about LOTR (which involved making a secondary item in The Hobbit, at least in its initial draft, a central element of this new phase of Tolkien’s sub-creative project). The Hobbit does not have any real concern about love and being loved, nor is it about fellowship (certainly not to the degree that LOTR is). This final scene, which aims to draw the narrative elements of the movie together into a summative conclusion well illustrates how haphazardly the filmmakers have followed the approach of connecting Tolkien’s stories with Tolkien’s life. The makers’ comprehensions—or at least presentations—of Tolkien’s life and of Tolkien’s works are superficial—at least, as they represent their comprehension on screen—and they have only illustrated that they have not crafted their story in such a way as to demonstrate that they have taken the time to understand both the life and the works and only then have pursued the right narrative approach for how to relate them. The result is that the conclusion falls flat when it should have been a crescendo.
I remember having a conversation with a friend months before the movie came out in theaters, when I learned that it was only covering Tolkien’s earlier years, and I predicted that the last shot of the movie would be Tolkien writing the sentence that spawned The Hobbit and ultimately LOTR: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” The movie ended exactly like that. Of course, if the scope of Tolkien’s biopic is going to be restricted to his early years, this is a fine ending point, as the story hereafter is, relatively speaking, more well known. Oddly, the filmmakers decided to forego another bit of Tolkien eccentricity and humor by having him write this sentence simply on some blank paper, rather than on a paper attached to a school certificate paper that he was correcting. After noting his writing of this sentence in a letter to W. H. Auden (Letter #163), he said, “I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror's Map.” In other words, Tolkien did not intend to write a new story with this sentence. He only wrote it out of boredom and he eventually built a great addition to an already developing mythos, this time focusing on the meaning of “hobbit” and what kind of world a “hobbit” lived in. I actually think it would have been more effective for the filmmakers to have retained this note of history. He could have written the sentence out quite suddenly, almost as if by instinct, and as he read back what he wrote, he could say something like, “A hobbit? Now what is that?” and then the movie abruptly ends right there. It also would have added an element to the ending that most people would not expect. Such an addition would not only be true to history; it would add more of a punch to the end of the movie.