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

would hurry round to serve mass for Father Francis at his favourite side-altar in the Oratory church. Afterwards they would eat breakfast in the plain refectory, and then, when they had played their usual game of spinning the kitchen cat around in the revolving food-hatch, they would set off for school. Hilary had passed the entrance examination and was now at King Edward’s, and the two boys would walk together down to New Street if there was time, or would take a horse-bus if the clock at Five Ways showed that they were late.

      Ronald made many friends at school, and one boy in particular soon became an inseparable companion. His name was Christopher Wiseman. A year younger than Ronald, he was the son of a Wesleyan minister who lived in Edgbaston; he had fair hair, a broad good-natured face, and an energetically critical manner. The two boys met in the Fifth Class in the autumn of 1905, Tolkien achieving first place in the class – he was now showing distinct academic promise – and Wiseman coming second. This rivalry soon developed into a friendship based on a shared interest in Latin and Greek, a great delight in Rugby football (‘soccer’ was never played at King Edward’s), and an enthusiasm for discussing anything and everything. Wiseman was a staunch Methodist, but the two boys found that they could argue about religion without bitterness.

      Together they moved class by class up the school. Clearly Ronald Tolkien had an aptitude for languages – his mother had seen that – and King Edward’s provided the ideal environment in which this aptitude could flourish. The study of Latin and Greek was the backbone of the curriculum, and both languages were taught particularly well in the First (or senior) Class, which Ronald reached shortly before his sixteenth birthday. The First Class was under the bright eye of the headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, a remarkable man with a neat pointed beard who was an amateur inventor and an accomplished scientist as well as a skilled teacher of the classics; among his inventions were a windmill that charged batteries to provide electric light for his house, a species of hectograph which duplicated the school exam papers (illegibly, said the boys), and a small gun that could shoot golf balls. When teaching, he encouraged his pupils to explore the byways of learning and to be expert in everything that came their way: an example that made a great impression on Ronald Tolkien. But though he was discursive, Gilson also encouraged his pupils to make a detailed study of classical linguistics. This was entirely in keeping with Tolkien’s inclinations; and, partly as a result of Gilson’s teaching, he began to develop an interest in the general principles of language.

      It was one thing to know Latin, Greek, French and German; it was another to understand why they were what they were. Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all: he had begun, in fact, to study philology, the science of words. And he was encouraged to do this even more when he made his acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon.

      This was thanks to George Brewerton, the master who preferred muck to manure. Under his tuition Ronald Tolkien had shown an interest in Chaucerian English. Brewerton was pleased by this and offered to lend the boy an Anglo-Saxon primer. The offer was accepted eagerly.

      Opening its covers, Tolkien found himself face to face with the language that was spoken by the English before the first Normans set foot in their land. Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English, was familiar and recognisable to him as an antecedent of his own language, and at the same time was remote and obscure. The primer explained the language clearly in terms that he could easily understand, and he was soon making light work of translating the prose examples at the back of the book. He found that Old English appealed to him, though it did not have the aesthetic charm of Welsh. This was rather a historical appeal, the attraction of studying the ancestor of his own language. And he began to find real excitement when he progressed beyond the simple passages in the primer and turned to the great Old English poem Beowulf. Reading this first in a translation and then in the original language, he found it to be one of the most extraordinary poems of all time: the tale of the warrior Beowulf, his fight with two monsters, and his death after battle with a dragon.

      Now Tolkien turned back to Middle English and discovered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here was another poem to fire his imagination: the medieval tale of an Arthurian knight and his search for the mysterious giant who is to deal him a terrible axeblow. Tolkien was delighted by the poem and also by its language, for he realised that its dialect was approximately that which had been spoken by his mother’s West Midland ancestors. He began to explore further in Middle English, and read the Pearl, an allegorical poem about a dead child which is believed to have been written by the author of Sir Gawain. Then he turned to a different language and took a few hesitant steps in Old Norse, reading line by line in the original words the story of Sigurd and the dragon Fafnir that had fascinated him in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book when he was a small child. By this time he had acquired a range of linguistic knowledge that was remarkable in a schoolboy.

      He continued his search for the ‘bones’ behind all these languages, rummaging in the school library and exploring the remoter shelves of Cornish’s bookshop down the road. Eventually he began to find – and to scrape together enough money to buy – German books on philology that were ‘dry-as-dust’ but which could provide him with the answers to his questions. Philology: ‘the love of words’. For that was what motivated him. It was not an arid interest in the scientific principles of language; it was a deep love for the look and the sound of words, springing from the days when his mother had given him his first Latin lessons.

      And as a result of this love of words, he had started to invent his own languages.

      Most children make up their own words. Some even have rudimentary private languages that they share with each other. This was what Ronald’s young cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon had done. Their language was called ‘Animalic’, and it was constructed principally out of animal names; for instance Dog nightingale woodpecker forty meant ‘You are an ass’. The Incledons now lived outside Birmingham at Barnt Green, the neighbouring village to Rednal, and Ronald and Hilary usually spent part of their holidays there. Ronald learnt ‘Animalic’ and was amused by it. A little later Marjorie (the elder sister) lost interest in it, and when she dropped out Mary and Ronald collaborated to invent a new and more sophisticated language. This was called ‘Nevbosh’ or the New Nonsense, and it was soon sufficiently developed for the two cousins to chant limericks in it:

       Dar fys ma vel gom co palt ‘Hoc

       Pys go iskili far maino woc?

       Pro si go fys do roc de

       Do cat ym maino bocte

       De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc!’

       (There was an old man who said ‘How

       Can I possibly carry my cow?

       For if I were to ask it

       To get in my basket

       It would make such a terrible row!’)

      This kind of thing caused a good deal of amusement at Barnt Green, and as Ronald reached adolescence it gave him an idea. Already when beginning to learn Greek he had entertained himself by making up Greek-style words. Could he not take this further and invent a complete language, something more serious and properly organised than Nevbosh – most of which was only English, French, or Latin in disguise? Such a language might not have any particular use – though the invented language Esperanto was very popular at the time – but it would amuse him and allow him to put all his favourite sounds on paper. Certainly it seemed worth trying: if he had been interested in music he would very likely have wanted to compose melodies, so why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be as it were a private symphony?

      In adult life Tolkien came to believe that his impulse towards linguistic invention was similar to that felt by many schoolchildren. He once remarked, while talking about the invention of languages: ‘It’s not that uncommon, you know. An enormously greater number of children have what you might call a creative element in them than is usually supposed, and it isn’t necessarily limited to certain things: they may not want to paint or draw, or have much music, but they nevertheless want to create something.