A return to England at the age of eleven followed. Here in my Surrey prep. school I read non-fiction seriously for the first time—true wartime escape stories such as Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape, set in the same prisoner-of-war camp in Sagan where my father, then an R.A.F. fighter pilot, had been held; Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse, which describes the ingenious escape of POWs hidden under a vaulting horse in the prison yard, and Pat Reid’s The Colditz Story, about escapes from the ‘escape-proof’ Colditz Castle near Leipzig in the heart of Nazi Germany. These accounts, written with a good-humoured understatement that belied the acts of courage they described, were a tonic to schoolboy restiveness chafing under petty schoolmasterly authority. I also read with glee the hilarious and anarchic Compleet (sic) Molesworth, a collection of peculiarly English school stories by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle, but purporting to have been written by a pupil, one twelve-year-old Nigel Molesworth, who proudly describes himself as “the curse of st. custards” and “the gorilla of 3B.” Nigel is the literary ancestor of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s famous fictional young diarist. But it is due to the efforts of my much-revered English teacher, Mr. Athonas, that I first met the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.
“In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.” This is said to have been the sentence written down on a student’s blank page by Tolkien, while marking School Certificate examinations. When he did this, he said, he had no idea of what a hobbit was, and had to write to find out. The sentence eventually became the inspiration for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the latter voted in 1997 as the ‘greatest book of the century’ to the applause of its millions of readers, children and adults alike, and to the intense annoyance of the academy and literary establishment that still cannot understand its appeal. Edmund Wilson dismissed it as ‘balderdash,’ and ‘juvenile trash,’ and Philip Toynbee predicted a ‘merciful oblivion’ for it. More fools they. Both Tolkien and his great admirer C.S. Lewis passionately disavowed the idea that their work was only for children. In a famous essay, Tolkien wrote “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults. They will, of course, put more in and get more out than children can. Then, as a branch of a genuine art, children may hope to get fairy stories fit for them to read … as they may hope to get suitable introductions to poetry, history and the sciences.” The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings is a work of complex construction, written as it was by a scholar of Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon poetry, and contains within it a rich mixture of mythology, philology, political allegory and Christian parable, invented language and epic questing. But it is its story, of the redemption of the known world by the dauntless courage of Frodo the hobbit in destroying the Ring of Power and thus bringing about the collapse of the Dark Lord Sauron and his brigades of the fearsome mounted wraiths the Nazgul, vicious orcs and stupid trolls, the terrifying Balrog, and associated evil companions, that has fired the imaginations of millions of readers, as well as that of the New Zealander Peter Jackson, whose three films of The Lord of the Rings, despite their inaccuracies and excessive emphasis on the sensational, have been hailed as cinematic masterpieces worthy of Tolkien himself. Even the Harvard Lampoon’s brilliant parody Bored of the Rings is a tribute to Tolkien, as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. After all, as one wag put it, “Tolkien is hobbit-forming.”
