Lovers, one of them a future great novelist kept apart by a priest, the last thing Robert Hiini expected to find in the bargain bin of an antique shop in Rockingham.
The two lovers had been spotted together once more and the usually cheerful priest was furious at the deception.
The first time, they were cavorting innocently over tea: he, having left their mutual lodging house on the pretext of visiting a sportsground, and she, having cycled to their clandestine meeting place under the guise of meeting a cousin.
The then 17 year old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien promised he would never see Edith Bratt again but the temptation was too great.
He loved his guardian, Fr Francis Morgan, or “Fr F” as he would call him in letters and diary entries.
The priest had taken him into his own heart and was “a father to me, more than most real fathers” Tolkien would write years later.
But such was his sense of kinship with Edith and the ardour he felt for her that Tolkien couldn’t obey his surrogate’s admonition. He hadn’t the strength; at least, not yet.
****
I sat back from the computer screen, 98 years after the events I had just read about took place.
A book which had once been owned by the persecutor of Tolkien and Edith’s young love was open in front of me; the book which led me down this happy but unexpected trail of coming to appreciate the life of an author I had previously loathed.
For I come from a long line of Tolkien atheists, albeit of a laconic rather than virulent variety.
People told me he was the greatest author in the English language – in ‘serious’ Catholic circles, the view is nearly dogmatic – but I felt no fervour for him, until I read about his life.
When I had picked up the book in that sadly-defunct Rockingham antique store in 2008, it was without any knowledge of the historical treasures it would reveal.
I picked it up for a very different reason.
“Nova et Vetera” (New and Old), I read on the book’s leather spine. And inside, the subheading which immediately secured my purchase: “Informal meditations for times of spiritual dryness”.
I had been working in the Catholic Church for three years and was ready to walk: not so much over the lumbering mess that is institutional Catholicism but more depressingly, the emptiness and hypocrisy of my own Catholic posturing and the sense that when I was praying to God I was simply doing a pretty average job of talking to myself.
And there, in the bargain bin, was a book which might help to shed God’s light on my own increasing bitterness, written by a Jesuit, no less, back when they had a better name among “orthodox” folks such as myself (the book, a third edition, was first published in 1900). I paid the gent his $4 and made my way home to read and google my find.
The book’s author, George Tyrrell, turned out to be a leading “modernist” of the early 20th century; intent on revisioning the Gospel to fit modern certainties as the more-than-occasionally reductive science of the day delineated them.
An Irish convert from Anglicanism, his views grew increasingly divergent from those of what Pope Benedict has recently described as the then heavy-handed and intellectually stilted Holy See.
Tyrrell was expelled from the Jesuit order in 1906 and excommunicated the following year when he criticised Pope Pius X’s encyclical letter, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which condemned what it amorphlessly labelled “modernism”.
To read, the book was a disappointment, but inside lay far more interesting tidbits.
On its inside cover there was a book plate with a coat of arms and the words “Franciscus Morgan et Osborne” and “Cong: Orat: Pres apud Edgbaston”.
To my ignorant eyes, this Latin was opaque except for the obvious name of a man and, probably, of a place.
On the title page were written the neat, handwritten words “Francis Morgan” and “1907” and what looked to me like “theoratory”.
Many google searches later and I had found my man: Fr Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory in Edgbaston, made famous by its saintly founder, Cardinal John Henry Newman (1907 was the year construction began on the Birmingham Oratory Church, built in Cardinal Newman’s honour).
Fr Francis was not an academic, nor a sportsman according to his confrere, Fr Philip Lynch. Born to parents of Welsh and Spanish backgrounds, he was remembered simply as a good and dependable priest, living up to the Latin moto on his family crest “Ut Ameris Amabilis Esto” – “be amiable, and then you will be loved.” He was evidently appreciated and greatly respected by Tolkien’s mother, Mabel, who listed him as her boys’ legal guardian when she was diagnosed with diabetes, before the advent of penicillin.
Mabel had raised her sons on her own after leaving South Africa and her husband behind in 1895 for a holiday with her boys in England.
In early 1896, Tolkien’s father, Arthur, contracted rheumatic fever and died. Tolkien was four years old and his brother Hilary, two.
Ensconced for the next four years in Birmingham, Mabel and her sister, May, angered their families by receiving instruction and entering the Catholic Church in June of 1900.
The disdain meted out to both was swift. After cajoling his wife to desist, May’s husband Walter was determined to bring Mabel back from disgrace and cut the financial help he and his wife had been providing since Arthur’s death. But Mabel would not relent.
It was to her friend Fr Francis that Mabel turned when she knew she was approaching the end. In November 1904, when Tolkien was 12, Mabel died and the boys passed into “Fr F’s” care.
By all accounts, the Tolkien boys’ surrogate father, Fr F, was a loving and engaged guardian.
But how can one reconcile that image with what was to come and the separation he enforced which threatened to derail Tolkien’s and Edith’s happiness?
After three years lodging with an unloving aunt, Fr F moved the boys to the Duchess Road lodging house of a Mrs Faulkner. It was there that the 16 year old Tolkien met fellow lodger, Edith Bratt, 19.
Both knew devastating loss, Edith perhaps even more than Tolkien. Her mother had died four years prior and her father was unknown, leaving Edith to grow up in a community which didn’t love “illegitimate” children.
The two became friends almost immediately and, by the end of summer 1909, were firmly in love.
Their fraternising was blissfully unhindered until that bicycle ride in the countryside and their visit to the tea rooms in Rednal Village. Their tea attendant mentioned seeing Tolkien with an unknown girl to the Oratory’s caretaker. Fr F got word and forbade further contact.
More illicit, clandestine meetings ensued, further angering Fr F until Edith opted to move away to Cheltenham.
Tolkien biographer Joseph Pearce points to Tolkien’s diary entry of 16 February as a sorrowful expression of Tolkien’s state of mind:
“Last night prayed would see E by accident. Prayer answered. Saw her at 12.55 at Prince of Wales. Told her I could not write and arranged to see her off on Thursday fortnight. Happier but so much long to see her just once to cheer her up. Cannot think of anything else.”
Fr F’s last admonition was his harshest but was intended for Tolkien’s own good; to protect the future career of a brilliant mind. He threatened to withdraw support for Tolkien’s study for Oxford if he did not agree to suspend contact with Edith until he was 21.
Tolkien wrote of the night of her 2 March departure to Cheltenham: “At Francis Road corner she passed me on bike on way to station. I shall not see her again perhaps for three years.”
And that was how it happened. His sense of obligation to the well meaning priest was so great that he finally yielded. On the day of his 21st birthday he sent a letter proposing marriage to Edith, his first communication with her in nearly three years.
She was already engaged but she returned the engagement ring by post. And while more struggles awaited them, Tolkien and Edith were happily joined in marriage on 22 March 1916.
****
In a roundabout way, my $4 antique shop find delivered on its initial promise of aiding one experiencing spiritual dryness.
What was one hour of then tedium per week at Mass or minutes spent in empty prayer compared with Tolkien’s three years of pained, solitary longing? What kind of man could withstand that?
Only a man as faithful as Tolkien.