Walking Down Narrow Streets by Marta

Chapter 1

Not A.U., not really, but not exactly a comfortable read either. Touches on themes of Christian belief and homosexuality (appropriate to the time).

Read Chapter 1

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There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate.
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Tolkien walked down the narrow back-streets of Oxford. He hardly could see where he was going, the light from the grubby lamps was so dim, and the worn tread of his shoes skidded on the uneven pavement. He imagined himself slipping fully, knocking his head against the trash-bins and lying there ‘til morning. It would be relief of sorts, such an oblivion – the closest he’d come to true rest tonight. God knows he wouldn’t get it any other way.

He had tried. Blimey, but he’d tried. He had twisted half the night away until he woke Edith, but he couldn’t tell even her the truth. How could she ever believe him? And what would she think of him if she did? So he’d told her that he’d caught Richard, that student of his she’d taken a liking to, at some mischief, and that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to take it to his program chair. She’d nodded at that, accepted it easily enough; Richard was no stranger to trouble, for all he was likeable enough. She’d believed him, and it had done no harm, but still he’d lied to her. The first lie of any real consequence he’d ever given her, and it pained him.

But what choice had there been? She liked his faery-stories when they were younger, but only as a diversion. They were childish play, something a father of four – and with other responsibilities besides – ought to have set aside a long time ago. If she knew how his fantasies bridged into his profession, she would be rightly nervous. And if she knew how close his mad hobby brought him to going against the church, gambling his soul against a whim as she’d see it – well, she’d laugh at him, or be terribly cross, and Tolkien just wasn’t sure he could bear either possibility.

So he walked the narrow back-streets of Oxford, stepping into the shadows when one of the constables peered down the way on their late-night patrols. He was doing nothing wrong, but he had no great desire to explain himself. Not on tonight of all nights. They’d be like Edith, if they heard him out at all; they’d laugh at him for worrying so over made-up characters, or be angry at him for wasting their time, or perhaps even cart him off to an asylum.

The trouble was, Tolkien wasn’t so sure they were characters. Not sure at all.

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Time for you and time for me,
And time for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
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It had all begun back at Leeds. No, if he was being truly honest – and he could see little reason not to be, for no one would believe him in either case – it had all begun with a dream. At least he’d thought it a dream, but now it seemed almost a vision. And why shouldn’t it be? Hadn’t Fr. Francis told him often enough about the folks in the Bible having such dreams? And yet... ai, but it was absurd! To dream of a mariner who sailed the skies with a star bound to his brow, that was laughable enough as a mere dream. But to think that it might be true? Better to blame it on that dish Wiseman had cooked up the night before, curry he’d called it. Too spicy of food, and too much drink, that was his answer.

He’d have written Earendel off as the fruit of a bold fancy, if not for Reykjavik codices. So he supposed it had all begun at Leeds, this torturous striving after faery-tales. Some curator of an ancient castle had stumbled across a chest full of ancient books, the Midgaard Codices they called them; copied from scrolls at some lord’s requests almost from before history. They’d sent the whole treasure-trove south to Leeds, and Tolkien had been asked to sort through them; which he had.

At first it had seemed like so many other fragments from Britain’s history ere Christendom took hold. A nice addition to some library, to be sure, and notable for its size if nothing else; but hardly holding many revelations. It did seem genuine, for the spelling and word use was what you’d expect for the period, Tolkien would give it that. Yet the stories themselves were standard fare – a murdered king, a son on a quest for vengeance, an epic war, and on and on.

He’d nearly set it aside for other projects, but then a name jumped out at him: Gondolin. And there he was, his Earendel and the story of how he came to wear a star upon his brow, and Tolkien could hardly believe it! When he read of the sailor’s ship, Vingilótë, he’d nearly dropped the codex on the floor. It seemed incredible, for in his vision petals had floated on the foam of Vingilótë’s wake, and here the ship was named foam-flower. What could all this mean? How could he have had a dream a decade and more ago, about a poem he could not have known about?

Unless it had not just been a poem? He studied the epics as literature, but was there not the possibility of some truth behind the verses?

Which would make his discovery all the more troubling, for it was not all heroics of the sort a good Catholic might find thrilling. If it was but literature, Tolkien could have looked over certain elements, written them off as the imprint of an ancient culture not yet perfected by Christendom. He remembered what Gilson had said, once, about that man Hume: that we could find art beautiful without always loving what it portrayed. Tolkien had once thought that Hume a madman, for how could you think something beautiful if you hated it; but now he remembered how his son had loved Guernica but cried at the bombing of Canterbury. If the codices were but fiction, then perhaps...

Yet, if the story of these silmarils was history, if it was true, and what’s more if God had saw fit to call his mind to it in modern times – that was a matter of a wholly different sort. If that was so, Tolkien hardly knew what to think.

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Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?
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Tolkien knew this back-street, even in the half-obscured lamplight. And he knew that the constables who had earlier passed the alley had not been keeping an eye out just for pickpockets. Sodomy was, after all, still a crime. He had not chosen this street on purpose – he had not chosen any street but had merely let his feet carry him where they would – but it struck him as oddly appropriate that he should end up here. It was buggery, after all, that explained why he was so buggered, or would be come morning if he couldn’t find some sleep.

Looking at the clothes-lines strung between windows, struck by the utter lack of women’s wear, Tolkien’s mind was drawn back to Richard. Why had he named him to Edith, rather than someone else? He told himself it was because they’d met just the morning prior, that it had nothing to do with how Richard lived on a street much like this. Tolkien had always prided himself on dealing with his students based on how they lived within the college walls, and not beyond it. What did it matter to him, if the man was an aesthete? He’d certainly never grade Richard harshly, nor any of the others, whatever Tolkien might think of their personal lives.

Yet Tolkien did know of the aesthetes. He knew how they lived, and why there were no dresses on the clothesline, and so he could imagine what might have played out in these houses just a few hours earlier. He could almost hear deep groans escaping out windows thrown open against the summer’s heat. And there would have been other men, leaning out their windows in shirtsleeves and little else, laughing knowingly at those sounds. For they knew those sounds well, knew them in their own voices.

As did Tolkien – oh, but not like that. He’d heard similar groans come from his own mouth, in his own marriage-bed, brought out by his own wife. And there was the rub: he’d been told his whole life that such love between men was unnatural, unholy even. He might be civilized toward men he knew to be aesthetes, but he could not truly approve. So what should he make of his visions, if they were marked by such a love?

For there was no denying it. Eager to find more stories about the ship that sailed the stars, Tolkien had read more of the codices from Reykjavik, translating them as quickly as his duties allowed. And there it was, plain for any to see. There was an unfinished saga, and a line about a dwarf-made helm passed among the elves. It should have been a small enough incident, one he glanced over on his ways to more pertinent fare, were it not for the words.

Fingon had given Azaghâl’s helmet to Maedhros, his cousin, and he’d given it as mitgift. That word was seldom used in the Midgaard Codices; Tolkien could only remember seeing it perhaps twice before. Yes: that Gondorian lord Faramir had mitgifted a star-embroidered mantle to his lady-wife in the Thegnsboc, and then a legal treatise had used the word for gifts traded between spouses. Had he seen it elsewhere? Tolkien scoured his memory, but for naught; he simply could not remember. And he was a linguist; words were his stock and trade, he could not simply discard such clues that they offered.

It was a strange choice indeed – unless the cousins’ bond was something more than he’d first thought.

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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
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At last Tolkien made his way back home: out of the dark back-street and onto more clearly lit roads. Somewhere, a churchbell struck the fifth hour of the night; he had been out too long already, and Edith would worry if he was not home for breakfast. A constable walking across the street looked at him queerly but, after only a minute’s hesitation, tipped his hat to the venerable professor. Tolkien laughed inwardly at that; here in Oxford, at least, a professor’s patched jacket and ink-stained fingers still carried some measure of respect.

And no small degree of responsibility, he added to himself.

He had thought once of publishing a translation someday. It was his duty. What had at first struck him as standard forms – the faery-king, the warring sons, the Quest for vengeance and to recover stolen treasures, the battle and the remaking of the war – now seemed like something more. The old ingredients were all there, and yet, there was something more than all of that. They were entertaining, perhaps even edifying – for the most part. And for their sheer size, they would be a welcome linguistic size. He owed it to his peers to share what he’d found, to translate them for that purpose alone. So much could be gained through their study.

And yet... and yet there were those few parts, only a handful of sentences but present nonetheless, that could ruin him. To publish them he would have to introduce them. Frame them as fiction or history; and if as fiction to show how Christian Britain should read them. Were they proof of a barbaric past best left behind? Or was there something more to them? He could not call them fiction, not truthfully, but what would they say of him if he called it history? That Maedhros might be pushed aside as aberrant, a trained character, but what of Fingon? He was as heroic as they came.

If Tolkien was truthful, if he translated the words as he knew they were meant and if he tacked his name to it, it would mark him an aesthete. He might have risked that, but who would publish such a translation? And who would read such lines as anything but fiction, penned in as propaganda, or see it as proof that Fingon and the rest were barbarians? And there was his wife to think of, and his children, and Father Francis beside...

Deep in his core, Tolkien felt a deep shame. He longed for the courage of an elf-lord, to do what must be done; yet he was just a professor of linguistics, a small enough man in the grand scheme of things. Still, Tolkien knew that there was truth in those pages; he knew it at his very core. Whatever way he found to share them, or if he never did, he must hold on to that at least.

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For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
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Notes

Read Notes

To some of you, what I have written may seem like alternate universe, even unlikely. I do not consider this piece A.U. because to me that label implies that what I have written breaks canon. There is no canon when it comes to Tolkien’s life because canon is what a creator chooses to make authoritative about a certain world – it is the rule-stick. If we read the Red Book et al as fiction rather than history then Tolkien can give us canon there; but certainly he cannot be the only author of the historical events of his own life, any more than Bilbo’s perceptions would have captured the whole of the Quest for Erebor.

Still, I have tried my best to be consistent, both with Tolkien’s views expressed in his letters and with general historical knowledge of the period. While we are not told that most of the events in question ever happened, I have done my best to make sure they could have happened this way. I also have tried to honor the spirit of Tolkien’s conceit that his books might be translations, to explore how translating something he might not approve of would have affected him.

A few line-notes on some issues to explain my thinking; feel free to skip. :-)

There will be time to murder and create etc.: The poetry quoted throughout is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” You can read it here .

“mad hobby”: This description comes from Letter #4: “I often long to work at it and don’t let myself ‘cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!”

Wiseman and curry: Wiseman is Christopher Wiseman, a member of the T.C.B.S. (Letter #5) This incident is my invention (though curry appeared in British cookbooks as early as 1747, so it’s certainly possible).

Gilson and Hume: Rob Gilson is another one of Tolkien’s friends from the T.C.B.S. The Hume referred to is David Hume’s essay Of the Standards of Taste , particularly paragraphs 10-12.

Earendel: Tolkien had a draft of the “Earendel” poem as early as 1914 – see letter #2. If as I suggest the historical documents he “translated” only became available when he was at Leeds (1924-1925), his writing of the Earendel poem has to be explained by other means. The spelling of Earendel is deliberate; this is how Tolkien spells it when referring to his poem.

Fr. Francis: This is the Catholic priest who raised Tolkien after his mother died.

Midgaard Codices: The name Midgaard is Old English for Middle-earth.

Thegnsboc: My attempt at Old English for the Thain's Book, the version of the Red Book that received some annotations in Gondor, and was cited by Tolkien as one of his sources in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings.

Azaghâl: The incident of Fingon and Maedhros exchanging Azaghâl’s helmet as a gift comes from the “Narn i Hin Hurin” (section: “The Departure of Turin”), incidentally never published in Tolkien’s lifetime. The idea that the word for “gift” here has a specific connotation of a romantic gift is my own invention. I really do not intend to argue that Fingon/Maedhros is a canonical slash pairing, but merely used this as a potential incident to advance the plot

mitgift: This is the Old English word for a gift given to a bride on marrying her; literally, wife-gift.

aesthetes: During Tolkien’s time at Oxford there was a counterculture of aesthete students – that is, homosexual individuals. Tyellas summarizes this situation very nicely in her essay Warm Beds Are Good ; Tyellas in turn draws on Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, pp. 21-77. So while Tolkien’s letters on sexuality suggest he didn’t approve of homosexuality, he most likely would have had students who he knew were homosexual.

sodomy: Sodomy was still a crime in England as late as 1967, and even after that there were significantly more restrictions on same-sex sexual activity than different-sex homosexuality. (For instance, until 1994 the age of consent for homosexual sexual acts was twenty-one, compared to sixteen for heterosexual sexual acts). Tolkien is very likely right that at the point of this story, homosexual sexual activity would still be a criminal activity.