A review of Tolkien (2019)

I’m currently on a J.R.R. Tolkien kick, having finished both a re-read of The Lord of the Rings and a re-read of Humphrey Carpenter’s outstanding biography. Last night I watched for the first time Tolkien (2019), which I have both managed to (until now) avoid out of some combination of forgetfulness and anticipated dread of ill-treatment of its subject. I’m pleased to say that I found it a good film, not great, but worth the watch.

Tolkien focuses on Tolkien’s early life from roughly age 10, circa 1902, ending with him writing the iconic first line of The Hobbit, in the early 1930s. We get a heavy emphasis on his romance with Edith Bratt, his friendship with the T.C.B.S., four passionate boys who shared a common love of heroic literature, his love of languages, and his experiences with love and war that inspired his great story of the war of the ring and its underlying mythology.

Overall I enjoyed the film, and was moved by a few scenes. It took several dramatic liberties, compressing and magnifying various events to help propel along the sometimes quite ordinary course of about 25 years of his life. Other events I believe were wholly created—sneaking into the storage room of a sold-out concert hall to listen to a performance of the Richard Wagner opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen” with Edith, for example. Normally I would not complain about it, except that Tolkien was not particularly influenced by Wagner’s opera, despite the shared conceit of a ring of power, and a casual viewer of the film might leave thinking that Wagner’s Ring Cycle was the chief influence on The Lord of the Rings (it was not). Tolkien did romantically reunite with Bratt after the latter had gotten engaged to another man, and encouraged her to break off the relationship. But it did not happen in the seconds before Tolkien dramatically boarded a transport ship to France, as was portrayed in Tolkien. But I accept these changes in the spirit of needing to create a dramatic film, which is very different from biography or history.

Tolkien was also surprisingly low on the “cringe” factor. There were no made-up dramatic charges into German machine gun fire, embarrassing sex scenes, or manufactured maudlin T.C.B.S. speeches; rather the genuine friendship and spirit of the four boys was well-portrayed, as was Tolkien’s view of Edith as something akin to an elven princess (for better and for worse, as she often felt alienated by his split personality around her). Tolkien’s life had a great many tragedies and triumphs that required no exaggeration, and the film presented some of these faithfully. I particularly liked that it preserved the 1916 letter from G.B. Smith to Tolkien, in which the former foresaw his own end in the fields of France and implored his old schoolmate to continue the great work the T.C.B.S. had vowed to create:

My 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.

It is heartbreaking to think what came next: T.C.B.S member Rob Gilson died in one of the many suicidal advances across the mud-choked Somme battlefield, straight into German machine-gun fire; Smith suffered shrapnel wounds from an exploding artillery shell and later died of gangrene infection. That left only Wiseman and Tolkien to carry on the T.C.B.S.' promised great work. Tolkien developed trench fever and had to be evacuated back to England, which in all likelihood saved his life. He and Wiseman held up their end of the bargain: Wiseman would go on to become a school headmaster, while Tolkien of course would go on to become an Oxford professor and write the greatest fantasy the world has ever known.

The best account of this period of Tolkien’s life remains John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, which after Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth is one of the best pieces of Tolkien scholarship I have read. But you could do worse on a Saturday night than a viewing of Tolkien.