The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and literary experiences.
Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners, dragons and wizards – in a modest print run of 1500 copies. Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain, when The Road to Wigan Pier was published that same year. Commissioned for The Left Book Club, it examined the appalling living and working conditions of miners in the North of England.
Vagabondish and restless, Orwell was iconoclastic, eschewed academia and rejected religion. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. Orwell could not have despised this tradition more vehemently, often mocking adherents with jibes such as:
‘In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree.’
Orwell especially doubted the usefulness of this faith to novelists:
“The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties.”
Tolkien, being a good novelist and a good Catholic, disproved Orwell’s waggish rule.
On closer examination, it is evident the two writers shared many beliefs and values. Both men were eccentric and held idiosyncratic points of view on a wide range of topics. Orwell’s brand of democratic Socialism (he always capitalised the “s”) was founded on a belief in the fundamental decency and commonsense of the English working class. Tolkien’s experiences in WWI led him to admire the private soldiers he met in the trenches.
Both men were nostalgic about their Edwardian childhoods in the period prior to WWI. They were both relatively poor scholarship boys who read incredibly widely and published in their school magazines. They developed a profound love of nature as boys which lasted their entire lives. Both men had abhorrence of industrialisation and machines and a love of handmade things. Tobacco became a lifelong addiction.
Orwell claimed in 1940 that:
“Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening. I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires, candle light and comfortable chairs. I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and “modern” furniture.”
Tolkien told a correspondent towards the end of his life:
“I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanised farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible).”
It is hardly surprising that writers would have long interest in literature and language. Tolkien worked on developing artificial languages (and fictional worlds to house them) his whole life. Orwell’s devised Newspeak for his final novel. Both had a patriotic love of Englishness which led to a strong preference for Anglo-Saxon rather than the French vocabulary which had colonised the language after 1066. One of his biographers emphasises how much Tolkien bemoaned “the medieval take-over of the English language by Norman French”. Orwell railed against this too:
“One mystery about the English language is why, with the biggest vocabulary in existence, it has to be constantly borrowing foreign words and phrases. Where is the sense, for instance, of saying cul de sac when you mean blind alley? Other totally unnecessary French phrases are joie de vivre, amour propre, reculer pour mieux sauter, raison d’être, vis-à-vis, tête-à-tête, au pied de la lettre, esprit de corps.”
Tolkien had particularly fond childhood memories of the rural idyll that was his life prior to being orphaned by the premature death of his mother. In Orwell’s 1939 novel, Coming Up For Air, the protagonist reflects:
“I am sentimental about my childhood—not my own particular childhood, but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick. And fishing is somehow typical of that
