A few years ago, I discovered the beautiful picture book biography John Ronald’s Dragons by Caroline McAlister with illustrations by Eliza Wheeler. When I became a mother, I developed this habit of suddenly noticing characters I had never noticed before, mainly the overlooked mothers in the story, and I am so grateful to McAlister for introducing me to Tolkien’s mother, Mabel. In John Ronald’s Dragons, we meet Mabel as she is reading fairy tales to her sons.
John Ronald didn’t care for Treasure Island, but the old fairy tales from Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book captivated him, especially the story of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir.
“I desired dragons with a profound desire,’ he said long afterwards in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” “Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”
After reading this, I pulled our own copy of The Red Fairy Book off the shelf and found “The Story of Sigurd.” Though the fairy tale was strange, familiar faces appeared: a fearsome dragon wallowing on hoarded gold, a dwarf, and a ring that brings everyone bad luck. It was not the story of The Hobbit, but the seeds were there, buried in the rich soil his mother had prepared for him.
Widowed at a young age with two young sons, Mabel Tolkien found a cottage for her family to live in in the English countryside in Sarehole, a place that delighted John Ronald’s imagination and was very much The Shire we imagine in his books. (Ironically, he would spend the rest of his life living in plain suburban houses where he would have to convert the garage of his house into a library, and visit The Shire in his imagination.)
Once settled, Mabel began her sons’ education at home. She took all that she knew: languages, painting, drawing, and playing the piano and offered it to her children. John Ronald didn’t take to the piano, but he loved the musicality of words and languages, and his mother encouraged his interest by teaching him Latin, French, and German. He soon started inventing his own languages and would continue to do so his entire life, even in the trenches of World War I. Tolkien would grow up to be a philologist, a scholar of Middle English, a speaker of many languages, who could read myths in Icelandic and invent the elvish languages in his books. Mabel even passed along her own singular style of handwriting that Tolkien would use as a guide for Aragorn’s penmanship.
Another gift Mabel gave her boys was her faith. After converting to Catholicism, many in her family turned against her and withdrew their financial support. Despite this, she brought her boys to church and gave John Ronald a rich experience with God that stayed with him his entire life. Later, it was a discussion of his own love of myth and God that convinced his friend C.S. Lewis to convert to Christianity.
In Mabel Tolkien’s life, we see someone who gave to her sons everything that she had: her knowledge, her passions, her faith, even her elvish handwriting. She saw in her sons the seeds of interests and passions and tried to plant them in rich soil where they would bloom and grow. And they did, even after she passed away from diabetes when the boys were just teens.
Many years later, J.R.R. Tolkien was asked how he came up with the ideas for his stories. He answered,
“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind; out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.”
Before he started writing, Tolkien already had all of the rich depth of imagination and memory and myth that he needed to author The Lord of the Rings because much of it had been planted there in his childhood by his mother, Mabel.
The work of motherhood is humbling, unseen, sometimes painful, often overlooked. I, personally never knew how much it would feel like what Jesus called “dying to self” until I was buried at home with four little children under the age of six, and didn’t really sleep for a decade. Yet Jesus promised that from this soil of motherhood, new life would come.
“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” John 12:24 MSG
Mothers are mulchmakers, turning soil in the dark of the night when the dragons rear their heads, and planting seeds of courage and of hope. All the stories, the songs, the sharing of our passions as well as all of the sorrows, screw-ups, and pleas for forgiveness are all being worked into the leaf-mould of our children’s minds. Mabel Tolkien didn’t get to live to see the fruit of her small loving actions, but we, readers of Tolkien, can thank her for preparing the rich soil of J. R. R. Tolkien’s imagination. From a boy who loved dragons, to a man who faced them in war, to the generations who through his stories will find courage to face their own dragons. Thank you, Mabel.
