Episode 29 - The Carpenter Biography: A Response

Transcript

Speaker: Hi everyone, welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer-led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Alicia, and I'm here with my usual co-hosts, Leah. a And Grace.

Speaker: Hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining us today. i am pounding a bottle of Mountain Dew Baja Blast because I'm angry and fuck Humphrey Carpenter. That's how I'm starting today.

Speaker: Enjoy your beverage of choice. Just make sure it's in a throwable vessel.

Speaker: Yeah, um we've been doing a lot of reading of the Carpenter biography lately. And we are all as AFAB, chronically ill people, quite angry. Yeah.

Speaker: concur Third. Thirded.

Speaker: Yeah. This kind of emerged when you were working on a different paper, right, Alicia? you kind of... yes revisited a couple of things and we also all went back to revisit a really great article by Nicole M. Duplessis on the shoulders of Humphrey Carpenter and that really kind of got to us and one and kind of made us want to dive back into into Carpenter and have some rage bait, I guess. yeah If you are listening to our podcast as they come out, we are referencing

Speaker: last episode, the Lobelia Sackville-Fagans episode, because when I was working on that Lobelia paper that ended up becoming the podcast episode, I originally was coming at it from a very kind of carpenter point of view of what Tolkien's relationship with women was, that he was so separated from women he probably didn't really understand what Lobelia would have been going through.

Speaker: ands In the process of doing additional research on that, I realized, wait, no, that doesn't make any sense because all of these other scholars like Duplessis, like Ratliff, have covered in detail how Tolkien was not nearly as invested in the boys club to the exclusion of everything else as Carpenter would have made it out to be.

Speaker: And just reading Duplessis' article, and I was actually there when she presented this because she presented it at MythCon the year before it got published.

Speaker: And I don't know why I had a apparently completely forgotten about it when I was writing my abstract for the Slubelia paper. It's astounding what a douchebag Humphrey Carpenter was to Edith Tolkien.

Speaker: Truly. Yeah. Yeah. I think as i have been rereading this and we've all chatted as hosts that, you know, the last time each of us picked up this particular volume, like we were familiar with it, but like for some of us, it's been a while. Like I, last time I read this covered cover to cover,

Speaker: i believe I was in the in the ninth grade writing a paper about J.R.R. Tolkien. Side note, it was supposed to be a four page paper and it ended up being a 12 page paper. And my English teacher accused me of plagiarism because this is the level of work I would expect from my AP 12th grade students.

Speaker: Wow. And she was eventually forced to grade the paper. And she very saltily gave it a 91. And I am still mad about it. But she had to walk back her her claims of plagiarism because like everything was cited and it was correct.

Speaker: I digress. yeah So the last time that I read the Carpenter biography in full cover to cover, instead of like looking at particular chapters or snippets, I was a child and not a fully grown human being who can like look at some of the things that were presented as fact then as I was reading it. And now I can look that and go, well, that does not seem to hold up.

Speaker: But I do note that if you tab like all of the mentions of female characters in like the Lord of the Rings even The Hobbit.

Speaker: Sure, you're not going to see every single page be marked and everything. But as you read back through those tabs, you get a really keen sense of a lot of different ways for female characters to be.

Speaker: heroic or villainous or antiheroes or petty or noble or just everyday folks. And if you do the same thing to Carpenter's treatment of Edith, women in general, but Edith in specific, in this volume, all you get is enraged as you read back through.

Speaker: Yeah, it's it's awful. Truly appalling. Her only character is is shrew And that's it. Yeah. She's set up kind of in opposition.

Speaker: And this this kind of points out to sort of how, just even just as like a work of biography and as a biographer, how Carpenter fails on several levels. Because number one, we don't really write biographies like this anymore.

Speaker: He's not a professional. He's like just some some dude who kind of warmed his way the graces of the family and managed to persuade them to... you know, let him write it. But he hadn't really done this sort of thing professionally before. He develops a reputation for this, but he didn't have that reputation. But he didn't have it at the time.

Speaker: He was chosen because he was part of the Oxford milieu. Yeah. And so he kind of got in without really... The kind of more rigor and hair that we actually put into biographies today didn't exist really at the time, but it feels particularly egregious, I think, for Carpenter to be sort of hailed as this, this is a really great work, and it really, really isn't, you know, just from a biographical, historical point of view.

Speaker: And I do to take the point that he and then others have made about his first draft being very different than the published edition. And that sort of reading between the lines, the family had a lot to say about cutting various things that or reshaping them, which is always a challenge of trying to write a biography like between truth and varied perception and all of that.

Speaker: But my sympathy evaporates when we get to, and this is the version of Edith that was acceptable to the family on the final revision of what he had written. Yeah, it's weird that he, in trying to kind of make Tolkien's life into a narrative, really, he he chooses to cast Edith kind of more or less in the in a more antagonistic role. She kind of becomes the sort of the default villain of Tolkien's life when that's not how life works. That's not.

Speaker: He often contradicts himself on the same page about her. Yeah, and so it makes things very muddled and very, again, very antagonistic and very, I don't know, hostile in a lot of ways, I think, to Edith's position in Tolkien's life and kind of her our own character to a degree, too.

Speaker: Yeah, and we cannot discount how much this affects scholarship. Yeah, exactly what I was going to say. Yep. Everyone is looking at women, Tolkien's female characters, at women in Tolkien, at the women who surround Tolkien. Everyone is looking at that through the lens of how Humphrey Carpenter wrote about his marriage. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: Humphrey Carpenter's biography is not the first biography, but it is the only authorized biography, which gives it like weight that nothing else has.

Speaker: Yeah. And quite apart from who Edith was or was not as an actual person, any given day of her life, The treatment in Carpenter's project here has that continued impact on scholarship.

Speaker: And I don't feel that it is earned. Like, I don't feel that the way that he portrays Edith is consistent enough with the scant records that actually exist to say this is how women in general should be treated.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, let's kind of get into some of the the specifics, I guess. i I do think that like it being the the authorized biography and the role of the estate in shaping the narrative, i think that, that's like you said, that that's what lends the weight to further work down the line. and everybody And a lot of people seem to try to like defer kind of back to Carpenter's in a way, with some very notable exceptions, like Duplessis, which, you know, this was the point of her article, was to kind of reposition us in in looking a little bit more squarely at where we have to really understand that, like, Carpenter makes no attempt to be unbiased or impartial.

Speaker: He writes from a very insider sort of, insider Oxford point of view, And he sort of is he assumes a position of Tolkien being kind of like a natural sort of genius and a natural sort of scholarly elevated position and decides to make that kind of the heart of the conflict between Tolkien and Tolkien.

Speaker: and Edith in that here is this Oxford Don and his kind of untutored, uncultured wife, and who is a shrew who kind of interferes with his ability to an extent, not like, you know, it's not like she's like actively undermining his profession or his professional work, but that's kind of like the heart of the conflict that he chooses to focus on and that to me is sort of like that's definitely coming from a guy who who was deep in it probably

Speaker: There's a point where he talks about Tolkien being drawn away from his work and the the implication of this great work by Edith ringing the dinner bell and as though someone cooking your meals for you so that you can continue your intellectual work and not have to do that work of cooking and housekeeping and feeding your damn self.

Speaker: is inconvenient. Or raising their children. Yeah, and I guess it's just like, that's something that just really stood out to me in revisiting this work. It's just like this this weird binary dichotomy kind of positions like imagination and scholarship and kind of like high elevated, high minded sort of pursuits that that Tolkien largely spent in the company of men versus the sort of insular sort of closed off inconvenient domestic life which he does kind sort of like say like there were like you know there's moments of happiness and there's moments where Tolkien is clearly kind of enjoying things and

Speaker: But it always seems to come off with a little bit of a, i don't know, a weird sort of like sneer or sort of a a sort of a condescension, I think, on Carpenter's part when describing... to leave so many things out or extrapolate so deeply From things that as you step back and go, wait, I'm not sure you can draw that conclusion that conclusion from that point. so some of the assertions ah about Tolkien and frustrations with domesticity and being taken away from his work come from like a letter to Christopher where Tolkien sort of categorizing different things that that happen. And in one of the days he talks about losing the entire day to various things that are happening around the house.

Speaker: and expresses some mild consternation with that. The thing that's happening around the house that Tolkien has to deal with and is taken away from what he wants to be doing is dealing with a plumbing clog.

Speaker: And I don't know about anybody else, but anytime that I have ever had to deal with a clog in the toilet pipes and like be grabbing my plunger or snaking a drain for a clump of really disgusting hair down the shower, I am not sitting there going, ah I am reaching my highest purpose today and I feel so delighted that I didn't get to any research.

Speaker: That doesn't mean that I hate my house and everyone in it. It means that I'm annoyed at the drain clog. Yeah. Right. I would like to point out that a lot of the source that Carpenter primarily used that proves all of the like marital discord that's happening between ah Jean Ronald and Edith is a coded diary that has never been published.

Speaker: So there is absolutely no way to fact check any of this, really. I'm not saying that Carpenter lied about it, but given the fact that Carpenter has on record said that when he was writing this biography, he was trying to find like a narrative thread, and then he chose that narrative thread to be Edith is holding back dirt.

Speaker: I don't know with what amount of like seriousness I can take his analysis of what was in this journal. Also, not for nothing, the journal or the journals over time that are written in various codes are not the same code over time. Where they are the same code, there are, like Carpenter owns, there are examples where things that were a character that that meant one thing at the beginning of the creation of a code meant a different character a year later, which means that Tolkien himself sometimes, according to Carpenter, I don't recall correctly,

Speaker: had trouble deciphering what he had written. And now you're trying to do that posthumously over a fairly small span of time comparatively. And out of that conclusion, coming to the idea that Edith was holding Tolkien back and and was just not a very good or interesting person.

Speaker: Feels like a stretch. Yeah. Well, we kind of want to get into some of the specific points and kind of do like a little bit of, like I guess, charting a bit of the relationship as portrayed in in Carpenter, like from the beginning.

Speaker: Yeah, sure. So kind of like right from the beginning, Carpenter decides to emphasize different, I guess, incompatibilities that he would seem as more incompatibilities.

Speaker: And kind of sets up their marriage to sort of be like an unlikely source of happiness and a kind of like, and I guess, a successful marriage.

Speaker: He kind of casts like the tiniest like little shade, I guess, on what is ostensibly a very successful marriage in over, you know, 50 years of together.

Speaker: But he begins by emphasizing that there's an age gap. He was younger, three years younger than she was. And this line in particular always kind of makes me mad, but from Carpenter, quote, but he was old for his age and she looked young for hers and she was neat and small and exceptionally pretty.

Speaker: end quote. We can basically just roll credits. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's sort of like, okay, great. Thanks, I guess, for letting us know that. Yeah. Smile more, Edith. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: And he also sort of positions them, again, like as intellectually incompatible or that Jert is sort of on ah a different level than Edith is in terms of education and also intellectual pursuits and interests.

Speaker: Also, like, Carpenter is really down on people being middle class. Yeah. He mentions middle being middle class as a pejorative multiple times in this biography.

Speaker: It's such a strange one to me. Yeah. I don't know if maybe you might have a little bit more context for this, Bryce, but being an Oxford academic, that's not an upper middle class position. Not really.

Speaker: I mean, it's respectable in a way that like not having a title or something like that is respectable. This is respectable in a different way. And so.

Speaker: But in terms of money, in terms of income. Yeah, you're looking at like middle class to upper middle class, especially in this era. I think it's really interesting, too, because Carpenter makes sure to point out that Edith and Tolkien were conservatives. But like at that time, that political party, this is like after the Disraeli time and everything. And so like that political party has just had its most impactful time of reform and done the most to impact.

Speaker: positively the lives of lower income folks and working class folks and like sort of more mingle the upper classes and the middle classes. And so treating being middle class as is such ah ah a silly, obnoxious thing like Carpenter does strikes me as a little bit odd based on what exists in the record. Okay, so I wasn't even going to go into this yet, but so there's something that I found really interesting that is only kind of touched on in the Carpenter work, which is that right before

Speaker: tolkien edith like get back together because they're separated sort of by each of their various folks who are supposed to be looking out for their well-being their guardians or legal legal guardians basically yeah she becomes engaged to another man tolkien's a homewrecker yeah that together because like he like he shows up at the train station she meets him and they walk three and a half miles and then hang out under a viaduct all day in the middle of January

Speaker: And decide that they're going to get back together and they're going to keep their relationship a secret. And definitely, definitely nothing that was at all improprietious happened in that amount of time. And that definitely had nothing to do with them getting back together. Like Carpenter presents their relationship is like so passionless.

Speaker: And charming and pragmatic, which think does reflect the social mores, like not to talk about even kissing or anything like this. Right. Whereas like in reality, there are letters from Tolkien to Edith where he's like, if I do all of my homework, I get kisses. Right. For every hour I do my work and I do good job at school, I get kisses. Yeah. And I'm going to make him pay that bill. Like he literally, like actually pretty charmingly constructs it as a bill that is due. And this is like a thing that they work out between them. And I find that charming.

Speaker: So, but right before they get back together, Tolkien writes this play. The title of it is The Bloodhound, The Chef, and The Suffragette. In which it's very clear that he's he's like making comparisons to...

Speaker: Edith, like the suffragette, is this heiress and all these hijinks ensue and everything. And she's older than the protagonist, but they get together and So real subtle, super subtle.

Speaker: But I think it's really interesting to note that like he's talking about Edith as a suffragette. So she was a member of the Primrose League, which was a conservative body that really like again, it was like post Israeli sort of conservative party politics.

Speaker: But it's the first organization in which women were given similar roles to what men had. Eventually, it it spun out to have like ah a women's side and a men's side. And Edith had joined that.

Speaker: But this was something like they embraced ah suffrage for women and everything like that. Like some of the things that that I don't know that I would that I would be surprised by in capital C conservatism.

Speaker: And the way that Carpenter talks about it are things that Tolkien is very clearly talking about as being true of Edith, the like believing in women's suffrage and that being an important part of her life and that she's part of societies and she has all of these friends and she has a very...

Speaker: robust social life and everything like that. And that's happening at the same time that Carpenter is saying things like, oh, she had no friends. She had nothing to do. She was so bored and everything. And it just doesn't seem to align with the actual records of what she was doing at the time.

Speaker: m But then as Carpenter talks about all of these things being like middle class and sort of like lowbrow and everything, It's striking to me that like he treats Edith as so unintellectual and so uninformed in ways that sort of like just confound me again, because in Gallant Edith Bratt, the authors there, Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill Keyes,

Speaker: find evidence of how when Edith was at school, there's published evidence that she it was sort of like awarded or recognized not only for her musical ability, which Carpenter talks about,

Speaker: But this is in the Evansham Standard and West Midland Observer, Saturday, February 4th, 1905. Honors, Edith Bratt, Birmingham, Distinction in Scripture and English Literature. Like, published evidence that that she had this intellectual prowess at the school. And he talks about the school as being only good for music, but but terrible at everything else kind of thing.

Speaker: But that school had, like, they taught Latin. We don't know if Edith took Latin classes from the records that exist, but we know that it was a more rigorous education than what Carpenter represents.

Speaker: That's really interesting. Carpenter's attitude towards Edith actually... really specifically blends over into how he's depicting Tolkien. This is an actual quote from the but the biography. Tolkien did not encourage Edith to pursue any intellectual activity, partly because he did not consider it to be a necessary part of her role as wife and mother, which that is 100% Carpenter just editorializing. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: Because every single time you actually see Tolkien talking about Edith, he's always talking about, like, there's the quote about how, like, gallant and gay-spirited she was. Like, when he's talking to her children, like, later after she's passed, and he's talking about what strength she had and all of this, Tolkien never is just like,

Speaker: yeah well she was my bang maid right yeah like it's so dismissive and like to so to treat it as charming that for instance tolkien never really learned how to type with more than two fingers and so he would sort of like two finger his typing and and the typewritten manuscripts for various things and and sort of treat that as charming and quirky, but noble.

Speaker: And then be so dismissive of Edith's contributions, where Carpenter says, like, Edith was glad to help him, and she made a fair copy of The Fall of Gondolin, writing it out in a large exercise book.

Speaker: Like, to treat their two skill sets as so strikingly different in the regard of just, like, copying out a second draft of something feels strange to me.

Speaker: m I feel like Carpenter's misogyny also, like you said, Alicia, it really sort of puts Tolkien as being told through the mouth of Carpenter into kind of a bad light as well.

Speaker: And it sets him up a bit like though he was sort of like the quote, you know, self-chosen sentimental lover, he actually completely hid this sort of side from from his male friends and also kind of didn't exactly share a lot of what he shared with like the TCBS with Edith and this sort of siloing of his two different you know spheres of his life I feel like that probably was there to a degree But I feel like Carpenter sort of telling us about Tolkien's attitude towards Edith without a whole lot of evidence, especially they began courting and as their relationship began really early on, i feel like it really it does a disservice to everybody and it really does a disservice to Tolkien.

Speaker: And that echoes down through the ages, right, where the feminists start looking at this as evidence of Tolkien's own misogyny and his own inability to kind of reconcile the homosocial world of Oxford with the more egalitarian, I guess, more femme or domestic sphere.

Speaker: And that kernel, like, there is a piece in... Gale and Edith Bratt, which I think the challenge for that particular work is that they do a really good job of looking at some general context or potentially applicable contexts from those contemporaneous decades of Edith's life, of Tolkien's life, to give us an idea of general social ideas or things that were existing within the culture at the time.

Speaker: hmm. But then is as you go to try to connect that to a specific person, there's not a lot to tie information to about if that experience was true or resonant for Edith. And I think that's the place where it's really challenging in that particular work to say, like, okay, definitively, this is how she would have thought or felt or anything like that. And and we run into that as we look back in history kind of across the board.

Speaker: But they do point out something in that particular work that sort of was a light bulb moment for me. And I went, ah that seems like a much stronger motivation for not telling your friends about your fiance or your lover or sweetheart or what have you.

Speaker: And that is that most of the members of the TCBS show. We're still in contact with members of one of Tolkien's family. And so if Tolkien had given Edith's name after they had been forbidden to see each other and had disclosed that they were back in contact, that information could have had them forcibly separated again.

Speaker: Wow, that's such a great point. yeah That seems like a much stronger motivation to me for just kind of keeping things chill and quiet and not sharing a name, even when you've talked about being engaged, than, he didn't want to to sully the the noble manly spheres of Oxford and Cambridge with the little ladies.

Speaker: Yeah. Oh, that's such a great point because it makes Tolkien seem much weirder and much more, much weirder than he actually maybe was. There's also a lot in Carpenter, like mu like two times at least where Carpenter is like, ah but despite loving the the company of men and really adoring the company of men, he had no idea what homosexuality was. He had no idea what that word meant when he was 19.

Speaker: Possibly. good Because the word wasn't in that common of Parlayans when he was 19. But that's an awful lot of protesting against the idea. my dude who was also in this largely male only educational sphere.

Speaker: Right. I have a pet theory about why. Carpenter really harps on the separation between Edith and all of Tolkien's friends.

Speaker: Because like if you read ah Garth's first book about the war. john Garth, Tolkien the Great War. Yes. This same interlude where Tolkien is telling the CCBS that he's engaged comes up in there And it's characterized much differently because it's mostly about the friends are scared that if Tolkien gets married, that they're going to fall out of contact with each other. And then he goes on to say that at least one of them continues to be friends with the now Tolkien couple after they get married. So like that ends up not being something that happens.

Speaker: When Carpenter is writing this biography, it is at the end of Tolkien's life. Who is Tolkien the most close to at the end of his life? The Inklings.

Speaker: Notably, C.S. Lewis. Who is C.S. Lewis as a person? A raging misogynist. He's a weird dude. Edith didn't like him. ah He had no idea how to like be a human being around Most women did not like Lewis. And Lewis didn't like them.

Speaker: I think even Carpenter alludes to that. This is where we get into full red string tinfoil hat territory. Well, like, so also what did Carpenter write immediately after Tolkien, a biography? He wrote a biography about the Inklings. He is studying Lewis and studying Tolkien at the same time. And there is bleed over between the two. There is bleed over between like how Lewis sees women and how Carpenter assumes Tolkien sees women.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. And I completely understand why that would happen, because they do spend a lot of time together. It would make sense that they would have similar views on women. We know that is false. John Ratliff's chapter in Perilous and Fair goes in depth about how much Tolkien was not a fan of how Lewis saw women specifically in education.

Speaker: But like, if I were Edith, I wouldn't want to hang out with Lewis because he's he's a weird dude who doesn't like me and doesn't like women. Like, just leave me alone to do whatever the fuck it is I want to do. Right. Like, so I can understand why Carpenter's like, no, Edith never was friends with any of know John Ronald's friends.

Speaker: No, maybe it's just his one weird friend. Because she was friend with friends with his wife when he got married for that brief period of time. Yeah. Like, Edith and Louis' wife were friends.

Speaker: Edith and Louis were not. Right. I'm extrapolating a whole lot, but also, it makes sense to me. Yeah, I'm into it.

Speaker: I'll follow you. I'll follow you down that road. Oh, yeah. or i guess maybe maybe we can get a little bit more into some of this this relationship between tolen and lewis where george sayer kind of says about in recollecting the relationship between tolkien and lewis was, quote, had been very close, so close that Edith Tolkien had resented the time that her husband spent with him.

Speaker: And that's coming from George Sayre, but it is also sort of, I guess, not really corroborated, but it's set up in Carpenter as, and I'm kind of like, i love to I'd love to think about maybe she resented his time with him because she didn't like the dude.

Speaker: Yeah. like I would love to know more details of what's supporting this because yeah, it's very, very relatable, I think, to not necessarily be frustrated by who your partner's friends are and yet be frustrated if your partner is not showing up in some of the the ways that they've promised to, because they're out hanging out with their friends you and you can hold the value of wanting to protect the the beauty of that friendship at the same time that you would also like to not be the only one taking out the trash, you know? So like I can think of of a lot of reasons why might be,

Speaker: mightte talk about frustration with the time that their partner is spending with another person and not just have that be like, oh she's jealous or, oh she isn't privy to their great works. so So the little miss is just feeling put out everything like that.

Speaker: there can be a lot more nuance than what we get in this biography. And I wish that we had a little bit more of the ability to look at what these folks are drawing and Carpenter in particular is drawing his assertions from.

Speaker: Yeah, and how he interprets what Tolkien says himself in different letters, he kind of gives a really harsh spin sometimes to how Tolkien is talking about his marriage to a degree, and I feel like that's not only deeply unnecessary, but it really casts a real shadow on Tolkien's character and on Edith's character when it's sort of like these these two people were were humans, They clearly had a really deep affection and love for each other. But much like two married humans, they had ups and downs. They they had a real relationship, right? They had things that they needed to work through and to go through.

Speaker: And presenting it as this kind of like how Carpenter sort of characterizes it, that it's like how like this marriage was kind of not really like doomed or anything from the start, but kind of like set up to be incompatible and set up to be fraught between these two different people when ah so much more grace could be given to the two of them. So much more nuance could be given.

Speaker: in how he portrays their relationship as ostensibly an outsider who does not have access to the dynamics between them. Well, yeah, to identify this as a problem and then to simultaneously absolve Tolkien and lay it at Edith's feet. So here's a quote from Carpenter where he says, Edith began to feel that she was being ignored by Ronald.

Speaker: In terms of actual hours, he was certainly in the house a great deal. Much of his teaching was done there and he was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week. But it was a really, ah really a matter of his affections.

Speaker: He was loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health as she was about his and solicitous about domestic matters. But she could see that one side of him only came alive when he was in the ac company of men of his own kind. And then this goes into like saying that that she was but she resented his devotion to Jack Lewis and everything.

Speaker: Like, this casts Edith as being unreasonable in any frustrations that she has. So it it supposes frustrations that aren't ever substantiated and then blames Edith for having them and exonerates Tolkien. Oh, he wasn't out more than one or two nights a week and everything.

Speaker: Which strikes me as strange in one of Carpenter's contradictions, because later on in Days of Retirement, he talks about how the Tolkiens don't get as many visitors and they don't have many things that they that they get to to do and they don't go out very often.

Speaker: Really just the occasional visitors and then a weekly sort of dinner date with with other folks at the college and where they go around to the different hotels and everything. i'm like So on one hand, Tolkien's only out one or two nights a week.

Speaker: And you're saying that that Edith shouldn't have had any concerns in that. But later on, you're saying that if they go out only one or two times a week, that is a diminishment from what their lives had been. And they have no friends. And Edith in particular has no friends.

Speaker: Yeah. Which is it? Weird. Which is it? The math is not mathing. Yeah. One of the things that like Carpenter never actually goes into, and I don't actually think anyone who's covered this has gone into it, it makes sense to me, given specifically how their relationship started, that Edith would greatly resent being left alone for Jert to go out and like have fun times with the Inklings. like They started dating,

Speaker: They were forcibly separated. He came back into her life. He was gone mostly in their early marriage, like training to go to World War one And then he was deployed and went to World War I. They were essentially long distance for a good long while. And as someone who dated someone long distance for a good long while, when you finally like get together, you don't want them to leave again.

Speaker: m Like Tim and I dated long distance before we moved in together for like six or seven years. Wow. Yeah. And that's a long time to like love somebody and live apart from them. And when we moved in together, I was like, cool, I never want to be apart from you ever again. And like, obviously you get through that part of it at some point. But like, yeah, like there's like a debt you're owed of interaction when you don't get to be near someone for that amount of time and you desperately want to be near them. So like I could understand even like decades later.

Speaker: If she feels like he's continuously blowing her off to go like hang out with his weird, creepy friend Jack. Yeah, I can understand why would feel some kind of way about that.

Speaker: Or if your partner is giving you the time that is chores around the house and garden, but quality time is being withheld from partnership and and given to people outside of it instead of balanced where everybody gets a little bit of you.

Speaker: Then that can also, I think, rightly breed resentment. It's something that, you know, I think today we'd say, well, let's work on that in couples counseling, not, oh Edith is just unreasonable for, like, wanting to spend time with her husband. Yeah.

Speaker: Right. They both have a lot of baggage from their childhood coming into this, right? Oh, yeah. Carpenter kind of mentions like that their peritraumatic childhoods is kind of directly responsible for you know the sometimes, so I guess, the tumultuous times.

Speaker: And this is something that it's like, oh, yeah, this this could have been unpacked somewhat in therapy, right? Yeah. Instead of these two people kind of wanting to, who kind of clung to each other a little bit and who probably didn't do a whole lot of unpacking of their various traumas of their childhoods, but did it kind of by as best as they could.

Speaker: And again, Carpenter sort of, he gives a lot more sympathy, I think, to Tolkien than he does to Edith in terms of kind of allowing him to have that baggage around his mother, particularly around his mother's religion as a Catholic.

Speaker: And he gives a lot of grace to Tolkien's feelings about Edith converting to Catholicism than he actually does for Edith feeling rather pressured and unhappy as time went on.

Speaker: Also, not for nothing in the conversion to Catholicism, she had to lose her entire friend group and social circle. So every time that there's a statement from Carpenter that either doesn't have many friends, it's like, well, she did. And then something happened where she's following Tolkien.

Speaker: And she loses that friend group. She birthed to Catholicism. she They moved to Leeds and then moved back to Oxford. And and then ah toward the end of their lives, where Carpenter talks about Tolkien making this great sacrifice to go live in Bournemouth,

Speaker: with her for a couple of years where she has a big circle of friends and everything. He's like, that's the first time in her life that she had a big circle of friends. Like, okay, cool.

Speaker: A few pages ago, you just referenced like Tolkien traveling on a trip to Italy with Priscilla, their daughter, and Edith kind of following the oversea route instead with, because she was going on a cruise with three of her besties.

Speaker: But she had no friends and Tolkien was definitely the one who who who had friends and and knew how to socialize with people. But no, like Edith frequently had to set aside her social circle every time something changed in their lives. And Carpenter gives no credit for that.

Speaker: He also does not. And this is maybe just a piece that gets lost between the time that this biography is published and the time that I'm reading it now in 2026. But he sort of lightly sketches the fact that Edith's parentage was illegitimate, that she didn't know who her father was, though her family knew her her who her father was at some point.

Speaker: And the social implications of that. But that is something that as we talk about, you know, the the hardships of Tolkien's childhood and his brother's childhood, like they end up in that same sort of boarding house space because each of them are separated from the families that were their families of birth and don't have as many options to just go, you know, stay with mom and dad kind of thing.

Speaker: And the social pressures around, not just like the fact that Edith was illegitimate, but like her mother had had an affair with her father. Her mother was a governess in the employ of her father.

Speaker: And... She was not raised with her mother for the first few years and then was raised calling her mother her aunt. And the cousin who she lived with a lot, Jenny Grove, was a servant in that in her mother's household as she's being raised as her mother's niece. And some of the complexities there, we don't know all the nuances of for sure.

Speaker: um we can sort of extrapolate a little bit and Gallant Edith Bratt tries to do that in a way that I think it's hard to effectively connect back to Edith for certain. But Carpenter just sketches over all of those hardships that Edith endures and minimizes them and diminishes them and diminishes her as he treats her as like just sort of this frivolous little lady who likes to play piano and doesn't like her husband's friends.

Speaker: Yeah, and who actively makes, kind of distresses Tolkien by not wanting to go to mass and not wanting to go to confession because she's ill.

Speaker: And not wanting to return all of the calls from the ladies who are the Don's wives. Oxford right. Oxford, because... she just, and Carpenter states this as that she sort of like doesn't know what to do in that sort of society. And then in the next line makes a brief reference to her headaches. And it's like, hey, do you think any of that might be connected?

Speaker: do you think the chronic illness might have some impact on how willing you are to navigate very complex and poised,

Speaker: society where there's room for a lot more faux pas than acceptance because I don't want to go and do like hobnobbing and schmoozing when I have a migraine yeah and I don't want to go confess my sins to a priest on an empty stomach like at least let me have some fucking breakfast so and that was kind of a reason that she was like don't I don't only like going to mass je it doesn't really agree with me I don't know if there were options for like midnight mass and Oxford at the time. Yeah.

Speaker: But in any case, I would love to get a little bit more into their, i guess what we might describe it as like family planning and also either health in particular, but also jert to a degree and sort of how those things sort of interplay with each other. how different Carpenter treats them both. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, let's let's get into it. Like Carpenter describes Edith really sympathetically in taking care of their first son, John.

Speaker: It was a difficult birth and he describes her as being, quote, wearied and often in pain. I'm going to push back. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I don't think that he's being sympathetic in the least in this. But go go on. That's what I mean, because it seems to sort of set up this like in the same sentence, Carpenter mentions that she, quote, wrote bitterly to Ronald, I'll never go around with you again.

Speaker: which this sort of sets up this context as like he's kind of throwing this sort of shade and this negative attitude towards being sexually intimate with each other because she doesn't want to get pregnant again.

Speaker: Carpenter frames that, I think, in a really unsympathetic way, even at the same time that he's being like, yo, yeah, it was a difficult birth and Edith was weary. But she was also being kind of a jerk to jerk and being like, I'll never go around with you again because she doesn't want to get pregnant again. oh that silly little lady. Right. well So this is all happening in the context of like all of the time Tolkien, he's come down ill during his time in the First World War.

Speaker: And so he is sent back to England to recover and the passivity with which Carpenter makes this statement. On 16th November 1917, son was born to Ronald and Edith Tolkien in a Cheltenham nursing home.

Speaker: It was a difficult labor and Edith's life was in danger. A son was born to them. I don't think that that just happened. And like, there's no story came. Yeah. The story came. And like, there was no way that there was any way to know that in the preceding nine months, I'm,

Speaker: of any time that they'd spent together, that a son or a child at all might bless them with its presence. The stork, just mysterious. Okay. And he goes on to say, but although Ronald had been discharged from hospital, he was required in camp, and much to his sorrow, he could not get leave to come south until almost a week after the birth, by which time Edith had begun to recover.

Speaker: Edith goes through a pregnancy, in the middle of a war with her husband in like army hospitals and trying to recuperate from some pretty serious illnesses that derived from his time having had to engage in trench warfare.

Speaker: And she isn't allowed to stay with him. He, as he recuperates, he has to go back two various levels of engagement with the army where he can't be with her and they can't live together and he may go back to the front and like he may face the same outcome as as actually what ends up happening to like most the members of his unit um he continues getting sick and never actually returns

Speaker: But then she goes through this birth, which is dangerous, leaves her with lifelong increased complications and health challenges on top of the health challenges that she was already experiencing prior to that.

Speaker: And he's not even there. Like, he's not that far away, but he's not even there and he's not allowed to come be by her side. But also, he just doesn't make it happen, even though maybe that's not possible.

Speaker: She goes through all of that on her own. And for a week with him not far away and having recuperated enough that he's he's not in a hospital bed anymore.

Speaker: She's still unable to see him and he does not see their son for a week after his son has been born. Yeah. And then she has to keep deciding how and when she is going to follow him or try to set up a household that's stable for an infant and herself and her cousin.

Speaker: Or whether they keep going around and following him. So that quote from her to John Ronald is, I'll never go around with you again. Yeah.

Speaker: In terms of like a few weeks postpartum, she's not interested. and also like she's also saying she's not going to continue uprooting the life and her life and stability and everything in order to just keep following him, that there has to be greater balance is kind of how i read that.

Speaker: And then I think it's really interesting because ah Carpenter has this very passive way of talking about her suffering and her illness and and her chronic conditions and everything.

Speaker: Whereas the way that he writes Tolkien's illness is... While he was lying in hospital in Hull, Tolkien composed another major story for the Book of Lost Tales. Or he talks about Tolkien is ill in hospital, that Edith and her cousin Jenny packed their belongings and followed him north to Yorkshire, moving into furnished lodgings from Camp of Cornsea. And then he got became sick once more and was put in a Harrogate sanatorium. And Carpenter's like, he was not malingering. There's no doubt that he had real symptoms of illness.

Speaker: Unlike his stupid wife is implied. Yeah. He's composing that the, so you know, what would become the Silmarillion. And he's doing great and and important work while he has a chronic condition. He is writing his works.

Speaker: His natural works. And she is only growing this baby. yeah And griping about growing this baby. And so I really actually enjoy this one thing that Carpenter point points out right in the same paragraph where he talks about where she says, I'll never go around with you again.

Speaker: He says, meanwhile, on his return to the Humber garrison, Ronald was taken ill yet again and was sent back to the officer's hospital in Hull. And then, quote, I should think you ought never to feel tired again, Edith wrote, for the amount of bed you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.

Speaker: Boom. And in the next sentence, in hospital, beside working on his mythology in the Elvish languages, he was teaching himself a little Russian and improving his Spanish and Italian. and so just... I wasn't Edith doing this when raising her and their toddler.

Speaker: And it really strikes me that Carpenter... is willing to push back against assumptions that for Tolkien being ill was a time for recuperation and that he wasn't doing fast enough, right? That he's doing his great works. he's He's improving his language. He's training in things. He's, you know, he's better and then he's ill again and then he's better. But then but he's not malingering.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. But for Edith, a son is born and her life is in danger. And there's no similar just sort of holding space for her recovery at any point in time.

Speaker: I just imagine being in that situation where You're newly married. You're giving birth. Your husband is enlisted in one of the deadliest wars.

Speaker: He's actively sick right now. So like, is he going to die in the hospital? Is he going to get sent back to France and die there? You don't fucking know. You've had this kid. You've almost died. And you're trying to recuperate from that. Like, surely all she's thinking about is what happens if I die and my son becomes essentially an orphan? Because like, even if Tolkien survives what he's in the hospital for, there's still a possibility he gets sent back. And even if he doesn't die when he's over there, what the fuck's happening to their kid? Yeah.

Speaker: yeah And of course, as she's thinking through all of that, there's definitely no traumatic baggage hanging over her head about the fact that Her husband is an orphan and that she essentially is as well. There's definitely no generational trauma there.

Speaker: no none at all. None at all. ah Reading sort of between a lot of these lines just gives me so much sympathy. and And again, we've talked a bit about this, the bad moms of Tolkien in the legendarium.

Speaker: And that probably is coloring a a lot of how I'm reading Edith, because i feel like Carpenter is sort of making her out to be a bad mom in the same way that a lot of fans sort of interpret different characters in the legendarium as, as bad moms. When i feel like, like, no, it's a, I think that there's, there's some shadier stuff happening here.

Speaker: Well, and I think Edith's health is something that's kind of blithely alluded to by Carpenter throughout her entire life in this biography before they get married we we already talked about that she found that that her health sometimes precluded her going mass and taking confession and everything in the way that ronald would have wanted that she has this sort of like long-term experience of long-term effects from being pregnant and then having the the really difficult and dangerous birth and trying to recuperate from that. And that is with her first child. She goes on to have three more. shez yeah And

Speaker: then there's also like the talk we mentioned that she had headaches that were sometimes really challenging in terms of like what her experience was it at Oxford and trying to like fit into society there.

Speaker: he brings up headaches in like the context of her not having more children too. um Very much in the whole, you know, honey, I have a headache, not tonight kind of way, which Yeah.

Speaker: He says she also suffered from severe headaches, which could prostrate her for a day or more. Before I get to my next sort of things about health. Hi, that sounds like migraines. It's 100 percent migraines. 100 percent.

Speaker: This is the thing I'm the most pissed off with Humphrey Carpenter about. Yeah. bro have you never had a migraine in your life my dude and like this woman is going through this before biologics before excedrin before like what options are there to treat migraines in the 1930s not many oh my god okay so migraine deep dive with alicia

Speaker: I have chronic migraines and have my entire life. I have been on basically every medicine that they accidentally found out that could help migraines from the time I was 15. I've been on antidepressants for it. I've been on blood pressure medicine for it. Like I've had Botox for it. I'm currently on one of the antibody based medicines, which has been a godsend. My God, if you have migraines try to get on one of those it's amazing i've gone from having 20 to ish migraine days a month to maybe one

Speaker: Life changing. Anyway, and yeah she's living in a time before we even like found out that those medicines had a side effect of maybe helping with migraines. Like I just if you've never had a migraine, it can be completely debilitating.

Speaker: It feels like an ice pick is being stabbed into the back of your eyeball. Like sounds hurt, light hurts. I can only imagine trying to like run a household with like four screaming children when you have a migraine.

Speaker: And just the the flippant way in which Carpenter talks about like, if you have a migraine that's enough to debilitate you for an entire day, like that's not just a hee hee ha ha headache. Fuck you.

Speaker: And like, how dare a woman suffering through migraines want people to eat lunch at the time that lunch is ready and she told them to eat. Right.

Speaker: Because you were just before I got on the medicine that I'm on now and i I had been on Botox, I had become immune to the Botox. And like we were just trying to keep me in a holding pattern before the antibody based medicines came on to the market.

Speaker: I was doing everything in my power to just get any sort of relief at all. Like it is, it was a struggle to do anything other than lay in bed and wish that I was dead.

Speaker: Like, I just, I cannot fucking imagine what it must've been like. I have also had a history of migraines nowhere near as bad as yours, Alicia, but there's a pretty significant link between endometriosis and migraines as well. with And they're both neuroinflammatory mechanisms and everything.

Speaker: And so, like i read this and I immediately have this sympathy of knowing what that experience of a debilitating headache like that is like. Right.

Speaker: And I know that that is my experience as an endometriosis girly for whom pain not measured on the same scale of people who don't experience this kind of stuff.

Speaker: Right. like Yeah. on Pain pieces. Yeah. where There are a lot of examples, including myself, of like people with endometriosis going through surgery and being like, oh, oh, gosh, I thought it was going to be bad. No, this is like this is like a normal Tuesday. Like i went through endometriosis surgery and I did the recovery with Tylenol and aspirin. Like, yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, I walked on a broken ankle for three days because I didn't realize it was broken because I was like, surely if I had broken a bone, it would hurt worse than this. This is nothing because my pain sensation has been so out of whack because of the the chronic migraines. It's wild.

Speaker: Yep. So I just want to put that in the context of like, Edith is a chronic headache sufferer. we can't officially say migraines, but like we all recognize this phenomenon.

Speaker: She's a chronic headache sufferer. She went through like dangerous pregnancies and childbirths and everything like that. Her pain tolerance,

Speaker: Probably a lot higher than most of the people around her. And yet Carpenter treats it as, if not a failing and unfortunate sort of annoyance that her family has to deal with.

Speaker: Mm hmm.

Speaker: And that just like that grinds my gears in a way that I just I can't put enough words to of how awful that is.

Speaker: But they do comfort myself a tiny bit because we know that Tolkien considered Edith to be his Luthien and he baron and everything like that. And like as you look at like some of the stories of Luthien and what Luthien perseveres through what what it's really a lot of women in the legendarium persevere through like we do get this glimpse that like oh no Tolkien had some awareness that women are badass and people who have suffered through like unyielding amounts of pain are really resilient Carpenter don't have the same feelings about but hey

Speaker: And that's not where it all like leaves off for her either. Because then like later on in life, she is diagnosed with like rheumatism and arthritis. And that actually prompts the Tolkens to move to Sorry, let me back up.

Speaker: In Carpenter's assessment, that is what prompts the Tolkens to move. to a house where Edith doesn't have to do as many stares and doesn't have to go through as many challenges with the house.

Speaker: Right. He largely leaves out that Tolkien, like he eventually covers it. But then again, this very like passive minimized way of like, Edith's health is the problem.

Speaker: Tolkien falling down the stairs and breaking his leg had nothing to do with them moving to a house where they could be on one story. Jesus. It sort of made Tolkien willing to do it, but it really, like, it was Edith's health problems that were that were the issue.

Speaker: And then he there's a lot of talk in them moving that Edith was less able to do some of that the housework and everything. And just this bit.

Speaker: The domestic arrangements at Sandfield Road were by no means ideal, and the situation deteriorated over the years that as Edith's health became worse. Despite her increasing lameness from it arthritis, she managed to do all the cooking, most of the housework and some of the gardening. But as the 1960s advanced and she came closer to her 80th birthday, it was clear that she could not manage for much longer.

Speaker: And this is like what precipitates their move to Bournemouth. That paragraph, I have had almost every line in every paragraph on that page, just with increasing outrage, because this woman who is approaching her eighty s is still doing all of this work. And like she continues in Bournemouth, she continues doing this and everything.

Speaker: Her fragile lady body just can't keep up with what she's supposed to be doing as a woman. Fuck this man. Right? Fuck this man. And like, I think as someone who is like raised and socialized as a woman reading this, I read it and go,

Speaker: Damn, that is an impressive amount of still doing things that this woman is doing as she approaches her 80th birthday. Right. Wow, she should not have to. But the tone that it's written in is not complimentary enough.

Speaker: It's just, I feel like he kind of gets nastier and nastier in some ways as as time goes on. And in the narrative, as Edith and Tolkien are getting older, kind of culminating, one one line that really stuck out to me was after the death of Edith, which was pretty sudden and pretty shocking to Tolkien.

Speaker: Basically, Carpenter quotes of Tolkien. He had suffered much distress at the loss of Edith, and he was essentially a lonely man now. Yet he was free, as he had not been within memory, and he could live his life as he pleased.

Speaker: Just as Bournemouth had in some ways been a reward for Edith for all that she had faced in the early days of their marriage, so his almost bachelor existence in Merton Street seemed to be a reward for his patience at Bournemouth.

Speaker: End quote. And cue me throwing the book across the room. What the fuck is wrong with you, Humphrey? It's giving incel. It really is.

Speaker: the fuck is wrong with you Humphrey? like How did you manage to, like, red pill yourself this this long before red pilling was a thing? What the fuck? His wife died really horribly, like, and suddenly, but he was now free.

Speaker: And everything that he had suffered for her could finally be rewarded. I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. Because that's not how you write.

Speaker: ah He was incredibly bereaved, but found solace in the opportunities available to him and lived his his final years. Yeah, you can't write nuance and complicated feelings that humans have because we're complicated beings.

Speaker: No, you have to have Tolkes being rewarded for his patience, for his wife's weakness. Like, what? Just... For the listener, since this is an audio medium and not a visual one, I do want you to know that in the reading of that last quote, all of us have thrown our hands up in the air multiple times and there have been many like flames, flames on the side of my face gestures. I feel that you may also be making those gestures yourself as you listen, but it is outrageous that that is like essentially how the biography ends.

Speaker: Yeah. That's sort of like the place where he arrives at Edith's death. That's maybe not quite the the total like conclusion like for her arc, but it's pretty close.

Speaker: Infuriating. Infuriating. And I feel like even us learning about Tolkien calling her my Luthien, and she knew she was my Luthien, and kind of some of the the really beautiful sentiments that he has...

Speaker: i I feel like this line kind of casts a real shadow on that that is really unnecessary. And also really like... It really truly is.

Speaker: Like from this biography, i don't feel that you get the sense of Tolkien saying like that she's Luthan and he's barren. Like it presents an unsupported fact with nothing that really makes you...

Speaker: understand that feeling. it it doesn't, it it seems like fact's not an evidence, it's just stated to you. And that is something that I think that there should be more consternation about.

Speaker: I am pretty sure that this never would have gotten published if Tolkien was still alive. Because I feel like Tolkien would have had so many problems with how his relationship with Edith was portrayed. And like, I mean, Tolkien also famously didn't want to have any sort of scholarly or biographical work done about him at all because he thought it was crazy. But i one of the things that keeps coming back to me as we're discussing all of this is there is, and believe it's a quote from the Clive Kilby book where Kilby was talking about

Speaker: how Auden came over to their house and said something negative about how their living room was decorated. And Tolkien got so fucking angry that oh Auden would have said anything negative about his wife at all.

Speaker: And like trying to square that fact with just the general tone of how Carpenter writes about Edith in this biography, it's impossible. Yeah, it doesn't square up at all.

Speaker: It really doesn't. Oh, there is one interesting piece of speculation, speculation based in social fact. in the Gallant Edith Bratt book that I think is really interesting in light of Edith's health issues throughout her life. so they talk in there about essentially that there's there's this practice of baby farming where whether children are like legitimate or not,

Speaker: Parents would sort of send them off to be cared for by other people and until that they sort of figured out if they were going to live or not and pick them back up when they were, you know, five, seven something.

Speaker: and that this was certainly more likely to happen for children who were illegitimate, like Edith. And they go back to some of the census records that show that in the 1891 census, Edith is too enlisted at a border in the house of George and Emma Clifford and Gloucester.

Speaker: They also note that no Clifford child of Edith's age is listed in the census. So it was likely that Edith was not breastfed, but was raised on dry nursing, meaning animal milk mixed with other nutrients.

Speaker: And on the although an increase in medical problems and infant mortality was identified as associated with dry nursing as early as 1846, an adequate infant formula was not developed until the early 20th century.

Speaker: They also talk about the overwhelming cost of food in the the general household budget then as compared to now and the phenomenon that often children, especially in that type of circumstance,

Speaker: were restricted, like their their food was restricted, their calories were restricted, and they they often had lingering health problems as a result if they did survive. Mm-hmm. And I think all of those potential impacts on Edith's early years are something that to me matters as a reader. That context matters to me in understanding what potentially Edith was dealing with, but what people of the time were dealing with.

Speaker: And for the treatment of her health problems to be like, oh, she just wasn't strong enough. Like, no, this was an incredibly resilient woman. ah Speaking of the idol speculation, where was the part that there was some speculation about possibly their premarital relationship, like how they might have been had a pregnancy scare or something and why they wanted to be separated There's definitely an assertion that there was like either a practical or moral reason for keeping them apart as teenagers.

Speaker: That Tolkien having seen Edith in her nightgown when they were teenagers was incredibly scandalous. Her Victorian slash Edwardian era nightgown that went from her chin to her toes. Yeah.

Speaker: Yes, that was somehow referred to as her little nightgown. Like, okay. i' my god Some of that speculation is based on the Cottage of Lost play poem, by the way. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: Oh, say more. Yeah. So there if you've never read the Cottage of Lost play, it's... Was it Duplices who said that point? Yeah, because it's hinted at in the gallant Edith Brat, if I recall correctly, and she's talking about it in there. Well, because there he also, like, illustrates this cottage, right? Is this the cottage with, like, the sunshine and the seashells and everything?

Speaker: Yeah, in the first stanza of the Cottage of Lost play, we knew that land once you and I, and once we wandered there, in the long days now long gone by, a dark child and a fair, was it on the paths of firelight, thought in winter cold and white, or in the blue-spun twilight hours of little early tucked-up beds and drowsy summer night, that you and I in sleep went down to meet each other there, your dark hair on your white nightgown, and mine was tangled there. there's a lot of speculation that this was written about their early relationship and that the reference to the nightgown is read as being

Speaker: sexual is there anything sexual about this poem absolutely not

Speaker: but there are people who think that this is about as spicy as Tolkien gets um I'm willing to read between the lines at least in the published work for hashtag release so much in her forearms one time so we know it wasn't a sleeveless nightgown It wasn't a sleeveless nightgown. I've launched ships off of last. I'm not going to judge anyone. Oh, yeah. yeah Hashtag release the smut. We know it's there.

Speaker: i do think, though, that it's really interesting to consider how he talks about elven marriage as being sort of like you decide to be together and then you go off into the forest and then you're together and you're married. And if you decide have a child, you will.

Speaker: isn I know that's ah that's a very I think analysis laws and customs of the Eldar. But I do think that the speculation that if they so much as held hands or kissed and that was reported, that their various guardians and every, you know, nosy bitty up and down the street would have had and apoplexy.

Speaker: So, yeah, I think that that that is an interesting component to think about when I'm sort of like empathizing. And then I think about these two things.

Speaker: One, Edith was illegitimate. So... She was obviously seen as a harlot. Yeah. Right? Her mother's a harlot and, like, she comes from bad stock. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: In the assertions of the time. Mm-hmm. And... Tolkien's mother and his father were kept apart for a time and her sister brought messages between the two of them. And so by continuing to write letters to each other and everything, they were being defiant of the norms and cultures of the time. And so, you know, Tolkien maybe also not from the proper, there's a risk there that the boy might be defiant in that way. And so like these two people falling in love in what's probably an actually pretty chaste and normative sort of way could certainly be viewed as society as awful.

Speaker: Yeah. And very dramatic in ways that then that comes back to those two young people as messages that are real, real toxic and play on real toxic social messages that they've internalized as they grow as well, because they're still quite young at this point.

Speaker: So when I think through my empathy on that, I have a lot of thoughts like, yeah, that that could have been complicated these two for sure. Mm hmm.

Speaker: It's one of the things I liked about the biopic that came out forever ago at this point. i liked how they dealt with the kind of beginnings of the John Ronald and Edith relationship because it was just like, you know, two kids going around throwing sugar packets at people and stuff. And it seemed like really innocent and cute. And honestly, that biopic was better than it had any right to be.

Speaker: yeah I think there's another element of the Luthien connection that I did not realize until this week, which is that the way that Carpenter presents everything is like, Edith is illegitimate. That's this great shame that she confesses to to Tolkien when she has when they go to be married and she has to put her father's name down on the register and he forgives her for it. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: way that it's treated in the Carpenter biography is very like she's coming at a deficit and she is always at a deficit in comparison to Tolkien and Tolkien is the the great and forgiving man and and you know that he gets them through everything and like he builds this this life for them and he's very good with money and everything like that. i mean, she keeps her household before they're married, but he's he's the one who's good with money. He's the one who's good with everything. He's really the the really remarkable one.

Speaker: Edith Bratt was an heiress. From her mother's estate and the investments therein and like not necessarily just ready cash and everything, but the the entire value of it. She inherited a sum of money, which in like 2018, 2019 dollars, which is the last comparison I've seen made, was about equivalent to a between eight hundred and fifty and nine hundred thousand dollars.

Speaker: Wow. Must be fucking nice. Yeah. Nice work and geeky can get it. Apparently that's barely middle class in Carpenter's estimation. the Wait, you said 8.50? Inflation calculator.

Speaker: information yeah calculator Let's look this up real fast. Real fast. but just between So that was in twenty nineteen dollars twenty nineteen yeah eight fifty and twenty don't know what terror seemed under that over a million cheese okay cool cool cool 1.1 million.

Speaker: That is what she, from like a young age, was like setting up households with and everything like that. And yet they were still so poor. Yes.

Speaker: Jeez. She would forget to to order the sausages from the grocers and Tolkien would have to go pick them up. That's actually one of the like pettiest grinding my gears, complete imaginations that Carpenter makes up.

Speaker: Oh, heaven forbid the sausage. Heaven forbid. And it's not even like Tolkien was willing to pick up the sausages on his way home. He had to pick them up because Edith, bad at housekeeping, had forgotten them. This is a fictional day that never happened.

Speaker: What did Edith do to you, Humphrey? know I think it's really interesting that Edith was technically, and certainly a little bit of the time in what we would say now, like ah an heiress, she'd inherited money to be able to set up her own household And so she had guardians who were supposed to safeguard that money.

Speaker: and this like 16 year old dude who decided he was in love with her was maybe not who they were like, yeah, that sounds great for for growing stability. and And lovely that their love came in person through all of that. But when you then consider that Luthien is the daughter of...

Speaker: Amaya and an elven king and like comes from this like greater stature than Baron and is willing to give that up and move away like to go with Baron and defend him, save his life and then set up a home apart from all of the negative experiences of each of their early lives.

Speaker: Yeah, I think I understand a little bit more about why Tolkien is talking about her as this equivalent of an elven princess. Like she she comes from a different economic background than he does.

Speaker: hmm. His inheritance is much smaller and he is ah not very well monetarily endowed college student with scholarships. And she has all of these things that she does bring.

Speaker: to a marriage and is willing to convert to Catholicism for him and then leave behind so much of what she has known and built. And Carpenter treats her as consistently lesser at every point and never, never owns that truly she has all of this other their dimension to her, that she's more than just this caricature.

Speaker: at least ba little very little room for both Edith and Jert to be normal people, to be humans with human problems and human emotions and a very, very human relationship.

Speaker: Again, I feel like one of the great legacies of Carpenter is both this weird contributing to the sanctification of Tolkien at the expense of his humanity. And I feel like part of his legacy can also be some of the, a little bit of the demonization of Edith and her legacy.

Speaker: And it's a real shame that we don't have the materials that Carpenter used. And we also just don't have very much, apparently we don't have very much material evidence of Edith's own words.

Speaker: who which could be used to really shape a much more nuanced and interesting and vibrant voice for her. And that's a real shame.

Speaker: And i feel like, again, this biography wouldn't be written like this today. it wouldn't stand up at all. It would be excoriated, I think, and rightly so.

Speaker: And we need a new one that like post haste and and ones that aren't like by Christian cottage publishing industry insiders who have a very particular angle that they want to do. Speaking of sanctification of Tolkien.

Speaker: um if Carpenter is right about some of Tolkien's attitudes and everything based on what is in these diaries and and things like that. let that information out.

Speaker: That's a much more interesting, complex, nuanced person with flaws and beautiful things to their personality than the sort of deification of this very ordinary man. Because i I think actually one of the things that is good about this biography is that Carpenter talks about the the ordinariness of this man and this couple and that he wrote this this incredible like set of works and everything for sure.

Speaker: But he was a he was a guy He was a dude. He was a dude. He was just a dude. And that's something that that I know we continually harp on is like, he was just a dude. Like he can be an interesting dude, but he was a dude.

Speaker: He was not a deity. He is not some, you know, genius that we should start bastardizing his ideas and naming weapon systems after or make into a literal canonized saint yeah and so if there are contradictions that exist within these other records and diaries and and everything like that And maybe it's time to go ahead and and let them out and let more than one person sift through them and let more than one person see them and and see the complexity that's there. We certainly know already that Tolkien had a lot of contradictions of like saying that monarchy and anarchy and things like that. And, you know, saying like all of this intellectual things, but not wanting to read the newspaper and wanting to just do the crossword. and things like that. So, you know, hashtag release the smut and hashtag release the letters, release the journals.

Speaker: I do think that as we get further away in generations from Jert and his family, it is more likely that we're going to get things like this to be released by the state the estate or at least have additional people get access to it. Because like I'm not going to fault Christopher. If there's like a bunch of boxes of letters between his parents where they're talking about how much they want to fuck, I don't blame him for not wanting to share that with other people. i honestly wouldn't have blamed him if he had burned them.

Speaker: but Yeah, like i can I can understand if you're that close to the situation, like you have your narrative of who your father and mother were, and that is what you want shared with the world, right? so but us But us perverts need... Yes.

Speaker: I'm really glad that in general, more people are being, i don't want to say skeptical, but more they're looking into Carpenter's And seeing the flaws and the work in a way that wasn't done early in Tolkien studies, it's it's really a phenomenon that's been happening in the past five to ten years. That people are going back and looking at Carpenter and being like, wait a second, this doesn't this seem great. Yeah, this doesn't smell good.

Speaker: Well, and we know that there there was a lot that Carpenter was working on that he like he he was spending time with Christopher Tolkien and the family and everything like that. And with the gentlest little bit of criticism to Christopher Tolkien, pop quiz.

Speaker: What is Christopher Tolkien's wife's name? I don't remember. No idea. not A second generation and like really some of the first generation of the scholarship around Tolkien and Tolkien's works and everything where the people who are the domestic partners of the folks doing the the research and compiling of information and data are not written into the narrative.

Speaker: m And I know that I've read her name this week and I can't remember it. I think it starts with B. But I think that that we are also trying to remember as a society that everyone is more complex than just the the sort of facades that we can look at through biography of people as great and important beings who are not in no way influenced by the people around them unless it's specific, also very important people instead of folks in their day to day.

Speaker: And i think that As society and the norms are changing around how we consider talking about domestic partnership and and who and how people want to be in the narrative of the particular person who does a thing, hopefully we can find more nuance again.

Speaker: i will say also for Carpenter, the way that this reads reminds me of pretty much every British novel published at this time, like every British detective story that I have read from this era, like every Ruth Rendell novel, everything has the same sort of tone. And this matter of factness of this perspective from the character is how things are.

Speaker: And I think that's another factor in why it would not be written that way today, because that wouldn't be an accepted tone today without question and without documentation.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, are there any any last points that we want to make sure that we touch on? I had my tirade. I'm good. I have one more small tirade, which is just that I went through as we were talking just re-tabbed with a a different system.

Speaker: And I do have, think, 10 11 little sticky notes here highlighting all the times that Carpenter says that Edith has no friends or is very lonely or whatever. And then within a paragraph or a page tends to contradict himself and then list out a number of people that she has friends with or people that she travels with or people that the tokens are friends with women who she and Ronald are friends with from ronald's sort of literary experiences that personal secretaries that that come in and remain family friends and all of that.

Speaker: And so, But she was so lonely. She was so lonely. So i I don't know. i feel like the Edith loneliness epidemic is about as accurate as the male loneliness epidemic.

Speaker: We're like... If she or Ronald were feeling lonely, like probably true, but probably not quite that distinction that he is a social creature and she is very bad at being friends with people.

Speaker: i mean, she it was probably least to a certain extent, she was very busy. She's running a house. She had multiple kids. And she was keeping up these other relationships, right? That apparently weren't important enough for Carpenter to talk about.

Speaker: And while she is not necessarily maybe going out into, you know, Oxford society as much as some of some other folks are, she is still like there are scholars coming into the house all the time. There are like Tolkien's tutoring people. She is like there are people in and out of the house all the time that she is managing the household for. And then still making sure that all of the people in it eat, like not just have food, but remember to eat it.

Speaker: And not for nothing, i did tab one page in this like imagined day in the life of J.R.R. Tolkien that an entire chapter is devoted to, where it goes through a fairly like relatable series of events of Tolkien is shaving, but then something goes wrong downstairs and he's gone to get this and then breakfast is ah about to happen.

Speaker: He comes downstairs to answer the postman at the door and the postman is like, oh, there's something there's smoke coming out of the chimney in a way that it shouldn't be. And he still only has his face half shaven. and by the time his student gets there, did did it it it and it's like several paragraphs in a row where I just tabbed it and made a mental note. of Like, this is a fantastic depiction of someone with ADHD. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah That can be its whole whole own episode. But I have been trying to get friend of the pod, Claire, to write a presentation about how Tolkien was probably neurodivergent for literal years now.

Speaker: Because I see so much of myself in him, and but I don't want to write the paper because I don't have the disability studies background that Claire has. Please, Claire. Yeah. public appeal to you please write this presentation and present it at PCA because I really want to witness it exactly the gauntlet has been thrown but in that context of someone who whether we look at it today and say oh I see examples that correspond to neurodivergence or just that cliche of the absent-minded professor mm-hmm

Speaker: h m I would like to argue that it is no small task to make sure everyone of all generations in a household has their food and remembers to eat it. And maybe the dinner bell is not actually quite so offensive a thing as Carpenter likes to say that, you know, that it interrupts Tolkien's creative genius. And then he's done working for the day if he comes down to lunch or dinner when he tells him it's time to eat.

Speaker: perhaps we do need to just keep having sustenance in order to keep having our big thinking thoughts. ah

Speaker: Indeed. That is also how I feel about it. That's how we're going to end this. I think so. Heavy Yeah. every yes Heavy sigh from the abyss. So glad that there was someone at the time shortly after the death of the Tolkiens that was able to go through family papers and make some assertions.

Speaker: And shit all over Edith's memory. Thanks. but like I'm glad that it exists for us to push back against because i think the interest in biography and everything does have a a not insubstantial effect on the existence of Tolkien studies and the scholarship that's been done in a lot of different factors around Tolkien since.

Speaker: But I mean, it's all we've got. It's ah it's all we've got. so it's sort of like, what else what else are we going to do? Like we said at the beginning, so much scholarship about women and in Tolkien's life and women in Tolkien's works is based around Carpenter's biography in a way that I don't think is serving us as well as we ever thought.

Speaker: Amen. Co-signed. And here we are at the end of all things. End of all things. Thank you guys for listening to us. And so if you do revisit the Carpenter biography, I hope it's with a little bit more of a critical eye. And maybe you can discover some of the same, some of the same shit we did when we re-read this. for because i Reread it. It's fun. Especially if you got low blood pressure. Liz will fix it.

Speaker: You can see how you've grown as a person since you last read it. Also, please note that we did not go into Grace's tirade about the early chapter and how South Africa. Oh, boy. Oh, Jesus.

Speaker: Yeah. though At some point, we're going to do that episode about colonialization. And I feel like that's a great time to get into Grace's thoughts about that chapter about South Africa. Yeah.

Speaker: But that is not this day. So thank you guys for listening. And Alicia, do you want to close us out? Yeah. Thank you for joining us today. i have a much different energy than I started this episode with. It was kind of cathartic, honestly. Very cathartic. Yeah.

Speaker: All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. My energy is way different than it was at the start of the episode. Very cathartic to just scream into the ether about Humphrey Carpenter for a while.

Speaker: I'm so glad we got to do it. Indeed. All right. You can find us basically wherever you listen to podcasts. Please like, share, subscribe, leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to us. You can also stream our episodes directly on Zencaster. That's Zencaster.com slash CareerLodgings with Tolkien podcast hyphens in between all of those words.

Speaker: ah You can also go to QueerLogings.com where we post our episodes along with show notes, our resources, transcripts. We also have a merch store there and a link to our Discord server. You can find us on so many social media platforms. We're on Facebook. We're on Twitter, but we only do podcast updates on Twitter because fuck Elon Musk. We're also on Blue Sky and on YouTube Podcasts. You can find us there. by searching Queer Lodgings Podcast.

Speaker: The ARD username is QueerLodgings6911. Nice. You can also email us at QueerLodgingsPodcast at gmail.com if you just want to reach out and shoot the shit or have episode i ideas.

Speaker: We're always glad to hear from you. Bye. Bye.

Speaker: I might have to go to Carpenter to find where I... The dog rolled over one of his squeaky toys.

Speaker: Oh my god. Oh my god. The punctuation. the punctuation. Impeccable timing. The long one too is such multiple timing.

Speaker: Oh no.

Speaker: oh no