I’ve been reading the new essay by H.L. Spencer, “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: monsters and critics”. One of the things I was pleased to learn was that Tolkien seems to have known Wells’s The Time Machine, on the genesis of which I’ve recently written a book. The evidence for Tolkien having read The Time Machine is that he wrote a poem, circa 1927, which satirised the fearsomeness of “exalted” academics by describing them in proto-Gollum terms. In both person and topography, since they live underground and beyond the “Morlock Mountains”. The reference being, of course, to the Morlocks — the devolved subterraneans in Wells’s The Time Machine.

This poem was titled “Knocking at the Door” and subtitled: “Lines Induced by Sensation When Waiting for an Answer at the Door of an Exalted Academic Person”. It was published 18th February 1937 in The Oxford Magazine (page 403, as ‘Oxymore’). Sadly it seems The Oxford Magazine is not online, and the original version of the poem seems not to be available online in any form.

The 1962 version is however online on YouTube, in several readings, and also at the Tolkien Gateway in text form. Here are the final verses…

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they’ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips – and the Mewlips feed.

The similarity to “flap-flip”-footed Gollum, in his bone-strewn cave under the mountains, should be obvious. So it’s interesting that Gollum could have started off as a prototype as early as 1927 and in the form of a satire on slippery student-gobbling “exalted” academics. H.L. Spencer explores the possibility that the academic who Tolkien had in mind was his rival at the time for Gawain, Sir Israel Gollancz. But finds the evidence rather vague, and offers some counter-evidence on Tolkien’s sentiments at the time. It’s difficult to tell, without seeing the original poem. For instance, was “And there they count their gold.” in the 1937 original? [Update: no, it wasn’t] Or was it something more academic, like “And there they scratch so bold.”?

The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion & Guide comments on the later version of the poem, that…

“Knocking at the Door seems to be a comment on the trepidation of a student calling on a professor; transformed into The Mewlips and divorced from its original meaning, it is a work purely of mood and imagination.”

To be specific, it was re-titled, stripped of its explanatory sub-title and apparently re-worked (how much?) for children, and thus tamed. It was reprinted as “The Mewlips” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962).

H. L. Spencer usefully comments in a footnote in the essay, that…

“The Mewlips are later said to live beyond the ‘Merlock Mountains’; in the original [1927/1937] version, these are the ‘Morlock Mountains’, referring to H. G. Wells’s cannibalistic underground creatures”.

I’d add that this shift from Morlock to Merlock also shifts the register from the Biblical (Morlock recalls Moloch) to the Arthurian (Merlock recalls Merlin). I’ve discussed Wells’s Biblical Moloch link at length, in my recent book on the genesis of The Time Machine. One then has to suspect that Tolkien easily spotted that Wells was quietly referencing Moses and Moloch worship throughout The Time Machine, and would thus have puzzled out all the subtle re-uses of such Biblical elements and names. In which case he knew that Morlock must recall Moloch for the fellows of Oxford who read The Oxford Magazine, which must then key the poem’s theme to the similar and well-known forms of Moloch worship. This can then be seen to tie in with certain other aspects of the information given in H. L. Spencer’s essay, and even with a certain gruesome later development in Gollum’s back-story as given in The Lord of the Rings.

Also interestingly, Tolkien’s apparent reading of The Time Machine, if in perhaps circa 1924/25, would have been closely paralleled by H. P. Lovecraft reading The Time Machine for the first time in New York during November 1924.¹ It’s strange to think of them as such contemporaries in horror, like that. Shortly after experiencing the underground cannibalistic Morlocks, Lovecraft writes “The Horror at Red Hook” (underground, child sacrifice), and Tolkien writes “Knocking at the Door” (underground, student-eating).

1. Lovecraft thought Wells was a tedious and canting socialist, which he was by that point. Thus Lovecraft avoided his books. But a young protege of Lovecraft was making a collection of very early SF, then largely forgotten, with the aid of the used bookshops of New York City. He encouraged the master to at least read The Time Machine.