‘Mounted on the monster’: Tolkien and the motor-car

To mark the publication of The Bovadium Fragments, let’s explore the background to Tolkien’s satire on the motor-car and Oxford.

Though J.R.R. Tolkien never saw a motor-car in his Sarehole childhood, in 1911 he was driven to Oxford in one: his old schoolteacher’s, and quite possibly steam-powered. The car appears in his parodic account of his arrival at his new university home, Lemminkainen Goeth to the Ford of Oxen:

Lo! he spied a honking roadhop
Rooting up the road towards him.
Swiftly Lemminkainen mounted
On the monster; whereupon it
After prefatory snortings
Bounded forward like an arrow
— well, a rather rummy arrow;
quite impossible projectile —.
Never stopped it loudly tooting;
Creaking all its many jointings;
Rattling up its oily tumtum;
Droning down the dusty roadways;
Roaring through the scattered hamlets…¹

The noise, absurdity and monstrousness would leave their mark his imagination. I’m reminded of the ‘motor-cars oozing grease on the gravel’ in Howards End, E.M. Forster’s contemporary satire on old values under siege by the machine. Two years later, Tolkien was on a trip to Brittany as chaperone of two Roman Catholic Mexican boys when he saw their elderly aunt fatally struck by a car mounting the pavement.

These experiences established the twin poles of his experience of the motor vehicle, a new power that was both a temptation and a terror.