J. R. R. Tolkien’s First Car

In a previous post, I noted that Tolkien had a particularly adversarial disposition toward Machines. In his book, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter recounts a humorous anecdote about Tolkien’s personal relationship with one kind of Machine, the automobile. Carpenter reports,

There was the unforgettable occasion in 1932 when Tolkien bought his first car, a Morris Cowley that was nicknamed ‘Jo’ after the first two letters of its registration. After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm. At various times during the journey ‘Jo’ sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall near Chipping Norton, with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later – not entirely without justification, for Tolkien’s driving was daring rather than skilful. When accelerating headlong across a busy main road in Oxford in order to get into a side-street, he would ignore all other vehicles and cry ‘Charge ‘em and they scatter!’ – and scatter they did. ‘Jo’ was later replaced by a second Morris which did duty until the beginning of the Second World War, when petrol rationing made it impractical to keep it. By this time Tolkien perceived the damage that the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing to the landscape, and after the war he did not buy another car or drive again.((Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. HarperCollins, 162. ))

Later, writing in May of 1944 to his son, Christopher, who was at that time a soldier in WWII, Tolkien declared,

It is full Maytime by the trees and grass now. But the heavens are full of roar and riot. You cannot even hold a shouting conversation in the garden now, save about 1 a.m. and 7 p.m. – unless the day is too foul to be out. How I wish the ‘infernal combustion’ engine had never been invented. Or (more difficult still since humanity and engineers in special are both nitwitted and malicious as a rule) that it could have been put to rational uses – if any…((J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, HarperCollins Publishers, 77. ))