Francis Xavier Morgan

Francis Xavier Morgan C. O. (born Francisco Javier Morgan Osborne, 18 January 1857 – 11 June 1935 ) was a Spanish and British Catholic priest of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. He served for most of his priesthood at the Birmingham Oratory in Edgbaston. Decades after his death, Morgan has become famous as the teacher, legal guardian, and father figure to the fantasy author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien.

According to a 1987 lecture about Fr. Morgan's life by a fellow priest of the Birmingham Oratory, the elder Francis Morgan was a Welsh Protestant and María Manuela Osborne was a Catholic, which made theirs a disparity of cult marriage.

As a boy, Francis was sent to England, where he became only the third student to enter the primary school attached to the Birmingham Oratory, After primary school, Francis Morgan went to the Catholic grammar school run by Monsignor Thomas John Capel in London, and then entered the University of Louvain. After two years there he returned to the Birmingham Oratory as a novice.

In 1880 he accompanied Father John Norris, the prefect of the Birmingham Oratory, to Rome, where they were granted an audience with Pope Leo XIII. After his ordination to the priesthood in 1883, Fr. Francis Morgan became an active member of the Birmingham Oratory community.

In April 1904 Mabel Tolkien fell seriously ill with diabetes, having great difficulty fending for herself.

In November 1904, seven months after being diagnosed with diabetes, Mabel Tolkien died at Rednal cottage in the care of Father Francis. In her will she appointed him legal guardian of her two children.

Father Francis took the Tolkien brothers to live with him at the Oratory. The library that the priest kept in his cell was frequently used by Ronald, who learned some Castilian Spanish from his guardian, which enabled him to create a language he called "naffarin". In all probability, thanks to Father Francis' library the young Tolkien had access to the Castilian historical novels of Cecilia Böhl de Faber, the priest's great-aunt, who published under the pseudonym Fernán Caballero. This has been suggested because of the similarity between Gollum's second riddle in The Hobbit concerning the wind, and Fernán Caballero's 187th riddle. (Fernán Caballero's 187th riddle is: "" In English: "Flies wingless, hisses/whistles mouthless, lashes handless, and you neither see it nor touch it." This has been compared to Gollum's second riddle: "Voiceless it cries, Wingless flutters, Toothless bites, Mouthless mutters." From Fernán Caballero's Cuentos, oraciones, adivinanzas y refranes populares (Madrid, 1877).)

Soon after taking them in, Father Francis allowed Ronald and Hilary to live with a sister-in-law of their late mother, Beatrice Suffield. After three years, the priest realised that Mrs Suffield, widowed and deeply depressed, could not offer the most suitable environment for the Tolkien brothers to grow up in. He looked for something more like a home for them, and so he decided to put them up in Mrs Faulkner's boarding house, right next door to the Oratory. Ronald, aged 16, met Edith Bratt, aged 19, who had been living alone with Mrs Faulkner since the death of their mother, and a romantic relationship began between the two teenagers.

Possibly because of the disparity of cult marriage between his own parents, Father Francis Morgan considered it "altogether unfortunate" that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman. Tolkien later wrote that "the combined tensions" of having a serious romantic relationship in his teens nearly caused, "a very bad breakdown" and are the reason why he "muffed [his] exams" to enter Oxford University. Fr. Morgan accordingly prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.

In a 1941 letter to his son Michael Tolkien, Tolkien recalled, "I had to choose between disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most father's, but without any obligation, and 'dropping' the love affair until I was 21. I don't regret my decision, though it was particularly hard on my lover. But that was not my fault. She was perfectly free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else."

Father Francis again found new lodgings for the two boys, this time with the McSherry family, parishioners of the Oratory. From there, Ronald successfully retook his exams to enter Oxford University, after which he moved to Oxford, but on the very day when he became a legal adult, wrote and successfully proposed marriage to Edith. According to the couple's children John and Priscilla, "Their respective guardians were not enthusiastic, although Father Francis eventually gave his blessing."

John and Priscilla Tolkien later wrote that while their father was attending Oxford, "Father Francis sometimes came to visit from Birmingham, once chaperoning Edith. She remembered the train stopping at Banbury and Father Francis insisted upon buying Banbury cakes - the local delicacy - which were very greasy. The grease got everywhere and caused considerable confusion."

After the couple's marriage and Tolkien's return from active service during the Battle of the Somme, Father Francis came to from Birmingham to Cheltenham in November 1917 to Baptize their first child, who was named John Francis Reuel Tolkien in his honour.

Death and legacy According to Fr. Philip Lynch, "Fr. Francis only went home every alternate year, as getting out there was such a business - booking a cabin to Gibraltar there and back on a P&O liner, or other such, and then the long journey by diligence to Puerto de Santa Maria. On one occasion towards the end of his life, Fr. Francis and his bachelor brother, Augustus, who lived in Spain, went to Palestine to see their sister, who had been a Reparatrice nun in Jerusalem for many years and wasn't very good at English. When they got there, they found that she had gone stone deaf. On some of the years that he did not go to Spain to visit the tribe - as he used to say - Fr. Francis would spend a week or so at Rednal."

Francis Xavier Morgan died inside his room at the Birmingham Oratory at the age of 78 in 1935. He left each of the Tolkien brothers £1,000 as an inheritance (equivalent to £ in ). According to Fr. Philip Lynch, "The Oratory was a duller place without him." In a 2019 movie review, Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce, who had previously expressed concern about the film's potentially negative depiction of Father Francis Morgan, instead praised the film. Pearce wrote, "It is the characterization of Fr. Francis Morgan which surprised me most. There’s none of the anti-Catholic bigotry that one has come to expect in the characterization of priests in contemporary cinema. He shines forth as a compassionate father-figure, which is how Tolkien described him in his letters, who has Tolkien’s best interests in mind at all times, even and especially at those times when he appears most harsh, such as his decision to forbid Tolkien from seeing Edith."