Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien reported to a Colonel Tobin in Bedford’s leafy De Parys Avenue on Monday 19 July 1915. The short course was his first taste of 24-hour military life since that windblown camp with King Edward’s Horse in 1912. He was in comfortable quarters, sharing a house with six other officers, attending military lectures, and learning how to drill a platoon.
Despite the shock of his appointment, Tolkien held on to the hope of joining the ‘Oxford literary lights’. In fact, as Smith noted, he was ‘philosophick’ about his posting to the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers. It turned out that Colonel Stainforth would be happy to take him on in the Salford Pals. Tolkien must take up his appointed position before he could apply formally for a transfer, wrote Smith, urging ‘tact, tact, tact’. All depended on the 13th Battalion commander and whether he had enough officers. ‘If one keeps one’s cool one is always alright,’ Smith said. ‘After all what does this stupid army matter to a member of the TCBS who has got a first at Oxford?’
The very first weekend of the Bedford course, Tolkien took leave and went back to Barnt Green. Here, on Saturday 24 July, he wrote the decidedly unhappy ‘Happy Mariners’, in which a figure imprisoned in a tower of pearl listens achingly to the voices of men who sail by into the mystical West. The poem reads like an opening-up of Keats’s evocative lines in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ about ‘magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’. But the faëry lands lie quite beyond reach, and the magic merely tantalizes. Indeed, the poem follows an arc remarkably similar to that of ‘Goblin Feet’, with the sea taking the place of the magic road and the mariners passing by like the fairy troop whom the observer is unable to follow. Now, though, Tolkien eschewed all Victorian dainties and wrote about the lure of enchantment using imagery that is both original and haunting.
I know a window in a western tower
That opens on celestial seas,
And wind that has been blowing through the stars
Comes to nestle in its tossing draperies.
It is a white tower builded in the Twilit Isles
Where Evening sits for ever in the shade;
It glimmers like a spike of lonely pearl
That mirrors beams forlorn and lights that fade;
And sea goes washing round the dark rock where it stands,
And fairy boats go by to gloaming lands
All piled and twinkling in the gloom
With hoarded sparks of orient fire
That divers won in waters of the unknown sun:
And, maybe, ‘tis a throbbing silver lyre
Or voices of grey sailors echo up,
Afloat among the shadows of the world
In oarless shallop and with canvas furled,
For often seems there ring of feet, or song,
Or twilit twinkle of a trembling gong.—
O! happy mariners upon a journey long
To those great portals on the Western shores
Where, far away, constellate fountains leap,
And dashed against Night’s dragon-headed doors
In foam of stars fall sparkling in the deep.
While I, alone, look out behind the moon
From in my white and windy tower,
Ye bide no moment and await no hour,
But chanting snatches of a secret tune
Go through the shadows and the dangerous seas
Past sunless lands to fairy leas,
Where stars upon the jacinth wall of space
Do tangle, burst, and interlace.
Ye follow Eärendel through the West –
The Shining Mariner – to islands blest,
While only from beyond that sombre rim
A wind returns to stir these crystal panes,
And murmur magically of golden rains
That fall for ever in those spaces dim.
These last lines, in which a hint of paradise is borne on the air through intervening rains, read almost like a premonition of Elvenhome as it is seen at the end of The Lord of the Rings:
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
It is remarkable to see such a moment of vision, or partial vision, established decades before Tolkien’s epic romance was written.
On the other hand, in the context of what he had put in writing by July 1915, ‘The Happy Mariners’ contains many apparent enigmas. Some of these are only explicable with the help of the first fully-fledged prose form of Tolkien’s mythology, ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. Its introductory narrative, written in the winter of 1916-17, mentions ‘the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl that stands far out to west in the Twilit Isles’, who was awoken when one of Eärendel’s companions in the voyage to Kôr sounded a great gong. Further details resurface in a passage written during the two years after the Great War. Then, the world would be visualized as a flat disc surrounded by the deep blue ‘Wall of Things’. The Moon and Sun would pass this wall in their diurnal courses through the basalt Door of Night, carved with great dragon-shapes. The ‘sparks of orient fire’ won by divers ‘in waters of the unknown sun’ would be explained as the ancient sunlight scattered during attempts to pilot the new-born Sun beneath the roots of the world at night. As Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘The Happy Mariners’ was apparently the song of the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl mentioned in the same passage.
But the story of the Sleeper was never developed, and at this early stage it is not at all clear that Tolkien himself knew exactly what place his images might take within his mythology, any more than he had known exactly who Eärendel was when he first wrote about him. It is possible that in ‘The Happy Mariners’ these details are seen at the time of their first emergence into his consciousness and that he then set about ‘discovering’ their significance.
Eärendel’s poetic function here is quite different to what it was in ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’, written ten months earlier. Then, Tolkien had celebrated the star-mariner’s daring twilight flight, and the poem had followed him across the night sky. But the speaker in ‘The Happy Mariners’ is apparently confined in this tower and cannot sail in Eärendel’s wake; the twilight is a paralysing veil. Perhaps these differences of viewpoint reflect the change in Tolkien’s own situation and mood between defying the rush to arms in 1914 and committing himself now, in 1915, as a soldier. Read this way, the statement that the enviable mariners ‘bide no moment and await no hour’ looks less opaque, implying that Tolkien, as he began training for war, voiced some of his own anxiety about the future through the figure in the tower of pearl.
The war had now been raging for a year, claiming up to 131,000 British and five million European lives; and there was stalemate on the Western Front, where Germany had just added the flame-thrower to the arsenal of new technologies. Parallels between Tolkien’s life and his art are debatable, but the war certainly had a practical impact on him as a writer. Newly bound to military duty, and with the prospect of battle growing suddenly more real, he took action to bring his poetry to light.
He and Smith were set to appear in an annual anthology of Oxford poetry being co-edited by T. W. Earp, whom Tolkien had known at Exeter College. Each had submitted several poems; ‘Goblin Feet’ had been chosen for inclusion along with two of Smith’s. Tolkien had also sent copies of his work to his old schoolmaster, R. W. Reynolds. ‘Dickie’ Reynolds had been in the background throughout the public development of the TCBS at school, as chairman of the literary and debating societies as well as the library committee. A mild man of whimsical humour but broad experience, before becoming a teacher he had tried for the Bar and been secretary of the Fabian Society. But in the 1890s he had been part of W. E. Henley’s team of literary critics on the prestigious National Observer, which had published work by writers of stature including W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, and J. M. Barrie. Tolkien did not entirely trust Dickie Reynolds’ opinions, but he respected the fact that the teacher had once been a literary critic on a London journal, and during the Bedford course Tolkien turned to him for advice on getting a whole collection published. Normally a poet could expect to make his reputation by publishing a poem here and there in magazines and newspapers, but the war had changed all that, Reynolds said. Tolkien should indeed try to get his volume published.*
Tolkien eagerly embraced further opportunities for weekend leave and visits to Edith, riding the fifty miles from Bedford to Warwick on a motorcycle he had bought with a fellow officer. When the course ended in August, he travelled to Staffordshire and joined his 2,000-strong battalion encamped with the four other units of the 3rd Reserve Brigade on Whittington Heath, just outside Lichfield. Apart from the OTC trips of his youth, this was his first experience of a full-scale military camp under canvas. Formed at Hull the previous December, the 13th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was a ‘draft-finding unit’, created to drum up fresh soldiers to replace those lost in the front line by other battalions; as such, it would not be the unit in which Tolkien fought. He was one of fifty or so officers with the battalion when he arrived, but he spent most of his time with the handful in the platoon to which he was assigned. Unlike G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson, who were lucky to be with commanding officers they genuinely liked, Tolkien did not find the higher-ranking officers congenial. ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed,’ he wrote to Edith.
The platoon comprised some sixty men of all ranks. It was the subaltern’s duty to pass on what he had learned to the ‘other ranks’ and prepare them for battle. At this stage the training was basic, and physical. ‘All the hot days of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration,’ Tolkien wrote with chagrin when winter came and these exertions were replaced by chilly open-air lectures. Such was military life in the early twentieth century, and it sharpened Tolkien’s dislike of bureaucracy. ‘What makes it so exasperating,’ he said later of life in camp, ‘is the fact that all its worst features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as “planners” refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by “organization”.’ Elsewhere he was comically precise, declaring that ‘war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)2 when x = normal human crassitude’. The diligent, meticulous, and imaginative thinker felt like a ‘toad under the harrow’ and would vent his feelings in letters, particularly to Father Vincent Reade, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. Yet in retrospect, as Tolkien told his son Christopher in 1944, this was the time when he made the acquaintance of ‘men and things’. Although Kitchener’s army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together. Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy”, especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties’. He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time he had been sitting in a tower not of pearl, but of ivory.
Army life could not challenge Tolkien intellectually. His mind would inevitably roam beyond the job at hand – if there was one: ‘It isn’t the tough stuff one minds so much,’ he commented, but ‘the waste of time and militarism of the army’. Rob Gilson found time amid his duties to work on embroidery designs for furnishings at Marston Green, his family home near Birmingham; G. B. Smith worked on his poetry, especially his long ‘Burial of Sophocles’. Tolkien read Icelandic and continued to focus on his creative ambitions. He later recalled that most of the ‘early work’ on the legendarium had been carried out in the training camps (and in hospitals, later in the war) ‘when time allowed’.
Life in camp appears to have helped Tolkien extend the bounds of his imagined world in a quite direct way. Hitherto, Tolkien’s mythological poetry had gazed across the western ocean to Valinor. Now he began to name and describe the mortal lands on this side of the Great Sea, starting with a poem that described an encampment of men ‘In the vales of Aryador / By the wooded inland shore’. ‘A Song of Aryador’, written at Lichfield on 12 September, inhabits the twilight hours that Tolkien already favoured as a time when the enchanted world is most keenly perceived. But now the gulf between fairies and humankind seems vaster than ever. No goblin troop pads happily by, and no piper-fay is glimpsed making ecstatic music. Only, after the sun has gone down, ‘the upland slowly fills / With the shadow-folk that murmur in the fern’.
Despite the mountains, the scene perhaps owes something to Tolkien’s situation, and even (with poetic exaggerations) to the topography of Whittington Heath, in the Tame valley, with a wood and a lake, and the distant heights of Cannock Chase to the west and the Pennines to the north. This was once the heartland of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that encompassed both Birmingham and Oxford, and with which Tolkien felt a special affinity. Lichfield was the seat of its bishopric and Tamworth, a few miles away, the seat of the Mercian kings. With its Anglo-Saxon subtitle, Án léop Éargedores, ‘A Song of Aryador’ might describe the founding fathers of ancient Mercia.
Tolkien’s imagination flew way back before the Mercians, however, and further afield. He looked to the dim era of their ancestors in the wilds of Europe, for this was where his imaginary history dovetailed with the legendary time of the Germanic peoples: the vanishing point where names of half-forgotten significance such as Éarendel glimmered like distant beacons.
Aryador is not quite one of those historically attested names that tantalized Tolkien; but it almost is. The Qenya lexicon says that it is the ‘name of a mountainous district, the abode of the Shadow Folk’, which adds nothing to the enigmatic phrases of the Whittington Heath poem. One of the first bits of Elvish most readers of The Lord of the Rings learn is the element -dor, ‘land’, seen in the names Gondor and Mordor. Strip that away from Aryador and we are left with Arya-. The Qenya lexicon provides a complex etymology deriving this element from a Primitive Eldarin root; but at the same time it is impossible to miss the resemblance to a real-world name: Aryan. Long before it was misapplied by Hitler as an expression of Nordic racial superiority, Aryan was the nineteenth-century philological term for proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of many European and Asian tongues. Linguistic consensus is that the real-world word Aryan applies properly only to the Indo-Iranians; but some have found traces of the word in the names of other Indo-European peoples, such as Eriu, ‘Ireland’. The word is supposed to derive (via Sanskrit) from the prehistoric name of a nation – a name of unknown meaning that puts it in the same tantalizing category as Éarendel. A year earlier, Tolkien had ‘rediscovered’ the star-mariner behind that name, and since then he had invented a language in which the name had a meaning. Now, likewise, he implied that a place-name in Elvish was the ultimate source for Sanskrit Aryan. In the process, he ‘rediscovered’ the inhabitants of Aryador, who are presumably to be seen as the speakers of the Indo-European ancestral language.
Many years later, when The Lord of the Rings had made him famous, Tolkien expressed his puzzlement and irritation at the many ‘guesses at the “sources” of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings’ proffered by enthusiastic readers. ‘These seem to me no more than private amusements,’ he said, dismissing them as ‘valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction’. The true sources of his names, he wished to emphasize, were his own invented languages, the on-going products of decades of painstaking craft. His statements were undoubtedly true in 1967, and reflected his creative practice over the previous two, three, or four decades. They also reflect the fact that chance resemblances will inevitably occur between a large invented vocabulary and words in real languages. But evidence suggests that in 1915, at least, Tolkien did create a small but significant proportion of his Qenya words specifically to show kinship with ancient recorded or reconstructed words. The names of Eärendel and his boat Wingelot have already been cited; Tolkien also stated that he originally derived the name of the ‘nectar’ of the gods, miruvōrë, from Gothic *midu, ‘mead’ (the asterisk indicates that this is an unrecorded form deduced by philologists), and wopeis, ‘sweet’. Other possible examples may be adduced from the Qenya lexicon. The stem ulband-, ‘monster, giant’, must literally mean ‘unlovely one’, and it descends according to the regular sound-shift laws from a Primitive Eldarin negative UL- /and a derivative of VANA-, the root for words for ‘beauty’. But in form, Qenya ulband- closely resembles Gothic ulbandus, ‘camel’. Philologists do not know where ulbandus came from, except that English elephant came from the same lost word. In Tolkien’s fictional linguistic world, the common ancestors of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons had borrowed the word from Qenya. The skein of designations – ugly creature, giant, monster, camel, elephant – implies a whole history of travellers’ tales and mistrans-mission. Tolkien would later write about this in a comic poem, ‘Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt’:
The Indic oliphaunt’s a burly lump, A moving mountain, a majestic mammal (But those that fancy that he wears a hump Confuse him incorrectly with the camel).
Elsewhere in the lexicon, to take a more mundane example, the stem owo, whence Qenya oa, ‘wool’, suggests the reconstructed Indo-European word *owis, whence Latin ovis, ‘sheep’, and English ewe.
These do not seem to be coincidences; Tolkien was certainly not short of imagination, and produced plenty of Qenya words with no near real-world homonyms. He had a reason to scatter such words throughout his Elvish language. As with Arya-, the real-world words he dropped in were frequently ones whose original meaning is now lost. Jakob Grimm had been much exercised by the Irminsûl, a mysterious Germanic totem. In his capacity as a professional philologist, Tolkien later surmised that the old Germanic element irmin was a mythological term imported by the migrant Anglo-Saxons and applied to the ‘works of the giants’ they found in Britain, hence the Roman road name Ermine Street. But the Qenya lexicon entries for irmin, ‘the inhabited world’, and sūlë, ‘pillar, column’, suggest that Tolkien was working towards a fictional explanation for Irminsûl. Philologists have derived the Greek and Sanskrit words for ‘axe’, pelekus and parasu, from a lost non-Indo-European source; but Tolkien ‘rediscovered’ that source in the Qenya word pelekko. Tolkien also seeded his invented language with words the Indo-Europeans did not borrow, such as ond, ‘stone’, which, he had read as a child, was virtually the only word reconstructed from the lost language of pre-Celtic Britain.
Tolkien meant Qenya to be a language that the illiterate peoples of pre-Christian Europe had heard, and had borrowed from, when they were singing their unrecorded epics. Elves and gods had walked in those epics, and so had dwarves, dragons, and goblins; but only fragments of their stories were written down when literacy and Christianity arrived. Tolkien, with his lexicon of a fictional, forgotten civilization in hand, was now disinterring the fragments and restoring them to life.
The most striking feature of ‘A Song of Aryador’ is that these tribespeople seem profoundly ill at ease in this Aryador, the land from which implicitly they were to derive their name. They are not native at all, but pioneers; intruders at odds with their natural surroundings; benighted wanderers despite their attempts to make a home of the place. In fact, as the Qenya lexicon explains, this is not really their home at all, but ‘the abode of the Shadow Folk’. The mortals by the lake shore in the poem seem oblivious to this faint faëry presence, but ‘A Song of Aryador’ looks to an epoch older still, when humans had not arrived.
Men are kindling tiny gleams
Far below by mountain-streams
Where they dwell among the beechwoods near the shore,
But the great woods on the height
Watch the waning western light
And whisper to the wind of things of yore,
When the valley was unknown,
And the waters roared alone,
And the shadow-folk danced downward all the night,
When the Sun had fared abroad
Through great forests unexplored
And the woods were full of wandering beams of light.
Then were voices on the fells
And a sound of ghostly bells
And a march of shadow-people o’er the height.
In the mountains by the shore
In forgotten Aryador
There was dancing and was ringing;
There were shadow-people singing
Ancient songs of olden gods in Aryador.
Clearly, these shadow-people are Elves, perhaps hymning the Valar, the ‘olden gods’ of Valinor over the western ocean, but they seem to have since been driven into hiding by the intrusion of Men.* Similarly, in Irish myth, the faëry Tuatha Dé Danann retreated underground when the Celts invaded. Tolkien’s ‘shadow-people’ embody the spirit of the natural world. The human interlopers in Aryador are aliens here, blind to its wonders or just plain scared of them.
‘I am really angry with myself for the way I have treated all along your invitation to criticize,’ Rob Gilson wrote out of the blue in September, breaking months of silence. ‘Because I do feel that it is one of the best things the TCBS can possibly do at present. Some day I want to submit a book of designs in like manner.’ Gilson had received Tolkien’s first batch of poems from G. B. Smith in the spring but had passed them on to Christopher Wiseman a fortnight later without comment. Probably it was neither laziness nor reticence that stopped him, but distraction. At the time, Gilson had been on the brink of one of the defining acts of his short life. In recent years he had spent long holidays with the family of a retired American consul, Wilson King, who was a Birmingham friend of the Headmaster’s. The Kings had taken him into their hearts as a dear friend, but Gilson had long ago developed a secret passion for Estelle, Wilson King’s English daughter. In April 1915 he had finally revealed his feelings and asked her to marry him. However, she had recoiled in surprise and confusion and her father warned Gilson that he would not countenance her betrothal to a lowly subaltern with no immediate prospects and a war to fight.
Tolkien, it seems certain, knew none of this: the TCBS did not share such confidences. He had only told the others about Edith Bratt when they were at last betrothed over four years after they had fallen in love. He had told Wiseman once that he could not bear ‘a compartmented life’ in which the TCBS and Edith were unaware of each other. He made efforts to introduce his friends to his fiancée, and they made a fuss of her. (Wiseman once even wrote to Tolkien that the TCBS ‘of course includes your missis’.) But in reality romantic love posed a threat to the tight-knit circle. Since his failed declaration to Estelle, Rob Gilson had cut off communication with her; but his letters to the TCBS had apparently ceased too, and Tolkien had appealed in vain for a response to his letters when he wrote to Gilson with news of his commission back in July 1915.
Now, after a long hard summer debating whether to renew his suit to Estelle, Gilson was laid up in hospital in industrial Sunderland, on the north-east coast, recovering from the ‘flu and profoundly miserable. He had come with his battalion for a musketry course but now the Cambridgeshires had left for the south of England. In Birmingham his stepmother had heard from Dickie Reynolds about Oxford Poetry 1915. Gilson was eager for news of his old friends and wrote, ‘I confess that I have often felt that the TCBS seemed very remote. That way lies despair.’ He asked Tolkien to send more of his verse, adding, ‘I have oceans of time on my hands.’
Tolkien now sent him a second sheaf of his poems and Gilson, feeling revivified by the TCBSian spirit, promised to criticize them. Abruptly, he had learned he was about to be released from hospital, and was going on leave to Marston Green. He determined to visit Tolkien at Lichfield and sent telegrams summoning Smith and Wiseman as well. ‘At times like this when I am alive to it, it is so obvious that the TCBS is one of the deepest things in my life,’ he told Tolkien, ‘and I can hardly understand how I can be content to let slip so many opportunities.’ Wiseman came up from Greenwich, where he had begun his navigation course, and Smith travelled from Salisbury Plain, where the Salford Pals were now encamped. Arriving first, Smith and Gilson – now cutting a much thinner figure than in school and college days – visited the cathedral and the birthplace of Dr Johnson. Tolkien joined them, and finally so did Wiseman, and the four stayed at the George Hotel for an evening of ‘that delightful and valued conversation which ever illumines a council of the TCBS’, as Smith put it. The four were assembled for the last time. It was Saturday 25 September 1915. In northern France, in a foretaste of the battle that lay in store for three of the TCBS, the British army at Loos (including the first Kitchener volunteers) launched an assault so disastrous that, as the attackers turned to retreat, the German machine gunners who had mowed down eight thousand men ceased firing, finally overcome with pity.
On Sunday afternoon the friends repaired to Marston Green and then went their separate ways. By a quirk of military organization, when Gilson rejoined his battalion on Salisbury Plain a week later, disorientated and unhappy, he found his unit on the point of moving to the village of Sutton Veny, a mere five miles up the Wylye Valley from Codford St Mary, where Smith was. A rainy weekend together shopping and eating cheered him immensely. They went to Salisbury and then to the pretty village of Westbury, which, to their great pleasure, was ‘almost without soldiers’. Gilson wrote home:
The rain stopped just as we got there and the evening was beautiful. We walked up on to the top of the bastions of the Plain, and sat down with a wonderful view all around us – greys and dull blues and greens, with wet trees down in the valley all blurred and misty. I drew a little picture of a copse – a thin line of blue trees with a black group of buildings behind it, and the thin straight trunks making a lovely pattern against the sky in the darkening light. G. B. Smith wrote a poem about it some time ago, the one thing I believe of his which is being printed in Oxford Poetry 1915, so I gave him the drawing. He read Herrick to me while I drew, and we got miles away from the war.
Smith’s poem about the copse was ‘Songs on the Downs’, a reflection on the Roman road crossing the Plain upon which ‘The years have fallen like dead leaves, / Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed…’ Smith’s mood was febrile and fretful, and, reflecting on his imminent coming of age, he wrote darkly to Tolkien: ‘The steps I have taken in the direction of growing up have been simply steps farther away from my blessed days at school, and towards the absolutely unknown, whether it be a business career or a shattered skull.’
He and Gilson laid plans for a TCBS meeting in Bath, a short train ride from the Salisbury Plain camps. They reconnoitred the town as Smith intoned comments in long ‘Gibbonian periods’, revelling in its eighteenth-century heritage and anticipating the pleasures of a gathering there of the four. Smith, for one, lurched feverishly towards such oases. ‘I feel that we shall inevitably enact scenes from The Rivals at every street-corner,’ he declared. Meanwhile he wanted Tolkien to send copies of his recent poems to show Captain Wade-Gery, the former classics don now in the Salford Pals. Gilson and Smith plotted Tolkien’s literary future and urged him to get his poetry off to a publisher such as Hodder & Stoughton or Sidgwick & Jackson.
Tolkien’s life was far removed from this kind of companionship, and around the middle of October his battalion moved again, leaving Lichfield for the broad, windswept upland of Cannock Chase, north of Birmingham. The Earl of Lichfield had granted the army use of the Chase, which he owned, at the outbreak of war. In those days, before it was furred over with forestry plantations, it was almost treeless, with a raw, desolate beauty. But a vast, unbeautiful military complex had been grafted on to the face of the heath where the Sher Brook ran off it northwards. On the shallow banks of the stream the army had established Rugeley Camp and its neighbour Brocton Camp, together big enough to process 40,000 men at a time. Grim barrack huts were arranged in straight parallel lines around a complex of parade grounds, above which loomed a square water-tower and a power station whose four chimneys pumped smoke into the sky. German prisoners were held behind wire, watched from guard towers. Hogsbacks of gravel lounged on the surrounding heath, the stop-ends of rifle ranges. Construction work was still in progress when Tolkien’s battalion arrived, and it went on until February.
The battalions of the 3rd Reserve Brigade trained here in musketry, scouting, physical training, gas warfare, and other disciplines, including signalling. Concerts and gatherings in cramped YMCA huts provided some social life for the rank-and-file soldiers, but escape was sought as often as possible in the pubs of villages around the Chase; boredom and drink, however, proved an inevitably fractious brew, and discipline was enforced with extra drills and fatigues, or confinement to the guardroom. The winter barracks were bitter with coke fumes and tobacco smoke, mingling oppressively with the smell of boot polish, sweat, beer, rifle-oil, and wet floors.
As a subaltern with the brigade Officers’ Company, Tolkien was much better off. In Penkridge Camp, he shared a small officers’ hut heated by a stove. Off duty, he could try to close his ears to the sound of marching boots, barked orders, bugles, rifle-fire, and the constant wind in order to work on his expanding Qenya lexicon or his ever more ambitious writings. But during the day there was no escape from the cold, wet weather of the Chase. This was a dark period for Tolkien. ‘These grey days wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing, are not enjoyable,’ he wrote. A typical day was physically unpleasant and mentally enervating:
The usual kind of morning standing about freezing and then trotting to get warmer so as to freeze again. We ended up by an hour’s bomb-throwing with dummies. Lunch and a freezing afternoon…we stand in icy groups in the open being talked at! Tea and another scramble – I fought for a place at the stove and made a piece of toast on the end of a knife: what days!
Meanwhile Tolkien had evidently failed to achieve a transfer to Smith’s battalion, or had given up trying. Edith was unwell and in Warwick. The war filled him with fear for his friends and for England itself.
The Council of Bath did not take place. On impulse, Smith and Gilson took the train to see Wiseman in London because Tolkien could not make it. Gilson wrote: ‘I never before felt quite so keenly the four-squareness of the TCBS. Take one away and it is like cutting a quarter of the canvas from the Granduca Madonna.’ They watched Pinero’s The Big Drum enjoyably, though only Wiseman actually liked it. ‘I laughed a little, generally at the right places,’ he wrote, ‘while Rob and GBS laughed at the wrong places, being of superior dramatic insight.’
Smith and Gilson had sat up late with Wiseman at his Wandsworth home, bemoaning the state of modern theatre. London was full of libidinous soldiers home from the Western Front looking for a ‘bit of fun’ and leaving ‘war babies’ in their wake. The Routh Road conclave blamed George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen for doing away with Victorian prudery but putting nothing in its place to prevent moral freefall. Gilson proposed that feminism would help by banishing the view that ‘woman was just an apparatus for man’s pleasure’. But they pinned their real reformist hopes on the TCBS itself.
Smith declared that, through art, the four would have to leave the world better than they had found it. Their role would be ‘to drive from life, letters, the stage and society that dabbling in and hankering after the unpleasant sides and incidents in life and nature which have captured the larger and worser tastes in Oxford, London and the world…to re-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everyone’s breast.’ Smith wrote to Tolkien the next day: ‘It struck me last night that you might write a fearfully good romantic drama, with as much of the “supernatural” as you cared to introduce. Have you ever thought of it?’
None of these young idealists seems to have baulked at the vast evangelizing task they were setting themselves. Gilson told Tolkien that, sitting in Routh Road, where the inspiration of last year’s Council of London hung over them, ‘I suddenly saw the TCBS in a blaze of light as a great moral reformer…England purified of its loathsome insidious disease by the TCBS spirit. It is an enormous task and we shall not see it accomplished in our lifetime.’ Wiseman, who was very modest about his own artistic abilities, was slightly more reserved. ‘You and GBS have been given your weapon early and are sharpening it,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t know what mine is, but you shall see it one day. I am not going to be content with a Civil Commission in the TCBS.’ Meanwhile there was the real war to face. If Germany conquered, Wiseman declared, drawing on old school memories for a burst of boyish pluck, ‘The TCBS stays in old England and fights the fight as begun in the Richards’ matches.’
Despite the crusading language, the TCBSian cultural and moral manifesto did not involve telling people what to do. This is clear from what both Smith and Tolkien were writing. Smith’s poetry had always displayed a misanthropic hunger for solitudes of wind and sea; now it occasionally exulted in war as a purgative to wash away the old and stale, revealing a new, better world. Its most biting criticism was aimed at the confident, golf-playing ‘sons of culture’ and their ‘polite laughter’, a class-diatribe against the likes of T. K. Barnsley and Sidney Barrowclough, perhaps. Fundamentally, however, what Smith expressed in his poetry was a desire to escape from society, rather than to change it. Tolkien’s poems were even less didactic and morally charged, yet Smith was full of praise for the batch he received just before the Routh Road meeting. ‘I have never read anything in the least like them,’ he wrote back, ‘and certainly nothing better than the best. “The Happy Mariners” is a magnificent effort.’ If this was the glint of weaponry in the war on decadence, then the TCBSian strategy was indirect, to say the least: inspirational, rather than confrontational.
The Great War was a time of enormous upheaval, when old orders were indeed thrust aside; the desire for a newer, better world was everywhere and took many forms. For the revolutionaries now plotting the downfall of Tsarist Russia, new meant new. For Tolkien, Smith, and Gilson (none of whom shared much of Wiseman’s progressive, scientific liberalism), new meant a variety of old. Each had his personal, nostalgic Parnassus: the Anglo-Saxon period, the eighteenth century, the Italian Renaissance. None of these eras had been utopian, but distance lent them a glittering clarity. The twentieth century seemed a fogbound wilderness in comparison, and now civilization truly seemed to have lost its way. It may be that Tolkien was expressing this sentiment in ‘The Happy Mariners’, which yearns towards a different time and place, the immortal West.
But this was not the escapist urge it appears at first glance. The West of Tolkien’s imagination was the heartland of a revolution of sorts: a cultural and spiritual revolution. Like so many of his major ideas, this thought seems to have appeared first in his early lexicon of Qenya. There he had written that it was from Kôr, west over the ocean, that ‘the fairies came to teach men song and holiness’. Song and holiness: the fairies had the same method and mission as the TCBS.
‘Kortirion among the Trees’, a long November 1915 poem and Tolkien’s most ambitious work so far, laments the fairies’ decline. The Qenya lexicon calls Kortirion ‘the new capital of the Fairies after their retreat from the hostile world to the Tol Eressëa’: to the ‘Lonely Isle’, implicitly the island of Britain. Aryador might have borrowed from Whittington Heath a few topographical features, but Kortirion is Warwick, in a mythic prehistory: ‘the city of the Land of Elms, / Alalminórë in the Faery Realms’, and Alalminórë is glossed ‘Warwickshire’ in the Qenya lexicon. However, the lexicon tells us that Kortirion was named after Kôr, the city from which the Elves came over the western sea on their mission into ‘the hostile world’. So Tolkien’s Elvish history presents a double decline, first from Kôr across the sea to Kortirion, then from Kortirion down the years to Warwick.
This provided an elegant ‘explanation’ for the presence in fairy-tale tradition of two apparently contradictory versions of Faërie. The Canterbury Tales mentions both. Chaucer’s Merchant depicts Pluto and Proserpine as the king and queen of fairyland, which is therefore a land of the dead; and here Chaucer was tapping into a tradition in which Faërie is an Otherworld like the Arthurian Avalon, the Welsh Annwn, or the Irish land of eternal youth, Tír na nÓg. However, the Wife of Bath recalls that, in King Arthur’s day, all Britain was ‘fulfild of fayerye’ and the elf-queen danced in many a meadow; yet now, she says, ‘kan no man se none elves mo’; so now Chaucer was drawing on the rival tradition, of a fairyland that once flourished openly in our own mortal world but had since faded from general view. Tolkien’s idea was that each of the two traditions could represent a different stage in Elvish history. When Elves dwelt openly here in mortal lands they (or some of them at least) were exiles from an Otherworld Faërie cut off by perilous enchanted seas.
The double decline in Tolkien’s Elvish history is matched by two levels of nostalgia. Of Kôr the original and splendid, now empty, Kortirion was merely a consolatory memorial built in defeat. Of Kortirion, modern Warwick knows next to nothing:
O fading town upon a little hill, Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,
Thy robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still; The castle only, frowning, ever waits
And ponders how among the towering elms
The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms And slips between long meadows to the western sea –
Still bearing downward over murmurous falls One year and then another to the sea;
And slowly thither have a many gone Since first the fairies built Kortirion.
The lengthy ‘Kortirion’ gave Tolkien room to make the most of his imagery. Trees yield some extraordinary extended metaphors: trunks and foliage are seen as masts and canvas on ships sailing off to other shores, and the wind-loosed leaves of autumn are likened to bird wings:
Then their hour is done,
And wanly borne on wings of amber pale
They beat the wide airs of the fading vale And fly like birds across the misty meres.
The image anticipates Galadriel’s song of farewell in The Lord of the Rings: ‘Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!’ The Ents of Fangorn Forest are a long way off, but already in ‘Kortirion’ tree and leaf are far more than objects of beauty: they count the seasons, they sail or soar away, they entangle the stars.
In this 1915 poem, Tolkien struck the first note of the mood that underpins his entire legendarium: a wistful nostalgia for a world slipping away. The spring and summer represent the lost past when Elves walked England openly. Winter is the harbinger of mortality:
Strange sad October robes her dewy furze
In netted sheen of gold-shot gossamers,
And then the wide-umbraged elm begins to fail;
Her mourning multitudes of leaves go pale
Seeing afar the icy shears
Of Winter, and his blue-tipped spears
Marching unconquerable upon the sun
Of bright All-Hallows.
More immediate concerns, perhaps, also register in Tolkien’s poem. The summer to which ‘Kortirion’ looks back may be seen as a symbol of both childhood and the pre-war past, and winter, with his on-coming army, as the uniquely lethal future allotted to Tolkien’s generation.
However that may be, the poem confesses that autumn/winter ‘is the season dearest to my heart, / Most fitting to the little faded town’. This seems a paradox, but ‘fitness’, the accord of symbol and meaning, was essential to Tolkien’s aesthetics, as can be seen from the careful matching of sound to sense in his invented languages. Another young soldier-poet, Robert Graves, said during the Great War that he could not write about ‘England in June attire’ when ‘Cherries are out of season, / Ice grips at branch and root’. But ‘Kortirion’ actually discovers beauty in the way the autumn embodies the evanescence of youth or elfinesse.
The overriding metaphor of the seasons also provides a note of consolation, suggesting not only loss and death but also renewal and rebirth. To similar effect, the fairies of faded Kortirion sing a ‘wistful song of things that were, and could be yet’. Thus it is not sadness that finally prevails in ‘Kortirion’ but an acceptance approaching contentment.
The mood is most apparent in the poem’s sense of rootedness. In contrast to Éarendel or the envious figure in ‘The Happy Mariners’, the voice hymning Kortirion concludes that it has no desire for adventure:
I need not know the desert or red palaces Where dwells the sun, the great seas or the magic isles,
The pinewoods piled on mountain-terraces…
The sentiment is central to Tolkien’s character. Later, when he had put the years of enforced wandering behind him, he rarely travelled far except in his imagination. It was landscape and climate more than political statehood that fired his idea of nationalism. The spirit of place, so potent in Tolkien’s mythology, seems to have emerged fully fledged just as the subaltern poet was swept into a life outdoors and on the move: his eye was sharpened, but so was his longing for home, which Warwick had come to embody. Stray workings for this latest poem (relating to the army of winter) suggest that he may have begun the poem shortly after arriving at Penkridge Camp, with its grey waste, its boredom and its grind. But Tolkien created the Elf-haunted town of Kortirion from life when, following army inoculations, he spent a week of frost and clear skies with Edith in Warwick. On his return to camp, he sent her a copy of the poem and then wrote out another, despatching it at the end of November to Rob Gilson for circulation among the TCBS.
‘I am now 21 years of age, and cannot help doubting whether I shall ever be 22,’ G. B. Smith had written from Salisbury Plain in mid-October. ‘Our departure for France is almost within sight. The King is going to inspect us shortly. I hope he will be duly impressed by this member of the TCBS.’ The Salford Pals were waiting to move out along with eleven other battalions, including Ralph Payton’s and Hilary Tolkien’s, all of which belonged to a single vast army division encamped around Codford St Mary. In November, Smith worked hard to finish a long poem of his own, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’, before embarkation. He rushed home to West Bromwich to say goodbye to his widowed mother and dined at Codford for the last time with Gilson, who wrote: ‘It is impossible for us to tell him all the hopes and wishes and prayers that the first TCBSite to set forth carries with him…I feel that this is a memorable day in TCBSian history.’
The day had already come for some of those who had belonged to the TCBS before the Council of London. Sidney Barrowclough had sailed with the Royal Field Artillery in September for Salonica, the staging-post for British troops fighting in the Balkans. T. K. Barnsley, who had switched his ambitions from the Methodist ministry to professional soldiering, was now in the trenches with the élite Coldstream Guards, having transferred from the Warwickshires in August. Smith, waiting to go as the first of the ‘foursquare’ TCBS, wrote to Tolkien:
We are now so pledged to see the matter through, that no reasoning or thinking about it will do anything except waste time and undermine resolution. I often thought that we should be put to the fiery trial: the time is almost upon us. If we emerge, we emerge victorious, if not, I hope I shall be proud to die for my country and the TCBS. But who knows what is hidden in the black darkness between now and the spring? It is the most anxious hour of my life.
On 21 November 1915, in rain and biting wind, Lieutenant G. B. Smith paraded at the head of his platoon on the Wiltshire downs and then took the train to Southampton. After a night crossing to Le Havre, shadowed by a British destroyer, Smith and the Salford Pals marched off the blacked-out troop ship Princess Caroline onto beleaguered French soil.
On 2 December, following a week of route marches, GBS wrote from the front to say that he had visited the trenches ‘to the peril of neither body or soul’. He was cheerful, if somewhat overworked. Far more distressing to him than the trenches was the fact that somewhere on the journey he had lost his great poem, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’. Military censorship prevented him from pinpointing his position, but in fact he was in Albert, near the River Somme, an area that would become darkly familiar to Tolkien and notorious in history.
Ever since joining the army in July, Tolkien had turned his attention away from Kôr and the Otherworld over the sea and had focused on Kortirion and mortal lands, where the elves are a fading, elusive ‘shadow-people’. But Tolkien’s wartime poem ‘Habbanan beneath the Stars’ was peopled by the figures of men and was set neither in England nor in Aryador. He later recalled that it was written either at Brocton Camp in December 1915, or the following June in the massive transit camp at Étaples on the French coast. Either way, it seems apt that the poem should depict an encampment of men.
There is a sound of faint guitars
And distant echoes of a song,
For there men gather into rings
Round their red fires while one voice sings -
And all about is night.
The Qenya lexicon describes Habbanan simply as ‘a region on the borders of Valinor’, and prior to the post-war ‘Lost Tales’ there is no further elucidation of its significance.
But there is a spiritual and religious dimension to Tolkien’s world, never absent though rarely blatant, that was notably pronounced in his original conceptions. Side by side with terms for different Elvish tribes in the lexicon are words for ‘saint’, ‘monastery’, and ‘crucifixion’, ‘nun’, ‘gospel’, and ‘Christian missionary’. There is even a Qenya aphorism, perilmë metto aimaktur perperienta, ‘We indeed endure things but the martyrs endured and to the end’ – an interesting perspective from a member of the Great War generation. The Valar who rule Valinor, or ‘Asgard’, are only gods in pagan eyes: in reality they are angels under ‘God Almighty, the creator who dwells without the world’. Although Tolkien later refined this religious element, and in The Lord of the Rings made it all but invisible to the inattentive eye, he never removed it from his conception of Middle-earth.
The religious dimension helps to explain how the elves could come to ‘teach men song and holiness’. Tolkien’s conviction at this time appears not to have been far different from the view he propounded later in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’: that although myths and fairy-tales contradicted the Christian story, they were not lies. Because they were the work of human beings ‘subcreating’ in emulation of their own Creator, he felt that they must contain seeds of the truth. The idea was not entirely new, and had been expressed the other way round by G. K. Chesterton in his 1908 essay ‘The Ethics of Elfland’: ‘I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.’ Before Christ, in Tolkien’s benighted Aryador, myth and Faërie would have been as close to that truth as the wandering peoples of Europe could attain. The Elvish religious mission, then, can be seen as a metaphor for the enlightening impact of fairy-stories.
In literal terms, however, the Elves come from Kôr, which abuts the land of the Valar: they have lived alongside the angels. Tolkien’s synthesis of human supernatural beliefs is staggeringly ambitious. Habbanan, which also borders Valinor, is the place ‘where all roads end however long’ this side of Heaven itself. It is a vision, perhaps, to console those facing death: the Christian purgatory seen through a faëry glass.
There on a sudden did my heart perceive
That they who sang about the Eve,
Who answered the bright-shining stars
With gleaming music of their strange guitars,
These were His wandering happy sons
Encamped upon those aëry leas
Where God’s unsullied garment runs
In glory down His mighty knees.