Tolkien had always been fascinated by codes and alphabets, and in his teens had made many of his own – the beginning of a lifelong passion. Once in the army, he decided to specialize in signals, in which cryptography played a small part. Training would be more interesting and he would be playing to his strengths, putting his unusual aptitudes at the army’s disposal. Consciously or otherwise, he was also boosting his chances of surviving the war, which would be poor indeed at the head of a routine patrol or an attacking platoon in No Man’s Land. It is a strange thought that, without such decisions, children might never have heard of Bilbo Baggins, or Winnie-the-Pooh either, for that matter: elsewhere in the army, a subaltern called A. A. Milne also opted to be a signaller quite consciously to save his skin. But Milne also called signalling ‘much the most interesting work in the infantry, with the great advantage that one is the only officer in the Battalion who knows anything about it, and is consequently one’s own master – a great thing to a civilian in the Army’.
By late December 1915, when the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers had shifted from Penkridge Camp to the neighbouring Brocton Camp, Tolkien was engrossed in cryptanalytic exercises and scribbling his workings on the backs of envelopes. But of course signalling was not just about making and breaking codes. The more mechanical aspect of the job dealt with ways of transmitting the coded message, and so Tolkien learned how to signal to an observer with semaphore flags, or with Morse ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ flashed out with a lamp by night or with a heliograph by day. For longer-distance work, or for times when flashing a light was inadequate or dangerous, he had to master the use and maintenance of a field telephone. The other two items in his armoury were rather less sophisticated: rockets and carrier pigeons. He also learned map-reading and took part in the usual military manoeuvres on Cannock Chase. It was a bitter place to call home in the middle of winter, and he was miserable.
Rob Gilson’s fears of being sent to France or Flanders had been banished before Christmas by rumours that they were off to Egypt and by the issuing of desert kit. ‘Imagine the general rejoicing at the awakening from our long nightmare of the cold, wet, muddy, and worst of all, the ragtime, trenches,’ he wrote to Tolkien on Boxing Day. But that day the Cambridgeshires had been ordered to relinquish their sun-helmets, and their hopes. ‘The whole world looks gray again. It is worse than ever for the sunny dream that has intervened.’
Gilson soon rallied. His long anguish over Estelle King had come to an end. His stepmother Donna, learning that Estelle wished to see him before he left, had brought them face to face for the first time since his disastrous April proposal. At the end of November, Gilson had renewed his petition and she had returned his love. Proud and head-over-heels, he desperately wanted to tell his friends but refrained at the request of Estelle, whose parents still forbade any formal engagement. However, she heard all about the TCBS, and when ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ reached Gilson on Salisbury Plain he promised he would one day show her Tolkien’s poetry. As 1916 came in he told her: ‘What a wonderful year! I expected nothing but wretchedness and I have found—! I wish I were a poet and then I might be able to express myself.’
The same day Christopher Wiseman, now a naval officer with two gold stripes on his arm, reported for duty in Scotland, where he joined the HMS Superb at Invergordon on 2 January. ‘Then I plunge myself into the middle of 870 other mortals, about whom I know nothing, and who know and care nothing about me,’ he had written to Tolkien. His arrival was more alarming than he feared. The battleship was berthed with its squadron in Cromarty Firth, where a mysterious explosion had just sunk an armoured cruiser, killing more than three hundred seamen. Amid suspicions that a German submarine was hunting in the Firth, the big ships were ringed by their torpedo nets, which hung suspended forty feet out from the vessels’ flanks. To board the Superb, Wiseman had to climb up a rope ladder and along the boom straddling the shielded gap.
Gilson was promoted to lieutenant and sailed for France on 8 January 1916 – the same day, coincidentally, that Estelle King took ship for Holland as a volunteer nurse. He wrote to her: ‘I wish I could describe or draw for you the lovely sunrise we watched this morning from the train – like one of the Bellinis in the National Gallery, with Salisbury Plain standing up against the sky, bounded by a lovely velvety black line…It is a long time since I have felt the sheer beauty of things so strongly. It really seems for the moment more like a holiday.’ He promised that, when the war was over, they would travel to his beloved Italy together. He carried with him a New Testament and the Odyssey, both in Greek.
Tolkien had just turned twenty-four. In the space of seven weeks, all three of his dearest friends had gone to war. In the midst of it all, Oxford Poetry 1915 had been published, containing his poem ‘Goblin Feet’. A thousand copies were printed, and it marked the first time a piece of his writing had reached a wider audience than school or college.
A critic in the Oxford Magazine reflected that no Pope or Tennyson held sway now: ‘The idols have fallen…The pedestal stands empty.’ Some of the poets were exploring new modes of expression, such as vers libre, and new subjects, such as motorbikes and (in the case of T. W. Earp of Exeter College) mechanical cranes, the anonymous reviewer noted approvingly; and he was pleased to see that the old conventions of love poetry, the language of ‘christal eyes and cherrie lippes’, had been exhausted.
From France, G. B. Smith opined vigorously that the reviewer ought to be shot. ‘The truth is,’ he told Tolkien, ‘that everything which is prosaic and noisy passes nowadays as being clever.’ He assured Tolkien that ‘Goblin Feet’ read splendidly, though he added that it was far from being his best work. More than two weeks later, on 12 January, Smith was still cursing that ‘terrible fellow’ Earp. By that time Gilson had forwarded ‘Kortirion’ to him. Smith was living in a trench dugout and had been attached to a battalion of professional soldiers for instruction;* he was feeling lost and incompetent, he said, but was uplifted by Tolkien’s ‘great and noble poem’. He wrote:
I carry your last verses…about with me like a treasure…You know as well as I do, my dear John Ronald, that I don’t care a damn if the Bosch drops half-a-dozen high explosives all round and on top of this dugout I am writing in, so long as people go on making verses about ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ and such other topics – that indeed is why I am here, to keep them and preserve them…
After eighteen months’ anticipation, Rob Gilson had his first taste of the trenches on 2 February a few miles south of Armentières, in the lowland of canals and poplars near the Belgian border. ‘It is a strange and dreary looking place – wasteland and shattered trees and houses,’ he told Estelle. ‘What most impresses me at first is the appalling expenditure of human labour on merely hiding each other from each other’s devilishness. I had never grasped it with my imagination. It is one of the very saddest sights I have ever seen.’ At one point Gilson had an absurd vision of his younger self – the cultured and fastidious undergraduate who had thought ‘the real business of life’ was touring Normandy churches with a sketchbook – seeing the soldier he had now become crawling on his belly in a French field on a wet winter’s night. Out in the middle of No Man’s Land, he had to suppress a guffaw.
The same week, and fifty miles away, Smith (now back with his own battalion) faced patrol with the benefit of neither comedy nor novelty. He had spent half the ten weeks since reaching France either in the trenches or close behind them, but this was the worst stretch of line the Salford Pals had experienced. A hundred yards of the frontline trench, together with all the protecting barbed wire, had been blown in during heavy bombardment just before they arrived. They had to post men in shell holes to guard the line while going out again and again under cover of darkness to put up new wire. Enemy patrols were on the prowl every night and there had been clashes: an officer who was leading a British scouting party on 2 February had attacked with grenades and gunfire but had been wounded. The next day the battalion’s bombing officer led another group out and did not come back.
‘A good friend of mine has been wounded on patrol and captured by the Germans. God knows if he is still living,’ Smith wrote as he prepared to set out into No Man’s Land that night. Face to face with death, he urged Tolkien,
My dear John Ronald, publish by all means. I am a wild and whole-hearted admirer, and my chief consolation is, that if I am scuppered to-night – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the TCBS. Death is so close to me now that I feel – and I am sure you feel, and all the three other heroes feel, how impuissant it is. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four!…
Yes, publish – write to Sidgwick and Jackson or who you will. You I am sure are chosen, like Saul among the Children of Israel. Make haste, before you come out to this orgy of death and cruelty…
May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.
Patrols went out with blackened faces, armed like thieves with clubs and knives, and would crawl along at a rate of perhaps forty yards an hour until they had covered their allotted stretch of No Man’s Land. Smith returned safely with all three of his men that night, having seen and heard nothing of the enemy, and lived to lead further patrols. Later, a Turkish flag was hoisted above the enemy trench: clearly the Germans had learned from their captive that they faced the Lancashire Fusiliers and aimed to discomfort them with a reminder of their fruitless losses at Gallipoli. But Smith’s captured friend, a nineteen-year-old called Arthur Dixon, was never seen again; he died the next day of wounds sustained during the encounter in No Man’s Land and was buried behind German lines.
Within a week Tolkien wrote to Smith announcing that he had submitted his collection of poems, The Trumpets of Faërie, to Sidgwick & Jackson. Smith cautioned him not to raise his hopes, and when he realized that ‘Kortirion’ had not been submitted pressed him to send it off. ‘I remember how your first verses perplexed me,’ Smith wrote. ‘I am glad to say I see now that my criticism of them was just.’
‘Kortirion’ was taken to heart by all the TCBS. Ever the most hesitant, Rob Gilson suggested it had ‘too many precious stones’ but said the poem had frequently cheered him up during hours of dull routine. But Christopher Wiseman wholeheartedly shared Smith’s view. ‘I am immensely braced with it,’ he wrote in February from the Superb, now with the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. ‘You seem to have got out of underground caverns full of stalactites lit up with magnesium wire…I used to be afraid you would never write anything but freak poetry, however clever it might be, and however beautiful the effect…But Kortirion seems to me to be as “John Ronaldian” as ever, but less “freakish”.’
Prior to this breakthrough, in other words, Tolkien had been labouring, with too much artifice, after the strange and the unfamiliar. Wiseman was right about the breakthrough. There are qualitative differences between ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ and – to take a quartet of 1915 poems that mark four points on the Tolkienian compass – the formal ‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon’; the faery ‘Goblin Feet’; the heraldic ‘Shores of Faëry’; and the psychological ‘Happy Mariners’. The first of the four is a virtuoso metrical and verbal performance built around a slight joke: an accomplished piece of light entertainment. The second is a generic faëry piece, standing self-consciously apart from the mainstream: it looks like an act of defiance against the stylistic experimentation and quotidian subject-matter that dominated Oxford Poetry 1915. The third is startling, to be sure, but less like a piece of literature than a symbolist painting (which is how it started), with stark emblems and strange names unmediated by commentary or characterization. The fourth, paralysed, fearful, and introspective, suggests a deeply troubled state of mind. Each of these poems might be described as ‘freakish’ in its way.
‘Kortirion’ follows each of these four directions to some extent, but largely avoids their pitfalls. Like the earlier ‘Man in the Moon’ it is technically brilliant, but it is not the case that ‘there was more form than content about it’, as R. W. Reynolds said of the later poem: its expansive structure allows its symbolic core to be explored from all angles, and gives breathing-space for meditation and the modulation of feeling. ‘Kortirion’ is a generic piece of faëry writing like ‘Goblin Feet’, but it also embraces the broader tradition of English landscape writing. Like ‘The Shores of Faëry’, it depicts mysterious peoples and places, but the brush-strokes are intimate and naturalistic, the invitation to explore is more enticing, and the location is real. Finally, like ‘The Happy Mariners’, ‘Kortirion’ may be seen as a window onto a psychological state, but now the claustrophobia is banished, the mind expands, and the mood moves towards reconciliation with reality, ‘a haunting ever-near content’ with the fading year.
Understandably, Tolkien was hurt to hear his best friend apparently dismiss the bulk of his work as ‘freakish’. He accused Wiseman of a lack of sympathy with his primary inspirations: the glory of the night, the twilight and stars. Wiseman returned that Tolkien failed to appreciate ‘the grandeur of the glare of the noon’. They were talking in metaphors: Tolkien’s imagination was fired by vast mysteries and remote beauty, but Wiseman was enthralled by the human endeavour unravelling the riddles of the universe. The argument drew a dividing line between the medievalist, mystical, Catholic Tolkien and the rationalist, humanist, Methodist Wiseman. But Wiseman relished the fight. ‘Old days, Harborne Road and Broad Street again,’ he wrote. ‘A grand old quarrel!…Such openness in speech is what has kept the TCBS together for so long.’ He now confessed to long-suppressed reservations about Tolkien’s entire project:
You are fascinated by little, delicate, beautiful creatures; and when I am with you, I am too. So I do sympathize with you. But I feel more thrilled by enormous, slow moving, omnipotent things, and if I had greater artistic gifts I would make you feel the thrill too. And having been led by the hand of God into the borderland of the fringe of science that man has conquered, I can see that there are such enormous numbers of wonderful and beautiful things that really exist, that in my ordinary frame of mind I feel no need to search after things that man has used before these could fill a certain place in the sum of his desires.
Tolkien was far from pacified. He responded that his own work expressed his love of God’s creation: the winds, trees, and flowers. His Elves were a way of expressing it, too, primarily because they were creatures, things created. They caught a mystical truth about the natural world that eluded science, he said, insisting that ‘the Eldar, the Solosimpë, the Noldoli are better, warmer, fairer to the heart than the mathematics of the tide or the vortices that are the winds.’ Wiseman countered:
I say they are not. Neither are good warm or fair. What is good, warm and fair, is your creating one and the scientist creating the other. The completed work is vanity; the process of the working is everlasting. Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them. When you have finished creating them they will be as dead to you as the atoms that make our living food, and they will only live when you or I go through your process of creation once more. How I hate you when you begin to talk of the ‘conquests of science’! Then you become just like the inartistic boor in the street. The ‘conquests’ vanish when they are made; they are only vital in the making. Just as the fugue is nothing on the page; it is only vital as it works its way out.
But he drew a line under the altercation, writing: ‘I am very sorry indeed if I have hurt you. The precise form of abnormality which your work took seemed to me to be a fault, which, as far as I could see, you were gradually and consciously eliminating. And now I have said far too much. Indeed we all have.’
Christopher Wiseman was not alone in doubting the value of Faërie. Whatever the TCBSian creed was, it was not founded on a fascination with the supernatural. Rob Gilson confided to Estelle King that he was ‘lacking in the strings that ought to vibrate to faint fantastic fairy music’. He thought such music strayed from the real theme on which the best art elaborated: ‘I like to say and to hear it said and to feel boldly that the glory of beauty and order and joyful contentment in the universe is the presence of God…I love best the men who are so certain of it that they can stand up and proclaim it to the world. That is why I love Browning so dearly…Heaven knows I have not that great certainty myself.’
G. B. Smith was closely attentive to Tolkien’s vision, and in some measure shared it (despite his avowed antipathy to romanticism), just as he shared a delight in Arthur and the Welsh cycle of legends, the Mabinogion. Smith saw no demarcation between holiness and Faërie. One of his own poems, ‘Legend’, has a monk returning from a morning’s stroll during which he listened, transfixed, as a bird sang ‘diviner music / Than the greatest harpers made’,
Sang of blessed shores and golden Where the old, dim heroes be,
Distant isles of sunset glory, Set beyond the western sea.
Sang of Christ and Mary Mother Hearkening unto angels seven
Playing on their golden harp-strings In the far courts of high Heaven.
Back at the monastery, none of the other monks recognizes him. After he has retreated to a cell they discover that he has crumbled to dust: he had set off on his stroll a hundred years previously and strayed into a timeless Otherworld. But the bird’s song is Tolkien’s, too: the shores of Faërie may not be Heaven, but they are illuminated by it.
Wiseman was mistaken to think that Tolkien was at heart an anti-rationalist. There was a strain of scientific curiosity and discipline in his work, in the development of Qenya on rigorous phonological principles. Although this took place behind the scenes in the pages of a lexicon, it was the reason why Tolkien wanted to make myths: to give life to his language. Wiseman was wrong, too, in supposing that Tolkien’s gaze was turned away from humankind. In pursuing the link between language and mythology, Tolkien was acting upon his revelation, kindled by the Kalevala and perhaps by war, that human language and human beliefs were intimately bound up together.
The mythology surrounding Tolkien’s poems had not yet coalesced; no wonder they seemed strange and disconnected from one another, like inconclusive forays into an unfathomably vast subterranean complex. None of the many TCBS letters discussing his work mentions an ‘epic’ or ‘mythology’ until 1917. Yet Wiseman knew enough from Tolkien by now not to baulk at invented clan-denominations of Faërie such as ‘the Eldar, the Solosimpë, the Noldoli’. Taken together, the poems hinted at the bigger picture, if you squinted; but in conversation Tolkien could reveal still more of the mythology he had sketched out in his lexicon.
Every language draws its vital force from the culture it expresses, and English received an enormous jolt of electricity from the new technologies and experiences of the Great War. Old words received new meanings; new words were coined; foreign phrases were bastardized. Air raids were deterred by captive balloons or blimps, a portmanteau-word (Tolkien opined) formed from blister and lump in which ‘the vowel i not u was chosen because of its diminutive significance – typical of war humour’. Servicemen, who had a nickname for everyone and everything, utilized this changed language in its most concentrated form. Smith casually used Bosch (French Boche) for ‘German’; but Gilson relished his role as upholder of inflexible English, proclaiming from his cushy spot in the front line: ‘I fully intended to eschew trench slang when I came out here – it is particularly obnoxious – but I never hoped to persuade a whole mess to do the same. If anyone here refers to “Huns” or “Bosches” or “strafing”…he is severely sat upon.’ Britain was Blighty (from Hindi), and a blighty was a wound serious enough to bring you home. The flares used for observation and signals, Very lights, were inevitably dubbed Fairy lights. Tolkien was surrounded by wordsmiths. But soldiers’ slang, which spanned death, drink, food, women, weapons, the battlefield, and the warring nations, grew out of irony and contempt for what was intolerable; it was as crude and unlovely as camp life itself.
Qenya thrived in the same soil, but not in the same mood. Nothing could be further removed from the unbeautiful inflexible practicalities Tolkien was being taught than the invention of a language for the joy of its sounds. It was a solitary and shy pleasure, but in fact he discovered he was not the only member of Kitchener’s army engaged in the ‘secret vice’. One day, sitting through a military lecture ‘in a dirty wet marquee filled with trestle tables smelling of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed and wet creatures’ (as he recalled in a talk on inventing languages), he was exploring the further reaches of boredom when a man nearby muttered, as if in reverie, ‘Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!’ Tolkien tried to prise from the soldier more about this private grammar, but he proved ‘as close as an oyster’.
Tolkien, too, usually kept his hobby to himself, or else made light of it; so he would write to Edith: ‘I have been reading up old military lecture-notes again:- and getting bored with them after an hour and a half. I have done some touches to my nonsense fairy language…’ But Qenya was a serious matter to him, and the ‘touches’ he made to it in March meant he could write poetry in it: the crowning achievement. He had attempted to do so back in November, but he had produced no more than a quatrain paraphrasing the lines in ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ in which falling leaves are likened to bird-wings. Now he expanded it to a full twenty lines.
Having brought Qenya to this stage of sophistication, and having submitted his poetry to the publishers, Tolkien had brought his mythological project to a watershed. Undoubtedly he pondered his next move, but he knew embarkation could not be far off and personal matters required his attention before he left England. This may therefore be an appropriate point to survey, albeit tentatively, the state of the mythology at the time that Tolkien went to war.
Enu, whom men refer to as Ilūvatar, the Heavenly Father, created the world and dwells outside it. But within the world dwell the ‘pagan gods’ or ainur, who, with their attendants, here are called the Valar or ‘happy folk’ (in the original sense of ‘blessed with good fortune’). Few of them are named: notably Makar the god of battle (also known as Ramandor, the shouter); and the Sūlimi of the winds; Ui, who is queen of the Oaritsi, the mermaids; and Niëliqi, a little girl whose laughter brings forth daffodils and whose tears are snowdrops. The home of the Valar is Valinor or ‘Asgard’, which lies at the feet of lofty, snow-capped Taniqetil at the western rim of the flat earth.
Beside Valinor is the rocky beach of Eldamar, once home of the Elvish Eldar or Solosimpë, the beach-fays or shoreland-pipers. The royal house of the fairies, the Inweli, was headed by their ancient king, Inwë, and their capital was the white town of Kôr on the rocks of Eldamar. Now it is deserted: Inwë led the fairies dancing out into the world to teach song and holiness to mortal men. But the mission failed and the Elves who remained in Aryador (Europe?) are reduced to a furtive ‘shadow-people’.
The Noldoli or Gnomes, wisest of the faëry tribes, were led from their land of Noldomar to the Lonely Isle of Tol Eressëa (England) by the god Lirillo. The other fairies retreated from the hostile world to the island, which is now called Ingilnōrë after Inwë’s son Ingil (or Ingilmo). In Alalminórë (Warwickshire), the land of elms at the heart of the island, they built a new capital, Kortirion (Warwick). Here the goddess Erinti lives in a circle of elms, and she has a tower which the fairies guard. She came from Valinor with Lirillo and his brother Amillo to dwell on the isle among the Elvish tribes in exile. Now the fairy pipers haunt the beaches and weedy sea-caves of the island; but one, Timpinen or Tinfang Warble, pipes in the woods.
The name Inwinórë, Faërie, was used by Tolkien for both Eldamar and Tol Eressëa. The Elves are immortal and they drink a liquid called limpë (whereas the Valar drink miruvōrë). They are generally diminutive, some especially so: a mushroom is known as a ‘fairy canopy’, Nardi is a flower fairy, and likewise Tetillë, who lives in a poppy. Are such beings as these, or the sea-nymphs, akin to the ‘fairies’ who built Kôr? It is impossible to judge from the evidence of Qenya at this stage. Qenya is only one of several elvish languages; the lexicon also lists dozens of words in another, Gnomish.
Sky-myths figure prominently side-by-side with the saga of the Elvish exile to the Lonely Isle/England. Valinor is (or was?) lit by the Two Trees that bore the fruit of Sun and Moon. The Sun herself, Ur, issues from her white gates to sail in the sky, but this is the hunting ground of Silmo, the Moon, from whom the Sun once fled by diving into the sea and wandering through the caverns of the mermaids. Also hunted by the Moon is Eärendel, steersman of the morning or evening star. He was once a great mariner who sailed the oceans of the world in his ship Wingelot, or Foamflower. On his final voyage he passed the Twilit Isles, with their tower of pearl, to reach Kôr, whence he sailed off the edge of the world into the skies; his earthly wife Voronwë is now Morwen (Jupiter), ‘daughter of the dark’. Other stars in Ilu, the slender airs beyond the earth, include the blue bee Nierninwa (Sirius), and here too are constellations such as Telimektar (Orion), the Swordsman of Heaven. The Moon is also thought of as the crystalline palace of the Moon King Uolë·mi·Kōmë, who once traded his riches for a bowl of cold Norwich pudding after falling to earth.
Besides wonders, there are monsters in these pages too: Tevildo the hateful, prince of cats, and Ungwë·Tuita, the Spider of Night, whose webs in dark Ruamōrë Earendel once narrowly escaped. Fentor, lord of dragons, was slain by Ingilmo or by the hero Turambar, who had a mighty sword called Sangahyando, or ‘cleaver of throngs’ (and who is compared to Sigurðr of Norse myth). But there are other perilous creatures: Angaino (‘tormentor’) is the name of a giant, while ork means ‘monster, ogre, demon’. Raukë also means ‘demon’ and fandor ‘monster’.
The fairies know of Christian tradition with its saints, martyrs, monks, and nuns; they have words for ‘grace’ and ‘blessed’, and mystic names for the Trinity. The spirits of mortal men wander outside Valinor in the region of Habbanan, which in the abstract is perhaps manimuinë, Purgatory. But there are various names for hell (Mandos, Eremandos, and Angamandos) and also Utumna, the lower regions of darkness. The souls of the blessed dwell in iluindo beyond the stars.
It is curious – especially in contrast to his later, famous writings – that Tolkien’s own life is directly mythologized in these early conceptions. He left his discreet signature on his art, and at times the lexicon is a roman à clef. The Lonely Isle’s only named locations are those important to him when he began work on it: Warwick, Warwickshire, Exeter (Estirin), after which his college was named, and Oxford itself (Taruktarna). Possibly we see John Ronald and Edith in Eärendel and Voronwë, but Edith is also certainly represented by Erinti, the goddess who presides aptly over ‘love, music, beauty and purity’ and lives in Warwick, while Amillo equates to Hilary Tolkien. John Ronald was perhaps declaring his own literary ambitions as Lirillo, god of song, also called Noldorin because he brought the Noldoli back to Tol Eressëa.* Tolkien’s writings, he may have been hinting, would signal a renaissance for Faërie.
War also intrudes. Makar the battle god seems to have been one of the first named Valar. As well as describing the natural world, Qenya furnishes a vocabulary for wartime. Almost all of this accords with the sense that the mythology takes place in the ancient world (kasien, ‘helm’; makil, ‘sword’); but some of it smells distinctly twentieth-century. One could easily enumerate features of the trenches: londa-, ‘to boom, bang’; qolimo, ‘an invalid’; qonda, ‘choking smoke, fog’; enya, ‘device, machine, engine’; pusulpë, ‘gas-bag, balloon’. Entirely anachronistic is tompo-tompo, ‘noise of drums (or guns)’: an onomatopoeia, surely, for the deep repercussive boom and recoil of heavy artillery, but not, one would think, a word Tolkien could use in his faëry mythology.
Particularly striking is how Qenya at this stage equates Germans with barbarity. Kalimban is ‘“Barbary”, Germany’; kalimbarië is ‘barbarity’, kalimbo is ‘a savage, uncivilized man, barbarian. – giant, monster, troll’, and kalimbardi is glossed ‘the Germans’. There is a strong sense of disillusionment in these definitions, so devoid of the attraction Tolkien had felt towards ‘the “Germanic” ideal’ as an undergraduate. He lived in a country wracked with fear, grief, and hatred, and by now people he knew had been killed by Germans.
The concept of the devilish Germans was popular, not least among some military minds. For many, it was increasingly difficult to remain high-minded, especially when in 1916 Germany adopted the slaughter of enemy soldiers as a key strategy in a new ‘war of attrition’. On 21 February a furious assault was unleashed against Verdun, a fortress that held special symbolic significance in the French national consciousness because it barred the road to Paris from the east. It did not matter whether or not Verdun was captured, the Kaiser had been advised: in trying to defend it France would pour in its troops and ‘bleed to death’. Thousands upon thousands on either side were now dying in the pitiless siege.
Knowing he could be called to fight overseas any time now, Tolkien could wait no longer to be married to Edith: he found the situation ‘intolerable’. The prospects for both of them were grim. As he summed it up later, ‘I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p.a. (£20-40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern).’* He sold his share in the motorbike he jointly owned with a fellow officer and went to see Father Francis Morgan in Birmingham to make further financial arrangements. When it came to telling him that he was to marry Edith, the subject of his guardian’s ban six years previously, his nerve failed. He delayed until two weeks before the event, and Father Francis’s conciliatory offer of an Oratory wedding came too late. He was also worried about how his friends would react. But G. B. Smith, writing back to wish them both the best, reassured him: ‘My goodness, John Ronald, nothing could ever cut you off from the TCBS!’ Wiseman gently chided him for imagining that the three would disapprove and declared that, ‘on the contrary, the TCBS heartily approves, in the full belief that you are not likely to be “foolish” in these matters’. Gilson was taken aback when he heard, and wrote home, ‘The imminence of the date is a complete surprise to me, as all his movements nearly always are.’ But he was genuinely pleased for his friend: ‘I rejoice many times for your sake that you are thus able to raise yourself out of this mire of existence.’
To Estelle King, Gilson confided his sympathy for Tolkien’s lot, explaining that his friend had lost both parents and had ‘always had something of a wanderer’s life’. Tolkien was contemplating that same fact when he returned to Oxford for his long-delayed degree ceremony on Thursday 16 March 1916. That day he started a long new poem, continuing it when he returned to Warwick: ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’. Correspondence aside, it is the most overtly personal of Tolkien’s published writings. The mythology was in abeyance. It is perhaps no coincidence that Tolkien experimented in this more conventional direction in the midst of his argument with Wiseman about the ‘freakishness’ of his other poetry.
A prelude depicts an unidentified landscape of orchard, mead, and grassland settled by ‘my father’s sires’; which, if Wiseman read it right, is to be taken literally as a description of Tolkien’s paternal ancestors in ancient Germania.
There daffodils among the ordered trees
Did nod in spring, and men laughed deep and long
Singing as they laboured happy lays
And lighting even with a drinking-song.
There sleep came easy for the drone of bees
Thronging about cottage gardens heaped with flowers;
In love of sunlit goodliness of days
There richly flowed their lives in settled hours…
But Tolkien’s roots in Saxony lie in the remote past, and he is an ‘unsettled wanderer’ in Britain, where the scene shifts to Warwick and Oxford.
In Warwick’s fourteenth-century keep, the Norman earls lie as if in a blissful reverie, silently rebuked by the passing seasons.
No watchfulness disturbs their splendid dream,
Though laughing radiance dance down the stream;
And be they clad in snow or lashed by windy rains,
Or may March whirl the dust about the winding lanes,
The Elm robe and disrobe her of a million leaves
Like moments clustered in a crowded year,
Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps nor grieves,
Uncomprehending of this evil tide,
Today’s great sadness, or Tomorrow’s fear:
Faint echoes fade within their drowsy halls
Like ghosts; the daylight creeps across their walls.
‘Tomorrow’ here is not just age, as it had been in ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, but the dreadful prospect of battle that Tolkien and his peers faced. Against this terrible upheaval, the ‘old lords too long in slumber lain’ represent a deceptive continuity, an inertia that rolls unheeding through the changing years. They are complacent, unadaptable, and incapable of vigilance. We may catch a hint of the anger shared by many of Tolkien’s generation, whose world seemed to have been consigned to disaster by the negligence of their elders.
But if so, Tolkien was conscious that he too had been dreaming. ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ takes a distinctly different view from ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, in which he had proclaimed his sense of ‘ever-near content’ in Warwick. For in his new poem he wrote:
Here many days once gently past me crept
In this dear town of old forgetfulness;
Here all entwined in dreams once long I slept
And heard no echo of the world’s distress.
Now he had grasped the urgency of the moment, as his official graduation, his attempt at publication and his marriage all demonstrate. After the wedding Edith was going to stay as close as possible to him, and would be leaving Warwick: ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ bids the town and its dreams goodbye.
Tolkien was no mere nostalgist. The passing of time was the subject of a constant internal debate: part of him mourned what was gone and part of him knew change was necessary. In the Oxford of this poem, the past achieves an ideal status, not embalmed and half-forgotten, but vitally alive and full of significance for today.
Thy thousand pinnacles and fretted spires
Are lit with echoes and the lambent fires
Of many companies of bells that ring
Rousing pale visions of majestic days
The windy years have strewn down distant ways;
And in thy halls still doth thy spirit sing
Songs of old memory amid thy present tears,
Or hope of days to come half-sad with many fears.
In contrast to Warwick’s inertia, Oxford shows true continuity, based on academic erudition and the perpetual renewal of its membership.
On a personal level, memories of undergraduate life crowd in. Tolkien, whose stays in Warwick were private, domestic, and circumscribed, had been the most sociable of Oxonians: understandably he used the university to symbolize lost fellowship and the tragedy of the war. The past is unnervingly present, so that in a visionary moment the intervening years or months are swept aside:
O agéd city of an all too brief sojourn,
I see thy clustered windows each one burn
With lamps and candles of departed men.
The misty stars thy crown, the night thy dress,
Most peerless-magical thou dost possess
My heart, and old days come to life again…
Despite its elegant use of autobiographical material for symbolic purposes, ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ is not altogether successful. Wiseman told Tolkien it was not ‘quite up to your usual standard’ and said the Oxford passage was unworthy of ‘the greatest city but London in the Empire of England’. A more serious flaw is that its attempt to locate consolation and hope in the university city seems merely wishful when its Belgian counterpart, Louvain, had been all but destroyed. The final optimistic assertion sounds a trifle shrill:
Lo! though along thy paths no laughter runs
While war untimely takes thy many sons,
No tide of evil can thy glory drown
Robed in sad majesty, the stars thy crown.
The wanderer pledges allegiance to learning, living memory, and alertness, but (understandably) invests them with an unrealistic impregnability.
Wiseman felt there was an ‘apparent lack of connection’ between the sections of the poem and said, ‘I am left hung up at the end between the Tolkienian ancestors taking root in Germany, and the Norman feudalists of the Castle while the author is still, as I know to my cost, an unsettled wanderer.’ But Oxford and Warwick seem to symbolize two responses to temporal change – responses that now appear to be mutually incompatible but which had co-existed blissfully in ancient Saxony. Without booklore, Tolkien’s remote Saxon ancestors had sung the ‘Songs of old memory’ now remembered in Oxford (at least in the English department); simultaneously they had listened to the pulse of the seasons without drifting into a static slumber like the Warwick nobles. The poem describes a fall into division of being.
What goes unmentioned is Saxony’s situation in the Great War, the fate of Tolkien’s relatives there, or how his ancestry affected Tolkien’s patriotic allegiance to England (with its Norman aristocracy). The poem never sets out to deal with these subjects, but inevitably they hover around it.
Tolkien remained in Warwick after completing the poem. On Wednesday 22 March 1916 he and Edith were married at the Roman Catholic church of St Mary Immaculate, near Warwick Castle. It was Lent: accordingly, they could only take part in the Marriage Service, and not the Nuptial Mass that would otherwise have followed. They spent a week’s honeymoon in the windswept village of Clevedon on the Severn Estuary during which they visited the caves at Cheddar. When they returned to Warwick, Tolkien found a letter from Sidgwick & Jackson informing him that they had decided not to publish The Trumpets of Faërie. He now faced the possibility that he might be killed with all his extraordinary words unheard.
Meanwhile, Edith had little chance to see her new husband. Within a month of their wedding he was in Yorkshire taking a course at a signals school run by the army’s Northern Command at Farnley Park, Otley, and was away for several weeks of training and tests. On practical matters his performance was mediocre: using a lamp he could signal at six words per minute, but the average speed was between seven and ten words. He did well in the written test and on map reading, however, and on 13 May he was issued with a provisional certificate permitting him to instruct army signallers. Tolkien left the same day for Warwick, having been given just two of the four days’ leave he had requested.
Edith was now leaving the town for good. Tolkien’s battalion duties meant that they could not live together, but they had decided that Edith would take rooms as near as possible to his camp. Accordingly, she moved with her cousin Jennie Grove into the home of a Mrs Kendrick in Great Haywood, an attractive village on a beautiful stretch of the River Trent just below the northern shoulders of Cannock Chase. Across the Trent lay the manorial elegance of Shugborough Park, the seat of the Earls of Lichfield. An old and narrow packhorse bridge with fourteen arches spanned the stream here where it took in the waters of the River Sow. At Great Haywood the newlyweds received a nuptial blessing at the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist, in front of a Sunday congregation who (amid the national atmosphere of moral turpitude the TCBS so detested) seemed convinced that they had so far been living in sin.
On the Somme, the squirming misery of the winter mud had given way to an incongruous renascence of anemones, poppies, bluebells, and cowslips. In some snatched moment of tranquillity, G. B. Smith had written:
Now spring has come upon the hills in France,
And all the trees are delicately fair,
As heeding not the great guns’ voice, by chance
Brought down the valley on a wandering air…
Smith had sent home for a copy of the Odyssey, and the compartmentalized life continued in his letters to Tolkien, which dwelt almost exclusively on the poetry for which he fought, not on trench life itself – though he had mentioned a narrow escape on April Fool’s Day when an aeroplane deposited two bombs nearby. Censorship was not the reason: usually only details of troop movements were suppressed. Smith simply preferred (like many soldiers) to keep the horror and exhaustion out of his letters. But he longed for the company of his old friends: ‘I wish another council were possible…All the TCBS is ever in my thoughts, it is for them I carry on, and in the hope of a reunion refuse to be broken in spirit,’ he had written some time ago. A council of the four remained impossible, but now the opportunity came for a reunion with Tolkien.
The week after Tolkien’s signals course ended, a telegram announced that Smith was back at home. The two quickly arranged to meet and, on the last Saturday of May 1916, a train carrying Smith pulled into Stafford station. Eight months had passed since the friends last met at Lichfield. Smith stayed overnight at Great Haywood, and for most of the Sunday too, eking out the splendid reunion as long as he could. ‘Nothing could have been more reassuring or more encouraging and inspiring than to see once again a TCBSite in the flesh and realise that he had changed not at all,’ Smith wrote on returning to his battalion in France. ‘Me I have no doubt you found different: more tired and less vigorous: but neither, I firmly believe, have I changed in any one vital particular. The TCBS has not shirked its plain duty: it will never shirk it: I am beyond words thankful for that.’
The plain duty of the TCBS entailed the relinquishment of pleasure, and perhaps life itself, as Smith wrote in his spring poem:
There be still some, whose glad heart suffereth
All hate can bring from her misbegotten stores,
Telling themselves, so England’s self draw breath,
That’s all the happiness on this side death.
This was a fellowship founded on laughter, schoolboy pranks, and youthful enthusiasms. At times, happiness seemed to live in the past, in the tea room at Barrow’s Stores, in the library cubby-hole at King Edward’s, or even in the Governor’s Room, sitting exams as the master paced silently up and down behind their backs and the smell of tar drifted in from New Street. ‘The real days’, a dejected Wiseman called them, ‘when one felt oneself to be somebody, and had something to substantiate the feeling, when it was possible to get something done, such as win a match or act a play or pass an exam, the most important things that ever can be done…’ Doubtless Tolkien, busily creative and newly married, felt rather differently about the value of his life since leaving school. Nevertheless, he saw the TCBS as an ‘oasis’ in an inhospitable world.
Yet the Tea Club was now much more than a refuge. As well as hilarity and good conversation, TCBSianism had come to mean fortitude and courage and alliance. Smith, displaying his weakness for bombast, had once likened the four to the Russian army battling vastly superior German and Austro-Hungarian forces (‘the most magnificent spectacle Europe has seen for generations’, as he called it). But the TCBS had absorbed patriotic duty into its constitution not simply because its members were all patriots. The war mattered because it was being fought ‘so England’s self draw breath’: so that the inspirations of ‘the real days’ of peace might survive.
One facet of their duty was not so plain. Somewhere along the line the TCBS had decided it could change the world. The view had been born on the rugby pitch in the spirited exploits of Wiseman and Tolkien, the Great Twin Brethren. It had grown during the battle to wrest control of school life from boorishness and cynicism – a prolonged struggle from which the TCBS had emerged victorious. The ejection of ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley and the vapid, irony-obsessed members of the TCBS had left the Council of London free to reaffirm the society’s sense of mission. Tolkien had told them that they had a ‘world-shaking power’, and (with the occasional exception of the more cautious Gilson) they all believed it.
Now they felt that, for them, the war was only the preparation for the task that lay in store. It was a ‘travail underground’ from which they would emerge enriched, Gilson said. ‘I have faith,’ he ventured, ‘that the TCBS may for itself – never for the world – thank God for this war some day.’ Smith observed that ‘Providence insists on making each TCBSian fight his first battles alone’, and Wiseman underlined the fortifying virtue of the divine scheme. ‘Really you three, especially Rob, are heroes,’ he wrote. ‘Fortunately we are not entirely masters of our fate, so that what we do now will make us the better for uniting in the great work that is to come, whatever it may be.’
All this might sound like so much hot air, were it not for two considerations. These young men were gifted members of a gifted generation; and they included in their ‘republic’ of equals a genius whose work has since reached an audience of millions. When orders arrived on Friday 2 June instructing him to travel to Folkestone for embarkation overseas, Tolkien already believed that the terrors to come might serve him in the visionary work of his life – if he survived.
There was no fanfare when he left Cannock Chase. In contrast to his friends, who had marched out of their training camps with their entire divisions of more than 10,000 men, Tolkien went alone: his training battalion stayed at home and sent men out as and when the fighting battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers needed reinforcements.
Tolkien was given forty-eight hours for his ‘last leave’. He and Edith went back to Birmingham, where on Saturday they spent a final night together at the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, just down the road from the Oratory and Father Francis. The house in Duchess Road where he and Edith had met as lodgers was minutes away. Visible across the street was the Highfield Road house where he had lived with Hilary after contact with Edith was banned.
Late on Sunday 4 June, 1916, Tolkien set off for the war. He did not expect to survive. ‘Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,’ he later recalled. ‘Parting from my wife then…it was like a death.’