The fever persisted. Tolkien wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, his commanding officer, explaining his whereabouts, but All Hallows went by and after nine days in hospital at Le Touquet he was sent by train to Le Havre. There, on 8 November 1916, he boarded the soldier’s joy, ‘the Blighty boat’. A packet ship in peacetime, the steam liner Asturias was now brilliantly lit up and painted white, with green stripes and red crosses, to tell enemy submarines that she was a hospital ship and not a military target. She was large and comfortable, with cosy beds; and during the ten-hour crossing the next day there were sea-water baths to be had. Most homeward-bound soldiers were walking wounded, happy to have a minor but honourable ‘Blighty’ wound. The worst-hit survivors of battle never got further than the tented ‘moribund ward’ of the casualty clearing station in the field. Some, especially now that winter was here, were simply ill, like Tolkien; but others suffered from something worse than feverish delirium: they trembled or twitched uncontrollably and had an otherworldly look.
England glimmered into view: the Lonely Isle, ‘sea-girdled and alone’. The Asturias steamed into Southampton and the same day a train took Tolkien back to the city of his childhood. That night, Thursday 9 November, he was in a bed at the Birmingham University Hospital. Soon he was reunited with Edith, five months after the parting that had seemed ‘like a death’.
The First Southern General Hospital (as it was officially known) had been set up in September 1914 in the grand arched halls and corridors of the university at Edgbaston and was continually being expanded under pressure of war casualties, who were cared for by the Medical Corps with the assistance of Red Cross and St John Ambulance volunteers. Tolkien was not the only old TCBSite invalided home to Birmingham, for T. K. Barnsley was back too. Buried alive by a trench mortar at Beaumont-Hamel in August, Tea-Cake had been packed off to England with a split eardrum and suffering from shell shock. Rob Gilson’s sister, Molly, dressed wounds here for the army surgeon, Major Leonard Gamgee. A man of some repute, and an Old Edwardian, he was a relative of the famous Sampson Gamgee who had invented, and given his name to, surgical gamgee-tissue, mentioned by Tolkien as the source of Sam Gamgee’s surname in The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien would not be here for long, if his commanding officer had his way. Captain Munday, the 11th Lancashire Fusilier’s new adjutant (Kempson having been shot through the shoulder in the attack on Regina Trench) sent a note for Tolkien to hand to the military authorities as soon as he was discharged from hospital. The battalion was short of officers, his signallers were under a non-commissioned officer, and he was needed badly, it said, adding: ‘Lt-Col Bird wishes me to state that he values the services of Lt Tolkien very highly.’ The CO was going to be very disappointed; but not so Tolkien’s friends. ‘Stay a long time in England,’ exhorted G. B. Smith when he heard. ‘Do you know I was horribly afraid you had been settled for good? I am beyond measure delighted…’ If Wiseman shared those fears he did not voice them, but he was equally merry when Smith passed on the news. ‘If you had offered me 500 guesses,’ he declared, ‘I would never had thought of your being in giddy old Brum, as you once called it. I wish I could get off for one day only, and would go straight there and see you.’ Tolkien, he noted, had sent him no poetry since their argument about its ‘freakishness’ back in March. Tolkien duly despatched some of his verses and, thanks perhaps to Wiseman’s prompting, during November he revised the long semi-autobiographical poem he had written in the midst of that argument, ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, renaming the sequence ‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow’.
On Saturday 2 December 1916 Tolkien was called before a military medical board. His temperature had been back to normal for a week, but he was still pale and weak and beset by persistent aches and pains in his legs. The board predicted that he would be fit for action in six weeks. In fact Tolkien was considering a transfer to the Royal Engineers, which ought to be safer than a combat unit. The idea perhaps had something to do with his father’s sister Mabel and her husband Tom Mitton, whose home in Moseley Tolkien was using as a correspondence address and whose son, Thomas Ewart Mitton, was a signaller in the Royal Engineers. Christopher Wiseman had suggested that Tolkien appeal to Tea-Cake’s father, Sir John Barnsley, to let him into his brigade. Nothing came of the idea; but in the meantime he was unfit for service, and the board told him to go home.
In his absence Edith had traced his movements on the map on her wall. Until now, any knock at her door could have brought a dreaded War Office telegram. His return to Great Haywood was thus an emotionally charged moment, which Tolkien marked with a six-stanza ballad, ‘The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel’. Tavrobel (‘wood-home’) is the Gnomish equivalent of Haywood (‘enclosed wood’), but on this occasion any mythological considerations seem secondary to the personal ones.* The scene is set with ‘two rivers running fleetly’ – the Trent and the Sow – and a reference to the old packhorse bridge that spans them at Great Haywood. Further parallels with Tolkien’s situation do not need spelling out as the ballad moves into a dialogue of love and longing:
‘O! tell me, little damozelle,
Why smile you in the gloaming
On the old grey bridge of Tavrobel
As the grey folk come a-homing?’
‘I smile because you come to me
O’er the grey bridge in the gloaming:
I have waited, waited, wearily
To see you come a-homing.
In Tavrobel things go but ill,
And my little garden withers
In Tavrobel beneath the hill,
While you’re beyond the rivers.’
‘Ay, long and long I have been away
O’er sea and land and river
Dreaming always of the day
Of my returning hither.’
With a final stanza that laments lost ‘days of sunlight’, ‘The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel’ is slight yet haunting. By contrast, Tolkien’s last batch of poems was unreservedly declared ‘magnificent’ by Christopher Wiseman, who promised that if Tolkien were to publish he could arrange for a decent notice in the Manchester Guardian. ‘I am convinced,’ he declared from the Superb, ‘that if you do come out in print you will startle our generation as no one has as yet…Really it is presumptuous in me to say anything about the poems themselves, but I am afraid they will kill the dear old XIXth Century altogether…Where you are going to lead us is a mystery…’ Wiseman now felt that G. B. Smith was lagging behind and was still fundamentally a Victorian writer. Surely, he added, the TCBS was ‘one of the most extraordinary associations ever’, what with its two antithetical poets and himself, more likely to become a finance minister.
Wiseman was concerned about Smith, and not just about his current poetic output, which he felt was ‘rather below his usual standard’. He had asked Tolkien to write ‘and tell me all about him’; but Tolkien had not seen Smith since August, and letters had become more and more brief. With the conversion of the 3rd Salford Pals to a ‘pioneer’ battalion of navvies, they had taken part in one attack but largely just laid roads and dug trenches. Such a unit had no use for intelligence work, so Smith had shouldered the dull duties of billeting officer. Every time the battalion moved he would go on ahead to arrange accommodation and then meet the troops as they marched up behind. Small wonder that he had complained ‘sheer vacancy’ was destroying him. At the end of October 1916, as Tolkien lay in hospital in Le Touquet, Smith had become adjutant, responsible for all the manpower requirements of the Pals. He announced the fact with a humorist’s false modesty (‘For such I am, eheu, eheu’), but in practice being adjutant was unexciting, and in a pioneer battalion it meant little more than churning out routine marching orders. ‘Fur undercoats will be neatly rolled and strapped on top of packs,’ he would write. ‘Strict march discipline must be observed and on no account must men be allowed to straggle…Battalion Order No. 252 para 3, re carrying of loose articles or parcels on the line of march, will also be strictly complied with.’
All this was contrary to Smith’s guiding spirit. By nature he was undisciplined and passionately skittish. He had once written despairingly: ‘My career in the Army has not been a success, because I cannot set myself or realise the Army ideals in business matters. What is clean? What is just? What is severe? I know not, nor ever shall, although I have tried very hard, from a sense of duty.’ Now he joked bitterly, ‘The Corps Commander is in the yard…and your humble servant sits in his Adjutant’s rabbit hole and simply shivers. I am so much afraid he will rush in and ask me why I haven’t complied with his XYX/S7/U5/3F of yesterday’s date or something.’ The schoolboy who had found the ‘engaging rascal’ Robin Hood ‘one of the most living characters in all literature’, and the ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’ of Tolkien’s mythology, were imprisoned behind an army desk.
Smith’s training in the language of military orders and reports had enabled him to describe with detachment in his official intelligence report for 1 July the slaughter of the men with whom he had lived and worked for eighteen months: ‘Owing to hostile MG fire the advance was made by short rushes. Casualties were heavy.’ So far as poetry communicates feeling, this was the reverse of poetry. The sheer horror of war, of course, also conspired to de-sensitize, as Smith knew when he wrote, of his generation,
Who battled have with bloody hands
Through evil times in barren lands,
To whom the voice of guns
Speaks and no longer stuns…
All this, combined with the sheer grind of winter life on the Somme, amply explains any decline in Smith’s writing. But war seemed endless; and if he felt sorry for himself, it is hard not to join him in sympathy. In one of his late pieces he addressed the spirits of Rob Gilson and other dead friends:
Shapes in the mist, ye see me lonely,
Lonely and sad in the dim firelight:
How far now to the last of all battles?
(Listen, the guns are loud tonight!)
At least the Salford Pals, stationed for the past two months just behind the front line, had lost no men in all that time. He had entertained his widowed mother with letters about his riding experiences, and the news of his friend’s safe return home seemed to have cheered Smith immensely. Unfortunately, his promotion to adjutant had delayed his next opportunity to get away, but on 16 November he wrote to Tolkien: ‘I hope I shall be able to come to Great Haywood, for my leave is assuredly on the wing.’
When the Battle of the Somme finally petered out in late November 1916, G. B. Smith was stationed with the Salford Pals at the non-descript village of Souastre, nine miles north of Bouzincourt where he had last seen Tolkien. The pioneers spent the short, freezing days in bursts of rain, sleet, and snow. On the morning of Wednesday 29 November, Smith was overseeing the usual repairing and drainage work on one of the roads leading out of the village, but he had organized a football match for the men that afternoon and was looking forward to playing. He was walking along the road when the air was split by the shriek of shells. A German howitzer had fired somewhere to the east, four miles or more away. Two fragments from a bursting shell struck Smith in the right arm and buttock.
He walked to the dressing station and, while waiting for an ambulance, he smoked a cigarette and wrote a letter to his mother telling her not to worry: his wounds were slight and soon he would be back at the base, Étaples. At the casualty clearing station he was in the care of nurses whom he knew and liked.
After two days, however, he developed gas gangrene. Bacteria from the soil had infected his thigh wound, killing off his tissues and swelling them with gas. Surgeons operated to stem the advance. ‘After that he quickly sank,’ his mother Ruth told Tolkien. ‘He dictated a letter to me saying I am doing famously and shall be in England soon after Christmas. He thought so, never realising the danger he was in…’
Geoffrey Bache Smith died at half past three in the morning on 3 December 1916, at Warlincourt. His commanding officer told Mrs Smith that those who had survived the terrible first days of the Somme thought they might live to see the end of the war.
Smith wrote his most fully achieved poem, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’ (begun before the war and rewritten in the trenches after being lost en route to France) as a riposte to the axiom that those whom the gods love die young. In it he had envisaged the perfection of a completed life:
O seven times happy he is that dies
After the splendid harvest-tide,
When strong barns shield from winter skies
The grain that’s rightly stored inside:
There death shall scatter no more tears
Than o’er the falling of the years.
Aye, happy seven times is he
Who enters not the silent doors
Before his time, but tenderly
Death beckons unto him, because
There’s rest within for weary feet
Now all the journey is complete.
Christopher Wiseman broke the news to Tolkien. ‘My dear JR,’ he wrote. ‘I have just received news from home about GBS, who has succumbed to injuries received from shells bursting on Dec. 3rd. I can’t say very much about it now. I humbly pray Almighty God I may be accounted worthy of him. Chris.’ In reply to a letter of condolence, Ruth Smith asked Tolkien to send copies of any poems of Geoffrey’s he might have, so they could be published. ‘You can imagine what is this loss to me,’ she said. After the death of her husband, Geoffrey had become her chief support and strength, and he had relied equally on her. ‘He had never left home until going to Oxford and we built many castles in the air of the life we would have together after the War.’
Tolkien had been gathering himself for a spring. Probably while still in hospital, he made a new list of Qenya words drawn from his lexicon, calling it ‘The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’ (another name for the language). Halfway through, he interrupted it with a chart of denizens of Faërie, in which every Qenya word is translated not only into English, but also into a second invented language, Gnomish or Goldogrin. In accordance with historical linguistics, his academic speciality, Tolkien had derived Qenya fictively from an older ancestral language via a series of regular sound shifts and word-forming affixes. He created Gnomish, Qenya’s sibling, by filtering the same originating language, Primitive Eldarin, through different sound shifts, sometimes also applying different morphological elements. This, principally, is how German and English have both grown out of the language spoken in common by the Germanic peoples in the first centuries A.D. Tolkien, however, followed his heart, not his head, by finding the inspiration for his two invented tongues in a pair of real-world languages that are utterly unrelated. Just as Qenya reflected Tolkien’s passion for Finnish, so Goldogrin reflected his love of Welsh. Qenya liked trailing vowels, but Gnomish forgot them. Qenya favoured the ‘hard’, voiceless stops k, t, and p, but Gnomish allowed their ‘softer’ voiced counterparts g, d, and b to flourish. (The names of the Finnish and Welsh national myths, Kalevala and Mabinogion, illustrate these characteristics well.*) Aesthetically, Goldogrin sounds as if it has been worn smooth by change and experience, as befits a tongue spoken in exile among the fading woods of our mortal world, in contrast to Qenya, spoken in stately, immutable Kôr. It seems apt that Qenya, the language of lore, had been devised when Tolkien was an undergraduate and a soldier in training, whereas Gnomish, the language of adventure, tragedy, and war, should emerge after the Somme.
The distinction between the two served Tolkien for the rest of his creative life, though he constantly altered both languages and their histories. He ultimately took Gnomish off the Gnomes and gave it to the Grey-elves of the ‘Silmarillion’, renaming it Sindarin. The Gnomes, or Noldor as they were called by that time, were then allowed to borrow it. But that was far in the future.
In the meantime, below the fairies and the ogres on his chart, Tolkien wrote Eärendl, the name of the sky-mariner who had presaged his mythology back in September 1914. Since then, Eärendel had remained a solitary figure, more of a symbol than an individual, but now Tolkien finally gave him a dynasty. Eärendel was to be half man but half Gnome (or Noldo): the son of a human father, Tuor, and a faëry mother, Idril. Idril’s father was ‘king of the Free-noldor’, Turgon, who ruled over Gondolin, the City of Seven Names. In hospital and on leave after returning from the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien wrote his tale, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, a major imaginative turning point.
The long periods of marching, or watching and waiting in the trenches, and then convalescing in bed, had allowed Tolkien’s ideas to ferment. Finally free to write again, he did so with tremendous fluency. The established matter of sky myths and Valinor and the Lonely Isle were set aside for the time being, as ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ came out of his head ‘almost fully formed’. An explosion of creative power, it established the moral parameters of Tolkien’s world, enshrining aspects of good and evil in faëry races and demiurgic beings who are locked in perpetual conflict.
Compared with later writings – even those composed immediately after the First World War – ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ shows very little of that detailed ‘historical’ context that is one of Tolkien’s mature hallmarks. Very few lands or peoples are named. The spotlight falls strongly on the city of Gondolin itself, and especially its constituent kindreds; but there are only occasional glimpses of the momentous history of the Noldoli, or Gnomes, and of how this branch of Elf-kind came to establish their city. He already saw ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ (or ‘Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin’, as he initially called it) as part of a much larger narrative in which the history of the Gnomes would be told in full. But for now that history emerged only piecemeal.
A terrible oppression has befallen the Gnomes. Most have been enslaved and are kept in ‘the Hells of Iron’ by the tyrannical Melko, who infests the north with his goblins and spies. Those who are not physically kept prisoner are penned in mountain-ringed Aryador and in mental shackles. The free Gnomes have fled to the hidden refuge of Gondolin.
It is in Aryador that the tale begins, already marked as a land of primitive mortals ignorant of the fairy ‘shadow-folk’ in their midst. But the hero, Tuor, is different from the outset. He shows signs of poetic inspiration, singing rough but powerful songs on his bear-sinew harp; yet he leaves as soon as an audience gathers. Tuor escapes Aryador by way of a river tunnel, then pursues the stream to the sea. A distinct air of the Finnish Kalevala, with its forest-dwelling lakeside harpers and hunters, now gives way to a mode of romance used by William Morris in books such as The Well at the World’s End, in which callow youths achieve moral stature traversing an imaginary topography. Yet already Tolkien’s landscapes make Morris’s seem slapdash and vague. It is hard not to become immersed in the sensory world Tuor explores, sharing his wonder as he approaches the unrumoured sea:
He wandered till he came to the black cliffs by the sea and saw the ocean and its waves for the first time, and at that hour the sun sank beyond the rim of Earth far out to sea, and he stood on the cliff-top with outspread arms, and his heart was filled with a longing very great indeed. Now some say that he was the first of Men to reach the Sea and look upon it and know the desire it brings…
In fact Tuor has been unwittingly drawn to the sea by Ulmo, demiurge of the deep, for reasons that remain unspoken: to enrich his spirit yet purge his desire for solitude, perhaps, or to ensure that he returns there at the end of the tale when he has a son, the mariner-to-be Eärendel.
For now, however, once the sea has made its mark, Ulmo silently prompts Tuor to move inland; but in the Land of Willows disaster almost strikes. Tuor succumbs to the delight of naming the butterflies, moths, bees, and beetles, and he works on his songs. The temptation to linger acquires its own voice: ‘Now there dwelt in these dark places a spirit of whispers, and it whispered to Tuor at dusk and he was loth to depart.’ But hints of war appear in the descriptions of peace, where ‘beneath the willows the green swords of the flaglilies were drawn, and sedges stood, and reeds in embattled array’.
It is tempting to see parallels with Tolkien’s own life during 1914 and 1915. (In the abortive 1951 recasting of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, Tuor is twenty-three when he sets out, Tolkien’s age when he began both his mythology and his military service.) Tuor is a singer seeking wonders, a coiner of words, and a loner, as Tolkien was a poet with a Romantic bent, an inventor of languages, and elusive even to his closest friends. As duty found Tolkien amid the ‘Oxford “sleepies”’, so it finds Tuor among the sluggish waters.
Ulmo, perceiving that the ‘spirit of whispers’ may thwart his plan, now reveals himself in his majesty, telling Tuor he must bear a secret message to the free Gnomes of Gondolin. Several thrall-Noldoli clandestinely guide him until fear of Melko and his spies drives all but one away. With the help of the faithful Voronwë, however, Tuor finds the secret Way of Escape into Gondolin, a faëry land like a ‘dream of the gods’.
The city of Gondolin, built on a flat-topped hill with towers, marble walls, and seedlings of the Two Trees, was modelled on immutable Kôr on the rocks of Eldamar. It is, however, a flawed copy. A place of learning, living memory, and alertness, like Oxford in ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, it is in danger of becoming a ‘town of dreams’ like Warwick. Ulmo’s message is that Gondolin must arm itself and strike against Melko on behalf of the thrall-Noldoli, and before the tyrant overwhelms the world. King Turgon refuses to risk his city on the advice of one of the Valar, who ‘hide their land and weave about it inaccessible magic, that no tidings of evil come ever to their ears’. The weary Tuor falls back into a contented repose among the Gnomes, who brush off Ulmo’s warning with declarations that Gondolin will ‘stand as long as Taniquetil or the Mountains of Valinor’. ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ had said as much about Oxford, asserting that ‘No tide of evil can thy glory drown’; but Tolkien’s first mythological story highlights the perilous complacency in such claims.
If the first half of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ appears to echo Tolkien’s creative development and slow acceptance of duty in the first year of the war, the second half surely reverberates to his collision with war itself. The vivid extremes of the Somme, its terrors and sorrows, its heroism and high hopes, its abomination and ruin, seem to have thrown his vision of things into mountainous relief. A bright light illuminated the world and raised awful shadows. In this tale, Tolkien’s mythology becomes, for the first time, what it would remain: a mythology of the conflict between good and evil. The idea that the conflict must be perpetual arose directly from a long-held scepticism about the blandly optimistic prognoses prevailing during the Great War, as Tolkien recalled in an interview nearly half a century later: ‘That, I suppose, was an actual conscious reaction from the War – from the stuff I was brought up on in the “War to end wars” – that kind of stuff, which I didn’t believe in at the time and I believe in less now.’
In ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, too, his fairies shed the diminutive stature they had assumed in Shakespearean and Victorian traditions. The shift may have had something to do with Wiseman’s cautionary words in March about Tolkien’s love of ‘little, delicate, beautiful creatures’, or it may have been in answer to a creative need: now the Elves would have to play a part in war on a grand scale. Though still ‘small and slender and lithe’ the Noldoli are the same order of size as humans, solid and physical, capable of dealing wounds and receiving them. This reversion to a more ancient view of elves also allowed Tolkien to draw upon the old motif of the faëry bride, with the intermarriage of human Tuor with Idril of Gondolin, and so bring Eärendel into the story as their child.
A story ensues of spies and counsels of war like a fairy-tale relation of John Buchan’s 1915 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, set in the uneasy pre-war years. But the jealous Gnome Meglin, betrayer of Gondolin, seems to come from old romance by way of battlefield reality: captured by the enemy, he reveals Gondolin’s weaknesses in exchange for his life. Tuor takes a chief part in the defence of the city when Melko’s monsters come up over the mountain fence, and he leads its refugees in flight to the sea.
‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is one of Tolkien’s most sustained accounts of battle. But Gondolin under attack is not the Somme, despite its corpse-choked waters and smoke-filled claustrophobia. Least of all does the tale dress up the English as Gnomes and the Germans as Goblins. Prior to the Somme, Tolkien had written the Germans into his Qenya lexicon as kalimbardi, associated with kalimbo, ‘a savage, uncivilized man, barbarian. – giant, monster, troll’. These words now appeared in the more recent ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words’ simply as ‘goblins’, ‘goblin, monster’.* In England, news of the destruction of Louvain, or submarine attacks on merchant vessels, made it easy to see the Germans as barbaric, or even monstrous. Cary Gilson had written to Tolkien from Marston Green after Rob’s death: ‘That you are going to win – and restore righteousness and mercy to their place in the counsels of mankind I am certain: and it is a glorious privilege whether one dies or lives.’ Even in the midst of the Somme, Tolkien wrote that the war was ‘for all the evil of our own side in the large view good against evil’. Yet on the battlefield he had faced an enemy with all the hallmarks of humanity. Meanwhile, the Allies also used poison gas and unofficially sanctioned the killing of captives. Tolkien later insisted there was no parallel between the Goblins he had invented and the Germans he had fought, declaring, ‘I’ve never had those sort of feelings about the Germans. I’m very anti that kind of thing.’
‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is not war propaganda, but myth and moral drama. Like Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Tolkien took the confused moral landscape of the real world and attempted to clarify it into polarities of good and evil; but he applied the principle on an epic scale. He explained his approach much later in a letter to his son Christopher. ‘I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in “realistic” fiction,’ he wrote, ‘only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For “romance” has grown out of “allegory”, and its wars are still derived from the “inner war” of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.’ So it might be said that the Goblins embody ‘all the evil of our own side’ in the real war, as well as all the evil on the German side. They wreck and pillage, and they kill prisoners. The Gnomes of Gondolin, meanwhile, embody virtues on which no nation had a monopoly. They represent (as he wrote of his Elves in general) ‘beauty and grace of life and artefact’.
The battalions of Gondolin rally behind the dynastic standards of the Pillar, the Tower of Snow, the Tree, the Golden Flower, the Harp, the Mole, the Swallow, and the White Wing, each with its own heraldic livery: ‘they of the Heavenly Arch being a folk of uncounted wealth were arrayed in a glory of colours, and their arms were set with jewels that flamed in the light…’ Their folk-names recall the Wolfings, the Hartings, the Elkings, and the Beamings of William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings: Gothic tribes whose names reflect an intimate bond with the land they defend from the acquisitive Romans. Morris turned the classical view upside down, so that his forest-dwelling Goths uphold civilized values while imperial Rome represents barbarism. Tolkien’s moral compass has a similar orientation. The Noldoli see nature as a thing of intrinsic value, not simply as a commodity. Like all of Tolkien’s Elves, they also embody the older faëry tradition in which they are the spiritual representatives of the natural world, as angels are of heaven. They defend nature herself against a covetous power whose aim is to possess, exploit, and despoil.
Tolkien had listed several monstrous creatures in the ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’ and its ethnological chart: tauler, tyulqin, and sarqin, names which in Qenya indicate tree-like stature or an appetite for flesh. All these new races of monsters proved transitory, bar two: the Balrogs and the Orcs. Orcs were bred in ‘the subterranean heats and slime’ by Melko: ‘Their hearts were of granite and their bodies deformed; foul their faces which smiled not, but their laugh that of the clash of metal…’ The name had been taken from the Old English orc, ‘demon’, but only because it was phonetically suitable. The role of demon properly belongs to Balrogs, whose Goldogrin name means ‘cruel demon’ or ‘demon of anguish’. These are Melko’s flame-wielding shock troops and battlefield captains, the cohorts of Evil.
Orcs and Balrogs, however, are not enough to achieve the destruction of Gondolin. ‘From the greatness of his wealth of metals and his powers of fire’ Melko constructs a host of ‘beasts like snakes and dragons of irresistible might that should over-creep the Encircling Hills and lap that plain and its fair city in flame and death’. The work of ‘smiths and sorcerers’, these forms (in three varieties) violate the boundary between mythical monster and machine, between magic and technology. The bronze dragons in the assault move ponderously and open breaches in the city walls. Fiery versions are thwarted by the smooth, steep incline of Gondolin’s hill. But a third variety, the iron dragons, carry Orcs within and move on ‘iron so cunningly linked that they might flow…around and above all obstacles before them’; they break down the city gates ‘by reason of the exceeding heaviness of their bodies’ and, under bombardment, ‘their hollow bellies clanged…yet it availed not for they might not be broken, and the fires rolled off them’.
The more they differ from the dragons of mythology, however, the more these monsters resemble the tanks of the Somme. One wartime diarist noted with amusement how the newspapers compared these new armoured vehicles with ‘the icthyosaurus, jabberwocks, mastodons, Leviathans, boojums, snarks, and other antediluvian and mythical monsters’. Max Ernst, who was in the German field artillery in 1916, enshrined such comparisons on canvas in his iconic surrealist painting Celebes (1921), an armour-plated, elephantine menace with blank, bestial eyes. The Times trumpeted a German report of this British invention: ‘The monster approached slowly, hobbling, moving from side to side, rocking and pitching, but it came nearer. Nothing obstructed it: a supernatural force seemed to drive it onwards. Someone in the trenches cried, “The devil comes,” and that word ran down the line like lightning. Suddenly tongues of fire licked out of the armoured shine of the iron caterpillar…the English waves of infantry surged up behind the devil’s chariot.’ The Times’s own correspondent, Philip Gibbs, wrote later that the advance of tanks on the Somme was ‘like fairy-tales of war by H. G. Wells’.
Indeed, there is a whiff of science fiction about the army attacking Gondolin, a host that has ‘only at that time been seen and shall not again be till the Great End’. In 1916, Tolkien was anticipating the dictum of Arthur C. Clarke that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ From a modern perspective, this enemy host appears technological, if futuristic; the ‘hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ of its brazen dragons remind us of the internal combustion engine. But to the Noldoli the host seems the product of sorcery. ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, in Tolkien’s grand unfolding design, is a story told by an Elf; and the combustion engine, seen through enchanted eyes, could appear as nothing other than a metal heart filled with flame.
Melko, the tyrant making war on Gondolin, is the Devil himself. But he is not sequestered in a Miltonic Pandemonium across the abyss of Chaos. The road to his hell runs northwards and downwards, as in Norse myth. A byname, Yelur, links him to Qenya Yelin, ‘winter’, seen in notes from late 1915 for ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ that speak of the ‘wintry spell of Yelin’ and ‘the icy blue-tipped sp[ears] of winter marching up beh[ind]’.* Melko himself did not apparently exist in Tolkien’s mythology before the Somme, but this poetic metaphor of a warlord bent on destroying light and life prefigured him, and he shares the same wintry functions.
Tolkien’s use of his sources was always daring. Unlike the Satan of Christian tradition, Melko is jailer to living beings – the thrall-Noldoli who slave for him in his Hells of Iron. But by making the Gnomes’ sojourn there a matter of compulsion, Tolkien was also rewriting traditions about underworlds ruled by faëry races such as the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann so that they seem to foreshadow Christian eschatology. It is the harrowing of this Elvish hell that Ulmo, through the agency of Tuor, hopes to achieve.
Captives who somehow leave the Hells of Iron are afflicted by ‘a binding terror’ so that even when they are far from Melko’s domain ‘he seemed ever nigh them…and their hearts quaked and they fled not even when they could’. Meglin, released by Melko after betraying Gondolin’s secrets, resumes his public life in Gondolin as if nothing has happened, but he will no longer work and seeks to ‘drown his fear and disquiet’ in false gaiety. He, too, is now under Melko’s ‘spell of bottomless dread’.
Melko (who is better known by his later names Melkor and Morgoth) represents the tyranny of the machine over life and nature, exploiting the earth and its people in the construction of a vast armoury. With a brutal inevitability, the Gnomes, with their medieval technology, lose the contest. Tolkien’s myth underlines the almost insuperable efficacy of the machine against mere skill of hand and eye. Yet it recognizes that the machine would not exist without the inventor and the craftsman. Melko does not know how to achieve the destruction of the Gnomes’ city: chillingly, it is Meglin of Gondolin who hatches the plan for the creeping beast-machines that will surmount its defences. The Gnomes are driven by ‘unconquerable eagerness after knowledge’. Melko has little use for their eagerness, but he depends on their knowledge, and so he has the thrall-Noldoli dig his ore and work his metals, leaving them stooped with their labours. In the Hells of Iron, the higher arts and sciences are subsumed or crushed in the service of mechanical industry – endlessly repetitious and motivated by nothing but the desire for more power.
As a literary creation, Melko is more than a winter-symbol or an abstraction of destructiveness and greed. He appeared in 1916 with remarkable timing. With his dreams of world domination, his spies, his vast armies, his industrial slaves, and his ‘spell of bottomless dread’, he anticipated the totalitarianism that lay just around the corner. Within a year, the Russian Revolution had established the first totalitarian dictatorship, its aim being to crush the individual will in the service of the economy and Bolshevik power. Lenin became a template for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the other political monsters of the twentieth century. But all that the totalitarian dictators did was to take to a logical extreme the dehumanization already seen in heavy industry, and to exploit the break with the past that the Great War had introduced. In its capacity to warn about such extremes, fantastic fiction has the edge over what is called realism. ‘Realism’ has a knee-jerk tendency to avoid extremes as implausible, but ‘fantasy’ actively embraces them. It magnifies and clarifies the human condition. It can even keep pace with the calamitous imaginings of would-be dictators. Doubtless Tolkien had no intention of making political predictions, but his work nevertheless foreshadowed things to come. A spiritual kinship exists between the unhappy Meglin and Winston Smith, downing his Victory gin under the eyes of Big Brother.