‘You ought to start the epic,’ Christopher Wiseman told Tolkien in the chill January of 1917. ‘When you do, however,’ he added, ‘mind you get on your high horse, not your high horse on you.’ It seems likely that Tolkien was already firmly in charge of the reins in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, and in another, shorter piece, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, which would introduce the whole cycle of tales now planned. For this introductory section, Tolkien devised a new mariner figure to be a seeker of wonders; unlike Eärendel, however, he was not to be a wonder in himself.
The new arrival belonged not to myth, but to the post-mythological twilight, that period on the margins of known history that so haunted Tolkien. The mariner’s role was to hear, and to pass on to posterity, the stories told about Faërie by the fairies. Even from the vantage-point of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, though, Gondolin and the other ‘Lost Tales’ would be ancient history; and the mariner would act as a mediator halfway between these unfathomably remote events and the modern day. The structure owes much to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – although a more immediate precursor was William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, in which Norse seafarers swap stories with the sequestered descendants of ancient Greeks whom they encounter on a remote island.
In all ways Tolkien’s mariner fits his fictional era, emerging (according to background notes) from the western coast of Germanic Europe and sailing to the Lonely Isle, the island of Britain. He is the father of Hengest and Horsa, the historical warlords who led the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Into the design Tolkien also wove parallels with his own life. The mariner’s original name is Ottor, which is simply the Old English equivalent of Otter. That seems to have been Tolkien’s name for himself in Animalic, an invented language he had shared with his Incledon cousins in childhood. Ottor is also called by his own people Wœfre, ‘restless, wandering’. He has suffered a profound spiritual longing since being orphaned in boyhood and his past has been blighted by a terrible war. In the Lonely Isle he will marry an elfmaid and their younger son, Heorrenda, will have his capital at Great Haywood, while Hengest and Horsa will be associated with Warwick and Oxford. Crucially, through Ottor the English will learn ‘the true tradition of the fairies’. The name given to Ottor in the Lonely Isle is Eriol, ‘One who dreams alone’. Without intruding any detail that would jar with his imaginative portrayal of an ancient world, Tolkien left his own signature on the canvas.
Arriving one peaceful evening at a town at the heart of the Lonely Isle, Eriol finds the Cottage of Lost Play – Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva in Qenya – a home from home that offers peace, rest, and food for the imagination. A man who has surfeited on experience, now he will adventure no more but will simply listen to the history of the Elves and Gnomes.
The cottage threshold leads back into childhood, both for Eriol and for the reader, and ‘all who enter must be very small indeed, or of their own good wish become as very little folk’. The wayfarer steps inside, and to his amazement finds himself in a spacious house, where the courteous elven hosts, Lindo and Vairë, make him their guest. It is a place of joy, comfort, and ceremony, where daily rituals centre around feasting and story-telling.
At that same moment a great gong sounded far off in the house with a sweet noise, and a sound followed as of the laughter of many voices mingled with a great pattering of feet. Then Vairë said to Eriol, seeing his face filled with a happy wonderment: ‘That is the voice of Tombo, the Gong of the Children, which stands outside the Hall of Play Regained, and it rings once to summon them to this hall at the times for eating and drinking, and three times to summon them to the Room of the Log Fire for the telling of tales’…
The ‘Cottage of Lost Play’ comes with liberal doses of ‘magic’ and a population of jolly miniatures who might have trooped out of a Victorian nursery book. Their high spirits are unleavened by either the amoral laughter of the inhabitants of Neverland in Peter Pan or the earthy scepticism that Tolkien later gave to the hobbits. That ‘the walls shake with mirth’ when a tale is to be told seems strange, as humour is hardly the dominant characteristic of the ‘Lost Tales’. The note of gaiety also chimes uneasily with the deeper themes of exile and loss in Eriol’s past and in the strange history of the cottage.
The magical house is situated in Kortirion, and ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ returns to the idea of the two versions of Faërie that had been developed in the Qenya lexicon and ‘Kortirion among the Trees’. The Elves here in the Lonely Isle are exiles, and Kortirion, their capital, is just an echo of Kôr, the city in Valinor across the western ocean that they left long ago after ‘hearing the lament of the world’. The cottage Eriol finds in Kortirion is built in remembrance of a more ancient house in Valinor, next to the silver sea and not far from Kôr. ‘This was the Cottage of the Children, or of the Play of Sleep,’ explains Vairë, ‘and not of Lost Play, as has wrongly been said in song among Men – for no play was lost then, and here alas only and now is the Cottage of Lost Play.’*
The two cottages, in Valinor and Kortirion, encompass between them a whole complex of relations between dream, reality, and story. Once upon a time, ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of men’ could reach the Cottage of the Play of Sleep by travelling the Path of Dreams, which ran (like the rainbow-bridge Bifrost in Norse myth) from mortal to immortal lands. There they would play at bows and arrows or climb on the roof, like the Lost Boys who follow Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie’s Neverland. Children who became friends there in their dream-play might later meet in waking life, as lovers or close comrades.
Dream visits to the old cottage had their perils, Eriol hears. Dreamers who strayed beyond the garden into Kôr itself, and saw Valinor, the home of the gods, suffered a complete estrangement from their own people, becoming silent and ‘wild’ and filled with yearning. It is in the nature of Faërie to enchant beyond mortal limits. On the other hand, some of the straying dreamers returned to mortal lands with heads filled not with madness, but with wonder. ‘Of the misty aftermemories of these,’ Eriol is told, ‘of their broken tales and snatches of song, came many strange legends that delighted Men for long, and still do, it may be; for of such were the poets of the Great Lands.’ Tolkien had been inspired and tantalized by the mythologies and folk traditions of the ancient world, and especially by the fragmentary remnants of Germanic legend he had found scattered through Beowulf, Cynewulf’s Crist, and elsewhere. Now he was devising a fiction in which these fragments represented the last vestiges of visions seen in Valinor itself.
Times change. When the Elves left Kôr, the Path of Dreams was closed, so that the Cottage of the Play of Sleep now stands desolate on the shores of Valinor. Lindo and Vairë, exiled in the Lonely Isle, established the Cottage of Lost Play as a place where ‘old tales, old songs, and elfin music’ might still be celebrated. But it is also the home of fairy-tales, and from here come the fairies who visit ‘lonely children and whisper to them at dusk in early bed by nightlight and candle-flame, or comfort those that weep’ (an urgent need, it might be noted, not only in Tolkien’s own childhood, but also in the Great War’s world of orphans). So the age of myth and the Cottage of the Play of Sleep cedes place to the age of fairy-story and the Cottage of Lost Play.
However, the truer vision of the old myth-makers may yet return. Eriol is given a glimpse of a radiant future when the roads to Valinor ‘shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men’ and the Cottage of the Play of Sleep will once more be filled with life. The scales, presumably, will fall from mortal eyes, and the earthly paradise be opened to them. This is expected to follow ‘the Faring Forth and the Rekindling of the Magic Sun’, to which the exiles of Kortirion raise their cups. Sadly, Tolkien never reached the point of describing these momentous events in any detail before his eschatological ideas changed completely, and he left only a hint of the universal consolation to come.
Readers of The Lord of the Rings may find two elements in ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ familiar. In Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva itself there is more than a hint of elven Rivendell, with its Hall of Fire where tales are told and songs sung; and the queen of the Lonely Isle in ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, Meril-i-Turinqi, has something of Galadriel about her. She lives among her maidens in a ceremonial circle of trees in Kortirion, like Galadriel in her city of trees in Lothlórien. Meril is a descendant of Inwë, the elven-king over the sea, as Galadriel is of Ingwë, his counterpart in later stages of the mythology. Both elf-queens are repositories of ancient knowledge, but each also is the source of a supernaturally enduring vitality: Meril through the marvellous drink limpë that she dispenses, Galadriel through the power to arrest decay in her realm. It is symptomatic of both the fluidity and the stability of Tolkien’s mythopoeic conceptions that, while names evolved and the interrelationships of individuals and peoples changed almost beyond recognition through years of writing, rewriting, and recasting, these embodiments of quintessential elvishness – the house of lore and the queen of trees – recurred.*
‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, complete by early February 1917, makes plain that Tolkien already had in mind the idea that Eriol would hear the Lost Tales in Kortirion. In one note, the tales were to be written down by Heorrenda of Hægwudu (Great Haywood), Eriol’s son by the elf-maid Naimi, in a ‘Golden Book’: the Qenya and Gnomish lexicons give translations for this title. But it was also to be known as i·band a·gwentin laithra, the ‘Book of Lost Tales’.
The title recalls R. W. Chambers’ reference to ‘the lost Tale of Wade’, in a chapter of his study of the Old English poem Widsith that focuses on the old sea-legends of the ancient Germanic tribes of the north-western European coastlands (and which also deals with Éarendel). Chambers’ book reads like a message to Tolkien. He rages against the Romans for disdaining the illiterate Germans and failing to record their songs and tales, and laments the fact that, despite King Alfred’s love for the old lays, the Anglo-Saxons wrote too few of them down. ‘So this world of high-spirited, chivalrous song has passed away,’ says Chambers. ‘It is our duty then to gather up reverently such fragments of the old Teutonic epic as fortune has preserved in our English tongue, and to learn from them all we can of that collection of stories of which these fragments are the earliest vernacular record.’ But Tolkien may have had the idea of ‘lost tales’ at the back of his mind even longer. Lord Macaulay, in the book that provided Tolkien with the model for his ‘Battle of the Eastern Field’, explains himself in similar terms: his Lays of Ancient Rome were attempts to recreate what the national poems of early Rome would have been like before their local character was swallowed up by the culture of Greece. In passing, he notes that oblivion has taken the ancient Germanic and English songs too.
When Tolkien summed up his youthful ambitions in a letter to Milton Waldman of Collins, the publisher, written c.1951, he put England at their heart: ‘Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.’ But in creating this mythology for England, the younger Tolkien was responding to a particular sense of nationalism that had much in common both with Macaulay’s love of early Rome, a self-contained cultural unity, and with Chambers’ hatred of late Rome, an acquisitive empire. He was celebrating the linguistic and cultural roots of ‘Englishness’, not vaunting (or even mourning) the British Empire. His opposition to imperialism was deep-seated, and extended not only to support for Home Rule in Ireland but also, not long after the war, to a horror at the increasingly popular idea that English itself, the object of his love and his labour, would become the universal lingua franca thanks to America’s entry on the world stage at the end of the Great War – ‘as an ambition’, he wrote, ‘the most idiotic and suicidal that a language could entertain’:
Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’…sufficiently to realize the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life…
No manifesto fired Tolkien’s mythology; instead, a particular ‘vision of life’ that was bound up with physical rather than political geography. He told Waldman: ‘It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East)…’ If anything, by harking back to the common origins of the English and German languages and traditions, and by focusing on decline and fall, the mythology ran counter to wartime jingoism.
Prior to the Somme, Tolkien had spent much time playing with words and symbols and reflective lyricism. But something had happened to his ambition to become a poet, born out of the Council of London in December 1914. With the Lost Tales he turned to narrative prose, the mode for which he would chiefly be remembered. ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ could certainly have been written as narrative verse – the form of Beowulf and the Kalevala, of his mythological work in the 1920s, and of sections of his 1914 Story of Kullervo. Reasons why he now set verse aside can only be guessed at. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Sidgwick & Jackson had rejected his volume of poems, The Trumpets of Faërie. Perhaps he was suffering from some kind of poetic block: he admitted to Wiseman in August 1917 that so far that year he had only written one poem. On the other hand, he may simply have felt that prose was the pragmatic choice, free of the technical difficulties of rhythm and rhyme. He knew, after all, that as soon as he was fit he would be called back to fight.
His leave of absence ended on 12 January 1917, and, to be available for duty, Tolkien went to stay in Monument Road, Edgbaston, and in Wake Green Road, Moseley. But he had been unwell again. Hearing this, Wiseman declared himself ‘unreservedly glad’ and told him, ‘Malinger to your utmost. I rely on Mrs T…’ In fact, Tolkien had no need to sham illness. By the time he faced a second medical board at the Birmingham University Hospital on 23 January, the fever had returned twice, though the attacks were relatively minor. It was not unusual for trench fever to recur months, even years, after the first infection. Following his return from the Somme, Tolkien was caught between two potentially lethal forces: the War Office and illness. For now, the latter had the upper hand; he was still pale and weak and could eat little, and an ache lingered in his knees and elbows. The military doctors sent him back to Edith for another month.
The interlude at Great Haywood came to its final end on Thursday 22 February 1917. Tolkien returned to Monument Road and then to Abbotsford, Moseley. On 27 February a medical board saw Tolkien at Lichfield Military Hospital and found that his health had improved little. Pending his return to service overseas, he had been earmarked for the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers, which guarded the Yorkshire coast and the mouth of the River Humber against invasion. Accordingly, he was now sent to a convalescent hospital for officers in Harrogate, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, and far from home.
There was, of course, one major compensation for the upheaval, as Edith reminded him: ‘Every day in bed means another day in England.’ Every day also brought him closer to health. At the end of his month at Furness Auxiliary Hospital, though his joints were still causing him pain, he was found fit for light duty.
First Tolkien was granted three weeks’ leave, at 95 Valley Drive, where Edith and her cousin Jennie Grove had taken lodgings early in March. In the middle of April, Wiseman finally obtained shore leave and invited himself rambunctiously to the Tolkiens’: ‘I am going to burst into your literary solitudes, with the permission of Mrs Tolkien, and with or without yours,’ he declared. ‘So here’s to the Council of Harrogate.’ He was overjoyed to find his friend still in England and likely to stay there for some while to come. ‘Meanwhile let all the pushes go merrily on in France and finish before you get out again,’ he wrote.
Despite his predilection for humour, there is no reason to think that Wiseman had been joking when he urged Tolkien to malinger. Of the TCBS, only the Great Twin Brethren were left, and he had every reason to fear that Tolkien might join Rob Gilson and G. B. Smith in the corner of some foreign field.
‘As you said,’ Wiseman had written early in the year, ‘it is you and I now, Greenfield Crescent and Gothic, the old and original. The whole thing is so ineffably mysterious. To have seen two of God’s giants pass before our eyes, to have lived and laughed with them, to have learnt of them, to have found them something like ourselves, and to see them go back again into the mist whence they came out.’
True to these sentiments, Wiseman had suggested that he and Tolkien, as the two surviving TCBSites, should take an interest in Smith’s creative legacy, his poetry, and in Ruth Smith’s efforts to have it published. She had now lost her other son, Roger, a subaltern attached to the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Tigris front in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), who had been killed in action at Basra in January. ‘I cannot believe the terrible thing that has befallen me,’ their mother wrote to John Ronald. ‘To lose two such fine sons is indeed crushing.’ Her sole consolation was the thought that Roger never knew his brother was dead. Wiseman summed up the tragedy to Tolkien: ‘I suppose very few people have given more than Mrs Smith; it is unspeakably sad. I ought to write to her, but can’t find words to do so with.’
By the time Tolkien and Wiseman met in Harrogate on 18 April 1917, the German forces had fallen back from the Somme; though not in defeat. It was a strategic withdrawal that straightened and shortened their line, making it easier to defend. But it made a mockery of months of bitter battle and appalling loss of life. All that Britain and its allies gained was ‘a few acres of mud’, as Wiseman said. Such events made the struggle to salvage emotional, moral, and spiritual meaning ever more acute. This was the year the French army mutinied and the Russian army collapsed completely.
Life in England was a shadow of its pre-war self; ‘the starvation-year’, Tolkien called 1917. At the end of January, Germany had resumed unrestricted naval warfare, which had been held in abeyance through much of 1916. Now U-boats laid siege to Britain, attacking not only military vessels but also merchant vessels and hospital ships. The Asturias, which had borne Tolkien in fever back from France in November, was torpedoed without warning and sunk off the south coast of England on 20 March; it had offloaded its cargo of invalids but forty-one crew and staff died. In April, a quarter of the ships leaving British ports fell victim to mines or submarines. The U-boat campaign also brought America into the war against Germany, but it would be a long time before US troops arrived in Europe in decisive numbers. In the midst of England’s increasing austerity, and after nearly six months of almost continuous leave from the army, Tolkien was plunged back into military life. He was still very run down, and not yet fit to return to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Instead he was despatched to the Humber Garrison, on the north-east coast.
Tolkien arrived there on Thursday 19 April 1917, immediately after ‘the Council of Harrogate’ and just before the Battle of Arras. He may have been posted initially to Hornsea, where the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers had an outpost and musketry school; at any rate it was in this seaside town that Edith and Jennie Grove took lodgings. But if Tolkien was ever sent there, he did not stay for long. The battalion had its headquarters at Thirtle Bridge, fifteen miles south, on the peninsula of Holderness, a low land of hollows and hummocks and shallow ridges. Holderness was critically placed, stretched like a guardian sea-lion between the North Sea and the mouth of the Humber, which had provided an inroad for the ships of the early Anglo-Saxon settlers. Centuries on, Edward II began defensive works at Hull, and later Henry VIII extended the defences to the coast. With the advent of the First World War, fortresses had been built in the midst of the broad, muddy estuary, and the banks were dotted with watch-posts, signals stations, and batteries. Thirtle Bridge Camp itself had been established on farmland where the road from coastal Withernsea ran across an old drainage ditch on the way to the village of Roos, a mile further inland.
Life here was notoriously dull. The railway was nearly three miles from Thirtle Bridge, at Withernsea, and the visiting wives of officers had to be ferried from the station to the camp by pony and trap. As one subaltern put it, ‘Here some sixty officers and nearly fifteen hundred men passed laborious days of work and leisure. Which of the two was calculated to bore one more, would be hard to say.’ More than half of the officers were unfit, like Tolkien, and among them at various times were several from the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Fawcett-Barry, the former commander of ‘A’ Company, was adjutant at Thirtle Bridge for a while, and Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, Tolkien’s commanding officer on the Somme, now organized battalion sports, plays, and concerts here. Tolkien’s friend Huxtable, still recovering from being buried alive in the trenches, was stationed at nearby Tunstall Hall, but was sent back to France in September.
In a 1917 photograph with Edith at the seaside, Tolkien is noticeably thin, and his baggy officer’s breeches look too big. Twelve days after his posting, a medical board at Hull found him fit for general home front duties; but the doctors said he still needed ‘hardening’. From the time Tolkien joined the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers until the end of the war, it sent close on seven hundred officers overseas, including those who had been invalided home. He had to get fighting fit again through the old slog of physical training. How else he was occupied is unclear, but the battalion’s new recruits needed signals training, and there were patrols to be carried out along the low seaward cliffs: a dangerous job on stormy nights because no lights must be shown. Zeppelins made incursions over the coast, and from Thirtle Bridge their bombs could be seen exploding in and around Hull. Searchlights showed them up like silver cigars, high in the sky.
The Holderness landscape, though bleak, bordered the sea, which haunted so much of what Tolkien wrote. Its cliffs provide a precarious defence against the depredations of the hungry waves. Land disappears at Withernsea and southwards faster than almost anywhere in the world – nearly six feet a year. The North Sea has devoured swathes of shoreline here, gnawing its way westwards through the shales and clays since before the Anglo-Saxons came. More than thirty towns have been swallowed up since the twelfth century, and from time to time the sea casts ashore bones from graves it has robbed. The Humber and the North Sea have worked other remarkable changes on topography. A lowland to the south is called Sunk Island, though in fact it originally rose as a sandbank out of the estuary waters in the reign of Charles II before joining the mainland. The long, protruding sand spit of Spurn Point, continually remodelled by the elements, swings very slowly east and west like a geological pendulum.
The clearest evidence that the shifting Holderness landscape entered into Tolkien’s imaginary world is contained, characteristically, in a fragment of an invented language. G. B. Smith had left him some books of Welsh, including the four branches of the Mabinogi, and at this time Tolkien was jotting down words and etymologies for his own Welsh-influenced tongue, Gnomish or Goldogrin. He decided that his new lexicon could be an artefact created by Eriol, and he wrote the mariner’s name on the cover under the title i·Lam na·Ngoldathon. But below he added in Gnomish the dateline ‘Tol Withernon (and many places besides), 1917’. The date indicates that here, on one level, Eriol is Tolkien’s nom de plume, while Tol Withernon, which occurs nowhere else, evokes Withernsea, the nearest town to Thirtle Bridge. He might have meant it as Eriol’s landfall: to Holderness, in the dim origins of English history, came the Germanic seafarers across the North Sea from Angeln.
The origin of Withern- in Withernsea is debatable, and it is unclear whether Tolkien intended his Goldogrin equivalent to be meaningful. But Gnomish tol means ‘island’, suggesting that he thought the ending of Withernsea was Old Norse ey or Old English ēg, īeg, all with that meaning. On the face of it, this would be a strange interpretation, for Withernsea is part of mainland Britain. However, near the town’s edge is a reedy flat that used to be a lake until the thirteenth century; and local tradition held that the North Sea once flowed in here, running in a winding channel to the Humber itself and cutting off the southern half of the Holderness peninsula from the mainland.* In Tol Withernon we perhaps glimpse a matching conception of an island on the eastern edge of the larger Tol Eressëa.
The transformative power of the sea was to play a key role in Middle-earth, a world repeatedly refashioned by its waters in the wars between the Valar and Morgoth and in the destruction of Númenor, Tolkien’s 1930s version of Atlantis. But in 1917, the gale-battered coast of Holderness made an appropriate setting for a further complete reworking of ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’, the storm poem Tolkien had last worked on two and a half years earlier. The 1917 version, written while he was living in a lonely house near Roos, provides a glimpse of an early Tolkienian cosmogony remarkable for its violence:
in those eldest of the days
When the world reeled in the tumult as the Great Gods tore
the Earth
In the darkness, in the tempest of the cycles ere our birth.
The lines seem of a piece with the era, when world-shaking human conflicts and the harsh cycles of nature might have looked like two aspects of a single truth. War was unrelenting, and in Russia, where the Tsar had abdicated, revolutionaries were calling on workers of the world to rise up. But this conception of nature created from conflict also mirrors the rending and rebuilding of Holderness. In the 1917 version of the sea poem, it manifests itself in the actions of the capricious sea-spirit Ossë, who assails coasts, wrecks ships, and sends
the embattled tempest roaring up behind the tide
When the trumpet of the first winds sounded, and the grey sea
sang and cried
As a new white wrath woke in him, and his armies rose to war
And swept in billowed cavalry towards the walled and moveless shore.
Mindful of the ambivalent nature of the sea, Tolkien had assigned to it not one but two tutelary spirits. The greater of the two is not Ossë, despite his furious strength, but Ulmo (Gnomish Ylmir) ‘the upholder’, who understands the hearts of Elves and Men and whose music haunts its hearers. Accordingly, he now renamed the poem ‘The Horns of Ulmo’, tying it for the first time to his infant mythology. Additional lines identified the song as Tuor’s account of how he heard the music of Ulmo in the Vale of Willows.
In the twilight by the river on a hollow thing of shell
He made immortal music, till my heart beneath his spell
Was broken in the twilight, and the meadows faded dim
To great grey waters heaving round the rocks where sea-birds swim.
Even when Tuor emerges from the spell, a salt mist redolent of Holderness lies over the Oxford-like Vale of Willows.
Only the reeds were rustling, but a mist lay on the streams Like a sea-roke drawn far inland, like a shred of salt sea-dreams. ‘Twas in the Land of Willows that I heard th’unfathomed breath Of the Horns of Ylmir calling – and shall hear them till my death.
For a while during the spring of 1917, Tolkien was put in charge of an outpost of the Humber Garrison near Thirtle Bridge at Roos (in a house next to the post office, according to local tradition) and Edith was able to live with him.
‘In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance,’ he wrote to their son Christopher after her death in 1971. When duty permitted, they would stroll in a nearby wood, which Roos tradition identifies as Dents Garth, at the south end of the village, beside the parish church of All Saints. Here, at the feet of the ash, oak, sycamore, and beech trees, tall flowers with white umbels burst into bloom from mid-April until the end of May. The flowers, Anthriscus sylvestris, are what books might call cow parsley, wild chervil, or Queen Anne’s lace, among many other names; but Tolkien referred to all such white-flowered umbellifers (and not just the highly poisonous Conium maculatum) by the usual rural name of hemlock.* Among these cloudy white heads, Edith danced and sang. The scene fixed itself in Tolkien’s mind. It could have come from fairy-tale, a vision of sylvan loveliness glimpsed by a wanderer returned from war. When he next had the leisure to compose at length, Tolkien put the scene at the heart of just such a tale.
But in the meantime, on Friday 1 June 1917, RAMC officers at Hull found him fit for general service. The timing could hardly have been worse. Three days later, the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers sent more than a hundred men off to various fronts. On 7 June, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers (who had not seen frontline duty since their arrival in Flanders in October) took part in a huge British attack on Messines Ridge, south of Ypres: an entirely triumphant reprise of the strategy at the start of the Somme, preceded by three weeks’ artillery bombardment and the explosion of nineteen huge mines. Bowyer, the quartermaster, was the only officer killed in Tolkien’s old battalion.
Tolkien, however, was told to continue with the Humber Garrison. He already had responsibilities with the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers and there was a strong likelihood that he might soon be made signals officer at Thirtle Bridge. In July he sat the exam; but he failed. Possibly his health was to blame. On 1 August he joined Huxtable and others at the regiment’s annual Minden Day dinner; but a fortnight later he succumbed to fever again and was admitted to hospital once more.
Brooklands Officers’ Hospital, in Cottingham Road on the north side of Hull, was overseen by a woman glorying in the name of Mrs Strickland Constable. As Tolkien lay there, German aeroplanes flew in over the coast and Zeppelins carried out a bombing raid on the city. In Russia, the provisional government that had ousted the Tsar was running into crisis. In Flanders, ‘Third Ypres’ was under way: the murderous quagmire of Passchendaele. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had marched up to the line under intense shelling that killed Captain Edwards of Tolkien’s old ‘A’ Company, still just twenty years old.
Tolkien’s temperature ran high for the first six weeks and he was kept at Brooklands for a further three weeks. The journey from Hornsea was arduous for Edith, who had conceived during her husband’s winter convalescence at Great Haywood and was now more than six months pregnant. His latest relapse brought matters to a crisis, and she abandoned her increasingly miserable lodgings in the seaside town, returning with Jennie Grove to Cheltenham. She had lived there for the three years prior to their engagement in 1913 and wanted to have the baby there. Christopher Wiseman wrote in an attempt to console Tolkien, but found words inadequate. ‘It is all the more distressing now that I cannot help you even vicariously as I could before,’ he said, ‘and though we are the TCBS we have each got to see the other shouldering his load by himself without being able to lend a finger to steady him.’ Failing (characteristically) to post the letter at the start of September, Wiseman learned five weeks later that Edith was still in Cheltenham and John Ronald still in hospital. ‘I am very anxious for news of you, and also of your missis,’ he wrote. But he added, ‘So the Army do not contain quite so many fools as I supposed. I expected them to send you out before now, and I am delighted they haven’t.’
Tolkien sent Wiseman the one poem he had written that year, ‘Companions of the Rose’. As yet unpublished, this is an elegiac piece about G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson; its title refers to the fact that both belonged to regiments that had fought at Minden, commemorated by the wearing of the white rose on 1 August. Wiseman, who approved of the poem, consoled him: ‘There is of course no legislation that touches the Muse, and she has not been entirely idle because you have spent a good time on the mythology.’
Indeed, when he was well enough Tolkien found the hospital a haven of congenial company (which included a regimental friend), and conducive to writing. Here, he wrote ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, the love story at the heart of the ‘Lost Tales’ that had been inspired by that moment of fleeting beauty earlier in 1917 when he had gone walking with Edith in a wood at Roos. The second tale to be written down, it moved far from the vast war that had taken centre-stage in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. The threat posed by Melko remained in the background, and the stage was given over to a personal romance. Around this time Tolkien also began to prepare the ground for a darker counterpart to this story, the ‘Tale of Turambar’. This was a direct descendant of his attempt, in the first months of the Great War, to retell the section of the Finnish Kalevala that deals with Kullervo, who kills himself after unwittingly seducing his sister.*
The large and complex mythological background to these tales was still evolving slowly, mostly by a process of accretion and alteration in name-lists and lexicons as Tolkien followed his linguistic muse. By the time he arrived at Brooklands, he had probably begun to enlarge the pantheon of ‘gods’ or Valar beyond the tiny handful he had named before the Somme. They were headed by Manwë and Varda and also included Aulë the smith, Lòrien Olofantur of dreams and Mandos Vefantur of death, the goddesses Yavanna and Vana, and possibly the hunter Oromë, in addition to the sea-deities Ulmo and Ossë. As for the Elves, Tolkien had probably decided by now that they first came into being beside Koivië·nēni, the ‘waters of awakening’. He knew that the Two Trees of Valinor, painted back in May 1915, were both to be destroyed by Melko and Gloomweaver, clearly the Spider of Night who had appeared in an early outline of Eärendel’s voyage. He also knew that the fortunes of the Gnomes in the war against Melko would pivot around the terrible battle of Nînin Udathriol, ‘unnumbered tears’. Most would become thralls to Melko, and those who remained free would be largely destroyed in the Fall of Gondolin, leaving a remnant led by Eärendel. In the end the Vala Noldorin would lead a host of Elves from Kôr across the sea in a quest to liberate the captive Gnomes, but Orcs would overwhelm them in the Land of Willows. Noldorin, surviving the attack, would fight Melko at the Pools of Twilight with Tulkas, another Vala. But these are shreds of story, and it is impossible to guess what else Tolkien was revolving in his head before the full narratives took shape in the Lost Tales he wrote immediately after the war.
Tolkien was discharged from Brooklands on 16 October, still delicate and troubled by pain in his shins and arms. A month later, on Friday 16 November 1917, Edith gave birth at the Royal Nursing Home in Cheltenham. It was an ordeal that left her in a critical condition. But her husband could not be there. On the day his son, John Francis Reuel, was born, Tolkien stood before yet another medical board in Hull. His fever had recurred slightly but now he was judged fit to carry on full duties at Thirtle Bridge.
England was under siege, and Tolkien was standing guard at the sea-wall, chronically unwell. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had seized power in Russia and called an armistice, allowing Germany to begin moving vast numbers of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western. ‘The end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now,’ Tolkien told his second son, Michael, in the darkness of 1941. He could get no leave to go to Cheltenham until almost a week later, just after the great but short-lived British tank advance at Cambrai. By then Edith was recovering, and Father Francis came down from Birmingham to baptize John. From Scapa Flow, Christopher Wiseman sent the kind of wish that is only made during a war. ‘When your kiddie comes to take his place with the rest of us who have spent their lives fighting God’s enemies, perhaps he will find I can teach him to use his sword,’ he wrote. In the meantime, he added, ‘I insist on the appointment of uncle, or some such position symbolic of incurable bachelorhood and benevolence essential to the proper inculcation of some TCBS rites and doctrines.’
Tolkien sold the last of his patrimonial shares in the South African mines to pay for Edith’s stay in the nursing home, but there was no pay rise when he was promoted to lieutenant soon afterwards. He returned to Holderness, and Edith now took rooms for herself and the baby in Roos itself.
His own health remained a problem and a mild fever took hold twice more, consigning him to bed for five days. But before the year was over, Tolkien had been transferred away from Roos and Thirtle Bridge to another coastal defence unit in Holderness, where his duties would be less demanding and he could receive on-going medical care.
The Royal Defence Corps had been set up in 1916 to make use of men too old to fight. A short-lived forerunner to the famous Home Guard of the Second World War, it also drew in soldiers such as Tolkien who were of fighting age but not fighting-fit. A unit for the old or unwell, it was a symptom of the damage war had dealt to Britain’s population. Tolkien was sent to Easington, a tiny farming hamlet of three hundred people huddled near the tip of the peninsula, where the 9th Battalion of the Royal Defence Corps spent desolate days watching the sea. It was considerably more bleak here than at Thirtle Bridge ten miles to the north. Cliffs rose nearly ninety feet out of the North Sea, the air was salty, and the land treeless. A century before, soldiers had watched for Napoleon’s ships from Dimlington, a tiny neighbouring settlement founded by the Angles; but Dimlington had since fallen into the sea. Close by, the cliffs dwindled and the land tapered into a long low tail stretching out into the mouth of the Humber: Spurn Point. A military railway ran past to the gun battery on the tip of the spit of land, built to replace the old road that the sea had also claimed.
The sea-tang enters again into ‘The Song of Eriol’, not so much a new poem as a reconfiguration of the old opening of ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, which had apparently dealt with Tolkien’s ‘father’s sires’ in Saxony. Christopher Wiseman had made some stringent criticisms of the ‘apparent lack of connection’ between parts of the poem. Now Tolkien pared the first part away from the longer sections dealing with Warwick, Town of Dreams, and Oxford, City of Present Sorrow, and reassigned the German ancestors to Eriol’s bloodline. So his ever-hungry mythology took a bite out of one of his rare pieces of autobiographical poetry.
Nevertheless, like the period in which it was devised, Eriol’s emergent back-history is dominated by an armed struggle spanning Europe, or the Great Lands, as Tolkien now called the continent. Just as it had in ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, the scene shifts from the ‘sunlit goodliness’ of the rural ancestral idyll to a time of devastating conflict.
Wars of great kings and clash of armouries,
Whose swords no man could tell, whose spears
Were numerous as a wheatfield’s ears,
Rolled over all the Great Lands; and the Seas
Were loud with navies; their devouring fires
Behind the armies burned both fields and towns;
And sacked and crumbled or to flaming pyres
Were cities made, where treasuries and crowns,
Kings and their folk, their wives and tender maids
Were all consumed…
Despite the very twentieth-century scale of these armies and the scarred landscapes (not to mention the anachronistic reference to naval warfare), the singer’s vantage-point is medieval. This is manifestly the Dark Ages, when the Germanic peoples who were thrust ever westward in waves of migrations and invasions set up their new homes in lands still marked by the ruinous stoneworks of the fallen Roman civilization.
Now silent are those courts,
Ruined the towers, whose old shape slowly fades,
And no feet pass beneath their broken ports.
The sentiment echoes that of the Old English poem The Wanderer, in which ‘ealda enta geweorc idlu stodon’, the old work of giants stood desolate. Like the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer, too, Eriol has been bereaved by an apocalyptic war. Orphaned and made captive, he heard somehow the distant call of the great sea and escaped through ‘wasted valleys and dead lands’ to the western shores, arriving eventually in the Lonely Isle.
But that was long ago
And now the dark bays and unknown waves I know,
The twilight capes, the misty archipelago,
And all the perilous sounds and salt wastes ‘tween this isle
Of magic and the coasts I knew awhile.
The inhospitable, fogbound tip of Holderness seems to make its presence felt here at the end of Eriol’s wanderings, while the sea, ever ambivalent, loses some of its lustre for him, much as it did for Tuor.
Tolkien found 1918 an ordeal. As the new year came in and he turned twenty-six, he was feeling much stronger, but then the pace of recovery slowed down. Exercise still left him exhausted, and he looked weak. Two months later he was struck down by a bout of 'flu which confined him to his bed for five days, though this was before the terrible Spanish influenza epidemic that left millions dead across Europe in the latter half of the year.
But in March, medical officers at the Humber Garrison put an end to his treatment. The Royal Defence Corps was being wound down, and on Tuesday 19 March Tolkien was sent back for further ‘hardening’ with the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers at Thirtle Bridge. He was reunited with Edith, and on 10 April he was found to be fighting fit again. Then, to Edith’s despair, he was posted back to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers.
The War Office needed every man it could get. The Germans had launched their long-expected Spring Offensive on 21 March, using all the vast manpower that had been freed from the Eastern Front when the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war. For Germany this was a last gamble before Americans could arrive in their millions. For a while it seemed a wildly successful throw of the dice.
Having withdrawn from the Somme in 1917, the Germans now swept over the British line. Tolkien’s comrades-in-arms in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were among those pushed back with great loss by the relentless tide, finding themselves on 26 March – after a sixteen-mile retreat – defending the old Somme front line where it had stood at the very beginning of the great 1916 battle. And this was only the first of five grand assaults by Germany.
Whatever the War Office had in mind for Tolkien, he was stationed initially at Penkridge Camp, an outlying section of Rugeley Camp on a ridge east of the Sher Brook, where he had stayed for a while during training for France. The barrenness of the heath was here relieved by a plantation of trees, and in the spring the Chase was more bearable than it had been when he had first arrived in late 1915. Later he was moved to Brocton Camp on the other side of the brook.
The return to Staffordshire ushered in a relatively happy interlude. Edith, baby John, and Jennie Grove found lodgings at a pleasant, rambling house called Gipsy Green, in Teddesley Hay, a manorial estate at the western foot of the Chase, and Tolkien was able to stay with them. He took out his sketchbooks again after a long break and drew the house, together with a tableau of scenes of family life. In his Gnomish lexicon, where he was outlining ideas for further ‘Lost Tales’ during 1918, Gipsy Green followed Warwick, Great Haywood, Oxford, and Withernsea into the topography of the Lonely Isle, becoming Fladweth Amrod or Nomad’s Green, ‘a place in Tol Erethrin where Eriol sojourned a while, nigh to Tavrobel’. In the summer, his shared labours with Christopher Wiseman over G. B. Smith’s verse came to fruition when it was published by Erskine Macdonald as a small volume entitled A Spring Harvest.
But the Gipsy Green idyll, such as it was, ended on 29 June, when Tolkien succumbed to gastritis at Brocton Camp. He was sent back to Brooklands in Hull; and as soon as he had recovered he might be posted to nearby Thirtle Bridge. Edith teased him, ‘I should think you ought never to feel tired again, for the amount of Bed you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.’ Edith herself was still far from well, and she refused to move again. With Jennie she had lived in twenty-two different sets of lodgings in the two years since leaving Warwick in the spring of 1915 and had found it a ‘miserable wandering homeless sort of life’. Nor was it over: Tolkien himself looked back on the period from John’s birth until 1925 as ‘a long nomadic series of arrivals at houses or lodgings that proved horrible – or worse: in some cases finding none at all’. But Edith’s exasperated decision now to stay at Gipsy Green was well timed: her husband spent the remainder of the war in hospital.
The gastritis that struck him down in 1918 may have saved his life, just as trench fever had saved it before. The cruel pushes on the Western Front had taken their toll. Men were becoming scarce and, despite the arrival of the Americans, the war was far from won. On Friday 26 July Tolkien received orders to embark for Boulogne the next day in order to join his battalion in France. Almost as soon as it was issued, the embarkation order was cancelled. The War Office pen-pusher responsible had failed to take note not only that Lieutenant Tolkien was laid up in hospital, but also that his service battalion had effectively ceased to exist.
Straight after their pursuit by the Germans across the old Somme battlefield, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had once more been moved to Ypres, in time to be on the receiving end of the second great German offensive of 1918, on 9 April. Despite heavy losses, they were sent unsuccessfully against Mount Kemmel on 25 April (a day after the Germans had destroyed the defending unit, G. B. Smith’s old battalion, the 3rd Salford Pals). Then they had been moved far afield to unfamiliar territory in the French sector of the line, on the River Aisne, where on 27 May they bore the brunt of one of the fiercest bombardments of the war, and the Germans’ third 1918 offensive. After two days of fighting and falling back, they turned at bay to cover the retreat of the rest of the 74th Brigade. Nothing was heard from them again. All that was left of the battalion Tolkien had fought in were sixteen men who had stayed in reserve (led by Major Rodney Beswick, who had been with him at Regina Trench). The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were officially disbanded in August.
At Brooklands, Tolkien managed to pursue his mythological work, further developing Qenya and Goldogrin. He brushed up on his Spanish and Italian and – just as the Western Allies effectively joined the White Russians’ war against the Bolsheviks – he began to study Russian. But military duties of any sort were beyond Tolkien. Meals were followed by pain and stomach upsets. He lost two stone and regaining it proved to be a slow struggle. The Humber Garrison medical board decided he was out of danger and now needed little more than rest; but the War Office had ended the practice of sending officers home to convalesce, having decided that they made no efforts to get well.
He was saved from action for one last, crucial period. Germany’s astonishing 1918 offensives had failed to decide the war in the Kaiser’s favour. Now the tide had visibly turned as the Americans arrived in ever increasing force and Spanish influenza laid waste the half-starved German troops. The Somme, and more, had been swiftly regained by an armada of tanks. The Great War was hastening to an end.
Now Tolkien’s obstinate ill health at last registered with the War Office, or rather its manpower needs were finally easing. Despite a barrage of red tape, the bonds of service were cut with surprising speed. At the start of October, Tolkien was allowed to ask Lloyd George’s new Ministry of Labour if he could be employed outside the military. He was no longer attached to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers.
On 11 October he was released from Brooklands and sent across the north of England to Blackpool, and the Savoy Convalescent Hospital.
He was well enough now to enjoy a formal Italian meal there with several officers, including two carabinieri, on Sunday 13 October, and the next day a medical board found him unfit for any military duty for six months – but fit for a desk job. He was discharged from the hospital there and then.
The Great War ended on 11 November, with scenes of jubilation on the streets of Britain and ‘unwonted silence’ in No Man’s Land. Tolkien, who would remain a soldier of the British Army until he was demobilized, asked after Armistice Day to be stationed at Oxford ‘for the purposes of completing his education’. Like many who find themselves once more masters of their own fate after a long remission, he had returned immediately to where he had last been a free man. His ambition before enlistment had been to begin an academic career, and nothing (certainly not his unpublished, unfinished, and painstaking mythology) had changed his mind. He cast about for work but found nothing, until his undergraduate tutor in Old Norse, William Craigie, one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, offered to find him employment as an assistant lexicographer. From the viewpoint of the dictionary’s editors, Tolkien would be an asset, but from the perspective of a jobless soldier facing a future that had never seemed less certain, this was a big break (and one he remembered with gratitude in his valedictory address forty-one years later at the end of his tenure as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature). An Old Edwardian in Oxford reported back to the school Chronicle some time later: ‘We rejoice to have Tolkien still among us – rumours of a dictionary beside which all previous dictionaries shall be as vocabularies reach us, and we go on our way shivering.’
By Christmas, Tolkien had found rooms at 50 St John Street, up the road from the ‘Johnner’, the digs he had shared with Colin Cullis, and he moved in with Edith, John, and Jennie Grove. Students were flooding back from the armed forces, although they would not return to their pre-war numbers for a while and as yet, in the words of one historian, ‘were acutely aware of stepping into the shoes of dead men’. Soon Tolkien was earning extra pennies by giving tuition, chiefly to women students, and re-reading Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At Exeter College, Tolkien’s old friend T. W. Earp had (in the words of Robert Graves) ‘set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years’, preserving the minute-books of many undergraduateless societies, which were now re-formed. The Essay Club became the first public audience for Tolkien’s mythology when he read ‘The Fall of Gondolin’.
In the real world it was ‘the enemy’ that had fallen: the empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. But the old world had gone too, leaving the new one with a legacy of uncertainty, cruelty, and suffering. Millions had died, and very few were untouched by bereavement. Many of the young men who had stood beside Tolkien in those black-and-white photographs of rugby teams or dining clubs at King Edward’s School and Exeter College were gone.* From Tolkien’s school, 243 died; from his college, 141. From Oxford University as a whole, nearly one in five servicemen was killed, considerably more than the national average because so many had been junior officers.
Even Colin Cullis did not long survive the war in which he had been judged physically unfit to serve: pneumonia, brought on by the influenza epidemic, claimed his life just after Tolkien was demobbed. From King Edward’s, Tolkien’s cousin Thomas Ewart Mitton, five years his junior and a fellow poet, had been killed in an accident while serving as a signaller at Ypres. Of the broad Birmingham TCBS, Ralph Payton had died on the Somme in 1916 and the wise-cracking ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley, having recovered from shell shock, had been killed in action with the Coldstream Guards near Ypres in 1917. Rob Gilson was gone. The loss of so many friends remained, in the words of Tolkien’s children, ‘a lifelong sadness’. It was for G. B. Smith that Tolkien mourned most deeply; the two had understood each other’s social background and maternal upbringing; they had shared a school, a university, a regiment, and a bloody page of history; they had been akin in their reverence for poetry and the imagination, and had spurred each other into creative flight.
The war also weakened the bond between the Great Twin Brethren. Back in 1916, as Tolkien lay in the Birmingham University Hospital, Christopher Wiseman had looked forward to days of peace when he might go to Oxford and study law at Christ Church. He and Tolkien might share digs, he declared; ‘perhaps in the ever-famous “Johnner”’. After Smith’s death, and that of his own mother in August 1917, Wiseman had been abject, writing, ‘We must contrive to stick together somehow. I can’t bear to be cut off from the seventh heaven I lived in my younger days.’
But while Tolkien was at Easington they had had another ‘grand old quarrel’ of the sort that used to invigorate their walks to school up Harborne Road and Broad Street. Typically, it started from a small observation and became a battle royal between rationalism and mysticism. Tolkien found the most mundane human misunderstandings depressing, and blamed a ‘clash of backgrounds’ arising from what he called ‘the decay of faith, the break up of that huge atmosphere or background of faith which was common to Europe in the Middle Ages’. Wiseman was scornful: ‘That huge atmosphere of magic; that ghastly atmosphere of superstition: that it is that has gone.’ This was a religious dispute, with Tolkien speaking for the pre-schismatic Roman Catholic world, Wiseman for the Protestant Reformation and its legacy.
Wiseman had argued that the true modern clash was between foregrounds, with individuals too busy about their own lives to fully understand each other. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was the whole glory of the TCBS, that in spite of the clash of our foregrounds, which was very great, we had discovered the essential similarity of our backgrounds. The TCBS arose partly as a protest against the assumption of artificial foregrounds.’ Though he had used the past tense when writing of the group, he was emphatic: ‘I am still a TCBSite. I love you, and pray for you and yours.’
The bond had suffered much wear and tear. Through much of 1918 the two lost track of each other’s movements, but in December Wiseman wrote to say that he was going to Cambridge to teach junior officers. ‘So the TCBS will again be represented at both ‘Varsities, and perhaps may assemble from time to time,’ he said. He expressed ‘parental anxiety’ for Tolkien and Edith and baby John, but the TCBSian future, once colossal and world-bestriding, now looked merely life-sized.
On 15 July 1919 Tolkien made his way on a travel warrant to the village of Fovant on Salisbury Plain, a few miles south of G. B. Smith’s old training camp at Codford St Mary, to be demobbed. He was handed a ration book and for the next six months he received a small disability pension because of persistent health problems. The next day, almost exactly four years after he received his commission, he was released from service.