Once, Christopher Wiseman had allowed faith to take the place of mere hope and imagined that the TCBS would be saved for better things than war. Neither Rob Gilson nor G. B. Smith had achieved their ambitions in life, and the bond they had all forged now seemed fruitless. As Wiseman had said in a letter to Tolkien after Smith’s death, ‘What is not done, is left undone; and love that is voided becomes strangely like a mockery.’
Yet there remained another way to see their hopes fulfilled. Wiseman himself had once said that he, Smith, and Gilson wrote Tolkien’s poems. Smith had put it more tactfully: ‘We believe in your work, we others, and recognise with pleasure our own finger in it.’ Facing death, he had drawn consolation from the fact that Tolkien would survive, and there would ‘still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon’. Smith had wanted them to leave the world a better place than when they found it, to ‘re-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty’ through art embodying TCBSian principles. Beyond such broad outlines, what Smith dreamed is unguessable – as Wiseman lamented, he ‘never lived to write the “tales”’ he planned – but it may be surmised that he envisaged Tolkien, rather than Wiseman or Gilson, voicing the dream.
Gilson’s artistic talent had been in recording beauty or truth, rather than originating it. Otherwise his strength lay in personal relations. Ironically, his most widely circulated work was an anonymous platoon drill for coordinated trench-digging, which appeared in a wartime military manual aimed at school training corps – a significant contribution to the war effort, but surely not part of the TCBSian dream.
Wiseman insisted that his own ambitions had outlived Smith and Gilson, declaring, ‘I can still ask for the weight of glory we cared so light-heartedly to crave for in the old days, promising to pay the last farthing I have for it.’ But although he wrote a little music now and then, he never really found a medium in which he could match Tolkien or Smith. He did not become a finance minister, as he had threatened in a letter to Tolkien in 1916, but was drawn instead into the headmastership of a Methodist public school, Queen’s College in Taunton, Somerset, taking it on in 1926 as a duty rather than a pleasure. Here, he passed on the TCBSian virtues on a smaller scale, nurturing in his pupils a love of music, personally learning the oboe and clarinet to help raise a woodwind section for the school orchestra he formed, and teaching the violin to a whole class en masse.
As to fulfilling the TCBSian dream of kindling ‘a new light’ in the world at large, only Tolkien was left, as Smith had foreseen. Now he had a duty to his old friend, and to whatever divinity lay in his own survival, to pursue the mythology he had started to map out.
Straight after the war Tolkien set about the task of completing ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in earnest, starting out with a grand myth of world-making, ‘The Music of the Ainur’. The influence of the TCBS may be seen here, if anywhere. Back before the Somme, Wiseman had declared that the Elves only seemed alive to Tolkien because he was still creating them, and that the same principle held for all art and science. ‘The completed work is vanity, the process of the working is everlasting…The “conquests” vanish when they are made; they are only vital in the making,’ he had said – adding in a characteristic musical analogy, ‘the fugue is nothing on the page; it is only vital as it works its way out…’ As if he had Wiseman’s words in mind, Tolkien now depicted the creation of the world as an on-going act, and music as the primal creative form. Song is also the medium for supernatural power in the Kalevala; while Tolkien had already equated the music of Ulmo with the very sound of the sea. But ‘The Music of the Ainur’ portrays the whole universe as a choral work conceived by the Heavenly Father, Ilúvatar, and sung by the angelic host of the Ainur, who elaborate upon his themes. At the end, Ilúvatar reveals that their music has shaped the world and its history, while he has given it substance and essence.
Now when they reached the midmost void they beheld a sight of surpassing beauty and wonder where before had been emptiness; but Ilúvatar said: ‘Behold your choiring and your music!…Each one herein will find contained within the design that is mine the adornments and embellishments that he himself devised…One thing only have I added, the fire that giveth Life and Reality’ – and behold, the Secret Fire burnt at the heart of the world.
The early lexicon of Qenya may shed some light on the last statement, explaining that Sā, ‘fire, especially in temples, etc.’, is also ‘A mystic name identified with the Holy Ghost’. Ilúvatar’s further solo contribution is the creation of Elves and Men, together with their distinguishing talent – language.
Elevated subject and style should not obscure the tale’s pertinence to the terrible times Tolkien had known. It is nothing less than an attempt to justify God’s creation of an imperfect world filled with suffering, loss, and grief. The primal rebel Melko covets Ilúvatar’s creativity where the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost coveted God’s authority, a distinction reflecting Tolkien’s aestheticist anti-industrialism and Milton’s puritan anti-monarchism. Melko enters the void to search for the Secret Fire, yet having failed to find it he nevertheless introduces his own discordant music, brash but marked by ‘unity and a system of its own’. But in this collaborative Genesis, he distorts Creation itself, as Ilúvatar reveals: ‘Through him has pain and misery been made in the clash of overwhelming musics; and with confusion of sound have cruelty, and ravening, and darkness, loathly mire and all putrescence of thought or thing, foul mists and violent flame, cold without mercy, been born, and death without hope.’ These ills (universal, though strikingly evocative of the Somme) do not arise exclusively from Melko’s repetitive music; rather, they spring from its ‘clash’ with Ilúvatar’s themes.
In Tolkien’s view, creative decadence and spiritual schism were inextricably linked. During the TCBS crisis of 1914, he had told Wiseman: ‘It is the tragedy of modern life that no one knows upon what the universe is built to the mind of the man next to him in the tram: it is this that makes it so tiring, so distracting; that produces its bewilderment, lack of beauty and design; its ugliness; its atmosphere antagonistic to supreme excellence.’ In 1917 he had again bemoaned the decay in ‘beauty in all men’s works and fabrications for more than two centuries’, and located its cause and symptom in the ‘clash of backgrounds’ that had opened up since the Middle Ages.
‘The Music of the Ainur’ portrayed such schism on a universal scale, but moved beyond complaint to reach a consolatory view. Ilúvatar insists that the cosmogonic discords will ultimately make ‘the theme more worth hearing, Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous’. As if to shed some light on this rather bald assertion, he cites the beauty of ice and snow, produced from water (Ulmo’s work) by intemperate cold (Melko’s). So much for natural wonders and marvels; but how do the discords improve the experience of life for the individual facing ‘cold without mercy…and death without hope’? This is left as a riddle for the ensuing stories of good and evil to unravel.
In the tales that follow, angels eager to continue the work of creation descend into the new-coined world to be its guardians. Here they are known as the Valar, frequently called gods. Eriol, indeed, has never heard of a Creator or Heavenly Father, but he knows about the Anglo-Saxon gods Wòden (Odin) and Þunor (Thor), whom the Elves identify as Manwë, chief of the Valar, and Tulkas, their champion.
Tolkien’s pantheon is quirky and assymetric. There are no simple dualisms among the Valar: no god of happiness to counterbalance mournful Fui, for example, and no shepherd or sower to contrast with the hunter Oromë. The brotherhood of Mandos and Lórien, the gods of death and dreams, implies a visionary connection with the spirit world. Others of the Valar are not only actors in the drama but also elemental forces of nature: Manwë’s breath is the breeze, and Melko’s very presence in his native north breeds glaciers and icebergs.
The battle god Makar and his sister Méassë are anomalous. Their court hosts a perpetual battle in which Méassë urges Makar’s warriors to blows or revives them with wine, her arms ‘reddened to the elbow dabbling in that welter’. The scenario incorporates a powerful motif from Norse myth: Valhalla, the hall to which Odin’s shieldmaidens, the Valkyries, bring warriors slain in battle to fight every day under Odin’s eye. But the presence of Makar and Méassë and their brutalist iron hall in Valinor suggests an ambivalent view of war as a necessary evil. Notably, it is not Makar but Tulkas, a sporting champion ‘who loveth games and twanging of bows and boxing, wrestling, running, and leaping’, who deals blows for the Valar against Melko.* Méassë and her brother play only a minor role in the Lost Tales, and later vanished from the mythology.
The Valar of the Lost Tales have many of the imperfections of the Gods of Asgard or Olympus. Clashing temperaments meet in unruly council under Manwë, disagreeing especially over their duty towards Elves and Men. First among equals rather than absolute monarch, Manwë makes several poor decisions, misreads others’ motives, and stands aside when more impatient gods defy him. The Valar may be hot-headed, devious, and violent under provocation. But in general they err on the side of caution, shutting themselves away from the troubled world.
Melko precedes the Valar into the world, not as an outcast from heaven like Satan, but as a petitioner pledging to moderate the violence and intemperate extremes his music has brought about. His ensuing conflict with the Valar makes a whole history out of the biblical declaration, ‘Let there be light’.* The first era is the age of the Gods, when they live in the midst of the flat earth lit by Lamps at north and south. In the second era, they withdraw to a sanctuary in the west, Valinor, illuminated by Two Trees of silver and gold, but they set stars in the perpetual night east of Valinor for the advent of the Elves, Ilúvatar’s first-born children. But after Elvenhome has been established in bright Valinor, Melko destroys the Trees, as he destroyed the Lamps. In the third era, light is restored to the whole world by the Sun and Moon, the last fruit and flower of the Trees, and humans enter the drama. Elves fade from general view in the fourth era, which begins when Melko impairs the Sun’s original magic. So it is that the Elves whom mortal Eriol meets in the Cottage of Lost Play look forward to a ‘Rekindling of the Magic Sun’.
In this mythology of light, primeval darkness is embodied in the spider-form of Gloomweaver or Wirilómë, who helps Melko destroy the Trees. Her provenance is a mystery even to the Valar. ‘Mayhap she was bred of mists and darkness on the confines of the Shadowy Seas, in that utter dark that came between the overthrow of the Lamps and the kindling of the Trees,’ comments the story-teller Lindo, ‘but more like she has always been’. By contrast, primeval light is a liquid that flows around the young world but is gradually used up in the creation of the earthly and celestial lights, leaving only the intangible radiation we know. It is tempting to connect these primordial principles with the ancient void and the Secret Fire of creation. Darkness such as Wirilómë represents is unholy, ‘a denial of all light’, rather than its mere absence. But already it is possible to see abundant consolations for Melko’s discords and destructiveness: without them, neither Trees nor Sun and Moon would have been created.
Such paradoxes also run through the history of the Elves (also called fairies or Eldar, ‘beings from outside’). Their fall from unity into division, beginning on the long journey from the place of their first awakening to Valinor, is responsible for the diverse flowering of Faërie across the world. The first group to reach their destination, the Teleri, devote themselves to the arts of music and poetry; the second, the Gnomes (Noldoli), to science; together these two clans establish the town of Kôr. Through the diaspora of the third tribe, the world’s wild places become populated by fairies who have more to do with nature than culture. Those who strayed from the route are accounted the Lost Elves, the elusive Shadow-folk who haunt the 1915 poem ‘A Song of Aryador’. Only a portion of the third kindred at last reach Valinor and settle near Kôr on the Bay of Faërie as the Shoreland-pipers (Solosimpi).
They play a key role in a further thread of the legendarium, the hallowed prehistory of England. The British archipelago appears early on as a single unbroken island, serving as a vast ship on which the sea-god Ossë ferries the Valar to Valinor after the cataclysm of the Lamps. Later Ulmo, god of the deep, harnesses the primeval whale Uin to tow the fairies to Valinor, kindred by kindred. Catching the gleam of the Two Trees on two such voyages, the island flourishes into the very crown of nature. But proprietorial Ossë halts the third crossing westward, when the Solosimpi are on board. The ensuing tug-of-war between the rival water divinities exemplifies the occasional light-heartedness and frequent exuberance of the Lost Tales:
Vainly doth Ulmo trumpet and Uin with the flukes of his unmeasured tail lash the seas to wrath, for thither Ossë now brings every kind of deep sea creature that buildeth itself a house and dwelling of stony shell; and these he planted about the base of the island: corals there were of every kind and barnacles and sponges like stone…the isle has grown fast in the most lonely waters of the world.
When Eriol makes landfall to hear the Lost Tales, the Lonely Isle has yet to make the final voyage to its current location just off the European coast.
In leaving their place of origin, the Waters of Awakening, for a better life in the earthly paradise of Elvenhome, the Eldar follow the same progression as the Valar, who left heaven for their first paradise in the midst of the world. This curious repeated pattern, quite distinct from the Judaeo-Christian myth of Eden, seems less surprising in the context of Tolkien’s own wandering existence, particularly his childhood idyll, after leaving South Africa, in the English West Midlands – a home ‘perhaps more poignant to me because I wasn’t born in it’. This is not to say that the mythology was ‘about’ his own life; but that, like any artist, he instilled his creation with his values. For the Valar and the Elves, home is a blessing discovered, not inherited. Furthermore, no paradise may be taken for granted. Tolkien’s sense of home was fraught: his own rural idyll had soon been left behind for industrial Birmingham; he had lost both his parents; and since 1911 he had remained in no single place for more than a few months. In his mythology, Melko destroys both the divine and the faëry paradises.
The Elves find the serpent already loose in the garden. By the time they arrive in Valinor, Melko has been imprisoned and then released there as a penitent. Faithful only to his own original spirit, he exercises his malevolence again through envy of others’ creations – this time, that of the Eldar, whose art emulates the divine artistry behind the green world. In Tolkien’s poem ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, the fairies sing a ‘woven song of stars and gleaming leaves’; and in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ the heraldry of the elven battalions is a celebration of nature. The Gnomes of Kôr are the creators of the world’s gems, by a distinctively faëry science involving the infusion of stones with the multiform essences of light. Lusting for the products of this profligate genius, Melko pillages their treasury, destroys the Trees, and brings the vengeful Gnomes in hot pursuit to the Great Lands, where the rest of the Lost Tales take place.
But the Gnomes have fallen from creativity into possessiveness and have been suborned by Melko into rebellion against the Valar, who now shut Valinor against them so that the only way back for the exiles is the Road of Death. The story so far is Tolkien’s Paradise Lost, an account of the fall in heaven and the fall on earth it precipitates. The sequence embodies his early ambition (as expressed many years later to Milton Waldman) to depict ‘the large and cosmogonic’ upon ‘the vast backcloths’ of his mythology for England.
At the opposite end of the scale, ‘the level of romantic fairy-story…in contact with the earth’, lies ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, set in the Great Lands some time after the Valar have restored light to the wide world by creating the Sun and Moon. ‘Tinúviel’, drafted in the summer of 1917 and inspired by a walk in the Roos ‘hemlocks’ with Edith, features a love story, woodland fairies, and comedy in the kitchen of the Prince of Cats. But for all its light-heartedness, this Lost Tale most closely approaches the range of mood in The Lord of the Rings, ultimately acquiring the gravity of myth. The dialogue of low and high was something Tolkien had long valued; his comments in 1914 about the mystic poet Francis Thompson fit his own work perfectly: ‘One must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being’s harmony.’
Depicting the realm of Artanor, a wood where fairies hunt and revel but the intruder is bewildered or enchanted, Tolkien challenges the Shakespearean view of elves and fairies as frivolous, diminutive mischief-makers. First he restores the dignity of the fairy queen, whimsically maligned in Romeo and Juliet as Mab, the midwife of delusionary dreams whose carriage is
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web…
Such is the imagery that led Tolkien to pronounce ‘a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs’ for debasing Faërie. His own fairy queen, Gwendeling, is less ornamental and more substantial, a figure of mystery with a retinue of nightingales and a divine power of dream:
Her skin was white and pale, but her eyes shone and seemed deep, and she was clad in filmy garments most lovely yet of black, jet-spangled and girt with silver. If ever she sang, or if she danced, dreams and slumbers passed over your head and made it heavy. Indeed she was a sprite that escaped from Lórien’s gardens…
Gwendeling, one of the primeval spirits who accompanied the Valar into the world, is queen of fairies through marriage to Tinwelint, original leader of the third elven tribe. Their daughter Tinúviel inherits not only Gwendeling’s beauty and trappings, but also – in this most thaumaturgic of Tolkien’s tales – her powers of enchantment.
But this is also a love story in which love, transfixing and transfiguring the wanderer Beren when he sees Tinúviel dance among the hemlocks, seems a kind of magic. Its first enemy is not a demonic power but prejudice and mockery. Tinwelint regards the Gnomish Beren with suspicion because of his people’s thraldom to Melko.* When Beren asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he sets a seemingly impossible test: Beren must bring him one of the three Silmarils, peerless masterpieces of the Gnomes’ gem-making craft, now set in Melko’s iron crown. Tinwelint thinks this is impossible, and simply means no; but Beren takes the challenge at face value, pausing only to comment that the king holds his daughter cheap. His quest for the Silmaril is also a quest to overturn belittling irony and re-establish true worth.
Tolkien’s attempt to ‘reconstruct’ the lost tales behind surviving fragments – to restore the fairy queen’s dignity, for example – is an allied endeavour. For the confinement of Tinúviel in a fantastic tree-house, and Beren’s concurrent servitude under Tevildo, Prince of Cats, he excavated two familiar stories. He made a coherent, if mystical, narrative out of one of the surreal moments in ‘Rapunzel’, a story he knew from a childhood favourite, Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book. Whereas Rapunzel hauls visitors up to her treetop prison with her impossibly long hair, Tinúviel uses hers (vastly propagated by magic) to escape: Rapunzel is a thoroughly passive victim, Tinúviel anything but. Meanwhile Tevildo’s name (Gnomish Tifil, Tiberth – all related to Elvish words for ‘hate’) evokes Tybalt/Tibert, a cat name popular from the tom-cat in the medieval Reynard the Fox. Such beast fables left Tolkien dissatisfied; the beast was only ‘a mask upon a human face, a device of the satirist or the preacher’, he later said. He imagined therefore that the surviving incarnations of Tibert/Tybalt – down to Romeo and Juliet’s strutting street-fighter, who has shed his animal mask altogether – were only the shadows of a now-forgotten monster, Tevildo:
His eyes were long and very narrow and slanted, and gleamed both red and green, but his great grey whiskers were as stout and as sharp as needles. His purr was like the roll of drums and his growl like thunder, but when he yelled in wrath it turned the blood cold, and indeed small beasts and birds were frozen as to stone, or dropped lifeless often at the very sound.
It is a pity that later, as the exuberant Lost Tales gave way to the austere ‘Silmarillion’, there was no longer any place for this astonishing grotesque, vain, capricious, and cruel; but at least his role as Beren’s captor passed to no less a figure than Sauron the Necromancer. Meanwhile, Tevildo and the other animals in this tale, the faithful talking hound Huan and Karkaras, ‘the greatest wolf the world has ever seen’, are bold, blunt creations with magic in their blood; such human characteristics as they possess serve to reveal the beast within.
But the cat-and-dog story is only the test before the real crisis. Arriving in Melko’s stronghold, Angband, a shadowy immensity above an industrial slave-pit, we reach the crux of Tolkien’s narrative: the moment when the small but resolute confronts the demonic embodiment of tyranny and destruction. Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinúviel as ‘the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, “the wheels of the world”, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak’. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations.
The lovers’ clandestine entry into Angband, under the dark cloak of slumber that Tinúviel has woven from her own hair, provides an intriguing parallel with the assault upon the Two Trees by Melko and Gloomweaver under the cover of the Spider’s suffocating webs. It is as if the quest for the Silmaril, in which the light of the Trees is preserved, were in its small way an exorcism of the older nightmare. But the enemy cannot be engaged on his own terms. Confronting Melko, Tinúviel’s weapon is aesthetic: her spellbinding dance, to which she adds a dream-song that brings the sound of the nightingale into the heart of darkness.
The scene epitomizes a narrative moment that Tolkien saw in life, and in fairy-tales, but rarely in other literary forms. He coined a word for it in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’: eucatastrophe, from the Greek eu ‘good’ and katastrophe, ‘sudden turn’, and saw it as a glimpse of the glad tidings (evangelium) of eternal life.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is…a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Tinúviel’s attendant bird, the nightingale, is a fitting emblem of eucatastrophe, pouring out its fluting song when all is dark. Its symbolic significance may be measured in the words of men on the Western Front. Rob Gilson, hearing a nightingale in the early hours one May morning from his trench dugout, thought it ‘wonderful that shells and bullets shouldn’t have banished them, when they are always so shy of everything human’, while Siegfried Sassoon wrote that ‘the perfect performance of a nightingale…seemed miraculous after the desolation of the trenches’.
The glimpse of joy from the depths of hell is nothing if not fleeting, and during the flight from Angband the wolf Karkaras bites off the hand in which Beren holds the recovered Silmaril. Victory, you might say, has been snatched by the jaws of defeat, and Beren must return to Artanor a visibly reduced figure. Yet far from accepting that the joke is on him, Beren repays King Tinwelint’s earlier mockery with a richer jest by declaring, ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now,’ before revealing his maimed arm. It is a lesson in true value: instead of the bride-price, Beren delivers proof of immeasurable courage and love. Conceived when thousands of men were returning from the battlefront permanently disabled, this seems a brave and timely illustration of Ilúvatar’s promise of consolation for the discords in Creation. Through endurance, Beren has achieved a moral victory against which material acquisitions are nothing.
Love conquers all – even, in the end, death. For its final impassioned paean to love, ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ enters the plane of myth. As the Silmaril is regained in a wolf-hunt, Beren is fatally injured; soon grief-stricken Tinúviel follows him down the Road of Death. But at her plea, Mandos releases the lovers from the halls of the dead, and they return to earthly life. Yet even this resurrection may not be the ultimate release, but only its prelude, as we shall see.
Túrin Turambar’s story is the unhappy counterpart to Beren’s, telling of hopes betrayed, fruitless heroism and love gone awry.
Tolkien was not alone among latter-day writers in characterizing the individual’s fate as the work of a malicious demiurgic power. Thomas Hardy pictured Tess Durbeyfield as a victim of an Olympian ‘President of the Immortals’, while the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, in ‘Soldier’s Dream’, imagined merciful Jesus spiking all the guns but God fixing them again. In contrast, though, Tolkien’s faith in God and the mythological method may be gauged by his personification of cruel destiny in satanic Melko rather than in Manwë or Ilúvatar; and by Melko’s status as an actor in the drama rather than a metaphor. Túrin falls victim to the demiurge’s curse on his father, Úrin, a soldier taken captive but defiant to Angband after battle.
In its scale, centrality, and tragedy, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (though never directly recounted in the Lost Tales) inevitably bears comparison with the Somme – though it spans days at most and produces an outright victory for the enemy rather than a Pyrrhic victory for the allies. Nearly half of these countless, hopeful battalions of Gnomes and Men are killed. Tolkien provides an arresting and concentrated emblem for the terrible carnage in the Hill of Death, ‘the greatest cairn in the world’, into which the Gnomes’ corpses are gathered. Survivors, many of them driven to vagabondage, do not speak of the battle. Of the fates of fathers and husbands, families hear nothing.
Yet the Battle of Unnumbered Tears is much more than a military disaster. An epochal stage in a war that Tolkien saw as everlasting, it ushers in the enslavement of individual art and craft by impersonal industry and cold avarice: the thraldom of the Gnomes in Melko’s mines, and their demoralization under the Spell of Bottomless Dread. Imagination thrives now only in scattered faëry refuges, such as Gondolin and Artanor, a ‘bulwark…against the arrogance of the Vala of Iron’. The majority of Men, meanwhile, having proved faithless in battle, are cut off from Elves and the inspiration that they represent.
Úrin’s people, who stood firm, are corralled by Melko in shadowy Aryador, whence his wife Mavwin, with an infant daughter to look after, sends young Túrin to fosterage in Artanor. This separation is only ‘the first of the sorrows that befell him’, the tale notes, beginning a tally. Four times Túrin travels from a new home (Aryador, Artanor, the hidden Gnomish kingdom of the Rodothlim, and a village of human wood-rangers) into peril (near-starvation in the forest as a child, capture by orcs as a grown man, capture by the dragon Glorund, the dragon’s return). In successive phases he draws nearer to happiness and heroic stature, but is then plunged into yet deeper anguish.
Savage irony is at work here. It is not simply that good times are replaced by bad: happiness and heroism are the very causes of sorrow and failure; their promise turns out to be not hollow, but false. By tremendous daring and ‘the luck of the Valar’, Túrin’s dearest friend, the elven archer Beleg, rescues him from orc captors; but in the dark, Túrin mistakes him for an assailant and kills him. In the final pages he finds a beautiful stranger wandering distraught in the woods, her memory a blank; but every step towards joyous union with Níniel ‘daughter of tears’ (as he names her) is a step towards tragedy: she is his long-lost sister.
This final, most fiendish irony is set up by Melko’s servant, Glorund. A creature apart from the mechanistic dragons of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, he belongs to the same species as Fafnir in the Icelandic Volsunga Saga and Smaug in The Hobbit: carnal monsters who ‘love lies and lust after gold and precious things with a great fierceness of desire, albeit they may not use nor enjoy them’, in the words of the Lost Tale. His trail is desolation:
The land had become all barren and was blasted for a great distance about the ancient caverns of the Rodothlim, and the trees were crushed to the earth or snapped. Towards the hills a black heath stretched and the lands were scored with the great slots that that loathly worm made in his creeping.
Glorund’s particular genius, then, is to undermine beauty and truth, either by destroying them or by rendering them morally worthless. His despoliation of treasuries, his desecration of nature, and his delight in irony are of a piece.
The contrast with ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ could not be greater. Beren could overturn mockery, but it vitiates Túrin’s every achievement. The elven lovers escaped all prisons, but Úrin only leaves Angband at Melko’s will, after years of extraordinary psychological torture. Tinúviel could hide in her enchanted cloak and Beren could shift his shape; but Túrin can only change his name. You can almost hear the laughter of Glorund when, on the eve of his unwitting incest, Túrin celebrates his foresight in taking the pseudonym Turambar, ‘Conqueror of Fate’: ‘for lo! I have overcome the doom of evil that was woven about my feet.’ There is a hint that, if he had told Níniel his real name, her memory would have returned, thwarting calamity.
But a darkness falls between families, friends, and lovers (surely reflecting something of Tolkien’s own wartime experience). Tolkien underlines the point with a mythographer’s flourish, in a scene in which Níniel and Mavwin meet Glorund’s eye: ‘a swoon came upon their minds, and them seemed that they groped in endless tunnels of darkness, and there they found not one another ever again, and calling only vain echoes answered and there was no glimmer of light.’
The narrative divides to follow first Túrin then, in a long flashback, his mother and sister, as the siblings move towards their collision. Thus the reader exchanges ignorance for infinitely more uncomfortable knowledge. We can taste the impotent misery of Úrin, whose torture is to watch from a place of vision in Angband as the curse slowly destroys his family. In an acutely distressing scene prior to the reunion of the fatal siblings, Túrin is similarly immobilized by Glorund while orcs take away the elven woman who might have been his own Tinúviel:
In that sad band stood Failivrin in horror, and she stretched out her arms towards Túrin, but Túrin was held by the spell of the drake, for that beast had a foul magic in his glance, as have many others of his kind, and he turned the sinews of Túrin as it were to stone, for his eye held Túrin’s eye so that his will died, and he could not stir of his own purpose, yet might he hear and see…Even now did the Orcs begin to drive away that host of thralls, and his heart broke at the sight, yet he moved not; and the pale face of Failivrin faded afar, and her voice was borne to him crying: ‘O Túrin Mormakil, where is thy heart; O my beloved, wherefore dost thou forsake me?’
Knowledge does not bring power. Instead, when the isolating darkness in this tale lifts, the revelation can lacerate. For Turambar and Níniel at the end, the truth is unendurable.
‘The Tale of Turambar’ would not be a success if the hero were simply a puppet in Melko’s maleficent hands. The god’s curse appears to work not only through external circumstance, the ‘bad luck’ that haunts the family, but also through Túrin’s stubborn misjudgements and occasionally murderous impulses. Whereas Beren survives his emotional and physical injuries with innate resilience, Túrin endures his traumas through sheer obduracy, never losing their imprint. He first becomes a warrior to ‘ease his sorrow and the rage of his heart, that remembered always how Úrin and his folk had gone down in battle against Melko’; and later he invokes the memory of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears to persuade the Rodothlim to cast aside their secrecy, courting disaster. The curse is often indistinguishable, then, from what might be called psychological damage.
Tolkien’s declared aim was to create myths and fairy-tales, but there are haunting notes here from a more contemporary repertoire. One is naturalism. The desolation of Túrin’s world is often brought home through modest but eloquent tableaux: his cries as a seven-year-old taken from his mother; the swallows mustering under her roof when he returns years later to find her gone; his wine-soaked hand after murder at the feast. The other is ambiguity. Túrin’s victory over Glorund might be read as a final victory over his fate, yet it brings the curse to its full fruition by withdrawing the veil from Níniel’s memory. His dogged struggle through serial tragedy is courageous, but it causes terrible suffering. Likewise Úrin’s defiant words to Melko, ‘At least none shall pity him for this, that he had a craven for father.’
‘The Tale of Turambar’ is not so much fairy-story as human-story, told by a mortal occupant of the Cottage of Lost Play and immersed in what Tolkien later termed dyscatastrophe. Its only major flaw is the upturn at the very end, where the spirits of Túrin and Níniel pass through purgatorial flame and join the ranks of the Valar. Too similar to the climax of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, and contrary to the dark spirit of ‘Turambar’, it seems a clumsy way of depicting the consolatory Joy that Tolkien elsewhere reserved for those who have passed, not merely beyond life, but beyond the created world altogether.
Tolkien, still developing the story of Túrin many years later, wrote in 1951 that it ‘might be said (by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo’. Yet this is a judgement about criticism, not a denial of influence; and by the time he made the comment he had indeed moved far from the concept of unearthing lost tales. Through the narrator of ‘The Tale of Turambar’ he acknowledges his debt, while declaring the fictional premise of the whole ‘Book of Lost Tales’:
In these days many such stories do Men tell still, and more have they told in the past especially in those kingdoms of the North that once I knew. Maybe the deeds of other of their warriors have become mingled therein, and many matters beside that are not in the most ancient tale – but now I will tell to you the true and lamentable tale…
To Tolkien the philologist, deriving a single story from these overlapping but disparate narratives must have seemed no more strange than reconstructing an unrecorded Indo-European root from related words in various languages. Yet this is neither plagiarism nor, in fact, reconstruction at all, but a highly individual imaginative enterprise. Figures such as Beleg, the fugitive slave Flinding, and bright-eyed Failivrin enter ‘The Tale of Turambar’ unforeshadowed by Tolkien’s sources; the background and web of motives is all his own; and in stitching disparate elements together with many more of his own invention he brings the plot to a pitch of suspense and horror he rarely bettered. Most importantly, perhaps, Tolkien amplified the aspects of these myths and traditions that spoke most eloquently to his own era, replete with tragedy and irony.
Undoubtedly Tolkien meant the sequel to Túrin’s story, ‘The Tale of the Nauglafring’, to be the ‘lost tale’ behind the garbled references in Norse myth to the mysterious Brísingamen, a necklace forged by dwarves, worn by the love-goddess Freyja, and stolen by the trickster Loki. Possibly it was this scheme that originally gave rise to the Silmarils, their fabulous radiance (relating Brísingamen to Old Norse brísingr, ‘fire’), their theft by Melko, and their association with half-divine Tinúviel. However that may be, the curse of Glorund’s hoard now brings Artanor to ruin as Tinwelint orders the gold to be made into a necklace for the Silmaril that Beren cut from Melko’s crown.
The elf-king’s dealings and double-dealings with the dwarven smiths form one of the least satisfying elements in the Lost Tales. Self-interested greed could have sharpened Tinwelint’s wits, but instead it appears to stupefy him. The only real artistic flaw, however, is that the Dwarves, misshapen in body and soul, come close to caricature. The narrative briefly regains potency as Tinwelint appears resplendent in the Necklace of the Dwarves:
Behold now Tinwelint the king rode forth a-hunting, and more glorious was his array than ever aforetime, and the helm of gold was above his flowing locks, and with gold were the trappings of his steed adorned; and the sunlight amid the trees fell upon his face, and it seemed to those that beheld it like to the glorious face of the sun at morning…
The procession of paratactic clauses, fusing annalistic distance with breathless excitement, became a hallmark of Tolkien’s writing. So did what follows: a daring shift from the main event to another scene, cranking up the tension and foreboding before the denouement. We learn of Tinwelint’s fate only when his stricken queen is presented with his head still ‘crowned and helmed in gold’. His glorious ride to the hunt turns out to have been the swansong of Faërie in the Great Lands.
The muted tone of the rest of the tale suggests the ebb of enchantment. Artanor falls not with a bang, but a whimper. Not even Beren and Tinúviel are allowed to escape the decline as they reappear to reclaim the Silmaril. In their second span of life the resurrected lovers are now mortal, and the Necklace hastens Tinúviel’s death; Beren ends in lonely wandering. Deprived even of the honour of a tragic ending, their exit reflects what Tom Shippey has called (with reference to the fate of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings) an ‘unrecognized touch of hardness’ in Tolkien.
But now, probably in 1919 or 1920, he was contemplating a huge narrative enterprise, certainly mournful but nevertheless shot through with splendour and enchantment. He had arrived at the longest-planned story of all, to which the ‘Nauglafring’ was merely the prologue. If the scheme had been realized, Christopher Tolkien calculates, ‘the whole Tale of Eärendel would have been somewhere near half the length of all the tales that were in fact written’. Beyond the arrival of Tinúviel’s granddaughter Elwing at the shoreland refuge of Tuor and the exiles of Gondolin, virtually nothing of the remainder of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ passed beyond notes and outlines. The tale would have recounted Eärendel’s many hazardous sailings west and his final voyage into the starry skies, transfigured by suffering: a considerably more solemn figure than the blithe fugitive whom Tolkien had envisioned in his poem of September 1914. Meanwhile, the Elves of Kôr would march out into the Great Lands to cast Melko down from the pinnacle of his triumph.
After Eärendel’s tale, two further sections were planned before the book would be finished. For his account of how the rebel archangel is finally stripped of his powers, Tolkien would have waded into ‘that very primitive undergrowth’ of folklore he had praised in the Kalevala. Melko was to escape his bonds and stir strife among the Elves, mostly now gathered in the Lonely Isle; but he was to be chased up a gigantic pinetree at Tavrobel (Great Haywood) into the sky, becoming a creature of envy ‘gnawing his fingers and gazing in anger on the world’. With his marring of the Sun’s primal magic and the inexorable rise of the human race, the Lost Tales told to Eriol were to reach an end, as the chronological narrative caught up with the Germanic wanderer’s own day.
In a coda involving Eriol (or his son Heorrenda, according to some projections) the faëry island was to be hauled to its latter-day location off the Great Lands of Europe, but then broken asunder into Ireland and Britain in another tussle of the sea gods. The island Elves would march to the aid of their diminishing mainland kin in a war against Melko’s servants: the great Faring Forth. Despite hopes of a new golden age, with the rekindling of the ‘Magic Sun’ or even the Two Trees, it seems that human treachery was to bring about the outright defeat of the Elves, and Men were to begin the invasion of Britain.
The final crisis may be glimpsed in a powerful ‘Epilogue’ that Tolkien dashed down on paper, purporting to be the words of Eriol before he sealed his Book of Lost Tales at Tavrobel:
And now is the end of the fair times come very nigh, and behold, all the beauty that yet was on earth – fragments of the unimagined loveliness of Valinor whence came the folk of the Elves long long ago – now goeth it all up in smoke.
Eriol, writing with the immediacy of a diarist, has fled in the face of a terrible battle between Men on the High Heath nearby – surely Cannock Chase with the Sher Brook (Old English scír, ‘bright’) running down towards Great Haywood:
Behold, I stole by the evening from the ruined heath, and my way fled winding down the valley of the Brook of Glass, but the setting of the Sun was blackened with the reek of fires, and the waters of the stream were fouled with the war of men and grime of strife…
And now sorrow…has come upon the Elves, empty is Tavrobel and all are fled, [?fearing] the enemy that sitteth on the ruined heath, who is not a league away; whose hands are red with the blood of Elves and stained with the lives of his own kin, who has made himself an ally to Melko…
In words that echo the last ride of Tinwelint, Eriol recalls Gilfanon, oldest of the Eldar of the Lonely Isle, in a cavalcade of light and song; and the people of Tavrobel dancing ‘as clad in dreams’ about the grey bridge and the rivers’ meeting. But now, Eriol records, the island Elves are fading too, or Men growing yet more blind. His last words are a prophecy of disenchantment, when most will scoff at the idea of fairies, ‘lies told to the children’. Some will at least regard them fondly as metaphors of nature, ‘a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees’. Only a few will believe, and be able to see the Elves thronging their ancient towns in Autumn, their season, ‘fallen as they are upon the Autumn of their days’.
But behold, Tavrobel shall not know its name, and all the land be changed, and even these written words of mine belike will all be lost, and so I lay down the pen, and so of the fairies cease to tell.
It may be no more than coincidence that A Spring Harvest, the posthumous volume of Smith’s poems arranged by Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman, closes with this sestet:
So we forbear the building of the rime,
And bid our hearts be steel for times and a time
Till ends the strife, and then,
When the New Age is verily begun,
God grant that we may do the things undone.
But it seems equally likely that here, at the projected close of his Lost Tales, Tolkien meant to pay a quiet tribute to G. B. Smith, who had looked forward so eagerly to reading them.
The fading of the Elves, a phenomenon surely intended to ‘explain’ the Shakespearean and Victorian view of fairies, leaves the world and its fate in human hands. On the face of it, this seems a grim conclusion: man, in Eriol’s closing words, is ‘blind, and a fool, and destruction alone is his knowledge’. Tolkien did not get very far with his Lost Tale of how Ilúvatar’s secondborn children arrived in the era of the Sun; but what little he wrote shows that Melko corrupted them early on. Losing their first home through his machinations, unlike the Valar and the Eldar they found no new Eden. ‘The Tale of Turambar’, meanwhile, may be taken as a distillation of Men’s unhappy lot; and even after Melko is banished to the sky and deprived of his earthly powers, he is able to plant evil in the human heart.
There seems every reason to envy the Elves, graced with superhuman skill, beauty, and longevity, living on until ‘the Great End’ with much of the vigour of youth and, should they die from violence or grief, even being reborn as elf-children. Tolkien’s Eldar could not be less like the deathless Struldbruggs of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, whose life is an endless descent into fathomless depths of physical and mental decrepitude.
Yet without the agency of human beings, Ilúvatar’s universal drama would not reach completion. Whereas the cosmogonic Music prescribed the fate of the Elves, and even the Ainur, humans were granted ‘a free virtue’ to act beyond it, so that ‘everything should in shape and deed be completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest’. Without this ‘free virtue’, it seems, all would be complete in conception (if not execution) as soon as the Music was over; there would be nothing for us to do but follow our pre-ordained steps. (Happily, Tolkien seems not to have tried to illustrate the implication that the Elves, the Valar, and Melko lack free will, which would surely have blighted his narratives.)
Taken together with the Lost Tales, the idea of this ‘free virtue’ sheds light on the riddle of how Melko’s discords may make ‘Life more worth the living’. A parallel may be drawn with a phenomenon that Tolkien found deeply moving: the ‘ennoblement of the ignoble’ through hardship and fear. ‘On a journey of a length sufficient to provide the untoward in any degree from discomfort to fear’, he once wrote, in a transparent reference to the Great War, ‘the change in companions well-known in “ordinary life” (and in oneself) is often startling.’ The potential for such change or ennoblement in the face of danger lies at the heart of all his portrayals of character. It is this equation, by which individuals become far more than the sum of their parts, that takes them beyond the provisions of the Music towards a destination altogether unforeseen. So it is that in Tolkien’s legendarium the weak rise up to shake the world, embodying what he called ‘the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama’.
Humans in his pre-Christian mythology cannot commune consciously with their Creator through sacraments and prayer, but glimpse him uncomprehendingly through the sublimities of nature. Tuor and Eriol are captivated by the ambivalent, alien sea because ‘there liveth still in water a deeper echo of the Music of the Ainur than in any substance else that is in the world, and at this latest day many of the Sons of Men will hearken unsatedly to the voice of the Sea and long for they know not what’. What they long for, unconsciously, is eternal life in heaven. It is a yearning for home: the souls of Men will outlive the world in which their bodies die.
One of Tolkien’s most radical imaginative leaps was to put this tenet of his faith in perspective by placing his human figures in a picture dominated by – indeed, painted by – a sibling race with a destiny apart. To Swift, the human desire for immortality was a folly to be satirized without mercy through the Struldbruggs. Tolkien took a more sympathetic view: to him, immortality was indeed in our nature, and the human folly lay only in mistakenly coveting mere corporeal permanence. From the earliest writings onwards, he left the question of what will happen to the Elves after the End a profound enigma. Their own opinion seems to be that they will expire with the world, and they have little hope of bliss in Ilúvatar’s heaven. Death, Tolkien later wrote, was the ‘Gift of Ilúvatar’ to Men, releasing them into an eternal life that is more than mere longevity. The resurrection of Beren and Tinúviel, therefore, may be sadly brief compared to the earthly span they might have enjoyed as Elves, but implicitly their second death will give them what no other Elves can have: a future ‘beyond the walls of the world’. In Tolkien’s view, that is the ultimate release.
The spring, summer, and ages-long autumn of the Elves may be regarded as a consummation of the intrinsic potential in creation, but a consummation as limited and flawed as the finite world itself. Except for what they have learned of elvish art and grace, Men remain the benighted travellers we first encountered in ‘A Song of Aryador’ of 1915. Meanwhile, the imperfect gods under God are bound to founder in their care of the world. So one of the narrators of the Lost Tales declares that the Valar ought to have gone to war against Melko straight after the destruction of the Two Trees, adding suggestively: ‘and who knows if the salvation of the world and the freeing of Men and Elves shall ever come from them again? Some there are who whisper that it is not so, and hope dwelleth only in a far land of Men, but how so that may be I do not know.’ The implication must surely be that the failure of God’s angelic representatives would ultimately pave the way for God’s direct intervention as Christ.
The Lost Tales emerged at a steady pace. Etymological work among the Oxford English Dictionary slips in the Old Ashmolean took up little more than half the day, and although Tolkien also began taking private pupils in Old English he did not make enough money from this to give up the dictionary work until the spring of 1920. The family moved out of St John Street in late summer of 1919, and Tolkien remained sufficiently unwell to take a small army pension; but, compared to the years before and after, this was a settled interlude of uninterrupted creativity. However, Tolkien never wrote the Lost Tales describing the birth of Men, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the voyage of Eärendel, the expulsion of Melko, the Faring Forth, or the Battle of the High Heath. The full expression of these events had to wait until he had found a different form for the mythology, and in some points was never achieved. By the early 1920s, problems had come into focus that needed solutions, and his concepts had shifted – not least at the linguistic foundations of his mythology. He continued to refine his invented languages, making time-consuming changes to their internal histories and their phonological and morphological foundations (so, for example, the tongue of the Gnomes now commonly formed plurals by vowel mutation rather than by adding a suffix, as English does in rare instances such as foot/feet*). He revised, rewrote, and rearranged the Lost Tales he had already written. Eriol became Ælfwine, a mariner from Anglo-Saxon England as late as the eleventh century. Tolkien now conceived Elvish Tol Eressëa as an entirely distinct island to the west. He also set to work retelling the story of Turambar as a long narrative poem.
There were further practical barriers to completing ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. In 1920 Tolkien had finally launched the academic career that the war had delayed, taking a position at Leeds University, where he energetically revivified the English language syllabus. At the same time he compiled, with long and meticulous labour, A Middle English Vocabulary to accompany an anthology edited by Kenneth Sisam, his former tutor at Oxford. When that was published in 1922 he was working on a new edition of the alliterative Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with a Leeds colleague, E. V. Gordon. In 1924 Tolkien was made a professor at Leeds, but the following year he won the Rawlinson Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. By then he was also the father of three young children.
Tolkien’s bigger difficulty, however, was a niggling perfectionism. He was well aware of it and, much later, he wrote a story, ‘Leaf by Niggle’, in which the problem is borne by a painter doomed never to complete his enormous picture of a tree. In years to come the legendarium grew into a vast complex of interwoven histories, sagas, and genealogies, of phonologies, grammars, and vocabularies, and of philological and philosophical disquisitions. Left to his own devices it seems quite likely that Tolkien would never have finished a single book in his life. What he needed were publishers’ deadlines and a keen audience.
Back in November 1917, his old schoolmaster R. W. Reynolds had expressed himself ‘much interested in the book of tales you are at work on’, urging Tolkien to send it to him as soon as it was ‘in a state to travel’. But in 1922 Reynolds and his novelist wife, Dorothea Deakin, moved for health reasons to Capri in the Bay of Naples, and by the time he got back in touch, following her death in 1925, Tolkien had long left the tales incomplete. Instead he sent several poems out to Capri, including two works in progress: his alliterative lay about Túrin and a rhymed geste about Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel (as she was now called). Reynolds had little or nothing good to say about the first, and thought the second promising but prolix. He was being true to form. ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ – the poem G. B. Smith had carried around the trenches of Thiepval Wood ‘like a treasure’ – had seemed to Reynolds merely ‘charming’, but not gripping. Before the 1914 Council of London, Tolkien had told Wiseman he thought Reynolds was to blame for Smith’s excess of aestheticism over moral character. Wiseman had commented since then that Smith’s poetry was beyond Reynolds’ grasp. If that was so, he could scarcely have engaged with Tolkien’s.
Tolkien did no further work on the Túrin poem, though he pursued the geste for several more years. Yet the intervention of Reynolds had a radical effect on Tolkien’s central mythological project. To furnish his old teacher with the background information necessary for an understanding of the two narrative lays, Tolkien summed up ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in a ‘sketch’ of the mythology. So many of his ideas, linguistic inventions, and stylistic preferences had changed that the Lost Tales as originally written now seemed to him inadequate. To take a key example, the Silmarils, their maker Fëanor, and his seven oath-driven sons had assumed a central role in terms of narrative and theme that was barely portended in the Lost Tales. The précis turned into a replacement. By and large, the tales he had laboriously written out in exercise books from late 1916 onwards were filed away for ever. When he next worked on the mythology as a whole – or the ‘Silmarillion’, as he came to call it – he consulted not the Lost Tales, but the sketch.
The effect of this decision was to remove at a stroke the ebullience, earthiness, and humour of the original mythology. It is a great shame that Tolkien compressed these stories, when given more time and less perfectionism he might have expanded each one to produce something commensurate with a William Morris romance; he was certainly Morris’s superior in imaginative and descriptive powers. But in the versions that followed, culminating in The Silmarillion, posthumously published in 1977, the physical and psychological detail of the narrative poems was largely excluded as well. The Valar became increasingly civic and humane, but perhaps less interesting. The frame-story, with its elm-grown city, its curious elven cottage, and its dreaming mariner, all but vanished. The long English prehistory between the voyage of Eärendel and the Faring Forth was abandoned. The ‘Silmarillion’ in all its versions retreats from fairy-story, and the ‘contact with the earth’ that Tolkien had thought so important fades away, while the epic heroes tend to merge into the ‘vast backcloths’.
Both Wiseman and Reynolds had warned Tolkien of such problems during the war. Reynolds had said ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ was ‘lacking in experience of life’. Somehow ignoring the brute fact of the Somme, Wiseman felt in 1917 that Tolkien had still not been through enough to write at his best, and that therefore he should indeed start with epic, ‘the only form of serious verse available for a poet who has not yet experienced life’, as he put it. His reasoning was false: ‘In an epic you make no pretence of dealing with life; so experience of it is unnecessary, ’ he said. But his prophecy was spot on: ‘You can’t go on writing epics all your life; but until you can do something else, you simply must write epics.’ What kept Tolkien ploughing his lonely furrow, however, was not inexperience but reverence for epic as a literary mode. He did not give other forms much serious thought. As Wayne G. Hammond has observed, it was writing children’s stories that ‘gave him opportunities (or excuses) to experiment with other modes of story-telling than the formal prose or poetry he used in writing his mythology’.
After the death of G. B. Smith, Tolkien had no ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’. At times Wiseman found Tolkien’s work astonishing and unprecedented, and they shared some interests – Arthurian legend, for example. But the two were often at odds. Relishing a good argument, they frequently offended each other. Such problems, quickly resolved at school, festered between letters exchanged at long intervals. The forthright Wiseman did not conceal his basic lack of sympathy with the Lost Tales, though there is no evidence that he ever read them. In 1917, he had told Tolkien that he could not compete with Alexander Pope or Matthew Arnold and that the project must be a mere prelude to more worthwhile things. It might produce an epic, or a great poem, or a mythology, Wiseman had conceded; but, he urged, ‘I want you to get this stage over and go on to something else.’
Wiseman and Tolkien saw a little of one another, on and off, but when one became a headmaster and the other an Oxford professor they started to feel they had little in common. The deaths of Smith and Gilson perhaps also cast a shadow over their thoughts of each other. There was no rift; John Ronald spoke fondly of Christopher ever afterwards, and named his third son after him. Yet they drifted apart, and Tolkien lost a stern but useful critic. The direct influence of the TCBS ended forever.
C. S. Lewis stepped into the breach they had left. The two met in 1926 and Lewis, an English don and medievalist from Magdalen College, Oxford, joined the Coalbiters, a group founded by Tolkien to read the Icelandic myths and sagas. Later Tolkien became a regular in the Inklings, the literary clique that revolved around Lewis from the 1930s. By that time they had recognized in each other a common love of ‘Northernness’, and Lewis had become a closer friend to Tolkien than anyone since the heyday of the TCBS. Indeed, Lewis rolled into one forceful personality their several roles: the generous social gifts of Rob Gilson, the critical insight of Christopher Wiseman, and, most importantly, the passionate imaginative sympathies of G. B. Smith. Just like Tolkien, Lewis had written reams of unpublished material, and still wanted to be a great poet, but regarded the majority of contemporary writers with impatience. ‘Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby,’ Tolkien wrote. Clearly, he had left far behind the heady days when his three old schoolfriends had urged him to publish before he was sent in to battle.
By the time Lewis read ‘The Lay of Leithian’, the long Tinúviel poem, Tolkien had another enthusiastic audience: his family. Edith’s early involvement in his writing (she made fair copies of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ in February 1917 and ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ around 1919) had not lasted. But Tolkien had started writing stories for their children as early as 1920, when he first sent John a letter purporting to be from Father Christmas. That year Edith had a second son, Michael, and in 1924 a third, Christopher. In 1929 a daughter, Priscilla, was born. It was for their entertainment that he wrote ‘The Hobbit’, showing it to an enthusiastic Lewis in 1933.
‘The Hobbit’ became absorbed into the margins of Tolkien’s mythology, a process that began, characteristically, with the problem of naming a half-elf whom Bilbo was to meet early in his adventure. He plucked the name Elrond from ‘The Silmarillion’, where it belonged to none other than the son of Eärendel the star-mariner. Quickly the two Elronds became one, and even Gondolin appeared as part of a barely glimpsed but atmospheric ancient history.
News of this unique and stirring children’s story reached the publishers George Allen & Unwin in 1936, and The Hobbit appeared the following September to enthusiastic reviews. With prospects bright, Allen & Unwin quickly asked for a sequel, and in December 1937 Tolkien began writing the first chapter of ‘a new story about Hobbits’. So began the long gestation of Tolkien’s masterpiece, a tale which (as he later wrote), ‘grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it’.
The two remaining representatives of 1914’s inspirational Council of London met up again at last, late in life, when both were living in retirement on the South Coast: Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, hiding from fame in Bournemouth, and Wiseman, retired headmaster and energetic chairman of the village association in nearby Milford-on-Sea.
In November 1971 Edith died, leaving her husband bereft. On her tombstone in north Oxford he had the name Lúthien inscribed, ‘which says for me more than a multitude of words: she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien,’ he wrote. ‘But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.’
Three months after her death, Tolkien moved back to Oxford to live in rooms provided by Merton College, still hoping somehow to finish the mythological work he had begun with such high ambition in the months after the Battle of the Somme. In the meantime, though, he had paid a visit to Wiseman – also now a recent widower, following the death of Christine, the woman who in 1946 had finally cured his ‘incurable bachelorhood’. But Wiseman had just remarried, and his second wife Patricia and her daughter Susan walked in the garden with Tolkien. He seemed, they thought, very much a hobbit in his green waistcoat, delighted by the flowers and fascinated by the insects, about which he spoke knowledgeably. But as for the two surviving members of the Immortal Four: they did not speak to each other very much, or once mention their recent bereavements, and Wiseman at least (though he played his own part in this conspiracy of silence) was privately hurt.
Yet the bond, if strained, was certainly not broken. When Tolkien next wrote, from Oxford in May 1973, he thanked Wiseman for drawing him from his ‘lair’ and signed himself, ‘Your most devoted friend’, adding after his own initials the letters ‘TCBS’. Near the end of August, Tolkien was back in Bournemouth, staying with friends, and made a reservation to stay at his retirement haunt, the Hotel Miramar, for a few days from 4 September. He explained in a note to his daughter Priscilla, ‘I wish v. much to visit various people here,’ he said, ‘also Chris Wiseman at Milford…’ But two days after the letter, he was taken to hospital suffering from an acute bleeding gastric ulcer. J. R. R. Tolkien died at the age of eighty-one, on 2 September 1973. He was buried next to Edith, with the name Beren beneath his own.