A pale, drawn man sits in a convalescent bed of a wartime hospital. He takes up a school exercise book and writes on its cover, with a calligraphic flourish: ‘Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin’. Then he pauses, lets out a long sigh between the teeth clenched around his pipe, and mutters, ‘No, that won’t do anymore.’ He crosses out the title and writes (without the flourish): ‘A Subaltern on the Somme’.
That is not what happened, of course. Tolkien produced a mythology, not a trench memoir. Middle-earth contradicts the prevalent view of literary history, that the Great War finished off the epic and heroic traditions in any serious form. This postscript will argue that despite its unorthodoxy – and quite contrary to its undeserved reputation as escapism – Tolkien’s writing reflects the impact of the war; furthermore, that his maverick voice expresses aspects of the war experience neglected by his contemporaries. This is not to say that his mythology was a response to the poetry and prose of his contemporaries, but that they represent widely divergent responses to the same traumatic epoch.
Literature hit a crisis point in 1916, in the assessment of critic Samuel Hynes: ‘a “dead spot” at the centre of the war’ when ‘creative energies seemed to sink to a low point’ among British writers. G. B. Smith and his poetry were both languishing on the Somme; ‘sheer vacancy is destroying me’, he said. A very different writer, Ford Madox Ford, was in a similar rut at Ypres, asking himself ‘why I can write nothing – why I cannot even think anything that to myself seems worth thinking’.
Tolkien’s poetry does seem to have come close to drying up in the wake of the Somme, with just one piece (‘Companions of the Rose’) written in the first eight months of 1917. But he had hardly been idle, as Wiseman pointed out. Whatever malaise was afflicting other writers, his creative energies were at a peak when he began ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in the winter of 1916-17.
Out of the ‘dead spot’, two new and enormously influential literary movements emerged: firstly, a style of war writing that has attained ‘classic’ status; secondly, modernism. But the impact of these on Tolkien was negligible.
In the modernist experimentation that took off in the post-war years – largely a reflection of the shock, moral chaos, and bewildering scale of the war – he played no part. The era of The Waste Land and Ulysses was in his view ‘an age when almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or “personal expression”’.
Nor did he participate in the kind of literature now seen as the epitome of the trenches. Out of the diversity of writing produced by soldiers, what is remembered is an amalgam of bitter protest and gritty close-ups, uncompromisingly direct in its depiction of trench life and death. Spearheading this style, Robert Graves, his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and Sassoon’s brilliant protégé Wilfred Owen take pride of place in anthologies of ‘Great War writing’. A handful of Owen’s poems have become the measure of all other portrayals of the First World War – even of war in general.
In pursuit of directness, Graves and his followers threw away the rulebook used by newspapers, recruitment literature, and mainstream poetry, which filtered the war through a style inherited from previous conflicts. Owen’s most famous poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, highlights the mismatch between the sacramental imagery of the inherited language and the reality of his war:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
The old style traced its way back to Arthurian romance by way of Shakespeare, the Romantics, and High Victorian medievalism. It had action, heroism, and epic sweep; it purported to show the big picture and employed the ‘high diction’ of valour. Paul Fussell, in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, provides a lexicon of this language, in which ‘A horse is a steed, or charger, the enemy is the foe, or the host; danger is peril’, and so forth. He regards high diction as a form of censorship. Historian Jay Winter rages at the armchair militarists of 1914-18: ‘Those too old to fight had created an imaginary war, filled with medieval knights, noble warriors, and sacred moments of sacrifice. Such writing…was worse than banal; it was obscene.’
By the yardstick of Owen’s poetry, the Somme would seem to have had no effect on Tolkien’s writing at all. Problematically, he wrote about an imaginary war that looks rather like the kind of thing Winter derides and is packed with high diction.
It has earned him the opprobrium of reviewers who cannot see his prose style without suspecting him of jingoism: a general taint has attached itself to this sort of language thanks to the First World War. Tolkien’s style has made some of his admirers uncomfortable too. In an essay that raises some interesting points about how the Somme may have influenced Middle-earth, Hugh Brogan asks bluntly ‘how it was that Tolkien, a man whose life was language, could have gone through the Great War, with all its rants and lies, and still come out committed to a “feudal” literary style’. Brogan concludes that in refusing to conform to the new rules established by Robert Graves and the archmodernist Ezra Pound, Tolkien was engaged in ‘an act of deliberate defiance of modern history’.
There are good reasons for Tolkien’s apparent stubbornness. Samuel Hynes has noted that the war ushered in a censorious campaign against German intellectual and artistic influences. By chance, this affected every area of secular culture and learning that Tolkien espoused. Even five years after the armistice, he complained that ‘“philology” itself, conceived as a purely German invention, is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things that the late war was fought to end…a thing whose absence does credit to an Englishman’. Alongside this assault on such rationalist traditions came an attack on Romanticism, in which Germany had also been Britain’s teacher, and which played a major part in Tolkien’s creative thought.
In fact, he had swum against the tide even before the war, when his fascination with the ancient North ran counter to the classicism of King Edward’s School. He would not or could not now turn his back on philology, matters Germanic, or Romanticism. During the Great War, with an audience of six at most – the TCBS, Edith, Wade-Gery of the Salford Pals, and R. W. Reynolds of King Edward’s School – he was under little pressure to change; but in any case, as C. S. Lewis once said, ‘No one ever influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.’
Despite his taste for romance and high diction, however, Tolkien did not find the war adventurous, dashing, or sacred. He summed up trench life as ‘animal horror’. Even in 1910, when he spoofed Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome in ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’, he knew the old language of war could be used for false heroics. Having been through the training camps and the trenches, he was acutely aware of its shortcomings, declaring, ‘The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists)…’
But even if Tolkien had been more like Pound or Graves in outlook, he would have been unable to join their literary movements when he was finding his voice as a writer. Modernism, such as it had been before the war, had been silenced as decadent, while scarcely a scrap of what we now see as classic Great War poetry had been published by the end of 1916. As for the other paths then available to a young writer, none appealed to Tolkien’s imagination as much as the romances and epic adventures of writers such as William Morris and Rider Haggard – both labelled by Fussell as ‘tutors’ in high diction to the war propagandists.
Yet Tolkien’s greater passion was for the genuinely medieval, from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As he said after the publication of The Lord of the Rings (in a reply, never sent, to a friendly but critical letter from Brogan), ‘not being especially well read in modern English, and far more familiar with works in the ancient and “middle” idioms, my own ear is to some extent affected; so that though I could easily recollect how a modern would put this and that, what comes easiest to mind or pen is not quite that’. Tolkien remained committed to an archaic air because it was the one he breathed.
The abuse of high diction in battlefield journalism or recruitment pamphlets does not devalue the medievalism that Tolkien pursued – any more than the kicking of footballs as a morale-booster during the Somme assault renders the game itself obscene or obsolete. He rebelled against what he called ‘the extraordinary 20th C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as “contemporary” – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one’s friends shudder or feel hot in the collar’. In ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ and elsewhere, he adopted a style that suited his mythological and legendary content. It was a choice as conscious and serious as the opposite but complementary decision made by Graves, Sassoon, and Owen.
Its justification lies in the history of Tolkien’s register – in its cultural, moral, and poetic weight. Pointing out that the Beowulf poet’s style had been archaic by the standards of his Anglo-Saxon audience, he said:
This sort of thing – the building up of a poetic language out of words and forms archaic and dialectal or used in special senses – may be regretted or disliked. There is nonetheless a case for it: the development of a form of language familiar in meaning and yet freed from trivial associations, and filled with the memory of good and evil, is an achievement, and its possessors are richer than those who have no such tradition.
Tolkien’s stylistic values reverse Ezra Pound’s famous modernist exhortation to ‘Make it new!’ To Tolkien, language accumulated qualities that could not be replaced and ought not to be lightly discarded. In a century when revolutionaries dismissed the whole concept of good and evil as a delusion of the weak or deviant, this became a substantial issue, and already during the Great War it was an urgent one. For Tolkien’s mythology, ‘the memory of good and evil’ is the keynote.
Just when the old ways of telling were being misused by the military propagandists and rejected by the trench writers, Tolkien envisioned ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, a sequence of stories salvaged from the wreck of history. That he saw the value in traditions that most others rejected is one of his gifts to posterity: truth should never be the property of one literary mode, any more than it should be the monopoly of one authoritarian voice. Tolkien was not immune to epochal change, however. He did not simply preserve the traditions the war threatened, but reinvigorated them for his own era. His most distinctive success was with fairy-story. Robert Graves pictured the simultaneous arrival of maturity and war as the obliteration of Faërie:
Wisdom made a breach and battered
Babylon to bits: she scattered
To the hedges and ditches
All our nursery gnomes and witches.
Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,
Drag their treasures from the shelves.
This was more than metaphor. Faërie came close to vanishing altogether during the First World War, thanks to this associative confusion of the pre-war era, childhood, and fairy-tales. Yet Tolkien did not regard fairies as childish, and he was not writing nursery-tales, but an epic history of the world through faëry eyes. In her galloping survey of fairy traditions, Troublesome Things, Diane Purkiss says that ‘The Western Front made the fairy aesthetic seem both desperately necessary and hopelessly anachronistic.’ Tolkien’s account of the tragic decline of the Elves acknowledges that their time is over but urges the desperate necessity of holding on to the values they represented. Far from being a sign that the war had no impact on Tolkien, his commitment to Faërie was a consequence of it. ‘A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood,’ he wrote later, ‘and quickened to full life by war.’
Tolkien’s use of Faërie and its diction has brought accusations of escapism. Indeed, Hugh Brogan argues that the ‘Lost Tales’ and what followed them were ‘therapy for a mind wounded in war, and before that by deep sorrow in childhood and young manhood’ – in other words, that Middle-earth was just a kind of fantastic laudanum for its author. Many commentators clearly believe, by extension, that it is nothing but a general opiate for millions of readers.
No one has defended Tolkien more eloquently against this charge of ‘escapism’ than Tolkien himself, who pointed out in ‘On Fairy-stories’ that in real life escape is ‘very practical, and may even be heroic’, but that literary critics tend to confound ‘the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter’, often wilfully.
Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics…so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt.
Speaking in 1939, six years into Hitler’s murderous chancellorship, Tolkien was not mincing his words. Though he was himself a master of naturalism, especially in his depictions of landscape, he was acutely aware that in his lifetime realism had combined with modernism in an overbearing, intolerant, and denunciatory orthodoxy, a monolith dominating the academic and cultural establishments. Its advocates liked to think of this as progress, as if it were the only approach vindicated by the forward march of time. In fact, the new orthodoxy had grown contingently, like totalitarianism, in the often violent scramble for new certainties that followed the First World War. A Romantic and an individualist, Tolkien had opposed these orthodoxies for just as long, as his invention of Eärendel the escapee (1914) and Melko the tyrant (1916) testify. He was not purveying imaginary opiates: disgust, anger, and condemnation were perennial factors in his ‘escape’ into fairy-tale, myth, and ancientry.
For Tolkien, the distant past was a frame of reference, a daily currency. So, too, for Robert Graves; but Graves liked to cash in ancient for modern, ‘translating’ Anglo-Saxon poetry into trench imagery, with ‘Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff tent; and Brunaburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fight’. Tolkien’s tendency was the opposite; he might see the German Flammenwerfer and think of Greek fire, exchanging new coin for old. A glance at some of the parallels between his creations and his immediate circumstances suggests that such double vision helped him construct his myth of a fictional ancient past; so that in war-emptied Oxford he devised the deserted elven capital Kôr, in troop-crowded Whittington Heath the migrant encampments of Aryador, and after the Somme the ‘dragon’ attack on Gondolin.
In a similar way, the pitmen and labourers of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers may perhaps be discerned in one of the Gnome-kindreds in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, the Hammer of Wrath. These smiths or craftsmen, many of them escapees from Melko’s slave-mines, form the last-named battalion but the first to meet the enemy onslaught: ‘Very numerous was that battalion, nor had any amongst them a faint heart, and they won the greatest glory of all those fair houses in that struggle against doom; yet were they ill-fated, and none ever fared away from that field…’ The enemy draws them out and surrounds them; but they die taking many of their foes with them.
It is difficult to imagine that Tolkien devised this scenario without thinking about the Somme. Units virtually obliterated in the Big Push of 1 July 1916 included Rob Gilson’s Cambridgeshires and G. B. Smith’s Salford Pals. His own battalion suffered appalling losses a week later (while Tolkien was with divisional signals at Bouzincourt), when ‘C’ Company was wiped out.
The company had made a daring 1,200-yard night advance up the hill east of La Boisselle, but daybreak showed they had gone twice as far as planned. In a German trench that was only half-dug, they were bombarded by the enemy and their own side: ‘The problem was to know where our chaps were,’ said one British artilleryman. But it was afternoon before Captain John Metcalfe, still barely twenty, abandoned his position with the six men who remained unscathed; only he and a sergeant reached safety.
Tolkien’s view of the incident is not known. His academic studies criticize both Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon duke Beorhtnoth for recklessly endangering others in a sportsmanlike pursuit of honour and glory. But the Hammer of Wrath’s over-extended advance was the first of several such heroic tragedies in his legendarium: Fëanor in the ‘Silmarillion’ and Théoden in The Lord of the Rings also pay with their lives for charging too deeply into enemy territory. The questions of courage, honour, leadership, and responsibility exercised both Tolkien’s heart and his mind, possibly in different directions.
Whether or not the Hammer of Wrath recalls ‘C’ Company, it is clear that other writers might have turned this Somme incident into a blast of vitriol at Metcalfe or the makers of trench maps. But personal reticence made Tolkien temperamentally incapable of writing protest verse like Sassoon’s or Owen’s. Recalling his own tribulations as a soldier, in 1944 he sent his son Christopher, then with the RAF in South Africa, the Latin advice Aequam serva mentem, comprime linguam: ‘Keep a calm mind, restrain the tongue.’ He once described himself to W. H. Auden as a writer ‘whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress’.
Although Tolkien had a rare genius for this ‘cloaking’, as he called it, he was far from alone in his desire to apply the patterns of myth and legend to the experience of real life. Although the stereotypical picture of the Western Front does not include soldiers reading the Mabinogion with its Welsh Arthuriana, as G. B. Smith did, or William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, which Tolkien carried, in fact quest literature was profoundly popular. Books such as Morris’s The Well at the World’s End and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress provided a key without which this life of tribulation and death seemed incomprehensible, as Paul Fussell admits: ‘The experiences of a man going up to the line to his destiny cannot help seeming to him like those of a hero of medieval romance if his imagination has been steeped in actual literary romances…’
Christopher Wiseman, declaring in 1917 that experience of life was unnecessary in writing epics since they ‘make no pretence of dealing with life’, was thoroughly mistaken. Had Tolkien felt no need to express his shock at the outbreak of war, his heightened awareness of mortality, and his horror at mechanized warfare, it is possible that he would not have pursued fantasy at all. But his own metaphor of the concealing cloak is misleading. The distillation of experience into myth could reveal the prevailing elements in a moral morass such as the Great War, show the big picture where trench writers like Robert Graves tended to home in on the detail. Tolkien is not the first mythographer to produce a grave and pertinent epic in time of war and revolution. However else they differ from him, in this John Milton and William Blake are his forebears. When the world changes, and reality assumes an unfamiliar face, the epic and fantastic imagination may thrive.
At the opposite pole from heroic romance, the fairy-tale aspects of Tolkien’s world could paradoxically provide a mirror for the world at war. In her lucid study, A Question of Time, Verlyn Flieger considers Tolkien’s haunting 1930s poem, ‘Looney’, and its better known 1960s incarnation, ‘The Sea-bell’, which recount a bewildering lone odyssey to Faërie and the return of the traveller to mortal lands, where he finds himself estranged from his kind. Flieger notes that, whereas fairy-stories and war would seem to be opposites,
Beneath the surface, however, [Tolkien’s] words suggest a deep but unmanifest connection between these apparently unlike things…Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return so that they become ‘pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness’, not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen or experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faërie can change out of all recognition the wanderer’s perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was.
Strikingly, Tolkien wrote his first account of a mortal’s arrival in Faërie, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, just after his return to England from the Somme with trench fever. Eriol’s first impressions of the Lonely Isle are much happier than those in ‘Looney’ and ‘The Sea-bell’, but he glimpses Faërie’s indifference to humanity. Tolkien’s outlines show that the mariner would eventually become alienated from his kind; and in the last pages of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, Eriol expresses his fear that his message to human posterity – the tales he has recorded – will be lost.
Viewed in the context of 1916-17, the arrival of Eriol, ‘One who dreams alone’, in the Lonely Isle, ‘the Land of Release’, has the air of a soldier’s anticipatory dream of a homecoming in which everything will turn out alright again. But he is escaping the current of his own time and entering the timelessness of Faërie. Similarly, for the soldier, time seemed to have moved on incalculably in the trenches but fallen behind in England. The Lonely Isle, then, may be seen as a symbolic version of the England that had slipped away. Nostalgia, a word that had hitherto always meant homesickness, began to appear in its now prevalent sense – regretful or wistful yearning for the past – straight after the Great War. To Tolkien’s generation, nostalgia was a constant companion: they were looking over their shoulders, like the survivors of Gondolin, at an old home that seemed now to embody everything beautiful and doomed. Tolkien’s myth expresses the desire for such apparently timeless beauty, but constantly recognizes that it is indeed doomed: for all its apparent imperviousness, in the long run the Lonely Isle, like Gondolin, must succumb to implacable change.
The war memoirist Charles Douie looked back on Peter Pan as a kind of prophecy. ‘Did no feeling of apprehension darken the mind of any mother in that audience which first heard, “My sons shall die like English gentlemen”; did no foreboding enter into the exultation with which those sons first heard youth’s defiance of death – “To die would be an awfully big adventure”?’
It was Peter’s perpetual youth that came closest to the mark during the Great War, when so many young men would never grow old; and Tolkien’s Elves, forever in the prime of adulthood, hit the bullseye. As Tom Shippey notes, ‘There is no difficulty in seeing why Tolkien, from 1916 on, was preoccupied with the theme of death…The theme of escape from death might then naturally seem attractive.’ Much more robust than the airy miniatures of Victorian and Shakespearean fancy, the Eldar could shoulder the burden of these weightier themes. Their ancient roots in Germanic and Celtic myth, furthermore, made them apt symbols of timelessness in a twentieth-century epic about loss.
Neither Milton nor Blake saw battle itself. That Tolkien did may explain the central or climactic role of battles in his stories. The tank-like ‘dragons’ in the assault on Gondolin strongly imply that this is the case. So does the strategic importance of timing in many of Tolkien’s fictional clashes. The failure of units to coordinate their attacks, a disastrous feature of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears as developed in the ‘Silmarillion’, parallels a fatal problem in the Somme offensive. The last-minute intervention of a fresh force to save the day, a staple of military engagements in Middle-earth, may seem less realistic and more ‘escapist’, but this was the part his own battalion played in the taking of Ovillers and the rescue of the Warwickshires, when he was present as a signaller.
Tolkien’s even-handed depiction of war as both terrible and stirring is well matched by a comment from Charles Carrington (one of the beleaguered Warwickshires), who writes that, for the soldier in the midst of mortal danger, ‘There was an arguing realism, a cynical side to one’s nature that raised practical objections and suggested dangers, and against it there strove a romantic ardour for the battle that was almost joyful.’ Túrin, ‘sick and weary’ after the fray, illustrates the frequent sequel to such ardour – the resurgence of reality. But high diction, which sets Tolkien so far apart from the classic trench writers, expresses perfectly a psychological truth of war they tend to neglect. In all its enormity and strangeness, combat could induce what Carrington calls the ‘exaltation of battle…an elevated state of mind which a doctor might have defined as neurosis’; he says he was ‘uplifted in spirit’.
A similar observation in Frederic Manning’s acute Somme novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, points to a more profound parallel between the view on the battlefield and Tolkien’s creative vision. Manning relates the exaltation of combat to the soldiers’ conviction that they were fighting in a just cause, a ‘moral impetus’ that ‘carried them forward on a wave of emotional excitement, transfiguring all the circumstances of their life so that these could only be expressed in the terms of heroic tragedy, of some superhuman or even divine conflict with the powers of evil…’ Tolkien’s legendarium assumed the dimensions of a conflict between good and evil immediately after the Somme. Might that be partly the result of a desire to express this singular experience, so far beyond the scope of conventional literary expression?
Whatever the answer, Tolkien’s moral vision is utterly different in application from the soldier’s and the propagandist’s. With the possible exception of the Hammer of Wrath, noted above, Orcs and Elves do not equate to the Germans and the British; on the contrary, they distil the cruelty and the courage he saw on both sides in war, as well as more general qualities of barbarism and civilization. It was not the Kaiser that Tolkien demonized in Melko, but the tyranny of the machine over the individual, an international evil going back far earlier than 1914 but exercised with merciless abandon on the Western Front.
As Tom Shippey has pointed out, Tolkien is in good company among later writers who turned away from realism because, as combat veterans, they had seen ‘something irrevocably evil’. George Orwell (the Spanish Civil War), Kurt Vonnegut and William Golding (the Second World War) fall into this category. Crucially, Shippey argues, Tolkien and these others adopted various forms of fantasy because they felt that the conventional explanations for the evil they had seen ‘were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself’. For example, realist fictions hold that there is no absolute evil, only relative degrees of social maladjustment; but in Lord of the Flies Golding suggests that something intrinsically evil lurks inside us all, waiting to get out. Trench realism embraces detail and flinches from universal statements, but ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ mythologizes the evil that Tolkien saw in materialism. To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.
During Tolkien’s own war, the conventional British view as expressed in propaganda was that evil certainly existed, and it was German. Trench poets such as Wilfred Owen felt that the real enemy was the blind self-interest of national governments determined to gain territory whatever the human cost. But both groups shared a taste for polemic. Owen’s poem about a gassed soldier leaves an indelible impression, and was meant to:
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The personal address, ‘my friend’, is only the salute before the bayonet-thrust. You, it says, are passing on lies to your children, and so they may one day suffer torments such as this I saw. The voice of the trench writer has primacy, as a guarantor of eyewitness reliability but also as a badge of unimpeachable moral authority.
Tolkien eschewed polemical rhetoric, part of the evil of tyranny and orthodoxy that he opposed. In his work, a multitude of characters speak in diverse voices, but the author stays well out of sight. While trench writers such as Owen challenged the propagandists and censors for the monopoly on truth, Tolkien moved away from the idea of a monopoly altogether, telling his Lost Tales through multiple narrators (rather as Ilúvatar in ‘The Music of the Ainur’ allows his seraphic choirs to elaborate his themes). The idea survived into the ‘Silmarillion’, a collation of disparate historical accounts, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which purport to have been edited from the writings of their protagonists.
But the evil that Tolkien’s mythology most squarely opposes, disenchantment, is burned into the fabric of classic Great War literature.
By editing G. B. Smith’s A Spring Harvest, Tolkien contributed to a spate of fallen soldiers’ poetry, most of which is now forgotten. The little that is still remembered, including Owen’s poetry, was not cemented into the cultural memory until several more years had passed, when trench survivors broke their traumatized silence. A flurry of memoirs and novels appeared between 1926 and 1934, including Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Graves’s Good-bye to All That, and the start of Henry Williamson’s Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence. Now, in the words of Samuel Hynes, ‘the Myth of the War was defined and fixed in the version that retains authority’: the disenchanted version.
This ‘myth’ implies that the war consisted almost entirely of passive suffering. In his poetry, Sassoon neglects to mention his solo killing sprees in the German lines; in his prose he downplays the daring involved. In Wilfred Owen’s verse, men trudge through mud, or move a dying comrade into the sun, or simply wait to be attacked. He declared his subject to be pity, not heroes or deeds. In other words, action and heroism were omitted for a more effective protest against the war.
The revisionist approach of the late 1920s, which Owen had heralded, underlined the bitter irony of lives squandered for ‘a few acres of mud’, as Christopher Wiseman had put it. The snapshot narratives in the literature of disenchantment typically pivot on ironic incidents in which action is proved futile and courage a waste. Paul Fussell identifies classic trench writing with the ‘ironic’ mode of narrative that Northrop Frye (in The Anatomy of Criticism) defined as characterizing the latter phase of a typical cycle of literary history. The earliest fictions (myth, romance, epic, and tragedy) portrayed heroes who enjoyed greater power of action than their audience; but in the quintessentially modern ironic mode the protagonist has less power of action than ourselves, and is caught in a ‘scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity’.
These days it tends to be forgotten that many veterans resented the way their story was being told from 1926 onwards. ‘Book after book related a succession of disasters and discomforts with no intermission and no gleam of achievement,’ wrote Carrington. ‘Every battle a defeat, every officer a nincompoop, every soldier a coward.’ The wounded pride of a disgruntled officer, perhaps; but Carrington’s own memoir is hardly a rose-tinted affair.
The disenchanted view has left us a skewed picture of an important and complex historical event; a problem only exacerbated by a cultural and academic tendency to canonize the best and forget the rest. Coming after the desperate cheer of frontline letters home, the newspaper and government propaganda and the stilted elegies of the war era, the former soldier Charles Douie thought that the new approach restored balance; but he added:
The authors of this poetry and prose of horror have overstated the case in quite as great a degree as we understated it during the war. The sight of blood has gone to their heads. They can see nothing else…Are the prose and poetry of this age to be charged with disillusion and despair?
The disenchanted view of the war stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives.
‘The Book of Lost Tales’, composed between 1916 and c.1920, is the same vintage as Charles Carrington’s A Subaltern’s War, largely written in 1919-20. Carrington’s later words about his memoir apply equally to Tolkien’s mythology. ‘It is thus anterior to the pacifist reaction of the nineteen-thirties and is untainted by the influence of the later writers who invented the powerful image of “disenchantment” or “disillusion”,’ Carrington wrote. ‘I go back to an earlier stage in the history of ideas.’
The metaphorical uses of disenchanted and disillusioned have so overtaken the literal that it is easy to forget what they once meant. To say you are ‘disenchanted’ with the government or a love affair or a career, for example, is to say that you no longer value them. Wilfred Owen was disenchanted with a whole set of archaic values, declaring that his poetry was not about ‘deeds, or lands, or anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War’. But Robert Graves’s image of the end of innocence – wisdom scattering the nursery fairies – indicates the literal meaning of disenchantment. The Great War had broken a kind of spell.
Tolkien stands against disenchantment in both its literal and metaphorical senses; indeed, they cannot strictly be separated in his work. The disenchanted view, metaphorically speaking, is that failure renders effort meaningless. In contrast, Tolkien’s protagonists are heroes not because of their successes, which are often limited, but because of their courage and tenacity in trying. By implication, worth cannot be measured by results alone, but is intrinsic. His stories depict the struggle to uphold inherited, instinctive, or inspirational values – matters of intrinsic and immeasurable worth – against the forces of chaos and destruction. But Tolkien’s world is literally enchanted, too. Not only does it contain talking swords, moving islands, and spells of sleep, but even its most ‘normal’ objects and inhabitants possess a spiritual value that has nothing to do with any practical usefulness: no one has argued more energetically than Tolkien that a tree is more than a source of wood. Furthermore, according to ‘The Music of the Ainur’, the world is a spell in progress, a work of enchantment – etymologically, a magic that is sung.
Tolkien’s story of Túrin Turambar may appear to come close to the ‘disenchanted’ mode of literature. The ironies of inescapable circumstance either deprive Túrin of victory or they cheat him of its fruits. However, Tolkien parts company with his contemporaries in his depiction of the individual’s response to circumstance. Túrin’s dogged struggle against fate sets the seal on the heroic status he achieves in combat. Fate may laugh at his efforts, but he refuses to be humbled.
Irony is sometimes accounted an absolute virtue in literature, as if depicting reversals of fortune were evidence of a wise detachment from life, or saying the opposite of what is meant demonstrated a wry wit and paid a compliment to the reader’s cleverness. Tolkien recognized that ironic circumstance exists and must be portrayed, but it is clear that he did not account irony a virtue. He had stood with Christopher Wiseman when the latter complained, in late 1914, that the TCBS had become dominated by a waggish and sarcastic element ‘who sneer at everything and lose their temper at nothing’. His characterization of the dragon Glorund as the ironist who engineers Túrin’s destruction illustrates his own disapproval of those who delight in mockery.
Tolkien’s other narratives may stand further from ‘disenchanted’ literature, yet they still frequently involve the ironic downturn characteristic of classic trench writing: the disaster or discovery that undermines all achievements and threatens to snuff out hope. That downturn, however, is not the pivotal moment that matters most in Middle-earth. Tolkien propels his plots beyond it and so reaches the emotional crux that truly interested him: ‘eucatastrophe’, the sudden turn for the better when hope rises unforeseeably from the ashes. He makes despair or ‘disenchantment’ the prelude to a redemptive restoration of meaning.
From Tuor onwards he recorded how individuals are transfigured by extraordinary circumstances. His characters set out, more often than not, from a point something like Frye’s ‘ironic’ mode, in bondage, frustration, or absurdity, but they break free of those conditions, and so become heroes. They achieve greater power of action than ourselves, and so reach the condition of characters in the older modes identified by Northrop Frye in his cyclical view of literary history: myth, romance, and epic. So Tolkien dramatized the joy of victory against all odds in Beren and Tinúviel, whose courage and tenacity overcome not only Melko but also the mockery Beren has suffered in the court of Tinúviel’s father. This liberation from the chains of circumstance makes his stories especially vital in an age of disenchantment.
Heroism does happen, as Tolkien vouched with characteristic reticence in his landmark 1936 paper on Beowulf: ‘Even to-day…you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them…’ Courage had not changed since the days of ‘the old heroes…dying with their backs to the wall’, he said. The metaphor is commonplace, but loaded with meaning in contexts ancient and modern, public and perhaps personal. It recalls how, in the Old English poem The Wanderer, the lord’s retainers ‘eal gecrong / wlonc bi wealle’ – ‘all perished, proud beside the wall’. Tolkien might have remembered that Christopher Wiseman had used the same metaphor in his letter calling the TCBS to order after Rob Gilson’s death: ‘Now we stand with our backs to the wall, and yet we haver and question as to whether we had better not all put our backs against separate walls.’ For Tolkien’s inter-war audience, however, it would surely have evoked Field-Marshal Haig’s inspirational order during the German Spring Offensive of 1918: ‘With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.’ Through his narratives of hard-won and partial victory, Tolkien suggests that we should go on, whether we can or not.
Like Milton, he also tries to justify the ways of God to Men. Following the introduction of discord into the Music of the Ainur, Ilúvatar asserts that ‘even shall those beings, who must now dwell among his evil and endure through Melko misery and sorrow, terror and wickedness, declare in the end that it redoundeth only to my great glory, and doth but make the theme more worth the hearing, Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous’. In a more sceptical era, it is easy to scoff at this as a kind of faith that is blind to the reality of suffering; but Tolkien was not blind, and in the years immediately prior to writing those words he had witnessed suffering on an industrial scale. Others who lived through the shocks and turmoils of his times sought for similar consolatory explanations of God’s mysterious ways. Concluding his soldiering memoir, The Weary Road, Charles Douie wrote: ‘Perhaps some day later generations may begin to see our war in a truer perspective, and may discern it as an inevitable step in the tragic process by which consciousness has informed the will of man, by which in time all things will be fashioned fair.’ Tolkien was not writing about later generations, but about the end of the world. F. L. Lucas, the classicist-soldier whose enlistment had precipitated Rob Gilson’s, wrote that the purpose of tragic drama was ‘to portray life that its tears become a joy forever’. In Tolkien’s myth, our immortal souls will be able to contemplate the drama in which we have taken part as a finished work of art. They will also join the Ainur in a second, greater Music, when Ilúvatar’s themes will ‘be played aright; for then Ainur and Men will know his mind and heart as well as may be, and all his intent’.
Close to two decades separate the composition of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ from the publication of The Hobbit; closer to four divide it from the appearance of The Lord of the Rings. The ‘Silmarillion’ continued to evolve until Tolkien’s death, involving major developments at every level of detail from cosmology to nomenclature. Though a full examination of the question would be out of place here, I would argue that most of what has been said in this postscript holds true for all this later work.
By the time The Hobbit appeared, Tolkien had long abandoned the identification of the Lonely Isle with Britain, and the story of a Germanic or Anglo-Saxon mariner hearing the ‘true tradition’ of the Elves had dwindled to the occasional ‘editorial’ aside in the ‘Silmarillion’. The myth was no longer, in any geographical or cultural respect, about the genesis of England. But the loosening of these links – together with the new scope for naturalistic portraiture that accompanied his move away from epic modes – meant paradoxically that Tolkien could now write about ‘Englishness’ in a more meaningful way than in drawing linear connections through vast aeons. He could model hobbits directly on English people as he had known them in and around his cherished childhood home of Sarehole near Birmingham, borrowing aspects of custom, society, character, and speech. Hobbits, he said, constitute a community that is ‘more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’. He admitted, ‘I take my models like anyone else – from such “life” as I know.’ A figure standing uncertainly at the doorway into adventure, Bilbo Baggins is an engaging mixture of timidity and temerity, but he learns and grows with astonishing speed, until he can look death calmly in the eye. Bilbo is simply much more like us, Tolkien’s readers, than Beren or Tinúviel or Túrin could be. Meanwhile, the tincture of Englishness and the aura of 1897 draw this story closer to the First World War – the end of the era that hobbits evoke – than the Lost Tales that were actually written during and immediately after it.
It would be misleading to suggest that The Hobbit is Tolkien’s wartime experience in disguise; yet it is easy to see how some of his memories must have invigorated this tale of an ennobling rite of passage past the fearful jaws of death. The middle-class hero is thrown in with proud but stolid companions who have been forced to sink ‘as low as blacksmith-work or even coalmining’. The goblins they meet recall those of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, though in The Hobbit – because he made no bones about addressing a twentieth-century audience – Tolkien was much more explicit about the kind of evil they represent: ‘It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them…but in those days…they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.’ The company approaches the end of its quest across the desolation created by Smaug, a dragon of Glorund’s ilk: a once green land with now ‘neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished’. Scenes of sudden, violent ruin ensue (Tom Shippey sees elements of First World War attitudes in Bard the Bowman’s defence of Laketown); we visit the camps of the sick and wounded and listen to wranglings over matters of command and strategy. And all culminates in a battle involving those old enemies, the Elves and the Orcs. Horror and mourning, two attitudes to battlefield death, appear side by side, the Orcs lying ‘piled in heaps till Dale was dark and hideous with their corpses’, but among them ‘many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood’.
In 1916, from a trench in Thiepval Wood, G. B. Smith had written Tolkien a letter he thought might be his last. ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.’ The 24-year-old Tolkien had believed just as strongly in the dream shared by the TCBS, and felt that they ‘had been granted some spark of fire…that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world…’ At 48, however, Tolkien felt that the Great War had come down like winter on his creative powers in their first bloom. ‘I was pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again,’ he said in October 1940.
What he would have written had he not been ‘pitched into it all’ is difficult to imagine. The war imposed urgency and gravity, took him through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form. Without the war, it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on a conflict between good and evil; or if they had, whether good and evil would have taken a similar shape. The same may be said for his thoughts on death and immortality, dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe, enchantment and irony, the significance of fairy-story, the importance of ordinary people in events of historic magnitude, and, crucially, the relationship between language and mythology. If we were lucky enough now to survey a twentieth century in which there had been no Great War, we might know of a minor craftsman in the tradition of William Morris called J. R. R. Tolkien; or we might know him only as a brilliant academic. Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs.
Tolkien’s retrospective view in 1940 seems clouded. He was struggling to push on with his sequel to The Hobbit after a year’s hiatus under the pall of a new global conflict, but he had little sense of what the book would become.
But The Lord of the Rings, the masterpiece that was published a decade and a half later, stands as the fruition of the TCBSian dream, a light drawn from ancient sources to illuminate a darkening world. Some of its success may be attributed to a sense of depth and detail unparalleled in an imagined world: the result of a long germination that began not in December 1937, when the first sentence of this new story was written, but in 1914, with ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’; The Lord of the Rings was a part of the same tree that the Great War spurred into growth. But a good measure of its strength, surely, derives from its roots in Tolkien’s war. When it was published, baffled critics tried their hardest to interpret it as an allegory of the struggle against Nazi Germany; but Tolkien responded:
One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.
If you really must look for a meaningful biographical or historical influence, he would appear to be saying, 1914-18 is where you ought to start.
Tolkien intentionally contributed very little to such evidence as exists; his statements on the influence or otherwise of the First World War on The Lord of the Rings are few and wary. While no longer prone to assign himself any kind of walk-on role in his stories, as he had half-done with Eriol in ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, he nevertheless conceded that out of the entire dramatis personae, ‘As far as any character is “like me” it is Faramir – except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.’ Faramir, of course, is an officer but also a scholar, with a reverence for the old histories and sacred values that helps him through a bitter war. Tolkien asserted a less specific but much more concrete connection between the Great War and The Lord of the Rings by declaring, ‘My “Sam Gamgee” is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.’ Finally, he said that the Somme battlefield had re-emerged in the desolate approaches to Mordor:
Personally I do not think that either war…had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.
Though couched within a sweeping denial of influence, the admission has stuck. A survey of ‘British fiction writers of the First World War’ by Hugh Cecil focuses on such authors as Richard Aldington, Wilfrid Ewart, and Oliver Onions, but by way of introducing the Western Front it turns first to Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes, a scene of morbid desolation that has become, in effect, a shorthand symbol for the trenches. C. S. Lewis leaned strongly towards the view that the war of their generation had cast its shadow on his friend’s story. Lewis had also served on the Western Front, discovering camaraderie in the midst of horror, suffering trench fever and then sustaining a ‘Blighty’ wound at the Battle of Arras. Reviewing The Lord of the Rings in 1955, he wrote about one of the book’s ‘general excellences’, its surprising realism:
This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when ‘everything is now ready’, the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heavensent windfalls as a cache of tobacco ‘salvaged’ from a ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy-tale was wakened into maturity by active service; that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf), ‘There is good rock here. This country has tough bones.’
More might be added to Lewis’s list: the atmosphere of pre-war tension and watchfulness, Frodo Baggins’s restless impatience with his parochial countrymen in the Shire, the world’s dizzying plunge into peril and mass mobilizations; tenacious courage revealed in the ordinary people of town and farm, with camaraderie and love as their chief motivations; the striking absence of women from much of the action; the machine-dominated mind of Saruman. Tom Shippey notes that the failure of the Shire to fête Frodo Baggins on his return reflects in Tolkien ‘the disillusionment of the returned veteran’.
Lewis failed to mention the equally surprising pertinence of superficially unrealistic elements in The Lord of the Rings. Here are a few that suggest the influence of 1914-18: the sweeping surveillance of the Eye of Sauron, the moments when reality shifts into dream during those long marches, or into nightmare in the midst of battle, the battlefield dominated by lumbering elephantine behemoths and previously unseen airborne killers, the Black Breath of despair that brings down even the bravest; the revenge of the trees for their wanton destruction. The popularity of William Morris’s quest stories on the Western Front has been noted. Tolkien completed the circle by drawing on his experiences of the Great War for a series of ‘medieval’ romances, beginning with ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and, it may be judged, most fully achieved in The Lord of the Rings.
The book recounts the piteous predicament of the soldier down in the battlefield mud, but it also tackles the themes that Wilfred Owen ruled off-limits: deeds, lands, glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, power. It examines how the individual’s experience of war relates to those grand old abstractions; for example, it puts glory, honour, majesty, as well as courage, under such stress that they often fracture, but are not utterly destroyed. Mindful, no doubt, of the schism of war literature into propaganda and protest, Lewis called The Lord of the Rings ‘a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike’ that presides at ‘the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment’.
The last word may go to Siegfried Sassoon, a quintessential Great War writer. In The Lord of the Rings the embattled city of Minas Tirith is saved by the intervention of a host of the dead out of ancient legends: people who deserted their allies three thousand years before, and have come at last to redeem their oath and to fight. It is an astonishing, fantastic scenario, and morally striking: ghosts joining the war against evil. Yet how similar this is to a visionary moment in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, where Sassoon recalls the shock of witnessing the return of his men to rest after eleven days in the Somme trenches:
I had seen something that night which overawed me. It was all in the day’s work – an exhausted Division returning from the Somme Offensive – but for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts. It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.
Tolkien, more famous for prose than poetry, was already at work on his mythology in 1916; but otherwise we may justly regard him as the epic writer Sassoon imagined.