J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  His own eye for landscape received a powerful stimulus during the summer of 1914 when, after visiting Edith, he spent a holiday in Cornwall, staying on the Lizard peninsula with Father Vincent Reade of the Birmingham Oratory. He found Cornwall exhilarating. He and Father Vincent went for long walks every day, and he wrote to Edith describing them: ‘We walked over the moor-land on top of the cliffs to Kynance Cove. Nothing I could say in a dull old letter would describe it to you. The sun beats down on you and a huge Atlantic swell smashes and spouts over the snags and reefs. The sea has carved weird wind-holes and spouts into the cliffs which blow with trumpety noises or spout foam like a whale, and everywhere you see black and red rock and white foam against violet and transparent seagreen.’ He never forgot this sight of the sea and the Cornish coastline, and it became an ideal landscape in his mind.

  One day he and Father Vincent explored the villages that lie a short way inland from the Lizard promontory. He recorded of this expedition: ‘Our walk home after tea started through rustic “Warwickshire” scenery, dropped down to the banks of the Helford river (almost like a fjord), and then climbed through “Devonshire” lanes up to the opposite bank, and then got into more open country, where it twisted and wiggled and wobbled and upped and downed until dusk was already coming on and the red sun just dropping. Then after adventures and redirections we came out on the bleak bare “Goonhilly” downs and had a four mile straight piece with turf for our sore feet. Then we got benighted in the neighbourhood of Ruan Minor, and got into the dips and waggles again. The light got very “eerie”. Sometimes we plunged into a belt of trees, and owls and bats made you creep: sometimes a horse with asthma behind a hedge or an old pig with insomnia made your heart jump: or perhaps it was nothing worse than walking into an unexpected stream. The fourteen miles eventually drew to an end – and the last two miles were enlivened by the sweeping flash of the Lizard Lights and the sounds of the sea drawing nearer.’

  At the end of the long vacation he travelled to Nottinghamshire to stay for a few days on the farm that his Aunt Jane was running with the Brookes-Smiths and his brother Hilary. While at the farm he wrote a poem. It was headed with the line from Cynewulf’s Crist that had so fascinated him: Eala Earendel engla beorhtast! Its title was ‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’, and it began as follows:

  Earendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup

  In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;

  From the door of Night as a ray of light

  Leapt over the twilight brim,

  And launching his bark like a silver spark

  From the golden-fading sand

  Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery death

  He sped from Westerland.

  The succeeding verses describe the star-ship’s voyage across the firmament, a progress that continues until the morning light blots out all sight of it.

  This notion of the star-mariner whose ship leaps into the sky had grown from the reference to ‘Earendel’ in the Cynewulf lines. But the poem that it produced was entirely original. It was in fact the beginning of Tolkien’s own mythology.

  1 Honour Moderations, like the majority of Oxford examinations, comprises a number of written papers covering various aspects of the candidate’s subject. The classes awarded are (in descending order of merit) from First to Fourth.

  CHAPTER VII

  WAR

  By the time that Tolkien wrote ‘The Voyage of Earendel’, in the late summer of 1914, England had declared war on Germany. Already young men were enlisting in their thousands, answering Kitchener’s appeal for soldiers. But Tolkien’s feelings were rather different: he was concerned to stay at Oxford until he could finish his degree, being hopeful of a First Class. So, though his aunts and uncles expected him to join up (his brother Hilary had already enlisted as a bugler) he went back to the University for the Michaelmas term.

  At first he reported: ‘It is awful. I really don’t think I shall be able to go on: work seems impossible. Not a single man I know is up except Cullis.’ But he became more cheerful when he learnt of the existence of a scheme whereby he could train for the army while at the University but defer his call-up until after he had taken his degree. He signed on for it.

  Once he had decided what to do, life became more pleasant. He had now moved from his college rooms to ‘digs’ in St John’s Street which he shared with Colin Cullis, who had not joined the army because of poor health. Tolkien found digs ‘a delicious joy compared with the primitive life of college’. He was also delighted to discover that his T.C.B.S. friend G. B. Smith was still up at Oxford awaiting a commission. Smith was to join the Lancashire Fusiliers, and Tolkien resolved to try for a commission in the same regiment, if possible the same battalion.

  A few days after the start of term he began to drill in the University Parks with the Officers’ Training Corps. This had to be combined with his normal academic work, but he found that the double life suited him. ‘Drill is a godsend,’ he wrote to Edith. ‘I have been up a fortnight nearly, and have not yet got a touch even of the real Oxford “sleepies”.’ He was also trying his hand at writing. His enthusiasm for William Morris had given him the idea of adapting one of the stories from the Finnish Kalevala into a Morris-style prose-and-verse romance. He chose the story of Kullervo, a hapless young man who unknowingly commits incest and, when he discovers, throws himself on to his sword. Tolkien began work on ‘The Story of Kullervo’ as he called it, and though it was little more than a pastiche of Morris it was his first essay in the writing of a legend in verse and prose. He left it unfinished.

  At the beginning of the Christmas vacation of 1914 he travelled to London to attend a gathering of the T.C.B.S. Christopher Wiseman’s family had moved south, and at their Wandsworth house there assembled all four members of the ‘club’: Tolkien, Wiseman, R. Q. Gilson, and G. B. Smith. They spent the weekend chiefly in sitting around the gas fire in the little upstairs room, smoking their pipes and talking. As Wiseman said, they felt ‘four times the intellectual size’ when they were together.

  It was curious how they had gone on meeting and writing to each other, this little group of school-friends. But they had begun to hope that together they might achieve something of value. Tolkien once compared them to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but the others scoffed at the idea. Yet they did feel that in some way they were destined to kindle a new light. Perhaps it was no more than the last spark of childhood ambition before it was snuffed out by experience of the world, but for Tolkien at least it had an important and practical result. He decided that he was a poet.

  Afterwards he explained that this T.C.B.S. meeting late in 1914 had helped him to find ‘a voice for all kind of pent up things’, adding: ‘I have always laid that to the credit of the inspiration that even a few hours with the four brought to us.’

  Immediately following the weekend in London he began to write poems. They were in general not very remarkable, and certainly they were not always economical in their use of words. Here are some lines from ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’, written on 4 December 1914 and based on Tolkien’s memories of his Cornish holiday a few months previously:

  In a dim and perilous region, down whose great

  tempestuous ways

  I heard no sound of men’s voices; in those eldest of

  the days,

  I sat on the ruined margin of the deep voiced

  echoing sea

  Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless

  cadency

  On the land besieged for ever in an aeon of

  assaults

  And torn in towers and pinnacles and caverned in

  great vaults.

  When Tolkien showed this and other poems to Wiseman, his friend remarked that they reminded him of Symons’s criticism of Meredith, ‘when he compared M. to a lady who liked to put on all her jewelry after breakfast’. And Wiseman advised: ‘Don’t overdo it.’

  Tolkien was more restrained in a poem describing his and Edith
’s love for each other, choosing a favourite image to express this:

  Lo! young we are and yet have stood

  like planted hearts in the great Sun

  of Love so long (as two fair trees

  in woodland or in open dale

  stand utterly entwined, and breathe

  the airs, and suck the very light

  together) that we have become

  as one, deep-rooted in the soil

  of Life, and tangled in sweet growth.

  Among other poems written by Tolkien at this time was ‘The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon’ (which was eventually published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil). He selected a similarly ‘fairy’ subject in ‘Goblin Feet’, a poem that he wrote to please Edith who said that she liked ‘spring and flowers and trees, and little elfin people’. ‘Goblin Feet’ represents everything of this sort that Tolkien soon came to detest heartily, so it is scarcely fair to quote from it; yet it has an undeniable sureness of rhythm, and as it reached print in several anthologies at the time it can be said to be his first published work of any significance:

  I am off down the road

  Where the fairy lanterns glowed

  And the little pretty flittermice are flying:

  A slender band of grey

  It runs creepily away

  And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.

  The air is full of wings,

  Of the blundering beetle-things

  That warn you with their whirring and their humming.

  O! I hear the tiny horns

  Of enchanted leprechauns

  And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming!

  O! the lights: O! the gleams: O! the little tinkly sounds:

  O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes:

  O! the echo of their feet – of their little happy feet:

  O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.

  G. B. Smith read all Tolkien’s verses and sent him criticisms. He was encouraging, but he remarked that Tolkien might improve his verse-writing by reading more widely in English literature. Smith suggested that he should try Browne, Sidney, and Bacon; later he recommended Tolkien to look at the new poems by Rupert Brooke. But Tolkien paid little heed. He had already set his own poetic course, and he did not need anyone else to steer him.

  He soon came to feel that the composition of occasional poems without a connecting theme was not what he wanted. Early in 1915 he turned back to his original Earendel verses and began to work their theme into a larger story. He had shown the original Earendel lines to G. B. Smith, who had said that he liked them but asked what they were really about. Tolkien had replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’ Not try to invent: try to find out. He did not see himself as an inventor of story but as a discoverer of legend. And this was really due to his private languages.

  He had been working for some time at the language that was influenced by Finnish, and by 1915 he had developed it to a degree of some complexity. He felt that it was ‘a mad

  hobby’, and he scarcely expected to find an audience for it. But he sometimes wrote poems in it, and the more he worked at it the more he felt that it needed a ‘history’ to support it. In other words, you cannot have a language without a race of people to speak it. He was perfecting the language; now he had to decide to whom it belonged.

  When talking about it to Edith he referred to it as ‘my nonsense fairy language’. Here is part of a poem written in it, and dated ‘November 1915, March 1916’. No translation survives, although the words Lasselanta (‘leaf-fall’, hence ‘Autumn’) and Eldamar (the ‘elvenhome’ in the West) were to be used by Tolkien in many other contexts:

  Ai lintulinda Lasselanta

  Pilingeve suyer nalla ganta

  Kuluvi ya karnevalinar

  V’ematte singi Eldamar.

  During 1915 the picture became clear in Tolkien’s mind. This, he decided, was the language spoken by the fairies or elves whom Earendel saw during his strange voyage. He began work on a ‘Lay of Earendel’ that described the mariner’s journeyings across the world before his ship became a star. The Lay was to be divided into several poems, and the first of these, ‘The Shores of Faery’, tells of the mysterious land of Valinor, where Two Trees grow, one bearing golden sun-apples and the other silver moon-apples. To this land comes Earendel.

  The poem bears comparatively little relation to Tolkien’s later mythological concepts, but it includes elements that were to appear in The Silmarillion, and it deserves to be quoted as an indication of what was happening in his imagination at this time. It is here printed in its earliest form:

  West of the Moon, East of the Sun

  There stands a lonely Hill

  Its feet are in the pale green Sea;

  Its towers are white and still:

  Beyond Taníquetil

  In Valinor.

  No stars come there but one alone

  That hunted with the Moon,

  For there the Two Trees naked grow

  That bear Night’s silver bloom;

  That bear the globéd fruit of Noon

  In Valinor.

  There are the shores of Faery

  With their moonlit pebbled strand

  Whose foam is silver music

  On the opalescent floor

  Beyond the great sea-shadows

  On the margent of the sand

  That stretches on for ever

  From the golden feet of Kôr –

  Beyond Taníquetil

  In Valinor.

  O! West of the Moon, East of the Sun

  Lies the Haven of the Star;

  The white town of the Wanderer

  And the rocks of Eglamar:

  There Wingelot is harboured

  While Earendel looks afar

  On the magic and the wonder

  ‘Tween here and Eglamar –

  Out, out beyond Taníquetil

  In Valinor – afar.

  While Tolkien’s mind was occupied with the seeds of his mythology he was preparing himself for Schools, his final examination in English Language and Literature. The examination began in the second week of June 1915, and Tolkien was triumphant, achieving First Class Honours.

  He could in consequence be reasonably certain of getting an academic job when the war was over; but in the meantime he had to take up his commission as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was posted not as he had hoped to the 19th Battalion in which G. B. Smith was serving, but to the 13th. His training began in July at Bedford, where he was billeted in a house in the town with half a dozen other officers. He learnt to drill a platoon, and attended military lectures. He bought a motor bicycle which he shared with a fellow officer, and when he could get weekend leave he rode over to Warwick to visit Edith. He grew a moustache. For most of the time he looked and behaved like any other young officer.

  In August he moved to Staffordshire, and during the succeeding weeks he and his battalion were shifted about from one camp to another with the apparent lack of plan which characterises troop-movements in wartime. Conditions were uniformly uncomfortable, and in the intervals between inedible meals, trench drill, and lectures on machine-guns, there was little to do except play bridge (which he enjoyed) and listen to ragtime on the gramophone (which he did not). Nor did he care for the majority of his fellow officers. ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors,’ he told Edith, ‘and even human beings rare indeed.’ He spent some of his time reading Icelandic – he was determined to keep up with his academic work during the war – but the time passed slowly. ‘These grey days,’ he wrote, ‘wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing, are not enjoyable.’

  By the beginning of 1916 he had decided to specialise in signalling, for the prospect of dealing with words, messages, and codes was more appealing than the drudgery and responsibility of commanding a platoon. So he learnt Morse code, flag and disc signalling, the tran
smission of messages by heliograph and lamp, the use of signal-rockets and field-telephones, and even how to handle carrier-pigeons (which were sometimes used on the battlefield). Eventually he was appointed battalion signalling officer.

  Embarkation for France was now near, and he and Edith decided to get married before he left, for the appalling death-roll among the British troops made it clear that he might never return. They had in any case waited more than long enough, for he was twenty-four and she twenty-seven. They did not have much money, but at least he was earning regular pay in the Army, and he decided to ask Father Francis Morgan to transfer all of his modest share capital to his own name. He also hoped to get some income from his poetry. His poem ‘Goblin Feet’ had been accepted by Blackwells for the annual volume of Oxford Poetry, and encouraged by this he sent a selection of his verses to the publishers Sidgwick & Jackson. To add to his capital he also sold his share in the motorbike.

  He went to Birmingham to see Father Francis about the money, and to tell him that he was going to marry Edith. He managed to arrange the money matters, but when it came to the point he could not bring himself to tell his old guardian about the marriage, and he left the Oratory without mentioning it; he could not forget Father Francis’s opposition to the romance six years before. It was not until a fortnight before the wedding that he finally wrote and explained. The letter that came back was kindly; indeed Father Francis wished them both ‘every blessing and happiness’, and declared that he would conduct the ceremony himself in the Oratory Church. Alas, it was too late. Arrangements had already been made for the marriage to take place in the Catholic church at Warwick.