J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Ronald Tolkien and Edith Bratt were married by Father Murphy after early mass on Wednesday 22 March 1916. They had chosen a Wednesday because that was the day of the week on which they had been reunited in 1913. There was one unfortunate incident: Edith did not realise that when she signed the register she would have to give her father’s name, and she had never told Ronald about her illegitimacy. Confronted by the register she panicked and wrote the name of an uncle, Frederick Bratt; but she could think of nothing to put under the heading ‘Rank or profession of father’, so she left it blank. Afterwards she told Ronald the truth. ‘I think I love you even more tenderly because of all that, my wife,’ he wrote to her, ‘but we must as far as possible forget it and entrust it to God.’ After the wedding they left by train for Clevedon in Somerset where they were to stay for a week, and in the compartment they both doodled (on the back of a greetings telegram) versions of Edith’s new signature: Edith Mary Tolkien … Edith Tolkien … Mrs Tolkien … Mrs J. R. R. Tolkien. It looked splendid.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE BREAKING OF THE FELLOWSHIP

  When he got back from his honeymoon, Tolkien found a letter from Sidgwick & Jackson rejecting his poems. He had half expected this, but it was a disappointment. Edith returned to Warwick, but only to wind up her affairs in that town. They had decided that for the duration of the war she would not have a permanent home, but would live in furnished rooms as near as possible to Ronald’s camp. She and her cousin Jennie (who was still living with her) came to Great Haywood, a Staffordshire village near the camp where Ronald was posted. There was a Catholic church in the village with a kindly priest, and Ronald had found good lodgings. But scarcely had he seen Edith settled than he received embarkation orders, and late on Sunday 4 June 1916 he set off for London and thence to France.

  Everyone in England had known for some time that ‘The Big Push’ was imminent. A virtual stalemate had continued throughout 1915 on the Western Front, and neither poison-gas at Ypres nor mass slaughter at Verdun had altered the line by more than a few miles. But now that the hundreds of thousands of new recruits had filtered through the training camps and had emerged as a New Army, it was clear that something spectacular was about to happen.

  Tolkien arrived at Calais on Tuesday 6 June and was taken to base camp at Étaples. Somehow on the journey his entire kit had been lost: camp-bed, sleeping-bag, mattress, spare boots, wash-stand, everything that he had chosen with care and bought at great expense had vanished without trace into the interstices of the army transport system, leaving him to beg, borrow, and buy replacements.

  The days passed at Étaples, and nothing happened. The nervous excitement of embarkation relapsed into a weary boredom made worse by a total ignorance of what was going on. Tolkien wrote a poem about England, took part in training exercises, and listened to the seagulls wheeling overhead. Along with many of his fellow officers he was transferred to the 11th Battalion, where he found little congenial company. The junior officers were all recruits like himself, some less than twenty-one years old; while the older company commanders and adjutants were in many cases professional soldiers dug out of retirement, men with narrow minds and endless stories of India or the Boer War. These old campaigners were ready to take advantage of any slip made by a recruit, and Tolkien reported that they treated him like an inferior schoolboy. He had more respect for the ‘men’, the N.C.O.s and privates who made up the other eight hundred or so members of the battalion. A few of them were from South Wales but most were Lancashire men. Officers could not make friends among them, for the system did not permit it; but each officer had a batman, a servant who was detailed to look after his kit and care for him much in the manner of an Oxford scout. Through this, Tolkien got to know several of the men very well. Discussing one of the principal characters in The Lord of the Rings he wrote many years later: ‘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.’

  After three weeks at Étaples the battalion set off for the Front. The train journey was almost unbelievably slow, interrupted by innumerable halts, and it was more than twenty-four hours before the flat featureless landscape of the Pas de Calais gave way to more hilly country where a canalised river with poplar-lined banks flowed alongside the railway. This was the Somme. And already they could hear gunfire.

  Tolkien’s battalion disembarked in Amiens, were given food from cookers in the main square, and then marched out of the town, heavily laden with their kit, stepping aside or halting when horses came by, pulling ammunition wagons or huge guns. Soon they were in the open Picardy countryside. By the sides of the straight road the houses gave way to fields of scarlet poppies or yellow mustard. It began to rain in torrents, and within moments the dusty surface of the road changed to a white chalky mud. The battalion marched on, dripping and cursing, to a hamlet called Rubempré, ten miles from Amiens. Here they were billeted for the night in conditions that they would soon be accustomed to: straw bunks in barns and sheds for the men, floor-space for camp beds in the farmhouses for the officers. The buildings were ancient and solid with warped beams and mud walls. Outside beyond the crossroads and the low houses, fields of rain-swept cornflowers stretched away to the horizon. The war was inescapable: there were broken roofs and ruined buildings, while from the near distance came the sound that they had been approaching all day, the whine, crash, and boom of the Allied bombardment of German lines.

  They stayed at Rubempré the next day, doing physical training and bayonet practice. On the Friday, 30 June, they moved to another hamlet nearer the front line. Early the next morning the attack began. They were not to be in it, for their task was to wait in reserve and go into battle several days later, by which time the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, reckoned that the German line would be smashed open and the Allied troops would be able to penetrate deep into enemy territory. But that was not what happened.

  At 7.30 a.m. on Saturday I July the troops in the British front line went over the top. Rob Gilson of the T.C.B.S., serving in the Suffolk regiment, was among them. They scrambled up ladders from the trenches and into the open, forming up in straight lines as they had been instructed, and beginning their slow tramp forward – slow because each man was carrying at least sixty-five pounds of equipment. They had been told that the German defences were already virtually destroyed and the barbed wire cut by the Allied barrage. But they could see that the wire was not cut, and as they approached it the German machine-guns opened fire on them.

  Tolkien’s battalion remained in reserve, moving to a village called Bouzincourt, where the majority bivouacked in a field while a few lucky ones (including Tolkien) slept in huts. There were clear signs that things had not gone according to plan on the battlefront: wounded men in their hundreds, many of them hideously mutilated; troops detailed for grave-digging; and a sinister smell of decay. The truth was that on the first day of battle twenty thousand Allied troops had been killed. The German defences had not been destroyed, the wire had been scarcely cut, and the enemy gunners had shot down the British and French, line after line, as they advanced with slow paces, forming a perfect target.

  On Thursday 6 July the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers went into action, but only ‘A’ Company was sent down to the trenches, and Tolkien stayed at Bouzincourt with the remainder. He re-read Edith’s letters with news from home and glanced once again at his collection of notes from the other members of the T.C.B.S. He was worried about Gilson and Smith, who had both been in the thick of the battle – and he was overwhelmingly relieved and delighted when later in the day G. B. Smith actually turned up at Bouzincourt alive and uninjured. Smith stayed for a few days’ rest period before returning to the lines, and he and Tolkien met and talked as often as they could, discussing poetry, the war, and the future. Once they walked in a field where poppies still waved in the wind despite the battle that was turning the countryside into a featureless desert of mud. They waited anxiou
sly for news of Rob Gilson. On the Sunday night ‘A’ Company came back from the trenches; a dozen of their number had been killed and more than a hundred wounded, and they told tales of horror. Then at last, on Friday 14 July, it was the turn of Tolkien and ‘B’ Company to go into action.

  What Tolkien now experienced had already been endured by thousands of other soldiers: the long march at night-time from the billets down to the trenches, the stumble of a mile or more through the communication alleys that led to the front line itself, and the hours of confusion and exasperation until the hand-over from the previous company had been completed. For signallers such as Tolkien there was bitter disillusionment, as instead of the neat orderly conditions in which they had been trained they found a tangled confusion of wires, field-telephones out of order and covered with mud, and worst of all a prohibition on the use of wires for all but the least important messages (the Germans had tapped telephone lines and intercepted crucial orders preceding the attack). Even Morse code buzzers were prohibited, and instead the signallers had to rely on lights, flags, and at the last resort runners or even carrier-pigeons. Worst of all were the dead men, for corpses lay in every corner, horribly torn by the shells. Those that still had faces stared with dreadful eyes. Beyond the trenches no-man’s-land was littered with bloated and decaying bodies. All around was desolation. Grass and corn had vanished into a sea of mud. Trees, stripped of leaf and branch, stood as mere mutilated and blackened trunks. Tolkien never forgot what he called the ‘animal horror’ of trench warfare.

  His first day in action had been chosen by the Allied commanders for a major offensive, and his company was attached to the 7th Infantry Brigade for an attack on the ruined hamlet of Ovillers, which was still in German hands. The attack was unsuccessful, for once again the enemy wire had not been properly cut, and many of Tolkien’s battalion were killed by machine-gun fire. But he survived unhurt, and after forty-eight hours without rest he was allowed some sleep in a dug-out. After another twenty-four hours his company was relieved of duty. On his return to the huts at Bouzincourt Tolkien found a letter from G. B. Smith:

  15 July 1916.

  My dear John Ronald,

  I saw in the paper this morning that Rob has been killed.

  I am safe but what does that matter?

  Do please stick to me, you and Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst of news.

  Now one realises in despair what the T.C.B.S. really was.

  O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do?

  Yours ever, G. B. S.

  Rob Gilson had died at La Boisselle, leading his men into action on the first day of the battle, I July.

  Tolkien wrote to Smith: ‘I do not feel a member of a complete body now. I honestly feel that the T.C.B.S. has ended.’ But Smith replied: ‘The T.C.B.S. is not finished and never will be.’

  Day now followed day in the same pattern: a rest period, back to the trenches, more attacks (usually fruitless), another rest period. Tolkien was among those who were in support at the storming of the Schwaben Redoubt, a massive fortification of German trenches. Prisoners were taken, among them men from a Saxon regiment that had fought alongside the Lancashire Fusiliers against the French at Minden in 1759. Tolkien spoke to a captured officer who had been wounded, offering him a drink of water; the officer corrected his German pronunciation. Occasionally there were brief periods of calm when the guns were silent. At one such moment (Tolkien later recalled) his hand was on the receiver of a trench telephone when a field-mouse emerged from hiding and ran across his fingers.

  On Saturday 19 August Tolkien and G. B. Smith met again, at Acheux. They talked, and met again on the following days, on the last of which they had a meal together at Bouzincourt, coming under fire as they ate but surviving uninjured. Then Tolkien returned to the trenches.

  Although there was no longer the same intensity of fighting as in the first days of the Battle of the Somme, British losses continued to be severe, and many of Tolkien’s battalion were killed. He himself remained entirely uninjured, but the longer he stayed in the trenches the greater were his chances of being among the casualties. As to leave, it was ever imminent but never granted.

  His rescuer was ‘pyrexia of unknown origin’, as the medical officers called it. To the soldiers it was simply ‘trench fever’. Carried by lice, it caused a high temperature and other fever symptoms, and already thousands of men had reported sick with it. On Friday 27 October it struck Tolkien. He was billeted at Beauval at the time, twelve miles behind the lines. When he was taken ill they transported him to hospital a short distance away. A day later he was on a sick-train bound for the coast, and by the Sunday night a bed had been found for him in hospital at Le Touquet, where he remained for a week.

  But the fever did not die down, and on 8 November he was put on board ship for England. Upon arrival he was taken by train to hospital in Birmingham. So in a matter of days he found himself transported from the horror of the trenches to white sheets and a view of the city he knew so well.

  He was reunited with Edith, and by the third week in December he was well enough to leave hospital and go to Great Haywood to spend Christmas with her. There he received a letter from Christopher Wiseman, who was serving in the Navy:

  H.M.S. Superb. 16 December 1916.

  My dear J. R.,

  I have just received news from home about G. B. S., who has succumbed to injuries received from shells bursting on December 3rd. I can’t say very much about it now. I humbly pray Almighty God I may be accounted worthy of him.

  Chris.

  Smith had been walking down the road in a village behind the lines when a shell burst near him; he was wounded in the right arm and thigh. An operation was attempted, but gas-gangrene had set in. They buried him in Warlencourt British Cemetery.

  Not long before, he had written to Tolkien:

  My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off to-night. And do you write it also to Christopher. 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.

  Yours ever, G. B. S.

  PART THREE

  1917–1925: The making of a mythology

  CHAPTER I

  LOST TALES

  May you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them. G. B. Smith’s words were a clear call to Ronald Tolkien to begin the great work that he had been meditating for some time, a grand and astonishing project with few parallels in the history of literature. He was going to create an entire mythology.

  The idea had its origins in his taste for inventing languages. He had discovered that to carry out such inventions to any degree of complexity he must create for the languages a ‘history’ in which they could develop. Already in the early Earendel poems he had begun to sketch something of that history; now he wanted to record it in full.

  There was another force at work: his desire to express his most profound feelings in poetry, a desire that owed its origin to the inspiration of the T.C.B.S. His first verses had been unremarkable, as immature as the raw idealism of the four young men; but they were the first steps towards the great prose-poem (for though in prose it is a poetic work) that he now began to write.

  And there was a third element playing a part: his desire to create a mythology for England. He had hinted at this during his undergraduate days when he wrote of the Finnish Kalevala: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ This idea grew until it reached grand proportions. Here is how Tolkien expressed it, when recollecting it ma
ny years later: ‘Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe; not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be “high”, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.’

  Absurdly grand the concept may have seemed, but on his return from France, Tolkien determined to realise it. Here now was the time and place: he was once more with Edith and at Great Haywood, in the English countryside that was so dear to him. Even Christopher Wiseman far away at sea sensed that something was about to happen. He wrote to Tolkien: ‘You ought to start the epic.’ And Tolkien did. On the cover of a cheap notebook he wrote in thick blue pencil the title that he had chosen for his mythological cycle: ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. Inside the notebook he began to compose what eventually became known as The Silmarillion.