Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  At the start of March, Rob Gilson wrote inviting Tolkien to join Wiseman and himself in Cambridge. Smith was going too, and Gilson was eager to repeat the experience of the ‘Council of London’. Ever since that weekend he had been enduring the unaccustomed hardships of military training, living in a hut in an often flooded field, sometimes ill from inoculations, and suffering a growing sense of pessimism. ‘I have quite lost now any conviction that the war is likely to end within the next six months,’ Gilson wrote home. ‘If anyone with a gift of prophecy were to tell me that the war would last ten years, I shouldn’t feel the least surprise.’ He told Tolkien, ‘My whole endurance of the present is founded on the remembrance that I am a TCBSite…But another conclave would be the most perfect bliss imaginable.’ If Tolkien could not come to Cambridge the following weekend, Gilson would be ‘bitterly disappointed’.

  Nevertheless, he did not turn up. On the Saturday the three wired an ultimatum calling on him to appear, or resign from the TCBS. It was not, of course, entirely serious. ‘When we sent the telegram,’ Wiseman wrote to Tolkien the following week, ‘we were groping for the thousand and first time in the dark for a John Ronald of whom there appeared no sound or sight or rumour in any direction…It always seems to us odd that you should so consistently be the only one left out of the TCBS.’

  ‘Schools’ were fast approaching, and Tolkien had to prepare for ten papers. Most of them covered areas in which he was an enthusiast: Gothic and Germanic philology, Old Icelandic, Old and Middle English language and literature. Volsunga Saga, The Seafarer, Havelock the Dane, Troilus and Criseyde: these he should have no trouble with. He had been familiar with some of this material for several years prior to joining the English course at Oxford, and ever since switching from Classics he had been breezily confident about doing well. But a week after the missed Cambridge meeting (as a three-day British offensive failed at Neuve-Chapelle) he headed off for the Easter vacation armed with set texts, and at Edith’s in Warwick he worked through the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale line by line, making thorough notes on vocabulary (such as attercoppe, ‘poisonheads’, which he later gave to Bilbo Baggins as a taunt against the spiders of Mirkwood).

  His other work, poetry, occupied him too. At the end of term Tolkien had again found an audience for his poetry at Exeter College’s Essay Club (the club had in fact survived well beyond its November ‘last gasp’), which listened to him read ‘The Tides’, or as he had named his revision of the poem, ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’. G. B. Smith had seen at least ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ in manuscript, but now Tolkien wanted to submit a whole set of poems to the TCBS for criticism. He had typescripts made of various Eärendel ‘fragments’ and other poems and sent them to Smith at his Magdalen College billets.

  Smith was perplexed. As a conservative and a lover of classical form, he found Tolkien’s wayward romanticism problematic. He also favoured the new simplicity of Georgian Poetry, an influential 1913 anthology edited by Edward Marsh, which included poems by Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Davies, and Walter de la Mare. Accordingly Smith urged Tolkien to simplify the syntax of ‘Sea Chant’ and others. He advised him to read and learn from ‘good authors’; although his idea of a ‘good’ author was not exactly congruent with Tolkien’s. However, he thought the poems ‘amazingly good’ and showed them to Henry Theodore Wade-Gery, a former Oxford Classics don who was a captain in Smith’s battalion and himself an accomplished poet.* Wade-Gery agreed that the syntax was occasionally too difficult, but like Smith he strongly approved of this love-poem:

  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.

  The parenthetical aside introduces an eloquent delay, as if to suggest the duration of the lovers’ growth together before the final clause reveals the result of that long entanglement.

  Light as a tangible substance (often a liquid) was to become a recurrent feature of Tolkien’s mythology. It is tempting to locate its origin here. It is noteworthy, too, that the Two Trees of Valinor, which were to illumine his created world, had their progenitors here in a poem celebrating his relationship with Edith and in his symbolic drawing Undertenishness.

  Both Smith and Wade-Gery also favoured a poem written in March called ‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon’, in which Tolkien took a well-known nursery rhyme and retold it at length. The original version is nonsensical:

  The man in the moon

  came down too soon,

  And asked the way to Norwich;

  He went by the south

  And burned his mouth

  With supping cold plum porridge.

  Tolkien’s retelling makes sense of the story (thankfully, without sacrificing any of its absurdity). The Man in the Moon acquires both personality and motive, leaving his chill and colourless lunar kingdom because he craves the exuberance of the Earth. In counterpoint to the ‘viands hot, and wine’ the Man in the Moon desires, his accustomed diet of ‘pearly cakes of light snowflakes’ and ‘thin moonshine’ sounds royally unsatisfying. Grandiose latinisms embellish the Man in the Moon’s vain imaginings until he is brought down to earth with a bump – or rather a splash. With the help of some deliciously pithy images (‘his round heart nearly broke’), the blunter Germanic words help to win him some sympathy.

  He twinkled his feet as he thought of the meat,

  Of the punch and the peppery stew,

  Till he tripped unaware on his slanting stair,

  And fell like meteors do;

  As the whickering sparks in splashing arcs

  Of stars blown down like rain

  From his laddery path took a foaming bath

  In the Ocean of Almain.

  Tolkien is seen at play in the English language. To twinkle is to move with a flutter (the Oxford English Dictionary cites a dance, the twinkle-step, in 1920), but appropriately it is also to glimmer like stars; whickering is the sound of something hurtling through air, but aptly enough it is also sniggering laughter. Of course, the Man in the Moon’s adventure ends ignominiously. He is fished out by trawlermen who take him to Norwich, where, instead of a royal welcome, in exchange for his jewels and ‘faerie cloak’ he gets merely a bowl of gruel.

  The poem is a fine example of Tolkien’s lightness of touch and as a piece of comic verse marks a great step from the merely parodic ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’. At first it was not connected with the mythological world then being sketched out in the Qenya lexicon; but (as Tom Shippey has pointed out) the extraction of a whole story from six lines of nursery nonsense shows the same fascination with reconstructing the true tales behind garbled survivals that powered Tolkien’s myth-making.

  Smith welcomed the arrival of another poet in the TCBS and had sent the poems on to Gilson by the end of March. To both John Ronald and Rob he also despatched copies of his own work, a long Arthurian piece called ‘Glastonbury’ he had written for Oxford University’s annual Newdigate Prize and described as ‘the most TCBSian mosaic of styles and seasons’.*

  There was another abortive attempt to arrange a TCBS meeting, this time in Oxford, where Tolkien would play host at St John Street. It seemed, perhaps, the only way to guarantee his involvement, but just ahead of the appointed date G. B. Smith wrote to say that the ‘Council of Oxford’ was off: he was at home on sick leave and caught up in a whirlwind attempt to leave the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry so that he and Tolkien could be soldiers together.

  The battalion had taken him on as a ‘supernumerary’ in December 1914 because its officer quota was full. It would certainly have no vacancy for Tolkien when he finished Schools. Accordingly, Smith had decided to transfer with Wade-Gery, his favourite among the officers, into another battalion. ‘I suppose I have your appr
oval?’ he wrote to Tolkien on Easter Monday. An acquaintance at the War Office arranged the transfer to the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers, which was training at Penmaenmawr on Conwy Bay in North Wales. When all was fixed, Smith had to face another week with his existing battalion during which, he said, he would ‘think often of the TCBS, possibly to the strains of a Court-Martial’.

  He warned, though, that there could be no guarantees of a commission in his new battalion for Tolkien, but advised him, ‘You can be sure of getting somewhere in the Army I think, unless things have collapsed by June.’ If the war was still under way, Smith said, he could recommend battalions in which his life would not be at great risk and Tolkien could save up to £50 a year for his fiancée. ‘I can’t help thinking that your prospects afterwards would be improved,’ he added, ‘unless you could snap up a good thing [a civilian job] at once in June, in which case I should advise you to take it, and let the old country go hang. You can always join a volunteer defence corps, to make your mind easy.’

  Smith and Wade-Gery were among a set of ‘other literary Oxford lights’ who, as Rob Gilson put it, ‘had gone in a body to officer the Lancashire Fusiliers’. The move perhaps reflected the mood of ‘mucking in together’ by people from all walks of life, very different from the rancour and industrial class-strife that had preceded the war. For the battalion Smith was joining was known informally as the 3rd Salford Pals and had just been formed in an industrial suburb of Manchester.* Its rank and file were drawn from towns of the East Lancashire coalfield. The Oxford University men duly took their place as officers beside the bankers and businessmen of Eccles, Swinton, and Salford. The ‘Pals’ battalions, such as those in Birmingham which Hilary Tolkien, T. K. Barnsley, and Ralph Payton had joined, emerged from the parochial pride and close-knit friendships within English towns and villages, especially in the North: recruits would be largely drummed up en masse from a single place, and groups of friends would be encouraged to join together. It could be a haphazard process: the 3rd Salford Pals consisted of men who had been meant for another Salford unit but had missed the train.

  The Lancashire Fusiliers had a fine reputation dating back to the landing of William of Orange in England in 1688, and in the Seven Years War its infantry had shattered the charge of the supposedly invincible French cavalry at Minden. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Duke of Wellington described it as ‘the best and most distinguished’ of British regiments. Most recently, during the Boer War, the Lancashire Fusiliers had suffered the heaviest casualties in the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, but had gone on to the relief of Ladysmith.

  When G. B. Smith joined the 19th Battalion, the regiment had just etched its name bloodily and tragically in the history books again. As the Oxford term began, on Sunday 25 April 1915, the British-Anzac assault was launched at Gallipoli against the Turkish allies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The day was a foretaste of thirty-seven weeks to come: a disastrously unequal fight, with British and Anzac troops wading ashore under cruel cliffs surmounted by wire and machine-gun posts. Nevertheless, the worn word ‘hero’ was being reforged in galvanizing fires. In the forefront of the assault, the Lancashire Fusiliers rowed into a hail of bullets at ‘W Beach’ on Cape Helles. As they leapt from their boats, seventy pounds of equipment dragged many of the injured to death by drowning. On reaching the shore, others foundered on the barbed wire, which a preceding naval bombardment had failed to break. The beach was secured that day but 260 of the 950 attacking Fusiliers were killed and 283 wounded. In the eyes of many at home, however, the regiment covered itself in glory, and eventually it reaped a historic six Victoria Crosses for that morning on the beach.

  Tolkien soon decided he would indeed try to follow Smith into the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers. His reasons are not recorded, but if he succeeded he would be going to war with his closest friend. He would also be surrounded by Oxford men who shared a literary outlook, and (a factor that should not be underestimated) training would take place in Wales, a land whose native tongue was rapidly joining Finnish as an inspiration for his language invention and legend-making.

  On the day of the Gallipoli landings, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien to say that he had now read his poems, which Gilson had sent on to him a couple of weeks before. G. B. Smith had commended the verses, but until he saw them for himself Wiseman was far from convinced that his old friend from the Great Twin Brethren had now become a poet. ‘I can’t think where you get all your amazing words from,’ he wrote. ‘The Man in the Moon’ he called ‘magnificently gaudy’ and thought that ‘Two Trees’ was quite the best poem he had read in ages. Wiseman had even gone so far as to start composing an accompaniment to ‘Woodsunshine’ for two violins, cello, and bassoon. Plucking a simile from the world at war, he described the ending of another poem, ‘Copernicus and Ptolemy’, as being ‘rather like a systematic and well thought out bombardment with asphyxiating bombs’. Tolkien’s poems had astonished him, he said. ‘They burst on me like a bolt from the blue.’

  FOUR

  The shores of Faërie

  April 1915, bringing the Great War’s first spring, could have been ‘the cruellest month’ T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote The Waste Land: halcyon weather, everywhere the stirrings of life, and enervating horror as news and rumour told of thousands of young men dying on all fronts. Closer to home, Zeppelins struck the Essex coast just where the Anglo-Saxon earl Beorhtnoth and his household troop had been defeated by Viking raiders almost ten centuries before. Tolkien, who was now studying that earlier clash between the continental Teutons and their island cousins in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, was already familiar with the lines uttered by one of Beorhtnoth’s retainers as fortune turned against the English:

  Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.

  As Tolkien later translated it: ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’ Ancient it might be, but this summation of the old Northern heroic code answered eloquently to the needs of Tolkien’s day. It contains the awareness that death may come, but it focuses doggedly on achieving the most with what strength remains: it had more to commend it, in terms of personal and strategic morale, than the self-sacrificial and quasi-mystical tone of Rupert Brooke’s already-famous The Soldier, which implied that a soldier’s worth to his nation was greater in death than life:

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  G.B. Smith admired Brooke’s poetry and thought Tolkien should read it, but the poems Tolkien wrote when he settled back in at 59 St John Street at the end of the month could hardly have been more different. On Tuesday 27 April he set to work on two ‘fairy’ pieces, finishing them the next day. One of these, ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, is a 65-line love poem to Edith. Hauntingly, it suggests that when they first met they had already known each other in dreams:

  You and me – we know that land

  And often have been there

  In the long old days, old nursery days,

  A dark child and a fair.

  Was it down the paths of firelight dreams

  In winter cold and white,

  Or in the blue-spun twilit hours

  Of little early tucked-up beds

  In drowsy summer night,

  That You and I got lost in Sleep

  And met each other there –

  Your dark hair on your white nightgown,

  And mine was tangled fair?

  The poem recalls the two dreamers arriving at a strange and mystical cottage whose windows look towards the sea. Of course, this is quite unlike the urban setting in which he and Edith had actually come to know each other. It was an expression of tastes that had responded so strongly to Sarehole, Rednal, and holidays on the coast, or that had been shaped by those places. But already Tolkien was being pulled in opposite directions, towards nostalgic, rustic beauty and a
lso towards unknown, untamed sublimity. Curiously, the activities of the other dreaming children at the Cottage of Lost Play hint at Tolkien’s world-building urges, for while some dance and sing and play, others lay ‘plans / To build them houses, fairy towns, / Or dwellings in the trees’.

  A debt is surely owed to Peter Pan’s Neverland. Tolkien had seen J. M. Barrie’s masterpiece at the theatre as an eighteen-year-old in 1910, writing afterwards: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live.’ This was a play aimed squarely at an orphan’s heart, featuring a cast of children severed from their mothers by distance or death. A chiaroscuro by turns sentimental and cynical, playful and deadly serious, Peter Pan took a rapier to mortality itself – its hero a boy who refuses to grow up and who declares that ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

  But Tolkien’s idyll, for all its carefree joy, is lost in the past. Time has reasserted itself, to the grief and bewilderment of the dreamers.

  And why it was Tomorrow came,

  And with his grey hand led us back;

  And why we never found the same

  Old cottage, or the magic track

  That leads between a silver sea

  And those old shores and gardens fair

  Where all things are, that ever were –

  We know not, You and Me.

  The companion piece Tolkien wrote at the same time, ‘Goblin Feet’, finds us on a similar magic track surrounded by a twilight hum of bats and beetles and sighing leaves. A procession of fairy-folk approaches and the poem slips into an ecstatic sequence of exclamations.