Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  Understandably, Tolkien was hurt to hear his best friend apparently dismiss the bulk of his work as ‘freakish’. He accused Wiseman of a lack of sympathy with his primary inspirations: the glory of the night, the twilight and stars. Wiseman returned that Tolkien failed to appreciate ‘the grandeur of the glare of the noon’. They were talking in metaphors: Tolkien’s imagination was fired by vast mysteries and remote beauty, but Wiseman was enthralled by the human endeavour unravelling the riddles of the universe. The argument drew a dividing line between the medievalist, mystical, Catholic Tolkien and the rationalist, humanist, Methodist Wiseman. But Wiseman relished the fight. ‘Old days, Harborne Road and Broad Street again,’ he wrote. ‘A grand old quarrel!…Such openness in speech is what has kept the TCBS together for so long.’ He now confessed to long-suppressed reservations about Tolkien’s entire project:

  You are fascinated by little, delicate, beautiful creatures; and when I am with you, I am too. So I do sympathize with you. But I feel more thrilled by enormous, slow moving, omnipotent things, and if I had greater artistic gifts I would make you feel the thrill too. And having been led by the hand of God into the borderland of the fringe of science that man has conquered, I can see that there are such enormous numbers of wonderful and beautiful things that really exist, that in my ordinary frame of mind I feel no need to search after things that man has used before these could fill a certain place in the sum of his desires.

  Tolkien was far from pacified. He responded that his own work expressed his love of God’s creation: the winds, trees, and flowers. His Elves were a way of expressing it, too, primarily because they were creatures, things created. They caught a mystical truth about the natural world that eluded science, he said, insisting that ‘the Eldar, the Solosimpë, the Noldoli are better, warmer, fairer to the heart than the mathematics of the tide or the vortices that are the winds.’ Wiseman countered:

  I say they are not. Neither are good warm or fair. What is good, warm and fair, is your creating one and the scientist creating the other. The completed work is vanity; the process of the working is everlasting. Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them. When you have finished creating them they will be as dead to you as the atoms that make our living food, and they will only live when you or I go through your process of creation once more. How I hate you when you begin to talk of the ‘conquests of science’! Then you become just like the inartistic boor in the street. The ‘conquests’ vanish when they are made; they are only vital in the making. Just as the fugue is nothing on the page; it is only vital as it works its way out.

  But he drew a line under the altercation, writing: ‘I am very sorry indeed if I have hurt you. The precise form of abnormality which your work took seemed to me to be a fault, which, as far as I could see, you were gradually and consciously eliminating. And now I have said far too much. Indeed we all have.’

  Christopher Wiseman was not alone in doubting the value of Faërie. Whatever the TCBSian creed was, it was not founded on a fascination with the supernatural. Rob Gilson confided to Estelle King that he was ‘lacking in the strings that ought to vibrate to faint fantastic fairy music’. He thought such music strayed from the real theme on which the best art elaborated: ‘I like to say and to hear it said and to feel boldly that the glory of beauty and order and joyful contentment in the universe is the presence of God…I love best the men who are so certain of it that they can stand up and proclaim it to the world. That is why I love Browning so dearly…Heaven knows I have not that great certainty myself.’

  G. B. Smith was closely attentive to Tolkien’s vision, and in some measure shared it (despite his avowed antipathy to romanticism), just as he shared a delight in Arthur and the Welsh cycle of legends, the Mabinogion. Smith saw no demarcation between holiness and Faërie. One of his own poems, ‘Legend’, has a monk returning from a morning’s stroll during which he listened, transfixed, as a bird sang ‘diviner music / Than the greatest harpers made’,

  Sang of blessed shores and golden Where the old, dim heroes be,

  Distant isles of sunset glory, Set beyond the western sea.

  Sang of Christ and Mary Mother Hearkening unto angels seven

  Playing on their golden harp-strings In the far courts of high Heaven.

  Back at the monastery, none of the other monks recognizes him. After he has retreated to a cell they discover that he has crumbled to dust: he had set off on his stroll a hundred years previously and strayed into a timeless Otherworld. But the bird’s song is Tolkien’s, too: the shores of Faërie may not be Heaven, but they are illuminated by it.

  Wiseman was mistaken to think that Tolkien was at heart an anti-rationalist. There was a strain of scientific curiosity and discipline in his work, in the development of Qenya on rigorous phonological principles. Although this took place behind the scenes in the pages of a lexicon, it was the reason why Tolkien wanted to make myths: to give life to his language. Wiseman was wrong, too, in supposing that Tolkien’s gaze was turned away from humankind. In pursuing the link between language and mythology, Tolkien was acting upon his revelation, kindled by the Kalevala and perhaps by war, that human language and human beliefs were intimately bound up together.

  The mythology surrounding Tolkien’s poems had not yet coalesced; no wonder they seemed strange and disconnected from one another, like inconclusive forays into an unfathomably vast subterranean complex. None of the many TCBS letters discussing his work mentions an ‘epic’ or ‘mythology’ until 1917. Yet Wiseman knew enough from Tolkien by now not to baulk at invented clan-denominations of Faërie such as ‘the Eldar, the Solosimpë, the Noldoli’. Taken together, the poems hinted at the bigger picture, if you squinted; but in conversation Tolkien could reveal still more of the mythology he had sketched out in his lexicon.

  Every language draws its vital force from the culture it expresses, and English received an enormous jolt of electricity from the new technologies and experiences of the Great War. Old words received new meanings; new words were coined; foreign phrases were bastardized. Air raids were deterred by captive balloons or blimps, a portmanteau-word (Tolkien opined) formed from blister and lump in which ‘the vowel i not u was chosen because of its diminutive significance – typical of war humour’. Servicemen, who had a nickname for everyone and everything, utilized this changed language in its most concentrated form. Smith casually used Bosch (French Boche) for ‘German’; but Gilson relished his role as upholder of inflexible English, proclaiming from his cushy spot in the front line: ‘I fully intended to eschew trench slang when I came out here – it is particularly obnoxious – but I never hoped to persuade a whole mess to do the same. If anyone here refers to “Huns” or “Bosches” or “strafing”…he is severely sat upon.’ Britain was Blighty (from Hindi), and a blighty was a wound serious enough to bring you home. The flares used for observation and signals, Very lights, were inevitably dubbed Fairy lights. Tolkien was surrounded by wordsmiths. But soldiers’ slang, which spanned death, drink, food, women, weapons, the battlefield, and the warring nations, grew out of irony and contempt for what was intolerable; it was as crude and unlovely as camp life itself.

  Qenya thrived in the same soil, but not in the same mood. Nothing could be further removed from the unbeautiful inflexible practicalities Tolkien was being taught than the invention of a language for the joy of its sounds. It was a solitary and shy pleasure, but in fact he discovered he was not the only member of Kitchener’s army engaged in the ‘secret vice’. One day, sitting through a military lecture ‘in a dirty wet marquee filled with trestle tables smelling of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed and wet creatures’ (as he recalled in a talk on inventing languages), he was exploring the further reaches of boredom when a man nearby muttered, as if in reverie, ‘Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!’ Tolkien tried to prise from the soldier more about this private grammar, but he proved ‘as close as an oyster’.

  Tolkien, too, usually kept
his hobby to himself, or else made light of it; so he would write to Edith: ‘I have been reading up old military lecture-notes again:- and getting bored with them after an hour and a half. I have done some touches to my nonsense fairy language…’ But Qenya was a serious matter to him, and the ‘touches’ he made to it in March meant he could write poetry in it: the crowning achievement. He had attempted to do so back in November, but he had produced no more than a quatrain paraphrasing the lines in ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ in which falling leaves are likened to bird-wings. Now he expanded it to a full twenty lines.

  Having brought Qenya to this stage of sophistication, and having submitted his poetry to the publishers, Tolkien had brought his mythological project to a watershed. Undoubtedly he pondered his next move, but he knew embarkation could not be far off and personal matters required his attention before he left England. This may therefore be an appropriate point to survey, albeit tentatively, the state of the mythology at the time that Tolkien went to war.

  Enu, whom men refer to as Ilūvatar, the Heavenly Father, created the world and dwells outside it. But within the world dwell the ‘pagan gods’ or ainur, who, with their attendants, here are called the Valar or ‘happy folk’ (in the original sense of ‘blessed with good fortune’). Few of them are named: notably Makar the god of battle (also known as Ramandor, the shouter); and the Sūlimi of the winds; Ui, who is queen of the Oaritsi, the mermaids; and Niëliqi, a little girl whose laughter brings forth daffodils and whose tears are snowdrops. The home of the Valar is Valinor or ‘Asgard’, which lies at the feet of lofty, snow-capped Taniqetil at the western rim of the flat earth.

  Beside Valinor is the rocky beach of Eldamar, once home of the Elvish Eldar or Solosimpë, the beach-fays or shoreland-pipers. The royal house of the fairies, the Inweli, was headed by their ancient king, Inwë, and their capital was the white town of Kôr on the rocks of Eldamar. Now it is deserted: Inwë led the fairies dancing out into the world to teach song and holiness to mortal men. But the mission failed and the Elves who remained in Aryador (Europe?) are reduced to a furtive ‘shadow-people’.

  The Noldoli or Gnomes, wisest of the faëry tribes, were led from their land of Noldomar to the Lonely Isle of Tol Eressëa (England) by the god Lirillo. The other fairies retreated from the hostile world to the island, which is now called Ingilnōrë after Inwë’s son Ingil (or Ingilmo). In Alalminórë (Warwickshire), the land of elms at the heart of the island, they built a new capital, Kortirion (Warwick). Here the goddess Erinti lives in a circle of elms, and she has a tower which the fairies guard. She came from Valinor with Lirillo and his brother Amillo to dwell on the isle among the Elvish tribes in exile. Now the fairy pipers haunt the beaches and weedy sea-caves of the island; but one, Timpinen or Tinfang Warble, pipes in the woods.

  The name Inwinórë, Faërie, was used by Tolkien for both Eldamar and Tol Eressëa. The Elves are immortal and they drink a liquid called limpë (whereas the Valar drink miruvōrë). They are generally diminutive, some especially so: a mushroom is known as a ‘fairy canopy’, Nardi is a flower fairy, and likewise Tetillë, who lives in a poppy. Are such beings as these, or the sea-nymphs, akin to the ‘fairies’ who built Kôr? It is impossible to judge from the evidence of Qenya at this stage. Qenya is only one of several elvish languages; the lexicon also lists dozens of words in another, Gnomish.

  Sky-myths figure prominently side-by-side with the saga of the Elvish exile to the Lonely Isle/England. Valinor is (or was?) lit by the Two Trees that bore the fruit of Sun and Moon. The Sun herself, Ur, issues from her white gates to sail in the sky, but this is the hunting ground of Silmo, the Moon, from whom the Sun once fled by diving into the sea and wandering through the caverns of the mermaids. Also hunted by the Moon is Eärendel, steersman of the morning or evening star. He was once a great mariner who sailed the oceans of the world in his ship Wingelot, or Foamflower. On his final voyage he passed the Twilit Isles, with their tower of pearl, to reach Kôr, whence he sailed off the edge of the world into the skies; his earthly wife Voronwë is now Morwen (Jupiter), ‘daughter of the dark’. Other stars in Ilu, the slender airs beyond the earth, include the blue bee Nierninwa (Sirius), and here too are constellations such as Telimektar (Orion), the Swordsman of Heaven. The Moon is also thought of as the crystalline palace of the Moon King Uolë·mi·Kōmë, who once traded his riches for a bowl of cold Norwich pudding after falling to earth.

  Besides wonders, there are monsters in these pages too: Tevildo the hateful, prince of cats, and Ungwë·Tuita, the Spider of Night, whose webs in dark Ruamōrë Earendel once narrowly escaped. Fentor, lord of dragons, was slain by Ingilmo or by the hero Turambar, who had a mighty sword called Sangahyando, or ‘cleaver of throngs’ (and who is compared to Sigurðr of Norse myth). But there are other perilous creatures: Angaino (‘tormentor’) is the name of a giant, while ork means ‘monster, ogre, demon’. Raukë also means ‘demon’ and fandor ‘monster’.

  The fairies know of Christian tradition with its saints, martyrs, monks, and nuns; they have words for ‘grace’ and ‘blessed’, and mystic names for the Trinity. The spirits of mortal men wander outside Valinor in the region of Habbanan, which in the abstract is perhaps manimuinë, Purgatory. But there are various names for hell (Mandos, Eremandos, and Angamandos) and also Utumna, the lower regions of darkness. The souls of the blessed dwell in iluindo beyond the stars.

  It is curious – especially in contrast to his later, famous writings – that Tolkien’s own life is directly mythologized in these early conceptions. He left his discreet signature on his art, and at times the lexicon is a roman à clef. The Lonely Isle’s only named locations are those important to him when he began work on it: Warwick, Warwickshire, Exeter (Estirin), after which his college was named, and Oxford itself (Taruktarna). Possibly we see John Ronald and Edith in Eärendel and Voronwë, but Edith is also certainly represented by Erinti, the goddess who presides aptly over ‘love, music, beauty and purity’ and lives in Warwick, while Amillo equates to Hilary Tolkien. John Ronald was perhaps declaring his own literary ambitions as Lirillo, god of song, also called Noldorin because he brought the Noldoli back to Tol Eressëa.* Tolkien’s writings, he may have been hinting, would signal a renaissance for Faërie.

  War also intrudes. Makar the battle god seems to have been one of the first named Valar. As well as describing the natural world, Qenya furnishes a vocabulary for wartime. Almost all of this accords with the sense that the mythology takes place in the ancient world (kasien, ‘helm’; makil, ‘sword’); but some of it smells distinctly twentieth-century. One could easily enumerate features of the trenches: londa-, ‘to boom, bang’; qolimo, ‘an invalid’; qonda, ‘choking smoke, fog’; enya, ‘device, machine, engine’; pusulpë, ‘gas-bag, balloon’. Entirely anachronistic is tompo-tompo, ‘noise of drums (or guns)’: an onomatopoeia, surely, for the deep repercussive boom and recoil of heavy artillery, but not, one would think, a word Tolkien could use in his faëry mythology.

  Particularly striking is how Qenya at this stage equates Germans with barbarity. Kalimban is ‘“Barbary”, Germany’; kalimbarië is ‘barbarity’, kalimbo is ‘a savage, uncivilized man, barbarian. – giant, monster, troll’, and kalimbardi is glossed ‘the Germans’. There is a strong sense of disillusionment in these definitions, so devoid of the attraction Tolkien had felt towards ‘the “Germanic” ideal’ as an undergraduate. He lived in a country wracked with fear, grief, and hatred, and by now people he knew had been killed by Germans.

  The concept of the devilish Germans was popular, not least among some military minds. For many, it was increasingly difficult to remain high-minded, especially when in 1916 Germany adopted the slaughter of enemy soldiers as a key strategy in a new ‘war of attrition’. On 21 February a furious assault was unleashed against Verdun, a fortress that held special symbolic significance in the French national consciousness because it barred the road to Paris from the east. It did not matter whether or not Verdun was captured, the Kaiser had been advised:
in trying to defend it France would pour in its troops and ‘bleed to death’. Thousands upon thousands on either side were now dying in the pitiless siege.

  Knowing he could be called to fight overseas any time now, Tolkien could wait no longer to be married to Edith: he found the situation ‘intolerable’. The prospects for both of them were grim. As he summed it up later, ‘I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p.a. (£20-40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern).’* He sold his share in the motorbike he jointly owned with a fellow officer and went to see Father Francis Morgan in Birmingham to make further financial arrangements. When it came to telling him that he was to marry Edith, the subject of his guardian’s ban six years previously, his nerve failed. He delayed until two weeks before the event, and Father Francis’s conciliatory offer of an Oratory wedding came too late. He was also worried about how his friends would react. But G. B. Smith, writing back to wish them both the best, reassured him: ‘My goodness, John Ronald, nothing could ever cut you off from the TCBS!’ Wiseman gently chided him for imagining that the three would disapprove and declared that, ‘on the contrary, the TCBS heartily approves, in the full belief that you are not likely to be “foolish” in these matters’. Gilson was taken aback when he heard, and wrote home, ‘The imminence of the date is a complete surprise to me, as all his movements nearly always are.’ But he was genuinely pleased for his friend: ‘I rejoice many times for your sake that you are thus able to raise yourself out of this mire of existence.’