Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

Indeed, there is a whiff of science fiction about the army attacking Gondolin, a host that has ‘only at that time been seen and shall not again be till the Great End’. In 1916, Tolkien was anticipating the dictum of Arthur C. Clarke that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ From a modern perspective, this enemy host appears technological, if futuristic; the ‘hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ of its brazen dragons remind us of the internal combustion engine. But to the Noldoli the host seems the product of sorcery. ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, in Tolkien’s grand unfolding design, is a story told by an Elf; and the combustion engine, seen through enchanted eyes, could appear as nothing other than a metal heart filled with flame.

  Melko, the tyrant making war on Gondolin, is the Devil himself. But he is not sequestered in a Miltonic Pandemonium across the abyss of Chaos. The road to his hell runs northwards and downwards, as in Norse myth. A byname, Yelur, links him to Qenya Yelin, ‘winter’, seen in notes from late 1915 for ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ that speak of the ‘wintry spell of Yelin’ and ‘the icy blue-tipped sp[ears] of winter marching up beh[ind]’.* Melko himself did not apparently exist in Tolkien’s mythology before the Somme, but this poetic metaphor of a warlord bent on destroying light and life prefigured him, and he shares the same wintry functions.

  Tolkien’s use of his sources was always daring. Unlike the Satan of Christian tradition, Melko is jailer to living beings – the thrall-Noldoli who slave for him in his Hells of Iron. But by making the Gnomes’ sojourn there a matter of compulsion, Tolkien was also rewriting traditions about underworlds ruled by faëry races such as the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann so that they seem to foreshadow Christian eschatology. It is the harrowing of this Elvish hell that Ulmo, through the agency of Tuor, hopes to achieve.

  Captives who somehow leave the Hells of Iron are afflicted by ‘a binding terror’ so that even when they are far from Melko’s domain ‘he seemed ever nigh them…and their hearts quaked and they fled not even when they could’. Meglin, released by Melko after betraying Gondolin’s secrets, resumes his public life in Gondolin as if nothing has happened, but he will no longer work and seeks to ‘drown his fear and disquiet’ in false gaiety. He, too, is now under Melko’s ‘spell of bottomless dread’.

  Melko (who is better known by his later names Melkor and Morgoth) represents the tyranny of the machine over life and nature, exploiting the earth and its people in the construction of a vast armoury. With a brutal inevitability, the Gnomes, with their medieval technology, lose the contest. Tolkien’s myth underlines the almost insuperable efficacy of the machine against mere skill of hand and eye. Yet it recognizes that the machine would not exist without the inventor and the craftsman. Melko does not know how to achieve the destruction of the Gnomes’ city: chillingly, it is Meglin of Gondolin who hatches the plan for the creeping beast-machines that will surmount its defences. The Gnomes are driven by ‘unconquerable eagerness after knowledge’. Melko has little use for their eagerness, but he depends on their knowledge, and so he has the thrall-Noldoli dig his ore and work his metals, leaving them stooped with their labours. In the Hells of Iron, the higher arts and sciences are subsumed or crushed in the service of mechanical industry – endlessly repetitious and motivated by nothing but the desire for more power.

  As a literary creation, Melko is more than a winter-symbol or an abstraction of destructiveness and greed. He appeared in 1916 with remarkable timing. With his dreams of world domination, his spies, his vast armies, his industrial slaves, and his ‘spell of bottomless dread’, he anticipated the totalitarianism that lay just around the corner. Within a year, the Russian Revolution had established the first totalitarian dictatorship, its aim being to crush the individual will in the service of the economy and Bolshevik power. Lenin became a template for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the other political monsters of the twentieth century. But all that the totalitarian dictators did was to take to a logical extreme the dehumanization already seen in heavy industry, and to exploit the break with the past that the Great War had introduced. In its capacity to warn about such extremes, fantastic fiction has the edge over what is called realism. ‘Realism’ has a knee-jerk tendency to avoid extremes as implausible, but ‘fantasy’ actively embraces them. It magnifies and clarifies the human condition. It can even keep pace with the calamitous imaginings of would-be dictators. Doubtless Tolkien had no intention of making political predictions, but his work nevertheless foreshadowed things to come. A spiritual kinship exists between the unhappy Meglin and Winston Smith, downing his Victory gin under the eyes of Big Brother.

  TWELVE

  Tol Withernon and Fladweth Amrod

  ‘You ought to start the epic,’ Christopher Wiseman told Tolkien in the chill January of 1917. ‘When you do, however,’ he added, ‘mind you get on your high horse, not your high horse on you.’ It seems likely that Tolkien was already firmly in charge of the reins in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, and in another, shorter piece, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, which would introduce the whole cycle of tales now planned. For this introductory section, Tolkien devised a new mariner figure to be a seeker of wonders; unlike Eärendel, however, he was not to be a wonder in himself.

  The new arrival belonged not to myth, but to the post-mythological twilight, that period on the margins of known history that so haunted Tolkien. The mariner’s role was to hear, and to pass on to posterity, the stories told about Faërie by the fairies. Even from the vantage-point of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, though, Gondolin and the other ‘Lost Tales’ would be ancient history; and the mariner would act as a mediator halfway between these unfathomably remote events and the modern day. The structure owes much to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – although a more immediate precursor was William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, in which Norse seafarers swap stories with the sequestered descendants of ancient Greeks whom they encounter on a remote island.

  In all ways Tolkien’s mariner fits his fictional era, emerging (according to background notes) from the western coast of Germanic Europe and sailing to the Lonely Isle, the island of Britain. He is the father of Hengest and Horsa, the historical warlords who led the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Into the design Tolkien also wove parallels with his own life. The mariner’s original name is Ottor, which is simply the Old English equivalent of Otter. That seems to have been Tolkien’s name for himself in Animalic, an invented language he had shared with his Incledon cousins in childhood. Ottor is also called by his own people Wœfre, ‘restless, wandering’. He has suffered a profound spiritual longing since being orphaned in boyhood and his past has been blighted by a terrible war. In the Lonely Isle he will marry an elfmaid and their younger son, Heorrenda, will have his capital at Great Haywood, while Hengest and Horsa will be associated with Warwick and Oxford. Crucially, through Ottor the English will learn ‘the true tradition of the fairies’. The name given to Ottor in the Lonely Isle is Eriol, ‘One who dreams alone’. Without intruding any detail that would jar with his imaginative portrayal of an ancient world, Tolkien left his own signature on the canvas.

  Arriving one peaceful evening at a town at the heart of the Lonely Isle, Eriol finds the Cottage of Lost Play – Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva in Qenya – a home from home that offers peace, rest, and food for the imagination. A man who has surfeited on experience, now he will adventure no more but will simply listen to the history of the Elves and Gnomes.

  The cottage threshold leads back into childhood, both for Eriol and for the reader, and ‘all who enter must be very small indeed, or of their own good wish become as very little folk’. The wayfarer steps inside, and to his amazement finds himself in a spacious house, where the courteous elven hosts, Lindo and Vairë, make him their guest. It is a place of joy, comfort, and ceremony, where daily rituals centre around feasting and story-telling.

  At that same moment a great gong sounded far off in the house with a sweet noise, and a sound followed as of the laughter of many voices mingled with a great pattering of feet. Then Vairë said
to Eriol, seeing his face filled with a happy wonderment: ‘That is the voice of Tombo, the Gong of the Children, which stands outside the Hall of Play Regained, and it rings once to summon them to this hall at the times for eating and drinking, and three times to summon them to the Room of the Log Fire for the telling of tales’…

  The ‘Cottage of Lost Play’ comes with liberal doses of ‘magic’ and a population of jolly miniatures who might have trooped out of a Victorian nursery book. Their high spirits are unleavened by either the amoral laughter of the inhabitants of Neverland in Peter Pan or the earthy scepticism that Tolkien later gave to the hobbits. That ‘the walls shake with mirth’ when a tale is to be told seems strange, as humour is hardly the dominant characteristic of the ‘Lost Tales’. The note of gaiety also chimes uneasily with the deeper themes of exile and loss in Eriol’s past and in the strange history of the cottage.

  The magical house is situated in Kortirion, and ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ returns to the idea of the two versions of Faërie that had been developed in the Qenya lexicon and ‘Kortirion among the Trees’. The Elves here in the Lonely Isle are exiles, and Kortirion, their capital, is just an echo of Kôr, the city in Valinor across the western ocean that they left long ago after ‘hearing the lament of the world’. The cottage Eriol finds in Kortirion is built in remembrance of a more ancient house in Valinor, next to the silver sea and not far from Kôr. ‘This was the Cottage of the Children, or of the Play of Sleep,’ explains Vairë, ‘and not of Lost Play, as has wrongly been said in song among Men – for no play was lost then, and here alas only and now is the Cottage of Lost Play.’*

  The two cottages, in Valinor and Kortirion, encompass between them a whole complex of relations between dream, reality, and story. Once upon a time, ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of men’ could reach the Cottage of the Play of Sleep by travelling the Path of Dreams, which ran (like the rainbow-bridge Bifrost in Norse myth) from mortal to immortal lands. There they would play at bows and arrows or climb on the roof, like the Lost Boys who follow Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie’s Neverland. Children who became friends there in their dream-play might later meet in waking life, as lovers or close comrades.

  Dream visits to the old cottage had their perils, Eriol hears. Dreamers who strayed beyond the garden into Kôr itself, and saw Valinor, the home of the gods, suffered a complete estrangement from their own people, becoming silent and ‘wild’ and filled with yearning. It is in the nature of Faërie to enchant beyond mortal limits. On the other hand, some of the straying dreamers returned to mortal lands with heads filled not with madness, but with wonder. ‘Of the misty aftermemories of these,’ Eriol is told, ‘of their broken tales and snatches of song, came many strange legends that delighted Men for long, and still do, it may be; for of such were the poets of the Great Lands.’ Tolkien had been inspired and tantalized by the mythologies and folk traditions of the ancient world, and especially by the fragmentary remnants of Germanic legend he had found scattered through Beowulf, Cynewulf’s Crist, and elsewhere. Now he was devising a fiction in which these fragments represented the last vestiges of visions seen in Valinor itself.

  Times change. When the Elves left Kôr, the Path of Dreams was closed, so that the Cottage of the Play of Sleep now stands desolate on the shores of Valinor. Lindo and Vairë, exiled in the Lonely Isle, established the Cottage of Lost Play as a place where ‘old tales, old songs, and elfin music’ might still be celebrated. But it is also the home of fairy-tales, and from here come the fairies who visit ‘lonely children and whisper to them at dusk in early bed by nightlight and candle-flame, or comfort those that weep’ (an urgent need, it might be noted, not only in Tolkien’s own childhood, but also in the Great War’s world of orphans). So the age of myth and the Cottage of the Play of Sleep cedes place to the age of fairy-story and the Cottage of Lost Play.

  However, the truer vision of the old myth-makers may yet return. Eriol is given a glimpse of a radiant future when the roads to Valinor ‘shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men’ and the Cottage of the Play of Sleep will once more be filled with life. The scales, presumably, will fall from mortal eyes, and the earthly paradise be opened to them. This is expected to follow ‘the Faring Forth and the Rekindling of the Magic Sun’, to which the exiles of Kortirion raise their cups. Sadly, Tolkien never reached the point of describing these momentous events in any detail before his eschatological ideas changed completely, and he left only a hint of the universal consolation to come.

  Readers of The Lord of the Rings may find two elements in ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ familiar. In Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva itself there is more than a hint of elven Rivendell, with its Hall of Fire where tales are told and songs sung; and the queen of the Lonely Isle in ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, Meril-i-Turinqi, has something of Galadriel about her. She lives among her maidens in a ceremonial circle of trees in Kortirion, like Galadriel in her city of trees in Lothlórien. Meril is a descendant of Inwë, the elven-king over the sea, as Galadriel is of Ingwë, his counterpart in later stages of the mythology. Both elf-queens are repositories of ancient knowledge, but each also is the source of a supernaturally enduring vitality: Meril through the marvellous drink limpë that she dispenses, Galadriel through the power to arrest decay in her realm. It is symptomatic of both the fluidity and the stability of Tolkien’s mythopoeic conceptions that, while names evolved and the interrelationships of individuals and peoples changed almost beyond recognition through years of writing, rewriting, and recasting, these embodiments of quintessential elvishness – the house of lore and the queen of trees – recurred.*

  ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, complete by early February 1917, makes plain that Tolkien already had in mind the idea that Eriol would hear the Lost Tales in Kortirion. In one note, the tales were to be written down by Heorrenda of Hægwudu (Great Haywood), Eriol’s son by the elf-maid Naimi, in a ‘Golden Book’: the Qenya and Gnomish lexicons give translations for this title. But it was also to be known as i·band a·gwentin laithra, the ‘Book of Lost Tales’.

  The title recalls R. W. Chambers’ reference to ‘the lost Tale of Wade’, in a chapter of his study of the Old English poem Widsith that focuses on the old sea-legends of the ancient Germanic tribes of the north-western European coastlands (and which also deals with Éarendel). Chambers’ book reads like a message to Tolkien. He rages against the Romans for disdaining the illiterate Germans and failing to record their songs and tales, and laments the fact that, despite King Alfred’s love for the old lays, the Anglo-Saxons wrote too few of them down. ‘So this world of high-spirited, chivalrous song has passed away,’ says Chambers. ‘It is our duty then to gather up reverently such fragments of the old Teutonic epic as fortune has preserved in our English tongue, and to learn from them all we can of that collection of stories of which these fragments are the earliest vernacular record.’ But Tolkien may have had the idea of ‘lost tales’ at the back of his mind even longer. Lord Macaulay, in the book that provided Tolkien with the model for his ‘Battle of the Eastern Field’, explains himself in similar terms: his Lays of Ancient Rome were attempts to recreate what the national poems of early Rome would have been like before their local character was swallowed up by the culture of Greece. In passing, he notes that oblivion has taken the ancient Germanic and English songs too.

  When Tolkien summed up his youthful ambitions in a letter to Milton Waldman of Collins, the publisher, written c.1951, he put England at their heart: ‘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: to England; to my country.’ But in creating this mythology for England, the younger Tolkien was responding to a particular sense of nationalism that had much in common both with Macaulay’s love of early Rome, a self-contain
ed cultural unity, and with Chambers’ hatred of late Rome, an acquisitive empire. He was celebrating the linguistic and cultural roots of ‘Englishness’, not vaunting (or even mourning) the British Empire. His opposition to imperialism was deep-seated, and extended not only to support for Home Rule in Ireland but also, not long after the war, to a horror at the increasingly popular idea that English itself, the object of his love and his labour, would become the universal lingua franca thanks to America’s entry on the world stage at the end of the Great War – ‘as an ambition’, he wrote, ‘the most idiotic and suicidal that a language could entertain’:

  Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’…sufficiently to realize the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life…

  No manifesto fired Tolkien’s mythology; instead, a particular ‘vision of life’ that was bound up with physical rather than political geography. He told Waldman: ‘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)…’ If anything, by harking back to the common origins of the English and German languages and traditions, and by focusing on decline and fall, the mythology ran counter to wartime jingoism.

  Prior to the Somme, Tolkien had spent much time playing with words and symbols and reflective lyricism. But something had happened to his ambition to become a poet, born out of the Council of London in December 1914. With the Lost Tales he turned to narrative prose, the mode for which he would chiefly be remembered. ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ could certainly have been written as narrative verse – the form of Beowulf and the Kalevala, of his mythological work in the 1920s, and of sections of his 1914 Story of Kullervo. Reasons why he now set verse aside can only be guessed at. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Sidgwick & Jackson had rejected his volume of poems, The Trumpets of Faërie. Perhaps he was suffering from some kind of poetic block: he admitted to Wiseman in August 1917 that so far that year he had only written one poem. On the other hand, he may simply have felt that prose was the pragmatic choice, free of the technical difficulties of rhythm and rhyme. He knew, after all, that as soon as he was fit he would be called back to fight.