by John Garth
In the real world it was ‘the enemy’ that had fallen: the empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. But the old world had gone too, leaving the new one with a legacy of uncertainty, cruelty, and suffering. Millions had died, and very few were untouched by bereavement. Many of the young men who had stood beside Tolkien in those black-and-white photographs of rugby teams or dining clubs at King Edward’s School and Exeter College were gone.* From Tolkien’s school, 243 died; from his college, 141. From Oxford University as a whole, nearly one in five servicemen was killed, considerably more than the national average because so many had been junior officers.
Even Colin Cullis did not long survive the war in which he had been judged physically unfit to serve: pneumonia, brought on by the influenza epidemic, claimed his life just after Tolkien was demobbed. From King Edward’s, Tolkien’s cousin Thomas Ewart Mitton, five years his junior and a fellow poet, had been killed in an accident while serving as a signaller at Ypres. Of the broad Birmingham TCBS, Ralph Payton had died on the Somme in 1916 and the wise-cracking ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley, having recovered from shell shock, had been killed in action with the Coldstream Guards near Ypres in 1917. Rob Gilson was gone. The loss of so many friends remained, in the words of Tolkien’s children, ‘a lifelong sadness’. It was for G. B. Smith that Tolkien mourned most deeply; the two had understood each other’s social background and maternal upbringing; they had shared a school, a university, a regiment, and a bloody page of history; they had been akin in their reverence for poetry and the imagination, and had spurred each other into creative flight.
The war also weakened the bond between the Great Twin Brethren. Back in 1916, as Tolkien lay in the Birmingham University Hospital, Christopher Wiseman had looked forward to days of peace when he might go to Oxford and study law at Christ Church. He and Tolkien might share digs, he declared; ‘perhaps in the ever-famous “Johnner”’. After Smith’s death, and that of his own mother in August 1917, Wiseman had been abject, writing, ‘We must contrive to stick together somehow. I can’t bear to be cut off from the seventh heaven I lived in my younger days.’
But while Tolkien was at Easington they had had another ‘grand old quarrel’ of the sort that used to invigorate their walks to school up Harborne Road and Broad Street. Typically, it started from a small observation and became a battle royal between rationalism and mysticism. Tolkien found the most mundane human misunderstandings depressing, and blamed a ‘clash of backgrounds’ arising from what he called ‘the decay of faith, the break up of that huge atmosphere or background of faith which was common to Europe in the Middle Ages’. Wiseman was scornful: ‘That huge atmosphere of magic; that ghastly atmosphere of superstition: that it is that has gone.’ This was a religious dispute, with Tolkien speaking for the pre-schismatic Roman Catholic world, Wiseman for the Protestant Reformation and its legacy.
Wiseman had argued that the true modern clash was between foregrounds, with individuals too busy about their own lives to fully understand each other. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was the whole glory of the TCBS, that in spite of the clash of our foregrounds, which was very great, we had discovered the essential similarity of our backgrounds. The TCBS arose partly as a protest against the assumption of artificial foregrounds.’ Though he had used the past tense when writing of the group, he was emphatic: ‘I am still a TCBSite. I love you, and pray for you and yours.’
The bond had suffered much wear and tear. Through much of 1918 the two lost track of each other’s movements, but in December Wiseman wrote to say that he was going to Cambridge to teach junior officers. ‘So the TCBS will again be represented at both ‘Varsities, and perhaps may assemble from time to time,’ he said. He expressed ‘parental anxiety’ for Tolkien and Edith and baby John, but the TCBSian future, once colossal and world-bestriding, now looked merely life-sized.
On 15 July 1919 Tolkien made his way on a travel warrant to the village of Fovant on Salisbury Plain, a few miles south of G. B. Smith’s old training camp at Codford St Mary, to be demobbed. He was handed a ration book and for the next six months he received a small disability pension because of persistent health problems. The next day, almost exactly four years after he received his commission, he was released from service.
Epilogue. ‘A new light’
Once, Christopher Wiseman had allowed faith to take the place of mere hope and imagined that the TCBS would be saved for better things than war. Neither Rob Gilson nor G. B. Smith had achieved their ambitions in life, and the bond they had all forged now seemed fruitless. As Wiseman had said in a letter to Tolkien after Smith’s death, ‘What is not done, is left undone; and love that is voided becomes strangely like a mockery.’
Yet there remained another way to see their hopes fulfilled. Wiseman himself had once said that he, Smith, and Gilson wrote Tolkien’s poems. Smith had put it more tactfully: ‘We believe in your work, we others, and recognise with pleasure our own finger in it.’ Facing death, he had drawn consolation from the fact that Tolkien would survive, and there would ‘still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon’. Smith had wanted them to leave the world a better place than when they found it, to ‘re-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty’ through art embodying TCBSian principles. Beyond such broad outlines, what Smith dreamed is unguessable – as Wiseman lamented, he ‘never lived to write the “tales”’ he planned – but it may be surmised that he envisaged Tolkien, rather than Wiseman or Gilson, voicing the dream.
Gilson’s artistic talent had been in recording beauty or truth, rather than originating it. Otherwise his strength lay in personal relations. Ironically, his most widely circulated work was an anonymous platoon drill for coordinated trench-digging, which appeared in a wartime military manual aimed at school training corps – a significant contribution to the war effort, but surely not part of the TCBSian dream.
Wiseman insisted that his own ambitions had outlived Smith and Gilson, declaring, ‘I can still ask for the weight of glory we cared so light-heartedly to crave for in the old days, promising to pay the last farthing I have for it.’ But although he wrote a little music now and then, he never really found a medium in which he could match Tolkien or Smith. He did not become a finance minister, as he had threatened in a letter to Tolkien in 1916, but was drawn instead into the headmastership of a Methodist public school, Queen’s College in Taunton, Somerset, taking it on in 1926 as a duty rather than a pleasure. Here, he passed on the TCBSian virtues on a smaller scale, nurturing in his pupils a love of music, personally learning the oboe and clarinet to help raise a woodwind section for the school orchestra he formed, and teaching the violin to a whole class en masse.
As to fulfilling the TCBSian dream of kindling ‘a new light’ in the world at large, only Tolkien was left, as Smith had foreseen. Now he had a duty to his old friend, and to whatever divinity lay in his own survival, to pursue the mythology he had started to map out.
Straight after the war Tolkien set about the task of completing ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in earnest, starting out with a grand myth of world-making, ‘The Music of the Ainur’. The influence of the TCBS may be seen here, if anywhere. Back before the Somme, Wiseman had declared that the Elves only seemed alive to Tolkien because he was still creating them, and that the same principle held for all art and science. ‘The completed work is vanity, the process of the working is everlasting…The “conquests” vanish when they are made; they are only vital in the making,’ he had said – adding in a characteristic musical analogy, ‘the fugue is nothing on the page; it is only vital as it works its way out…’ As if he had Wiseman’s words in mind, Tolkien now depicted the creation of the world as an on-going act, and music as the primal creative form. Song is also the medium for supernatural power in the Kalevala; while Tolkien had already equated the music of Ulmo with the very sound of the sea. But ‘The Music of the Ainur’ portrays the whole universe as a choral work conceived by the Heavenly Father, Ilúv
atar, and sung by the angelic host of the Ainur, who elaborate upon his themes. At the end, Ilúvatar reveals that their music has shaped the world and its history, while he has given it substance and essence.
Now when they reached the midmost void they beheld a sight of surpassing beauty and wonder where before had been emptiness; but Ilúvatar said: ‘Behold your choiring and your music!…Each one herein will find contained within the design that is mine the adornments and embellishments that he himself devised…One thing only have I added, the fire that giveth Life and Reality’ – and behold, the Secret Fire burnt at the heart of the world.
The early lexicon of Qenya may shed some light on the last statement, explaining that Sā, ‘fire, especially in temples, etc.’, is also ‘A mystic name identified with the Holy Ghost’. Ilúvatar’s further solo contribution is the creation of Elves and Men, together with their distinguishing talent – language.
Elevated subject and style should not obscure the tale’s pertinence to the terrible times Tolkien had known. It is nothing less than an attempt to justify God’s creation of an imperfect world filled with suffering, loss, and grief. The primal rebel Melko covets Ilúvatar’s creativity where the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost coveted God’s authority, a distinction reflecting Tolkien’s aestheticist anti-industrialism and Milton’s puritan anti-monarchism. Melko enters the void to search for the Secret Fire, yet having failed to find it he nevertheless introduces his own discordant music, brash but marked by ‘unity and a system of its own’. But in this collaborative Genesis, he distorts Creation itself, as Ilúvatar reveals: ‘Through him has pain and misery been made in the clash of overwhelming musics; and with confusion of sound have cruelty, and ravening, and darkness, loathly mire and all putrescence of thought or thing, foul mists and violent flame, cold without mercy, been born, and death without hope.’ These ills (universal, though strikingly evocative of the Somme) do not arise exclusively from Melko’s repetitive music; rather, they spring from its ‘clash’ with Ilúvatar’s themes.
In Tolkien’s view, creative decadence and spiritual schism were inextricably linked. During the TCBS crisis of 1914, he had told Wiseman: ‘It is the tragedy of modern life that no one knows upon what the universe is built to the mind of the man next to him in the tram: it is this that makes it so tiring, so distracting; that produces its bewilderment, lack of beauty and design; its ugliness; its atmosphere antagonistic to supreme excellence.’ In 1917 he had again bemoaned the decay in ‘beauty in all men’s works and fabrications for more than two centuries’, and located its cause and symptom in the ‘clash of backgrounds’ that had opened up since the Middle Ages.
‘The Music of the Ainur’ portrayed such schism on a universal scale, but moved beyond complaint to reach a consolatory view. Ilúvatar insists that the cosmogonic discords will ultimately make ‘the theme more worth hearing, Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous’. As if to shed some light on this rather bald assertion, he cites the beauty of ice and snow, produced from water (Ulmo’s work) by intemperate cold (Melko’s). So much for natural wonders and marvels; but how do the discords improve the experience of life for the individual facing ‘cold without mercy…and death without hope’? This is left as a riddle for the ensuing stories of good and evil to unravel.
In the tales that follow, angels eager to continue the work of creation descend into the new-coined world to be its guardians. Here they are known as the Valar, frequently called gods. Eriol, indeed, has never heard of a Creator or Heavenly Father, but he knows about the Anglo-Saxon gods Wòden (Odin) and Þunor (Thor), whom the Elves identify as Manwë, chief of the Valar, and Tulkas, their champion.
Tolkien’s pantheon is quirky and assymetric. There are no simple dualisms among the Valar: no god of happiness to counterbalance mournful Fui, for example, and no shepherd or sower to contrast with the hunter Oromë. The brotherhood of Mandos and Lórien, the gods of death and dreams, implies a visionary connection with the spirit world. Others of the Valar are not only actors in the drama but also elemental forces of nature: Manwë’s breath is the breeze, and Melko’s very presence in his native north breeds glaciers and icebergs.
The battle god Makar and his sister Méassë are anomalous. Their court hosts a perpetual battle in which Méassë urges Makar’s warriors to blows or revives them with wine, her arms ‘reddened to the elbow dabbling in that welter’. The scenario incorporates a powerful motif from Norse myth: Valhalla, the hall to which Odin’s shieldmaidens, the Valkyries, bring warriors slain in battle to fight every day under Odin’s eye. But the presence of Makar and Méassë and their brutalist iron hall in Valinor suggests an ambivalent view of war as a necessary evil. Notably, it is not Makar but Tulkas, a sporting champion ‘who loveth games and twanging of bows and boxing, wrestling, running, and leaping’, who deals blows for the Valar against Melko.* Méassë and her brother play only a minor role in the Lost Tales, and later vanished from the mythology.
The Valar of the Lost Tales have many of the imperfections of the Gods of Asgard or Olympus. Clashing temperaments meet in unruly council under Manwë, disagreeing especially over their duty towards Elves and Men. First among equals rather than absolute monarch, Manwë makes several poor decisions, misreads others’ motives, and stands aside when more impatient gods defy him. The Valar may be hot-headed, devious, and violent under provocation. But in general they err on the side of caution, shutting themselves away from the troubled world.
Melko precedes the Valar into the world, not as an outcast from heaven like Satan, but as a petitioner pledging to moderate the violence and intemperate extremes his music has brought about. His ensuing conflict with the Valar makes a whole history out of the biblical declaration, ‘Let there be light’.* The first era is the age of the Gods, when they live in the midst of the flat earth lit by Lamps at north and south. In the second era, they withdraw to a sanctuary in the west, Valinor, illuminated by Two Trees of silver and gold, but they set stars in the perpetual night east of Valinor for the advent of the Elves, Ilúvatar’s first-born children. But after Elvenhome has been established in bright Valinor, Melko destroys the Trees, as he destroyed the Lamps. In the third era, light is restored to the whole world by the Sun and Moon, the last fruit and flower of the Trees, and humans enter the drama. Elves fade from general view in the fourth era, which begins when Melko impairs the Sun’s original magic. So it is that the Elves whom mortal Eriol meets in the Cottage of Lost Play look forward to a ‘Rekindling of the Magic Sun’.
In this mythology of light, primeval darkness is embodied in the spider-form of Gloomweaver or Wirilómë, who helps Melko destroy the Trees. Her provenance is a mystery even to the Valar. ‘Mayhap she was bred of mists and darkness on the confines of the Shadowy Seas, in that utter dark that came between the overthrow of the Lamps and the kindling of the Trees,’ comments the story-teller Lindo, ‘but more like she has always been’. By contrast, primeval light is a liquid that flows around the young world but is gradually used up in the creation of the earthly and celestial lights, leaving only the intangible radiation we know. It is tempting to connect these primordial principles with the ancient void and the Secret Fire of creation. Darkness such as Wirilómë represents is unholy, ‘a denial of all light’, rather than its mere absence. But already it is possible to see abundant consolations for Melko’s discords and destructiveness: without them, neither Trees nor Sun and Moon would have been created.
Such paradoxes also run through the history of the Elves (also called fairies or Eldar, ‘beings from outside’). Their fall from unity into division, beginning on the long journey from the place of their first awakening to Valinor, is responsible for the diverse flowering of Faërie across the world. The first group to reach their destination, the Teleri, devote themselves to the arts of music and poetry; the second, the Gnomes (Noldoli), to science; together these two clans establish the town of Kôr. Through the diaspora of the third tribe, the world’s wild places become popul
ated by fairies who have more to do with nature than culture. Those who strayed from the route are accounted the Lost Elves, the elusive Shadow-folk who haunt the 1915 poem ‘A Song of Aryador’. Only a portion of the third kindred at last reach Valinor and settle near Kôr on the Bay of Faërie as the Shoreland-pipers (Solosimpi).
They play a key role in a further thread of the legendarium, the hallowed prehistory of England. The British archipelago appears early on as a single unbroken island, serving as a vast ship on which the sea-god Ossë ferries the Valar to Valinor after the cataclysm of the Lamps. Later Ulmo, god of the deep, harnesses the primeval whale Uin to tow the fairies to Valinor, kindred by kindred. Catching the gleam of the Two Trees on two such voyages, the island flourishes into the very crown of nature. But proprietorial Ossë halts the third crossing westward, when the Solosimpi are on board. The ensuing tug-of-war between the rival water divinities exemplifies the occasional light-heartedness and frequent exuberance of the Lost Tales:
