Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  There are good reasons for Tolkien’s apparent stubbornness. Samuel Hynes has noted that the war ushered in a censorious campaign against German intellectual and artistic influences. By chance, this affected every area of secular culture and learning that Tolkien espoused. Even five years after the armistice, he complained that ‘“philology” itself, conceived as a purely German invention, is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things that the late war was fought to end…a thing whose absence does credit to an Englishman’. Alongside this assault on such rationalist traditions came an attack on Romanticism, in which Germany had also been Britain’s teacher, and which played a major part in Tolkien’s creative thought.

  In fact, he had swum against the tide even before the war, when his fascination with the ancient North ran counter to the classicism of King Edward’s School. He would not or could not now turn his back on philology, matters Germanic, or Romanticism. During the Great War, with an audience of six at most – the TCBS, Edith, Wade-Gery of the Salford Pals, and R. W. Reynolds of King Edward’s School – he was under little pressure to change; but in any case, as C. S. Lewis once said, ‘No one ever influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.’

  Despite his taste for romance and high diction, however, Tolkien did not find the war adventurous, dashing, or sacred. He summed up trench life as ‘animal horror’. Even in 1910, when he spoofed Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome in ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’, he knew the old language of war could be used for false heroics. Having been through the training camps and the trenches, he was acutely aware of its shortcomings, declaring, ‘The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists)…’

  But even if Tolkien had been more like Pound or Graves in outlook, he would have been unable to join their literary movements when he was finding his voice as a writer. Modernism, such as it had been before the war, had been silenced as decadent, while scarcely a scrap of what we now see as classic Great War poetry had been published by the end of 1916. As for the other paths then available to a young writer, none appealed to Tolkien’s imagination as much as the romances and epic adventures of writers such as William Morris and Rider Haggard – both labelled by Fussell as ‘tutors’ in high diction to the war propagandists.

  Yet Tolkien’s greater passion was for the genuinely medieval, from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As he said after the publication of The Lord of the Rings (in a reply, never sent, to a friendly but critical letter from Brogan), ‘not being especially well read in modern English, and far more familiar with works in the ancient and “middle” idioms, my own ear is to some extent affected; so that though I could easily recollect how a modern would put this and that, what comes easiest to mind or pen is not quite that’. Tolkien remained committed to an archaic air because it was the one he breathed.

  The abuse of high diction in battlefield journalism or recruitment pamphlets does not devalue the medievalism that Tolkien pursued – any more than the kicking of footballs as a morale-booster during the Somme assault renders the game itself obscene or obsolete. He rebelled against what he called ‘the extraordinary 20th C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as “contemporary” – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one’s friends shudder or feel hot in the collar’. In ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ and elsewhere, he adopted a style that suited his mythological and legendary content. It was a choice as conscious and serious as the opposite but complementary decision made by Graves, Sassoon, and Owen.

  Its justification lies in the history of Tolkien’s register – in its cultural, moral, and poetic weight. Pointing out that the Beowulf poet’s style had been archaic by the standards of his Anglo-Saxon audience, he said:

  This sort of thing – the building up of a poetic language out of words and forms archaic and dialectal or used in special senses – may be regretted or disliked. There is nonetheless a case for it: the development of a form of language familiar in meaning and yet freed from trivial associations, and filled with the memory of good and evil, is an achievement, and its possessors are richer than those who have no such tradition.

  Tolkien’s stylistic values reverse Ezra Pound’s famous modernist exhortation to ‘Make it new!’ To Tolkien, language accumulated qualities that could not be replaced and ought not to be lightly discarded. In a century when revolutionaries dismissed the whole concept of good and evil as a delusion of the weak or deviant, this became a substantial issue, and already during the Great War it was an urgent one. For Tolkien’s mythology, ‘the memory of good and evil’ is the keynote.

  Just when the old ways of telling were being misused by the military propagandists and rejected by the trench writers, Tolkien envisioned ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, a sequence of stories salvaged from the wreck of history. That he saw the value in traditions that most others rejected is one of his gifts to posterity: truth should never be the property of one literary mode, any more than it should be the monopoly of one authoritarian voice. Tolkien was not immune to epochal change, however. He did not simply preserve the traditions the war threatened, but reinvigorated them for his own era. His most distinctive success was with fairy-story. Robert Graves pictured the simultaneous arrival of maturity and war as the obliteration of Faërie:

  Wisdom made a breach and battered

  Babylon to bits: she scattered

  To the hedges and ditches

  All our nursery gnomes and witches.

  Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,

  Drag their treasures from the shelves.

  This was more than metaphor. Faërie came close to vanishing altogether during the First World War, thanks to this associative confusion of the pre-war era, childhood, and fairy-tales. Yet Tolkien did not regard fairies as childish, and he was not writing nursery-tales, but an epic history of the world through faëry eyes. In her galloping survey of fairy traditions, Troublesome Things, Diane Purkiss says that ‘The Western Front made the fairy aesthetic seem both desperately necessary and hopelessly anachronistic.’ Tolkien’s account of the tragic decline of the Elves acknowledges that their time is over but urges the desperate necessity of holding on to the values they represented. Far from being a sign that the war had no impact on Tolkien, his commitment to Faërie was a consequence of it. ‘A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood,’ he wrote later, ‘and quickened to full life by war.’

  Tolkien’s use of Faërie and its diction has brought accusations of escapism. Indeed, Hugh Brogan argues that the ‘Lost Tales’ and what followed them were ‘therapy for a mind wounded in war, and before that by deep sorrow in childhood and young manhood’ – in other words, that Middle-earth was just a kind of fantastic laudanum for its author. Many commentators clearly believe, by extension, that it is nothing but a general opiate for millions of readers.

  No one has defended Tolkien more eloquently against this charge of ‘escapism’ than Tolkien himself, who pointed out in ‘On Fairy-stories’ that in real life escape is ‘very practical, and may even be heroic’, but that literary critics tend to confound ‘the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter’, often wilfully.

  Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics…so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt.

  Speaking in 1939, six years into Hitler’s murderous chancellorship, Tolkien was not mincing his words. Though he was himself a master of naturalism, especia
lly in his depictions of landscape, he was acutely aware that in his lifetime realism had combined with modernism in an overbearing, intolerant, and denunciatory orthodoxy, a monolith dominating the academic and cultural establishments. Its advocates liked to think of this as progress, as if it were the only approach vindicated by the forward march of time. In fact, the new orthodoxy had grown contingently, like totalitarianism, in the often violent scramble for new certainties that followed the First World War. A Romantic and an individualist, Tolkien had opposed these orthodoxies for just as long, as his invention of Eärendel the escapee (1914) and Melko the tyrant (1916) testify. He was not purveying imaginary opiates: disgust, anger, and condemnation were perennial factors in his ‘escape’ into fairy-tale, myth, and ancientry.

  For Tolkien, the distant past was a frame of reference, a daily currency. So, too, for Robert Graves; but Graves liked to cash in ancient for modern, ‘translating’ Anglo-Saxon poetry into trench imagery, with ‘Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff tent; and Brunaburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fight’. Tolkien’s tendency was the opposite; he might see the German Flammenwerfer and think of Greek fire, exchanging new coin for old. A glance at some of the parallels between his creations and his immediate circumstances suggests that such double vision helped him construct his myth of a fictional ancient past; so that in war-emptied Oxford he devised the deserted elven capital Kôr, in troop-crowded Whittington Heath the migrant encampments of Aryador, and after the Somme the ‘dragon’ attack on Gondolin.

  In a similar way, the pitmen and labourers of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers may perhaps be discerned in one of the Gnome-kindreds in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, the Hammer of Wrath. These smiths or craftsmen, many of them escapees from Melko’s slave-mines, form the last-named battalion but the first to meet the enemy onslaught: ‘Very numerous was that battalion, nor had any amongst them a faint heart, and they won the greatest glory of all those fair houses in that struggle against doom; yet were they ill-fated, and none ever fared away from that field…’ The enemy draws them out and surrounds them; but they die taking many of their foes with them.

  It is difficult to imagine that Tolkien devised this scenario without thinking about the Somme. Units virtually obliterated in the Big Push of 1 July 1916 included Rob Gilson’s Cambridgeshires and G. B. Smith’s Salford Pals. His own battalion suffered appalling losses a week later (while Tolkien was with divisional signals at Bouzincourt), when ‘C’ Company was wiped out.

  The company had made a daring 1,200-yard night advance up the hill east of La Boisselle, but daybreak showed they had gone twice as far as planned. In a German trench that was only half-dug, they were bombarded by the enemy and their own side: ‘The problem was to know where our chaps were,’ said one British artilleryman. But it was afternoon before Captain John Metcalfe, still barely twenty, abandoned his position with the six men who remained unscathed; only he and a sergeant reached safety.

  Tolkien’s view of the incident is not known. His academic studies criticize both Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon duke Beorhtnoth for recklessly endangering others in a sportsmanlike pursuit of honour and glory. But the Hammer of Wrath’s over-extended advance was the first of several such heroic tragedies in his legendarium: Fëanor in the ‘Silmarillion’ and Théoden in The Lord of the Rings also pay with their lives for charging too deeply into enemy territory. The questions of courage, honour, leadership, and responsibility exercised both Tolkien’s heart and his mind, possibly in different directions.

  Whether or not the Hammer of Wrath recalls ‘C’ Company, it is clear that other writers might have turned this Somme incident into a blast of vitriol at Metcalfe or the makers of trench maps. But personal reticence made Tolkien temperamentally incapable of writing protest verse like Sassoon’s or Owen’s. Recalling his own tribulations as a soldier, in 1944 he sent his son Christopher, then with the RAF in South Africa, the Latin advice Aequam serva mentem, comprime linguam: ‘Keep a calm mind, restrain the tongue.’ He once described himself to W. H. Auden as a writer ‘whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress’.

  Although Tolkien had a rare genius for this ‘cloaking’, as he called it, he was far from alone in his desire to apply the patterns of myth and legend to the experience of real life. Although the stereotypical picture of the Western Front does not include soldiers reading the Mabinogion with its Welsh Arthuriana, as G. B. Smith did, or William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, which Tolkien carried, in fact quest literature was profoundly popular. Books such as Morris’s The Well at the World’s End and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress provided a key without which this life of tribulation and death seemed incomprehensible, as Paul Fussell admits: ‘The experiences of a man going up to the line to his destiny cannot help seeming to him like those of a hero of medieval romance if his imagination has been steeped in actual literary romances…’

  Christopher Wiseman, declaring in 1917 that experience of life was unnecessary in writing epics since they ‘make no pretence of dealing with life’, was thoroughly mistaken. Had Tolkien felt no need to express his shock at the outbreak of war, his heightened awareness of mortality, and his horror at mechanized warfare, it is possible that he would not have pursued fantasy at all. But his own metaphor of the concealing cloak is misleading. The distillation of experience into myth could reveal the prevailing elements in a moral morass such as the Great War, show the big picture where trench writers like Robert Graves tended to home in on the detail. Tolkien is not the first mythographer to produce a grave and pertinent epic in time of war and revolution. However else they differ from him, in this John Milton and William Blake are his forebears. When the world changes, and reality assumes an unfamiliar face, the epic and fantastic imagination may thrive.

  At the opposite pole from heroic romance, the fairy-tale aspects of Tolkien’s world could paradoxically provide a mirror for the world at war. In her lucid study, A Question of Time, Verlyn Flieger considers Tolkien’s haunting 1930s poem, ‘Looney’, and its better known 1960s incarnation, ‘The Sea-bell’, which recount a bewildering lone odyssey to Faërie and the return of the traveller to mortal lands, where he finds himself estranged from his kind. Flieger notes that, whereas fairy-stories and war would seem to be opposites,

  Beneath the surface, however, [Tolkien’s] words suggest a deep but unmanifest connection between these apparently unlike things…Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return so that they become ‘pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness’, not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen or experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faërie can change out of all recognition the wanderer’s perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was.

  Strikingly, Tolkien wrote his first account of a mortal’s arrival in Faërie, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, just after his return to England from the Somme with trench fever. Eriol’s first impressions of the Lonely Isle are much happier than those in ‘Looney’ and ‘The Sea-bell’, but he glimpses Faërie’s indifference to humanity. Tolkien’s outlines show that the mariner would eventually become alienated from his kind; and in the last pages of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, Eriol expresses his fear that his message to human posterity – the tales he has recorded – will be lost.

  Viewed in the context of 1916-17, the arrival of Eriol, ‘One who dreams alone’, in the Lonely Isle, ‘the Land of Release’, has the air of a soldier’s anticipatory dream of a homecoming in which everything will turn out alright again. But he is escaping the current of his own time and entering the timelessness of Faërie. Similarly, for the soldier, time seemed to have moved on incalculably in the trenches but fallen
behind in England. The Lonely Isle, then, may be seen as a symbolic version of the England that had slipped away. Nostalgia, a word that had hitherto always meant homesickness, began to appear in its now prevalent sense – regretful or wistful yearning for the past – straight after the Great War. To Tolkien’s generation, nostalgia was a constant companion: they were looking over their shoulders, like the survivors of Gondolin, at an old home that seemed now to embody everything beautiful and doomed. Tolkien’s myth expresses the desire for such apparently timeless beauty, but constantly recognizes that it is indeed doomed: for all its apparent imperviousness, in the long run the Lonely Isle, like Gondolin, must succumb to implacable change.

  The war memoirist Charles Douie looked back on Peter Pan as a kind of prophecy. ‘Did no feeling of apprehension darken the mind of any mother in that audience which first heard, “My sons shall die like English gentlemen”; did no foreboding enter into the exultation with which those sons first heard youth’s defiance of death – “To die would be an awfully big adventure”?’

  It was Peter’s perpetual youth that came closest to the mark during the Great War, when so many young men would never grow old; and Tolkien’s Elves, forever in the prime of adulthood, hit the bullseye. As Tom Shippey notes, ‘There is no difficulty in seeing why Tolkien, from 1916 on, was preoccupied with the theme of death…The theme of escape from death might then naturally seem attractive.’ Much more robust than the airy miniatures of Victorian and Shakespearean fancy, the Eldar could shoulder the burden of these weightier themes. Their ancient roots in Germanic and Celtic myth, furthermore, made them apt symbols of timelessness in a twentieth-century epic about loss.