by John Garth
Neither Milton nor Blake saw battle itself. That Tolkien did may explain the central or climactic role of battles in his stories. The tank-like ‘dragons’ in the assault on Gondolin strongly imply that this is the case. So does the strategic importance of timing in many of Tolkien’s fictional clashes. The failure of units to coordinate their attacks, a disastrous feature of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears as developed in the ‘Silmarillion’, parallels a fatal problem in the Somme offensive. The last-minute intervention of a fresh force to save the day, a staple of military engagements in Middle-earth, may seem less realistic and more ‘escapist’, but this was the part his own battalion played in the taking of Ovillers and the rescue of the Warwickshires, when he was present as a signaller.
Tolkien’s even-handed depiction of war as both terrible and stirring is well matched by a comment from Charles Carrington (one of the beleaguered Warwickshires), who writes that, for the soldier in the midst of mortal danger, ‘There was an arguing realism, a cynical side to one’s nature that raised practical objections and suggested dangers, and against it there strove a romantic ardour for the battle that was almost joyful.’ Túrin, ‘sick and weary’ after the fray, illustrates the frequent sequel to such ardour – the resurgence of reality. But high diction, which sets Tolkien so far apart from the classic trench writers, expresses perfectly a psychological truth of war they tend to neglect. In all its enormity and strangeness, combat could induce what Carrington calls the ‘exaltation of battle…an elevated state of mind which a doctor might have defined as neurosis’; he says he was ‘uplifted in spirit’.
A similar observation in Frederic Manning’s acute Somme novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, points to a more profound parallel between the view on the battlefield and Tolkien’s creative vision. Manning relates the exaltation of combat to the soldiers’ conviction that they were fighting in a just cause, a ‘moral impetus’ that ‘carried them forward on a wave of emotional excitement, transfiguring all the circumstances of their life so that these could only be expressed in the terms of heroic tragedy, of some superhuman or even divine conflict with the powers of evil…’ Tolkien’s legendarium assumed the dimensions of a conflict between good and evil immediately after the Somme. Might that be partly the result of a desire to express this singular experience, so far beyond the scope of conventional literary expression?
Whatever the answer, Tolkien’s moral vision is utterly different in application from the soldier’s and the propagandist’s. With the possible exception of the Hammer of Wrath, noted above, Orcs and Elves do not equate to the Germans and the British; on the contrary, they distil the cruelty and the courage he saw on both sides in war, as well as more general qualities of barbarism and civilization. It was not the Kaiser that Tolkien demonized in Melko, but the tyranny of the machine over the individual, an international evil going back far earlier than 1914 but exercised with merciless abandon on the Western Front.
As Tom Shippey has pointed out, Tolkien is in good company among later writers who turned away from realism because, as combat veterans, they had seen ‘something irrevocably evil’. George Orwell (the Spanish Civil War), Kurt Vonnegut and William Golding (the Second World War) fall into this category. Crucially, Shippey argues, Tolkien and these others adopted various forms of fantasy because they felt that the conventional explanations for the evil they had seen ‘were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself’. For example, realist fictions hold that there is no absolute evil, only relative degrees of social maladjustment; but in Lord of the Flies Golding suggests that something intrinsically evil lurks inside us all, waiting to get out. Trench realism embraces detail and flinches from universal statements, but ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ mythologizes the evil that Tolkien saw in materialism. To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.
During Tolkien’s own war, the conventional British view as expressed in propaganda was that evil certainly existed, and it was German. Trench poets such as Wilfred Owen felt that the real enemy was the blind self-interest of national governments determined to gain territory whatever the human cost. But both groups shared a taste for polemic. Owen’s poem about a gassed soldier leaves an indelible impression, and was meant to:
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The personal address, ‘my friend’, is only the salute before the bayonet-thrust. You, it says, are passing on lies to your children, and so they may one day suffer torments such as this I saw. The voice of the trench writer has primacy, as a guarantor of eyewitness reliability but also as a badge of unimpeachable moral authority.
Tolkien eschewed polemical rhetoric, part of the evil of tyranny and orthodoxy that he opposed. In his work, a multitude of characters speak in diverse voices, but the author stays well out of sight. While trench writers such as Owen challenged the propagandists and censors for the monopoly on truth, Tolkien moved away from the idea of a monopoly altogether, telling his Lost Tales through multiple narrators (rather as Ilúvatar in ‘The Music of the Ainur’ allows his seraphic choirs to elaborate his themes). The idea survived into the ‘Silmarillion’, a collation of disparate historical accounts, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which purport to have been edited from the writings of their protagonists.
But the evil that Tolkien’s mythology most squarely opposes, disenchantment, is burned into the fabric of classic Great War literature.
By editing G. B. Smith’s A Spring Harvest, Tolkien contributed to a spate of fallen soldiers’ poetry, most of which is now forgotten. The little that is still remembered, including Owen’s poetry, was not cemented into the cultural memory until several more years had passed, when trench survivors broke their traumatized silence. A flurry of memoirs and novels appeared between 1926 and 1934, including Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Graves’s Good-bye to All That, and the start of Henry Williamson’s Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence. Now, in the words of Samuel Hynes, ‘the Myth of the War was defined and fixed in the version that retains authority’: the disenchanted version.
This ‘myth’ implies that the war consisted almost entirely of passive suffering. In his poetry, Sassoon neglects to mention his solo killing sprees in the German lines; in his prose he downplays the daring involved. In Wilfred Owen’s verse, men trudge through mud, or move a dying comrade into the sun, or simply wait to be attacked. He declared his subject to be pity, not heroes or deeds. In other words, action and heroism were omitted for a more effective protest against the war.
The revisionist approach of the late 1920s, which Owen had heralded, underlined the bitter irony of lives squandered for ‘a few acres of mud’, as Christopher Wiseman had put it. The snapshot narratives in the literature of disenchantment typically pivot on ironic incidents in which action is proved futile and courage a waste. Paul Fussell identifies classic trench writing with the ‘ironic’ mode of narrative that Northrop Frye (in The Anatomy of Criticism) defined as characterizing the latter phase of a typical cycle of literary history. The earliest fictions (myth, romance, epic, and tragedy) portrayed heroes who enjoyed greater power of action than their audience; but in the quintessentially modern ironic mode the protagonist has less power of action than ourselves, and is caught in a ‘scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity’.
These days it tends to be forgotten that many veterans resented the way their story was being told from 1926 onwards. ‘Book after book related a succession of disasters and discomforts with no intermission and no gleam of achievement,’ wrote Carrington. ‘Every battle a defeat, every officer a nincom
poop, every soldier a coward.’ The wounded pride of a disgruntled officer, perhaps; but Carrington’s own memoir is hardly a rose-tinted affair.
The disenchanted view has left us a skewed picture of an important and complex historical event; a problem only exacerbated by a cultural and academic tendency to canonize the best and forget the rest. Coming after the desperate cheer of frontline letters home, the newspaper and government propaganda and the stilted elegies of the war era, the former soldier Charles Douie thought that the new approach restored balance; but he added:
The authors of this poetry and prose of horror have overstated the case in quite as great a degree as we understated it during the war. The sight of blood has gone to their heads. They can see nothing else…Are the prose and poetry of this age to be charged with disillusion and despair?
The disenchanted view of the war stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives.
‘The Book of Lost Tales’, composed between 1916 and c.1920, is the same vintage as Charles Carrington’s A Subaltern’s War, largely written in 1919-20. Carrington’s later words about his memoir apply equally to Tolkien’s mythology. ‘It is thus anterior to the pacifist reaction of the nineteen-thirties and is untainted by the influence of the later writers who invented the powerful image of “disenchantment” or “disillusion”,’ Carrington wrote. ‘I go back to an earlier stage in the history of ideas.’
The metaphorical uses of disenchanted and disillusioned have so overtaken the literal that it is easy to forget what they once meant. To say you are ‘disenchanted’ with the government or a love affair or a career, for example, is to say that you no longer value them. Wilfred Owen was disenchanted with a whole set of archaic values, declaring that his poetry was not about ‘deeds, or lands, or anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War’. But Robert Graves’s image of the end of innocence – wisdom scattering the nursery fairies – indicates the literal meaning of disenchantment. The Great War had broken a kind of spell.
Tolkien stands against disenchantment in both its literal and metaphorical senses; indeed, they cannot strictly be separated in his work. The disenchanted view, metaphorically speaking, is that failure renders effort meaningless. In contrast, Tolkien’s protagonists are heroes not because of their successes, which are often limited, but because of their courage and tenacity in trying. By implication, worth cannot be measured by results alone, but is intrinsic. His stories depict the struggle to uphold inherited, instinctive, or inspirational values – matters of intrinsic and immeasurable worth – against the forces of chaos and destruction. But Tolkien’s world is literally enchanted, too. Not only does it contain talking swords, moving islands, and spells of sleep, but even its most ‘normal’ objects and inhabitants possess a spiritual value that has nothing to do with any practical usefulness: no one has argued more energetically than Tolkien that a tree is more than a source of wood. Furthermore, according to ‘The Music of the Ainur’, the world is a spell in progress, a work of enchantment – etymologically, a magic that is sung.
Tolkien’s story of Túrin Turambar may appear to come close to the ‘disenchanted’ mode of literature. The ironies of inescapable circumstance either deprive Túrin of victory or they cheat him of its fruits. However, Tolkien parts company with his contemporaries in his depiction of the individual’s response to circumstance. Túrin’s dogged struggle against fate sets the seal on the heroic status he achieves in combat. Fate may laugh at his efforts, but he refuses to be humbled.
Irony is sometimes accounted an absolute virtue in literature, as if depicting reversals of fortune were evidence of a wise detachment from life, or saying the opposite of what is meant demonstrated a wry wit and paid a compliment to the reader’s cleverness. Tolkien recognized that ironic circumstance exists and must be portrayed, but it is clear that he did not account irony a virtue. He had stood with Christopher Wiseman when the latter complained, in late 1914, that the TCBS had become dominated by a waggish and sarcastic element ‘who sneer at everything and lose their temper at nothing’. His characterization of the dragon Glorund as the ironist who engineers Túrin’s destruction illustrates his own disapproval of those who delight in mockery.
Tolkien’s other narratives may stand further from ‘disenchanted’ literature, yet they still frequently involve the ironic downturn characteristic of classic trench writing: the disaster or discovery that undermines all achievements and threatens to snuff out hope. That downturn, however, is not the pivotal moment that matters most in Middle-earth. Tolkien propels his plots beyond it and so reaches the emotional crux that truly interested him: ‘eucatastrophe’, the sudden turn for the better when hope rises unforeseeably from the ashes. He makes despair or ‘disenchantment’ the prelude to a redemptive restoration of meaning.
From Tuor onwards he recorded how individuals are transfigured by extraordinary circumstances. His characters set out, more often than not, from a point something like Frye’s ‘ironic’ mode, in bondage, frustration, or absurdity, but they break free of those conditions, and so become heroes. They achieve greater power of action than ourselves, and so reach the condition of characters in the older modes identified by Northrop Frye in his cyclical view of literary history: myth, romance, and epic. So Tolkien dramatized the joy of victory against all odds in Beren and Tinúviel, whose courage and tenacity overcome not only Melko but also the mockery Beren has suffered in the court of Tinúviel’s father. This liberation from the chains of circumstance makes his stories especially vital in an age of disenchantment.
Heroism does happen, as Tolkien vouched with characteristic reticence in his landmark 1936 paper on Beowulf: ‘Even to-day…you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them…’ Courage had not changed since the days of ‘the old heroes…dying with their backs to the wall’, he said. The metaphor is commonplace, but loaded with meaning in contexts ancient and modern, public and perhaps personal. It recalls how, in the Old English poem The Wanderer, the lord’s retainers ‘eal gecrong / wlonc bi wealle’ – ‘all perished, proud beside the wall’. Tolkien might have remembered that Christopher Wiseman had used the same metaphor in his letter calling the TCBS to order after Rob Gilson’s death: ‘Now we stand with our backs to the wall, and yet we haver and question as to whether we had better not all put our backs against separate walls.’ For Tolkien’s inter-war audience, however, it would surely have evoked Field-Marshal Haig’s inspirational order during the German Spring Offensive of 1918: ‘With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.’ Through his narratives of hard-won and partial victory, Tolkien suggests that we should go on, whether we can or not.
Like Milton, he also tries to justify the ways of God to Men. Following the introduction of discord into the Music of the Ainur, Ilúvatar asserts that ‘even shall those beings, who must now dwell among his evil and endure through Melko misery and sorrow, terror and wickedness, declare in the end that it redoundeth only to my great glory, and doth but make the theme more worth the hearing, Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous’. In a more sceptical era, it is easy to scoff at this as a kind of faith that is blind to the reality of suffering; but Tolkien was not blind, and in the years immediately prior to writing those words he had witnessed suffering on an industrial scale. Others who lived through the shocks and turmoils of his times sought for similar consolatory explanations of God’s mysterious ways. Concluding his soldiering memoir, The Weary Road, Charles Douie wrote: ‘Perhaps some day later generations may begin to see our war in a truer perspective, and may discern it as an inevitable step in the tragic process by which consciousness has informed the will of man, by which in time all things will be fashioned fair.’ Tolkien was not writing about later generations, but about the end of the world. F. L. Lucas, the classicist-soldier whose enlistment had precipitated Rob Gilson’
s, wrote that the purpose of tragic drama was ‘to portray life that its tears become a joy forever’. In Tolkien’s myth, our immortal souls will be able to contemplate the drama in which we have taken part as a finished work of art. They will also join the Ainur in a second, greater Music, when Ilúvatar’s themes will ‘be played aright; for then Ainur and Men will know his mind and heart as well as may be, and all his intent’.
Close to two decades separate the composition of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ from the publication of The Hobbit; closer to four divide it from the appearance of The Lord of the Rings. The ‘Silmarillion’ continued to evolve until Tolkien’s death, involving major developments at every level of detail from cosmology to nomenclature. Though a full examination of the question would be out of place here, I would argue that most of what has been said in this postscript holds true for all this later work.
By the time The Hobbit appeared, Tolkien had long abandoned the identification of the Lonely Isle with Britain, and the story of a Germanic or Anglo-Saxon mariner hearing the ‘true tradition’ of the Elves had dwindled to the occasional ‘editorial’ aside in the ‘Silmarillion’. The myth was no longer, in any geographical or cultural respect, about the genesis of England. But the loosening of these links – together with the new scope for naturalistic portraiture that accompanied his move away from epic modes – meant paradoxically that Tolkien could now write about ‘Englishness’ in a more meaningful way than in drawing linear connections through vast aeons. He could model hobbits directly on English people as he had known them in and around his cherished childhood home of Sarehole near Birmingham, borrowing aspects of custom, society, character, and speech. Hobbits, he said, constitute a community that is ‘more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’. He admitted, ‘I take my models like anyone else – from such “life” as I know.’ A figure standing uncertainly at the doorway into adventure, Bilbo Baggins is an engaging mixture of timidity and temerity, but he learns and grows with astonishing speed, until he can look death calmly in the eye. Bilbo is simply much more like us, Tolkien’s readers, than Beren or Tinúviel or Túrin could be. Meanwhile, the tincture of Englishness and the aura of 1897 draw this story closer to the First World War – the end of the era that hobbits evoke – than the Lost Tales that were actually written during and immediately after it.
