Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  It would be misleading to suggest that The Hobbit is Tolkien’s wartime experience in disguise; yet it is easy to see how some of his memories must have invigorated this tale of an ennobling rite of passage past the fearful jaws of death. The middle-class hero is thrown in with proud but stolid companions who have been forced to sink ‘as low as blacksmith-work or even coalmining’. The goblins they meet recall those of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, though in The Hobbit – because he made no bones about addressing a twentieth-century audience – Tolkien was much more explicit about the kind of evil they represent: ‘It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them…but in those days…they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.’ The company approaches the end of its quest across the desolation created by Smaug, a dragon of Glorund’s ilk: a once green land with now ‘neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished’. Scenes of sudden, violent ruin ensue (Tom Shippey sees elements of First World War attitudes in Bard the Bowman’s defence of Laketown); we visit the camps of the sick and wounded and listen to wranglings over matters of command and strategy. And all culminates in a battle involving those old enemies, the Elves and the Orcs. Horror and mourning, two attitudes to battlefield death, appear side by side, the Orcs lying ‘piled in heaps till Dale was dark and hideous with their corpses’, but among them ‘many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood’.

  In 1916, from a trench in Thiepval Wood, G. B. Smith had written Tolkien a letter he thought might be his last. ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.’ The 24-year-old Tolkien had believed just as strongly in the dream shared by the TCBS, and felt that they ‘had been granted some spark of fire…that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world…’ At 48, however, Tolkien felt that the Great War had come down like winter on his creative powers in their first bloom. ‘I was pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again,’ he said in October 1940.

  What he would have written had he not been ‘pitched into it all’ is difficult to imagine. The war imposed urgency and gravity, took him through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form. Without the war, it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on a conflict between good and evil; or if they had, whether good and evil would have taken a similar shape. The same may be said for his thoughts on death and immortality, dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe, enchantment and irony, the significance of fairy-story, the importance of ordinary people in events of historic magnitude, and, crucially, the relationship between language and mythology. If we were lucky enough now to survey a twentieth century in which there had been no Great War, we might know of a minor craftsman in the tradition of William Morris called J. R. R. Tolkien; or we might know him only as a brilliant academic. Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs.

  Tolkien’s retrospective view in 1940 seems clouded. He was struggling to push on with his sequel to The Hobbit after a year’s hiatus under the pall of a new global conflict, but he had little sense of what the book would become.

  But The Lord of the Rings, the masterpiece that was published a decade and a half later, stands as the fruition of the TCBSian dream, a light drawn from ancient sources to illuminate a darkening world. Some of its success may be attributed to a sense of depth and detail unparalleled in an imagined world: the result of a long germination that began not in December 1937, when the first sentence of this new story was written, but in 1914, with ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’; The Lord of the Rings was a part of the same tree that the Great War spurred into growth. But a good measure of its strength, surely, derives from its roots in Tolkien’s war. When it was published, baffled critics tried their hardest to interpret it as an allegory of the struggle against Nazi Germany; but Tolkien responded:

  One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

  If you really must look for a meaningful biographical or historical influence, he would appear to be saying, 1914-18 is where you ought to start.

  Tolkien intentionally contributed very little to such evidence as exists; his statements on the influence or otherwise of the First World War on The Lord of the Rings are few and wary. While no longer prone to assign himself any kind of walk-on role in his stories, as he had half-done with Eriol in ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, he nevertheless conceded that out of the entire dramatis personae, ‘As far as any character is “like me” it is Faramir – except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.’ Faramir, of course, is an officer but also a scholar, with a reverence for the old histories and sacred values that helps him through a bitter war. Tolkien asserted a less specific but much more concrete connection between the Great War and The Lord of the Rings by declaring, ‘My “Sam Gamgee” is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.’ Finally, he said that the Somme battlefield had re-emerged in the desolate approaches to Mordor:

  Personally I do not think that either war…had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.

  Though couched within a sweeping denial of influence, the admission has stuck. A survey of ‘British fiction writers of the First World War’ by Hugh Cecil focuses on such authors as Richard Aldington, Wilfrid Ewart, and Oliver Onions, but by way of introducing the Western Front it turns first to Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes, a scene of morbid desolation that has become, in effect, a shorthand symbol for the trenches. C. S. Lewis leaned strongly towards the view that the war of their generation had cast its shadow on his friend’s story. Lewis had also served on the Western Front, discovering camaraderie in the midst of horror, suffering trench fever and then sustaining a ‘Blighty’ wound at the Battle of Arras. Reviewing The Lord of the Rings in 1955, he wrote about one of the book’s ‘general excellences’, its surprising realism:

  This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when ‘everything is now ready’, the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heavensent windfalls as a cache of tobacco ‘salvaged’ from a ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy-tale was wakened into maturity by active service; that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf), ‘There is good rock here. This country has tough bones.’

  More might be added to Lewis’s list: the atmosphere of pre-war tension and watchfulness, Frodo Baggins’s restless impatience with his parochial countrymen in the Shire, the world’s dizzying plunge into peril and mass mobilizations; tenacious courage revealed in the ordinary people of town and farm, with camaraderie and love as their chief motivations; the striking absence of women from much of the action; the machine-dominated mind of Saruman. Tom Shippey notes that the failure of the Shire to fête Frodo Baggins on his return reflects in Tolkien ‘the disillusionment of the returned vetera
n’.

  Lewis failed to mention the equally surprising pertinence of superficially unrealistic elements in The Lord of the Rings. Here are a few that suggest the influence of 1914-18: the sweeping surveillance of the Eye of Sauron, the moments when reality shifts into dream during those long marches, or into nightmare in the midst of battle, the battlefield dominated by lumbering elephantine behemoths and previously unseen airborne killers, the Black Breath of despair that brings down even the bravest; the revenge of the trees for their wanton destruction. The popularity of William Morris’s quest stories on the Western Front has been noted. Tolkien completed the circle by drawing on his experiences of the Great War for a series of ‘medieval’ romances, beginning with ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and, it may be judged, most fully achieved in The Lord of the Rings.

  The book recounts the piteous predicament of the soldier down in the battlefield mud, but it also tackles the themes that Wilfred Owen ruled off-limits: deeds, lands, glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, power. It examines how the individual’s experience of war relates to those grand old abstractions; for example, it puts glory, honour, majesty, as well as courage, under such stress that they often fracture, but are not utterly destroyed. Mindful, no doubt, of the schism of war literature into propaganda and protest, Lewis called The Lord of the Rings ‘a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike’ that presides at ‘the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment’.

  The last word may go to Siegfried Sassoon, a quintessential Great War writer. In The Lord of the Rings the embattled city of Minas Tirith is saved by the intervention of a host of the dead out of ancient legends: people who deserted their allies three thousand years before, and have come at last to redeem their oath and to fight. It is an astonishing, fantastic scenario, and morally striking: ghosts joining the war against evil. Yet how similar this is to a visionary moment in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, where Sassoon recalls the shock of witnessing the return of his men to rest after eleven days in the Somme trenches:

  I had seen something that night which overawed me. It was all in the day’s work – an exhausted Division returning from the Somme Offensive – but for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts. It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.

  Tolkien, more famous for prose than poetry, was already at work on his mythology in 1916; but otherwise we may justly regard him as the epic writer Sassoon imagined.

  Notes

  Abbreviations and short titles used in notes

  See bibliography for full details of books and papers. Where no author is given (except in the cases of Artist, Biography, and Family Album), the author is JRRT.

  Artist Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator

  Biography Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography

  CLW Christopher Luke Wiseman

  CWGC Commonwealth War Graves Commission

  EK Estelle King

  EMB, EMT Edith Mary Bratt, later Edith Mary Tolkien

  Family Album John and Priscilla Tolkien, The Tolkien Family Album

  GBS Geoffrey Bache Smith

  JRRT John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

  Letters Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: A Selection

  LF The Lancashire Fusiliers

  LT1 The Book of Lost Tales, Part One

  LT2 The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two

  KES King Edward’s School

  KESC King Edward’s School Chronicle

  MCG Mrs Marianne Cary Gilson (‘Donna’)

  Monsters Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics

  OEG Old Edwardians Gazette

  RCG Robert Cary Gilson

  RQG Robert Quilter Gilson

  RWR Richard William Reynolds

  Correspondence dates in square brackets are those established by the author, sometimes tentatively, where a date is not given or is clearly in error.

  Prologue

  p.3

  Rugby match: RQG to MCG, 30 November 1913; ‘a beaten pack’, match details: undated report, KESC, March 1914, 11-12.

  p.4

  JRRT ill: KESC, March 1914, 9.

  CLW’s health and sport: KESC, December 1912, 86.

  CLW’s musicianship (and his settings for ‘Sing we the King’ and ‘Trull’): Lightwood, The Music of the Methodist Hymn Book, 94-5, 398.

  p.5

  JRRT and CLW: CLW memoir, OEG. Their disputes: CLW to JRRT, 15 November 1914. Great Twin Brotherhood and Trought: ibid.; JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

  Librarianship: CLW to JRRT, 27 April 1911.

  Literary papers: KESC, March 1911, 19-20; April 1912, 28; July 1910, 79; December 1910, 92.

  ‘almost the last word’: CLW to JRRT, 27 October 1915.

  p.6

  Campaign against cynics: CLW to JRRT, 10 November 1914, 27 October 1915, 1 March 1916.

  Light-hearted TCBS: CLW to JRRT, 5 June 1913, 10 November 1914.

  1911, ‘the sweltering town populations…’: Ensor, 442.

  p.7

  KESC does not list T. K. Barnsley among the TCBS, probably because it only lists prefects.

  Barnsley and GBS agree to play: RQG to MCG, 30 November 1913; TKB’s expressions: ibid., 17 and 22 February 1914.

  p.8

  ‘’Twas a good road…’: unsigned KESC Editorial, July 1911, 53.

  Four dead: the fourth was JRRT’s full-back, George Morley Smith.

  pp.8-9

  War dead: J. M. Winter, 1986, 92-9.

  ONE Before

  pp.11-12

  Life up to 1910: Biography, 9-49.

  ‘If your first Christmas tree…’: 1964 interview with Denis Gueroult, BBC Sound Archives.

  pp.12-13

  Drawing: Priestman, 9, 12, 19; Letters, 377.

  p.13

  Handwriting: Biography, 18, 21, 57; Priestman, 8-10; Artist, 201; Letters, 377.

  ‘I was brought up…’: Letters, 172.

  Reading: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 134-5; Letters, 311; read

  ‘too much…’: Mabel Tolkien, Biography, 28.

  Poetry: Biography, 47-8; Letters, 213.

  pp.13-14

  JRRT on Francis Thompson: Stapeldon Society minutes, 4 March 1914.

  p.14

  ‘Wood-sunshine’: excerpted in Biography, 47.

  TCBS and Pre-Raphaelites: CLW to GBS, 30 August 1916.

  ‘It seemed rather as if words…’: Biography, 22.

  ‘The fluidity…’: ‘English and Welsh’, Monsters, 191.

  pp.14-16

  Languages: ‘English and Welsh’, Monsters, 191-2; Letters, 213-14, 357.

  p.15

  Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary: Bodleian Tolkien E16/8.

  p.16

  School record: KES class lists.

  ‘quite a great authority…’: RQG to MCG, 22 May 1914; RQG to EK, 10 March 1916.

  ‘the highest epic genius…’: KESC, March 1911, 19-20.

  p.17

  ‘Reading Homer…’: CLW memoir, OEG. Language invention and friendship: CLW to JRRT, 10 November 1914, and Mrs Patricia Wiseman in conversation with the author.

  ‘It’s not uncommon…’: interview excerpted in Sibley, Audio Portrait.

  ‘serve the needs…’: ‘A Secret Vice’, Monsters, 201.

  Gautisk: Parma Eldalamberon 12, iv, x-xi; advice from Arden R. Smith.

  Sobriquets (footnote): RQG to JRRT 4 October 1911 and 21 March 1913.

  p.18

  The Peace: KESC, October 1911, 72; Biography, 49; the Greek Plays: William H. Tait in OEG, June 1972, 17; The Clouds: KESC, October 1912, 66. GBS as the Ass: KES photograph of The Frogs [July 1913].

  ‘As a boy…’ (C. V. L. Lycett); TCBS not aloof: Letters, 429.

  Nicknames: CLW to JRRT, 27 April and 17 August 1911, 19 March and 20 November 1912; CLW memoir, OEG.

  p.19

  Classical tags (footnote): KESC, March 1909, March 1910, March 1911.

&nbs
p; ‘My dear Gabriel’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 27 April 1911. ‘gracing our ancestral hearth’, etc.: RQG to JRRT, 10 June 1913.

  ‘a daft slang…’: J. B. Priestley, The Edwardians, 82.

  p.20

  Macaulay’s ‘The Battle of Lake Regillus’: Yates, ‘“The Battle of the Eastern Field”: A Commentary’, Mallorn 13, 3-5.

  ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’: KESC, March 1911, 22-7; ‘Sekhet, the lion-headed’: Haggard, She, 281.

  p.21

  ‘Our country is now supreme…’: KESC, February 1909, 9.

  ‘hooliganism and uproar’; foreign policy: Stapledon Society minutes, 1 December and 7 November 1913.

  ‘Court of Arbiters’ debate: KESC, February 1911, 5.

  p.22

  Debate demanding war: KESC, October 1911, 79.

  KES anthem, by Alfred Hayes (1857-1936): Trott, No Place for Fop or Idler, 1; The Annotated Hobbit, 344.

  p.23

  A good shot: Priscilla and Michael Tolkien, quoted in an unsigned report, Amon Hen 13, October 1974, 9.

  OTC presented to the King: KESC, November 1910, 69, 73.

  ‘kindled an immovable smile’: unsigned editorial, KESC, June 1911, 33.

  Footnote on Adfuit omen: T. A. Shippey to the author.

  Coronation trip: KESC, July 1911, 59-60; Letters, 391 (which says the party was twelve-strong).

  pp.23-4

  Aldershot camp: KESC, November 1910, 69.

  p.24

  Tidworth Pennings camp: William H. Tait in OEG, June 1972, 17.

  pp.24-5

  King Edward’s Horse: James, The History of King Edward’s Horse, 1-53; The Stapeldon Magazine, December 1911, 117-18; JRRT service record.