Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  * The Gnomish equivalent Calumoth in the ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words’ was shortlived, but Glamhoth, ‘folk of dreadful hate’ in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, is surely its phonaesthetic heir; and so the influence of the barbaric kalimbardi can be traced all the way to the name of Gandalf’s sword Glamdring, ‘Foehammer’.

  * In the finished ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ this became ‘Winter, and his blue-tipped spears / Marching unconquerable upon the sun / Of bright All-Hallows’.

  * This is a sly reference to Tolkien’s own April 1915 poem ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, which indeed depicts the original cottage. Tolkien planned to weave his earlier poetry into his prose ‘Book of Lost Tales’, and the story of Eriol’s arrival in the Lonely Isle also contains references to the song he made about Kortirion (‘Kortirion among the Trees’) and the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl from ‘The Happy Mariners’.

  * In ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ Meril herself took the place that had been occupied in early Qenya lexicon entries by Erinti, the Vala of love, music, beauty, and purity, who likewise lived in a circle of elms guarded by fairies in Kortirion. Erinti, as previously noted, was partly a representation of Edith Tolkien, who therefore has a curious link with Galadriel.

  * Generally the second element in Withernsea is derived from , meaning ‘mere’, with reference to the old lake there.

  * Christopher Tolkien notes that his father ‘regarded the restriction of a vernacular name to this or that species within a large group of plants not easily distinguishable to the eye as the pedantry of popularizing botanists – who ought to content themselves with the Linnean names’.

  * Tolkien erased the original tales and wrote new versions over them in ink soon after the war. They are discussed in the Epilogue below, together with the rest of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ composed at that time.

  * Four of the King Edward’s casualties had sat in front of Tolkien and Wiseman in the 1910 portrait of the school rugby XV reproduced in this volume: H. L. Higgins and H. Patterson, severely wounded in France, and John Drummond Crichton and George Frederick Cottrell, killed by shells at Cambrai and Ypres.

  * Tulkas, with his laughter, yellow hair, and sporting prowess, may catch aspects of Christopher Wiseman, as Erinti does of Edith, Noldorin of Tolkien, and Amillo of his brother Hilary.

  * Tolkien did not number the four epochs of this history of light, and they should not to be confused with the later, well-known division of Middle-earth’s history into the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Ages.

  * Evidence suggests that in the 1917 version, Beren was a mortal man (as he is subsequently in the ‘Silmarillion’), rendering the background of distrust even more acute.

  * The vowel change actually (as in English) shows the impact of a suffix that has been lost, so Gnomish orn, ‘tree’, from a primitive orně, pluralizes as yrn, showing the influence of the old plural suffix –i in primitive ornei.