Tolkien and the Great War (11 page)

The
Kalevala
had shown that myth-making could play a part in the revival of a language and a national culture, but it may be that there was a more immediate catalyst. During the Great War, a similar process took place on a vast scale, quite impromptu. For the first time in history, most soldiers were literate, but more than ever before they were kept in the dark. They made up for this with opinion and rumour, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastical: stories about a German corpserendering works, a crucified Canadian soldier, and the troglodytic wild men of No Man's Land who, the story went, were deserters from both sides. First World War history is often concerned with assessing the truth and impact of the seemingly more plausible ‘myths' that have arisen from it: the ‘lions led by donkeys', or the ‘rape of Belgium'. From the outset there were also myths of supernatural intercession. Exhausted British troops in retreat from Mons had apparently seen an angel astride a white horse brandishing a flaming sword; or a troop of heavenly archers; or three angels in the sky. The ‘
Angels of Mons
'
had forbidden the German advance, it was said. The incident had originated as a piece of fiction, ‘The Bowmen' by Arthur Machen, in which the English archers of Agincourt return to fight the advancing Germans of 1914; but it had quickly assumed the authority of fact. At the same time that the war produced myths, the vast outpouring of Great War letters, diaries, and poetry enriched the languages of Europe with new words, phrases, and even registers, subtly altering and defining the perceptions of national character that were so important to the patriotic effort. All this was a living example of the interrelationship between language and myth.

If the early conception of an undying land owes something to
Peter Pan
, as the child's dream-world of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play' seems to have done, Tolkien's Valinor was less haphazard than Neverland, a version of Faërie that Barrie had filched audaciously from every popular children's bedtime genre, with pirates and mermaids, Red Indians, crocodiles, and pixies. Yet Valinor was broader still in its embrace. Here the Elves lived side by side with the gods, and here mortal souls went after death to be judged and apportioned torment, twilit wandering, or Elysian joy.

The Qenya lexicon translates
Valinor
as ‘Asgard', the ‘home of the gods' where the Norsemen feasted after they had been slain in battle. Tolkien was undoubtedly developing the conceit that the Germanic Vikings modelled their mythical Asgard on the ‘true' myth of Valinor. In place of the Norse Æsir, or gods, are the
Valar.

In the same spirit,
‘The Shores of Faëry'
purports to show a glimpse of the truth behind a Germanic tradition as fragmentary and enigmatic as Éarendel's. The mariner's ship in ‘The Shores of Faëry' is called
Vingelot
(or
Wingelot, Wingilot
), which the lexicon explains is the Qenya for ‘foamflower'. But Tolkien chose the name ‘to resemble and “explain” the name of Wade's boat Guingelot', as he later wrote. Wade, like Éarendel, crops up all over Germanic legend, as a hero associated with the sea, as the son of a king and a merwoman, and as the father of the hero Wayland or Völund. The name of his vessel would have been
lost to history but for an annotation that a sixteenth-century antiquarian had made in his edition of Chaucer: ‘Concerning Wade and his boat
Guingelot
, as also his strange exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I passe it over.' Tolkien, having read the tantalizing note, now aimed to recreate the ‘long and fabulous' story. The great German linguist and folklorist Jakob Grimm (mentioning Wade in almost the same breath as Éarendel) had argued that Guingelot ought to be ascribed instead to Völund, who
‘timbered a boat out of the trunk of a tree, and sailed over seas'
, and who ‘forged for himself a winged garment, and took his flight through the air'. Out of this tangle of names and associations, Tolkien had begun to construct a story of singular clarity.

On Sunday 11 July Christopher Wiseman wrote to Tolkien announcing that he was going to sea. In June he had seen a Royal Navy recruiting advertisement saying that mathematicians were wanted as instructors; now he would soon be off to Greenwich to learn basic navigation
‘and the meaning of those mysterious words
port
, and
starboard'
. Wiseman proclaimed himself thoroughly jealous of Tolkien's First – he himself had only achieved the grade of
senior optime
, the equivalent of a second-class: ‘I am now the only one to have disgraced the TCBS,' he said. ‘I have written begging for mercy…'

Behind the glib tone, Wiseman was seriously missing his friends. He wished they could get together for a whole fortnight for once. It was manifestly impossible. Smith had written to him repeatedly about an unwelcome sense of growing up. ‘I don't know whether it is only the additional weight of his moustache, but I presume there must be something in it,' Wiseman commented. He too felt that they were all being pitched into maturity, Gilson and Tolkien even faster than Smith and himself. ‘It seems to proceed by a realization of one's minuteness and impotence,' he mused disconsolately. ‘One begins to fail for the first time, and to see the driving power necessary to force one's stamp on the world.'

When Wiseman's letter came, Tolkien was freshly and painfully alive to this process of diminution. On Friday 9 July the War Office had written to tell him he was a second lieutenant with effect from the following Thursday. Kitchener's latest recruit also received a printed calligraphic letter addressed ‘To our trusty and well-beloved J.R.R. Tolkien[,] Greeting,' and signed by King George, confirming the appointment and outlining his duties of command and service. But Tolkien's plans had gone awry. ‘
You have been posted
to the 13th Service Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers,' the War Office letter announced.

When Smith heard, four days later, he wrote from Yorkshire, ‘
I am simply bowled over
by your horrible news.' He blamed himself for not slowing Tolkien down in his headlong rush to enlist. Somewhat unconvincingly, he said the appointment might be a mistake, or short-term; but as things turned out he was right to guess that Tolkien would be in less danger in the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers than in the 19th.

Tolkien was not going to rendezvous with the 13th straight away. First he had to take an officers' course in Bedford. He received the regulation £50 allowance for uniform and other kit. Smith had outlined his needs in his discourse on ‘matters Martian': a canvas bed, pillow, sleeping-bag and blankets; a bath-and wash-stand, a steel shaving mirror and a soap-box; tent-pole hooks and perhaps a ground-sheet. All this would have to fit in a large canvas kit-bag. In addition he should equip himself with two or three pairs of boots and a pair of shoes; a decent watch; a Sam Browne belt, mackintosh, light haversack and waterbottle; and, most expensive of all, binoculars and prismatic compasses.
‘All else seems to me unnecessary,'
Smith had said. ‘My table and chairs I intend to be soap-boxes bought on the spot, also I mean to buy an honest tin bucket.' Creature comforts, it was clear, were going to be few and far between.

Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien reported to a Colonel Tobin in Bedford's leafy De Parys Avenue on Monday 19 July 1915. The short course was his first taste of 24-hour military life since that windblown camp with King Edward's Horse in 1912. He was in comfortable quarters, sharing a house with six other officers, attending military lectures, and learning how to drill a platoon.

Despite the shock of his appointment, Tolkien held on to the hope of joining the ‘Oxford literary lights'. In fact, as Smith noted, he was ‘
philosophick
' about his posting to the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers. It turned out that Colonel Stainforth would be happy to take him on in the Salford Pals. Tolkien must take up his appointed position before he could apply formally for a transfer, wrote Smith, urging
‘tact, tact, tact'.
All depended on the 13th Battalion commander and whether he had enough officers. ‘If one keeps one's cool one is always alright,' Smith said. ‘After all what does this stupid army matter to a member of the TCBS who has got a first at Oxford?'

The very first weekend of the Bedford course, Tolkien took leave and went back to Barnt Green. Here, on Saturday 24 July, he wrote the decidedly unhappy ‘Happy Mariners', in which a figure imprisoned in a tower of pearl listens achingly to the voices of men who sail by into the mystical West. The poem reads like an opening-up of Keats's evocative lines in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale' about ‘magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn'. But the faëry lands lie quite beyond reach, and the magic merely tantalizes. Indeed,
the poem follows an arc remarkably similar to that of ‘Goblin Feet', with the sea taking the place of the magic road and the mariners passing by like the fairy troop whom the observer is unable to follow. Now, though, Tolkien eschewed all Victorian dainties and wrote about the lure of enchantment using imagery that is both original and haunting.

I know a window in a western tower

That opens on celestial seas,

And wind that has been blowing through the stars

Comes to nestle in its tossing draperies.

It is a white tower builded in the Twilit Isles

Where Evening sits for ever in the shade;

It glimmers like a spike of lonely pearl

That mirrors beams forlorn and lights that fade;

And sea goes washing round the dark rock where it stands,

And fairy boats go by to gloaming lands

All piled and twinkling in the gloom

With hoarded sparks of orient fire

That divers won in waters of the unknown sun:

And, maybe, ‘tis a throbbing silver lyre

Or voices of grey sailors echo up,

Afloat among the shadows of the world

In oarless shallop and with canvas furled,

For often seems there ring of feet, or song,

Or twilit twinkle of a trembling gong.—

O! happy mariners upon a journey long

To those great portals on the Western shores

Where, far away, constellate fountains leap,

And dashed against Night's dragon-headed doors

In foam of stars fall sparkling in the deep.

While I, alone, look out behind the moon

From in my white and windy tower,

Ye bide no moment and await no hour,

But chanting snatches of a secret tune

Go through the shadows and the dangerous seas

Past sunless lands to fairy leas,

Where stars upon the jacinth wall of space

Do tangle, burst, and interlace.

Ye follow Eärendel through the West –

The Shining Mariner – to islands blest,

While only from beyond that sombre rim

A wind returns to stir these crystal panes,

And murmur magically of golden rains

That fall for ever in those spaces dim.

These last lines, in which a hint of paradise is borne on the air through intervening rains, read almost like a premonition of Elvenhome as it is seen at the end of
The Lord of the Rings:

And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

It is remarkable to see such a moment of vision, or partial vision, established decades before Tolkien's epic romance was written.

On the other hand, in the context of what he had put in writing by July 1915,
‘The Happy Mariners'
contains many apparent enigmas. Some of these are only explicable with the help of the first fully-fledged prose form of Tolkien's mythology, ‘The Book of Lost Tales'. Its introductory narrative, written in the winter of 1916-17, mentions ‘the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl that stands far out to west in the Twilit Isles', who was awoken when one of Eärendel's companions in the voyage to Kôr sounded a great gong. Further details resurface in a passage written during the two years after the Great War. Then, the world would be visualized as a flat disc surrounded by the deep blue ‘Wall of Things'. The Moon and Sun would pass this wall in their diurnal courses through the basalt Door of Night, carved
with great dragon-shapes. The ‘sparks of orient fire' won by divers ‘in waters of the unknown sun' would be explained as the ancient sunlight scattered during attempts to pilot the new-born Sun beneath the roots of the world at night. As Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘The Happy Mariners' was apparently the song of the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl mentioned in the same passage.

But the story of the Sleeper was never developed, and at this early stage it is not at all clear that Tolkien himself knew exactly what place his images might take within his mythology, any more than he had known exactly who Eärendel was when he first wrote about him. It is possible that in ‘The Happy Mariners' these details are seen at the time of their first emergence into his consciousness and that he then set about ‘discovering' their significance.

Eärendel's poetic function here is quite different to what it was in ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star', written ten months earlier. Then, Tolkien had celebrated the star-mariner's daring twilight flight, and the poem had followed him across the night sky. But the speaker in ‘The Happy Mariners' is apparently confined in this tower and cannot sail in Eärendel's wake; the twilight is a paralysing veil. Perhaps these differences of viewpoint reflect the change in Tolkien's own situation and mood between defying the rush to arms in 1914 and committing himself now, in 1915, as a soldier. Read this way, the statement that the enviable mariners ‘bide no moment and await no hour' looks less opaque, implying that Tolkien, as he began training for war, voiced some of his own anxiety about the future through the figure in the tower of pearl.

The war had now been raging for a year, claiming up to 131,000 British and five million European lives; and there was stalemate on the Western Front, where Germany had just added the flame-thrower to the arsenal of new technologies. Parallels between Tolkien's life and his art are debatable, but the war certainly had a practical impact on him as a writer. Newly bound to military duty, and with the prospect of battle growing suddenly more real, he took action to bring his poetry to light.

He and Smith were set to appear in an annual anthology of
Oxford poetry being co-edited by T. W. Earp, whom Tolkien had known at Exeter College. Each had submitted several poems; ‘Goblin Feet' had been chosen for inclusion along with two of Smith's. Tolkien had also sent copies of his work to his old schoolmaster, R. W. Reynolds. ‘Dickie' Reynolds had been in the background throughout the public development of the TCBS at school, as chairman of the literary and debating societies as well as the library committee. A mild man of whimsical humour but broad experience, before becoming a teacher he had tried for the Bar and been secretary of the Fabian Society. But in the 1890s he had been part of W. E. Henley's team of literary critics on the prestigious
National Observer
, which had published work by writers of stature including W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, and J. M. Barrie. Tolkien did not entirely trust Dickie Reynolds' opinions, but he respected the fact that the teacher had once been a literary critic on a London journal, and during the Bedford course Tolkien turned to him for advice on getting a whole collection published. Normally a poet could expect to make his reputation by publishing a poem here and there in magazines and newspapers, but the war had changed all that, Reynolds said. Tolkien should indeed try to get his volume published.
^*

Tolkien eagerly embraced further opportunities for weekend leave and visits to Edith, riding the fifty miles from Bedford to Warwick on a motorcycle he had bought with a fellow officer. When the course ended in August, he travelled to Staffordshire and joined his 2,000-strong battalion encamped with the four other units of the 3rd Reserve Brigade on Whittington Heath, just outside Lichfield. Apart from the OTC trips of his youth,
this was his first experience of a full-scale military camp under canvas. Formed at Hull the previous December, the 13th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was a ‘draft-finding unit', created to drum up fresh soldiers to replace those lost in the front line by other battalions; as such, it would not be the unit in which Tolkien fought. He was one of fifty or so officers with the battalion when he arrived, but he spent most of his time with the handful in the platoon to which he was assigned. Unlike G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson, who were lucky to be with commanding officers they genuinely liked, Tolkien did not find the higher-ranking officers congenial.
‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed,'
he wrote to Edith.

The platoon comprised some sixty men of all ranks. It was the subaltern's duty to pass on what he had learned to the ‘other ranks' and prepare them for battle. At this stage the training was basic, and physical. ‘
All the hot days
of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration,' Tolkien wrote with chagrin when winter came and these exertions were replaced by chilly open-air lectures. Such was military life in the early twentieth century, and it sharpened Tolkien's dislike of bureaucracy.
‘What makes it so exasperating,'
he said later of life in camp, ‘is the fact that all its worst features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as “planners” refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by “organization”.' Elsewhere he was comically precise, declaring that ‘war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one's precious days are ruled by (3
x
)
²
when
x
= normal human crassitude'. The diligent, meticulous, and imaginative thinker felt like a ‘toad under the harrow' and would vent his feelings in letters, particularly to Father Vincent Reade, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. Yet in retrospect, as Tolkien told his son Christopher in 1944, this was the time when he made the acquaintance of ‘men and things'. Although Kitchener's army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together. Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy”, especially the
plain soldier from the agricultural counties'. He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time he had been sitting in a tower not of pearl, but of ivory.

Army life could not challenge Tolkien intellectually. His mind would inevitably roam beyond the job at hand – if there was one: ‘
It isn't the tough stuff
one minds so much,' he commented, but ‘the waste of time and militarism of the army'. Rob Gilson found time amid his duties to work on embroidery designs for furnishings at Marston Green, his family home near Birmingham; G. B. Smith worked on his poetry, especially his long ‘Burial of Sophocles'. Tolkien read
Icelandic
and continued to focus on his creative ambitions. He later recalled that most of the ‘early work' on the legendarium had been carried out in the training camps (and in hospitals, later in the war) ‘when time allowed'.

Life in camp appears to have helped Tolkien extend the bounds of his imagined world in a quite direct way. Hitherto, Tolkien's mythological poetry had gazed across the western ocean to Valinor. Now he began to name and describe the mortal lands on this side of the Great Sea, starting with a poem that described an encampment of men ‘In the vales of Aryador / By the wooded inland shore'. ‘
A Song of Aryador
', written at Lichfield on 12 September, inhabits the twilight hours that Tolkien already favoured as a time when the enchanted world is most keenly perceived. But now the gulf between fairies and humankind seems vaster than ever. No goblin troop pads happily by, and no piper-fay is glimpsed making ecstatic music. Only, after the sun has gone down, ‘the upland slowly fills / With the shadow-folk that murmur in the fern'.

Despite the mountains, the scene perhaps owes something to Tolkien's situation, and even (with poetic exaggerations) to the topography of Whittington Heath, in the Tame valley, with a wood and a lake, and the distant heights of Cannock Chase to the west and the Pennines to the north. This was once the heartland of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that encompassed both Birmingham and Oxford, and with which Tolkien felt a special affinity. Lichfield was the seat of its bishopric and Tamworth, a few miles away, the seat of the Mercian kings.
With its Anglo-Saxon subtitle,
Án léop Éargedores
, ‘A Song of Aryador' might describe the founding fathers of ancient Mercia.

Tolkien's imagination flew way back before the Mercians, however, and further afield. He looked to the dim era of their ancestors in the wilds of Europe, for this was where his imaginary history dovetailed with the legendary time of the Germanic peoples: the vanishing point where names of half-forgotten significance such as
Éarendel
glimmered like distant beacons.