Tolkien and the Great War (12 page)

Aryador
is not quite one of those historically attested names that tantalized Tolkien; but it almost is. The Qenya lexicon says that it is the ‘name of a mountainous district, the abode of the Shadow Folk', which adds nothing to the enigmatic phrases of the Whittington Heath poem. One of the first bits of Elvish most readers of
The Lord of the Rings
learn is the element -
dor
, ‘land', seen in the names
Gondor
and
Mordor.
Strip that away from
Aryador
and we are left with
Arya-.
The Qenya lexicon provides a complex etymology deriving this element from a Primitive Eldarin root; but at the same time it is impossible to miss the resemblance to a real-world name:
Aryan
. Long before it was misapplied by Hitler as an expression of Nordic racial superiority,
Aryan
was the nineteenth-century philological term for proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of many European and Asian tongues. Linguistic consensus is that the real-world word
Aryan
applies properly only to the Indo-Iranians; but some have found traces of the word in the names of other Indo-European peoples, such as
Eriu
, ‘Ireland'. The word is supposed to derive (via Sanskrit) from the prehistoric name of a nation – a name of unknown meaning that puts it in the same tantalizing category as
Éarendel.
A year earlier, Tolkien had ‘rediscovered' the star-mariner behind that name, and since then he had invented a language in which the name had a meaning. Now, likewise, he implied that a place-name in Elvish was the ultimate source for Sanskrit
Aryan
. In the process, he ‘rediscovered' the inhabitants of
Aryador
, who are presumably to be seen as the speakers of the Indo-European ancestral language.

Many years later, when
The Lord of the Rings
had made him famous, Tolkien expressed his puzzlement and irritation at the
many ‘guesses at the “sources” of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings' proffered by enthusiastic readers. ‘These seem to me no more than private amusements,' he said, dismissing them as ‘valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction'. The true sources of his names, he wished to emphasize, were his own invented languages, the on-going products of decades of painstaking craft. His statements were undoubtedly true in 1967, and reflected his creative practice over the previous two, three, or four decades. They also reflect the fact that chance resemblances will inevitably occur between a large invented vocabulary and words in real languages. But evidence suggests that in 1915, at least, Tolkien did create a small but significant proportion of his Qenya words specifically to show kinship with ancient recorded or reconstructed words. The names of Eärendel and his boat Wingelot have already been cited; Tolkien also stated that he originally derived the name of the ‘nectar' of the gods,
miruvōrë
, from Gothic
^*
midu
, ‘mead' (the asterisk indicates that this is an unrecorded form deduced by philologists), and
wopeis
, ‘sweet'. Other possible examples may be adduced from the Qenya lexicon. The stem
ulband-
, ‘monster, giant', must literally mean ‘unlovely one', and it descends according to the regular sound-shift laws from a Primitive Eldarin negative
UL
- /and a derivative of
VANA
-, the root for words for ‘beauty'. But in form, Qenya
ulband-
closely resembles Gothic
ulbandus
, ‘camel'. Philologists do not know where
ulbandus
came from, except that English
elephant
came from the same lost word. In Tolkien's fictional linguistic world, the common ancestors of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons had borrowed the word from Qenya. The skein of designations – ugly creature, giant, monster, camel, elephant – implies a whole history of travellers' tales and mistrans-mission. Tolkien would later write about this in a comic poem, ‘
Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt
':

The Indic oliphaunt's a burly lump, A moving mountain, a majestic mammal (But those that fancy that he wears a hump Confuse him incorrectly with the camel).

Elsewhere in the lexicon, to take a more mundane example, the stem owo, whence Qenya
oa
, ‘wool', suggests the reconstructed Indo-European word
^*
owis
, whence Latin
ovis
, ‘sheep', and English
ewe.

These do not seem to be coincidences; Tolkien was certainly not short of imagination, and produced plenty of Qenya words with no near real-world homonyms. He had a reason to scatter such words throughout his Elvish language. As with
Arya-
, the real-world words he dropped in were frequently ones whose original meaning is now lost. Jakob Grimm had been much exercised by
the Irminsûl
, a mysterious Germanic totem. In his capacity as a professional philologist, Tolkien later surmised that the old Germanic element
irmin
was a mythological term imported by the migrant Anglo-Saxons and applied to the ‘works of the giants' they found in Britain, hence the Roman road name Ermine Street. But the Qenya lexicon entries for
irmin
, ‘the inhabited world', and
sūlë
, ‘pillar, column', suggest that Tolkien was working towards a fictional explanation for
Irminsûl.
Philologists have derived the Greek and Sanskrit words for ‘axe',
pelekus
and
parasu
, from a lost non-Indo-European source; but Tolkien ‘rediscovered' that source in the Qenya word
pelekko.
Tolkien also seeded his invented language with words the Indo-Europeans did not borrow, such as
ond
, ‘stone', which, he had read as a child, was virtually the only word reconstructed from the lost language of pre-Celtic Britain.

Tolkien meant Qenya to be a language that the illiterate peoples of pre-Christian Europe had heard, and had borrowed from, when they were singing their unrecorded epics. Elves and gods had walked in those epics, and so had dwarves, dragons, and goblins; but only fragments of their stories were written down when literacy and Christianity arrived. Tolkien, with his lexicon of a fictional, forgotten civilization in hand, was now disinterring the fragments and restoring them to life.

The most striking feature of ‘A Song of Aryador' is that these tribespeople seem profoundly ill at ease in this
Aryador
, the land
from which implicitly they were to derive their name. They are not native at all, but pioneers; intruders at odds with their natural surroundings; benighted wanderers despite their attempts to make a home of the place. In fact, as the Qenya lexicon explains, this is not really their home at all, but ‘the abode of the Shadow Folk'. The mortals by the lake shore in the poem seem oblivious to this faint faëry presence, but ‘A Song of Aryador' looks to an epoch older still, when humans had not arrived.

Men are kindling tiny gleams

Far below by mountain-streams

Where they dwell among the beechwoods near the shore,

But the great woods on the height

Watch the waning western light

And whisper to the wind of things of yore,

When the valley was unknown,

And the waters roared alone,

And the shadow-folk danced downward all the night,

When the Sun had fared abroad

Through great forests unexplored

And the woods were full of wandering beams of light.

Then were voices on the fells

And a sound of ghostly bells

And a march of shadow-people o'er the height.

In the mountains by the shore

In forgotten Aryador

There was dancing and was ringing;

There were shadow-people singing

Ancient songs of olden gods in Aryador.

Clearly, these shadow-people are Elves, perhaps hymning the Valar, the ‘olden gods' of Valinor over the western ocean, but they seem to have since been driven into hiding by the intrusion
of Men.
^*
Similarly, in Irish myth, the faëry Tuatha Dé Danann retreated underground when the Celts invaded. Tolkien's ‘shadow-people' embody the spirit of the natural world. The human interlopers in Aryador are aliens here, blind to its wonders or just plain scared of them.

‘
I am really angry with myself
for the way I have treated all along your invitation to criticize,' Rob Gilson wrote out of the blue in September, breaking months of silence. ‘Because I do feel that it is one of the best things the TCBS can possibly do at present. Some day I want to submit a book of designs in like manner.' Gilson had received Tolkien's first batch of poems from G. B. Smith in the spring but had passed them on to Christopher Wiseman a fortnight later without comment. Probably it was neither laziness nor reticence that stopped him, but distraction. At the time, Gilson had been on the brink of one of the defining acts of his short life. In recent years he had spent long holidays with the family of a retired American consul, Wilson King, who was a Birmingham friend of the Headmaster's. The Kings had taken him into their hearts as a dear friend, but Gilson had long ago developed a secret passion for Estelle, Wilson King's English daughter. In April 1915 he had finally revealed his feelings and asked her to marry him. However, she had recoiled in surprise and confusion and her father warned Gilson that he would not countenance her betrothal to a lowly subaltern with no immediate prospects and a war to fight.

Tolkien, it seems certain, knew none of this: the TCBS did not share such confidences. He had only told the others about Edith Bratt when they were at last betrothed over four years after they had fallen in love. He had told Wiseman once that he could not bear ‘
a compartmented life
' in which the TCBS and Edith were unaware of each other. He made efforts to introduce his friends to his fiancée, and they made a fuss of her.
(Wiseman once even wrote to Tolkien that the TCBS ‘
of course includes your missis
'.) But in reality romantic love posed a threat to the tight-knit circle. Since his failed declaration to Estelle, Rob Gilson had cut off communication with her; but his letters to the TCBS had apparently ceased too, and Tolkien had appealed in vain for a response to his letters when he wrote to Gilson with news of his commission back in July 1915.

Now, after a long hard summer debating whether to renew his suit to Estelle, Gilson was laid up in hospital in industrial Sunderland, on the north-east coast, recovering from the ‘flu and profoundly miserable. He had come with his battalion for a musketry course but now the Cambridgeshires had left for the south of England. In Birmingham his stepmother had heard from Dickie Reynolds about
Oxford Poetry 1915.
Gilson was eager for news of his old friends and wrote,
‘I confess that I have often felt that the TCBS seemed very remote. That way lies despair.'
He asked Tolkien to send more of his verse, adding, ‘I have oceans of time on my hands.'

Tolkien now sent him a second sheaf of his poems and Gilson, feeling revivified by the TCBSian spirit, promised to criticize them. Abruptly, he had learned he was about to be released from hospital, and was going on leave to Marston Green. He determined to visit Tolkien at Lichfield and sent telegrams summoning Smith and Wiseman as well.
‘At times like this when I am alive to it, it is so obvious that the TCBS is one of the deepest things in my life,'
he told Tolkien, ‘and I can hardly understand how I can be content to let slip so many opportunities.' Wiseman came up from Greenwich, where he had begun his navigation course, and Smith travelled from Salisbury Plain, where the Salford Pals were now encamped. Arriving first, Smith and Gilson – now cutting a much thinner figure than in school and college days – visited the cathedral and the birthplace of Dr Johnson. Tolkien joined them, and finally so did Wiseman, and the four stayed at the George Hotel for an evening of
‘that delightful and valued conversation which ever illumines a council of the TCBS'
, as Smith put it. The four were assembled for the last time. It was Saturday 25 September 1915. In northern France, in a foretaste of
the battle that lay in store for three of the TCBS, the British army at Loos (including the first Kitchener volunteers) launched an assault so disastrous that, as the attackers turned to retreat, the German machine gunners who had mowed down eight thousand men ceased firing, finally overcome with pity.

On Sunday afternoon the friends repaired to Marston Green and then went their separate ways. By a quirk of military organization, when Gilson rejoined his battalion on Salisbury Plain a week later, disorientated and unhappy, he found his unit on the point of moving to the village of Sutton Veny, a mere five miles up the Wylye Valley from Codford St Mary, where Smith was. A rainy weekend together shopping and eating cheered him immensely. They went to Salisbury and then to the pretty village of Westbury, which, to their great pleasure, was ‘almost without soldiers'. Gilson wrote home:

The rain stopped just as we got there and the evening was beautiful. We walked up on to the top of the bastions of the Plain, and sat down with a wonderful view all around us – greys and dull blues and greens, with wet trees down in the valley all blurred and misty. I drew a little picture of a copse – a thin line of blue trees with a black group of buildings behind it, and the thin straight trunks making a lovely pattern against the sky in the darkening light. G. B. Smith wrote a poem about it some time ago, the one thing I believe of his which is being printed in
Oxford Poetry 1915
, so I gave him the drawing. He read Herrick to me while I drew, and we got miles away from the war.

Smith's poem about the copse was
‘Songs on the Downs'
, a reflection on the Roman road crossing the Plain upon which ‘The years have fallen like dead leaves, / Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed…' Smith's mood was febrile and fretful, and, reflecting on his imminent coming of age, he wrote darkly to Tolkien: ‘The steps I have taken in the direction of growing up have been simply steps farther away from my blessed days at school, and towards the absolutely unknown, whether it be a business career or a shattered skull.'