Tolkien and the Great War (15 page)

You are fascinated by little, delicate, beautiful creatures; and when I am with you, I am too. So I do sympathize with you. But I feel more thrilled by enormous, slow moving, omnipotent things, and if I had greater artistic gifts I would make you feel the thrill too. And having been led by the hand of God into the borderland of the fringe of science that man has conquered, I can see that there are such enormous numbers of wonderful and beautiful things that really exist, that in my ordinary frame of mind I feel no need to search after things that man has used before these could fill a certain place in the sum of his desires.

Tolkien was far from pacified. He responded that his own work expressed his love of God's creation: the winds, trees, and flowers. His Elves were a way of expressing it, too, primarily because they were
creatures
, things created. They caught a mystical truth about the natural world that eluded science, he said, insisting that ‘
the Eldar
, the Solosimpë, the Noldoli are better, warmer, fairer to the heart than the mathematics of the tide or the vortices that are the winds.' Wiseman countered:

I say they are not. Neither are good warm or fair. What is good, warm and fair, is your creating one and the scientist creating the other. The completed work is vanity; the process of the working is everlasting. Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them. When you have finished creating them they will be as dead to you as the atoms that make our living food, and they will only live when you or I go through your process of creation once more. How I hate you when you begin to talk of the ‘conquests of science'! Then you become just like the inartistic boor in the street. The ‘conquests' vanish when they are made; they are only vital in the making. Just as the fugue is nothing on the page; it is only vital as it works its way out.

But he drew a line under the altercation, writing: ‘I am very sorry indeed if I have hurt you. The precise form of abnormality which your work took seemed to me to be a fault, which, as far as I could see, you were gradually and consciously eliminating. And now I have said far too much. Indeed we all have.'

Christopher Wiseman was not alone in doubting the value of Faërie. Whatever the TCBSian creed was, it was not founded on a fascination with the supernatural. Rob Gilson confided to Estelle King that he was
‘lacking in the strings that ought to vibrate to faint fantastic fairy music'
. He thought such music strayed from the real theme on which the best art elaborated: ‘I like to say and to hear it said and to feel boldly that the glory of beauty and order and joyful contentment in the universe is the presence of God…I love best the men who are so certain of it that they can stand up and proclaim it to the world. That is why I love Browning so dearly…Heaven knows I have not that great certainty myself.'

G. B. Smith was closely attentive to Tolkien's vision, and in some measure shared it (despite his avowed antipathy to romanticism), just as he shared a delight in Arthur and the Welsh cycle of legends, the
Mabinogion.
Smith saw no demarcation between holiness and Faërie. One of his own poems,
‘
Legend
', has a monk returning from a morning's stroll during which he listened, transfixed, as a bird sang ‘diviner music / Than the greatest harpers made',

Sang of blessed shores and golden Where the old, dim heroes be,

Distant isles of sunset glory, Set beyond the western sea.

Sang of Christ and Mary Mother Hearkening unto angels seven

Playing on their golden harp-strings In the far courts of high Heaven.

Back at the monastery, none of the other monks recognizes him. After he has retreated to a cell they discover that he has crumbled to dust: he had set off on his stroll a hundred years previously and strayed into a timeless Otherworld. But the bird's song is Tolkien's, too: the shores of Faërie may not be Heaven, but they are illuminated by it.

Wiseman was mistaken to think that Tolkien was at heart an anti-rationalist. There was a strain of scientific curiosity and discipline in his work, in the development of Qenya on rigorous phonological principles. Although this took place behind the scenes in the pages of a lexicon, it was the reason why Tolkien wanted to make myths: to give life to his language. Wiseman was wrong, too, in supposing that Tolkien's gaze was turned away from humankind. In pursuing the link between language and mythology, Tolkien was acting upon his revelation, kindled by the
Kalevala
and perhaps by war, that human language and human beliefs were intimately bound up together.

The mythology surrounding Tolkien's poems had not yet coalesced; no wonder they seemed strange and disconnected from one another, like inconclusive forays into an unfathomably vast subterranean complex. None of the many TCBS letters discussing his work mentions an ‘epic' or ‘mythology' until 1917.
Yet Wiseman knew enough from Tolkien by now not to baulk at invented clan-denominations of Faërie such as ‘the Eldar, the Solosimpë, the Noldoli'. Taken together, the poems hinted at the bigger picture, if you squinted; but in conversation Tolkien could reveal still more of the mythology he had sketched out in his lexicon.

Every language draws its vital force from the culture it expresses, and English received an enormous jolt of electricity from the new technologies and experiences of the Great War. Old words received new meanings; new words were coined; foreign phrases were bastardized.
Air raids
were deterred by captive balloons or
blimps
, a portmanteau-word (Tolkien opined) formed from
blister
and
lump
in which ‘the vowel
i
not
u
was chosen because of its diminutive significance – typical of war humour'. Servicemen, who had a nickname for everyone and everything, utilized this changed language in its most concentrated form. Smith casually used
Bosch
(French
Boche
) for ‘German'; but Gilson relished his role as upholder of inflexible English, proclaiming from his
cushy
spot in the
front line:
‘I fully intended to eschew trench slang when I came out here – it is particularly obnoxious – but I never hoped to persuade a whole mess to do the same. If anyone here refers to “Huns” or “Bosches” or “strafing”…he is severely sat upon.' Britain was
Blighty
(from Hindi), and a
blighty
was a wound serious enough to bring you home. The flares used for observation and signals, Very lights, were inevitably dubbed
Fairy lights.
Tolkien was surrounded by wordsmiths. But soldiers' slang, which spanned death, drink, food, women, weapons, the battlefield, and the warring nations, grew out of irony and contempt for what was intolerable; it was as crude and unlovely as camp life itself.

Qenya thrived in the same soil, but not in the same mood. Nothing could be further removed from the unbeautiful inflexible practicalities Tolkien was being taught than the invention of a language for the joy of its sounds. It was a solitary and shy pleasure, but in fact he discovered he was not the only member
of Kitchener's army engaged in the ‘secret vice'. One day, sitting through a military lecture ‘
in a dirty wet marquee
filled with trestle tables smelling of stale mutton fat, crowded with (mostly) depressed and wet creatures' (as he recalled in a talk on inventing languages), he was exploring the further reaches of boredom when a man nearby muttered, as if in reverie, ‘Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!' Tolkien tried to prise from the soldier more about this private grammar, but he proved ‘as close as an oyster'.

Tolkien, too, usually kept his hobby to himself, or else made light of it; so he would write to Edith: ‘I have been reading up old military lecture-notes again:- and getting bored with them after an hour and a half. I have done some touches to my nonsense fairy language…' But Qenya was a serious matter to him, and the ‘touches' he made to it in March meant he could write poetry in it: the crowning achievement. He had attempted to do so back in November, but he had produced no more than a quatrain paraphrasing the lines in ‘Kortirion among the Trees' in which falling leaves are likened to bird-wings. Now he expanded it to a full twenty lines.

Having brought Qenya to this stage of sophistication, and having submitted his poetry to the publishers, Tolkien had brought his mythological project to a watershed. Undoubtedly he pondered his next move, but he knew embarkation could not be far off and personal matters required his attention before he left England. This may therefore be an appropriate point to survey, albeit tentatively, the
state of the mythology
at the time that Tolkien went to war.

Enu
, whom men refer to as
Ilūvatar
, the Heavenly Father, created the world and dwells outside it. But within the world dwell the ‘pagan gods' or
ainur
, who, with their attendants, here are called the
Valar
or ‘happy folk' (in the original sense of ‘blessed with good fortune'). Few of them are named: notably
Makar
the god of battle (also known as
Ramandor
, the shouter); and the
SÅ«limi
of the winds;
Ui
, who is queen of the
Oaritsi
, the mermaids; and
Niëliqi
, a little girl whose laughter brings forth daffodils and whose tears are snowdrops. The home of
the Valar is
Valinor
or ‘Asgard', which lies at the feet of lofty, snow-capped
Taniqetil
at the western rim of the flat earth.

Beside Valinor is the rocky beach of
Eldamar
, once home of the Elvish
Eldar
or
Solosimpë
, the beach-fays or shoreland-pipers. The royal house of the fairies, the
Inweli
, was headed by their ancient king,
Inwë
, and their capital was the white town of
Kôr
on the rocks of Eldamar. Now it is deserted: Inwë led the fairies dancing out into the world to teach song and holiness to mortal men. But the mission failed and the Elves who remained in
Aryador
(Europe?) are reduced to a furtive ‘shadow-people'.

The
Noldoli
or Gnomes, wisest of the faëry tribes, were led from their land of
Noldomar
to the Lonely Isle of
Tol Eressëa
(England) by the god
Lirillo.
The other fairies retreated from the hostile world to the island, which is now called
Ingilnōrë
after Inwë's son
Ingil
(or
Ingilmo
). In
Alalminórë
(Warwickshire), the land of elms at the heart of the island, they built a new capital,
Kortirion
(Warwick). Here the goddess
Erinti
lives in a circle of elms, and she has a tower which the fairies guard. She came from Valinor with Lirillo and his brother
Amillo
to dwell on the isle among the Elvish tribes in exile. Now the fairy pipers haunt the beaches and weedy sea-caves of the island; but one,
Timpinen
or
Tinfang Warble
, pipes in the woods.

The name
Inwinórë
, Faërie, was used by Tolkien for both Eldamar and Tol Eressëa. The Elves are immortal and they drink a liquid called
limpë
(whereas the Valar drink
miruvōrë
). They are generally diminutive, some especially so: a mushroom is known as a ‘fairy canopy',
Nardi
is a flower fairy, and likewise
Tetillë
, who lives in a poppy. Are such beings as these, or the sea-nymphs, akin to the ‘fairies' who built Kôr? It is impossible to judge from the evidence of Qenya at this stage.
Qenya
is only one of several elvish languages; the lexicon also lists dozens of words in another,
Gnomish.

Sky-myths figure prominently side-by-side with the saga of the Elvish exile to the Lonely Isle/England. Valinor is (or was?) lit by
the Two Trees
that bore the fruit of Sun and Moon. The Sun herself,
Ur
, issues from her white gates to sail in the sky, but this is the hunting ground of
Silmo
, the Moon, from whom
the Sun once fled by diving into the sea and wandering through the caverns of the mermaids. Also hunted by the Moon is
Eärendel
, steersman of the morning or evening star. He was once a great mariner who sailed the oceans of the world in his ship
Wingelot
, or Foamflower. On his final voyage he passed the Twilit Isles, with their tower of pearl, to reach Kôr, whence he sailed off the edge of the world into the skies; his earthly wife
Voronwë
is now
Morwen
(Jupiter), ‘daughter of the dark'. Other stars in
Ilu
, the slender airs beyond the earth, include the blue bee
Nierninwa
(Sirius), and here too are constellations such as
Telimektar
(Orion), the Swordsman of Heaven. The Moon is also thought of as the crystalline palace of the Moon King
Uolë·mi·Kōmë
, who once traded his riches for a bowl of cold Norwich pudding after falling to earth.

Besides wonders, there are monsters in these pages too:
Tevildo
the hateful, prince of cats, and
Ungwë·Tuita
, the Spider of Night, whose webs in dark
Ruamōrë
Earendel once narrowly escaped.
Fentor
, lord of dragons, was slain by
Ingilmo
or by the hero
Turambar
, who had a mighty sword called
Sangahyando
, or ‘cleaver of throngs' (and who is compared to Sigurðr of Norse myth). But there are other perilous creatures:
Angaino
(‘tormentor') is the name of a giant, while
ork
means ‘monster, ogre, demon'.
Raukë
also means ‘demon' and
fandor
‘monster'.

The fairies know of Christian tradition with its saints, martyrs, monks, and nuns; they have words for ‘grace' and ‘blessed', and mystic names for the Trinity. The spirits of mortal men wander outside Valinor in the region of
Habbanan
, which in the abstract is perhaps
manimuinë
, Purgatory. But there are various names for hell (
Mandos, Eremandos
, and
Angamandos
) and also
Utumna
, the lower regions of darkness. The souls of the blessed dwell in
iluindo
beyond the stars.