Tolkien and the Great War (16 page)

It is curious – especially in contrast to his later, famous writings – that Tolkien's own life is directly mythologized in these early conceptions. He left his discreet signature on his art, and at times the lexicon is a
roman à clef.
The Lonely Isle's only named
locations are those important to him when he began work on it: Warwick, Warwickshire, Exeter (
Estirin
), after which his college was named, and Oxford itself (
Taruktarna
). Possibly we see John Ronald and Edith in Eärendel and Voronwë, but Edith is also certainly represented by Erinti, the goddess who presides aptly over ‘love, music, beauty and purity' and lives in Warwick, while Amillo equates to Hilary Tolkien. John Ronald was perhaps declaring his own literary ambitions as Lirillo, god of song, also called
Noldorin
because he brought the Noldoli back to Tol Eressëa.
^*
Tolkien's writings, he may have been hinting, would signal a renaissance for Faërie.

War also intrudes. Makar the battle god seems to have been one of the first named Valar. As well as describing the natural world, Qenya furnishes a
vocabulary for wartime
. Almost all of this accords with the sense that the mythology takes place in the ancient world (
kasien
, ‘helm';
makil
, ‘sword'); but some of it smells distinctly twentieth-century. One could easily enumerate features of the trenches:
londa-
, ‘to boom, bang';
qolimo
, ‘an invalid';
qonda
, ‘choking smoke, fog';
enya
, ‘device, machine, engine';
pusulpë
, ‘gas-bag, balloon'. Entirely anachronistic is
tompo-tompo
, ‘noise of drums (or guns)': an onomatopoeia, surely, for the deep repercussive boom and recoil of heavy artillery, but not, one would think, a word Tolkien could use in his faëry mythology.

Particularly striking is how Qenya at this stage equates Germans with barbarity.
Kalimban
is ‘“Barbary”, Germany';
kalimbarië
is ‘barbarity',
kalimbo
is ‘a savage, uncivilized man, barbarian. – giant, monster, troll', and
kalimbardi
is glossed ‘the Germans'. There is a strong sense of disillusionment in these definitions, so devoid of the attraction Tolkien had felt towards ‘the “Germanic” ideal' as an undergraduate. He lived in a country wracked with fear, grief, and hatred, and by now people he knew had been killed by Germans.

The concept of the devilish Germans was popular, not least among some military minds. For many, it was increasingly difficult to remain high-minded, especially when in 1916 Germany adopted the slaughter of enemy soldiers as a key strategy in a new ‘war of attrition'. On 21 February a furious assault was unleashed against Verdun, a fortress that held special symbolic significance in the French national consciousness because it barred the road to Paris from the east. It did not matter whether or not Verdun was captured, the Kaiser had been advised: in trying to defend it France would pour in its troops and ‘
bleed to death
'. Thousands upon thousands on either side were now dying in the pitiless siege.

Knowing he could be called to fight overseas any time now, Tolkien could wait no longer to be married to Edith: he found the situation ‘intolerable'. The prospects for both of them were grim. As he summed it up later, ‘I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p.a. (£20-40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern).'
^*
He sold his share in the motorbike he jointly owned with a fellow officer and went to see Father Francis Morgan in Birmingham to make further financial arrangements. When it came to telling him that he was to marry Edith, the subject of his guardian's ban six years previously, his nerve failed. He delayed until two weeks before the event, and Father Francis's conciliatory offer of an Oratory wedding came too late. He was also worried about how his friends would react. But G. B. Smith, writing back to wish them both the best, reassured him: ‘My goodness, John Ronald, nothing could ever cut you off from the TCBS!' Wiseman gently chided him for imagining that the three would disapprove and declared that, ‘on the contrary, the TCBS heartily approves, in the full belief that you are not likely to be “foolish” in these matters'. Gilson
was taken aback when he heard, and wrote home, ‘The imminence of the date is a complete surprise to me, as all his movements nearly always are.' But he was genuinely pleased for his friend: ‘I rejoice many times for your sake that you are thus able to raise yourself out of this mire of existence.'

To Estelle King, Gilson confided his sympathy for Tolkien's lot, explaining that his friend had lost both parents and had ‘
always had something
of a wanderer's life'. Tolkien was contemplating that same fact when he returned to Oxford for his long-delayed degree ceremony on Thursday 16 March 1916. That day he started a long new poem, continuing it when he returned to Warwick: ‘
The Wanderer's Allegiance
'. Correspondence aside, it is the most overtly personal of Tolkien's published writings. The mythology was in abeyance. It is perhaps no coincidence that Tolkien experimented in this more conventional direction in the midst of his argument with Wiseman about the ‘freakishness' of his other poetry.

A prelude depicts an unidentified landscape of orchard, mead, and grassland settled by ‘my father's sires'; which, if Wiseman read it right, is to be taken literally as a description of Tolkien's paternal ancestors in ancient Germania.

There daffodils among the ordered trees

Did nod in spring, and men laughed deep and long

Singing as they laboured happy lays

And lighting even with a drinking-song.

There sleep came easy for the drone of bees

Thronging about cottage gardens heaped with flowers;

In love of sunlit goodliness of days

There richly flowed their lives in settled hours…

But Tolkien's roots in Saxony lie in the remote past, and he is an ‘unsettled wanderer' in Britain, where the scene shifts to Warwick and Oxford.

In Warwick's fourteenth-century keep, the Norman earls lie as if in a blissful reverie, silently rebuked by the passing seasons.

No watchfulness disturbs their splendid dream,

Though laughing radiance dance down the stream;

And be they clad in snow or lashed by windy rains,

Or may March whirl the dust about the winding lanes,

The Elm robe and disrobe her of a million leaves

Like moments clustered in a crowded year,

Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps nor grieves,

Uncomprehending of this evil tide,

Today's great sadness, or Tomorrow's fear:

Faint echoes fade within their drowsy halls

Like ghosts; the daylight creeps across their walls.

‘Tomorrow' here is not just age, as it had been in ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play', but the dreadful prospect of battle that Tolkien and his peers faced. Against this terrible upheaval, the ‘old lords too long in slumber lain' represent a deceptive continuity, an inertia that rolls unheeding through the changing years. They are complacent, unadaptable, and incapable of vigilance. We may catch a hint of the anger shared by many of Tolkien's generation, whose world seemed to have been consigned to disaster by the negligence of their elders.

But if so, Tolkien was conscious that he too had been dreaming. ‘The Wanderer's Allegiance' takes a distinctly different view from ‘Kortirion among the Trees', in which he had proclaimed his sense of ‘ever-near content' in Warwick. For in his new poem he wrote:

Here many days once gently past me crept

In this dear town of old forgetfulness;

Here all entwined in dreams once long I slept

And heard no echo of the world's distress.

Now he had grasped the urgency of the moment, as his official graduation, his attempt at publication and his marriage all demonstrate. After the wedding Edith was going to stay as close as possible to him, and would be leaving Warwick: ‘The Wanderer's Allegiance' bids the town and its dreams goodbye.

Tolkien was no mere nostalgist. The passing of time was the subject of a constant internal debate: part of him mourned what was gone and part of him knew change was necessary. In the Oxford of this poem, the past achieves an ideal status, not embalmed and half-forgotten, but vitally alive and full of significance for today.

Thy thousand pinnacles and fretted spires

Are lit with echoes and the lambent fires

Of many companies of bells that ring

Rousing pale visions of majestic days

The windy years have strewn down distant ways;

And in thy halls still doth thy spirit sing

Songs of old memory amid thy present tears,

Or hope of days to come half-sad with many fears.

In contrast to Warwick's inertia, Oxford shows true continuity, based on academic erudition and the perpetual renewal of its membership.

On a personal level, memories of undergraduate life crowd in. Tolkien, whose stays in Warwick were private, domestic, and circumscribed, had been the most sociable of Oxonians: understandably he used the university to symbolize lost fellowship and the tragedy of the war. The past is unnervingly present, so that in a visionary moment the intervening years or months are swept aside:

O agéd city of an all too brief sojourn,

I see thy clustered windows each one burn

With lamps and candles of departed men.

The misty stars thy crown, the night thy dress,

Most peerless-magical thou dost possess

My heart, and old days come to life again…

Despite its elegant use of autobiographical material for symbolic purposes, ‘The Wanderer's Allegiance' is not altogether successful. Wiseman told Tolkien it was not ‘quite up to your usual
standard' and said the Oxford passage was unworthy of ‘the greatest city but London in the Empire of England'. A more serious flaw is that its attempt to locate consolation and hope in the university city seems merely wishful when its Belgian counterpart, Louvain, had been all but destroyed. The final optimistic assertion sounds a trifle shrill:

Lo! though along thy paths no laughter runs

While war untimely takes thy many sons,

No tide of evil can thy glory drown

Robed in sad majesty, the stars thy crown.

The wanderer pledges allegiance to learning, living memory, and alertness, but (understandably) invests them with an unrealistic impregnability.

Wiseman felt there was an ‘apparent lack of connection' between the sections of the poem and said, ‘I am left hung up at the end between the Tolkienian ancestors taking root in Germany, and the Norman feudalists of the Castle while the author is still, as I know to my cost, an unsettled wanderer.' But Oxford and Warwick seem to symbolize two responses to temporal change – responses that now appear to be mutually incompatible but which had co-existed blissfully in ancient Saxony. Without booklore, Tolkien's remote Saxon ancestors had sung the ‘Songs of old memory' now remembered in Oxford (at least in the English department); simultaneously they had listened to the pulse of the seasons without drifting into a static slumber like the Warwick nobles. The poem describes a fall into division of being.

What goes unmentioned is Saxony's situation in the Great War, the fate of Tolkien's relatives there, or how his ancestry affected Tolkien's patriotic allegiance to England (with its Norman aristocracy). The poem never sets out to deal with these subjects, but inevitably they hover around it.

Tolkien remained in Warwick after completing the poem. On Wednesday 22 March 1916 he and Edith were married at the Roman Catholic church of St Mary Immaculate, near Warwick Castle. It was Lent: accordingly, they could only take part in the
Marriage Service
, and not the Nuptial Mass that would otherwise have followed. They spent a week's
honeymoon
in the windswept village of Clevedon on the Severn Estuary during which they visited the caves at Cheddar. When they returned to Warwick, Tolkien found a letter from Sidgwick & Jackson informing him that they had decided not to publish
The Trumpets of Faërie.
He now faced the possibility that he might be killed with all his extraordinary words unheard.

Meanwhile, Edith had little chance to see her new husband. Within a month of their wedding he was in Yorkshire taking a course at a signals school run by the army's Northern Command at
Farnley Park
, Otley, and was away for several weeks of training and tests. On practical matters his performance was mediocre: using a lamp he could signal at six words per minute, but the average speed was between seven and ten words. He did well in the written test and on map reading, however, and on 13 May he was issued with a provisional certificate permitting him to instruct army signallers. Tolkien left the same day for Warwick, having been given just two of the four days' leave he had requested.

Edith was now leaving the town for good. Tolkien's battalion duties meant that they could not live together, but they had decided that Edith would take rooms as near as possible to his camp. Accordingly, she moved with her cousin Jennie Grove into the home of a
Mrs Kendrick
in Great Haywood, an attractive village on a beautiful stretch of the River Trent just below the northern shoulders of Cannock Chase. Across the Trent lay the manorial elegance of Shugborough Park, the seat of the Earls of Lichfield. An old and narrow packhorse bridge with fourteen arches spanned the stream here where it took in the waters of the River Sow. At Great Haywood the newlyweds received a
nuptial blessing
at the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist, in front of a Sunday congregation who (amid the
national atmosphere of moral turpitude the TCBS so detested) seemed convinced that they had so far been living in sin.