Tolkien and the Great War (28 page)

Mindful of the ambivalent nature of the sea, Tolkien had assigned to it not one but two tutelary spirits. The greater of the two is not Ossë, despite his furious strength, but Ulmo (Gnomish
Ylmir
) ‘the upholder', who understands the hearts of Elves and Men and whose music haunts its hearers. Accordingly, he now renamed the poem ‘
The Horns of Ulmo
', tying it for the first time to his infant mythology. Additional lines identified the song as Tuor's account of how he heard the music of Ulmo in the Vale of Willows.

In the twilight by the river on a hollow thing of shell

He made immortal music, till my heart beneath his spell

Was broken in the twilight, and the meadows faded dim

To great grey waters heaving round the rocks where sea-birds swim.

Even when Tuor emerges from the spell, a salt mist redolent of Holderness lies over the Oxford-like Vale of Willows.

Only the reeds were rustling, but a mist lay on the streams Like a sea-roke drawn far inland, like a shred of salt sea-dreams. ‘Twas in the Land of Willows that I heard th'unfathomed breath Of the Horns of Ylmir calling – and shall hear them till my death.

For a while during the spring of 1917, Tolkien was put in charge of an outpost of the Humber Garrison near Thirtle Bridge at Roos (in a house next to the post office, according to local tradition) and Edith was able to live with him.

‘In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and
dance,'
he wrote to their son Christopher after her death in 1971. When duty permitted, they would stroll in a nearby wood, which Roos tradition identifies as Dents Garth, at the south end of the village, beside the parish church of All Saints. Here, at the feet of the ash, oak, sycamore, and beech trees, tall flowers with white umbels burst into bloom from mid-April until the end of May. The flowers,
Anthriscus sylvestris,
are what books might call cow parsley, wild chervil, or Queen Anne's lace, among many other names; but Tolkien referred to all such white-flowered umbellifers (and not just the highly poisonous
Conium maculatum
) by the usual rural name of
hemlock.
^*
Among these cloudy white heads,
Edith danced and sang. The scene fixed itself in Tolkien's mind. It could have come from fairy-tale, a vision of sylvan loveliness glimpsed by a wanderer returned from war. When he next had the leisure to compose at length, Tolkien put the scene at the heart of just such a tale.

But in the meantime, on Friday 1 June 1917, RAMC officers at Hull found him fit for general service. The timing could hardly have been worse. Three days later, the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers sent more than a hundred men off to various fronts. On 7 June, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers (who had not seen frontline duty since their arrival in Flanders in October) took part in a huge British attack on Messines Ridge, south of Ypres: an entirely triumphant reprise of the strategy at the start of the Somme, preceded by three weeks' artillery bombardment and the explosion of nineteen huge mines. Bowyer, the quartermaster, was the only officer killed in Tolkien's old battalion.

Tolkien, however, was told to continue with the Humber Garrison. He already had responsibilities with the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers and there was a strong likelihood that he might soon be made signals officer at Thirtle Bridge. In July he sat the exam; but he failed. Possibly his health was to blame. On 1 August he joined Huxtable and others at the regiment's annual Minden Day dinner; but a fortnight later he succumbed to fever again and was admitted to hospital once more.

Brooklands
Officers' Hospital, in Cottingham Road on the north side of Hull, was overseen by a woman glorying in the name of Mrs Strickland Constable. As Tolkien lay there, German aeroplanes flew in over the coast and Zeppelins carried out a bombing raid on the city. In Russia, the provisional government that had ousted the Tsar was running into crisis. In Flanders, ‘Third Ypres' was under way: the murderous quagmire of
Passchendaele
. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had marched up to the line under intense shelling that killed Captain Edwards of Tolkien's old ‘A' Company, still just twenty years old.

Tolkien's temperature ran high for the first six weeks and he was kept at Brooklands for a further three weeks. The journey from Hornsea was arduous for Edith, who had conceived during
her husband's winter convalescence at Great Haywood and was now more than six months pregnant. His latest relapse brought matters to a crisis, and she abandoned her increasingly miserable lodgings in the seaside town, returning with Jennie Grove to Cheltenham. She had lived there for the three years prior to their engagement in 1913 and wanted to have the baby there. Christopher Wiseman wrote in an attempt to console Tolkien, but found words inadequate.
‘It is all the more distressing now that I cannot help you even vicariously as I could before,'
he said, ‘and though we are the TCBS we have each got to see the other shouldering his load by himself without being able to lend a finger to steady him.' Failing (characteristically) to post the letter at the start of September, Wiseman learned five weeks later that Edith was still in Cheltenham and John Ronald still in hospital. ‘I am very anxious for news of you, and also of your missis,' he wrote. But he added, ‘So the Army do not contain quite so many fools as I supposed. I expected them to send you out before now, and I am delighted they haven't.'

Tolkien sent Wiseman the one poem he had written that year, ‘
Companions of the Rose
'. As yet unpublished, this is an elegiac piece about G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson; its title refers to the fact that both belonged to regiments that had fought at Minden, commemorated by the wearing of the white rose on 1 August. Wiseman, who approved of the poem, consoled him: ‘There is of course no legislation that touches the Muse, and she has not been entirely idle because you have spent a good time on the mythology.'

Indeed, when he was well enough Tolkien found the hospital a haven of congenial company (which included a regimental friend), and conducive to writing. Here, he wrote ‘The Tale of Tinúviel', the love story at the heart of the ‘Lost Tales' that had been inspired by that moment of fleeting beauty earlier in 1917 when he had gone walking with Edith in a wood at Roos. The second tale to be written down, it moved far from the vast war that had taken centre-stage in ‘The Fall of Gondolin'. The threat posed by Melko remained in the background, and the stage was given over to a personal romance. Around this time Tolkien also began to prepare the ground for a darker counterpart to
this story, the ‘Tale of Turambar'. This was a direct descendant of his attempt, in the first months of the Great War, to retell the section of the Finnish
Kalevala
that deals with Kullervo, who kills himself after unwittingly seducing his sister.
^*

The large and complex mythological background to these tales was still evolving slowly, mostly by a process of accretion and alteration in name-lists and lexicons as Tolkien followed his linguistic muse. By the time he arrived at Brooklands, he had probably begun to enlarge the pantheon of ‘gods' or Valar beyond the tiny handful he had named before the Somme. They were headed by
Manwë
and
Varda
and also included
Aulë
the smith,
Lòrien Olofantur
of dreams and
Mandos Vefantur
of death, the goddesses
Yavanna
and
Vana,
and possibly the hunter
Oromë,
in addition to the sea-deities
Ulmo
and
Ossë.
As for the Elves, Tolkien had probably decided by now that they first came into being beside
Koivië·nēni,
the ‘waters of awakening'. He knew that the Two Trees of Valinor, painted back in May 1915, were both to be destroyed by Melko and
Gloomweaver,
clearly the Spider of Night who had appeared in an early outline of Eärendel's voyage. He also knew that the fortunes of the Gnomes in the war against Melko would pivot around the terrible battle of
Nînin Udathriol,
‘unnumbered tears'. Most would become thralls to Melko, and those who remained free would be largely destroyed in the Fall of Gondolin, leaving a remnant led by Eärendel. In the end the Vala Noldorin would lead a host of Elves from Kôr across the sea in a quest to liberate the captive Gnomes, but Orcs would overwhelm them in the Land of Willows. Noldorin, surviving the attack, would fight Melko at the
Pools of Twilight
with
Tulkas,
another Vala. But these are shreds of story, and it is impossible to guess what else Tolkien was revolving in his head before the full narratives took shape in the Lost Tales he wrote immediately after the war.

Tolkien was discharged from Brooklands on 16 October, still delicate and troubled by pain in his shins and arms. A month later, on Friday 16 November 1917, Edith gave birth at the Royal Nursing Home in Cheltenham. It was an ordeal that left her in a critical condition. But her husband could not be there. On the day his son, John Francis Reuel, was born, Tolkien stood before yet another medical board in Hull. His fever had recurred slightly but now he was judged fit to carry on full duties at Thirtle Bridge.

England was under siege, and Tolkien was standing guard at the sea-wall, chronically unwell. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had seized power in Russia and called an armistice, allowing Germany to begin moving vast numbers of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western. ‘
The end of the war
seemed as far-off as it does now,' Tolkien told his second son, Michael, in the darkness of 1941. He could get no leave to go to Cheltenham until almost a week later, just after the great but short-lived British tank advance at Cambrai. By then Edith was recovering, and Father Francis came down from Birmingham to baptize John. From Scapa Flow, Christopher Wiseman sent the kind of wish that is only made during a war. ‘
When your kiddie
comes to take his place with the rest of us who have spent their lives fighting God's enemies, perhaps he will find I can teach him to use his sword,' he wrote. In the meantime, he added, ‘I insist on the appointment of uncle, or some such position symbolic of incurable bachelorhood and benevolence essential to the proper inculcation of some TCBS rites and doctrines.'

Tolkien sold the last of his
patrimonial shares
in the South African mines to pay for Edith's stay in the nursing home, but there was no pay rise when he was promoted to
lieutenant
soon afterwards. He returned to Holderness, and Edith now took rooms for herself and the baby in Roos itself.

His own
health
remained a problem and a mild fever took hold twice more, consigning him to bed for five days. But before the year was over, Tolkien had been transferred away from Roos and Thirtle Bridge to another coastal defence unit in Holderness, where his duties would be less demanding and he could receive on-going medical care.

The
Royal Defence Corps
had been set up in 1916 to make use of men too old to fight. A short-lived forerunner to the famous Home Guard of the Second World War, it also drew in soldiers such as Tolkien who were of fighting age but not fighting-fit. A unit for the old or unwell, it was a symptom of the damage war had dealt to Britain's population. Tolkien was sent to Easington, a tiny farming hamlet of three hundred people huddled near the tip of the peninsula, where the 9th Battalion of the Royal Defence Corps spent desolate days watching the sea. It was considerably more bleak here than at Thirtle Bridge ten miles to the north. Cliffs rose nearly ninety feet out of the North Sea, the air was salty, and the land treeless. A century before, soldiers had watched for Napoleon's ships from Dimlington, a tiny neighbouring settlement founded by the Angles; but Dimlington had since fallen into the sea. Close by, the cliffs dwindled and the land tapered into a long low tail stretching out into the mouth of the Humber: Spurn Point. A military railway ran past to the gun battery on the tip of the spit of land, built to replace the old road that the sea had also claimed.

The sea-tang enters again into ‘
The Song of Eriol
', not so much a new poem as a reconfiguration of the old opening of ‘The Wanderer's Allegiance', which had apparently dealt with Tolkien's ‘father's sires' in Saxony. Christopher Wiseman had made some stringent criticisms of the ‘
apparent lack of connection
' between parts of the poem. Now Tolkien pared the first part away from the longer sections dealing with Warwick, Town of Dreams, and Oxford, City of Present Sorrow, and reassigned the German ancestors to Eriol's bloodline. So his ever-hungry mythology took a bite out of one of his rare pieces of autobiographical poetry.

Nevertheless, like the period in which it was devised, Eriol's emergent back-history is dominated by an armed struggle spanning Europe, or the Great Lands, as Tolkien now called the continent. Just as it had in ‘The Wanderer's Allegiance', the scene shifts from the ‘sunlit goodliness' of the rural ancestral idyll to a time of devastating conflict.

Wars of great kings and clash of armouries,

Whose swords no man could tell, whose spears

Were numerous as a wheatfield's ears,

Rolled over all the Great Lands; and the Seas

Were loud with navies; their devouring fires

Behind the armies burned both fields and towns;

And sacked and crumbled or to flaming pyres

Were cities made, where treasuries and crowns,

Kings and their folk, their wives and tender maids

Were all consumed…

Despite the very twentieth-century scale of these armies and the scarred landscapes (not to mention the anachronistic reference to naval warfare), the singer's vantage-point is medieval. This is manifestly the Dark Ages, when the Germanic peoples who were thrust ever westward in waves of migrations and invasions set up their new homes in lands still marked by the ruinous stoneworks of the fallen Roman civilization.