Tolkien and the Great War (33 page)

After Eärendel's tale, two further sections were planned before the book would be finished. For his account of how the rebel archangel is finally stripped of his powers, Tolkien would have waded into ‘that very primitive undergrowth' of folklore he had praised in the
Kalevala.
Melko was to escape his bonds and stir strife among the Elves, mostly now gathered in the Lonely Isle; but he was to be chased up a gigantic pinetree at Tavrobel (Great Haywood) into the sky, becoming a creature of envy ‘gnawing
his fingers and gazing in anger on the world'. With his marring of the Sun's primal magic and the inexorable rise of the human race, the Lost Tales told to Eriol were to reach an end, as the chronological narrative caught up with the Germanic wanderer's own day.

In a coda involving Eriol (or his son Heorrenda, according to some projections) the faëry island was to be hauled to its latter-day location off the Great Lands of Europe, but then broken asunder into Ireland and Britain in another tussle of the sea gods. The island Elves would march to the aid of their diminishing mainland kin in a war against Melko's servants: the great Faring Forth. Despite hopes of a new golden age, with the rekindling of the ‘Magic Sun' or even the Two Trees, it seems that human treachery was to bring about the outright defeat of the Elves, and Men were to begin the invasion of Britain.

The final crisis may be glimpsed in a powerful ‘Epilogue' that Tolkien dashed down on paper, purporting to be the words of Eriol before he sealed his Book of Lost Tales at Tavrobel:

And now is the end of the fair times come very nigh, and behold, all the beauty that yet was on earth – fragments of the unimagined loveliness of Valinor whence came the folk of the Elves long long ago – now goeth it all up in smoke.

Eriol, writing with the immediacy of a diarist, has fled in the face of a terrible battle between Men on the High Heath nearby – surely
Cannock Chase
with the Sher Brook (Old English
scír,
‘bright') running down towards Great Haywood:

Behold, I stole by the evening from the ruined heath, and my way fled winding down the valley of the Brook of Glass, but the setting of the Sun was blackened with the reek of fires, and the waters of the stream were fouled with the war of men and grime of strife…

And now sorrow…has come upon the Elves, empty is Tavrobel and all are fled, [?fearing] the enemy that sitteth on the ruined heath, who is not a league away; whose hands are red
with the blood of Elves and stained with the lives of his own kin, who has made himself an ally to Melko…

In words that echo the last ride of Tinwelint, Eriol recalls Gilfanon, oldest of the Eldar of the Lonely Isle, in a cavalcade of light and song; and the people of Tavrobel dancing ‘as clad in dreams' about the grey bridge and the rivers' meeting. But now, Eriol records, the island Elves are fading too, or Men growing yet more blind. His last words are a prophecy of disenchantment, when most will scoff at the idea of fairies, ‘lies told to the children'. Some will at least regard them fondly as metaphors of nature, ‘a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees'. Only a few will believe, and be able to see the Elves thronging their ancient towns in Autumn, their season, ‘fallen as they are upon the Autumn of their days'.

But behold, Tavrobel shall not know its name, and all the land be changed, and even these written words of mine belike will all be lost, and so I lay down the pen, and so of the fairies cease to tell.

It may be no more than coincidence that
A Spring Harvest,
the posthumous volume of Smith's poems arranged by Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman, closes with this sestet:

So we lay down the pen
,

So we forbear the building of the rime,

And bid our hearts be steel for times and a time

Till ends the strife, and then,

When the New Age is verily begun,

God grant that we may do the things undone.

But it seems equally likely that here, at the projected close of his Lost Tales, Tolkien meant to pay a quiet tribute to G. B. Smith, who had looked forward so eagerly to reading them.

The fading of the Elves, a phenomenon surely intended to ‘explain' the Shakespearean and Victorian view of fairies, leaves the world and its fate in human hands. On the face of it, this seems a grim conclusion: man, in Eriol's closing words, is ‘
blind, and a fool
, and destruction alone is his knowledge'. Tolkien did not get very far with his Lost Tale of how Ilúvatar's secondborn children arrived in the era of the Sun; but what little he wrote shows that Melko corrupted them early on. Losing their first home through his machinations, unlike the Valar and the Eldar they found no new Eden. ‘The Tale of Turambar', meanwhile, may be taken as a distillation of Men's unhappy lot; and even after Melko is banished to the sky and deprived of his earthly powers, he is able to plant evil in the human heart.

There seems every reason to envy the Elves, graced with superhuman skill, beauty, and longevity, living on until ‘the Great End' with much of the vigour of youth and, should they die from violence or grief, even being reborn as elf-children. Tolkien's Eldar could not be less like the deathless Struldbruggs of Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels,
whose life is an endless descent into fathomless depths of physical and mental decrepitude.

Yet without the agency of human beings, Ilúvatar's universal drama would not reach completion. Whereas the cosmogonic Music prescribed the fate of the Elves, and even the Ainur, humans were granted ‘a free virtue' to act beyond it, so that ‘everything should in shape and deed be completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest'. Without this ‘free virtue', it seems, all would be complete in conception (if not execution) as soon as the Music was over; there would be nothing for us to do but follow our pre-ordained steps. (Happily, Tolkien seems not to have tried to illustrate the implication that the Elves, the Valar, and Melko lack free will, which would surely have blighted his narratives.)

Taken together with the Lost Tales, the idea of this ‘free virtue' sheds light on the riddle of how Melko's discords may make ‘Life more worth the living'. A parallel may be drawn with a phenomenon that Tolkien found deeply moving: the
‘
ennoblement
of the ignoble' through hardship and fear. ‘On a journey of a length sufficient to provide the untoward in any degree from discomfort to fear', he once wrote, in a transparent reference to the Great War, ‘the change in companions well-known in “ordinary life” (and in oneself) is often startling.' The potential for such change or ennoblement in the face of danger lies at the heart of all his portrayals of character. It is this equation, by which individuals become far more than the sum of their parts, that takes them beyond the provisions of the Music towards a destination altogether unforeseen. So it is that in Tolkien's legendarium the weak rise up to shake the world, embodying what he called ‘the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama'.

Humans in his pre-Christian mythology cannot commune consciously with their Creator through sacraments and prayer, but glimpse him uncomprehendingly through the sublimities of nature. Tuor and Eriol are captivated by the ambivalent, alien sea because ‘
there liveth still
in water a deeper echo of the Music of the Ainur than in any substance else that is in the world, and at this latest day many of the Sons of Men will hearken unsatedly to the voice of the Sea and long for they know not what'. What they long for, unconsciously, is eternal life in heaven. It is a yearning for home: the souls of Men will outlive the world in which their bodies die.

One of Tolkien's most radical imaginative leaps was to put this tenet of his faith in perspective by placing his human figures in a picture dominated by – indeed, painted by – a sibling race with a destiny apart. To Swift, the human desire for immortality was a folly to be satirized without mercy through the Struldbruggs. Tolkien took a more sympathetic view: to him, immortality was indeed in our nature, and the human folly lay only in mistakenly coveting mere corporeal permanence. From the earliest writings onwards, he left the question of what will happen to the Elves after the End a profound enigma. Their own opinion seems to be that they will expire with the world, and they have little hope of bliss in Ilúvatar's heaven. Death, Tolkien
later wrote, was the ‘Gift of Ilúvatar' to Men, releasing them into an eternal life that is more than mere longevity. The resurrection of Beren and Tinúviel, therefore, may be sadly brief compared to the earthly span they might have enjoyed as Elves, but implicitly their second death will give them what no other Elves can have: a future ‘beyond the walls of the world'. In Tolkien's view, that is the ultimate release.

The spring, summer, and ages-long autumn of the Elves may be regarded as a consummation of the intrinsic potential in creation, but a consummation as limited and flawed as the finite world itself. Except for what they have learned of elvish art and grace, Men remain the benighted travellers we first encountered in ‘A Song of Aryador' of 1915. Meanwhile, the imperfect gods under God are bound to founder in their care of the world. So one of the narrators of the Lost Tales declares that the Valar ought to have gone to war against Melko straight after the destruction of the Two Trees, adding suggestively: ‘and who knows if the salvation of the world and the freeing of Men and Elves shall ever come from them again? Some there are who whisper that it is not so, and hope dwelleth only in a far land of Men, but how so that may be I do not know.' The implication must surely be that the failure of God's angelic representatives would ultimately pave the way for God's direct intervention as Christ.

The Lost Tales emerged at a steady pace. Etymological work among the
Oxford English Dictionary
slips in the Old Ashmolean took up little more than half the day, and although Tolkien also began taking private pupils in Old English he did not make enough money from this to give up the dictionary work until the spring of 1920. The family moved out of St John Street in late summer of 1919, and Tolkien remained sufficiently unwell to take a small army pension; but, compared to the years before and after, this was a settled interlude of uninterrupted creativity. However, Tolkien never wrote the Lost Tales describing the birth of Men, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the voyage of
Eärendel, the expulsion of Melko, the Faring Forth, or the Battle of the High Heath. The full expression of these events had to wait until he had found a different form for the mythology, and in some points was never achieved. By the early 1920s, problems had come into focus that needed solutions, and his concepts had shifted – not least at the linguistic foundations of his mythology. He continued to refine his invented languages, making time-consuming changes to their internal histories and their phonological and morphological foundations (so, for example, the tongue of the Gnomes now commonly formed plurals by vowel mutation rather than by adding a suffix, as English does in rare instances such as
foot/feet
^*
). He revised, rewrote, and rearranged the Lost Tales he had already written. Eriol became Ælfwine, a mariner from Anglo-Saxon England as late as the eleventh century. Tolkien now conceived Elvish Tol Eressëa as an entirely distinct island to the west. He also set to work retelling the story of Turambar as a long narrative poem.

There were further practical barriers to completing ‘The Book of Lost Tales'. In 1920 Tolkien had finally launched the academic career that the war had delayed, taking a position at
Leeds
University, where he energetically revivified the English language syllabus. At the same time he compiled, with long and meticulous labour,
A Middle English Vocabulary
to accompany an anthology edited by Kenneth Sisam, his former tutor at Oxford. When that was published in 1922 he was working on a new edition of the alliterative Middle English poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
with a Leeds colleague, E. V. Gordon. In 1924 Tolkien was made a professor at Leeds, but the following year he won the Rawlinson Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. By then he was also the father of three young children.

Tolkien's bigger difficulty, however, was a niggling perfectionism. He was well aware of it and, much later, he wrote a story,
‘Leaf by Niggle', in which the problem is borne by a painter doomed never to complete his enormous picture of a tree. In years to come the legendarium grew into a vast complex of interwoven histories, sagas, and genealogies, of phonologies, grammars, and vocabularies, and of philological and philosophical disquisitions. Left to his own devices it seems quite likely that Tolkien would never have finished a single book in his life. What he needed were publishers' deadlines and a keen audience.

Back in November 1917, his old schoolmaster R. W. Reynolds had expressed himself
‘much interested in the book of tales you are at work on'
, urging Tolkien to send it to him as soon as it was ‘in a state to travel'. But in 1922 Reynolds and his novelist wife, Dorothea Deakin, moved for health reasons to Capri in the Bay of Naples, and by the time he got back in touch, following her death in 1925, Tolkien had long left the tales incomplete. Instead he sent several poems out to Capri, including two works in progress: his alliterative lay about Túrin and a rhymed
geste
about Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel (as she was now called). Reynolds had little or nothing good to say about the first, and thought the second promising but prolix. He was being true to form. ‘Kortirion among the Trees' – the poem G. B. Smith had carried around the trenches of Thiepval Wood ‘like a treasure' – had seemed to Reynolds merely ‘charming', but not gripping. Before the 1914 Council of London, Tolkien had told Wiseman he thought Reynolds was to blame for Smith's excess of aestheticism over moral character. Wiseman had commented since then that Smith's poetry was beyond Reynolds' grasp. If that was so, he could scarcely have engaged with Tolkien's.