Tolkien and the Great War (36 page)

Although Tolkien had a rare genius for this ‘cloaking', as he called it, he was far from alone in his desire to apply the patterns
of myth and legend to the experience of real life. Although the stereotypical picture of the Western Front does not include soldiers reading
the
Mabinogion
with its Welsh Arthuriana, as G. B. Smith did, or William Morris's
The Earthly Paradise
, which Tolkien carried, in fact quest literature was profoundly popular. Books such as Morris's
The Well at the World's End
and John Bunyan's
The Pilgrim's Progress
provided a key without which this life of tribulation and death seemed incomprehensible, as Paul Fussell admits: ‘The experiences of a man going up to the line to his destiny cannot help seeming to him like those of a hero of medieval romance if his imagination has been steeped in actual literary romances…'

Christopher Wiseman, declaring in 1917 that experience of life was unnecessary in writing epics since they ‘
make no pretence
of dealing with life', was thoroughly mistaken. Had Tolkien felt no need to express his shock at the outbreak of war, his heightened awareness of mortality, and his horror at mechanized warfare, it is possible that he would not have pursued fantasy at all. But his own metaphor of the concealing cloak is misleading. The distillation of experience into myth could reveal the prevailing elements in a moral morass such as the Great War, show the big picture where trench writers like Robert Graves tended to home in on the detail. Tolkien is not the first mythographer to produce a grave and pertinent epic in time of war and revolution. However else they differ from him, in this John Milton and William Blake are his forebears. When the world changes, and reality assumes an unfamiliar face, the epic and fantastic imagination may thrive.

At the opposite pole from heroic romance, the fairy-tale aspects of Tolkien's world could paradoxically provide a mirror for the world at war. In her lucid study,
A Question of Time
, Verlyn Flieger considers Tolkien's haunting 1930s poem, ‘Looney', and its better known 1960s incarnation, ‘The Sea-bell', which recount a bewildering lone odyssey to Faërie and the return of the traveller to mortal lands, where he finds himself estranged from his
kind. Flieger notes that, whereas fairy-stories and war would seem to be opposites,

Beneath the surface
, however, [Tolkien's] words suggest a deep but unmanifest connection between these apparently unlike things…Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return so that they become ‘pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness', not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen or experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faërie can change out of all recognition the wanderer's perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was.

Strikingly, Tolkien wrote his first account of a mortal's arrival in Faërie, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play', just after his return to England from the Somme with trench fever. Eriol's first impressions of the Lonely Isle are much happier than those in ‘Looney' and ‘The Sea-bell', but he glimpses Faërie's indifference to humanity. Tolkien's outlines show that the mariner would eventually become alienated from his kind; and in the last pages of ‘The Book of Lost Tales', Eriol expresses his fear that his message to human posterity – the tales he has recorded – will be lost.

Viewed in the context of 1916-17, the arrival of Eriol, ‘One who dreams alone', in the Lonely Isle, ‘the Land of Release', has the air of a soldier's anticipatory dream of a homecoming in which everything will turn out alright again. But he is escaping the current of his own time and entering the timelessness of Faërie. Similarly, for the soldier, time seemed to have moved on incalculably in the trenches but fallen behind in England. The Lonely Isle, then, may be seen as a symbolic version of the England that had slipped away.
Nostalgia
, a word that had hitherto always meant homesickness, began to appear in its now prevalent sense – regretful or wistful yearning for the past – straight after the Great War. To Tolkien's generation, nostalgia
was a constant companion: they were looking over their shoulders, like the survivors of Gondolin, at an old home that seemed now to embody everything beautiful and doomed. Tolkien's myth expresses the desire for such apparently timeless beauty, but constantly recognizes that it is indeed doomed: for all its apparent imperviousness, in the long run the Lonely Isle, like Gondolin, must succumb to implacable change.

The war memoirist Charles Douie looked back on
Peter Pan
as a kind of prophecy. ‘
Did no feeling
of apprehension darken the mind of any mother in that audience which first heard, “My sons shall die like English gentlemen”; did no foreboding enter into the exultation with which those sons first heard youth's defiance of death – “To die would be an awfully big adventure”?'

It was Peter's perpetual youth that came closest to the mark during the Great War, when so many young men would never grow old; and Tolkien's Elves, forever in the prime of adulthood, hit the bullseye. As Tom Shippey notes, ‘
There is no difficulty
in seeing why Tolkien, from 1916 on, was preoccupied with the theme of death…The theme of escape from death might then naturally seem attractive.' Much more robust than the airy miniatures of Victorian and Shakespearean fancy, the Eldar could shoulder the burden of these weightier themes. Their ancient roots in Germanic and Celtic myth, furthermore, made them apt symbols of timelessness in a twentieth-century epic about loss.

Neither Milton nor Blake saw battle itself. That Tolkien did may explain the central or climactic role of battles in his stories. The tank-like ‘dragons' in the assault on Gondolin strongly imply that this is the case. So does the strategic importance of timing in many of Tolkien's fictional clashes. The failure of units to coordinate their attacks, a disastrous feature of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears as developed in the ‘Silmarillion', parallels a fatal problem in the Somme offensive. The last-minute intervention of a fresh force to save the day, a staple of military engagements in Middle-earth, may seem less realistic and more
‘escapist', but this was the part his own battalion played in the taking of Ovillers and the rescue of the Warwickshires, when he was present as a signaller.

Tolkien's even-handed depiction of war as both terrible and stirring is well matched by a comment from Charles Carrington (one of the beleaguered Warwickshires), who writes that, for the soldier in the midst of mortal danger, ‘There was an arguing realism, a cynical side to one's nature that raised practical objections and suggested dangers, and against it there strove a romantic ardour for the battle that was almost joyful.' Túrin, ‘
sick and weary
' after the fray, illustrates the frequent sequel to such ardour – the resurgence of reality. But high diction, which sets Tolkien so far apart from the classic trench writers, expresses perfectly a psychological truth of war they tend to neglect. In all its enormity and strangeness, combat could induce what Carrington calls the ‘exaltation of battle…an elevated state of mind which a doctor might have defined as neurosis'; he says he was ‘uplifted in spirit'.

A similar observation in Frederic Manning's acute Somme novel,
The Middle Parts of Fortune
, points to a more profound parallel between the view on the battlefield and Tolkien's creative vision. Manning relates the exaltation of combat to the soldiers' conviction that they were fighting in a just cause, a ‘moral impetus' that ‘carried them forward on a wave of emotional excitement, transfiguring all the circumstances of their life so that these could only be expressed in the terms of heroic tragedy, of some superhuman or even divine conflict with the powers of evil…' Tolkien's legendarium assumed the dimensions of a conflict between good and evil immediately after the Somme. Might that be partly the result of a desire to express this singular experience, so far beyond the scope of conventional literary expression?

Whatever the answer, Tolkien's moral vision is utterly different in application from the soldier's and the propagandist's. With the possible exception of the Hammer of Wrath, noted above, Orcs and Elves do not equate to the Germans and the British; on the contrary, they distil the cruelty and the courage he saw on both sides in war, as well as more general qualities
of barbarism and civilization. It was not the Kaiser that Tolkien demonized in Melko, but the tyranny of the machine over the individual, an international evil going back far earlier than 1914 but exercised with merciless abandon on the Western Front.

As Tom Shippey has pointed out, Tolkien is in good company among later writers who turned away from realism because, as combat veterans, they had seen ‘something irrevocably evil'. George Orwell (the Spanish Civil War), Kurt Vonnegut and William Golding (the Second World War) fall into this category. Crucially, Shippey argues, Tolkien and these others adopted various forms of fantasy because they felt that the conventional explanations for the evil they had seen ‘were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself'. For example, realist fictions hold that there is no absolute evil, only relative degrees of social maladjustment; but in
Lord of the Flies
Golding suggests that something intrinsically evil lurks inside us all, waiting to get out. Trench realism embraces detail and flinches from universal statements, but ‘The Book of Lost Tales' mythologizes the evil that Tolkien saw in materialism. To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.

During Tolkien's own war, the conventional British view as expressed in propaganda was that evil certainly existed, and it was German. Trench poets such as Wilfred Owen felt that the real enemy was the blind self-interest of national governments determined to gain territory whatever the human cost. But both groups shared a taste for polemic. Owen's poem about a gassed soldier leaves an indelible impression, and was meant to:

If in some smothering
dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face…

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The personal address, ‘my friend', is only the salute before the bayonet-thrust. You, it says, are passing on lies to your children, and so they may one day suffer torments such as this I saw. The voice of the trench writer has primacy, as a guarantor of eyewitness reliability but also as a badge of unimpeachable moral authority.

Tolkien eschewed polemical rhetoric, part of the evil of tyranny and orthodoxy that he opposed. In his work, a multitude of characters speak in diverse voices, but the author stays well out of sight. While trench writers such as Owen challenged the propagandists and censors for the monopoly on truth, Tolkien moved away from the idea of a monopoly altogether, telling his Lost Tales through multiple narrators (rather as Ilúvatar in ‘The Music of the Ainur' allows his seraphic choirs to elaborate his themes). The idea survived into the ‘Silmarillion', a collation of disparate historical accounts, and
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
, which purport to have been edited from the writings of their protagonists.

But the evil that Tolkien's mythology most squarely opposes, disenchantment, is burned into the fabric of classic Great War literature.

By editing G. B. Smith's
A Spring Harvest
, Tolkien contributed to a spate of fallen soldiers' poetry, most of which is now forgotten. The little that is still remembered, including Owen's poetry, was not cemented into the cultural memory until several more years had passed, when trench survivors broke their traumatized silence. A flurry of memoirs and novels appeared between 1926 and 1934, including Sassoon's
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
, Graves's
Good-bye to All That
, and the start of Henry Williamson's
Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
sequence. Now, in the words of Samuel Hynes, ‘
the Myth of the War
was defined and fixed in the version that retains authority': the disenchanted version.

This ‘myth' implies that the war consisted almost entirely of passive suffering. In his poetry, Sassoon neglects to mention his
solo killing sprees in the German lines; in his prose he downplays the daring involved. In Wilfred Owen's verse, men trudge through mud, or move a dying comrade into the sun, or simply wait to be attacked. He declared his subject to be pity, not heroes or deeds. In other words, action and heroism were omitted for a more effective protest against the war.

The revisionist approach of the late 1920s, which Owen had heralded, underlined the bitter irony of lives squandered for ‘
a few acres of mud
', as Christopher Wiseman had put it. The snapshot narratives in the literature of disenchantment typically pivot on ironic incidents in which action is proved futile and courage a waste. Paul Fussell identifies classic trench writing with the ‘ironic' mode of narrative that Northrop Frye (in
The Anatomy of Criticism
) defined as characterizing the latter phase of a typical cycle of literary history. The earliest fictions (myth, romance, epic, and tragedy) portrayed heroes who enjoyed greater power of action than their audience; but in the quintessentially modern ironic mode the protagonist has less power of action than ourselves, and is caught in a ‘scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity'.

These days it tends to be forgotten that many veterans resented the way their story was being told from 1926 onwards. ‘
Book after book
related a succession of disasters and discomforts with no intermission and no gleam of achievement,' wrote Carrington. ‘Every battle a defeat, every officer a nincompoop, every soldier a coward.' The wounded pride of a disgruntled officer, perhaps; but Carrington's own memoir is hardly a rose-tinted affair.