Tolkien and the Great War (53 page)

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Gautisk might have been an extrapolation from Gothic, but it was probably meant to be the tongue of the Geats of ancient Scandinavia, the language that the monster-slaying hero Beowulf would have spoken before his story was written down in Anglo-Saxon. Although Rob Gilson's grasp of philology was confessedly poor, some of the sobriquets he used in his letters to his friends invite speculation that he was in on his friend's language-invention game. Unfortunately deciphering them is also a matter of guesswork. Tolkien appears to be ‘Mr Undarhruiménitupp' and G. B. Smith is ‘Haughadel' or ‘Hawaughdall'.

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Every participant in the school's annual Latin debates sported a classical tag. By straightforward translation, Wiseman was
Sapientissimo Ingenti
and Barrowclough
Tumulus Vallis.
Cary Gilson was
Carus Helveticus
, in honour of his Alpine enthusiasms, and Rob had been his diminutive,
Carellus Helveticulus.
Wilfrid Payton was
Corcius Pato
and his younger brother Ralph
Corcius Pato Minor.
Vincent Trought was a very fishy
Salmonius Tructa Rufus
; but ‘Tea-Cake' Barnsley was
Placenta Horreo
, from the Latin words for ‘cake' and ‘barn'. Tolkien's tags were all puns on his surname rendered jokily as ‘toll keen':
Vectigalius Acer, Portorius Acer Germanicus
and, with a nod to his mastery of languages,
Eisphorides Acribus Polyglotteus.

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He had perhaps only encountered the name in Rider Haggard's
She
, which lists ‘Sekhet, the lion-headed' among the Egyptian powers, but does not specify her gender.

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Adfuit omen
acquires a special force from its contrast with the normal phrase,
Absit omen
, ‘Let there not be an omen'. It might be paraphrased, ‘It bloody well
was
an omen'.

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Vincent Trought was born in Birmingham on 8 April 1893 and died on 20 January 1912 in Gorran Haven, where he is buried.

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Later the 14th, 15th, and 16th Battalions of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

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The classicist F. L. Lucas survived the war to become a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and a critic, poet, and dramatist.

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A single illustration may serve. Tolkien decided that a primitive ‘root' LIŘI had survived almost unchanged in Qenya as
liri
-, the stem of a verb meaning ‘to sing'. By adding various noun-forming suffixes, it also produced
liritta
, ‘poem, lay, written poem', and
lirilla
, ‘lay, song'. However, the past tense was
lindë
, apparently formed by inserting an ‘infix', -
n
- (a morphological change), which combined with the original
-ř-
shifted to
-nd-
(a phonological change). But
lindë
acted as a stem in its own right, adding a suffix to produce
lindelë
, ‘song, music', or losing its unaccented final syllable for
lin
, ‘musical voice, air, melody, tune'. It also appears in compounds with other Qenya words as
lindorëa
, ‘singing at dawn' (applied especially to birds), and
lindeloktë
, ‘singing cluster', the name for the laburnum (where we see the semantic process of metaphor at work). All these transformation-types have their equivalents in real-world languages.

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Wade-Gery took over as commanding officer of the 3rd Salford Pals from April 1917 to May 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross. He was later Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford and a fellow of Merton College near the end of Tolkien's professorship there. He published several books on ancient Greek history and literature.

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The title ‘Glastonbury' was prescribed in the rebus for the Newdigate competition, worth about £300 to the winner. (Among the other aspiring Oxford poets who wrote a ‘Glastonbury' entry was Aldous Huxley.)

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The 19th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers is usually referred to here as the ‘3rd Salford Pals' to distinguish it from the three other battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers that come into this story.

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In his biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter overplays Tolkien's dislike of Shakespeare on the evidence of a bombastic piece of school debate polemic. Tolkien disliked
reading
Shakespeare but could enjoy watching
Hamlet
and, as Tom Shippey has argued, his own work was influenced by
Macbeth.
He came to blame Shakespeare for bastardizing the ‘fairy' tradition with
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, but ‘Goblin Feet' shows that, in 1915, Tolkien had not yet rebelled fully against the Shakespearean approach.

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It appears that Tolkien had a running order for the poems he planned to include. Intriguingly, Reynolds told Tolkien, ‘On the whole I think I should advise you to accept your friend's offer. Though it is hardly necessary to warn you that you must be prepared for the book to fall very flat.' There is no indication of what this publication offer was.

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Tolkien gave further information about the Shadow-folk in ‘The Book of Lost Tales' a few years later; see p. 259 below.

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The unit to which Smith was attached temporarily in Thiepval Wood on the Somme was the 2nd Manchesters, in which the war poet Wilfred Owen later served and died.

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February, the month of Hilary Tolkien's birth, is named
Amillion
after Amillo; but Tolkien had to split January in two so he could name the second half,
Erintion
, in honour of Edith's birthday (21 January) and the first half,
Lirillion
, in honour of his own (3 January).

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In real terms today, up to £1,480 a year and about £14 a day.

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Gilson was referring, perhaps, to Bécourt château near La Boisselle, where his battalion spent much time in the run-up to the Somme. The garden there is described in similar terms in C. C. R Murphy's
History of the Suffolk Regiment.

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The Gilsons sent the batman £50 that Rob had left him (the equivalent of nearly £2,000 today); but Bradnam had not mentioned the severity of his condition, and he was dead by the end of the first week in August following two amputations of parts of his leg. Major Philip Morton died in Rouen a few days later, an old soldier of fifty-two.

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The brigade signal officer was Tolkien's predecessor at battalion level, Lieutenant W. H. Reynolds. The quartermaster (killed in 1917) was Lieutenant Joseph Bowyer, a professional soldier twice Tolkien's age and the grandson of a Lancashire Fusilier from the Peninsular War.

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Officially renamed the 14th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, it had been part of Smith's division, the 32nd, during training but their paths diverged on arrival in France when the unit (with Hilary Tolkien's 16th Royal Warwickshires) transferred to another division.

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‘Artois' is an odd error for
Picardy,
perhaps prompted by Tolkien's acquaintance with Bus-lès-Artois.

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The Fusiliers were in the same trenches they had held from 28 to 31 August: new ‘parallels' at the head of Elgin and Inniskilling Avenues.