Tolkien and the Great War (54 page)

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It remained essential, and a bafflement to its users, in the Second World War: ‘What is my greatest joy in life, / More precious even than my wife, / So comforting ‘midst all this strife? / My Fullerphone. / How well I love your merry tricks; / Even when your buzzer sticks; / Delighting me with faint key clicks; / Oh Fullerphone…/ Potentiometer, it's true / I'm not sure what to do with you. / Yet even you add beauty to / My Fullerphone.' – from R. Mellor,
‘Ode to a Fullerphone'
.

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The Gilsons remained in some uncertainty over the exact location of Rob's grave for three months until inquiries by his father and sister confirmed that he had been buried in Bécourt Cemetery.

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Among the earliest instances of Gnomish are three heraldic devices of the towns of
Tol Erethrin
(Tol Erëssea):
Taurobel
(a variant of Tavrobel),
Cortirion
(Kortirion, or Warwick), and
Celbaros,
which depicts a fountain and intertwined rings appropriate to Cheltenham, the spa town where Tolkien asked Edith Bratt to marry him.
Ranon
and
Ecthelin
(suggesting the Gnomish for ‘fountain') stand for ‘Ronald' and ‘Edith'.

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Indeed, under certain conditions, where a Qenya word had a voiceless sound, the related Goldogrin word would have its voiced equivalent instead; so
Taniqetil,
the mountain of Valinor, was called by the Gnomes
Danigwethl,
and ‘lamentation' or the weeping willow not
siqilissë
but
sigwithiel.
There were, of course, many more phonological differences between the two languages.
Sigwithiel
also shows a morphological difference, being built from the same root as
siqilissë,
SIQI
, using a quite distinct affix.

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The Gnomish equivalent
Calumoth
in the ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words' was shortlived, but
Glamhoth,
‘folk of dreadful hate' in ‘The Fall of Gondolin', is surely its phonaesthetic heir; and so the influence of the barbaric
kalimbardi
can be traced all the way to the name of Gandalf's sword
Glamdring,
‘Foehammer'.

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In the finished ‘Kortirion among the Trees' this became
‘Winter, and his blue-tipped spears / Marching unconquerable upon the sun / Of bright All-Hallows'
.

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This is a sly reference to Tolkien's own April 1915 poem ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play', which indeed depicts the original cottage. Tolkien planned to weave his earlier poetry into his prose ‘Book of Lost Tales', and the story of Eriol's arrival in the Lonely Isle also contains references to the song he made about Kortirion (‘Kortirion among the Trees') and the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl from ‘The Happy Mariners'.

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In ‘The Book of Lost Tales' Meril herself took the place that had been occupied in early Qenya lexicon entries by Erinti, the Vala of love, music, beauty, and purity, who likewise lived in a circle of elms guarded by fairies in Kortirion. Erinti, as previously noted, was partly a representation of Edith Tolkien, who therefore has a curious link with Galadriel.

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Generally the second element in
Withernsea
is derived from
, meaning ‘mere', with reference to the old lake there.

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Christopher Tolkien notes that his father ‘regarded the restriction of a vernacular name to this or that species within a large group of plants not easily distinguishable to the eye as the pedantry of popularizing botanists – who ought to content themselves with the Linnean names'.

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Tolkien erased the original tales and wrote new versions over them in ink soon after the war. They are discussed in the Epilogue below, together with the rest of ‘The Book of Lost Tales' composed at that time.

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Four of the King Edward's casualties had sat in front of Tolkien and Wiseman in the 1910 portrait of the school rugby XV reproduced in this volume: H. L. Higgins and H. Patterson, severely wounded in France, and John Drummond Crichton and George Frederick Cottrell, killed by shells at Cambrai and Ypres.

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Tulkas, with his laughter, yellow hair, and sporting prowess, may catch aspects of Christopher Wiseman, as Erinti does of Edith, Noldorin of Tolkien, and Amillo of his brother Hilary.

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Tolkien did not number the four epochs of this history of light, and they should not to be confused with the later, well-known division of Middle-earth's history into the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Ages.

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Evidence suggests that in the 1917 version, Beren was a mortal man (as he is subsequently in the ‘Silmarillion'), rendering the background of distrust even more acute.

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The vowel change actually (as in English) shows the impact of a suffix that has been lost, so Gnomish
orn,
‘tree', from a primitive
orně,
pluralizes as
yrn,
showing the influence of the old plural suffix
–i
in primitive
ornei.