Tolkien and the Great War

On the day of the Gallipoli landings, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien to say that he had now read his poems, which Gilson had sent on to him a couple of weeks before. G. B. Smith had commended the verses, but until he saw them for himself Wiseman was far from convinced that his old friend from the Great Twin Brethren had now become a poet. ‘I can’t think where you get all your amazing words from,’ he wrote. ‘The Man in the Moon’ he called ‘magnificently gaudy’ and thought that ‘Two Trees’ was quite the best poem he had read in ages. Wiseman had even gone so far as to start composing an accompaniment to ‘Woodsunshine’ for two violins, cello, and bassoon. Plucking a simile from the world at war, he described the ending of another poem, ‘Copernicus and Ptolemy’, as being ‘rather like a systematic and well thought out bombardment with asphyxiating bombs’. Tolkien’s poems had astonished him, he said. ‘They burst on me like a bolt from the blue.’

FOUR The shores of Faërie

April 1915, bringing the Great War’s first spring, could have been ‘the cruellest month’ T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote The Waste Land: halcyon weather, everywhere the stirrings of life, and enervating horror as news and rumour told of thousands of young men dying on all fronts. Closer to home, Zeppelins struck the Essex coast just where the Anglo-Saxon earl Beorhtnoth and his household troop had been defeated by Viking raiders almost ten centuries before. Tolkien, who was now studying that earlier clash between the continental Teutons and their island cousins in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, was already familiar with the lines uttered by one of Beorhtnoth’s retainers as fortune turned against the English:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.

As Tolkien later translated it: ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’ Ancient it might be, but this summation of the old Northern heroic code answered eloquently to the needs of Tolkien’s day. It contains the awareness that death may come, but it focuses doggedly on achieving the most with what strength remains: it had more to commend it, in terms of personal and strategic morale, than the self-sacrificial and quasi-mystical tone of Rupert Brooke’s already-famous The Soldier, which implied that a soldier’s worth to his nation was greater in death than life:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

G.B. Smith admired Brooke’s poetry and thought Tolkien should read it, but the poems Tolkien wrote when he settled back in at 59 St John Street at the end of the month could hardly have been more different. On Tuesday 27 April he set to work on two ‘fairy’ pieces, finishing them the next day. One of these, ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, is a 65-line love poem to Edith. Hauntingly, it suggests that when they first met they had already known each other in dreams:

You and me – we know that land

And often have been there

In the long old days, old nursery days,

A dark child and a fair.

Was it down the paths of firelight dreams

In winter cold and white,

Or in the blue-spun twilit hours

Of little early tucked-up beds

In drowsy summer night,

That You and I got lost in Sleep

And met each other there –

Your dark hair on your white nightgown,

And mine was tangled fair?

The poem recalls the two dreamers arriving at a strange and mystical cottage whose windows look towards the sea. Of course, this is quite unlike the urban setting in which he and Edith had actually come to know each other. It was an expression of tastes that had responded so strongly to Sarehole, Rednal, and holidays on the coast, or that had been shaped by those places. But already Tolkien was being pulled in opposite directions, towards nostalgic, rustic beauty and also towards unknown, untamed sublimity. Curiously, the activities of the other dreaming children at the Cottage of Lost Play hint at Tolkien’s world-building urges, for while some dance and sing and play, others lay ‘plans / To build them houses, fairy towns, / Or dwellings in the trees’.

A debt is surely owed to Peter Pan’s Neverland. Tolkien had seen J. M. Barrie’s masterpiece at the theatre as an eighteen-year-old in 1910, writing afterwards: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live.’ This was a play aimed squarely at an orphan’s heart, featuring a cast of children severed from their mothers by distance or death. A chiaroscuro by turns sentimental and cynical, playful and deadly serious, Peter Pan took a rapier to mortality itself – its hero a boy who refuses to grow up and who declares that ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

But Tolkien’s idyll, for all its carefree joy, is lost in the past. Time has reasserted itself, to the grief and bewilderment of the dreamers.

And why it was Tomorrow came,

And with his grey hand led us back;

And why we never found the same

Old cottage, or the magic track

That leads between a silver sea

And those old shores and gardens fair

Where all things are, that ever were –

We know not, You and Me.

The companion piece Tolkien wrote at the same time, ‘Goblin Feet’, finds us on a similar magic track surrounded by a twilight hum of bats and beetles and sighing leaves. A procession of fairy-folk approaches and the poem slips into an ecstatic sequence of exclamations.

O! the lights: O! the gleams: O! the little tinkly sounds:

O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes:

O! the echo of their feet – of their little happy feet:

O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.

Yet ‘Goblin Feet’ turns in an instant from rising joy to loss and sadness, capturing once again a very Tolkienian yearning. The mortal onlooker wants to pursue the happy band, or rather he feels compelled to do so; but no sooner is the thought formed than the troop disappears around a bend.

I must follow in their train

Down the crooked fairy lane

Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,

And where silverly they sing

In a moving moonlit ring

All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on.

They are fading round the turn

Where the glow-worms palely burn

And the echo of their padding feet is dying!

O! it’s knocking at my heart –

Let me go! O! let me start!

For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!

O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!

O! the music of their feet – of their dancing goblin feet!

O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

Enchantment, as we know from fairy-tale tradition, tends to slip away from envious eyes and possessive fingers – though there is no moral judgement implied in ‘Goblin Feet’. Faërie and the mortal yearning it evokes seem two sides of a single coin, a fact of life.

In a third, slighter, piece that followed on 29 and 30 April, Tolkien pushed the idea of faëry exclusiveness further. ‘Tinfang Warble’ is a short carol, barely more than a sound-experiment, perhaps written to be set to music, with its echo (‘O the hoot! O the hoot!’) of the exclamatory chorus of ‘Goblin Feet’. In part, the figure of Tinfang Warble is descended in literary tradition from Pan, the piper-god of nature; in part, he comes from a long line of shepherds in pastoral verse, except he has no flock. Now the faëry performance lacks even the communal impulse of the earlier poem’s marching band. It is either put on for the benefit of a single glimmering star, or it is entirely solipsistic.

Dancing all alone,

Hopping on a stone,

Flitting like a faun,

In the twilight on the lawn,

And his name is Tinfang Warble!

The first star has shown

And its lamp is blown

To a flame of flickering blue.

He pipes not to me,

He pipes not to thee,

He whistles for none of you.

Tinfang Warble is a wisp of a figure, barely glimpsed. Meanwhile everything about the rather sugar-spun and Victorianesque marching figures of ‘Goblin Feet’ is miniature; the word ‘little’ becomes a tinkling refrain. Tolkien was clearly tailoring these poems for Edith, whom he would habitually address as ‘little one’ and whose home he called a ‘little house’. Late in life he declared of ‘Goblin Feet’ – with perhaps a hint of self-parody – ‘I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.’ Nevertheless, although these 1915 ‘leprechauns’ have almost nothing in common with the Eldar of Tolkien’s mature work, they represent (with the distant exception of 1910’s ‘Wood-sunshine’) the first irruption of Faërie into Tolkien’s writings. In fact the idea that ‘fairies’ or Elves were physically slight persisted for some years in his mythology, which never shed the idea that they fade into evanescence as the dominion of mortals grows stronger.

Tolkien’s April 1915 poems were not especially innovatory in their use of fantasy landscapes and figures; indeed they drew on the imagery and ideas of the fairy tradition in English literature. Since the Reformation, Faërie had undergone major revolutions in the hands of Spenser, Shakespeare, the Puritans, the Victorians, and most recently J. M. Barrie. Its denizens had been noble, mischievous, helpful, devilish; tiny, tall; grossly physical or ethereal and beautiful; sylvan, subterranean, or sea-dwelling; utterly remote or constantly intruding in human affairs; allies of the aristocracy or friends of the labouring poor. This long tradition had left the words elf, gnome, and fay/fairy with diverse and sometimes contradictory associations. Small wonder that Christopher Wiseman was confused by ‘Wood-sunshine’ and (as he confessed to Tolkien) ‘mistook elves for gnomes, with bigger heads than bodies’.

In ‘Goblin Feet’, goblins and gnomes are interchangeable, as they were in the ‘Curdie’ books of George MacDonald, which Tolkien had loved as a child (‘a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins’). Initially, Tolkien’s Qenya lexicon conflated them as well and related them to the elvish word for ‘mole’, evidently because Tolkien was thinking of Paracelsus’ gnomus, an elemental creature that moves through earth as a fish swims in water. Very soon, however, he assigned the terms goblin and gnome to members of distinct races at daggers drawn. He used gnome (Greek gnōmē, ‘thought, intelligence’) for a member of an Elf-kindred who embody a profound scientific and artistic understanding of the natural world from gemcraft to phonology: its Qenya equivalent was noldo, related to the word for ‘to know’. Thanks to the later British fad for ornamental garden gnomes (not so named until 1938), gnome is now liable to raise a smirk, and Tolkien eventually abandoned it.

Yet even in 1915 fairy was a problematic term: too generic, and with increasingly diverse connotations. Tolkien’s old King Edward’s schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, soon warned him that the title he proposed for his volume of verse, The Trumpets of Faërie (after a poem written in the summer), was ‘a little precious’: the word faërie had become ‘rather spoiled of late’. Reynolds was thinking, perhaps, not of recent trends in fairy writing, but of the use of fairy to mean ‘homosexual’, which dated from the mid-1890s.

For now, though, the fate of the word was not yet sealed, and Tolkien stuck pugnaciously to it. He was not alone: Robert Graves entitled his 1917 collection Fairies and Fusiliers, with no pun apparently intended. Great War soldiers were weaned on Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale anthologies and original stories such as George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and Faërie’s stock had surged with the success of Peter Pan, a story of adventure and eternal youth that now had additional relevance for boys on the threshold of manhood facing battle. Tinfang Warble had a contemporary visual counterpart in a painting that found a mass-market in Kitchener’s Army. Eleanor Canziani’s Piper of Dreams, which proved to be the belated swansong of the Victorian fairy-painting tradition, depicts a boy sitting alone in a springtime wood playing to a half-seen flight of fairies. Reproduced by the Medici Society in 1915, it sold an unprecedented 250,000 copies before the year was out. In the trenches, The Piper of Dreams became, in one appraisal, ‘a sort of talisman’.

A more cynical view is that ‘the war called up the fairies. Like other idle consumers, they were forced into essential war-work.’ A 1917 stage play had ‘Fairy voices calling, Britain needs your aid’. Occasionally, soldiers’ taste for the supernatural might be used to perk up an otherwise dull and arduous training exercise, as Rob Gilson discovered on one bitterly cold battalion field day: ‘There was a fantastic “scheme” involving a Witch-Doctor who was supposed to be performing incantations in Madingley Church. C and D Companies represented a flying column sent from a force to the West to capture the wizard.’ On the whole, however, the fairies were spared from the recruitment drive and wizards were relieved from military manoeuvres. Faërie still entered the lives of soldiers, but it was left to work on the imagination in a more traditional and indefinable way. Though George MacDonald had urged against attempts to pin down the meaning of fairy-tale, declaring ‘I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being’, Tolkien made the attempt twenty-four years later in his paper ‘On Fairy-stories’, in which he maintained that Faërie provided the means of recovery, escape, and consolation. The rubric may be illustrated by applying it to the Great War, when Faërie allowed the soldier to recover a sense of beauty and wonder, escape mentally from the ills confining him, and find consolation for the losses afflicting him – even for the loss of a paradise he has never known except in the imagination.

To brighten up trench dugouts, one philanthropist sent specially illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Land of Nod’, with its half-haunting, half-alluring version of fairyland. To raise money for orphans of the war at sea, a Navy Book of Fairy Tales was published in which Admiral Sir John Jellicoe noted that ‘Unhappily a great many of our sailors and marines (unlike the more fortunate fairies) do get killed in the process of killing the giant.’ Faërie as a version of Olde England could evoke home or childhood and inspire patriotism, while Faërie as the land of the dead or the ever-young could suggest an afterlife less austere and remote than the Judaeo-Christian heaven.

Tolkien’s new poems, read as the imaginings of a young man on the brink of wartime military service, seem poignantly wistful. He was facing the relinquishment of long-cherished hopes. His undergraduate education was coming to its end in a matter of weeks, but the ever-lengthening war had taken away any immediate chance of settling down with Edith. Hopes of an academic career must be put on hold. As rumour filtered back from the front line, it was growing increasingly clear too that (to paraphrase the famous subtitle of The Hobbit) he could not go there and be sure of coming back again.

The rush of creativity was not over, but finally Tolkien adopted a quite different register for ‘Kôr’, a sonnet of sublimity and grandeur. Kôr was the name of a city in Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the tale of Ayesha, a woman blessed and cursed with apparently eternal youth. Haggard had been a favourite in the King Edward’s library; during the mock school strike of 1911 the sub-librarians called for a ban on ‘Henty, Haggard, School Tales, etc…that can be read out in one breath’. (The following year Tolkien had presented the school library with another Haggardesque ‘lost race’ yarn, The Lost Explorers by Alexander Macdonald. ) Tolkien’s 30 April poem was subtitled ‘In a City Lost and Dead’, and indeed Haggard’s Kôr is also deserted, the enduring memorial to a great civilization that flourished six thousand years before modern adventurers stumble upon it, but now is utterly lost to memory:

I know not how I am to describe what we saw, magnificent as it was even in its ruin, almost beyond the power of realisation. Court upon dim court, row upon row of mighty pillars – some of them (especially at the gateways) sculptured from pedestal to capital – space upon space of empty chambers that spoke more eloquently to the imagination than any crowded streets. And over all, the dead silence of the dead, the sense of utter loneliness, and the brooding spirit of the Past! How beautiful it was, and yet how drear! We did not dare to speak aloud.

Both men’s versions of Kôr are inhabited only by shadows and stone; but whereas Haggard’s is seen, with overt symbolism, under the changeful Moon, Tolkien’s city basks under the steadily blazing Sun.

A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned

Stands gazing out across an azure sea

Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground

Impearled as ‘gainst a floor of porphyry

Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;

And tawny shadows fingered long are made

In fretted bars upon their ivory walls

By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade

Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault

With shaft and capital of black basalt.

There slow forgotten days for ever reap

The silent shadows counting out rich hours;

And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers

White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.

The shift is significant. Haggard’s narrator sees the city as a symbol of transience, a memento mori, a mockery of its builders’ hubristic ambition: Tolkien holds the grandeur and the emptiness of his Kôr in a fine balance. Even empty, his city stands as an enduring tribute to its unnamed inhabitants – a mood that anticipates Moria in The Lord of the Rings. Life, though now absent from Kôr, retains its significance. Nihilism is replaced by a consolatory vision.

Tolkien’s Kôr differs from Haggard’s in other, more tangible ways. It is embattled and built atop a vast black hill, and it stands by the sea, recalling a painting he had made earlier in 1915: the mysteriously named Tanaqui. It is clear that Tolkien already had his own vision of a city quite distinct from Haggard’s; but his use of the name ‘Kôr’ now, instead of ‘Tanaqui’, may be seen as a direct challenge to Haggard’s despairing view of mortality, memory, and meaning.

The city of Kôr appears in the Qenya lexicon too, again situated on a shoreland height. Here, though, a more important feature cuts it well and truly adrift from Haggard. Tolkien’s Kôr is located not in Africa but in Faërie: it is ‘the ancient town built above the rocks of Eldamar, whence the fairies marched into the world’. Other early entries give the words inwë for ‘fairy’ and elda for ‘beach-fay or Solosimpë (shore-piper)’. Eldamar, Tolkien wrote, is ‘the rocky beach in Western Inwinóre (Faëry), whence the Solosimpeli have danced along the beaches of the world. Upon this rock was the white town built called Kor, whence the fairies came to teach men song and holiness.’ In other words, Eldamar is the ‘fairy sand’ of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’. The ‘rampart-crowned’ city, superhuman in scale, cannot, however, be the work of fairies like J. M. Barrie’s Tinkerbell. Barrie and his Victorian predecessors were no more than a starting point for Tolkien, as Haggard had been. These are fairies prone to dancing on beaches, yet not only capable of building enduring monuments but also laden with a spiritual mission. They span the great divide between innocence and responsibility.

But why is Kôr ‘a City Lost and Dead’ in the poem? The answer appears in notes Tolkien added to his little prose outline about Éarendel’s Atlantic voyagings, an outline that clearly preceded Tolkien’s great Adamic works of name-giving. It had referred to a ‘golden city’ somewhere at the back of the West Wind. Now he added: ‘The golden city was Kôr and [Eärendel] had caught the music of the Solosimpë, and returns to find it, only to find that the fairies have departed from Eldamar.’ Kôr, in other words, was left empty by the Elves when they ‘marched into the world’.

It is a melancholy glimmer of story that, some years later, would form a climactic part of Tolkien’s mythological epic. Perhaps the idea owed something to the fact that, in 1915, his familiar haunts were virtually emptied of his peers, who were heading across the sea to fight. If so, Tolkien’s vision encapsulated mythological reconstructions and contemporary observation in one multi-faceted symbol.

If these April poems were a sudden spring bloom, then the Qenya Lexicon was root, stock, and bough. It is impossible, and perhaps meaningless, to give exact dates of composition for the lexicon, which was a work in progress during much of 1915 and accrued new words in no discernible order. It was a painstaking and time-consuming labour, and must have been set aside as Schools drew near. On 10 May, though, Tolkien was still musing on his mythology and painted a picture entitled The Shores of Faëry showing the white town of Kôr on its black rock, framed by trees from which the Moon and Sun hang like fruit.

From this, Tolkien had to turn to less enticing work: the much-neglected preparation for the two Schools papers he would rather not have had to sit at all. There was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Henry IV; and other ‘modern’ literature such as the works of Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson, none of which suited his maverick taste.* His preparation for these papers was perfunctory and saw the future Oxford professor of English borrowing introductions to Dryden and Keats from the library, as well as primers in Shakespeare and poetry, as late as the eve of his first paper.

Anxiety about his examinations was dwarfed by the fear of what lay beyond. Writing from Penmaenmawr at the start of June, G. B. Smith reassured him that the war would be over in a matter of months now that Italy had thrown its weight behind Britain and France. Smith, who shared his friend’s interest in the language and myth of Wales and had requested he send out a Welsh grammar, added: ‘Don’t worry about Schools, and don’t worry yourself about coming here.’ Four weeks would be quite enough time to sort out a place for Tolkien in the same battalion.

On Thursday 10 June, Tolkien started his exams. Just eight men and seventeen women in the whole university were left to endure the anticlimactic flurry of summing up three years’ work on English language and literature (or slightly less in Tolkien’s case) in ten sittings. In the middle of the ordeal, Smith wrote saying that Colonel Stainforth, his commanding officer (or ‘CO’), seemed certain to find space in the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers for Tolkien if he would write requesting a place. Schools finished the next week and Tolkien’s undergraduate life was behind him. Now for enlistment, training, and war.

Smith had sent a note on ‘matters Martian’ – advice on what kit to buy together with a facetious lexicon explaining the application procedure. The most important entry in Smith’s Concise Military Dictionary ran: ‘Worry: The thing to be avoided. Keep perfectly calm, and everything will settle itself.’ The policy worked for GBS, who was now a lieutenant. From Brough Hall, near Catterick Bridge in Yorkshire, where the Salford Pals had moved on midsummer’s day, Smith sent the reassuring suggestion, ‘Do not be afraid to bring a book or two, and a few paints, but let them be portable.’ Smith was now only a few miles to the north of Rob Gilson and the Cambridgeshires, who had marched out of their home town to Lindrick Camp near Fountains Abbey on 19 June. Gilson’s letters had dried up, however, and he was probably unaware of their proximity.