Tolkien and the Great War

Tolkien was at last catching up with his friends and getting into step with this world in motion, yielding to the pressures he had resisted for almost a year. Unsurprisingly, he wasted no time and, in his own words, ‘bolted’ into the army. On 28 June he applied at the Oxford recruiting office for a temporary officer’s commission ‘for the duration of the war’. Captain Whatley of the university OTC sponsored his application and a Royal Army Medical Corps officer pronounced him fit. The form pointed out that there were no guarantees of appointment to any particular unit, but noting Tolkien’s preference a military pen-pusher scrawled ‘19/Lancs Fusiliers’ in the top corner.

Tolkien packed up the ‘Johnner’, his digs in St John Street, and bade farewell to Oxford, perhaps forever. When the English School results were issued, on Friday 2 July, he knew that his commitment to philology had been vindicated and that if he survived the war he would be able to pursue his academic ambitions. Alongside two women and an American Yale scholar, he had achieved First Class Honours. On Saturday the results were published in The Times and the next day Smith sent congratulations on ‘one of the highest distinctions an Englishman can obtain’. He again urged Tolkien to write to Colonel Stainforth.

After some time with Edith in Warwick, Tolkien went to Birmingham, where he spent part of the next three weeks with his maternal aunt, May Incledon, and her husband Walter, in Barnt Green, just beyond the southern limits of Birmingham – a house he associated with childhood security and early language games with his cousins Marjorie and Mary. Travelling on foot and riding the bus between Edgbaston and Moseley, he was consumed one day in thoughts of his mythology and, in his Book of Ishness, he wrote out a poem on 8-9 July entitled ‘The Shores of Faëry’ opposite his May painting of the same name. It describes the setting of Kôr. Eärendel makes an appearance and, for the first time outside the Qenya lexicon, essential and permanent features of the legendarium are named: the Two Trees, the mountain of Taniquetil, and the land of Valinor.

East of the Moon

West of the Sun

There stands a lonely hill

Its feet are in the pale green Sea

Its towers are white & still

Beyond Taniquetil in Valinor

No stars come there but one alone

That hunted with the Moon

For there the Two Trees naked grow

That bear Night’s silver bloom;

That bear the globed fruit of Noon

In Valinor.

There are the Shores of Faery

With their moonlit pebbled Strand

Whose foam is silver music

On the opalescent floor

Beyond the great sea-shadows

On the margent of the Sand

That stretches on for ever

From the golden feet of Kôr

Beyond Taniquetil

In Valinor.

O West of the Sun, East of the Moon

Lies the Haven of the Star

The white tower of the Wanderer,

And the rock of Eglamar,

Where Vingelot is harboured

While Earendel looks afar

On the magic and the wonder

‘Tween here and Eglamar

Out, out beyond Taniquetil

In Valinor – afar.

‘The Shores of Faëry’ is pivotal. Tolkien intended to make it the first part of a ‘Lay of Eärendel’ that would fully integrate the mariner into his embryonic invented world. He noted on a later copy that this was the ‘first poem of my mythology’. The key step forward was that here Tolkien finally fused language and mythology in literary art: the fusion that was to become the wellspring and hallmark of his creative life.

‘It was just as the 1914 War burst on me,’ Tolkien wrote later, ‘that I made the discovery that “legends” depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the “legends” which it conveys by tradition.’ The discovery offered a new life for his creation: ‘So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing “legends” of the same “taste”.’

He had for years been unable to reconcile the scientific rigour he applied in the strictly linguistic aspects of philology with his taste for the otherworldly, the dragon-inhabited, and the sublime that appeared in ancient literatures. It was as an undergraduate, he later said, that ‘thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests – opposite poles of science and romance – but integrally related.’

The Kalevala had shown that myth-making could play a part in the revival of a language and a national culture, but it may be that there was a more immediate catalyst. During the Great War, a similar process took place on a vast scale, quite impromptu. For the first time in history, most soldiers were literate, but more than ever before they were kept in the dark. They made up for this with opinion and rumour, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastical: stories about a German corpserendering works, a crucified Canadian soldier, and the troglodytic wild men of No Man’s Land who, the story went, were deserters from both sides. First World War history is often concerned with assessing the truth and impact of the seemingly more plausible ‘myths’ that have arisen from it: the ‘lions led by donkeys’, or the ‘rape of Belgium’. From the outset there were also myths of supernatural intercession. Exhausted British troops in retreat from Mons had apparently seen an angel astride a white horse brandishing a flaming sword; or a troop of heavenly archers; or three angels in the sky. The ‘Angels of Mons’ had forbidden the German advance, it was said. The incident had originated as a piece of fiction, ‘The Bowmen’ by Arthur Machen, in which the English archers of Agincourt return to fight the advancing Germans of 1914; but it had quickly assumed the authority of fact. At the same time that the war produced myths, the vast outpouring of Great War letters, diaries, and poetry enriched the languages of Europe with new words, phrases, and even registers, subtly altering and defining the perceptions of national character that were so important to the patriotic effort. All this was a living example of the interrelationship between language and myth.

If the early conception of an undying land owes something to Peter Pan, as the child’s dream-world of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’ seems to have done, Tolkien’s Valinor was less haphazard than Neverland, a version of Faërie that Barrie had filched audaciously from every popular children’s bedtime genre, with pirates and mermaids, Red Indians, crocodiles, and pixies. Yet Valinor was broader still in its embrace. Here the Elves lived side by side with the gods, and here mortal souls went after death to be judged and apportioned torment, twilit wandering, or Elysian joy.

The Qenya lexicon translates Valinor as ‘Asgard’, the ‘home of the gods’ where the Norsemen feasted after they had been slain in battle. Tolkien was undoubtedly developing the conceit that the Germanic Vikings modelled their mythical Asgard on the ‘true’ myth of Valinor. In place of the Norse Æsir, or gods, are the Valar.

In the same spirit, ‘The Shores of Faëry’ purports to show a glimpse of the truth behind a Germanic tradition as fragmentary and enigmatic as Éarendel’s. The mariner’s ship in ‘The Shores of Faëry’ is called Vingelot (or Wingelot, Wingilot), which the lexicon explains is the Qenya for ‘foamflower’. But Tolkien chose the name ‘to resemble and “explain” the name of Wade’s boat Guingelot’, as he later wrote. Wade, like Éarendel, crops up all over Germanic legend, as a hero associated with the sea, as the son of a king and a merwoman, and as the father of the hero Wayland or Völund. The name of his vessel would have been lost to history but for an annotation that a sixteenth-century antiquarian had made in his edition of Chaucer: ‘Concerning Wade and his boat Guingelot, as also his strange exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I passe it over.’ Tolkien, having read the tantalizing note, now aimed to recreate the ‘long and fabulous’ story. The great German linguist and folklorist Jakob Grimm (mentioning Wade in almost the same breath as Éarendel) had argued that Guingelot ought to be ascribed instead to Völund, who ‘timbered a boat out of the trunk of a tree, and sailed over seas’, and who ‘forged for himself a winged garment, and took his flight through the air’. Out of this tangle of names and associations, Tolkien had begun to construct a story of singular clarity.

On Sunday 11 July Christopher Wiseman wrote to Tolkien announcing that he was going to sea. In June he had seen a Royal Navy recruiting advertisement saying that mathematicians were wanted as instructors; now he would soon be off to Greenwich to learn basic navigation ‘and the meaning of those mysterious words port, and starboard’. Wiseman proclaimed himself thoroughly jealous of Tolkien’s First – he himself had only achieved the grade of senior optime, the equivalent of a second-class: ‘I am now the only one to have disgraced the TCBS,’ he said. ‘I have written begging for mercy…’

Behind the glib tone, Wiseman was seriously missing his friends. He wished they could get together for a whole fortnight for once. It was manifestly impossible. Smith had written to him repeatedly about an unwelcome sense of growing up. ‘I don’t know whether it is only the additional weight of his moustache, but I presume there must be something in it,’ Wiseman commented. He too felt that they were all being pitched into maturity, Gilson and Tolkien even faster than Smith and himself. ‘It seems to proceed by a realization of one’s minuteness and impotence,’ he mused disconsolately. ‘One begins to fail for the first time, and to see the driving power necessary to force one’s stamp on the world.’

When Wiseman’s letter came, Tolkien was freshly and painfully alive to this process of diminution. On Friday 9 July the War Office had written to tell him he was a second lieutenant with effect from the following Thursday. Kitchener’s latest recruit also received a printed calligraphic letter addressed ‘To our trusty and well-beloved J.R.R. Tolkien[,] Greeting,’ and signed by King George, confirming the appointment and outlining his duties of command and service. But Tolkien’s plans had gone awry. ‘You have been posted to the 13th Service Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers,’ the War Office letter announced.

When Smith heard, four days later, he wrote from Yorkshire, ‘I am simply bowled over by your horrible news.’ He blamed himself for not slowing Tolkien down in his headlong rush to enlist. Somewhat unconvincingly, he said the appointment might be a mistake, or short-term; but as things turned out he was right to guess that Tolkien would be in less danger in the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers than in the 19th.

Tolkien was not going to rendezvous with the 13th straight away. First he had to take an officers’ course in Bedford. He received the regulation £50 allowance for uniform and other kit. Smith had outlined his needs in his discourse on ‘matters Martian’: a canvas bed, pillow, sleeping-bag and blankets; a bath-and wash-stand, a steel shaving mirror and a soap-box; tent-pole hooks and perhaps a ground-sheet. All this would have to fit in a large canvas kit-bag. In addition he should equip himself with two or three pairs of boots and a pair of shoes; a decent watch; a Sam Browne belt, mackintosh, light haversack and waterbottle; and, most expensive of all, binoculars and prismatic compasses. ‘All else seems to me unnecessary,’ Smith had said. ‘My table and chairs I intend to be soap-boxes bought on the spot, also I mean to buy an honest tin bucket.’ Creature comforts, it was clear, were going to be few and far between.

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