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by Raymond Edwards


  At the other end of the spectrum France was, still, mired in the furious and historically bloody rivalries of its nineteenth century: monarchical absolutism and militaristic reaction had, for the moment, lost out to militant anticlericalism and socialist experimentalism, but its defeat was not supposed permanent; over all, the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War – Sedan, national humiliation, the Commune – was deep.

  This time was the high-water mark of colonial Europe and especially of the British Empire: across the world, a century of (relative) peace policed by the Royal Navy, and scattered garrisons of regular soldiers; at home, despite the encroachments of income tax and death duties, the great and middling estates of the nobility and gentry still gave a framework to rural life in particular, and enabled, for their owners, a leisured existence that, in retrospect, seems both idyllic and difficult to credit. It is (for instance) constantly in the background of most of Buchan’s stories, those at least that are not set in an exclusively Scottish context; yet amidst the country house visiting and the taking of shooting and fishing, there is also (for Buchan’s characters, at least, and Buchan was an excellent mimic of his adopted class) an expectation of soldiering, or colonial administration, or politics, often hand-in-hand with the Bar. Leisure did not mean inactivity, or irresponsibility.

  Yet there had been disquiet abroad for decades. A series of sharp and bloody Balkan wars had been fought between the new states of southern Europe – Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro – and the decaying Ottoman Empire, now shedding the last of its European possessions; the victors soon fell to fighting amongst themselves. In the background, uneasy about spheres of influence and national minorities, was the other old polyglot Empire, Austria-Hungary, also gradually whittled down from its previous extent, and its bumptious and expansionist rival, Russia, keen to use Slav nationalism as a vehicle for its own efforts. Russia was aligned with France, and France in turn, since 1904, had an ‘understanding’ (the famous entente cordiale) with Britain, assuming military and especially naval co-operation in the event of general European war. Austria-Hungary was backed by the new and pushful German Empire, which was busily throwing its weight around in colonial spheres calculated to tread on British toes. Arguably the 1899–1902 Boer War, which had finally brought Tolkien’s birthplace under British rule at prodigious expense in blood and treasure, was in one sense a proxy war between Germany and Britain: the Kaiser’s government had egged the Boers on to defiance, sold them great quantities of modern arms and allowed the passage of numbers of foreign ‘volunteers’ to the Boer cause through its own African colonies. Critics of British South African policy at this period, incidentally, although they are right to notice the ambition of the Colonial Office under Joseph Chamberlain and the influence wielded by monied businessmen in the Cape Colony, might do well to remember that the German Empire had, as recently as 1884, established its own vast colony in South-West Africa, which could hardly be seen as anything except a direct challenge to British hegemony in the region, and an invitation to the Boer republics to join an eventual pan-Germanic African bloc stretching from coast to coast and permanently isolating British territory in the south from its possessions elsewhere in the continent. Germany, also, had for the previous decade engaged in a gratuitous and wholly provocative programme of naval construction, building a High Seas Fleet of modern battleships whose sole purpose was to challenge British naval hegemony (Germany had a tiny coastline and comparatively negligible amounts of seaborne and colonial trade).

  There was no suspicion of imminent catastrophe, however, when Tolkien returned to Oxford in October 1913 and began a busy year of work; he attended lectures and classes by, amongst others, Sisam, Napier and William Craigie, one of the editors of the OED, who was his tutor in Old Icelandic. He was also now joined in Oxford by a junior TCBS-ite colleague, G.B. Smith, who had come up to Corpus (as Corpus Christi College was usually known) on an exhibition with the intention of reading English. He and Tolkien were now much thrown together, and became much closer friends than had ever been the case at school. He was probably Tolkien’s accomplice in an undergraduate ‘rag’ which involved hijacking a bus and driving it up Cornmarket followed by a crowd, which Tolkien then addressed. Clearly scholarship was not a wholly consuming activity.26

  Towards the end of the calendar year, Tolkien wrote to tell his TCBS friends (or at least Wiseman and Gilson – he probably told Smith in person) that he was engaged; he did not tell them Edith’s name.27 He also visited Birmingham and his old school: he was due to open a debate on behalf of the Old Boys, but was taken suddenly ill (Gilson stood in for him); the following day, 16 December, however, Tolkien was recovered enough to captain the Old Boys in a match against the school’s First XV. Perhaps he was not wholly well; the school won by a narrow margin. What were now his three closest TCBS accomplices, Wiseman, Smith and Gilson, all also played.

  In Warwick, after a short and not wholly satisfactory course of instruction from the local Catholic priest, Edith was received into the Church on 8 January 1914, the first anniversary of her reunion with Tolkien. They then celebrated a formal betrothal in the church of St Mary Immaculate in Warwick. Tolkien does not seem to have said anything further to Francis Morgan, however; Fr Francis was perhaps unaware that Edith had been under instruction in the Faith.

  The remainder of the year was devoted to work, and to social life; Tolkien was elected President of the Stapeldon Society, and continued to take an active role in its business. There were several other undergraduate societies that also occupied his evenings; he sometimes also turned out for the College XV. His days were busy with lectures: Napier, and his assistant Sisam, gave the bulk of them (on various Old English texts, and on historical grammar), but Tolkien very likely also heard Craigie on Old Norse (both texts and grammar) and, perhaps, Sir John Rhys on the Mabinogion. When, that Hilary Term, he was awarded his college’s Skeat Prize for English (‘the only prize I ever won (there was only one other competitor)’28), he spent the £5 on various verse narratives by William Morris and, to the chagrin of the awarding body, on a Welsh grammar.

  He did a good deal of painting in watercolour, especially during the vacation of Christmas 1913, both landscapes and more abstract imagistic works; most were gathered in a sketchbook he called ‘The Book of Ishness’.29 He also revised some poems written originally three or four years before. The penultimate year of a man’s undergraduate degree (typically the second of his time in Oxford, although in this case the third) was, and perhaps still is, a time often spent in comparative diversion, even for someone like Tolkien who was hoping for an academic career: the efforts of Honour Moderations were past, and the grand push of Final Schools a year away (which, for a man barely twenty, seems a lifetime), and moreover one was now thoroughly comfortable at Oxford, and could expand into its manifold comforts and sociabilities. At the start of the Long (summer) Vacation, Tolkien went to visit Edith in Warwick.

  On 28 June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, made a state visit to Sarajevo, capital of the newly acquired imperial province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Austrians had rashly annexed only six years beforehand. It was a hotbed of Serbian nationalism; one especially virulent group, the Black Hand, consisted of Bosnian Serbs vowed to expel the Austrians by violence, and sponsored by Serbian military intelligence. They took the opportunity of Franz Ferdinand’s visit to try to kill him. A bomb attack failed, only wounding bystanders; the Archduke and his wife, after he had given his speech at the Town Hall, insisted on visiting the wounded. On their way back from the hospital, their car took a wrong turning, then stalled outside a delicatessen where one of the would-be assassins, a nineteen-year-old named Gavrilo Princip, had stopped for a bun. Princip emerged, saw the car, and shot them both. They died within minutes, and Europe, bound tight with alliances and elaborately programmed mobilizations dictated by railway timetables, was heading fast for war.

  Chapter 3 – War

  I – A mythology fo
r England

  On 4 August 1914, Britain entered the First World War, in defence of Belgian neutrality, which Germany had breached; Britain found herself ranged alongside France and Russia against the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. It looked fair to become a war on a vast scale; Britain’s small wholly professional army was, in this contest between great masses of European conscripts, quite outmatched (in numbers anyway, although decidedly not in ability to fight), and the government, in the person of the Minister for War, Lord Kitchener, called for volunteers to enlist. Tens of thousands did so at once. Many of Tolkien’s friends and contemporaries soon joined up to fight. His schoolfriend T.K. Barnsley’s father, Sir John Barnsley, held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorials, and was tasked by the city of Birmingham to raise a battalion of volunteers;1 particular appeal was made to old boys of King Edward’s. Barnsley got enough men for three battalions, which became the 14th, 15th and 16th battalions of the Royal Warwicks. Amongst the volunteers were T.K. Barnsley, R.S. Payton and Hilary Tolkien.

  Ronald however did not join up, but planned to complete the last year of his degree. This was not from a lack of patriotic feeling, or objection to the war or its aims, although Tolkien refused to join in the widespread vilifying of German culture, which he revered as the fountain-head of philology and as bearer of the northern spirit. Nor did he change his German surname, unlike many from King George V (who now adopted the unexampled ‘Windsor’) and Prince Louis of Battenberg (subsequently ‘Mountbatten’) downwards. He may have taken his lead from Joseph Wright, who was so far out of sympathy with anti-Germanism that he tried to start a German-language lending library for wounded German prisoners held in Oxford. But Tolkien was a poor man, engaged to be married and without any obvious prospects except what his mind and learning could bring him. For him, his future required getting a good degree; and so he planned to return to Oxford in October. The war could wait. The day after war was declared, he left for a fortnight’s walking holiday in Cornwall with Fr Vincent Reade, whose mother lived locally. Tolkien was overwhelmingly impressed by the rugged coast, and made numerous sketches of the cliffs and coves and bays. The trip over, the last week of August saw him in Warwick again, with Edith.

  Some time in September, he went to stay with his aunt, Jane Neave, at her farm at Gedling in Nottinghamshire.2 On 24 September 1914, he wrote a poem, called ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’. This was the first real text of what was to become his life’s work, the elaboration of a world-mythology in which his invented languages could be at home. For ease of reference, I refer to this whole body of writing as Tolkien’s legendarium.3 Tolkien later located in this time what he considered a fundamental insight, that language and legend were fundamentally correlated: any language ‘depends on the legends which it conveys’, which supply the semantic resonance essential for poetically concentrated meaning, just as much as a legend, or body of story, presupposes a language in which it is at home, and out of which, in some senses, it has grown; but these two things, language and legend, are organically linked and may not be separated. Their respective aesthetics are in fact interdependent; any mythology in translation is at once impoverished, although one that retains its original names will preserve at least something.4

  Amongst the Old English poems Tolkien read at Oxford was Crist, a ragbag collection of religious verse, much of it dull stuff, found in the Exeter Book manuscript. Its first section is a series of ‘Advent lyrics’, based on the ‘O Antiphons’ of that season. Amongst them, glossing the antiphon O Oriens (‘O Rising Sun, you are the splendour of eternal life and the sun of justice. O come and enlighten those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death’),5 is this couplet:

  Éalá Éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended

  Hail, Éarendel, brightest of angels / over middle-earth sent to men

  The word or name éarendel intrigued Tolkien. According to the glossaries, it was a star or planet, perhaps Venus the morning star, or Rigel in Orion; here, it perhaps refers to John the Baptist as herald of Christ, the Sun of Justice.6 But it was the form of the word that fascinated Tolkien: it was, he thought, both like other Old English words and yet, somehow, of a different and nobler style. Tolkien made a private connexion between this and the mysterious figure of Wade, a legendary voyager in his ship Wingelot; the details of his adventures were long lost.

  In his poem, he tried to explore what the word might have actually meant: it is the name of a mariner who pilots his ship across the sky from the west to the light of dawn, hearing the joys and sorrows of the men of earth betweentimes. It is an early work, but in its way remarkable for what it tries to do. We might see a hint of it, if no more, in a passage from Ker’s Dark Ages commenting on the unaffected mixture of Celtic legend with phrases and themes from scripture: ‘So one finds the mystery of Celtic stories illustrated with citations from the Bible; as where in the Arthurian legends the mysterious delivery of captives in an unearthly place beyond the Bridge of Dread is celebrated…with the verses of a spiritual song: “Gawain turned and looked back; and behold, across the river, all the streets of the place were filled with men and women, rejoicing and singing in carol-wise: The people that sat in darkness have beheld a great light.”’7 ‘Sat’ (from the Breviary) for the usual ‘walked’ may have fed into Tolkien’s image of forsaken and imprisoned exiles.

  One of Tolkien’s great laments was the absence of any specifically English body of myth and legend, comparable to that collected and synthesized for Germany by Jacob Grimm. First the Norman Conquest, then early industrialization had destroyed beyond recovery all but unmeaning fragments of the great body of legend and heroic story once native to England. By the time anyone thought to write any of it down, most of it had been forgotten. All that was left was ‘impoverished chapbook stuff’8. No English brothers Grimm came in time; and even if they had, their task would have been immeasurably harder than the Grimms’ was. The odd éarendel couplet in Crist was, Tolkien alleged, one of the few surviving fragments, but almost wholly without a context. What Tolkien was doing here, and what he continued to do throughout his life as a writer, was a form of philological enquiry: he examined the surviving evidence (for now-lost English legends, or fragments of lost or ‘invented’ languages) and tried to reconstruct what might have lain behind them: the story of Eärendil as it eventually developed (the great mariner who carries a Silmaril into the Uttermost West, to plead for the exiled men and elves in their dark oppression, and who is translated to the heavens as a new star, a sign of hope) is, we might say, the ‘asterisk reality’ that Tolkien thought best explained the name éarendel as it appeared in Old English, and in some few other old northern contexts. It is fair to note, however, that at least one later version of the poem recast it in terms of classical mythology, with Earendel replaced by Phosphorus, the Greek name for the morning star. It is perhaps simplistic, then, to see this as the ‘start of the legendarium’ in any but an adventitious sense; there was no inevitable progression from here as there was, say, from later tales; but the later tales were able retrospectively to incorporate Earendel with an ease that makes it in hindsight seem inevitable.

  As the long vacation came to its end, Tolkien visited Birmingham; he stayed with Francis Morgan at the Oratory for the last Sunday before term, 4 October 1914.9 Then it was time to begin another academic year.

  II – Enlistment deferred

  On returning to Oxford, Tolkien moved into a rented house with an undergraduate friend, Colin Cullis, whose health had kept him out of the Army. His college was much reduced by enlistment: only seventy-five undergraduates had come up that term. In their place, part of Exeter was now a barrack for the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and some gunners. The University in wartime was a depleted body; various colleges leased out their buildings to one branch or another of the armed forces, and several University buildings (such as the Examination Schools) were taken over for military use. The usual round of lectures resumed,
but in a hole-in-the-corner type of way, with much rescheduling and relocation to out-of-the-way rooms. He now had weekly tutorials with Sisam, and went to lectures by Napier, Craigie and Sir Walter Raleigh. Tolkien was, for a while at least, overcome by remorse and guilt at his decision to resume his degree: ‘It is awful. I really don’t think I shall be able to go on: work seems impossible.’10

  He was saved from despair when he discovered he could train with the University OTC whilst completing his degree; this would to some extent replace the basic training he would otherwise have to complete on enlisting. It would also make it very probable he would be granted an officer’s commission, rather than (like his brother Hilary) enlisting in the ranks. These distinctions are not trivial even today; in 1914, they were of great moment.11 Tolkien henceforth spent seven hours a week drilling in the University Parks, as well as listening to lectures on military life, and taking classes on map-reading and signalling. This last was to become Tolkien’s especial military skill. The expenditure of time may seem a heavy one; but Tolkien found that regular physical activity gave him more energy, and helped him avoid the endemic lethargy he had come to associate with term-time.

 

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