The original Éarendel verses were read to the Exeter College Essay Society in November 1914; Tolkien wrote, perhaps for G.B. Smith, a brief context for the poem, describing Éarendel’s voyaging through various climes and adventures: it would be fanciful to consider this as a first ‘sketch of the mythology’, however.12 Tolkien wrote another Éarendel poem, ‘The Bidding of the Minstrel’, over that winter.13 Tolkien took up this poem several times over the following decade, revising and expanding it. It was also, early in 1915, divided into two parts, perhaps at Smith’s suggestion; only the first of these parts has been published, and that only in a late and shortened revision. The original, longer text has never been published, nor has ‘The Mermaid’s Flute’, the second half of the later text.14
He also, in light of his continuing enthusiasm for Finnish, began a retelling of the story of Kullervo, taken from the Kalevala, in a Morrisinspired medley of prose and verse; the original tale is a bleak, tragic amalgam of heroism, mistaken identity, incest and despair ending in suicide. We should not necessarily take this as an index of Tolkien’s mood as much as of his literary taste.15 Over the previous two years, the hitherto rather nebulous TCBS had shed its outlying members, and become a group of four: Tolkien and Wiseman (‘the great twinbrethren’), Gilson and G.B. Smith, who since coming up to Oxford (alone of the TCBS, all of the rest of whom were at Cambridge) in Michaelmas 1913 had become close friends with Tolkien. Prompted by Tolkien and Wiseman, who were convinced of the need for a moral basis for artistic endeavour, their discussions, by letter and in person, gradually assumed a new (or renewed) seriousness.
Wiseman was concerned that the friendship was decaying, stymied by distance and inevitably diverging ideas; Tolkien sought to reassure him that they two, at least, remained united in their conviction that life must have a religious motive and character. For the rest, some things might be differed on, but (Tolkien asserted) some were not negotiable: religion, human love, patriotism and (what seems surprising, even faintly shocking, a century later) a belief in nationalism. A fierce love of country – of England – was for Tolkien utterly basic. His enthusiasm for England was mainly a domestic one, however; he was, he said, ‘more and more a convinced Home Ruler’. We do not know whether localism, or religious sympathy for Irish Catholics, was a dominant motive, but it seems likely that both contributed to this shift of opinion.16 Wiseman reminded Tolkien he had yet to tell him the name of his betrothed. Would his engagement drive out or at least compromise existing close friendships? Although he insisted he abominated the idea of a ‘compartmented life’ in which Edith and the TCBS were discrete, Tolkien, like many men of his time, and indeed before and since, was never quite sure how to reconcile his romantic life with the claims of male friendship.17 It hardly needs saying that for the vast majority of Tolkien’s contemporaries, this sort of quandary was a function of shyness and all-male schooling rather than latent homosexual feeling.
Most of this, taken in the context of its time, seems unremarkable, and is hardly a profound political or moral manifesto; but it does show Tolkien as a man keenly alive to his age, and to his contemporaries’ concerns, and one, also, consciously at odds with some, at least, of them.
On 12 December 1914, the four TCBS friends (Smith and Gilson were already in uniform18) met up for a reunion, which they dubbed ‘The Council of London’; their talk, that day, was of fundamentals: truth, religion, love, art, patriotic duty. Again, we may dismiss this as youthful idealism, but it seems to have unsealed in Tolkien a source of inspiration. Over the next few months, he wrote numerous poems, and elaborated his new neo-Finnish language, now called Qenya. He began keeping notes of it in a small pocketbook, hitherto used for Gothic, and gradually elaborated both a phonology and a lexicon of it.19 We saw earlier the impression Finnish made on Tolkien; this was now refined into an attempt to create a language that corresponded even more acutely to his developing linguistic taste.
He continued training with the University OTC; he was also elected President of the Exeter Junior Common Room, now a much-reduced body. He seems to have kept up his social and debating interests and prominence, despite a stronger focus on work and drill. Perhaps, also, imminent war gave him both motive and energy to pursue varied interests without too much dissipation of effort.
Some of his new poems, to judge only by their titles (‘Outside’; ‘Dark’; ‘Ferrum et Sanguis: 1914’), probably related more to the contemporary political situation than to his mythological interests; others (‘As Two Fair Trees’) were about Edith.20 Others were lyrical or imagistic: ‘Kôr: In a City Lost and Dead’ is a vision of a deserted city of white marble on a black hill.21 It, too, was soon caught up into his developing corpus of legend.
It is probable that it was now that Tolkien explicitly formulated his plan to compile, or recover, a ‘mythology for England’; likely, too, that he eventually abandoned work on his retelling of the Kullervo story in favour of poeticized fragments of lost legendry such as the various Éarendel poems.
We have seen the approach Tolkien took to what he reckoned were the surviving linguistic fragments of Old English legend; it was also precisely this same method he applied to the words of his ‘private languages’. According to strict philology, these words also implied a world in which to place them, and to a great extent described it. Tolkien always insisted that this was the correct order of his inspiration: first language, then story; although most readers, and even more critics, have had trouble believing him. There is good evidence that Tolkien is telling the truth, however.
Qenya, in this earliest form, was made home to several hitherto unexplained philological cruces: as well as Éarendel and his boat Wingilot, we have a Qenya root ulband-‘monster’, which clearly echoes the Gothic ulbandus ‘camel’, from some unknown precursor that yielded also ‘elephant’; the root OWO, whence Qenya oa ‘wool’, and is cognate with *owis (Schleicher’s *avis) ‘sheep’. The opaque name for a slightly mysterious Germanic sacred pole, Irminsûl, is here compounded of two Qenya roots, meaning ‘world-pillar’; whilst the hypothesized non-Indo-European loan word underlying the Greek pelekos ‘axe’ is revealed as the Qenya pelekko; and the British pre-Celtic *ond ‘stone’ is likewise a Qenya borrowing (Tolkien would have found many of these philological puzzles in Grimm and other standard authorities).22 More things of this sort can be discovered by the philologically curious. What Tolkien was doing is clear: he was trying to recover, using his own sense of linguistic taste as a guide, the proto-language that had seeded Indo-European mythology and, hand-in-hand with the language, the legends it told. Indeed, as one writer has put it, ‘Tolkien meant Qenya to be a language that the illiterate peoples of pre-Christian Europe had heard, and had borrowed from, when they were singing their unrecorded epics.’23
This was obviously a vast project, and one that could be completed only piecemeal. For the moment, during the next two years, he wrote a number of poems whose core was some element of his private languages; the poems were an attempt to express something of this linguistic inspiration in a discursive way: to give the same effect in verse as he had received in a word or phrase of his Qenya.
Robert Graves somewhere explains that, as he sees it, poems function as ‘stored magic’, a unique and (in his terms) ‘inspired’ verbal formula that, when repeated consciously, revives in the reader exactly the same emotions that the poet had when writing it. For Tolkien, and indeed for any classical philologist of imaginative bent, the very words of a language functioned in exactly this way, reviving from beyond the grave a freight of emotional and cultural resonance otherwise both untransmissible and inexpressible. Perhaps this is in some senses true of all poems, as well: that at their core is a word or phrase in which their burden is concentrated and to which, in effect, the remainder of the verse is mere commentary or exegesis. Time and again in the years to come, we can trace Tolkien’s storytelling back to a single impossibly resonant word or phrase (or in a few cases, an image), to which the rest of the tale serves as expli
cation. Some of these words and phrases (hobbit, mithril, silmaril) were his own discoveries, others (the Trees of Sun and Moon, éored, ents, the Dvergatal) were taken from contexts in northern legend, where they had sat incongruously, sometimes simply misunderstood or even emended by editors into nothingness, sometimes glossed in ways more or less implausible by the original writers or their later editors, in either case sitting at odds, in some fashion, with the tone and affect of their current surroundings. This business of detection and recovery is an intuitive one, much like what Graves describes as the discernment of true poetic inspiration, a matter of smell and taste (or their invisible analogues), rather than rational analysis and argument. But it is surely true that there are some words or phrases that ring the heart like a bell, no matter where we find them; and it was Tolkien’s gift to be able to find these, and his achievement to restore to them contexts, or give them explanations, or (if you like) expand their implications, in a manner that seems utterly consonant with the feeling that, isolated, they can evoke. But this is a delicate subject, and one impatient of long analyses; in a strong sense, either you see it or you don’t. I very much hope you do. The feeling, when it arises, is perhaps most like what C.S. Lewis called ‘joy’, ‘beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief’.
The primary fact of this last year before Schools remains Tolkien’s growing and developing imaginative activities: poems, painting and a systematic expansion of Qenya. All, moreover, were beginning to coalesce around what we can with hindsight detect as themes and figures from his later mythology: Eärendil, darkness and light, and cosmological musings on the sun and moon (one of his several-times-revised poems was briefly titled ‘Copernicus and Ptolemy’, whilst the story from the Kalevala of the capture by sorcery of the sun and moon lies behind at least one painting of the time). He saw the TCBS ‘Council of London’ of the previous December as the spur to this creative activity; we may suppose, also, that the imminence of war and his own part in it prompted him to act.
III – An end to Oxford
In June 1915, Tolkien took Final Schools; on 2 July, when the results were published, he was placed in the First Class. He had now done all he could to begin an academic career, and was free to join the Army. He was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers, which was G.B. Smith’s regiment. Gilson had joined the Suffolk Regiment, and Wiseman the Navy, where his mathematics were put to use range-finding on the early dreadnought HMS Superb. He saw action at Jutland at the end of May 1916. Tolkien hoped to join the same battalion as Smith, the 19th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose Commanding Officer was (Smith told him) happy to have Tolkien; Smith may have joined this battalion partly because it was training in Wales; he was transferred to it along with Henry Wade-Gery, a poet and Classics don (he was elected to a Wadham fellowship on the eve of war) who joined Smith in admiring Tolkien’s poems. But in the event, and to Tolkien’s acute disappointment, he was assigned to another unit, the 13th Battalion of the same regiment. This was a reserve and training formation supplying replacements to the regiment’s 11th Battalion, which was about to join the British Expeditionary Force in France.24 Tolkien spent the next few months in Bedford and Staffordshire training, before joining his unit; he also wrote and revised poems,25 and occasionally saw Edith, who was still living in Warwick.
In July 1915, in ‘Moseley and Edgbaston … (walking and on bus)’, he composed another short lyric, ‘The Shores of Faery (Ielfalandes Strand)’, which first mentions Taniquetil, Valinor, Eglamar – names from Qenya that were clearly in search of corroborative legends; and also the Two Trees of Sun and Moon (well, of ‘Night’s silver bloom’ and ‘the globed fruit of Noon’, but the meaning is clear if archly expressed), alongside Eärendel and Wingelot. Tolkien himself later declared it was the ‘first poem of my mythology’, in the sense of a connected and ramifying narrative: the 1914 Éarendel texts were later co-opted into it, but had begun as an excursus on a reconstructed Old English astronomical myth.26
At the same time (mid-July 1915) he also wrote another poem, ‘The Happy Mariners’, whilst staying with his Incledon cousins at Barnt Green, then a village next to Rednal. It is a lyrical monologue in the voice of a mysterious character later named as ‘The Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl’ in the Twilit Isles on the approaches to Valinor; Earendel is seen, departing into a west where the speaker may not follow him. Yet another poem, ‘The Trumpets of Faerie’ (or ‘Faery’), dates from the same period.
On 16 July, Tolkien was granted a temporary commission as a Second Lieutenant; three days later he was posted to Bedford to begin military training. He revised ‘The Happy Mariners’ soon after arriving in Bedford, and again in early September.27
Also in September, in camp near Lichfield, he wrote ‘A Song of Aryador’, a poeticized picture of the Mercian countryside, peopled with ‘shadow-folk’. Its most interesting point, however, is probably its title: Aryador (or, in its Old English subtitle, Éargedor) is clearly ‘the land of the Arya’. Tolkien is here making his own hypothesis of Indo-European (or, in these pre-Hitlerian days, Aryan) prehistory.
On 25 September, Wiseman, Smith and Gilson visited him for the weekend. It was to be the last time all four of them met.
That November, Tolkien drafted ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, a lyrical evocation of Warwick amidst the varying seasons, placing it in a legendary history of faërie. This became part of an extensive series of correspondences between actual people and places and their Elvish names. Like all of Tolkien’s early poems, it is an uneven performance; at its best, however, it is very fine indeed. Most published poets of the time would have been happy to have written about
… Winter, and his blue-tipped spears
Marching unconquerable upon the sun
Of bright All-Hallows.28
‘Goblin Feet’ had appeared in the anthology Oxford Poetry 1915; there, it had been noticed by Dora Owen, who was compiling an anthology of ‘fairy poetry’ for Longmans. She asked if she could include Tolkien’s poem; he agreed, and sent her some of his other verse. She urged him to submit them to a publisher, and suggested several; Tolkien was encouraged, and put together a collection which he sent, probably late in February, to Sidgwick and Jackson (whom he may have known already via R.W. Reynolds). It was entitled The Trumpets of Faerie, after the first poem in the series (Reynolds warned he thought the title ‘a little precious’, but Tolkien seems to have ignored him29). We do not know the exact contents of the collection, but it was probably substantially identical to the poems sent to Dora Owen: ‘The Trumpets of Faerie’, ‘Princess Ní’, ‘A Song of Aryador’, ‘Sea-Song of an Elder Day’ (also known as ‘Sea-Chant of an Elder Day’), ‘The Shores of Faery’, ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, ‘Outside’. There may have been others, but Tolkien did not include ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, by general consensus his best work to date, perhaps because he considered it unfinished, or wanted to hold it over for a separate volume.
If the title and subject-matter of Tolkien’s collection now seem odd in an infantry subaltern, we may note that Tolkien was not alone. The contemporary vogue for all things fairy is reflected, for instance, in the second volume of poems published by Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers of 1917. Graves was a comparatively hardened soldier: although he was three years younger than Tolkien, he had joined up in 1914 straight from school, postponing Oxford, and had been in France since May 1915 with a regular battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a quite different type of soldiering from that of Kitchener’s New Armies. There is a curious parallel, too, between the presence in the same battalion of Graves and Siegfried Sassoon and the original plan that Smith and Tolkien had hatched of soldiering together.
Tolkien had also sent ‘Kortirion’ to Christopher Wiseman, away with the Grand Fleet. Wiseman wrote to say that he liked it, but ventured some criticisms based (he said) on the differences between Tolkien’s taste, which was for starlight and delicate things, and his own, which ran to vast natural phenomena (m
ountains, winds) and scientific discovery. Tolkien sent him a sharpish answer; Wiseman began to draft a long reply, but it took weeks to be finished and sent. This awkward correspondence probably illustrates rather than having caused a cooling in Tolkien’s friendship for Wiseman; Smith, whom he had seen daily in Oxford and with whom he had hoped to soldier, was now probably his nearest friend. Smith, by the by, had been unequivocal in his praise of ‘Kortirion’, urging Tolkien to publish it.
Tolkien also at this time wrote a short poem in his invented Qenya: ‘Narqelion’, on falling leaves in autumn.30 He also made extensive notes in his Qenya lexicon, adding various names that were to remain: Taniquetil, Eldamar, Valinor, Turambar, Tulkas, Valar; and others that were to fall by the wayside: Erinti, goddess of love, music, beauty and purity, who was Edith, Amillo (Hilary Tolkien), Lirillo or Noldorin, the god of song, Tolkien himself. The outlines of a narrative to contain all these names were slowly emerging.31 There were various flower-fairies and cognate whimsies. Other Qenya words were more topical, and did not persist: kalimbarië, ‘barbarity’, kalimbo, ‘a barbarian’; kalimbardi, ‘the Germans’.
Tolkien knew he was likely to be sent to France soon; he and Edith planned to marry as soon as they might. To support them both, Tolkien had his Army pay. They settled on a date in late March, and towards the end of January he wrote to his TCBS friends to tell them. He visited Francis Morgan to arrange to have his small patrimony transferred to his name, and meant to tell him of his forthcoming marriage; but he could not, in the event, screw up his courage to do so. He eventually told him by letter, sometime in February. Fr Francis did not, as Tolkien had feared, disapprove, but wrote in congratulation and offering to solemnize the marriage himself, in the great Oratory Church in Birmingham. Unfortunately, Tolkien had already made other arrangements, which could not now be changed.
Tolkien Page 10