Tolkien

by Raymond Edwards

  On 25 October 1916, behind the lines in Beauval, Tolkien began to feel ill; two days later, he reported sick with a fever of 103°. He had caught what the troops knew as ‘trench fever’, and their medical officers as PUO, or ‘pyrexia of unknown origin’. After the war it was discovered to be transmitted by lice, which were endemic in the trenches; the German dugouts Tolkien and the rest of battalion headquarters had occupied were overrun by them. Trench fever’s formal name is now Bartonella quintana. Its symptoms were high fever, headaches, leg pain and subsequent extreme weakness; when severe, it could leave a legacy of depression. Tens of thousands of men fell sick with it during the war (perhaps as many as a third of all British troops had it at one time or another); for many, like Tolkien, it probably saved their lives.

  Tolkien was sent to a hospital in Le Touquet, but got no better, and on 8 November was put on a ship for England.44 On 9 November, he was admitted to a temporary hospital set up in the Edgbaston campus of Birmingham University. He wrote to Smith and Wiseman telling them of his condition; both replied they were happy he had escaped. By mid-December, he was well enough to be discharged from hospital, but too weak to return to duty. He travelled to Great Haywood in Staffordshire, where Edith was living with Jennie Grove.

  V – ‘Where is the land of Luthany?’45

  On 29 November 1916, behind the front line, G.B. Smith was wounded by shellfire; the wound was minor, but became infected. He died five days later, on 3 December 1916. Tolkien, when he heard the news (in a letter from Wiseman dated 16 December), was at Great Haywood with Edith; it was just before Christmas.

  We have no record of Tolkien’s immediate reaction to his friend’s death; we know he wrote to Smith’s mother, who replied with a longer account of his last days. He wrote an elegy for his friend, called simply ‘GBS’. It has never been published.

  After the initial shock and grief, Tolkien realized that if the TCBS was to come to anything, he would now have to try also to say what Gilson and Smith had wanted to, but now could not; Smith, indeed, had directly told him to do as much in one of the last letters he wrote.46

  So, at this time, whilst recovering in hospital and in lodgings, Ronald Tolkien began writing the first stories from what he called his Book of Lost Tales, the first efforts at his ‘mythology for England’. Edith copied out some of his early tales. This is the only recorded collaboration by her in his imaginative world; for many years afterwards, he shared it, if at all, only with a few male intimates.47 The first Tale to be written down was The Fall of Gondolin, recounting the destruction of an elven city by hordes of goblins and fire-demons equipped with diabolic mechanical siege weapons; although written in Morris-influenced archaic prose, the mark of the war is clear on it. Some have stated that Tolkien wrote these Tales whilst in the trenches; he himself pointed out the sheer impracticality of connected literary work under those conditions. ‘That’s all spoof,’ he said to someone who made the suggestion.48 There is a passage in a later letter claiming that ‘lots of the early parts’ of the Tales, and the languages, were written ‘in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle-light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell-fire’.49 I would suggest, again, that this must refer to notes (particularly to those making up the lexicons) rather than to connected prose. He had managed some short poems, but nothing longer. We may reckon he thought much about his legendarium, and especially about his private languages, whilst in France, and very probably made extensive notes that were the seed of later narratives (the two earliest lexicons of his languages are suitably tiny notebooks), but for extended narration, he needed comparative uninterruption, such as a convalescent hospital easily supplies.

  He may have turned to prose, rather than narrative verse, after the disappointment of having The Trumpets of Faerie rejected the previous spring; certainly, his output of poems now slowed dramatically. He did revise his farewell to Oxford, ‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow’; eventually, it was wholly reworked as ‘The Song of Eriol’, and all direct autobiography (Warwick, Oxford, wartime) ruthlessly excised. He had also written ‘The Lonely Harebell’ whilst in hospital, and, as we saw, an elegy on G.B. Smith.

  The Book of Lost Tales is Tolkien’s first attempt to give form to his ‘mythology for England’. We do not know what part, if any, Tolkien had supposed or hoped his allies in the TCBS might play in this mythological reconstruction; but now that Smith and Gilson were dead, the task fell to him alone. Wiseman was, he may have thought, no longer a sympathetic audience. After The Fall of Gondolin, he wrote a ‘framing narrative’ for the collection, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’.

  His method, like his prose style, was largely borrowed from William Morris, whose Earthly Paradise takes a group of lost mariners cast up on a strange shore, and has them hear and tell a varied body of myth and legend. We may remember Tolkien was given this book by Henry Wade-Gery on the last night he saw G.B. Smith.

  Tolkien, at least in the developed texts that survive (his notes and drafts from this time are but sparsely preserved), has a fifth-century Anglo-Saxon, at this point named Eriol, leave the ancestral home of the English in Jutland and end up cast ashore on Tol Eressëa, Elvenhome. At this stage, Tol Eressëa is the island of England, and there, at the Cottage of Lost Play, Eriol hears tales of the Elvish legendry. We might stress this point: in Tolkien’s original conception, England – Britain – is the Lonely Isle, once in the Uttermost West but dragged back to the Great Lands for the elves’ ‘Faring Forth’ (a slightly uncertain concept, and one that never reached full achievement, but which seems to have been an (abortive) expedition by the elves of Valinor to rescue their exiled kindred in the Great Lands), and never removed. The Lost Tales, indeed, make persistent attempts to calque the legends onto places in England. The places of Tolkien’s private joys – Warwick, Great Haywood, Cheltenham – were given Elvish history and names (Kortirion, Tavrobel, Celbaros – Kortirion, or Kôr, is a name transparently borrowed from Rider Haggard’s She, although the actual city there, not the name, is the model rather for Gondolin).

  ‘Eriol’, although in one place defined as ‘he who dreams alone’, is at another said to be the Elvish equivalent of ‘Angol’, a name he was given on account of his homeland: ‘Eriol’, then, means ‘the Englishman’. He also takes the by-name wæfre, ‘restless, wandering’, a transparent equivalent to the Old Norse Gangleri, who in the Prose Edda is the questioner catechized on Norse mythology; like Gangleri, Eriol Wæfre asks the elves on Tol Eressëa about the gods and their doings. He seems to be a figure of Tolkien himself. (There are various clues, aside from the direct insertion of Eriol into the autobiographical Wanderer’s Allegiance: Eriol’s original name is said to be Ottor; this is plausibly rendered ‘Otter’, which seems to have been Tolkien’s by-name in his cousins’ Animalic jargon.50 There is also an Otter, a shape-changer, in The Story of Sigurd.)

  The Tales themselves were said to be taken from ‘The Golden Book of Heorrenda’, or ‘The Tales of Tavrobel’. Heorrenda is son to Eriol; but it is a name from, again, Old English verse: the short poem ‘Deor’ is a lament by its eponymous poet, who, after listing reversals famous in legend, brings forward his own complaint, that he has been replaced at court by a rival scop, Heorrenda, leoðcræftig monn (a man skilled in song). Tolkien was privately convinced that Heorrenda was an archetypally famous Old English poet; indeed, in the following decades he would sometimes refer to the poet who wrote Beowulf as Heorrenda, in part to avoid the constant circumlocution ‘the Beowulf poet’.51 He seems, here, to be another equivalent of Tolkien himself. The ‘Englishness’ of these Tales is not simply a reflex of geography, however; Tolkien sought, above all, to capture a certain character, resonant of English air and soil, that he found hints of in what he identified as surviving fragments of ‘English legend’. It may be worth reminding ourselves that Tolkien was conscious of being, albeit at several removes, a descendant of a more recent Germanic migration; Eriol/�
�lfwine is also a sign of how an originally continental German may be, at the same time, archetypally English as Tolkien felt himself to be.

  Eriol and his sons, then (as well as Heorrenda, he was father to the legendary heroes Hengest and Horsa), were the means whereby the English have ‘the true tradition of the fairies’, rather than the garbled things found in Welsh and Irish sources. This was ‘a specifically English fairy-lore’,52 preserved in England, the ‘Lonely Isle’ or in Old English seo unwemmede Ieg, the Isle Unstained (Tolkien, remember, had written a poem to England with this title in June 1916). Eriol’s three sons were settled at places of private significance: Horsa at Oxford (Taruktarna or Taruithorn in the early Elvish word-lists), Hengest at Warwick (Kortirion, ‘the round tower’), Heorrenda at Great Haywood (Tavrobel). At one point, Tolkien ventured the device that Old English was the only Mannish language elves would willingly speak, owing to their sometime friendship with Eriol’s people.53

  There were elements, too, that were clearly very private to Tolkien and Edith. The Cottage of Lost Play, setting for the tale-telling, appears first in a poem written in April 1915, when Tolkien was still an undergraduate; the Cottage is a place of refuge and delight for lonely and unhappy children, who travel there in dreams. Tolkien’s 1915 poem describes a pair of children who meet, first, in this Cottage, and remember it, and their companionship there, in later life. They are obviously meant for Tolkien and Edith. It is probably no accident that the extant manuscript of the opening Tale, recounting this cottage, is in Edith’s handwriting and dated February 1917. This is a rare insight into the very early days of the Tolkiens’ marriage; it seems impertinent to analyse it further. As Christopher Tolkien has said, one needs little help to see ‘the personal and particular emotions in which all was still anchored’.54

  The style of the Tales is a deliberate mixture of archaizing prose in the best William Morris manner, with a faintly precious Edwardian ‘fairy’ or ‘elfin’ quality, all flittermice and flower-lanterns and diminutives (partly down to Francis Thompson, partly we may guess to Edith’s fondness for such things), with a dash of whimsy (cat-demons, talking hounds) that may owe something to Lord Dunsany. At moments, the effect is most like not Morris or Dunsany but, oddly, the later Randolph Carter stories of H.P. Lovecraft, which are explicit dream-narratives. These were not written until 1925–6, and were not published until after Lovecraft’s death, so there can be no question of influence either way, but there is a certain occasional likeness of tone. Lovecraft was two years older than Tolkien, and their backgrounds were not really alike; but there was perhaps something in the air. Both men, as well, had clearly read their Dunsany.

  Dunsany may be counted as a major influence, if only because his example had made it possible to write in a mythological mode, with much use of the historic present, and sly whimsical narratives of the gods and their doings; specifically, we may suspect that Tolkien’s Ulmo owes something to Dunsany’s Slid, although his depiction in Sime’s illustrations to Dunsany is as a smoothly youthful god, not the shaggy Neptune figure of Tolkien’s counterpart. There is little else that looks like direct borrowing, here at any rate.55

  VI – Survival

  At the end of February 1917, Tolkien was moved from the Southern General Hospital (Birmingham University) to a convalescent hospital in Harrogate; then, in mid-April, he was posted to the Humber Garrison. He was recovering, but was still too weak to return to France. Edith and Jennie Grove moved to Harrogate in early March. At around this time, Edith discovered she was pregnant.

  Tolkien continued to write his Book of Lost Tales, and also compiled a lexicon of a second ‘private language’, to add to his existing Qenya. This second creation was closer to Welsh, and was called Goldogrin or Gnomish.56 Thereafter, although their names and the supposed details of their interrelations changed often, these two ‘elvish’ languages were at the heart of Tolkien’s inventions. They eventually emerged, much changed, as Quenya and Sindarin. Wiseman evidently encouraged Tolkien by letter to work on his mythology, which he called ‘the epic’, perhaps under the impression it was to be a long poem. Certainly he was eager for Tolkien to bring out the connexions between the mythological fragments in his existing poems.57

  One day in May or June of that year, walking in the country near Roos in Yorkshire, Tolkien and Edith came across a hemlock grove. Under the high hemlock-umbels, Edith danced. This gave rise to one of the longest and most heart-felt of Tolkien’s Tales, the Tale of Tinúviel, which became the story of Beren and Lúthien: a mortal man, fled from war and defeat, sees the elven-fair maiden Lúthien dancing amidst the hemlock-umbels of a forest, and falls in love; together, they overcome, for a while, the darkness and sorrow of their time, and pass beyond even death together.

  Tolkien wrote little poetry at this time; on 1 August, he attended a regimental dinner to commemorate Minden, and afterwards wrote ‘Companions of the Rose’ in memory of Smith and Gilson. By tradition, Minden dinners included a toast to the fallen of that day, and by implication all the regimental dead. Smith, we should remember, was also a Lancashire Fusilier; whilst Gilson’s regiment, the Suffolks (then the 12th Foot, or Napier’s regiment), had also fought at Minden, as one of the six British infantry battalions. All ranks of the Lancashire Fusiliers wore a red rose on 1 August, the Suffolks red and yellow roses.

  Soon afterwards, Tolkien fell ill again; repeated bouts of illness prevented his being posted back to France, where his old battalion was now involved in the series of battles called Third Ypres, or Passchendaele.

  In the last stages of her pregnancy, probably in September, Edith went to Cheltenham. Tolkien was by now in hospital in Hull, and the journey to see him was difficult and exhausting; there was, moreover, a perceived danger from Zeppelin raids on the coast (there was a raid on the Humber estuary on 22 August; Hull itself was bombed on 25 September). If she was to be apart from her husband, it made more sense to be both safer and more comfortable, and so Cheltenham, where Edith had been happy and still had friends, it was. Their first son was born there in November 1917, after a difficult labour. He was named John Francis, after Fr Francis Morgan, who came down from Birmingham to baptize him. On the day John was born, his father was in Hull, before an Army medical board, who judged he was fit enough to return to garrison duty. He went to Cheltenham as soon as he could; Edith’s health was not good, and she needed time in a nursing home. To pay for this, Tolkien sold up his patrimony, the handful of mining shares he had inherited and which had been his only steady source of income (they generated between £20 and £40 a year). He now had only his Army pay, 7s. 6d. a day or about £140 a year, to support Edith and their son. They moved back up to Roos to be near him.

  The Tale of Turambar (Turambar and the Foalókë) was probably first drafted during this period, very likely after Tinúviel was written. It later became the story of Túrin and the Dragon, and is clearly inspired in the main by the same story of Kullervo that Tolkien had worked on before the war, although it is now combined with a dragon-slaying theme analogous to the story of Sigurd. Indeed Turambar explicitly refers to similar stories still told by men, ‘especially in … kingdoms of the North’, but whilst these stories have become ‘mingled’ with those originally about other heroes and events, Turambar is ‘the true and lamentable tale …’58 This is to claim a specific ‘asterisk reality’ for the growing legendarium, which (we have seen) was implicit in Tolkien’s method as early as the 1914 Éarendel poems, but is here, unusually, articulated in full.

  Tolkien spent the first quarter of 1918 as part of the coastal garrison; then, on 10 April, a medical board declared him fit for general service. The first of the great German spring offensives had opened three weeks previously, and strained the British line almost to breaking; manpower was urgently needed, and every trained man was at a premium. Tolkien was not sent straight to France, however, but to a series of camps in Staffordshire, which he knew from his training three years beforehand. Edith, baby John and Jennie Grove moved down to
be nearby, and lodged at a house called Gipsy Green, which entered the Elvish lexicon as Fladweth Amrod.

  At the end of May 1918, Tolkien’s former battalion, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, was all but wiped out on the Aisne during the great German spring offensive; holding the high ground north of Vesle, it resisted to the last man before being overwhelmed. The few survivors of the battalion were disbanded in August.

  Tolkien’s time in Staffordshire was pleasant after the wet and cold of the Yorkshire coast; but at the end of June he contracted gastritis, and was sent back to hospital in Hull. Edith, who reckoned up that she and Jennie had moved twenty-two times since leaving Warwick in early 1915, now refused to move again. She had still not recovered fully from giving birth. Tolkien was ruled unfit for service; he lost two stone in weight by the end of August. In late July, a War Office order to him to go to Boulogne and thence to his battalion was soon withdrawn: apart from anything else, there was no battalion to go to. In early September, he was sent to another hospital, this time in Blackpool; on 1 October, they declared him fit for sedentary employment, and told him to report to a Ministry of Labour office in a month’s time. The office was in Oxford, in University College. The Army, which had taken Tolkien from Oxford, now brought him back there: but not unchanged.