Tolkien
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The TCBS was broken by the war. Vincent Trought, as we saw, had died in 1912. As well as Smith and Gilson, other TCBS-ites were killed: Ralph Payton, like Gilson, died on the Somme in July 1916; T.K. Barnsley, who had transferred to the Coldstream Guards, was buried alive by an exploding German shell in August 1916 and sent back to England with a burst ear drum and shell shock, then returned to France to be killed at Ypres on 31 July 1917 (the first day of Passchendaele). The only survivors (apart from Tolkien and Wiseman) were W.H. Payton, who was in the Indian Army, and Sidney Barrowclough, who like Tolkien was invalided back to England and spent the last part of the war on Home Service. From perhaps nine ‘members’, five were now dead; of the inner circle of Tolkien’s friends, only Wiseman was left.
Nor were his Oxford contemporaries spared: of the fifty-seven Exeter College men who matriculated with Tolkien in 1911, twenty-three were killed or died from the effects of war. Even non-combatants, like his sometime room-mate Colin Cullis, were vulnerable: Cullis died in the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1919, when a disease of unexampled virulence swept across a Europe weakened by wartime deprivations, and killed more than had the fighting. This was not an unusual casualty rate for an Oxford college, most of whose undergraduates would have fought as junior officers, notoriously the most likely of all Great War soldiers to be killed.59
Tolkien survived the Great War, but was not unmarked by it. Famously, in the 1966 preface to The Lord of the Rings, he noted, ‘By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.’ His long illness arguably affected his health permanently; for the rest of his life, commonplace illnesses frequently laid him low for weeks, and often impeded his ability to work. Physical inertia and emotional despondency were frequent companions.
There were other effects, too: all too clearly, the Somme underlies his evocation of the werelit horrors of the Dead Marshes, the mounds of blasted earth around the approaches of Mordor, its hurrying columns of cursing soldiery.60 But these are just the superficial links. On one level, the losses of war galvanized his talent, to complete the work his TCBS friends now could not. Tolkien himself sometimes recognized this; at other times, he wondered whether the war had not stifled his development as a writer: ‘I was pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again.’61 But this was written in a dark day, when his great book was hardly begun and might never be finished; and all these things are, besides, forever unknowable. Tolkien’s writing is rooted, certainly, in his vast and intuitive scholarship, but also in an imaginative reaction by an acutely sensitive and educated Catholic to the staggering trauma of the Great War, a collective experience that still informs and qualifies our view of ‘civilized’ man. Running through his work is a profound and often heartbreaking meditation on the ruinous perversion of goodness and civilization, on the coterminous arising of aching beauty and unblinking malevolence from the same God-given faculty of subcreation. Above all, his theme (as he said in a late interview) was ‘death! – inevitable death’, that sets a term to all human achievement, that mars and frustrates our plans, and casts to ruin all we strive to build and create; and yet which is not the last word.
The Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918; the guns at last fell silent, and the threads of pre-War life might, in some fashion, be picked up again. Tolkien had been given permission, although still formally a soldier, to move to Oxford. He now needed to try to resume his academic career, laid aside three years before.
Chapter 4 – The Young Scholar
I – Dictionary work
Back in Oxford, with a wife and child to support, Tolkien needed a job. He cast around his old tutors and contemporaries for help.
Arthur Napier had died in 1916, aged only sixty-three; his Chair of Anglo-Saxon (now renamed the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship) was given to William Craigie of the Oxford English Dictionary, as an additional responsibility; his Merton chair was left vacant. Craigie was a Scot of formidable industry and remarkable linguistic capacity (he could, it is reliably said, compose Icelandic rímur as well as a native speaker) with a quiet but fierce intellectual acumen and (it is also said) a gift of mind-reading and the Sight.1
Craigie had taught Tolkien Old Icelandic as an undergraduate; now he recruited him to work on the OED, although Tolkien actually reported not to Craigie but to his senior colleague Henry Bradley. The OED had been started in conscious emulation of the Grimms’ Deutsche Wörterbuch, and was (and probably remains) the single most prestigious philological project in English.2 Tolkien had fallen on his feet.
He seems to have begun work in January or possibly February 1919. In later years, Tolkien used to claim, half-seriously, that he had written the OED; in fact, he wrote initial entries, and very comprehensive etymologies, for several dozen words beginning W–, and advised on numerous others. For any one person to claim to have written this astonishing book was a joke obvious to anyone who knew even the smallest thing about it; but Tolkien’s time at the OED should not be dismissed. He himself claimed to have learnt, in those two years, more philology than in any other comparable period of his life.3
He and Edith, with Jennie Grove still part of their household, found lodgings at the end of 1918, in St John’s Street, a few houses down from where he had lived during his last year as an undergraduate. Tolkien’s brother Hilary, meanwhile, after four years in the Army, bought a fruit farm near Evesham in Worcestershire, and for the next half a century grew and sold plums.
Apart from Tolkien, the only one of the original TCBS quartet to survive the war was Christopher Wiseman; but the Great Twin Brethren were now all but estranged. They had continued to write to each other, and Wiseman had late in 1917 visited Tolkien on the Yorkshire coast; but their talk ended in an argument, not (as before) easily glossed over. Still, he and Tolkien collaborated on an edition of G.B. Smith’s poems which appeared in June 1918.4 Two years previously, Wiseman had nurtured plans of reading law at Oxford when the war was done, and lodging with Tolkien;5 but in the event he went back to Cambridge, and worked for a while with Sir Ernest Rutherford.6 In 1921, he became a schoolmaster, later a headmaster; he wrote some Methodist hymns, but otherwise published nothing. He and Tolkien stayed in touch, but the old closeness was gone.
Tolkien’s pay at the OED was modest; he looked about for other work, which might help with finding a more permanent (and better-paid) academic post. In June 1919, his sometime tutor Kenneth Sisam, still for now at the Ministry of Food (in August 1919 he was made Director of Bacon Contracts, of all things7) but, with an enduring connexion to the University (and soon to be ensconced at the University Press), realized he didn’t have time to compile a glossary for an undergraduate anthology, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, that he was preparing, and asked Tolkien to produce one for him. Tolkien set to work with a thoroughness that exceeded what Sisam had expected or required.
Work on the glossary took time; in June 1919, he laid aside, incomplete, the Book of Lost Tales he had been writing, on and off, since 1916. By this time it comprised fourteen tales in all; three of these (Tinúviel, Turambar, The Fall of Gondolin) were the Great Tales which Tolkien planned to tell at greater length.
These long tales were in fact the earliest to be written, and date from Tolkien’s convalescence in hospital and in Yorkshire; this is certainly true of Gondolin and Tinúviel, which were written by 1917. Turambar may well be as early as that, but more probably was written in 1918. The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves, conceived on a grand scale, most probably dates from 1919 or 1920. Only ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ also dates from the very earliest phase of writing (1916–17).8 The long tales also, as became clear in the course of their composition, came from comparatively late in the narrative cycle of the Tales.9 During his time at the OED, Tolkien wrote a series of tales giving the cosmological origin of the world (the music of the Ainur) and its early ‘mythological’ history. He also rewrote much of the earlier work, usually in ink over a pencil draft that h
e then erased, so the very earliest versions of the stories are irrecoverable. Sadly, in what was to become a recurring pattern in his writing, he put the Tales aside before the narrative was fully achieved. Between the cosmological/mythological ‘tales of Valinor’ written in 1918–19 and the long heroic tales written earlier, there was a narrative gap that Tolkien aimed to fill with Gilfanon’s Tale: The Travail of the Noldoli and the Coming of Mankind, which would have told of the return of the Exiled Noldor to the Great Lands, the arising of men and the catastrophic Battle of Unnumbered Tears; this, however, was little more than begun, although outlines of how it was to proceed are extant. There was also a need to bring the cycle of Tales to their proper close, and to this end he purposed a Tale of Éarendel for which, again, no connected narrative was at this time written. The Book of Lost Tales, then, lacks both a middle and an end.
The lack of a connected Éarendel narrative is a particular grief; according to the narrator of the Nauglafring, ‘thus did all the fates of the fairies weave then to one strand, and that strand is the great tale of Eärendel’.10 The tale was sketched in seven parts, of which the extant Nauglafring was to be the first; it would thus have been the longest of the Lost Tales.
The lack of a true conclusion to the cycle means we do not have a clear notion of how Tolkien’s ‘historical’ framework for the Tales was developing. The disiecta membra of his various attempts have been ably collected and epitomized by his son,11 but the exact shape a continuous narrative might have taken at any time is necessarily speculative. In the earlier conception, Eriol witnesses the premature and disastrous ‘Faring Forth’, and indeed in one set of notes he actually provokes it; this is not so in the later ‘Ælfwine’ revisions. In the earlier concept, however, Eriol fights alongside the elves in their defeat by the Men who invade Tol Eressea. There is a curious passage in an epilogue to the (unwritten) story of this defeat, in the Battle of the Heath of Sky-Roof (Dor-na-Dhaideloth, according to a soon abandoned Elvish etymology), when the Elvish ‘Faring Forth’ to the aid of their exiled and lost kindred utterly failed. It describes the ruined Heath in terms clearly reminiscent of the war-destroyed landscape of northern France:
Then was my heart bitter to see the bones of the good earth laid bare with winds where the destroying hands of men had torn the heather and the fern and burnt them to make sacrifice to Melko and to lust of ruin; and the thronging places of the bees … these were now become fosses and mounds of stark red earth, and nought sang there or danced but unwholesome airs and flies of pestilence.12
The famed Two Trees of Valinor, which came first into the Tale The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor, may derive in part from a chance hint by (of all people) Kenneth Sisam. The Tale was written down, it seems, during Tolkien’s time at the OED, between 1918 and 1920.
In 1919, Sisam together with Henry Bradley, Tolkien’s boss at the OED, published a short and technical piece, ‘Textual Notes on the Old English Epistola Alexandri’.13 The text on which they commented, a translation of an apocryphal letter from Alexander the Great to his old teacher Aristotle, was a regular source for medieval traditions of the wonders of the East. Amongst the marvels Alexander finds in India are the trees of sun and moon. These are great sacred trees that at particular times of day (sunset and moonrise, respectively) can speak in prophecy; they also exude balsam. As they stand in the text, their likeness to the Trees of Valinor is perhaps slight: they function merely as vehicles for foretelling Alexander’s doom; but this may be another instance of Tolkien purporting to recover in his own work a truer tale than late and corrupt sources have preserved.14 The most evocative element of the story is in fact the Trees’ names, and this alone may have been enough to start him thinking.
The question, though, is where Tolkien encountered them. The complete text of the Old English Epistola Alexandri (from the Beowulf manuscript, MS Cotton Vitellius A XV) was not published (by the Early English Text Society or EETS) until 1924, at Sisam’s instance; extracts from another manuscript of it were printed in 1861 by Oswald Cockayne, and the whole text in the German journal Anglia for 1881,15 but Tolkien may well have not met these things by 1919; a short extract appears in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, read by Tolkien at school. None of these extracts feature the Trees, however. Sisam’s short piece, though, certainly mentions them in passing;16 it is a good bet that Tolkien would have seen this piece, or at very least known of Sisam’s work on the text, and (we may say) more than probable that he read the text itself before 1919.17 Certainly, in a lecture twenty years later, Tolkien referred to the Trees of Sun and Moon as to a thing proverbial.18 He may have drawn additional detail from a contemporary retelling by Robert Steele, a follower of William Morris who was also a fine medievalist (his editions of Roger Bacon have yet to be replaced) where the boles and leaves of the Two Trees ‘that bloom for ever’ shine like metal, ‘and the tree of the sun was like gold, and the tree of the moon was like silver’, details not found in the Latin original or the Old English.19 It may well be the case that Tolkien knew the story as a boy, and Sisam and Bradley merely reminded him.
It is worth noticing this in detail because the image of the Two Trees, and the fate of their light as preserved in the Silmarils, gradually assumed a central importance for Tolkien’s legendarium; and their appearance in the Letter of Alexander is incongruous enough to have struck Tolkien in exactly the same way as did (say) Éarendel, or any of the other things in the ragbag of philological hints and fragments that nourished his imagination. To trace this to a passing mention in a short and dry technical piece by his former tutor and his then boss merely illustrates the unexpectedness of the imagination, and Tolkien’s facility in lighting on the unusual even in the most unlikely places.
In July 1919, he was at last officially discharged from the Army. This meant the end of his Army pay, but he was given temporary retired pay (£35 a year, or around 2s. a day) until that December on account of his continued physical weakness.
Tolkien also at this time found work as an ‘extern tutor’ for the University, that is, a scholar who holds no tenured or even temporary position but is employed to teach undergraduates a particular subject, usually one outside the competence of their main subject tutor. There were few who could teach English philology, and a growing number of undergraduates in the Oxford English School; many of them were at the women’s colleges, and here Tolkien had the additional advantage of being married, which meant a woman student’s college did not have to find an additional person to chaperone her during her tutorials with him (although it seems unlikely that Edith was expected to sit in on the tutorials, so we may consider it as much a matter of form as substance; nevertheless this was invaluable). By the end of May 1920, he was getting enough regular teaching work of this sort to be able to leave the OED and teach full time, giving classes as well as individual tutorials.
There had been some changes in personnel in the English School since Tolkien graduated; Napier had died in 1916, leaving both his chairs vacant. The Chair of Anglo-Saxon, as we saw, had gone to Craigie; the Merton chair was left empty until 1920, when Henry Wyld, another philologist educated in Germany (Bonn and Heidelberg), previously at Liverpool University, was elected to it (Wyld had also in 1899 done an Oxford B.Litt., supervised and examined by Napier and Joseph Wright20). Wyld’s especial interest was in poetic diction across the ages. This restoration of the vacant chair took place as part of a general review of salaried posts across the University. Typically, and rather meanly, the authorities decided that Craigie’s salary as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor need not be increased in line with those of other chairs, since he had in addition his pay as Editor of the OED. Craigie’s formidable wife reckoned it was as if the University had said ‘your husband may do two jobs, if he so chooses, but he is only to get one salary’.21 He was not now a happy professor.
Also, confusingly, a chair of English Literature (created in 1904 for the literary scholar Sir Walter Raleigh) was in 1914 renamed the Merton Professor
ship of English Literature. Raleigh held it until his death in 1922. This, however, was decidedly part of the ‘lit’ side of the School, rather than the serious philological business Tolkien was engaged in. A characteristic Raleigh title was The English Novel (1894); he also published studies of Milton (1900), Wordsworth (1903), Shakespeare (1907) and Dr Johnson (1910) plus a number of other books. He was prolific, elegant, philologically incurious; ‘not a good lecturer’, declared Tolkien,22 although his published light verse has a pleasing Edwardian humour.
By September 1919, Tolkien’s income from teaching and the OED had grown enough to make it possible for the family to leave their lodgings and rent a house, in what was then Alfred Street (now Pusey Street) off St Giles’, around the corner from St John’s Street. Edith was able to bring her piano out of storage, and they engaged a cook-cum-housemaid; for the first time in three and a half years of marriage, the Tolkiens had something resembling a conventional family home.
He retained informal connexions with the University as well as his official ones; in the spring of 1920, he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, revising and abridging it for the occasion (he had read the poem ‘Éala Éarendel Engla Beorhtast’ to the same club in November 1914). This is one of the few recorded public outings of Tolkien’s legendarium before the 1930s, excepting the publication of some short poems; he allowed a few individuals to read some texts, but was perennially shy of public recitation. He wrote some small things at the time: an unpublished poem, ‘The Ruined Enchanter: A Fairy Ballad’, dates from (probably) November of this year;23 whilst at some point he composed two connected sentences in Qenya, known from their incipit as ‘Sí qente Feanor’, ‘Thus spake Fëanor’;24 this is worth noting because the quantity of extant connected text in the Elvish tongues is vanishingly small, and will hardly bear the extensive syntactical and grammatical synthesis recent proponents of their use have placed on it; but that is a discussion for another place.