by John Garth
Others might have kept such recondite interests to themselves, but at school Tolkien was effusive about philology. Rob Gilson described him as ‘quite a great authority on etymology – an enthusiast’, and indeed Tolkien once lectured the First Class on the origins of Europe’s languages. Against the Classicist ethos drummed into King Edward’s schoolboys he played the outsider with verve. He combatively told the literary society that the Volsunga Saga, the tale of the dragon-slayer Sigurd, displayed ‘the highest epic genius struggling out of savagery into complete and conscious humanity’. He even addressed one of the annual Latin debates in Gothic.
The corpus of Gothic is small, and to Tolkien it presented a tantalizing challenge. He would try to imagine what unrecorded Gothic was like. He invented Gothic words; not randomly, but using what he knew about sound-shifts to extrapolate the ‘lost’ words on the basis of their surviving relatives in other Germanic languages – a linguistic method rather like triangulation, the process by which map-makers record the heights of landmarks they have not visited. This ‘private lang.’ was an activity he rarely mentioned except to his diary because it often distracted him from ‘real’ school work, but into the Gothic project he drew as collaborator Christopher Wiseman. The self-deprecating Wiseman later recalled:
Reading Homer with Cary Gilson sparked off in me what in Tolkien was already well alight, an interest in Philology. In fact John Ronald got to the point where he constructed a language L and another LL representing what L had become after a few centuries. He tried to inculcate me into one of his homemade languages, and wrote me a postcard in it. He said that I replied to it in the same language, but there I think he was wrong.
Philology was the focus of passionate argument between the two, and Wiseman said many decades later that the invention of languages was a cornerstone of their youthful friendship. That may seem a bizarre activity for teenage boys; but Tolkien did not think so, insisting later: ‘It’s not uncommon, you know. It’s mostly done by boys…If the main mass of education takes linguistic form, creation will take linguistic form even if it isn’t one of their talents.’ Language-construction satisfied the urge to create, but it also met the desire for an argot that would ‘serve the needs of a secret and persecuted society, or’ – in the case of the Great Twin Brethren – ‘the queer instinct for pretending you belong to one.’
It is unclear whether Tolkien shared with Wiseman another venture, the invention of an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, Gautisk, and it seems unlikely that the wider TCBS joined in his philological recreations at all.* But Tolkien’s motivations in language-building were artistic rather than practical; and even if his friends were not collaborators, at least they would have been a discriminating and appreciative audience. After all, these were boys who conducted debates in Latin – and took part in King Edward’s annual performance of Aristophanes in the original classical Greek. Tolkien himself played an exuberant Hermes in the 1911 production of The Peace (his farewell to the school). Wiseman appeared as Socrates and Rob Gilson as Strepsiades in The Clouds a year later. Smith alone of the TCBS, being from the school’s ‘modern’ or commercial side, did not study Greek; perhaps this is why he was relegated to the role of the Ass in one of the plays. They were directed by Tolkien’s cigar-smoking housemaster, Algy Measures, and the boys feasted on a curious menu of buns, gooseberries, and ginger beer. ‘Does nobody else remember these plays?’ one Old Edwardian wrote in 1972. ‘The grand parade of the chorus, clad in white vestments, down the full length of Big School playing on flageolets? Or Wiseman and Gilson munching gooseberries on stage as they chatted away as though Greek were their normal tongue?’
The TCBS revelled in a degree of outlandishness. Their humour was quickfire and often sophisticated; their interests and talents were many, and they rarely felt the need to draw anyone else into their circle. Another former King Edward’s pupil wrote to Tolkien in 1973: ‘As a boy you could not imagine how I looked up to you and admired and envied the wit of that select coterie of JRRT, C. L. Wiseman, G.B. Smith, R. Q. Gilson, V. Trought, and Payton. I hovered on the outskirts to gather up the gems. You probably had no idea of this schoolboy worship.’ In retrospect Tolkien insisted they had not set out to stand aloof from the ordinary King Edward’s pupils but, intentionally or not, they erected barriers.
On the rugby pitch, Wiseman had somehow acquired the title of ‘the Prime Minister’, and the TCBS elaborated this practice, with Tolkien as the Home Secretary, Vincent Trought as the Chancellor, and the acute and punctilious Wilfrid Hugh Payton (nicknamed also ‘Whiffy’) as the Whip. G. B. Smith, in tribute to one of his enthusiasms, gloried in the non-governmental title of the Prince of Wales. Furthermore, this was just one set of epithets out of a whole compendium.* In a note from Wiseman just before the TCBS coalesced, Tolkien is addressed as ‘My dear Gabriel’ and styled apparently the ‘Archbishop of Evriu’; the letter is signed ‘Beelzebub’ (perhaps to make light of the vast gulf between the two friends’ religious outlooks) and contains an entirely opaque reference to ‘the first Prelate of the Hinterspace, our mutual friend’. An air of playful pomp runs through their correspondence (such as it was before the Great War), so that instead of simply inviting Tolkien to visit, Gilson would write asking whether he would be ‘gracing our ancestral hearth’ and ‘making use of our roof-tree’.
Casting a critical eye on the era in which he too grew up, the author J. B. Priestley saw such wordplay as a sign of shallowness and self-indulgence in the ruling class, who were addicted to ‘a daft slang of their own (as they might have called it “a deveen privato slangino”), and…the constant use of nick-names’. The TCBS, however, hailed from the middle classes, a broad social spectrum. At the gentrified top was Rob Gilson, with his spacious home, his important father, and his aristocratic acquaintances; at the precarious lower end was Tolkien, an orphan in city lodgings. His ‘private lang.’ was no mock Italian; and while nicknames and mock-archaisms may have helped keep the Tea Club exclusive, they gently parodied the traditional social hierarchy.
Parody was the mode of Tolkien’s first published attempt at epic narrative. It was the natural choice, given that the piece was to appear in the King Edward’s School Chronicle. ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ deals not with war but with rugby, being the tongue-in-cheek account of a match in 1911. Its model was Lord Macaulay’s then-popular Lays of Ancient Rome, the source of Wiseman and Tolkien’s epithet ‘the Great Twin Brethren,’ and it is at least moderately amusing. In the guise of Roman clans it depicts the rival school houses, Measures’ in red and Richards’ in green, and it is full of boys charging around in names that are much too big for them. Wiseman surely lurks behind Sekhet, a nod to his fair hair and his passion for ancient Egypt. (Tolkien, it seems, did not then realize that Sekhet is a female deity.*)
Sekhet mark’d the slaughter,
And toss’d his flaxen crest
And towards the Green-clad Chieftain
Through the carnage pressed;
Who fiercely flung by Sekhet,
Lay low upon the ground,
Till a thick wall of liegemen
Encompassed him around.
His clients from the battle
Bare him some little space,
And gently rubbed his wounded knee,
And scanned his pallid face.
The archaisms and the illusion of combat give way to a bathetic contemporary cameo. The down-to-earth reality of the rugby pitch gently mocks the heroic pretensions of the literary mode.
The mock-heroism of ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ reflects, consciously or otherwise, a truth about a whole generation’s attitudes. The sports field was an arena for feigned combat. In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means. Honour and glory cast an over-arching glamour over both, as if real combat could be an heroic and essentially decent affair. In his influential 1897 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt had imagined a soldier spurring his men through bloody battle by echoing h
is old school cricket captain’s exhortation, ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ Philip Larkin, a much later poet looking back across the decades, described volunteers queuing to enlist as if outside the Oval cricket ground, and lamented (or exhorted): ‘Never such innocence again.’ A wiser age had depicted War as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but in the Edwardian era it was as if he were engaged in little worse than a spot of polo.
In the years up to 1914, the prospect of international conflict was often considered. Victorian affluence was ebbing away from Britain, struck by agricultural setbacks and then by the cost of the Boer War. But Germany, unified in 1871, was the braggart youngster among the European powers. Undergoing rapid industrialization, it was manoeuvring for a stronger role in Europe via expansion of its colonial grasp and saw Britain, with its powerful navy, as the prime opponent.
The coming war had cast its shadow on the worldview of Tolkien and his friends when they were still at King Edward’s. As early as 1909, W. H. Payton, an excellent shot and a lancecorporal in the school’s junior Officer Training Corps, had argued in debate for compulsory military service. ‘Our country is now supreme and Germany wishes to be. We should therefore see to it that we are sufficiently protected against the danger of foreign invasion,’ he declared. In 1910, Rob Gilson had called for an international court of arbitration to replace war. Tolkien led the opposition. He preferred traditional hierarchies, and for example he once (perhaps not entirely in jest) equated democracy with ‘hooliganism and uproar’, declaring that it should play no part in foreign policy. An equal distrust of bureaucracy, or internationalism, or vast inhuman enterprises per se, lay behind his attack on a ‘Court of Arbiters’. With the help of Payton he had successfully dismissed the idea as unworkable. They had insisted that war was both a necessary and a productive aspect of human affairs, though one schoolboy had warned of ‘bloodfilled trenches’.
The temperature had risen by October 1911, when the Kaiser’s sabre-rattling prompted the debating society motion ‘this House demands immediate war with Germany’. But others insisted Germany was primarily a trade rival. G. B. Smith claimed that the growth of democracy in Germany and Russia would curtail any threat of war, assuring the debaters, with his tongue as usual in his cheek, that the only causes for alarm were the bellicose Daily Mail ‘and the Kaiser’s whiskers’. The debating society did not declare war on Germany. Smith wildly overestimated the strength of democracy in both countries, underestimated the influence of the press, and failed to see the real danger posed by Wilhelm II, an autocrat plagued by deep-seated insecurities. Just two days past his seventeenth birthday, and making his maiden speech to the debating chamber, he can be forgiven for naïvety; but in none of these misapprehensions was he alone.
Despite industrial unrest, Home Rule agitation in Ireland, and increasingly militant suffragette activism, to many Britons the era was a time of material comfort and tranquillity stretching into futurity. Only the loss of Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition and of the Titanic, both in 1912, raised doubts about the security of such long-term illusions.
King Edward’s was a bastion of robust sportsmanship, duty, honour, and vigour, all backed up by a rigorous grounding in Greek and Latin. The school’s anthem instructed the pupils:
Here’s no place for fop or idler, they who made our city great
Feared no hardship, shirked no labour, smiled at death and conquered fate;
They who gave our school its laurels laid on us a sacred trust,
Forward therefore, live your hardest, die of service, not of rust.
There had been drilling at King Edward’s in the Victorian era, though nothing systematic; but in 1907 Cary Gilson obtained military permission to set up an Officer Training Corps as part of national reforms to boost Britain’s readiness for military confrontation. The OTC was captained by W. H. Kirkby, Tolkien’s first-year master (and a noted shot in the part-time Territorial Army set up in the same reforms). Several of Tolkien’s rugby-playing friends became officers in the corps and Tolkien himself was one of 130 cadets. The corps also provided eight members for the school shooting team, with Rob Gilson (an OTC corporal) and W. H. Payton excelling on the ranges. Though Tolkien was also a good shot, he was not on the shooting team, but in the OTC he took part in drills and inspections on the school grounds, competition against the school’s other three houses, and field exercises and huge annual camps involving many other schools.
The massed corps was presented to the king and inspected by field marshals Lord Kitchener of Khartoum and Lord Roberts, the liberator of Bloemfontein. The school Chronicle concluded: ‘It is quite evident that the War Office and the Military Authorities are expecting great things from the OT.’ One midsummer, Tolkien travelled to London with seven other King Edward’s cadets to line the route for the coronation of George V. The year was 1911, and gloriously hot; he wrote at the time that it had ‘kindled an immovable smile’ on his face. But as they camped in the grounds of Lambeth Palace on the eve of the big day, a long dry spell finally broke, and it rained. ‘Adfuit omen’, Tolkien later commented: ‘It was an omen.’* The contingent stood facing Buckingham Palace watching troops pass up and down under the eye of Kitchener and Roberts. They heard the cheers as the king set out, and finally they got a close-up view as the royal coaches passed right in front of them on their way back to the palace.
For now, these military preparations were an occasion for high spirits. From one Aldershot camp Tolkien brought back ‘harrowing’ tales of the devastation wrought among the cadets by punning – inflicted, no doubt, by his own circle. He had returned from another camp, at Tidworth Pennings on Salisbury Plain in 1909, with a real injury, but not one acquired in action. With characteristic impetuousness, he had charged into the bell tent he was sharing with seven others, leapt up and slid down the central pole – to which someone had fixed a candle with a clasp knife. The resulting cut looked as if it would leave him scarred for life.
By the time G. B. Smith was cracking jokes about the Kaiser’s moustache, Tolkien was embarking on life at Exeter College, Oxford, where, in step with his generation, he pursued military training. As soon as he arrived he enrolled in King Edward’s Horse. This cavalry regiment had been conceived during the Boer War as the King’s Colonials, and it recruited men from overseas resident in the British Isles. As such, it enjoyed a dubious status compared to other British military units (and was the only one administered from Whitehall), but royal patronage had helped it grow; it had been renamed after the new king, Edward VII. The large numbers of overseas students at Oxford and Cambridge made the university towns prime targets for recruiting drives, and by 1911 the regiment had a strong following in Exeter College. Tolkien joined it, presumably, because of his South African birth: most new undergraduates enlisted in the university OTC, but those with a ‘colonial’ background were expected instead to join King Edward’s Horse.
Within the regiment, the Oxbridge squadron’s members were considered a fractious and independent-minded lot, but they had good mounts borrowed from the local hunts. Tolkien had a strong affinity with horses, which he loved, and became a de facto breaker-in. No sooner had he broken one horse in but it was taken away. Another would then be given to him and he had to start the process again. His membership of the regiment was shortlived, however. In July and August of 1912 he spent two weeks with the regiment at its annual camp at Dibgate Plateau, Shorncliffe, just outside Folkestone on the South Coast. The gales howling up the English Channel from the south-west were so severe that on two nights almost every tent and marquee was levelled. Once, the regiment carried out field manoeuvres after dark and, rather than return to camp, billeted for the night: an uncomfortable foretaste of life during wartime. Tolkien was discharged from the regiment, at his own request, the following January.
In the meantime, academic life at Oxford was relaxed, to say the least: ‘In fact we have done nothing; we are content with being,’ readers of the school Chronicle were told in t
he annual ‘Oxford Letter’ reporting on the activities of King Edward’s alumni. Tolkien was scarcely committed to the study of Classics. He was already known to old friends for his ‘predominant vice of slackness’ but now the sub-rector noted next to his name, ‘Very lazy’. Actually he was very busy – but not with Æschylus and Sophocles. He joined the college’s societies and its rugby team (though because standards were higher here he did not excel, and was regarded as ‘a winger pure and simple’). Ultimately far more distracting, however, was his burgeoning fascination with the epic Finnish poem, the Kalevala.
Tolkien had encountered this cycle of folk legend at school. He was ‘immensely attracted by something in the air’ of this verse epic of duelling Northern wizards and lovestruck youths, beer-brewers and shape-changers, then recently published in English in a popular edition. To a young man so drawn to the shadowy border where written historical records give way to the time of half-forgotten oral legends, it was irresistible. The names were quite unlike anything he had encountered in his studies of the Indo-European family of languages from which English sprang: Mielikki the mistress of the forests, Ilmatar the daughter of the air, Lemminkäinen the reckless adventurer. The Kalevala so engrossed Tolkien that he had failed to return the school’s copy of volume one, as Rob Gilson, his successor as King Edward’s librarian, politely pointed out in a letter. Thus equipped with all he needed, or was truly interested in, Tolkien barely used Exeter College’s library, and he withdrew only one Classics-related book (Grote’s History of Greece) in his entire first year. When he did venture in, he strayed outside the Classics shelves and unearthed a treasure: Charles Eliot’s pioneering grammar of Finnish. In a letter to W. H. Auden in 1955, he recalled that ‘It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.’ Ultimately it suffused his language-making with the music and structure of Finnish.