by John Garth
Cynewulf’s lines were about an angelic messenger or herald of Christ. The dictionary suggested the word meant a ray of light, or the illumination of dawn. Tolkien felt that it must be a survival from before Anglo-Saxon, even from before Christianity. (Cognate names such as Aurvandil and Orendil in other ancient records bear this out. According to the rules of comparative philology, they probably descended from a single name before Germanic split into its offspring languages. But the literal and metaphorical meanings of this name are obscure.) Drawing on the dictionary definitions and Cynewulf’s reference to Éarendel as being above our world, Tolkien was inspired with the idea that Éarendel could be none other than the steersman of Venus, the planet that presages the dawn. At Phoenix Farm, on 24 September 1914, he began, with startling éclat:
Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup
In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;
From the door of Night as a ray of light
Leapt over the twilight brim,
And launching his bark like a silver spark
From the golden-fading sand
Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death
He sped from Westerland.
Tolkien embellished ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ with a favourite phrase from Beowulf, Ofer ýpa ful, ‘over the cup of the ocean’, ‘over the ocean’s goblet’. A further characteristic of Éarendel may have been suggested to Tolkien by the similarity of his name to the Old English ēar ‘sea’: though his element is the sky, he is a mariner. But these were mere beginnings. He sketched out a character and a cosmology in forty-eight lines of verse that are by turns sublime, vivacious, and sombre. All the heavenly bodies are ships that sail daily through gates at the East and West. The action is simple: Éarendel launches his vessel from the sunset Westerland at the world’s rim, skitters past the stars sailing their fixed courses, and escapes the hunting Moon, but dies in the light of the rising Sun.
And Éarendel fled from that Shipman dread
Beyond the dark earth’s pale,
Back under the rim of the Ocean dim,
And behind the world set sail;
And he heard the mirth of the folk of earth
And hearkened to their tears,
As the world dropped back in a cloudy wrack
On its journey down the years.
Then he glimmering passed to the starless vast
As an isléd lamp at sea,
And beyond the ken of mortal men
Set his lonely errantry,
Tracking the Sun in his galleon
And voyaging the skies
Till his splendour was shorn by the birth of Morn
And he died with the Dawn in his eyes.
It is the kind of myth an ancient people might make to explain celestial phenomena. Tolkien gave the title in Old English too (Scipfæreld Earendeles Æfensteorran), as if the whole poem were a translation. He was imagining the story Cynewulf might have heard, as if a rival Anglo-Saxon poet had troubled to record it.
As he wrote, German and French armies clashed fiercely at the town of Albert, in the region named for the River Somme, which flows through it. But Éarendel’s is a solitary species of daring, driven by an unexplained desire. He is not (as in Cynewulf) monnum sended, ‘sent unto men’ as a messenger or herald; nor is he a warrior. If Éarendel embodies heroism at all, it is the maverick, elemental heroism of individuals such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, who that summer had sailed off on his voyage to traverse the Antarctic continent.
If the shadow of war touches Tolkien’s poem at all, it is in a very oblique way. Though he flies from the mundane world, Éarendel listens to its weeping, and while his ship speeds off on its own wayward course, the fixed stars take their appointed places on ‘the gathering tide of darkness’. It is impossible to say whether Tolkien meant this to equate in any way to his own situation at the time of writing; but it is interesting that, while he was under intense pressure to fight for King and Country, and while others were burnishing their martial couplets, he eulogized a ‘wandering spirit’ at odds with the majority course, a fugitive in a lonely pursuit of some elusive ideal.
What is this ideal? Disregarding the later development of his story, we know little more about the Éarendel of this poem than we do about the stick figure stepping into space in Tolkien’s drawing The End of the World. Still less do we know what Éarendel is thinking, despite his evident daring, eccentricity, and uncontainable curiosity. We might almost conclude that this is truly ‘an endless quest’ not just without conclusion, but without purpose. If Tolkien had wanted to analyse the heart and mind of his mariner, he might have turned to the great Old English meditations on exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Instead he turned to Romance, the quest’s native mode, in which motivation is either self-evident (love, ambition, greed) or supernatural. Éarendel’s motivation is both: after all, he is both a man and a celestial object. Supernaturally, this is an astronomy myth explaining planetary motions, but on a human scale it is also a paean to imagination. ‘His heart afire with bright desire’, Éarendel is like Francis Thompson (in Tolkien’s Stapeldon Society paper), filled with ‘a burning enthusiasm for the ethereally fair’. It is tempting to see analogies with Tolkien the writer bursting into creativity. The mariner’s quest is that of the Romantic individual who has ‘too much imagination’, who is not content with the Enlightenment project of examining the known world in ever greater detail. Éarendel overleaps all conventional barriers in a search for self-realization in the face of the natural sublime. In an unspoken religious sense, he seeks to see the face of God.
The week before the start of the Cambridge term found Rob Gilson staying with Christopher Wiseman in Wandsworth, London, where his family had moved following his father’s appointment as secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Home Mission Department in 1913. It was also the week of the fall of Antwerp. Gilson wrote: ‘We are of course very mad and hilarious. Last night we went to see Gerald du Maurier in Outcast – such a bad play. I don’t know what we are going to do today and shall probably start to do it before we have decided.’ At the same time, on 4 October, the last Sunday of the long vacation, Tolkien was back in Birmingham, staying at the Oratory with Father Francis Morgan. T. K. Barnsley, who had now been appointed the first subaltern in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, was leading the new unit in a church parade at the city’s central parish church. On the Monday the recruits began training. Saturday’s Daily Post had carried a list of men accepted to serve in the 3rd Birmingham Battalion. Hilary Tolkien was soon packed off without ceremony to train at a Methodist college in Moseley as a bugler.
Back in Oxford, Tolkien confided in a Catholic professor that the outbreak of war had come as a profound blow to him, ‘the collapse of all my world’, as he later put it. Tolkien had been prone to fits of profound melancholy, even despair, ever since the death of his mother, though he kept them to himself. The new life he had slowly built up since her death was now in peril. Hearing his complaint, however, the Catholic professor responded that this war was no aberration: on the contrary, for the human race it was merely ‘back to normal’.
Yet ‘ordinary life’, as Tolkien had known it, was an immediate casualty of war, even in Oxford. The university was transformed into a citadel of refugees and war-readiness. The time-honoured flow of undergraduates had haemorrhaged: a committee to process student recruits had dealt with 2,000 by September. Only seventy-five remained at Exeter College, and in the evenings unlit windows loomed over the silent quad. Tolkien was stricken with severe second thoughts about staying and declared: ‘It is awful. I really don’t think I shall be able to go on: work seems impossible.’ The college had become part-barracks, with areas allocated to Oxfordshire Light Infantrymen and batteries of gunners, who came and went in a steady stream. Some of the younger dons had gone off to war, and so had many of the college servants; older men had taken their place. Tolkien was glad to be living for the first time out of college, at 59 St John Street (an addr
ess which came to be known as ‘the Johnner’), where he shared ‘digs’ with his last remaining Exeter friend, Colin Cullis, who was not able to join up due to poor health.
The town was largely emptied of its younger men, but it was busier than ever. Women were stepping into men’s civilian jobs. Exiled Belgians and Serbs appeared. Convalescent soldiers wandered the streets and the wounded were laid up in the Examination Schools. The troops who were being trained to replace them drilled in the University Parks in their temporary-issue blue uniforms. Quaintly, as it now seems, Farnell the Rector was giving lessons in the épée and the sabre. For the first time since the English Civil War, Oxford had become a military camp.
Urged on by Farnell, Tolkien and his few fellow undergraduates strove to keep the college societies going. The Stapeldon Society, a shadow of its former self under ‘lowering clouds of Armageddon’, did its trivial best by passing a rousing vote of confidence in all Exonians in the armed forces and sending letters of support to King Albert of Belgium and Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty). But the first duty imposed upon Tolkien was to pursue the question of the redecoration of the Junior Common Room, the undergraduates’ meeting place. The students were warned that war would mean going short on such luxuries. The sub-rector told Tolkien that student entertainments were unduly wasteful and must be banned. Tolkien turned to humour, poking fun at the first-year intake for not taking baths, ‘no doubt,’ he said, because they were ‘economising with the best of intentions in this time of stress’. The society debated the motion that ‘This House disapproves a system of stringent economy in the present crisis.’ Tolkien spoke in a debate on ‘the Superman and International Law’, but his own proposal, that ‘This House approves of spelling reform,’ suggests an urge to turn aside from the war. It was a necessary appeal to non-martial life, but a puny one as more and more of the globe became entangled in war. At the end of October German forces in Belgium were driven back from the River Yser by flooding after the Belgians opened the seaward sluices at high tide, but at nearby Ypres British forces were succumbing to exhaustion in the mud, the new enemy. The opposing armies had failed to outflank each other and now began hunkering down in trenches: the Western Front had been established. Meanwhile, a mine sank Britain’s super-Dreadnought Audacious north of Scotland. Turkey entered the war and became Britain’s enemy. Far afield, the Boers of the Orange Free State, whose sympathies were pro-German, were now staging an uprising against British rule.
In lieu of enlisting in Kitchener’s army, at the start of term Tolkien had immediately enrolled in the university OTC. There were two courses: one for those hoping for a commission imminently, the other for those who wished to delay enlistment. Tolkien was one of twenty-five Exeter College men on the latter, which meant about six and a half hours’ drill and one military lecture per week. ‘We had a drill all afternoon and got soaked several times and our rifles got all filthy and took ages to clean afterwards,’ Tolkien wrote to Edith at the end of his first week. For those of a more sensitive nature, any military training could be sufficiently unpleasant: Rob Gilson, who loathed militarism, had taken Paradise Lost to read at the OTC summer camp at Aldershot the year before, and found that a like-minded friend (Frederick Scopes) had brought Dante’s Inferno. For Tolkien, though, years of playing rugby meant that the physical discomforts, at least, held no horror. The university corps were remote from real soldiering, with no field days or route marches, and rifles were soon taken away for the real war, but the active physical life banished the notorious ‘Oxford “sleepies”’ and brought fresh energy. ‘Drill is a godsend,’ he told Edith.
Reinvigorated, he worked on his Story of Kullervo, a dark tale for dark times, and enthused about the Finnish Kalevala to T. W. Earp, a member of the Exeter College literati. This epic poem was the work of Elias Lönnrot, collated from folk songs passed down orally by generations of ‘rune singers’ in the Karelian region of Finland. Fragmentary and lyrical though these songs were, many referred tantalizingly to an apparently pre-Christian cast of heroic or divine figures headed by the sage Väinamöinen, the smith Ilmarinen, and the boastful rogue Lemminkäinen. Lönnrot had seen his chance to create a Finnish equivalent of what contemporary Iceland and Greece had inherited, a mythological literature; and he did so at a time when the Finns were struggling to find a voice. Finland, ruled by Sweden since the twelfth century but entirely distinct in language, culture, and ethnic history, had become a personal grand duchy of the Tsar of Russia in 1809. Just then the notion that ancient literature expressed the ancestral voice of a people was sweeping through Europe’s academies and salons. When the Kalevala arrived in 1835, it had been embraced by Finnish nationalists, whose goal of independence was still unachieved in 1914.
Tolkien spoke in defence of nationalism at a college debate that November, even as the pride of nations was plunging Europe into catastrophe. Nationalism has carried even sourer connotations since the 1930s, but Tolkien’s version had nothing to do with vaunting one nation above others. To him the nation’s greatest goal was cultural self-realisation, not power over others; but essential to this were patriotism and a community of belief. ‘I don’t defend “Deutschland über alles” but certainly do in Norwegian “Alt for Norge” [All for Norway],’ he told Wiseman on the eve of the debate. By his own admission, therefore, Tolkien was both an English patriot and a supporter of Home Rule for the Irish. He could appreciate the Romantic notion of language as an ancestral voice, but he went further: he felt he had actually inherited from his maternal ancestors a taste and an aptitude for the Middle English of the West Midlands, a dialect he was studying for his English course in the religious text Ancrene Riwle. Writing about his life and influences much later, he declared:
I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere.
Like Lönnrot, Tolkien felt that his true culture had been crushed and forgotten; but, characteristically, he saw things on a vast timescale, with the Norman Conquest as the turning point. William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066 had brought the curtain down on the use of English in courtly language and in literature for centuries, and ultimately left English laced with non-Germanic words. The voice of a people, effectively, had been silenced for generations, and the continuity of the record had been severed. Tolkien had launched an ingenious counterattack at school, deploring the Norman Conquest ‘in a speech attempting to return to something of Saxon purity of diction’, as the school Chronicle reported – or as Tolkien himself put it, ‘right English goodliness of speechcraft’: a language purged of Latin and French derivatives (though before the end of his speech he forgot, in his excitement, not to use ‘such outlandish horrors as “famous” and “barbarous”’). Old English, though only written down by Christian Anglo-Saxons, had preserved glimpses of the older traditions that fascinated Tolkien in its literature and in the very fabric of its language; and undoubtedly much more had been swept away by the Norman Conquest.
In contrast, the Kalevala had preserved the Finns’ old traditions. Addressing Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society, at G. B. Smith’s invitation, on 22 November 1914, he declared: ‘These mythological ballads are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ He told the Sundial Society: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ This, in effect, was the young J. R. R. Tolkien’s creative manifesto.
Tolkien had read ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ aloud on 27 November 1914 to Exeter College’s Essay Club, at a poorly attended meeting which he called ‘an informal kind of last gasp’ as war emptied Oxford of its undergraduates. G. B. Smith also read the poem and ask
ed his friend what it was really about. Tolkien’s reply speaks volumes about his creative method, even at this early stage. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to find out.’ He had already emulated Lönnrot by working back through the Old English Crist into the ‘undergrowth’ of Germanic tradition, where a mariner called Éarendel might have sailed the skies. The celestial heroes of myth always have earthbound origins, but Tolkien had so far ‘discovered’ nothing about Éarendel’s. Around now he scribbled down some ideas:
Earendel’s boat goes through North. Iceland. Greenland, and the wild islands: a mighty wind and crest of great wave carry him to hotter climes, to back of West Wind. Land of strange men, land of magic. The home of Night. The Spider. He escapes from the meshes of Night with a few comrades, sees a great mountain island and a golden city – wind blows him southward. Tree-men, Sun-dwellers, spices, fire-mountains, red sea: Mediterranean (loses his boat (travels afoot through wilds of Europe?)) or Atlantic…’