Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  The notes then bring the seafarer to the point in ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ where he sails over the rim of the world in pursuit of the Sun. The scale of Tolkien’s imaginative ambitions is at once astonishingly clear. This is an Odyssey in embryo, but one in which the classical milieu of the Mediterranean appears only as an afterthought and whose heart lies in the bitter northern seas around Tolkien’s island home. But startling, too, is the way this elliptical note already foreshadows fundamental moments from The Silmarillion, from the Atlantis-story of Númenor, and even from The Lord of the Rings. Here, perhaps for the first time, these blurred images found their way onto paper. Many of them may have existed in some form already for a long time. But Cynewulf, the Kalevala, G. B. Smith’s probing questions, and arguably even Tolkien’s anxieties over enlistment, all conspired to bring them pouring out now.

  THREE

  The Council of London

  It had been agreed that the Oxford contingent of the TCBS would go up to Cambridge for a weekend in the middle of term, on Saturday 31 October 1914, but in the event only G. B. Smith turned up. ‘Tolkien was to come too, but hasn’t, as was to be expected,’ wrote Rob Gilson disappointedly. ‘No one knows why he couldn’t come, least of all Smith, who was with him on Friday night.’ The pair lunched with Christopher Wiseman, attended a Sunday service at King’s College chapel, and strolled around Cambridge. Smith was voluble about what he liked in the rival university town, and deployed his dazzling wit against what he disliked. Gilson wrote: ‘I always value his judgment though I often disagree with it, and am pleased to find that he is immensely enthusiastic about my rooms, and has never seen ones that he preferred – even in Oxford. I had a breakfast party this morning and they looked their best. A sunny morning with shadows across the Bowling Green and just enough mist to make the background of trees a perfect thing – blue and orange…I am having quite a perfect week-end.’ Smith clearly enjoyed it too, for he came back for more the following weekend. There was talk of a further get-together in Oxford.

  In fact Tolkien had simply stopped attending TCBS reunions. What seemed perfect to the impressionable Gilson was, to Tolkien, now tainted by a mood antithetical to the original spirit of the club. Humour had always been essential to the group, but originally each member had brought his own brand. Tolkien’s was occasionally boisterous, but he shared with Gilson a gentle delight in the lesser human follies, and he often indulged in wordplay. G. B. Smith had ‘a gift for rapping out preposterous paradoxes’ and for stylistic parody: ‘I played Rugger yesterday, and am one of the three stiffest mortals in Europe in consequence, ’ is GBS parodying the superlative triads of the Welsh Mabinogion. Wiseman enjoyed impromptu farce and abstruse mathematical wit. Sidney Barrowclough, on the other hand, affected a cold cynicism, robing his sarcasm in verbal elegance, and T. K. Barnsley and W. H. Payton favoured Barrowclough’s brand of repartee. Tolkien no longer cared to spend his time with a TCBS under their shadow.

  He was not alone. After enduring an evening of inane banter, with which he could not and would not compete, Wiseman had decided to sever his links with the TCBS. He wrote to Tolkien to say that he would not come to the Oxford meeting, declaring, ‘I should only go there, talk a little bilge for the space of a couple of days and go down again. I am getting very bored with the TCBS; none of them seem to have any mortal thing about which they can get angry; they merely make light and clever remarks (GBS is a perfect genius at it, I admit) about nothing at all.’ According to Wiseman, Barnsley and Barrowclough had demolished his own self-confidence, and Gilson’s. Now, before it was too late, he appealed to his oldest friend ‘by all the memories of VT [Vincent Trought], of Gothic, of binges in Highfield Road, of quarrels about philology’ to come to a crisis meeting after term with Gilson, Smith, and himself.

  Such was his disenchantment that he scarcely expected a reply. Instead, he found that for once he and Tolkien were in total agreement. ‘I tell you, when I had finished your letter I felt I could hug you,’ Wiseman wrote back. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge had ‘destroyed what made you and me the Twin Brethren in the good old school days before there was a TCBS apart from us and VT’, he said.

  Tolkien defended G. B. Smith, saying his superficiality was just a mask adopted in response to the ‘alien spirit’ now dominating their conclaves; but he agreed that Gilson had gradually lost interest in matters of moral weight and was now simply an aesthete. Tolkien thought Smith fell broadly into the same category, but he suspected that both men were still simply a trifle callow, rather than intrinsically shallow. Certainly he had no thought of excluding them. About one thing Tolkien was adamant: ‘the TCBS is four and four only’; the ‘hangers-on’ must be ejected.

  Despite his strictures, Tolkien maintained that the society was ‘a great idea which has never become quite articulate’. Its two poles, the moral and the aesthetic, could be complementary if kept in balance, yet its members did not actually know each other well enough. While the Great Twin Brethren had discussed the fundamentals of existence, neither of them had done so with Gilson or Smith. As a result, Tolkien declared, the potential these four ‘amazing’ individuals contained in combination remained unbroached. So it was that the moral wing of the TCBS determined that the four should meet in Wandsworth two weeks before Christmas. ‘TCBS über alles,’ Wiseman signed off, wryly, at the end of a frantic few days’ correspondence.

  It was touch-and-go whether G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson would be able to get to the ‘Council of London’, as the crisis summit was dubbed. Wiseman, like Tolkien, had early on decided to complete his degree before enlisting, on the basis that Kaiser Wilhelm had declared his soldiers would be back home by the time the leaves had fallen from the trees. Smith and Gilson, however, both now joined Kitchener’s army.

  Gilson had found Cambridge as sad and dark in wartime as Tolkien found Oxford, and since the start of term had been pondering cutting short his final year. His father, the Headmaster of King Edward’s, had advised him to get his degree before enlisting, and told him (with some sophistry but more foresight) that he had no right to desert Cambridge now, when the university corps needed every man it could get in order to ensure a future supply of officers as the war went on. The turning point seems to have come for Gilson in early November, when a shy and difficult undergraduate whom he had just befriended, F. L. Lucas, reluctantly joined up. ‘He is not at all the sort of person who rushes into it without thinking what it means,’ wrote Gilson. ‘He is really rather a hero…’* Military lectures had impressed upon the sensitive Gilson ‘what a fearful responsibility it is to be entrusted with so many men’s lives’. On the other hand, he felt guilty for not volunteering, and was surprised to find himself enjoying even the most gruelling field exercises. Others of the broader TCBS had now joined up. Sidney Barrowclough had been accepted in the Royal Field Artillery, and Ralph Payton had become a private in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, T. K. Barnsley’s unit; though W. H. Payton had found an honourable alternative to combat by signing up for the Indian Civil Service in August. Desperate to put an end to months of doubt and guilt, Gilson waited until his twenty-first birthday was past, and on 28 November he joined the Cambridgeshire Battalion as a second lieutenant.

  It was a relief, for although Gilson was strictly too sensitive for military life, he was sociable and found it easy to get on with his fellow officers. G. B. Smith, however, who was also sensitive but considerably less tolerant and naturally undisciplined, felt ‘much more a fish out of water’ after he followed suit on 1 December. Cary Gilson provided a character reference, and Oxford’s home regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, took the young poet on. It meant Smith would be training in Oxford and billeted at Magdalen College, where he would be on hand to see Tolkien’s burgeoning efforts at writing. One of Smith’s own poems, ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (‘hail and farewell’), had just appeared in the Oxford Magazine: a paean to his university town (but also to life itself) announcing ‘we may not linger here. A little while, an
d we are gone…’

  In the event, the two new subalterns both managed to arrange leave so that they could come to London on Saturday, 12 December. Gilson had moved the day before into officers’ huts at his battalion’s newly built camp at Cherry Hinton, just outside Cambridge. Under the auspices of Wiseman, in normal circumstances the visit would have been hilarious and carefree, with impromptu outings, missed trains, and countless telephone calls as he tried to keep his mother informed of his schedule. What with the family talent for chaos, and his father’s unpredictable hours, formality had given up the ghost at 33 Routh Road, Wandsworth. But now the four friends had urgent matters to discuss. They closeted themselves in Wiseman’s upstairs room and talked late into the night.

  They dubbed the reunion ‘the Council of London’ as if it were a council of war; in fact it was a council of life. War did not intrude, despite the enlistment of Smith and Gilson: in Rob’s words, the four of them were ‘absolutely undistracted by the outside world’. They had made a timely decision, though, to combine and consider the matter in hand: the greatness of the TCBS. That the TCBS was somehow great was a long-standing conviction based on mutual admiration. Gilson now doubted the truth of it, but Wiseman thought that together they each seemed ‘four times the intellectual size’, as if each one absorbed the capabilities of all. Tolkien felt the same way about ‘the inspiration that even a few hours with the four always brought to all of us’; but the inanity that had overtaken the wider group in recent years had left Tolkien and Wiseman convinced that it must now plant its feet firmly in the bedrock of fundamental principles: in other words, all four must open up about their deepest convictions, as the Great Twin Brethren had done long ago. Tolkien put religion, human love, patriotic duty, and nationalism on the agenda. It was not necessary that they all agree, but it was important that they discover the ‘allowable distance apart’, as he put it: in other words, how much internal dissent the club could accommodate.

  The Council surpassed all their hopes. ‘I never spent happier hours,’ Rob wrote to John Ronald afterwards. For Tolkien, the weekend was a revelation, and he came to regard it as a turning point in his creative life. It was, he said eighteen months later, the moment when he first became conscious of ‘the hope and ambitions (inchoate and cloudy I know)’ that had driven him ever since, and were to drive him for the rest of his life.

  Tolkien had long harboured creative ambitions, but they had found their outlet in his invented languages, at one extreme, or in drawings. Now all that changed. It may well be that, under the oppressive weight of war, he felt an answering pressure from within that could find no outlet in the old creative habits. He had experimented with prose in his Story of Kullervo. Now, however, he was going to take his cue from the Kalevala itself, from the verse into which Kullervo had fallen with increasing frequency, and from G. B. Smith. He would become a poet.

  In fact he had started already, a week before the Council, by writing an ambitious poem in a percussive version of the long line he had used in ‘From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames’. In its earliest published form, ‘The Tides’ begins:

  I sat on the ruined margin of the deep voiced echoing sea

  Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency

  On the land besieged for ever in an aeon of assaults

  And torn in towers and pinnacles and caverned in great vaults:

  And its arches shook with thunder and its feet were piled with shapes

  Riven in old sea-warfare from those crags and sable capes

  By ancient battailous tempest and primeval mighty tide…

  Subtitled ‘On the Cornish Coast’, this was the poetic expression of the sea-awe that Tolkien had described in his letters and drawings in Cornwall that summer of 1914. While the martial imagery might have been coloured by the fact that this was written at a moment of war, and amid widespread fear of invasion, he was concerned with processes on a geological timescale. The poet’s presence is almost incidental: he is there merely to witness the action of primal oceanic forces, inhuman and sublime. The piece gives a very early glimpse of Tolkien’s intense awareness of the vast histories inscribed within a landscape – an awareness that gives his mythological world the texture of reality.

  Very soon he was adding more poems to his corpus, in a rush of creativity that for him was unprecedented. ‘That Council,’ Tolkien told G. B. Smith, ‘was…followed in my own case with my finding a voice for all kinds of pent up things and a tremendous opening up of everything.’ A painting made two days after Christmas captures this strange mood of uplift in the midst of dark times: The Land of Pohja, depicting a scene from the Kalevala in which the Sun and Moon, drawn by the beauty of the wizard Väinämöinen’s harp-playing, settle in the branches of two trees, filling the icebound wastes with light.

  Tolkien was also absorbed once more in the Finnish language itself, and it played the most productive role in a creative breakthrough. When he had borrowed a college library copy of Chaucer to continue studying for his English course during the Christmas vacation, he had also taken Eliot’s Finnish Grammar out again. He immersed himself in the book, but not in order to read more Finnish; rather, he was allowing Finnish to shape the language he now hoped to devise. The language of the Kalevala had long been supplanting the earlier primacy of Gothic in his philological heart. At some point as 1915 came in, Tolkien took an exercise book, in which he had apparently been outlining aspects of Gautisk, and struck out his old notes, ready to make a fresh beginning. He tried out several names for the new language, eventually settling on Qenya.

  To Tolkien, working in the familiar fields of English and its Indo-European relatives, Finnish was remote, mysterious, and peculiarly beautiful. Its culture was pre-industrial, with ancient roots. By tapping into it, Tolkien was following, in his idiosyncratic way, the contemporary vogue for primitivism that had attracted Picasso to African masks. In the Kalevala, the natural and the supernatural were intimate and intermingled: the language, as Tolkien said, revealed ‘an entirely different mythological world’.

  The small, stark array of consonants and the chiming inflexional word-endings of Finnish produce a distinctive musicality that Tolkien adapted for Qenya; but he wanted a language with its own past, so he detailed how Qenya had evolved from an ancestral tongue that he soon named Primitive Eldarin. As in any real-world language, the process was a combination of sound shifts (phonology), the deployment of word-building elements (morphology) like the -s or -es that commonly pluralize an English noun, and developments in meaning (semantics).* A further fascination of this linguistic alchemy was that, as in the real world, an alternative set of sound-changes and morphological elements would produce elsewhere a quite different language from the same ancestral stock – an option Tolkien also began to explore before long.

  Tolkien’s sound-shift ‘laws’ fill many dry pages of his early Qenya notebook, but they were as essential to Qenya as the changes codified in Grimm’s Law are to German or English. He often wrote as if, like Jakob Grimm, he too were merely an observer looking back at the unrecorded but nonetheless real past of a living language. Even in these phonological notes, Tolkien was already entering into his world as a fiction writer does. From this ‘internal’ viewpoint, the sound shifts were unalterable facts of observed history.

  In practice, though, Tolkien also played God (or sub-creator emulating the Creator, as he would later have put it). He did not just observe history; he made it. Instead of working back from recorded evidence to reconstruct the lost ancestral ‘roots’ of words, as Grimm had done to arrive at a picture of ancient Germanic, he could invent Primitive Eldarin roots and move forward, adding affixes and applying sound shifts to arrive at Qenya. Furthermore, Tolkien could change a sound-shift law, and he sometimes did. Because each law should apply across the language, this might entail alterations to any number of words and their individual histories. Revision on that scale was a painstaking process, but it gave Tolkien a perfectionist’s pleas
ure. There was scope here for a lifetime’s tinkering, and he used it.

  If these austere sound-shift laws were the ‘scientific’ formulae by which Tolkien generated his ‘romantic’ language – as essential to its personal character as DNA is to our own – inventing Qenya was also an exercise in taste as heartfelt as any art. Tolkien’s sound-pictures were always acute: the bassy kalongalan, ‘ringing or jangling of (large) bells’, and its alto counterpart kilinkelë, ‘jingling of (small) bells’; the elegant alternations of vassivaswë for ‘beating or rushing of wings’; or the tongue-twisting pataktatapakta, ‘rat-a-tat’. Qenya is more than onomatopoeic, though: nang-, ‘I have a cold’, and miqë, ‘a kiss’ (pronounced more or less as ‘mee-kweh’), mimic what the speech organs do when your nose is blocked or your mouth is amorously engaged. Of course, most concepts have no intrinsic connection with any particular sound or mouth-movement. Tolkien tried to match sound and sense much as an expressionist painter might use colour, form, and shade to evoke a mood. Derivation aside, only taste dictated that fūmelotmeans ‘poppy’, eressëa means ‘lonely’, or morwen, ‘daughter of the dark’, signifies the glimmering planet Jupiter.

  Crucially, Tolkien used Qenya to create a world like our own, yet unlike. Its trees are ours but their names make them sound as if they are on the verge of communication: the laburnum is lindeloktë, ‘singing cluster’, while siqilissë, ‘weeping willow’, also means ‘lamentation’ itself. This is a world of austa and yelin, ‘summer’ and ‘winter’; of lisēlë, piqēlë, and piqissë, ‘sweetness’, ‘bitterness’, and ‘grief’. But enchantment courses through Qenya: from kuru ‘magic, wizardry’ to Kampo the Leaper, a name for Eärendel, and to a whole host of other names for peoples and places that emerged during a couple of years’ work on the lexicon. For Tolkien, to a greater extent even than Charles Dickens, a name was the first principle of story-making. His Qenya lexicon was a writer’s notebook.