by John Garth
The war had now been raging for a year, claiming up to 131,000 British and five million European lives; and there was stalemate on the Western Front, where Germany had just added the flame-thrower to the arsenal of new technologies. Parallels between Tolkien’s life and his art are debatable, but the war certainly had a practical impact on him as a writer. Newly bound to military duty, and with the prospect of battle growing suddenly more real, he took action to bring his poetry to light.
He and Smith were set to appear in an annual anthology of Oxford poetry being co-edited by T. W. Earp, whom Tolkien had known at Exeter College. Each had submitted several poems; ‘Goblin Feet’ had been chosen for inclusion along with two of Smith’s. Tolkien had also sent copies of his work to his old schoolmaster, R. W. Reynolds. ‘Dickie’ Reynolds had been in the background throughout the public development of the TCBS at school, as chairman of the literary and debating societies as well as the library committee. A mild man of whimsical humour but broad experience, before becoming a teacher he had tried for the Bar and been secretary of the Fabian Society. But in the 1890s he had been part of W. E. Henley’s team of literary critics on the prestigious National Observer, which had published work by writers of stature including W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, and J. M. Barrie. Tolkien did not entirely trust Dickie Reynolds’ opinions, but he respected the fact that the teacher had once been a literary critic on a London journal, and during the Bedford course Tolkien turned to him for advice on getting a whole collection published. Normally a poet could expect to make his reputation by publishing a poem here and there in magazines and newspapers, but the war had changed all that, Reynolds said. Tolkien should indeed try to get his volume published.*
Tolkien eagerly embraced further opportunities for weekend leave and visits to Edith, riding the fifty miles from Bedford to Warwick on a motorcycle he had bought with a fellow officer. When the course ended in August, he travelled to Staffordshire and joined his 2,000-strong battalion encamped with the four other units of the 3rd Reserve Brigade on Whittington Heath, just outside Lichfield. Apart from the OTC trips of his youth, this was his first experience of a full-scale military camp under canvas. Formed at Hull the previous December, the 13th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was a ‘draft-finding unit’, created to drum up fresh soldiers to replace those lost in the front line by other battalions; as such, it would not be the unit in which Tolkien fought. He was one of fifty or so officers with the battalion when he arrived, but he spent most of his time with the handful in the platoon to which he was assigned. Unlike G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson, who were lucky to be with commanding officers they genuinely liked, Tolkien did not find the higher-ranking officers congenial. ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed,’ he wrote to Edith.
The platoon comprised some sixty men of all ranks. It was the subaltern’s duty to pass on what he had learned to the ‘other ranks’ and prepare them for battle. At this stage the training was basic, and physical. ‘All the hot days of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration,’ Tolkien wrote with chagrin when winter came and these exertions were replaced by chilly open-air lectures. Such was military life in the early twentieth century, and it sharpened Tolkien’s dislike of bureaucracy. ‘What makes it so exasperating,’ he said later of life in camp, ‘is the fact that all its worst features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as “planners” refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by “organization”.’ Elsewhere he was comically precise, declaring that ‘war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)2 when x = normal human crassitude’. The diligent, meticulous, and imaginative thinker felt like a ‘toad under the harrow’ and would vent his feelings in letters, particularly to Father Vincent Reade, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. Yet in retrospect, as Tolkien told his son Christopher in 1944, this was the time when he made the acquaintance of ‘men and things’. Although Kitchener’s army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together. Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy”, especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties’. He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time he had been sitting in a tower not of pearl, but of ivory.
Army life could not challenge Tolkien intellectually. His mind would inevitably roam beyond the job at hand – if there was one: ‘It isn’t the tough stuff one minds so much,’ he commented, but ‘the waste of time and militarism of the army’. Rob Gilson found time amid his duties to work on embroidery designs for furnishings at Marston Green, his family home near Birmingham; G. B. Smith worked on his poetry, especially his long ‘Burial of Sophocles’. Tolkien read Icelandic and continued to focus on his creative ambitions. He later recalled that most of the ‘early work’ on the legendarium had been carried out in the training camps (and in hospitals, later in the war) ‘when time allowed’.
Life in camp appears to have helped Tolkien extend the bounds of his imagined world in a quite direct way. Hitherto, Tolkien’s mythological poetry had gazed across the western ocean to Valinor. Now he began to name and describe the mortal lands on this side of the Great Sea, starting with a poem that described an encampment of men ‘In the vales of Aryador / By the wooded inland shore’. ‘A Song of Aryador’, written at Lichfield on 12 September, inhabits the twilight hours that Tolkien already favoured as a time when the enchanted world is most keenly perceived. But now the gulf between fairies and humankind seems vaster than ever. No goblin troop pads happily by, and no piper-fay is glimpsed making ecstatic music. Only, after the sun has gone down, ‘the upland slowly fills / With the shadow-folk that murmur in the fern’.
Despite the mountains, the scene perhaps owes something to Tolkien’s situation, and even (with poetic exaggerations) to the topography of Whittington Heath, in the Tame valley, with a wood and a lake, and the distant heights of Cannock Chase to the west and the Pennines to the north. This was once the heartland of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that encompassed both Birmingham and Oxford, and with which Tolkien felt a special affinity. Lichfield was the seat of its bishopric and Tamworth, a few miles away, the seat of the Mercian kings. With its Anglo-Saxon subtitle, Án léop Éargedores, ‘A Song of Aryador’ might describe the founding fathers of ancient Mercia.
Tolkien’s imagination flew way back before the Mercians, however, and further afield. He looked to the dim era of their ancestors in the wilds of Europe, for this was where his imaginary history dovetailed with the legendary time of the Germanic peoples: the vanishing point where names of half-forgotten significance such as Éarendel glimmered like distant beacons.
Aryador is not quite one of those historically attested names that tantalized Tolkien; but it almost is. The Qenya lexicon says that it is the ‘name of a mountainous district, the abode of the Shadow Folk’, which adds nothing to the enigmatic phrases of the Whittington Heath poem. One of the first bits of Elvish most readers of The Lord of the Rings learn is the element -dor, ‘land’, seen in the names Gondor and Mordor. Strip that away from Aryador and we are left with Arya-. The Qenya lexicon provides a complex etymology deriving this element from a Primitive Eldarin root; but at the same time it is impossible to miss the resemblance to a real-world name: Aryan. Long before it was misapplied by Hitler as an expression of Nordic racial superiority, Aryan was the nineteenth-century philological term for proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of many European and Asian tongues. Linguistic consensus is that the real-world word Aryan applies properly only to the Indo-Iranians; but some have found traces of the word in the names of other Indo-European peoples, such as Eriu, ‘Ireland’. The word is supposed to derive (via Sanskrit) from the prehistoric name of a nation – a name of unknown meaning that puts it in the same tantalizing category as Éarendel. A year earlier, Tolkien had ‘rediscovered’ th
e star-mariner behind that name, and since then he had invented a language in which the name had a meaning. Now, likewise, he implied that a place-name in Elvish was the ultimate source for Sanskrit Aryan. In the process, he ‘rediscovered’ the inhabitants of Aryador, who are presumably to be seen as the speakers of the Indo-European ancestral language.
Many years later, when The Lord of the Rings had made him famous, Tolkien expressed his puzzlement and irritation at the many ‘guesses at the “sources” of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings’ proffered by enthusiastic readers. ‘These seem to me no more than private amusements,’ he said, dismissing them as ‘valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction’. The true sources of his names, he wished to emphasize, were his own invented languages, the on-going products of decades of painstaking craft. His statements were undoubtedly true in 1967, and reflected his creative practice over the previous two, three, or four decades. They also reflect the fact that chance resemblances will inevitably occur between a large invented vocabulary and words in real languages. But evidence suggests that in 1915, at least, Tolkien did create a small but significant proportion of his Qenya words specifically to show kinship with ancient recorded or reconstructed words. The names of Eärendel and his boat Wingelot have already been cited; Tolkien also stated that he originally derived the name of the ‘nectar’ of the gods, miruvōrë, from Gothic *midu, ‘mead’ (the asterisk indicates that this is an unrecorded form deduced by philologists), and wopeis, ‘sweet’. Other possible examples may be adduced from the Qenya lexicon. The stem ulband-, ‘monster, giant’, must literally mean ‘unlovely one’, and it descends according to the regular sound-shift laws from a Primitive Eldarin negative UL- /and a derivative of VANA-, the root for words for ‘beauty’. But in form, Qenya ulband- closely resembles Gothic ulbandus, ‘camel’. Philologists do not know where ulbandus came from, except that English elephant came from the same lost word. In Tolkien’s fictional linguistic world, the common ancestors of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons had borrowed the word from Qenya. The skein of designations – ugly creature, giant, monster, camel, elephant – implies a whole history of travellers’ tales and mistrans-mission. Tolkien would later write about this in a comic poem, ‘Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt’:
The Indic oliphaunt’s a burly lump, A moving mountain, a majestic mammal (But those that fancy that he wears a hump Confuse him incorrectly with the camel).
Elsewhere in the lexicon, to take a more mundane example, the stem owo, whence Qenya oa, ‘wool’, suggests the reconstructed Indo-European word *owis, whence Latin ovis, ‘sheep’, and English ewe.
These do not seem to be coincidences; Tolkien was certainly not short of imagination, and produced plenty of Qenya words with no near real-world homonyms. He had a reason to scatter such words throughout his Elvish language. As with Arya-, the real-world words he dropped in were frequently ones whose original meaning is now lost. Jakob Grimm had been much exercised by the Irminsûl, a mysterious Germanic totem. In his capacity as a professional philologist, Tolkien later surmised that the old Germanic element irmin was a mythological term imported by the migrant Anglo-Saxons and applied to the ‘works of the giants’ they found in Britain, hence the Roman road name Ermine Street. But the Qenya lexicon entries for irmin, ‘the inhabited world’, and sūlë, ‘pillar, column’, suggest that Tolkien was working towards a fictional explanation for Irminsûl. Philologists have derived the Greek and Sanskrit words for ‘axe’, pelekus and parasu, from a lost non-Indo-European source; but Tolkien ‘rediscovered’ that source in the Qenya word pelekko. Tolkien also seeded his invented language with words the Indo-Europeans did not borrow, such as ond, ‘stone’, which, he had read as a child, was virtually the only word reconstructed from the lost language of pre-Celtic Britain.
Tolkien meant Qenya to be a language that the illiterate peoples of pre-Christian Europe had heard, and had borrowed from, when they were singing their unrecorded epics. Elves and gods had walked in those epics, and so had dwarves, dragons, and goblins; but only fragments of their stories were written down when literacy and Christianity arrived. Tolkien, with his lexicon of a fictional, forgotten civilization in hand, was now disinterring the fragments and restoring them to life.
The most striking feature of ‘A Song of Aryador’ is that these tribespeople seem profoundly ill at ease in this Aryador, the land from which implicitly they were to derive their name. They are not native at all, but pioneers; intruders at odds with their natural surroundings; benighted wanderers despite their attempts to make a home of the place. In fact, as the Qenya lexicon explains, this is not really their home at all, but ‘the abode of the Shadow Folk’. The mortals by the lake shore in the poem seem oblivious to this faint faëry presence, but ‘A Song of Aryador’ looks to an epoch older still, when humans had not arrived.
Men are kindling tiny gleams
Far below by mountain-streams
Where they dwell among the beechwoods near the shore,
But the great woods on the height
Watch the waning western light
And whisper to the wind of things of yore,
When the valley was unknown,
And the waters roared alone,
And the shadow-folk danced downward all the night,
When the Sun had fared abroad
Through great forests unexplored
And the woods were full of wandering beams of light.
Then were voices on the fells
And a sound of ghostly bells
And a march of shadow-people o’er the height.
In the mountains by the shore
In forgotten Aryador
There was dancing and was ringing;
There were shadow-people singing
Ancient songs of olden gods in Aryador.
Clearly, these shadow-people are Elves, perhaps hymning the Valar, the ‘olden gods’ of Valinor over the western ocean, but they seem to have since been driven into hiding by the intrusion of Men.* Similarly, in Irish myth, the faëry Tuatha Dé Danann retreated underground when the Celts invaded. Tolkien’s ‘shadow-people’ embody the spirit of the natural world. The human interlopers in Aryador are aliens here, blind to its wonders or just plain scared of them.
‘I am really angry with myself for the way I have treated all along your invitation to criticize,’ Rob Gilson wrote out of the blue in September, breaking months of silence. ‘Because I do feel that it is one of the best things the TCBS can possibly do at present. Some day I want to submit a book of designs in like manner.’ Gilson had received Tolkien’s first batch of poems from G. B. Smith in the spring but had passed them on to Christopher Wiseman a fortnight later without comment. Probably it was neither laziness nor reticence that stopped him, but distraction. At the time, Gilson had been on the brink of one of the defining acts of his short life. In recent years he had spent long holidays with the family of a retired American consul, Wilson King, who was a Birmingham friend of the Headmaster’s. The Kings had taken him into their hearts as a dear friend, but Gilson had long ago developed a secret passion for Estelle, Wilson King’s English daughter. In April 1915 he had finally revealed his feelings and asked her to marry him. However, she had recoiled in surprise and confusion and her father warned Gilson that he would not countenance her betrothal to a lowly subaltern with no immediate prospects and a war to fight.
Tolkien, it seems certain, knew none of this: the TCBS did not share such confidences. He had only told the others about Edith Bratt when they were at last betrothed over four years after they had fallen in love. He had told Wiseman once that he could not bear ‘a compartmented life’ in which the TCBS and Edith were unaware of each other. He made efforts to introduce his friends to his fiancée, and they made a fuss of her. (Wiseman once even wrote to Tolkien that the TCBS ‘of course includes your missis’.) But in reality romantic love posed a threat to the tight-knit circle. Since his failed declaration to Estelle, Rob Gilson had cut off c
ommunication with her; but his letters to the TCBS had apparently ceased too, and Tolkien had appealed in vain for a response to his letters when he wrote to Gilson with news of his commission back in July 1915.
Now, after a long hard summer debating whether to renew his suit to Estelle, Gilson was laid up in hospital in industrial Sunderland, on the north-east coast, recovering from the ‘flu and profoundly miserable. He had come with his battalion for a musketry course but now the Cambridgeshires had left for the south of England. In Birmingham his stepmother had heard from Dickie Reynolds about Oxford Poetry 1915. Gilson was eager for news of his old friends and wrote, ‘I confess that I have often felt that the TCBS seemed very remote. That way lies despair.’ He asked Tolkien to send more of his verse, adding, ‘I have oceans of time on my hands.’
Tolkien now sent him a second sheaf of his poems and Gilson, feeling revivified by the TCBSian spirit, promised to criticize them. Abruptly, he had learned he was about to be released from hospital, and was going on leave to Marston Green. He determined to visit Tolkien at Lichfield and sent telegrams summoning Smith and Wiseman as well. ‘At times like this when I am alive to it, it is so obvious that the TCBS is one of the deepest things in my life,’ he told Tolkien, ‘and I can hardly understand how I can be content to let slip so many opportunities.’ Wiseman came up from Greenwich, where he had begun his navigation course, and Smith travelled from Salisbury Plain, where the Salford Pals were now encamped. Arriving first, Smith and Gilson – now cutting a much thinner figure than in school and college days – visited the cathedral and the birthplace of Dr Johnson. Tolkien joined them, and finally so did Wiseman, and the four stayed at the George Hotel for an evening of ‘that delightful and valued conversation which ever illumines a council of the TCBS’, as Smith put it. The four were assembled for the last time. It was Saturday 25 September 1915. In northern France, in a foretaste of the battle that lay in store for three of the TCBS, the British army at Loos (including the first Kitchener volunteers) launched an assault so disastrous that, as the attackers turned to retreat, the German machine gunners who had mowed down eight thousand men ceased firing, finally overcome with pity.