by John Garth
Aye, happy seven times is he
Who enters not the silent doors
Before his time, but tenderly
Death beckons unto him, because
There’s rest within for weary feet
Now all the journey is complete.
Christopher Wiseman broke the news to Tolkien. ‘My dear JR,’ he wrote. ‘I have just received news from home about GBS, who has succumbed to injuries received from shells bursting on Dec. 3rd. I can’t say very much about it now. I humbly pray Almighty God I may be accounted worthy of him. Chris.’ In reply to a letter of condolence, Ruth Smith asked Tolkien to send copies of any poems of Geoffrey’s he might have, so they could be published. ‘You can imagine what is this loss to me,’ she said. After the death of her husband, Geoffrey had become her chief support and strength, and he had relied equally on her. ‘He had never left home until going to Oxford and we built many castles in the air of the life we would have together after the War.’
Tolkien had been gathering himself for a spring. Probably while still in hospital, he made a new list of Qenya words drawn from his lexicon, calling it ‘The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’ (another name for the language). Halfway through, he interrupted it with a chart of denizens of Faërie, in which every Qenya word is translated not only into English, but also into a second invented language, Gnomish or Goldogrin. In accordance with historical linguistics, his academic speciality, Tolkien had derived Qenya fictively from an older ancestral language via a series of regular sound shifts and word-forming affixes. He created Gnomish, Qenya’s sibling, by filtering the same originating language, Primitive Eldarin, through different sound shifts, sometimes also applying different morphological elements. This, principally, is how German and English have both grown out of the language spoken in common by the Germanic peoples in the first centuries A.D. Tolkien, however, followed his heart, not his head, by finding the inspiration for his two invented tongues in a pair of real-world languages that are utterly unrelated. Just as Qenya reflected Tolkien’s passion for Finnish, so Goldogrin reflected his love of Welsh. Qenya liked trailing vowels, but Gnomish forgot them. Qenya favoured the ‘hard’, voiceless stops k, t, and p, but Gnomish allowed their ‘softer’ voiced counterparts g, d, and b to flourish. (The names of the Finnish and Welsh national myths, Kalevala and Mabinogion, illustrate these characteristics well.*) Aesthetically, Goldogrin sounds as if it has been worn smooth by change and experience, as befits a tongue spoken in exile among the fading woods of our mortal world, in contrast to Qenya, spoken in stately, immutable Kôr. It seems apt that Qenya, the language of lore, had been devised when Tolkien was an undergraduate and a soldier in training, whereas Gnomish, the language of adventure, tragedy, and war, should emerge after the Somme.
The distinction between the two served Tolkien for the rest of his creative life, though he constantly altered both languages and their histories. He ultimately took Gnomish off the Gnomes and gave it to the Grey-elves of the ‘Silmarillion’, renaming it Sindarin. The Gnomes, or Noldor as they were called by that time, were then allowed to borrow it. But that was far in the future.
In the meantime, below the fairies and the ogres on his chart, Tolkien wrote Eärendl, the name of the sky-mariner who had presaged his mythology back in September 1914. Since then, Eärendel had remained a solitary figure, more of a symbol than an individual, but now Tolkien finally gave him a dynasty. Eärendel was to be half man but half Gnome (or Noldo): the son of a human father, Tuor, and a faëry mother, Idril. Idril’s father was ‘king of the Free-noldor’, Turgon, who ruled over Gondolin, the City of Seven Names. In hospital and on leave after returning from the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien wrote his tale, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, a major imaginative turning point.
The long periods of marching, or watching and waiting in the trenches, and then convalescing in bed, had allowed Tolkien’s ideas to ferment. Finally free to write again, he did so with tremendous fluency. The established matter of sky myths and Valinor and the Lonely Isle were set aside for the time being, as ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ came out of his head ‘almost fully formed’. An explosion of creative power, it established the moral parameters of Tolkien’s world, enshrining aspects of good and evil in faëry races and demiurgic beings who are locked in perpetual conflict.
Compared with later writings – even those composed immediately after the First World War – ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ shows very little of that detailed ‘historical’ context that is one of Tolkien’s mature hallmarks. Very few lands or peoples are named. The spotlight falls strongly on the city of Gondolin itself, and especially its constituent kindreds; but there are only occasional glimpses of the momentous history of the Noldoli, or Gnomes, and of how this branch of Elf-kind came to establish their city. He already saw ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ (or ‘Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin’, as he initially called it) as part of a much larger narrative in which the history of the Gnomes would be told in full. But for now that history emerged only piecemeal.
A terrible oppression has befallen the Gnomes. Most have been enslaved and are kept in ‘the Hells of Iron’ by the tyrannical Melko, who infests the north with his goblins and spies. Those who are not physically kept prisoner are penned in mountain-ringed Aryador and in mental shackles. The free Gnomes have fled to the hidden refuge of Gondolin.
It is in Aryador that the tale begins, already marked as a land of primitive mortals ignorant of the fairy ‘shadow-folk’ in their midst. But the hero, Tuor, is different from the outset. He shows signs of poetic inspiration, singing rough but powerful songs on his bear-sinew harp; yet he leaves as soon as an audience gathers. Tuor escapes Aryador by way of a river tunnel, then pursues the stream to the sea. A distinct air of the Finnish Kalevala, with its forest-dwelling lakeside harpers and hunters, now gives way to a mode of romance used by William Morris in books such as The Well at the World’s End, in which callow youths achieve moral stature traversing an imaginary topography. Yet already Tolkien’s landscapes make Morris’s seem slapdash and vague. It is hard not to become immersed in the sensory world Tuor explores, sharing his wonder as he approaches the unrumoured sea:
He wandered till he came to the black cliffs by the sea and saw the ocean and its waves for the first time, and at that hour the sun sank beyond the rim of Earth far out to sea, and he stood on the cliff-top with outspread arms, and his heart was filled with a longing very great indeed. Now some say that he was the first of Men to reach the Sea and look upon it and know the desire it brings…
In fact Tuor has been unwittingly drawn to the sea by Ulmo, demiurge of the deep, for reasons that remain unspoken: to enrich his spirit yet purge his desire for solitude, perhaps, or to ensure that he returns there at the end of the tale when he has a son, the mariner-to-be Eärendel.
For now, however, once the sea has made its mark, Ulmo silently prompts Tuor to move inland; but in the Land of Willows disaster almost strikes. Tuor succumbs to the delight of naming the butterflies, moths, bees, and beetles, and he works on his songs. The temptation to linger acquires its own voice: ‘Now there dwelt in these dark places a spirit of whispers, and it whispered to Tuor at dusk and he was loth to depart.’ But hints of war appear in the descriptions of peace, where ‘beneath the willows the green swords of the flaglilies were drawn, and sedges stood, and reeds in embattled array’.
It is tempting to see parallels with Tolkien’s own life during 1914 and 1915. (In the abortive 1951 recasting of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, Tuor is twenty-three when he sets out, Tolkien’s age when he began both his mythology and his military service.) Tuor is a singer seeking wonders, a coiner of words, and a loner, as Tolkien was a poet with a Romantic bent, an inventor of languages, and elusive even to his closest friends. As duty found Tolkien amid the ‘Oxford “sleepies”’, so it finds Tuor among the sluggish waters.
Ulmo, perceiving that the ‘spirit of whispers’ may thwart his plan, now reveals himself in his majesty, telling Tuor he must bear a secret messa
ge to the free Gnomes of Gondolin. Several thrall-Noldoli clandestinely guide him until fear of Melko and his spies drives all but one away. With the help of the faithful Voronwë, however, Tuor finds the secret Way of Escape into Gondolin, a faëry land like a ‘dream of the gods’.
The city of Gondolin, built on a flat-topped hill with towers, marble walls, and seedlings of the Two Trees, was modelled on immutable Kôr on the rocks of Eldamar. It is, however, a flawed copy. A place of learning, living memory, and alertness, like Oxford in ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, it is in danger of becoming a ‘town of dreams’ like Warwick. Ulmo’s message is that Gondolin must arm itself and strike against Melko on behalf of the thrall-Noldoli, and before the tyrant overwhelms the world. King Turgon refuses to risk his city on the advice of one of the Valar, who ‘hide their land and weave about it inaccessible magic, that no tidings of evil come ever to their ears’. The weary Tuor falls back into a contented repose among the Gnomes, who brush off Ulmo’s warning with declarations that Gondolin will ‘stand as long as Taniquetil or the Mountains of Valinor’. ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ had said as much about Oxford, asserting that ‘No tide of evil can thy glory drown’; but Tolkien’s first mythological story highlights the perilous complacency in such claims.
If the first half of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ appears to echo Tolkien’s creative development and slow acceptance of duty in the first year of the war, the second half surely reverberates to his collision with war itself. The vivid extremes of the Somme, its terrors and sorrows, its heroism and high hopes, its abomination and ruin, seem to have thrown his vision of things into mountainous relief. A bright light illuminated the world and raised awful shadows. In this tale, Tolkien’s mythology becomes, for the first time, what it would remain: a mythology of the conflict between good and evil. The idea that the conflict must be perpetual arose directly from a long-held scepticism about the blandly optimistic prognoses prevailing during the Great War, as Tolkien recalled in an interview nearly half a century later: ‘That, I suppose, was an actual conscious reaction from the War – from the stuff I was brought up on in the “War to end wars” – that kind of stuff, which I didn’t believe in at the time and I believe in less now.’
In ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, too, his fairies shed the diminutive stature they had assumed in Shakespearean and Victorian traditions. The shift may have had something to do with Wiseman’s cautionary words in March about Tolkien’s love of ‘little, delicate, beautiful creatures’, or it may have been in answer to a creative need: now the Elves would have to play a part in war on a grand scale. Though still ‘small and slender and lithe’ the Noldoli are the same order of size as humans, solid and physical, capable of dealing wounds and receiving them. This reversion to a more ancient view of elves also allowed Tolkien to draw upon the old motif of the faëry bride, with the intermarriage of human Tuor with Idril of Gondolin, and so bring Eärendel into the story as their child.
A story ensues of spies and counsels of war like a fairy-tale relation of John Buchan’s 1915 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, set in the uneasy pre-war years. But the jealous Gnome Meglin, betrayer of Gondolin, seems to come from old romance by way of battlefield reality: captured by the enemy, he reveals Gondolin’s weaknesses in exchange for his life. Tuor takes a chief part in the defence of the city when Melko’s monsters come up over the mountain fence, and he leads its refugees in flight to the sea.
‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is one of Tolkien’s most sustained accounts of battle. But Gondolin under attack is not the Somme, despite its corpse-choked waters and smoke-filled claustrophobia. Least of all does the tale dress up the English as Gnomes and the Germans as Goblins. Prior to the Somme, Tolkien had written the Germans into his Qenya lexicon as kalimbardi, associated with kalimbo, ‘a savage, uncivilized man, barbarian. – giant, monster, troll’. These words now appeared in the more recent ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words’ simply as ‘goblins’, ‘goblin, monster’.* In England, news of the destruction of Louvain, or submarine attacks on merchant vessels, made it easy to see the Germans as barbaric, or even monstrous. Cary Gilson had written to Tolkien from Marston Green after Rob’s death: ‘That you are going to win – and restore righteousness and mercy to their place in the counsels of mankind I am certain: and it is a glorious privilege whether one dies or lives.’ Even in the midst of the Somme, Tolkien wrote that the war was ‘for all the evil of our own side in the large view good against evil’. Yet on the battlefield he had faced an enemy with all the hallmarks of humanity. Meanwhile, the Allies also used poison gas and unofficially sanctioned the killing of captives. Tolkien later insisted there was no parallel between the Goblins he had invented and the Germans he had fought, declaring, ‘I’ve never had those sort of feelings about the Germans. I’m very anti that kind of thing.’
‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is not war propaganda, but myth and moral drama. Like Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Tolkien took the confused moral landscape of the real world and attempted to clarify it into polarities of good and evil; but he applied the principle on an epic scale. He explained his approach much later in a letter to his son Christopher. ‘I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in “realistic” fiction,’ he wrote, ‘only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For “romance” has grown out of “allegory”, and its wars are still derived from the “inner war” of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.’ So it might be said that the Goblins embody ‘all the evil of our own side’ in the real war, as well as all the evil on the German side. They wreck and pillage, and they kill prisoners. The Gnomes of Gondolin, meanwhile, embody virtues on which no nation had a monopoly. They represent (as he wrote of his Elves in general) ‘beauty and grace of life and artefact’.
The battalions of Gondolin rally behind the dynastic standards of the Pillar, the Tower of Snow, the Tree, the Golden Flower, the Harp, the Mole, the Swallow, and the White Wing, each with its own heraldic livery: ‘they of the Heavenly Arch being a folk of uncounted wealth were arrayed in a glory of colours, and their arms were set with jewels that flamed in the light…’ Their folk-names recall the Wolfings, the Hartings, the Elkings, and the Beamings of William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings: Gothic tribes whose names reflect an intimate bond with the land they defend from the acquisitive Romans. Morris turned the classical view upside down, so that his forest-dwelling Goths uphold civilized values while imperial Rome represents barbarism. Tolkien’s moral compass has a similar orientation. The Noldoli see nature as a thing of intrinsic value, not simply as a commodity. Like all of Tolkien’s Elves, they also embody the older faëry tradition in which they are the spiritual representatives of the natural world, as angels are of heaven. They defend nature herself against a covetous power whose aim is to possess, exploit, and despoil.
Tolkien had listed several monstrous creatures in the ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’ and its ethnological chart: tauler, tyulqin, and sarqin, names which in Qenya indicate tree-like stature or an appetite for flesh. All these new races of monsters proved transitory, bar two: the Balrogs and the Orcs. Orcs were bred in ‘the subterranean heats and slime’ by Melko: ‘Their hearts were of granite and their bodies deformed; foul their faces which smiled not, but their laugh that of the clash of metal…’ The name had been taken from the Old English orc, ‘demon’, but only because it was phonetically suitable. The role of demon properly belongs to Balrogs, whose Goldogrin name means ‘cruel demon’ or ‘demon of anguish’. These are Melko’s flame-wielding shock troops and battlefield captains, the cohorts of Evil.
Orcs and Balrogs, however, are not enough to achieve the destruction of Gondolin. ‘From the greatness of his wealth of metals and his powers of fire’ Melko constructs a host of ‘beasts like snakes and dragons of irresistible might that should over-creep
the Encircling Hills and lap that plain and its fair city in flame and death’. The work of ‘smiths and sorcerers’, these forms (in three varieties) violate the boundary between mythical monster and machine, between magic and technology. The bronze dragons in the assault move ponderously and open breaches in the city walls. Fiery versions are thwarted by the smooth, steep incline of Gondolin’s hill. But a third variety, the iron dragons, carry Orcs within and move on ‘iron so cunningly linked that they might flow…around and above all obstacles before them’; they break down the city gates ‘by reason of the exceeding heaviness of their bodies’ and, under bombardment, ‘their hollow bellies clanged…yet it availed not for they might not be broken, and the fires rolled off them’.
The more they differ from the dragons of mythology, however, the more these monsters resemble the tanks of the Somme. One wartime diarist noted with amusement how the newspapers compared these new armoured vehicles with ‘the icthyosaurus, jabberwocks, mastodons, Leviathans, boojums, snarks, and other antediluvian and mythical monsters’. Max Ernst, who was in the German field artillery in 1916, enshrined such comparisons on canvas in his iconic surrealist painting Celebes (1921), an armour-plated, elephantine menace with blank, bestial eyes. The Times trumpeted a German report of this British invention: ‘The monster approached slowly, hobbling, moving from side to side, rocking and pitching, but it came nearer. Nothing obstructed it: a supernatural force seemed to drive it onwards. Someone in the trenches cried, “The devil comes,” and that word ran down the line like lightning. Suddenly tongues of fire licked out of the armoured shine of the iron caterpillar…the English waves of infantry surged up behind the devil’s chariot.’ The Times’s own correspondent, Philip Gibbs, wrote later that the advance of tanks on the Somme was ‘like fairy-tales of war by H. G. Wells’.