Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  His leave of absence ended on 12 January 1917, and, to be available for duty, Tolkien went to stay in Monument Road, Edgbaston, and in Wake Green Road, Moseley. But he had been unwell again. Hearing this, Wiseman declared himself ‘unreservedly glad’ and told him, ‘Malinger to your utmost. I rely on Mrs T…’ In fact, Tolkien had no need to sham illness. By the time he faced a second medical board at the Birmingham University Hospital on 23 January, the fever had returned twice, though the attacks were relatively minor. It was not unusual for trench fever to recur months, even years, after the first infection. Following his return from the Somme, Tolkien was caught between two potentially lethal forces: the War Office and illness. For now, the latter had the upper hand; he was still pale and weak and could eat little, and an ache lingered in his knees and elbows. The military doctors sent him back to Edith for another month.

  The interlude at Great Haywood came to its final end on Thursday 22 February 1917. Tolkien returned to Monument Road and then to Abbotsford, Moseley. On 27 February a medical board saw Tolkien at Lichfield Military Hospital and found that his health had improved little. Pending his return to service overseas, he had been earmarked for the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers, which guarded the Yorkshire coast and the mouth of the River Humber against invasion. Accordingly, he was now sent to a convalescent hospital for officers in Harrogate, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, and far from home.

  There was, of course, one major compensation for the upheaval, as Edith reminded him: ‘Every day in bed means another day in England.’ Every day also brought him closer to health. At the end of his month at Furness Auxiliary Hospital, though his joints were still causing him pain, he was found fit for light duty.

  First Tolkien was granted three weeks’ leave, at 95 Valley Drive, where Edith and her cousin Jennie Grove had taken lodgings early in March. In the middle of April, Wiseman finally obtained shore leave and invited himself rambunctiously to the Tolkiens’: ‘I am going to burst into your literary solitudes, with the permission of Mrs Tolkien, and with or without yours,’ he declared. ‘So here’s to the Council of Harrogate.’ He was overjoyed to find his friend still in England and likely to stay there for some while to come. ‘Meanwhile let all the pushes go merrily on in France and finish before you get out again,’ he wrote.

  Despite his predilection for humour, there is no reason to think that Wiseman had been joking when he urged Tolkien to malinger. Of the TCBS, only the Great Twin Brethren were left, and he had every reason to fear that Tolkien might join Rob Gilson and G. B. Smith in the corner of some foreign field.

  ‘As you said,’ Wiseman had written early in the year, ‘it is you and I now, Greenfield Crescent and Gothic, the old and original. The whole thing is so ineffably mysterious. To have seen two of God’s giants pass before our eyes, to have lived and laughed with them, to have learnt of them, to have found them something like ourselves, and to see them go back again into the mist whence they came out.’

  True to these sentiments, Wiseman had suggested that he and Tolkien, as the two surviving TCBSites, should take an interest in Smith’s creative legacy, his poetry, and in Ruth Smith’s efforts to have it published. She had now lost her other son, Roger, a subaltern attached to the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Tigris front in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), who had been killed in action at Basra in January. ‘I cannot believe the terrible thing that has befallen me,’ their mother wrote to John Ronald. ‘To lose two such fine sons is indeed crushing.’ Her sole consolation was the thought that Roger never knew his brother was dead. Wiseman summed up the tragedy to Tolkien: ‘I suppose very few people have given more than Mrs Smith; it is unspeakably sad. I ought to write to her, but can’t find words to do so with.’

  By the time Tolkien and Wiseman met in Harrogate on 18 April 1917, the German forces had fallen back from the Somme; though not in defeat. It was a strategic withdrawal that straightened and shortened their line, making it easier to defend. But it made a mockery of months of bitter battle and appalling loss of life. All that Britain and its allies gained was ‘a few acres of mud’, as Wiseman said. Such events made the struggle to salvage emotional, moral, and spiritual meaning ever more acute. This was the year the French army mutinied and the Russian army collapsed completely.

  Life in England was a shadow of its pre-war self; ‘the starvation-year’, Tolkien called 1917. At the end of January, Germany had resumed unrestricted naval warfare, which had been held in abeyance through much of 1916. Now U-boats laid siege to Britain, attacking not only military vessels but also merchant vessels and hospital ships. The Asturias, which had borne Tolkien in fever back from France in November, was torpedoed without warning and sunk off the south coast of England on 20 March; it had offloaded its cargo of invalids but forty-one crew and staff died. In April, a quarter of the ships leaving British ports fell victim to mines or submarines. The U-boat campaign also brought America into the war against Germany, but it would be a long time before US troops arrived in Europe in decisive numbers. In the midst of England’s increasing austerity, and after nearly six months of almost continuous leave from the army, Tolkien was plunged back into military life. He was still very run down, and not yet fit to return to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Instead he was despatched to the Humber Garrison, on the north-east coast.

  Tolkien arrived there on Thursday 19 April 1917, immediately after ‘the Council of Harrogate’ and just before the Battle of Arras. He may have been posted initially to Hornsea, where the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers had an outpost and musketry school; at any rate it was in this seaside town that Edith and Jennie Grove took lodgings. But if Tolkien was ever sent there, he did not stay for long. The battalion had its headquarters at Thirtle Bridge, fifteen miles south, on the peninsula of Holderness, a low land of hollows and hummocks and shallow ridges. Holderness was critically placed, stretched like a guardian sea-lion between the North Sea and the mouth of the Humber, which had provided an inroad for the ships of the early Anglo-Saxon settlers. Centuries on, Edward II began defensive works at Hull, and later Henry VIII extended the defences to the coast. With the advent of the First World War, fortresses had been built in the midst of the broad, muddy estuary, and the banks were dotted with watch-posts, signals stations, and batteries. Thirtle Bridge Camp itself had been established on farmland where the road from coastal Withernsea ran across an old drainage ditch on the way to the village of Roos, a mile further inland.

  Life here was notoriously dull. The railway was nearly three miles from Thirtle Bridge, at Withernsea, and the visiting wives of officers had to be ferried from the station to the camp by pony and trap. As one subaltern put it, ‘Here some sixty officers and nearly fifteen hundred men passed laborious days of work and leisure. Which of the two was calculated to bore one more, would be hard to say.’ More than half of the officers were unfit, like Tolkien, and among them at various times were several from the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Fawcett-Barry, the former commander of ‘A’ Company, was adjutant at Thirtle Bridge for a while, and Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, Tolkien’s commanding officer on the Somme, now organized battalion sports, plays, and concerts here. Tolkien’s friend Huxtable, still recovering from being buried alive in the trenches, was stationed at nearby Tunstall Hall, but was sent back to France in September.

  In a 1917 photograph with Edith at the seaside, Tolkien is noticeably thin, and his baggy officer’s breeches look too big. Twelve days after his posting, a medical board at Hull found him fit for general home front duties; but the doctors said he still needed ‘hardening’. From the time Tolkien joined the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers until the end of the war, it sent close on seven hundred officers overseas, including those who had been invalided home. He had to get fighting fit again through the old slog of physical training. How else he was occupied is unclear, but the battalion’s new recruits needed signals training, and there were patrols to be carried out along the low seaward cliffs: a dangerous job on stormy nights because no lights must be shown. Zeppelins made incursions o
ver the coast, and from Thirtle Bridge their bombs could be seen exploding in and around Hull. Searchlights showed them up like silver cigars, high in the sky.

  The Holderness landscape, though bleak, bordered the sea, which haunted so much of what Tolkien wrote. Its cliffs provide a precarious defence against the depredations of the hungry waves. Land disappears at Withernsea and southwards faster than almost anywhere in the world – nearly six feet a year. The North Sea has devoured swathes of shoreline here, gnawing its way westwards through the shales and clays since before the Anglo-Saxons came. More than thirty towns have been swallowed up since the twelfth century, and from time to time the sea casts ashore bones from graves it has robbed. The Humber and the North Sea have worked other remarkable changes on topography. A lowland to the south is called Sunk Island, though in fact it originally rose as a sandbank out of the estuary waters in the reign of Charles II before joining the mainland. The long, protruding sand spit of Spurn Point, continually remodelled by the elements, swings very slowly east and west like a geological pendulum.

  The clearest evidence that the shifting Holderness landscape entered into Tolkien’s imaginary world is contained, characteristically, in a fragment of an invented language. G. B. Smith had left him some books of Welsh, including the four branches of the Mabinogi, and at this time Tolkien was jotting down words and etymologies for his own Welsh-influenced tongue, Gnomish or Goldogrin. He decided that his new lexicon could be an artefact created by Eriol, and he wrote the mariner’s name on the cover under the title i·Lam na·Ngoldathon. But below he added in Gnomish the dateline ‘Tol Withernon (and many places besides), 1917’. The date indicates that here, on one level, Eriol is Tolkien’s nom de plume, while Tol Withernon, which occurs nowhere else, evokes Withernsea, the nearest town to Thirtle Bridge. He might have meant it as Eriol’s landfall: to Holderness, in the dim origins of English history, came the Germanic seafarers across the North Sea from Angeln.

  The origin of Withern- in Withernsea is debatable, and it is unclear whether Tolkien intended his Goldogrin equivalent to be meaningful. But Gnomish tol means ‘island’, suggesting that he thought the ending of Withernsea was Old Norse ey or Old English ēg, īeg, all with that meaning. On the face of it, this would be a strange interpretation, for Withernsea is part of mainland Britain. However, near the town’s edge is a reedy flat that used to be a lake until the thirteenth century; and local tradition held that the North Sea once flowed in here, running in a winding channel to the Humber itself and cutting off the southern half of the Holderness peninsula from the mainland.* In Tol Withernon we perhaps glimpse a matching conception of an island on the eastern edge of the larger Tol Eressëa.

  The transformative power of the sea was to play a key role in Middle-earth, a world repeatedly refashioned by its waters in the wars between the Valar and Morgoth and in the destruction of Númenor, Tolkien’s 1930s version of Atlantis. But in 1917, the gale-battered coast of Holderness made an appropriate setting for a further complete reworking of ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’, the storm poem Tolkien had last worked on two and a half years earlier. The 1917 version, written while he was living in a lonely house near Roos, provides a glimpse of an early Tolkienian cosmogony remarkable for its violence:

  in those eldest of the days

  When the world reeled in the tumult as the Great Gods tore

  the Earth

  In the darkness, in the tempest of the cycles ere our birth.

  The lines seem of a piece with the era, when world-shaking human conflicts and the harsh cycles of nature might have looked like two aspects of a single truth. War was unrelenting, and in Russia, where the Tsar had abdicated, revolutionaries were calling on workers of the world to rise up. But this conception of nature created from conflict also mirrors the rending and rebuilding of Holderness. In the 1917 version of the sea poem, it manifests itself in the actions of the capricious sea-spirit Ossë, who assails coasts, wrecks ships, and sends

  the embattled tempest roaring up behind the tide

  When the trumpet of the first winds sounded, and the grey sea

  sang and cried

  As a new white wrath woke in him, and his armies rose to war

  And swept in billowed cavalry towards the walled and moveless shore.

  Mindful of the ambivalent nature of the sea, Tolkien had assigned to it not one but two tutelary spirits. The greater of the two is not Ossë, despite his furious strength, but Ulmo (Gnomish Ylmir) ‘the upholder’, who understands the hearts of Elves and Men and whose music haunts its hearers. Accordingly, he now renamed the poem ‘The Horns of Ulmo’, tying it for the first time to his infant mythology. Additional lines identified the song as Tuor’s account of how he heard the music of Ulmo in the Vale of Willows.

  In the twilight by the river on a hollow thing of shell

  He made immortal music, till my heart beneath his spell

  Was broken in the twilight, and the meadows faded dim

  To great grey waters heaving round the rocks where sea-birds swim.

  Even when Tuor emerges from the spell, a salt mist redolent of Holderness lies over the Oxford-like Vale of Willows.

  Only the reeds were rustling, but a mist lay on the streams Like a sea-roke drawn far inland, like a shred of salt sea-dreams. ‘Twas in the Land of Willows that I heard th’unfathomed breath Of the Horns of Ylmir calling – and shall hear them till my death.

  For a while during the spring of 1917, Tolkien was put in charge of an outpost of the Humber Garrison near Thirtle Bridge at Roos (in a house next to the post office, according to local tradition) and Edith was able to live with him.

  ‘In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance,’ he wrote to their son Christopher after her death in 1971. When duty permitted, they would stroll in a nearby wood, which Roos tradition identifies as Dents Garth, at the south end of the village, beside the parish church of All Saints. Here, at the feet of the ash, oak, sycamore, and beech trees, tall flowers with white umbels burst into bloom from mid-April until the end of May. The flowers, Anthriscus sylvestris, are what books might call cow parsley, wild chervil, or Queen Anne’s lace, among many other names; but Tolkien referred to all such white-flowered umbellifers (and not just the highly poisonous Conium maculatum) by the usual rural name of hemlock.* Among these cloudy white heads, Edith danced and sang. The scene fixed itself in Tolkien’s mind. It could have come from fairy-tale, a vision of sylvan loveliness glimpsed by a wanderer returned from war. When he next had the leisure to compose at length, Tolkien put the scene at the heart of just such a tale.

  But in the meantime, on Friday 1 June 1917, RAMC officers at Hull found him fit for general service. The timing could hardly have been worse. Three days later, the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers sent more than a hundred men off to various fronts. On 7 June, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers (who had not seen frontline duty since their arrival in Flanders in October) took part in a huge British attack on Messines Ridge, south of Ypres: an entirely triumphant reprise of the strategy at the start of the Somme, preceded by three weeks’ artillery bombardment and the explosion of nineteen huge mines. Bowyer, the quartermaster, was the only officer killed in Tolkien’s old battalion.

  Tolkien, however, was told to continue with the Humber Garrison. He already had responsibilities with the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers and there was a strong likelihood that he might soon be made signals officer at Thirtle Bridge. In July he sat the exam; but he failed. Possibly his health was to blame. On 1 August he joined Huxtable and others at the regiment’s annual Minden Day dinner; but a fortnight later he succumbed to fever again and was admitted to hospital once more.

  Brooklands Officers’ Hospital, in Cottingham Road on the north side of Hull, was overseen by a woman glorying in the name of Mrs Strickland Constable. As Tolkien lay there, German aeroplanes flew in over the coast and Zeppelins carried out a bombing raid on the city. In Russia, the provisional government that had o
usted the Tsar was running into crisis. In Flanders, ‘Third Ypres’ was under way: the murderous quagmire of Passchendaele. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had marched up to the line under intense shelling that killed Captain Edwards of Tolkien’s old ‘A’ Company, still just twenty years old.

  Tolkien’s temperature ran high for the first six weeks and he was kept at Brooklands for a further three weeks. The journey from Hornsea was arduous for Edith, who had conceived during her husband’s winter convalescence at Great Haywood and was now more than six months pregnant. His latest relapse brought matters to a crisis, and she abandoned her increasingly miserable lodgings in the seaside town, returning with Jennie Grove to Cheltenham. She had lived there for the three years prior to their engagement in 1913 and wanted to have the baby there. Christopher Wiseman wrote in an attempt to console Tolkien, but found words inadequate. ‘It is all the more distressing now that I cannot help you even vicariously as I could before,’ he said, ‘and though we are the TCBS we have each got to see the other shouldering his load by himself without being able to lend a finger to steady him.’ Failing (characteristically) to post the letter at the start of September, Wiseman learned five weeks later that Edith was still in Cheltenham and John Ronald still in hospital. ‘I am very anxious for news of you, and also of your missis,’ he wrote. But he added, ‘So the Army do not contain quite so many fools as I supposed. I expected them to send you out before now, and I am delighted they haven’t.’