Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  Tolkien sent Wiseman the one poem he had written that year, ‘Companions of the Rose’. As yet unpublished, this is an elegiac piece about G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson; its title refers to the fact that both belonged to regiments that had fought at Minden, commemorated by the wearing of the white rose on 1 August. Wiseman, who approved of the poem, consoled him: ‘There is of course no legislation that touches the Muse, and she has not been entirely idle because you have spent a good time on the mythology.’

  Indeed, when he was well enough Tolkien found the hospital a haven of congenial company (which included a regimental friend), and conducive to writing. Here, he wrote ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, the love story at the heart of the ‘Lost Tales’ that had been inspired by that moment of fleeting beauty earlier in 1917 when he had gone walking with Edith in a wood at Roos. The second tale to be written down, it moved far from the vast war that had taken centre-stage in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. The threat posed by Melko remained in the background, and the stage was given over to a personal romance. Around this time Tolkien also began to prepare the ground for a darker counterpart to this story, the ‘Tale of Turambar’. This was a direct descendant of his attempt, in the first months of the Great War, to retell the section of the Finnish Kalevala that deals with Kullervo, who kills himself after unwittingly seducing his sister.*

  The large and complex mythological background to these tales was still evolving slowly, mostly by a process of accretion and alteration in name-lists and lexicons as Tolkien followed his linguistic muse. By the time he arrived at Brooklands, he had probably begun to enlarge the pantheon of ‘gods’ or Valar beyond the tiny handful he had named before the Somme. They were headed by Manwë and Varda and also included Aulë the smith, Lòrien Olofantur of dreams and Mandos Vefantur of death, the goddesses Yavanna and Vana, and possibly the hunter Oromë, in addition to the sea-deities Ulmo and Ossë. As for the Elves, Tolkien had probably decided by now that they first came into being beside Koivië·nēni, the ‘waters of awakening’. He knew that the Two Trees of Valinor, painted back in May 1915, were both to be destroyed by Melko and Gloomweaver, clearly the Spider of Night who had appeared in an early outline of Eärendel’s voyage. He also knew that the fortunes of the Gnomes in the war against Melko would pivot around the terrible battle of Nînin Udathriol, ‘unnumbered tears’. Most would become thralls to Melko, and those who remained free would be largely destroyed in the Fall of Gondolin, leaving a remnant led by Eärendel. In the end the Vala Noldorin would lead a host of Elves from Kôr across the sea in a quest to liberate the captive Gnomes, but Orcs would overwhelm them in the Land of Willows. Noldorin, surviving the attack, would fight Melko at the Pools of Twilight with Tulkas, another Vala. But these are shreds of story, and it is impossible to guess what else Tolkien was revolving in his head before the full narratives took shape in the Lost Tales he wrote immediately after the war.

  Tolkien was discharged from Brooklands on 16 October, still delicate and troubled by pain in his shins and arms. A month later, on Friday 16 November 1917, Edith gave birth at the Royal Nursing Home in Cheltenham. It was an ordeal that left her in a critical condition. But her husband could not be there. On the day his son, John Francis Reuel, was born, Tolkien stood before yet another medical board in Hull. His fever had recurred slightly but now he was judged fit to carry on full duties at Thirtle Bridge.

  England was under siege, and Tolkien was standing guard at the sea-wall, chronically unwell. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had seized power in Russia and called an armistice, allowing Germany to begin moving vast numbers of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western. ‘The end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now,’ Tolkien told his second son, Michael, in the darkness of 1941. He could get no leave to go to Cheltenham until almost a week later, just after the great but short-lived British tank advance at Cambrai. By then Edith was recovering, and Father Francis came down from Birmingham to baptize John. From Scapa Flow, Christopher Wiseman sent the kind of wish that is only made during a war. ‘When your kiddie comes to take his place with the rest of us who have spent their lives fighting God’s enemies, perhaps he will find I can teach him to use his sword,’ he wrote. In the meantime, he added, ‘I insist on the appointment of uncle, or some such position symbolic of incurable bachelorhood and benevolence essential to the proper inculcation of some TCBS rites and doctrines.’

  Tolkien sold the last of his patrimonial shares in the South African mines to pay for Edith’s stay in the nursing home, but there was no pay rise when he was promoted to lieutenant soon afterwards. He returned to Holderness, and Edith now took rooms for herself and the baby in Roos itself.

  His own health remained a problem and a mild fever took hold twice more, consigning him to bed for five days. But before the year was over, Tolkien had been transferred away from Roos and Thirtle Bridge to another coastal defence unit in Holderness, where his duties would be less demanding and he could receive on-going medical care.

  The Royal Defence Corps had been set up in 1916 to make use of men too old to fight. A short-lived forerunner to the famous Home Guard of the Second World War, it also drew in soldiers such as Tolkien who were of fighting age but not fighting-fit. A unit for the old or unwell, it was a symptom of the damage war had dealt to Britain’s population. Tolkien was sent to Easington, a tiny farming hamlet of three hundred people huddled near the tip of the peninsula, where the 9th Battalion of the Royal Defence Corps spent desolate days watching the sea. It was considerably more bleak here than at Thirtle Bridge ten miles to the north. Cliffs rose nearly ninety feet out of the North Sea, the air was salty, and the land treeless. A century before, soldiers had watched for Napoleon’s ships from Dimlington, a tiny neighbouring settlement founded by the Angles; but Dimlington had since fallen into the sea. Close by, the cliffs dwindled and the land tapered into a long low tail stretching out into the mouth of the Humber: Spurn Point. A military railway ran past to the gun battery on the tip of the spit of land, built to replace the old road that the sea had also claimed.

  The sea-tang enters again into ‘The Song of Eriol’, not so much a new poem as a reconfiguration of the old opening of ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, which had apparently dealt with Tolkien’s ‘father’s sires’ in Saxony. Christopher Wiseman had made some stringent criticisms of the ‘apparent lack of connection’ between parts of the poem. Now Tolkien pared the first part away from the longer sections dealing with Warwick, Town of Dreams, and Oxford, City of Present Sorrow, and reassigned the German ancestors to Eriol’s bloodline. So his ever-hungry mythology took a bite out of one of his rare pieces of autobiographical poetry.

  Nevertheless, like the period in which it was devised, Eriol’s emergent back-history is dominated by an armed struggle spanning Europe, or the Great Lands, as Tolkien now called the continent. Just as it had in ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, the scene shifts from the ‘sunlit goodliness’ of the rural ancestral idyll to a time of devastating conflict.

  Wars of great kings and clash of armouries,

  Whose swords no man could tell, whose spears

  Were numerous as a wheatfield’s ears,

  Rolled over all the Great Lands; and the Seas

  Were loud with navies; their devouring fires

  Behind the armies burned both fields and towns;

  And sacked and crumbled or to flaming pyres

  Were cities made, where treasuries and crowns,

  Kings and their folk, their wives and tender maids

  Were all consumed…

  Despite the very twentieth-century scale of these armies and the scarred landscapes (not to mention the anachronistic reference to naval warfare), the singer’s vantage-point is medieval. This is manifestly the Dark Ages, when the Germanic peoples who were thrust ever westward in waves of migrations and invasions set up their new homes in lands still marked by the ruinous stoneworks of the fallen Roman civilization.

  Now silent are those courts,

  Ruined the towers, whose old sha
pe slowly fades,

  And no feet pass beneath their broken ports.

  The sentiment echoes that of the Old English poem The Wanderer, in which ‘ealda enta geweorc idlu stodon’, the old work of giants stood desolate. Like the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer, too, Eriol has been bereaved by an apocalyptic war. Orphaned and made captive, he heard somehow the distant call of the great sea and escaped through ‘wasted valleys and dead lands’ to the western shores, arriving eventually in the Lonely Isle.

  But that was long ago

  And now the dark bays and unknown waves I know,

  The twilight capes, the misty archipelago,

  And all the perilous sounds and salt wastes ‘tween this isle

  Of magic and the coasts I knew awhile.

  The inhospitable, fogbound tip of Holderness seems to make its presence felt here at the end of Eriol’s wanderings, while the sea, ever ambivalent, loses some of its lustre for him, much as it did for Tuor.

  Tolkien found 1918 an ordeal. As the new year came in and he turned twenty-six, he was feeling much stronger, but then the pace of recovery slowed down. Exercise still left him exhausted, and he looked weak. Two months later he was struck down by a bout of 'flu which confined him to his bed for five days, though this was before the terrible Spanish influenza epidemic that left millions dead across Europe in the latter half of the year.

  But in March, medical officers at the Humber Garrison put an end to his treatment. The Royal Defence Corps was being wound down, and on Tuesday 19 March Tolkien was sent back for further ‘hardening’ with the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers at Thirtle Bridge. He was reunited with Edith, and on 10 April he was found to be fighting fit again. Then, to Edith’s despair, he was posted back to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers.

  The War Office needed every man it could get. The Germans had launched their long-expected Spring Offensive on 21 March, using all the vast manpower that had been freed from the Eastern Front when the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war. For Germany this was a last gamble before Americans could arrive in their millions. For a while it seemed a wildly successful throw of the dice.

  Having withdrawn from the Somme in 1917, the Germans now swept over the British line. Tolkien’s comrades-in-arms in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were among those pushed back with great loss by the relentless tide, finding themselves on 26 March – after a sixteen-mile retreat – defending the old Somme front line where it had stood at the very beginning of the great 1916 battle. And this was only the first of five grand assaults by Germany.

  Whatever the War Office had in mind for Tolkien, he was stationed initially at Penkridge Camp, an outlying section of Rugeley Camp on a ridge east of the Sher Brook, where he had stayed for a while during training for France. The barrenness of the heath was here relieved by a plantation of trees, and in the spring the Chase was more bearable than it had been when he had first arrived in late 1915. Later he was moved to Brocton Camp on the other side of the brook.

  The return to Staffordshire ushered in a relatively happy interlude. Edith, baby John, and Jennie Grove found lodgings at a pleasant, rambling house called Gipsy Green, in Teddesley Hay, a manorial estate at the western foot of the Chase, and Tolkien was able to stay with them. He took out his sketchbooks again after a long break and drew the house, together with a tableau of scenes of family life. In his Gnomish lexicon, where he was outlining ideas for further ‘Lost Tales’ during 1918, Gipsy Green followed Warwick, Great Haywood, Oxford, and Withernsea into the topography of the Lonely Isle, becoming Fladweth Amrod or Nomad’s Green, ‘a place in Tol Erethrin where Eriol sojourned a while, nigh to Tavrobel’. In the summer, his shared labours with Christopher Wiseman over G. B. Smith’s verse came to fruition when it was published by Erskine Macdonald as a small volume entitled A Spring Harvest.

  But the Gipsy Green idyll, such as it was, ended on 29 June, when Tolkien succumbed to gastritis at Brocton Camp. He was sent back to Brooklands in Hull; and as soon as he had recovered he might be posted to nearby Thirtle Bridge. Edith teased him, ‘I should think you ought never to feel tired again, for the amount of Bed you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.’ Edith herself was still far from well, and she refused to move again. With Jennie she had lived in twenty-two different sets of lodgings in the two years since leaving Warwick in the spring of 1915 and had found it a ‘miserable wandering homeless sort of life’. Nor was it over: Tolkien himself looked back on the period from John’s birth until 1925 as ‘a long nomadic series of arrivals at houses or lodgings that proved horrible – or worse: in some cases finding none at all’. But Edith’s exasperated decision now to stay at Gipsy Green was well timed: her husband spent the remainder of the war in hospital.

  The gastritis that struck him down in 1918 may have saved his life, just as trench fever had saved it before. The cruel pushes on the Western Front had taken their toll. Men were becoming scarce and, despite the arrival of the Americans, the war was far from won. On Friday 26 July Tolkien received orders to embark for Boulogne the next day in order to join his battalion in France. Almost as soon as it was issued, the embarkation order was cancelled. The War Office pen-pusher responsible had failed to take note not only that Lieutenant Tolkien was laid up in hospital, but also that his service battalion had effectively ceased to exist.

  Straight after their pursuit by the Germans across the old Somme battlefield, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had once more been moved to Ypres, in time to be on the receiving end of the second great German offensive of 1918, on 9 April. Despite heavy losses, they were sent unsuccessfully against Mount Kemmel on 25 April (a day after the Germans had destroyed the defending unit, G. B. Smith’s old battalion, the 3rd Salford Pals). Then they had been moved far afield to unfamiliar territory in the French sector of the line, on the River Aisne, where on 27 May they bore the brunt of one of the fiercest bombardments of the war, and the Germans’ third 1918 offensive. After two days of fighting and falling back, they turned at bay to cover the retreat of the rest of the 74th Brigade. Nothing was heard from them again. All that was left of the battalion Tolkien had fought in were sixteen men who had stayed in reserve (led by Major Rodney Beswick, who had been with him at Regina Trench). The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were officially disbanded in August.

  At Brooklands, Tolkien managed to pursue his mythological work, further developing Qenya and Goldogrin. He brushed up on his Spanish and Italian and – just as the Western Allies effectively joined the White Russians’ war against the Bolsheviks – he began to study Russian. But military duties of any sort were beyond Tolkien. Meals were followed by pain and stomach upsets. He lost two stone and regaining it proved to be a slow struggle. The Humber Garrison medical board decided he was out of danger and now needed little more than rest; but the War Office had ended the practice of sending officers home to convalesce, having decided that they made no efforts to get well.

  He was saved from action for one last, crucial period. Germany’s astonishing 1918 offensives had failed to decide the war in the Kaiser’s favour. Now the tide had visibly turned as the Americans arrived in ever increasing force and Spanish influenza laid waste the half-starved German troops. The Somme, and more, had been swiftly regained by an armada of tanks. The Great War was hastening to an end.

  Now Tolkien’s obstinate ill health at last registered with the War Office, or rather its manpower needs were finally easing. Despite a barrage of red tape, the bonds of service were cut with surprising speed. At the start of October, Tolkien was allowed to ask Lloyd George’s new Ministry of Labour if he could be employed outside the military. He was no longer attached to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers.

  On 11 October he was released from Brooklands and sent across the north of England to Blackpool, and the Savoy Convalescent Hospital.

  He was well enough now to enjoy a formal Italian meal there with several officers, including two carabinieri, on Sunday 13 October, and the next day a medical board found him u
nfit for any military duty for six months – but fit for a desk job. He was discharged from the hospital there and then.

  The Great War ended on 11 November, with scenes of jubilation on the streets of Britain and ‘unwonted silence’ in No Man’s Land. Tolkien, who would remain a soldier of the British Army until he was demobilized, asked after Armistice Day to be stationed at Oxford ‘for the purposes of completing his education’. Like many who find themselves once more masters of their own fate after a long remission, he had returned immediately to where he had last been a free man. His ambition before enlistment had been to begin an academic career, and nothing (certainly not his unpublished, unfinished, and painstaking mythology) had changed his mind. He cast about for work but found nothing, until his undergraduate tutor in Old Norse, William Craigie, one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, offered to find him employment as an assistant lexicographer. From the viewpoint of the dictionary’s editors, Tolkien would be an asset, but from the perspective of a jobless soldier facing a future that had never seemed less certain, this was a big break (and one he remembered with gratitude in his valedictory address forty-one years later at the end of his tenure as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature). An Old Edwardian in Oxford reported back to the school Chronicle some time later: ‘We rejoice to have Tolkien still among us – rumours of a dictionary beside which all previous dictionaries shall be as vocabularies reach us, and we go on our way shivering.’

  By Christmas, Tolkien had found rooms at 50 St John Street, up the road from the ‘Johnner’, the digs he had shared with Colin Cullis, and he moved in with Edith, John, and Jennie Grove. Students were flooding back from the armed forces, although they would not return to their pre-war numbers for a while and as yet, in the words of one historian, ‘were acutely aware of stepping into the shoes of dead men’. Soon Tolkien was earning extra pennies by giving tuition, chiefly to women students, and re-reading Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At Exeter College, Tolkien’s old friend T. W. Earp had (in the words of Robert Graves) ‘set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years’, preserving the minute-books of many undergraduateless societies, which were now re-formed. The Essay Club became the first public audience for Tolkien’s mythology when he read ‘The Fall of Gondolin’.