by John Garth
There were further practical barriers to completing ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. In 1920 Tolkien had finally launched the academic career that the war had delayed, taking a position at Leeds University, where he energetically revivified the English language syllabus. At the same time he compiled, with long and meticulous labour, A Middle English Vocabulary to accompany an anthology edited by Kenneth Sisam, his former tutor at Oxford. When that was published in 1922 he was working on a new edition of the alliterative Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with a Leeds colleague, E. V. Gordon. In 1924 Tolkien was made a professor at Leeds, but the following year he won the Rawlinson Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. By then he was also the father of three young children.
Tolkien’s bigger difficulty, however, was a niggling perfectionism. He was well aware of it and, much later, he wrote a story, ‘Leaf by Niggle’, in which the problem is borne by a painter doomed never to complete his enormous picture of a tree. In years to come the legendarium grew into a vast complex of interwoven histories, sagas, and genealogies, of phonologies, grammars, and vocabularies, and of philological and philosophical disquisitions. Left to his own devices it seems quite likely that Tolkien would never have finished a single book in his life. What he needed were publishers’ deadlines and a keen audience.
Back in November 1917, his old schoolmaster R. W. Reynolds had expressed himself ‘much interested in the book of tales you are at work on’, urging Tolkien to send it to him as soon as it was ‘in a state to travel’. But in 1922 Reynolds and his novelist wife, Dorothea Deakin, moved for health reasons to Capri in the Bay of Naples, and by the time he got back in touch, following her death in 1925, Tolkien had long left the tales incomplete. Instead he sent several poems out to Capri, including two works in progress: his alliterative lay about Túrin and a rhymed geste about Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel (as she was now called). Reynolds had little or nothing good to say about the first, and thought the second promising but prolix. He was being true to form. ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ – the poem G. B. Smith had carried around the trenches of Thiepval Wood ‘like a treasure’ – had seemed to Reynolds merely ‘charming’, but not gripping. Before the 1914 Council of London, Tolkien had told Wiseman he thought Reynolds was to blame for Smith’s excess of aestheticism over moral character. Wiseman had commented since then that Smith’s poetry was beyond Reynolds’ grasp. If that was so, he could scarcely have engaged with Tolkien’s.
Tolkien did no further work on the Túrin poem, though he pursued the geste for several more years. Yet the intervention of Reynolds had a radical effect on Tolkien’s central mythological project. To furnish his old teacher with the background information necessary for an understanding of the two narrative lays, Tolkien summed up ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in a ‘sketch’ of the mythology. So many of his ideas, linguistic inventions, and stylistic preferences had changed that the Lost Tales as originally written now seemed to him inadequate. To take a key example, the Silmarils, their maker Fëanor, and his seven oath-driven sons had assumed a central role in terms of narrative and theme that was barely portended in the Lost Tales. The précis turned into a replacement. By and large, the tales he had laboriously written out in exercise books from late 1916 onwards were filed away for ever. When he next worked on the mythology as a whole – or the ‘Silmarillion’, as he came to call it – he consulted not the Lost Tales, but the sketch.
The effect of this decision was to remove at a stroke the ebullience, earthiness, and humour of the original mythology. It is a great shame that Tolkien compressed these stories, when given more time and less perfectionism he might have expanded each one to produce something commensurate with a William Morris romance; he was certainly Morris’s superior in imaginative and descriptive powers. But in the versions that followed, culminating in The Silmarillion, posthumously published in 1977, the physical and psychological detail of the narrative poems was largely excluded as well. The Valar became increasingly civic and humane, but perhaps less interesting. The frame-story, with its elm-grown city, its curious elven cottage, and its dreaming mariner, all but vanished. The long English prehistory between the voyage of Eärendel and the Faring Forth was abandoned. The ‘Silmarillion’ in all its versions retreats from fairy-story, and the ‘contact with the earth’ that Tolkien had thought so important fades away, while the epic heroes tend to merge into the ‘vast backcloths’.
Both Wiseman and Reynolds had warned Tolkien of such problems during the war. Reynolds had said ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ was ‘lacking in experience of life’. Somehow ignoring the brute fact of the Somme, Wiseman felt in 1917 that Tolkien had still not been through enough to write at his best, and that therefore he should indeed start with epic, ‘the only form of serious verse available for a poet who has not yet experienced life’, as he put it. His reasoning was false: ‘In an epic you make no pretence of dealing with life; so experience of it is unnecessary, ’ he said. But his prophecy was spot on: ‘You can’t go on writing epics all your life; but until you can do something else, you simply must write epics.’ What kept Tolkien ploughing his lonely furrow, however, was not inexperience but reverence for epic as a literary mode. He did not give other forms much serious thought. As Wayne G. Hammond has observed, it was writing children’s stories that ‘gave him opportunities (or excuses) to experiment with other modes of story-telling than the formal prose or poetry he used in writing his mythology’.
After the death of G. B. Smith, Tolkien had no ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’. At times Wiseman found Tolkien’s work astonishing and unprecedented, and they shared some interests – Arthurian legend, for example. But the two were often at odds. Relishing a good argument, they frequently offended each other. Such problems, quickly resolved at school, festered between letters exchanged at long intervals. The forthright Wiseman did not conceal his basic lack of sympathy with the Lost Tales, though there is no evidence that he ever read them. In 1917, he had told Tolkien that he could not compete with Alexander Pope or Matthew Arnold and that the project must be a mere prelude to more worthwhile things. It might produce an epic, or a great poem, or a mythology, Wiseman had conceded; but, he urged, ‘I want you to get this stage over and go on to something else.’
Wiseman and Tolkien saw a little of one another, on and off, but when one became a headmaster and the other an Oxford professor they started to feel they had little in common. The deaths of Smith and Gilson perhaps also cast a shadow over their thoughts of each other. There was no rift; John Ronald spoke fondly of Christopher ever afterwards, and named his third son after him. Yet they drifted apart, and Tolkien lost a stern but useful critic. The direct influence of the TCBS ended forever.
C. S. Lewis stepped into the breach they had left. The two met in 1926 and Lewis, an English don and medievalist from Magdalen College, Oxford, joined the Coalbiters, a group founded by Tolkien to read the Icelandic myths and sagas. Later Tolkien became a regular in the Inklings, the literary clique that revolved around Lewis from the 1930s. By that time they had recognized in each other a common love of ‘Northernness’, and Lewis had become a closer friend to Tolkien than anyone since the heyday of the TCBS. Indeed, Lewis rolled into one forceful personality their several roles: the generous social gifts of Rob Gilson, the critical insight of Christopher Wiseman, and, most importantly, the passionate imaginative sympathies of G. B. Smith. Just like Tolkien, Lewis had written reams of unpublished material, and still wanted to be a great poet, but regarded the majority of contemporary writers with impatience. ‘Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby,’ Tolkien wrote. Clearly, he had left far behind the heady days when his three old schoolfriends had urged him to publish before he was sent in to battle.
By the time Lewis read ‘The Lay of Leithian’, the long Tinúviel poem, Tolkien had another enthusiastic audience: his family. Edith’s early involvement in his writing (she made fair copies of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ in F
ebruary 1917 and ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ around 1919) had not lasted. But Tolkien had started writing stories for their children as early as 1920, when he first sent John a letter purporting to be from Father Christmas. That year Edith had a second son, Michael, and in 1924 a third, Christopher. In 1929 a daughter, Priscilla, was born. It was for their entertainment that he wrote ‘The Hobbit’, showing it to an enthusiastic Lewis in 1933.
‘The Hobbit’ became absorbed into the margins of Tolkien’s mythology, a process that began, characteristically, with the problem of naming a half-elf whom Bilbo was to meet early in his adventure. He plucked the name Elrond from ‘The Silmarillion’, where it belonged to none other than the son of Eärendel the star-mariner. Quickly the two Elronds became one, and even Gondolin appeared as part of a barely glimpsed but atmospheric ancient history.
News of this unique and stirring children’s story reached the publishers George Allen & Unwin in 1936, and The Hobbit appeared the following September to enthusiastic reviews. With prospects bright, Allen & Unwin quickly asked for a sequel, and in December 1937 Tolkien began writing the first chapter of ‘a new story about Hobbits’. So began the long gestation of Tolkien’s masterpiece, a tale which (as he later wrote), ‘grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it’.
The two remaining representatives of 1914’s inspirational Council of London met up again at last, late in life, when both were living in retirement on the South Coast: Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, hiding from fame in Bournemouth, and Wiseman, retired headmaster and energetic chairman of the village association in nearby Milford-on-Sea.
In November 1971 Edith died, leaving her husband bereft. On her tombstone in north Oxford he had the name Lúthien inscribed, ‘which says for me more than a multitude of words: she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien,’ he wrote. ‘But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.’
Three months after her death, Tolkien moved back to Oxford to live in rooms provided by Merton College, still hoping somehow to finish the mythological work he had begun with such high ambition in the months after the Battle of the Somme. In the meantime, though, he had paid a visit to Wiseman – also now a recent widower, following the death of Christine, the woman who in 1946 had finally cured his ‘incurable bachelorhood’. But Wiseman had just remarried, and his second wife Patricia and her daughter Susan walked in the garden with Tolkien. He seemed, they thought, very much a hobbit in his green waistcoat, delighted by the flowers and fascinated by the insects, about which he spoke knowledgeably. But as for the two surviving members of the Immortal Four: they did not speak to each other very much, or once mention their recent bereavements, and Wiseman at least (though he played his own part in this conspiracy of silence) was privately hurt.
Yet the bond, if strained, was certainly not broken. When Tolkien next wrote, from Oxford in May 1973, he thanked Wiseman for drawing him from his ‘lair’ and signed himself, ‘Your most devoted friend’, adding after his own initials the letters ‘TCBS’. Near the end of August, Tolkien was back in Bournemouth, staying with friends, and made a reservation to stay at his retirement haunt, the Hotel Miramar, for a few days from 4 September. He explained in a note to his daughter Priscilla, ‘I wish v. much to visit various people here,’ he said, ‘also Chris Wiseman at Milford…’ But two days after the letter, he was taken to hospital suffering from an acute bleeding gastric ulcer. J. R. R. Tolkien died at the age of eighty-one, on 2 September 1973. He was buried next to Edith, with the name Beren beneath his own.
Postscript. ‘One who dreams alone’
A pale, drawn man sits in a convalescent bed of a wartime hospital. He takes up a school exercise book and writes on its cover, with a calligraphic flourish: ‘Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin’. Then he pauses, lets out a long sigh between the teeth clenched around his pipe, and mutters, ‘No, that won’t do anymore.’ He crosses out the title and writes (without the flourish): ‘A Subaltern on the Somme’.
That is not what happened, of course. Tolkien produced a mythology, not a trench memoir. Middle-earth contradicts the prevalent view of literary history, that the Great War finished off the epic and heroic traditions in any serious form. This postscript will argue that despite its unorthodoxy – and quite contrary to its undeserved reputation as escapism – Tolkien’s writing reflects the impact of the war; furthermore, that his maverick voice expresses aspects of the war experience neglected by his contemporaries. This is not to say that his mythology was a response to the poetry and prose of his contemporaries, but that they represent widely divergent responses to the same traumatic epoch.
Literature hit a crisis point in 1916, in the assessment of critic Samuel Hynes: ‘a “dead spot” at the centre of the war’ when ‘creative energies seemed to sink to a low point’ among British writers. G. B. Smith and his poetry were both languishing on the Somme; ‘sheer vacancy is destroying me’, he said. A very different writer, Ford Madox Ford, was in a similar rut at Ypres, asking himself ‘why I can write nothing – why I cannot even think anything that to myself seems worth thinking’.
Tolkien’s poetry does seem to have come close to drying up in the wake of the Somme, with just one piece (‘Companions of the Rose’) written in the first eight months of 1917. But he had hardly been idle, as Wiseman pointed out. Whatever malaise was afflicting other writers, his creative energies were at a peak when he began ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in the winter of 1916-17.
Out of the ‘dead spot’, two new and enormously influential literary movements emerged: firstly, a style of war writing that has attained ‘classic’ status; secondly, modernism. But the impact of these on Tolkien was negligible.
In the modernist experimentation that took off in the post-war years – largely a reflection of the shock, moral chaos, and bewildering scale of the war – he played no part. The era of The Waste Land and Ulysses was in his view ‘an age when almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or “personal expression”’.
Nor did he participate in the kind of literature now seen as the epitome of the trenches. Out of the diversity of writing produced by soldiers, what is remembered is an amalgam of bitter protest and gritty close-ups, uncompromisingly direct in its depiction of trench life and death. Spearheading this style, Robert Graves, his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and Sassoon’s brilliant protégé Wilfred Owen take pride of place in anthologies of ‘Great War writing’. A handful of Owen’s poems have become the measure of all other portrayals of the First World War – even of war in general.
In pursuit of directness, Graves and his followers threw away the rulebook used by newspapers, recruitment literature, and mainstream poetry, which filtered the war through a style inherited from previous conflicts. Owen’s most famous poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, highlights the mismatch between the sacramental imagery of the inherited language and the reality of his war:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
The old style traced its way back to Arthurian romance by way of Shakespeare, the Romantics, and High Victorian medievalism. It had action, heroism, and epic sweep; it purported to show the big picture and employed the ‘high diction’ of valour. Paul Fussell, in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, provides a lexicon of this language, in which ‘A horse is a steed, or charger, the enemy is the foe, or the host; danger is peril’, and so forth. He regards high diction as a form of censorship. Historian Jay Winter rages at the armchair militarists of 1914-18: ‘Those too old to fight had created an imaginary war, filled with medieval knights, noble warriors, and sacred moments of sacrifice. Such writing…was worse than banal; it was obscene.’
By the yardstick of Owen’s poetry, the Somme would seem to have had no effect on Tolkien’s writing at all. Prob
lematically, he wrote about an imaginary war that looks rather like the kind of thing Winter derides and is packed with high diction.
It has earned him the opprobrium of reviewers who cannot see his prose style without suspecting him of jingoism: a general taint has attached itself to this sort of language thanks to the First World War. Tolkien’s style has made some of his admirers uncomfortable too. In an essay that raises some interesting points about how the Somme may have influenced Middle-earth, Hugh Brogan asks bluntly ‘how it was that Tolkien, a man whose life was language, could have gone through the Great War, with all its rants and lies, and still come out committed to a “feudal” literary style’. Brogan concludes that in refusing to conform to the new rules established by Robert Graves and the archmodernist Ezra Pound, Tolkien was engaged in ‘an act of deliberate defiance of modern history’.