Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
exams (properly the examinations of the Honour School of English Language and Literature), were a year and a half away, and for now he could afford to explore the subject at his leisure. He studied Germanic origins under the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon, A. S. Napier. William Craigie, one of the editors of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, taught him in his new special subject, Old Norse, in which he read the Poetic Edda, the collection of heroic and mythological lays that recount, along with much else, the creation and destruction of the world. Meanwhile, the young Kenneth Sisam tutored him in aspects of historical phonology, as well as in the art of finding cheap second-hand books. Tolkien already knew many of the set texts well, and could devote time to broadening and deepening his knowledge.
He wrote essays on the ‘Continental affinities of the English People’ and ‘Ablaut’, constructing intricate tables of the familial words father, mother, brother, and daughter in ‘Vorgermanisch’, ‘Urgermanisch’, Gothic, Old Norse, and the various Old English dialects, demonstrating the sound shifts that had produced the divergent forms. As well as copious notes on the regular descent of English from Germanic, he also examined the influence of its Celtic neighbours and the linguistic impact of Scandinavian and Norman invasions. He translated the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf line by line and sampled its various Germanic analogues (among them the story of Frotho, who goes seeking treasure from a ‘hoard the hill-haunter holds, a serpent of winding coils’). He speculated on the provenance of the obscure figures of Ing and Finn and King Sheaf in the Germanic literatures. Tolkien was enjoying it so much that he had to share his pleasure. Giving a paper on the Norse sagas to Exeter College’s Essay Club, he characteristically thought himself into the part and adopted what a fellow undergraduate described as ‘a somewhat unconventional turn of phrase, suiting admirably with his subject’. (We may guess that he used a pseudo-medieval idiom, as William Morris had done in his translations from Icelandic, and as Tolkien would do in many of his own writings.)
A fertile tension is apparent in all this; a tension within philology itself, which stood (unlike modern linguistics) with one foot in science and the other in art, examining the intimate relationship between language and culture. Tolkien was attracted by both the scientific rigour of phonology, morphology, and semantics, and by the imaginative or ‘romantic’ powers of story, myth, and legend. As yet, he could not entirely reconcile the scientific and romantic sides, but nor could he ignore the thrilling glimpses of the ancient Northern world that kept appearing in the literature with which he was dealing. Furthermore, his hunger for the old world was leading him again beyond the confines of his appointed discipline. When he was awarded the college’s Skeat Prize for English in the spring of 1914, to the consternation of his tutors he spent the money not on English set texts, but on books about medieval Welsh, including a new historical Welsh Grammar, as well as William Morris’s historical romance The House of the Wolfings, his epic poem The Life and Death of Jason, and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga.
For all his interest in science and scientific stringency, and in keeping with his irrepressibly ‘romantic’ sensitivities, Tolkien was not satisfied by materialist views of reality. To him, the world resounded to the echoes of the past. In one Stapeldon Society debate he proposed ‘That this house believes in ghosts’, but his idiosyncratic personal belief, nearer to mysticism than to superstition, is better expressed in a poem published in Exeter College’s Stapeldon Magazine in December 1913:
From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames, Standing in a vale outcarven in a world-forgotten day,
There is dimly seen uprising through the greenly veilèd stems, Many-mansion’d, tower-crownèd in its dreamy robe of grey,
All the city by the fording: agèd in the lives of men,
Proudly wrapt in mystic mem’ry overpassing human ken.
In its rather grandiloquent fashion (with a long line probably inspired by William Morris) this suggests that the enduring character of Oxford predated the arrival of its inhabitants, as if the university were meant to emerge in this valley. Here is an early glimpse of the spirit of place that pervades much of Tolkien’s work: human variety is partly shaped by geography, the work of a divine hand. Studying the literatures of the old North in Oxford, Tolkien’s imaginative faculties began to strain after the forgotten outlines of ‘mystic mem’ry’ which he believed had made the world what it is.
Tolkien wrote relatively little poetry before the Great War, and certainly did not think of himself as a poet per se, unlike G. B. Smith. In poems such as ‘From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames’, though, he took his cue not from the Anglo-Saxons so much as from Francis Thompson and the Romantics (Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ had inspired a drawing in 1913) and their search for a dimension beyond the mundane. Giving a paper on Thompson to the Essay Club on 4 March 1914, Tolkien depicted a writer who could bridge the divide between rationalism and romanticism, highlighting ‘the images drawn from astronomy and geology, and especially those that could be described as Catholic ritual writ large across the universe’.
The fairies of Tolkien’s early poem ‘Wood-sunshine’ may have been nothing more, on one level, than wood-sunshine itself: the imaginative embodiment of light dappling the leaves on tree-branch and forest-floor. Tolkien’s Romantic imagination, however, finds them more real than mere photons and chlorophyll. ‘Wood-sunshine’ may be seen as a plea to these ‘glinting reflections of joy / All fashion’d of radiance, careless of grief’, a plea from the mundane and suffering world for solace. Lightweight as this imagery may seem, it was linked to substantial themes. By 1914 Tolkien could formulate that link as a precept for readers of Francis Thompson, telling his fellow undergraduates, ‘One must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being’s harmony.’
Nothing as momentous as the events of the previous year seemed likely to befall Tolkien in 1914, and the year unfolded much as any other. When the Easter vacation arrived, his term as Stapeldon president expired and he handed over to his friend Colin Cullis, who had been a member of the Apolausticks and had co-founded the later Chequers Club with him. The Stapeldon spent much of the summer term preparing for Exeter College’s 600th anniversary: it failed to send out any of its usual insubordinate remonstrances to foreign powers because no ‘international affairs of sufficient importance had occurred’. On 4 June the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, was the guest of the university’s enthusiastic Anglo-German Club, which included Joseph Wright and Lewis Farnell, now the college’s Rector, or principal. Mrs Farnell found the prince oddly distracted until she mentioned the activities of the Officer Training Corps, about which he seemed eager to know as much as possible. The dinner, part of the celebrations of Oxford’s links with Germany, was just one of a spectacular outcrop of parties at the end of the summer term. Two days later it was Exeter College’s sexcentenary dinner, and Tolkien proposed the toast to the college societies (as befitted a member of so many). Then there was the ‘Binge’ for the Chequers Club, its elegant invitations drawn by Tolkien. Finally, starting on Tuesday 23 June, there were three days of social events marking the college’s 600 years, with a summer ball, a gaudy (a reunion for former members of Exeter College, or Old Exonians), a lunch, and a garden party. Some months later Farnell recalled: ‘All our festivities were enhanced by charming weather, and our atmosphere was unclouded by any foreboding of the war-storm.’
Term came to an end and so, almost immediately, did the old world. On 28 June, in the Balkan city of Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist fired a gun at the heir to the Austrian throne, fatally wounding him. International alliances were invoked and states stepped together into a danse macabre. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian empire’s friend, Germany, declared war on Serbia’s ally, Russia. A day later, fearing encirclement, Germany declared war on France. On 4 August 1914, to circumvent the heavily fortified French-German border, invading troops marched into Belgium. That day Britain declared war on Germany, having pledged to defend Belgian neutrality. Three days later, Lord Kitchener, now Minister of War, called Tolkien’s generation to arms.