Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
It is an icy day on the uplands of northern France, and to left and right hordes of soldiers advance across No Man’s Land in a confusion of smoke, bullets, and bursting shells. In a command dugout giving instructions to runners, or out in the narrow trench trying to grasp the progress of battle, is Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien, now in charge of signals for a muddy and depleted battalion of four hundred fusiliers. At the end of the carnage, three miles of enemy trench are in British hands. But this is the last combat Tolkien will see. Days later he plunges into a fever, and an odyssey of tents, trains, and ships that will finally bring him back to Birmingham. There, in hospital, he begins to write the dark and complex story of an ancient civilization under siege by nightmare attackers, half-machine and half-monster: ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. This is the first leaf of Tolkien’s vast tree of tales. Here are ‘Gnomes’, or Elves; but they are tall, fierce, and grim, far different from the flitting fairies of ‘Wood-sunshine’. Here is battle itself: not some rugby match dressed up in mock-heroic garb. Faërie had not entirely captured his heart as a child, Tolkien declared much later: ‘A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.’
Writing to his son Christopher, serving in the Royal Air Force in the midst of the Second World War, he gave a clear indication of how his own experience of war had influenced his art. ‘I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering,’ he said. ‘In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.’ The mythology ultimately published as The Silmarillion, depicting a time when Sauron of The Lord of the Rings had been merely a servant of the fallen angel Morgoth, arose out of the encounter between an imaginative genius and the war that inaugurated the modern age.
The tree’s development would be slow and tortuous. In 1914 Tolkien had barely begun working with the materials that would go into the building of Gondolin and Middle-earth. All he had was a handful of strange visionary pictures, some fragments of lyric poetry, a retelling of a Finnish legend, and a string of experiments in language creation. There was no sign that these things would ever be hammered into the mythic structure that emerged in late 1916, nor is the impact of war immediately apparent in what he wrote following Britain’s entry into the European conflict. This was a time of great patriotic outpourings among his contemporaries, epitomized by the elegant poetry of Rupert Brooke. G. B. Smith contributed to the flood with a poem subtitled ‘On the Declaration of War’, which warned its upstart enemies that England might be old
But yet a pride is ours that will not brook
The taunts of fools too saucy grown,
He that is rash to prove it, let him look
He kindle not a fire unknown.
Pride and patriotism rarely make good poetry. Tolkien, it seems, kept off the bandwagon. On the face of it, indeed, he appears just as impervious to influence from all things contemporary: not only friends and literary movements, but also current affairs and even personal experience. Some critics have tended to dismiss him as an ostrich with head buried in the past; as a pasticheur of medieval or mythological literature desperate to shut out the modern world. But for Tolkien the medieval and the mythological were urgently alive. Their narrative structures and symbolic languages were simply the tools most apt to the hand of this most dissident of twentieth-century writers. Unlike many others shocked by the explosion of 1914-18, he did not discard the old ways of writing, the classicism or medievalism championed by Lord Tennyson and William Morris. In his hands, these traditions were reinvigorated so that they remain powerfully alive for readers today.
A week after Britain’s entry into the war, while the German supergun known as Big Bertha pounded the Belgian forts around Liège, Tolkien was in Cornwall sketching the waves and the rocky coast. His letters to Edith reveal a mind already unusually attuned to the landscape, as when he and his companion, Father Vincent Reade of the Oratory, reached Ruan Minor near the end of a long day’s hike. ‘The light got very “eerie”,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes we plunged into a belt of trees, and owls and bats made you creep: sometimes a horse with asthma behind a hedge or an old pig with insomnia made your heart jump: or perhaps it was nothing worse than walking into an unexpected stream. The fourteen miles eventually drew to an end – and the last two miles were enlivened by the sweeping flash of the Lizard Lights and the sounds of the sea drawing nearer.’ The sea moved him most of all: ‘Nothing I could say in a dull old letter would describe it to you. The sun beats down on you and a huge Atlantic swell smashes and spouts over the snags and reefs. The sea has carved weird wind-holes and spouts into the cliffs which blow with trumpety noises or spout foam like a whale, and everywhere you see black and red rock and white foam against violet and transparent seagreen.’
But Tolkien was not eager to embrace the frightening new reality of war. Kitchener wanted 500,000 men to bolster Britain’s small standing army. In Birmingham the poor, manual workers or unemployed, were the quickest to step forward. Then British troops were driven with heavy losses from Mons in Belgium – their first battle in mainland Europe since Waterloo in 1815. At the same time, no regular army was left at home to defend against invasion. Now attention turned to the middle classes, and especially to young men such as Tolkien, without dependants. ‘Patriotism,’ thundered the Birmingham Daily Post, ‘insists that the unmarried shall offer themselves without thought or hesitation. ’ At the end of August the city looked to Old Edwardians, in particular, to fill a new battalion. Chivying them along was Tea-Cake’s father, Sir John Barnsley, a lieutenant-colonel who had been invited to organize the new unit. T. K. Barnsley tried to persuade Rob Gilson to join him in the ‘Birmingham Battalion’,* but the most Rob would do was help train the Old Edwardian recruits to shoot. By 5 September, 4,500 men had registered for the unit, enough for a second battalion and more, with Tolkien’s brother Hilary joining the rush. The volunteers, whose uniforms would not be ready for some weeks, were issued with badges so they would not be abused in the streets as cowards. Tolkien, who was not among the recruits, recalled later: ‘In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in.’ Meanwhile, casualties from Mons were filling the military hospital that had just been set up in Birmingham University, and Belgian refugees were arriving in England with stories of German atrocities.
With the public reproaches came hints from relatives, then outspoken pressure. Tolkien had no parents to tell him what to do, but his aunts and uncles felt that his duty was plain. Late in September, however, when he and Hilary were staying with their widowed aunt, Jane Neave, at Phoenix Farm, in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, John Ronald made it clear that he was considering carrying on at Oxford.
In many ways, Tolkien should have been predisposed to respond promptly to Kitchener’s call. He was Catholic, whereas the German invaders of Belgium were reputedly Lutheran zealots who raped nuns and slaughtered priests. He shared the cultural values that were outraged by the German destruction of Louvain, with its churches, university, and its library of 230,000 books that included hundreds of unique medieval manuscripts. And he felt a duty to crown and country.
But in 1914 J. R. R. Tolkien was being asked to fight soldiers whose home was the land of his own paternal ancestors. There had been Tolkiens in England in the early nineteenth century, but the line (as Tolkiehn) went back to Saxony. Ancient Germania had also been the cradle of Anglo-Saxon culture. In one of his notebooks that year, Tolkien painstakingly traced the successive incursions that had brought the Germanic tribes to the island of Britain. At this stage, as he later admitted, he was drawn powerfully to ‘the “Germanic” ideal’, which Tolkien was to describe even in 1941 (despite its exploitation by Adolf Hitler) as ‘that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe’. There was also the matter of academic fellowship. Germany was the intellectual fount of the modern science of philology and had hauled Anglo-Saxon into the forefront of English studies. That autumn, his old tutor Farnell relayed tales of German atrocities in Belgium, but Joseph Wright, who was now Tolkien’s friend and adviser as well as tutor, was trying to set up a lending library for wounded German soldiers who were being treated in Oxford. Such sympathies and society may not have been entirely forgotten, even under the glaring eye of Lord Kitchener on the recruiting posters. Though many