Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
‘rune singers’ in the Karelian region of Finland. Fragmentary and lyrical though these songs were, many referred tantalizingly to an apparently pre-Christian cast of heroic or divine figures headed by the sage Väinamöinen, the smith Ilmarinen, and the boastful rogue Lemminkäinen. Lönnrot had seen his chance to create a Finnish equivalent of what contemporary Iceland and Greece had inherited, a mythological literature; and he did so at a time when the Finns were struggling to find a voice. Finland, ruled by Sweden since the twelfth century but entirely distinct in language, culture, and ethnic history, had become a personal grand duchy of the Tsar of Russia in 1809. Just then the notion that ancient literature expressed the ancestral voice of a people was sweeping through Europe’s academies and salons. When the Kalevala arrived in 1835, it had been embraced by Finnish nationalists, whose goal of independence was still unachieved in 1914.
Tolkien spoke in defence of nationalism at a college debate that November, even as the pride of nations was plunging Europe into catastrophe. Nationalism has carried even sourer connotations since the 1930s, but Tolkien’s version had nothing to do with vaunting one nation above others. To him the nation’s greatest goal was cultural self-realisation, not power over others; but essential to this were patriotism and a community of belief. ‘I don’t defend “Deutschland über alles” but certainly do in Norwegian “Alt for Norge” [All for Norway],’ he told Wiseman on the eve of the debate. By his own admission, therefore, Tolkien was both an English patriot and a supporter of Home Rule for the Irish. He could appreciate the Romantic notion of language as an ancestral voice, but he went further: he felt he had actually inherited from his maternal ancestors a taste and an aptitude for the Middle English of the West Midlands, a dialect he was studying for his English course in the religious text Ancrene Riwle. Writing about his life and influences much later, he declared:
I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere.
Like Lönnrot, Tolkien felt that his true culture had been crushed and forgotten; but, characteristically, he saw things on a vast timescale, with the Norman Conquest as the turning point. William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066 had brought the curtain down on the use of English in courtly language and in literature for centuries, and ultimately left English laced with non-Germanic words. The voice of a people, effectively, had been silenced for generations, and the continuity of the record had been severed. Tolkien had launched an ingenious counterattack at school, deploring the Norman Conquest ‘in a speech attempting to return to something of Saxon purity of diction’, as the school Chronicle reported – or as Tolkien himself put it, ‘right English goodliness of speechcraft’: a language purged of Latin and French derivatives (though before the end of his speech he forgot, in his excitement, not to use ‘such outlandish horrors as “famous” and “barbarous”’). Old English, though only written down by Christian Anglo-Saxons, had preserved glimpses of the older traditions that fascinated Tolkien in its literature and in the very fabric of its language; and undoubtedly much more had been swept away by the Norman Conquest.
In contrast, the Kalevala had preserved the Finns’ old traditions. Addressing Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society, at G. B. Smith’s invitation, on 22 November 1914, he declared: ‘These mythological ballads are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ He told the Sundial Society: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ This, in effect, was the young J. R. R. Tolkien’s creative manifesto.
Tolkien had read ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ aloud on 27 November 1914 to Exeter College’s Essay Club, at a poorly attended meeting which he called ‘an informal kind of last gasp’ as war emptied Oxford of its undergraduates. G. B. Smith also read the poem and asked his friend what it was really about. Tolkien’s reply speaks volumes about his creative method, even at this early stage. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to find out.’ He had already emulated Lönnrot by working back through the Old English Crist into the ‘undergrowth’ of Germanic tradition, where a mariner called Éarendel might have sailed the skies. The celestial heroes of myth always have earthbound origins, but Tolkien had so far ‘discovered’ nothing about Éarendel’s. Around now he scribbled down some ideas:
Earendel’s boat goes through North. Iceland. Greenland, and the wild islands: a mighty wind and crest of great wave carry him to hotter climes, to back of West Wind. Land of strange men, land of magic. The home of Night. The Spider. He escapes from the meshes of Night with a few comrades, sees a great mountain island and a golden city – wind blows him southward. Tree-men, Sun-dwellers, spices, fire-mountains, red sea: Mediterranean (loses his boat (travels afoot through wilds of Europe?)) or Atlantic…’
The notes then bring the seafarer to the point in ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ where he sails over the rim of the world in pursuit of the Sun. The scale of Tolkien’s imaginative ambitions is at once astonishingly clear. This is an Odyssey in embryo, but one in which the classical milieu of the Mediterranean appears only as an afterthought and whose heart lies in the bitter northern seas around Tolkien’s island home. But startling, too, is the way this elliptical note already foreshadows fundamental moments from The Silmarillion, from the Atlantis-story of Númenor, and even from The Lord of the Rings. Here, perhaps for the first time, these blurred images found their way onto paper. Many of them may have existed in some form already for a long time. But Cynewulf, the Kalevala, G. B. Smith’s probing questions, and arguably even Tolkien’s anxieties over enlistment, all conspired to bring them pouring out now.
It had been agreed that the Oxford contingent of the TCBS would go up to Cambridge for a weekend in the middle of term, on Saturday 31 October 1914, but in the event only G. B. Smith turned up. ‘Tolkien was to come too, but hasn’t, as was to be expected,’ wrote Rob Gilson disappointedly. ‘No one knows why he couldn’t come, least of all Smith, who was with him on Friday night.’ The pair lunched with Christopher Wiseman, attended a Sunday service at King’s College chapel, and strolled around Cambridge. Smith was voluble about what he liked in the rival university town, and deployed his dazzling wit against what he disliked. Gilson wrote: ‘I always value his judgment though I often disagree with it, and am pleased to find that he is immensely enthusiastic about my rooms, and has never seen ones that he preferred – even in Oxford. I had a breakfast party this morning and they looked their best. A sunny morning with shadows across the Bowling Green and just enough mist to make the background of trees a perfect thing – blue and orange…I am having quite a perfect week-end.’ Smith clearly enjoyed it too, for he came back for more the following weekend. There was talk of a further get-together in Oxford.
In fact Tolkien had simply stopped attending TCBS reunions. What seemed perfect to the impressionable Gilson was, to Tolkien, now tainted by a mood antithetical to the original spirit of the club. Humour had always been essential to the group, but originally each member had brought his own brand. Tolkien’s was occasionally boisterous, but he shared with Gilson a gentle delight in the lesser human follies, and he often indulged in wordplay. G. B. Smith had ‘a gift for rapping out preposterous paradoxes’ and for stylistic parody: ‘I played Rugger yesterday, and am one of the three stiffest mortals in Europe in consequence, ’ is GBS parodying the superlative triads of the Welsh Mabinogion. Wiseman enjoyed impromptu farce and abstruse mathematical wit. Sidney Barrowclough, on the other hand, affected a cold cynicism, robing his sarcasm in verbal elegance, and T. K. Barnsley and W. H. Payton favoured Barrowclough’s brand of repartee. Tolkien no longer cared to spend his time with a TCBS under their shadow.
He was not alone. After enduring an evening of inane banter, with which he could not and would not compete, Wiseman had decided to sever his links with the TCBS. He wrote to Tolkien to say that he would not come to the Oxford meeting,