Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
letters and drawings in Cornwall that summer of 1914. While the martial imagery might have been coloured by the fact that this was written at a moment of war, and amid widespread fear of invasion, he was concerned with processes on a geological timescale. The poet’s presence is almost incidental: he is there merely to witness the action of primal oceanic forces, inhuman and sublime. The piece gives a very early glimpse of Tolkien’s intense awareness of the vast histories inscribed within a landscape – an awareness that gives his mythological world the texture of reality.
Very soon he was adding more poems to his corpus, in a rush of creativity that for him was unprecedented. ‘That Council,’ Tolkien told G. B. Smith, ‘was…followed in my own case with my finding a voice for all kinds of pent up things and a tremendous opening up of everything.’ A painting made two days after Christmas captures this strange mood of uplift in the midst of dark times: The Land of Pohja, depicting a scene from the Kalevala in which the Sun and Moon, drawn by the beauty of the wizard Väinämöinen’s harp-playing, settle in the branches of two trees, filling the icebound wastes with light.
Tolkien was also absorbed once more in the Finnish language itself, and it played the most productive role in a creative breakthrough. When he had borrowed a college library copy of Chaucer to continue studying for his English course during the Christmas vacation, he had also taken Eliot’s Finnish Grammar out again. He immersed himself in the book, but not in order to read more Finnish; rather, he was allowing Finnish to shape the language he now hoped to devise. The language of the Kalevala had long been supplanting the earlier primacy of Gothic in his philological heart. At some point as 1915 came in, Tolkien took an exercise book, in which he had apparently been outlining aspects of Gautisk, and struck out his old notes, ready to make a fresh beginning. He tried out several names for the new language, eventually settling on Qenya.
To Tolkien, working in the familiar fields of English and its Indo-European relatives, Finnish was remote, mysterious, and peculiarly beautiful. Its culture was pre-industrial, with ancient roots. By tapping into it, Tolkien was following, in his idiosyncratic way, the contemporary vogue for primitivism that had attracted Picasso to African masks. In the Kalevala, the natural and the supernatural were intimate and intermingled: the language, as Tolkien said, revealed ‘an entirely different mythological world’.
The small, stark array of consonants and the chiming inflexional word-endings of Finnish produce a distinctive musicality that Tolkien adapted for Qenya; but he wanted a language with its own past, so he detailed how Qenya had evolved from an ancestral tongue that he soon named Primitive Eldarin. As in any real-world language, the process was a combination of sound shifts (phonology), the deployment of word-building elements (morphology) like the -s or -es that commonly pluralize an English noun, and developments in meaning (semantics).* A further fascination of this linguistic alchemy was that, as in the real world, an alternative set of sound-changes and morphological elements would produce elsewhere a quite different language from the same ancestral stock – an option Tolkien also began to explore before long.
Tolkien’s sound-shift ‘laws’ fill many dry pages of his early Qenya notebook, but they were as essential to Qenya as the changes codified in Grimm’s Law are to German or English. He often wrote as if, like Jakob Grimm, he too were merely an observer looking back at the unrecorded but nonetheless real past of a living language. Even in these phonological notes, Tolkien was already entering into his world as a fiction writer does. From this ‘internal’ viewpoint, the sound shifts were unalterable facts of observed history.
In practice, though, Tolkien also played God (or sub-creator emulating the Creator, as he would later have put it). He did not just observe history; he made it. Instead of working back from recorded evidence to reconstruct the lost ancestral ‘roots’ of words, as Grimm had done to arrive at a picture of ancient Germanic, he could invent Primitive Eldarin roots and move forward, adding affixes and applying sound shifts to arrive at Qenya. Furthermore, Tolkien could change a sound-shift law, and he sometimes did. Because each law should apply across the language, this might entail alterations to any number of words and their individual histories. Revision on that scale was a painstaking process, but it gave Tolkien a perfectionist’s pleasure. There was scope here for a lifetime’s tinkering, and he used it.
If these austere sound-shift laws were the ‘scientific’ formulae by which Tolkien generated his ‘romantic’ language – as essential to its personal character as DNA is to our own – inventing Qenya was also an exercise in taste as heartfelt as any art. Tolkien’s sound-pictures were always acute: the bassy kalongalan, ‘ringing or jangling of (large) bells’, and its alto counterpart kilinkelë, ‘jingling of (small) bells’; the elegant alternations of vassivaswë for ‘beating or rushing of wings’; or the tongue-twisting pataktatapakta, ‘rat-a-tat’. Qenya is more than onomatopoeic, though: nang-, ‘I have a cold’, and miqë, ‘a kiss’ (pronounced more or less as ‘mee-kweh’), mimic what the speech organs do when your nose is blocked or your mouth is amorously engaged. Of course, most concepts have no intrinsic connection with any particular sound or mouth-movement. Tolkien tried to match sound and sense much as an expressionist painter might use colour, form, and shade to evoke a mood. Derivation aside, only taste dictated that fūmelotmeans ‘poppy’, eressëa means ‘lonely’, or morwen, ‘daughter of the dark’, signifies the glimmering planet Jupiter.
Crucially, Tolkien used Qenya to create a world like our own, yet unlike. Its trees are ours but their names make them sound as if they are on the verge of communication: the laburnum is lindeloktë, ‘singing cluster’, while siqilissë, ‘weeping willow’, also means ‘lamentation’ itself. This is a world of austa and yelin, ‘summer’ and ‘winter’; of lisēlë, piqēlë, and piqissë, ‘sweetness’, ‘bitterness’, and ‘grief’. But enchantment courses through Qenya: from kuru ‘magic, wizardry’ to Kampo the Leaper, a name for Eärendel, and to a whole host of other names for peoples and places that emerged during a couple of years’ work on the lexicon. For Tolkien, to a greater extent even than Charles Dickens, a name was the first principle of story-making. His Qenya lexicon was a writer’s notebook.
At the start of March, Rob Gilson wrote inviting Tolkien to join Wiseman and himself in Cambridge. Smith was going too, and Gilson was eager to repeat the experience of the ‘Council of London’. Ever since that weekend he had been enduring the unaccustomed hardships of military training, living in a hut in an often flooded field, sometimes ill from inoculations, and suffering a growing sense of pessimism. ‘I have quite lost now any conviction that the war is likely to end within the next six months,’ Gilson wrote home. ‘If anyone with a gift of prophecy were to tell me that the war would last ten years, I shouldn’t feel the least surprise.’ He told Tolkien, ‘My whole endurance of the present is founded on the remembrance that I am a TCBSite…But another conclave would be the most perfect bliss imaginable.’ If Tolkien could not come to Cambridge the following weekend, Gilson would be ‘bitterly disappointed’.
Nevertheless, he did not turn up. On the Saturday the three wired an ultimatum calling on him to appear, or resign from the TCBS. It was not, of course, entirely serious. ‘When we sent the telegram,’ Wiseman wrote to Tolkien the following week, ‘we were groping for the thousand and first time in the dark for a John Ronald of whom there appeared no sound or sight or rumour in any direction…It always seems to us odd that you should so consistently be the only one left out of the TCBS.’
‘Schools’ were fast approaching, and Tolkien had to prepare for ten papers. Most of them covered areas in which he was an enthusiast: Gothic and Germanic philology, Old Icelandic, Old and Middle English language and literature. Volsunga Saga, The Seafarer, Havelock the Dane, Troilus and Criseyde: these he should have no trouble with. He had been familiar with some of this material for several years prior to joining the English course at Oxford, and ever since switching from Classics he had been breezily confident about doing well. But a week after the missed Cambridge meeting (as a three-day British offensive failed at Neuve-Chapelle) he headed off for the Easter vacation armed with set texts, and at Edith’s in Warwick he worked through the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale line by line, making