Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth

      The first star has shown

      And its lamp is blown

      To a flame of flickering blue.

      He pipes not to me,

      He pipes not to thee,

      He whistles for none of you.

      Tinfang Warble is a wisp of a figure, barely glimpsed. Meanwhile everything about the rather sugar-spun and Victorianesque marching figures of ‘Goblin Feet’ is miniature; the word ‘little’ becomes a tinkling refrain. Tolkien was clearly tailoring these poems for Edith, whom he would habitually address as ‘little one’ and whose home he called a ‘little house’. Late in life he declared of ‘Goblin Feet’ – with perhaps a hint of self-parody – ‘I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.’ Nevertheless, although these 1915 ‘leprechauns’ have almost nothing in common with the Eldar of Tolkien’s mature work, they represent (with the distant exception of 1910’s ‘Wood-sunshine’) the first irruption of Faërie into Tolkien’s writings. In fact the idea that ‘fairies’ or Elves were physically slight persisted for some years in his mythology, which never shed the idea that they fade into evanescence as the dominion of mortals grows stronger.

      Tolkien’s April 1915 poems were not especially innovatory in their use of fantasy landscapes and figures; indeed they drew on the imagery and ideas of the fairy tradition in English literature. Since the Reformation, Faërie had undergone major revolutions in the hands of Spenser, Shakespeare, the Puritans, the Victorians, and most recently J. M. Barrie. Its denizens had been noble, mischievous, helpful, devilish; tiny, tall; grossly physical or ethereal and beautiful; sylvan, subterranean, or sea-dwelling; utterly remote or constantly intruding in human affairs; allies of the aristocracy or friends of the labouring poor. This long tradition had left the words elf, gnome, and fay/fairy with diverse and sometimes contradictory associations. Small wonder that Christopher Wiseman was confused by ‘Wood-sunshine’ and (as he confessed to Tolkien) ‘mistook elves for gnomes, with bigger heads than bodies’.

      In ‘Goblin Feet’, goblins and gnomes are interchangeable, as they were in the ‘Curdie’ books of George MacDonald, which Tolkien had loved as a child (‘a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins’). Initially, Tolkien’s Qenya lexicon conflated them as well and related them to the elvish word for ‘mole’, evidently because Tolkien was thinking of Paracelsus’ gnomus, an elemental creature that moves through earth as a fish swims in water. Very soon, however, he assigned the terms goblin and gnome to members of distinct races at daggers drawn. He used gnome (Greek gnōmē, ‘thought, intelligence’) for a member of an Elf-kindred who embody a profound scientific and artistic understanding of the natural world from gemcraft to phonology: its Qenya equivalent was noldo, related to the word for ‘to know’. Thanks to the later British fad for ornamental garden gnomes (not so named until 1938), gnome is now liable to raise a smirk, and Tolkien eventually abandoned it.

      Yet even in 1915 fairy was a problematic term: too generic, and with increasingly diverse connotations. Tolkien’s old King Edward’s schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, soon warned him that the title he proposed for his volume of verse, The Trumpets of Faërie (after a poem written in the summer), was ‘a little precious’: the word faërie had become ‘rather spoiled of late’. Reynolds was thinking, perhaps, not of recent trends in fairy writing, but of the use of fairy to mean ‘homosexual’, which dated from the mid-1890s.

      For now, though, the fate of the word was not yet sealed, and Tolkien stuck pugnaciously to it. He was not alone: Robert Graves entitled his 1917 collection Fairies and Fusiliers, with no pun apparently intended. Great War soldiers were weaned on Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale anthologies and original stories such as George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and Faërie’s stock had surged with the success of Peter Pan, a story of adventure and eternal youth that now had additional relevance for boys on the threshold of manhood facing battle. Tinfang Warble had a contemporary visual counterpart in a painting that found a mass-market in Kitchener’s Army. Eleanor Canziani’s Piper of Dreams, which proved to be the belated swansong of the Victorian fairy-painting tradition, depicts a boy sitting alone in a springtime wood playing to a half-seen flight of fairies. Reproduced by the Medici Society in 1915, it sold an unprecedented 250,000 copies before the year was out. In the trenches, The Piper of Dreams became, in one appraisal, ‘a sort of talisman’.

      A more cynical view is that ‘the war called up the fairies. Like other idle consumers, they were forced into essential war-work.’ A 1917 stage play had ‘Fairy voices calling, Britain needs your aid’. Occasionally, soldiers’ taste for the supernatural might be used to perk up an otherwise dull and arduous training exercise, as Rob Gilson discovered on one bitterly cold battalion field day: ‘There was a fantastic “scheme” involving a Witch-Doctor who was supposed to be performing incantations in Madingley Church. C and D Companies represented a flying column sent from a force to the West to capture the wizard.’ On the whole, however, the fairies were spared from the recruitment drive and wizards were relieved from military manoeuvres. Faërie still entered the lives of soldiers, but it was left to work on the imagination in a more traditional and indefinable way. Though George MacDonald had urged against attempts to pin down the meaning of fairy-tale, declaring ‘I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being’, Tolkien made the attempt twenty-four years later in his paper ‘On Fairy-stories’, in which he maintained that Faërie provided the means of recovery, escape, and consolation. The rubric may be illustrated by applying it to the Great War, when Faërie allowed the