Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
for the night: an uncomfortable foretaste of life during wartime. Tolkien was discharged from the regiment, at his own request, the following January.
In the meantime, academic life at Oxford was relaxed, to say the least: ‘In fact we have done nothing; we are content with being,’ readers of the school Chronicle were told in the annual ‘Oxford Letter’ reporting on the activities of King Edward’s alumni. Tolkien was scarcely committed to the study of Classics. He was already known to old friends for his ‘predominant vice of slackness’ but now the sub-rector noted next to his name, ‘Very lazy’. Actually he was very busy – but not with Æschylus and Sophocles. He joined the college’s societies and its rugby team (though because standards were higher here he did not excel, and was regarded as ‘a winger pure and simple’). Ultimately far more distracting, however, was his burgeoning fascination with the epic Finnish poem, the Kalevala.
Tolkien had encountered this cycle of folk legend at school. He was ‘immensely attracted by something in the air’ of this verse epic of duelling Northern wizards and lovestruck youths, beer-brewers and shape-changers, then recently published in English in a popular edition. To a young man so drawn to the shadowy border where written historical records give way to the time of half-forgotten oral legends, it was irresistible. The names were quite unlike anything he had encountered in his studies of the Indo-European family of languages from which English sprang: Mielikki the mistress of the forests, Ilmatar the daughter of the air, Lemminkäinen the reckless adventurer. The Kalevala so engrossed Tolkien that he had failed to return the school’s copy of volume one, as Rob Gilson, his successor as King Edward’s librarian, politely pointed out in a letter. Thus equipped with all he needed, or was truly interested in, Tolkien barely used Exeter College’s library, and he withdrew only one Classics-related book (Grote’s History of Greece) in his entire first year. When he did venture in, he strayed outside the Classics shelves and unearthed a treasure: Charles Eliot’s pioneering grammar of Finnish. In a letter to W. H. Auden in 1955, he recalled that ‘It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.’ Ultimately it suffused his language-making with the music and structure of Finnish.
But first he launched into a retelling of part of the Kalevala, in the verse-and-prose manner of William Morris. This was the Story of Kullervo, about a young fugitive from slavery. It is a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Roman Catholic: Kullervo unwittingly seduces his sister, who kills herself, and then he too commits suicide. But the appeal perhaps lay partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair: Tolkien, after all, was in the midst of his enforced separation from Edith Bratt. The deaths of Kullervo’s parents may have struck a chord, too. An overriding attraction, though, was the sounds of the Finnish names, the remote primitivism, and the Northern air.
If Tolkien had merely wanted passionate pessimism he could have found it far closer to home in much of the English literature read avidly by his peers. The four years before the Great War were, in the words of J. B. Priestley, ‘hurrying and febrile and strangely fatalistic’. The evocations of doomed youth in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) were immensely popular:
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
One admirer of Housman was the Great War’s first literary celebrity, Rupert Brooke, who wrote that if he died in some corner of a foreign field it would be ‘for ever England’. G. B. Smith’s poetry was tinged with something of the same pessimism.
Tolkien, through the loss of his parents, had already known bereavement, and so had several of his friends. Rob Gilson’s mother had died in 1907 and Smith’s father was dead by the time the young historian got to Oxford. But the lesson of mortality came forcibly home again at the end of Tolkien’s first vacation from university.
Back in October 1911 Rob Gilson had written from King Edward’s School to lament that ‘The passing of certain among the gods seems almost to have robbed the remainder of the light of life.’ No one had died: what he meant was that Tolkien was sorely missed, along with W. H. Payton and their waggish friend ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley, both now at Cambridge. ‘Alas! for the good days of yore,’ Gilson added: ‘who knows whether the T. Club will ever meet again?’ In fact Birmingham’s remaining members continued to gather at ‘the old shrine’ of Barrow’s Stores, and to rule the library office. Now the clique also included Sidney Barrowclough and ‘the Baby’, Payton’s younger brother Ralph. During a mock school strike they demanded that all overdue-book fines be sequestered to pay for tea, cake, and comfortable chairs for themselves. The King Edward’s School Chronicle sternly admonished Gilson, Tolkien’s successor as Librarian, to ‘induce the Library to…assume a less exhibitionary character’. But the club cultivated its conspiratorial air with sly ostentation. The editors of the Chronicle, and the authors of this admonition, were none other than Wiseman and Gilson. It was this issue which distinguished several of the prefects and ex-pupils as ‘T.C., B.S., etc.’ – initials that were quite inscrutable to most at King Edward’s.
Returning to Birmingham for Christmas, Tolkien took part in the annual Old Boys’ debate, appearing on midwinter’s night as the linguistically incompetent Mrs Malaprop in Rob’s extravagant production of Sheridan’s The Rivals with Christopher Wiseman, Tea-Cake, and G. B. Smith – who was now accorded full TCBS membership.
In effect, Smith was stepping into the void left by Vincent Trought, who had been struck down by a severe illness in the autumn. Trought had now gone down to Cornwall to get away from the city’s polluted air and recover his strength. The attempt failed. In the new year, 1912, on the first day of the Oxford term, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien: ‘Poor old Vincent passed away at five o’clock yesterday (Saturday) morning. Mrs Trought went down to Cornwall on Monday and thought he was getting better, but he was taken very ill on Friday evening and passed away in the morning. I expect a wreath will be sent from the School, but I am going to try to get one from the TCBS specially.’ He added, ‘I am in the most miserable of spirits…you mustn’t expect any TCBSiness in this letter.’ Tolkien wanted to attend the funeral, but could not get to Cornwall in time.
Trought’s influence on his friends had been quiet but profound. Grimly tenacious on the rugby pitch, he was nervous and retiring in social situations, and prone to slow deliberation where others around him devoted so much energy to repartee. But he epitomized some of the best qualities of the TCBS: not its facetious humour, but its ambitious and creative individualism. For in moments of seriousness the key members of the circle felt that they were a force to be reckoned with: not a grammar school clique, but a republic of individuals with the potential to do something truly significant in the wider world. Vincent’s creative strength lay in poetry and, the school Chronicle noted after his death, ‘some of his verses show great depth of feeling and control of language’. For instruction and inspiration Trought could draw upon the whole lush field of Romanticism. But his tastes were more eclectic than those of his friends, and deeply responsive to beauty in sculpture, painting, and music. He was, his school obituary said, ‘a true artist’, and would have made an impact had he lived.* In a later year, in the midst of a crisis Trought could not have envisaged, his name would be invoked as an inspiration.
About the time of Trought’s decline and death, Tolkien began a series of twenty or so unusual symbolist designs he called ‘Ishnesses’, because they illustrated states of mind or being. He had always enjoyed drawing landscapes and medieval buildings, but perhaps such figurative work was now inadequate to his needs. This was a changeful, dark, and reflective period for Tolkien, cut loose from his school and friends and forbidden by Father Francis to contact Edith. He had crossed the threshold of adulthood, and his feelings about it may perhaps be inferred from the contrast between the exuberant Undertenishness, with its two trees, and the reluctant Grownupishness, with its blind scholarly figure, bearded like the veteran academics of Oxford. More upbeat, bizarrely, was the image of a stick-figure stepping jauntily off The End of the World into a swirling celestial void. Much darker were the torchlit rite-of-passage visions,