Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
passing between torches on the other side of the door. The sense of a fearful transformation is remarkable. Equally apparent is that here was a rich, visionary imagination that had not yet found the medium of its full fluency.
Tolkien’s life reached its major personal and academic turning point a year later. Up until 1913 he had lived the mere preliminaries. He had been thwarted in love and it was becoming increasingly clear that in pursuing Classics at Oxford he was heading up a blind alley. Now all that changed. On 3 January 1913 he reached the age of twenty-one, and the guardianship of Father Francis Morgan came to its end. Tolkien immediately contacted Edith Bratt, who had made a new life in Cheltenham. But three years apart had withered her hopes and she was engaged to someone else. Within the week, however, Tolkien was by her side and had persuaded her to marry him instead.
By now, a year had passed in which Tolkien continued to neglect his studies under his Classics tutor, Lewis Farnell. A vigorous, wiry man with a long bespectacled face and drooping whiskers, Farnell was a fastidious scholar who had lately completed a five-volume opus on ancient Greek cults. Twenty years earlier, when Greece was still a remote and relatively untravelled land, he had been something of an adventurer, riding and hiking through bandit country to locate some half-forgotten shrine, or shooting rapids on the upper Danube. Nowadays his archaeological fervour was nourished by the rediscovery of legendary Troy and by excavations at Knossos that annually yielded more secrets of Homeric civilization – and an undeciphered script to tantalize linguists. But neither Farnell nor Sophocles and Aeschylus fired Tolkien’s enthusiasm. Most of his time and energies were expended on extra-curricular activities. He socialized with college friends, spoke in debates, trained with his cavalry squadron, and pored over Eliot’s Finnish Grammar. ‘People couldn’t make out,’ he recalled later, ‘why my essays on the Greek drama were getting worse and worse.’
He had one opportunity to follow his heart, in the ‘special paper’ that gave him the option of studying comparative philology. If he did so, he realized, he would be taught by Joseph Wright, whose Gothic Primer had so inspired him as a schoolboy. ‘Old Joe’, a giant among philologists, who had started out as a millhand but had gone on to compile the massive English Dialect Dictionary, gave him a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin philology. But Tolkien’s overall failure to apply himself to Classics, together with the dramatic reunion with Edith, took their toll on his mid-course university exams, Honour Moderations. Instead of the first-class result that Cary Gilson thought his former pupil should have achieved, he only just scraped a second, and he would have sunk to a dismal third but for an excellent paper on Greek philology. Luckily Farnell was broad-minded, with an affection for German culture that disposed him favourably towards the field of philological inquiry that truly interested Tolkien. He suggested that Tolkien switch to studying English, and made discreet arrangements so that he would not lose his £60 scholarship money, which had been meant for funding Classical studies. At last Tolkien was in his element, devoting his studies to the languages and literature that had long stirred his imagination.
Meanwhile, Tolkien’s friendship with the TCBS was growing more and more tenuous. He had played no part in a revival of The Rivals staged in October 1912 as a farewell to King Edward’s by Christopher Wiseman and Rob Gilson, and he had missed the traditional old boys’ school debate that Christmas, though he was in Birmingham at the time. At university, Tolkien kept in touch with acquaintances at meetings of the Old Edwardian Society, but very few Birmingham friends had come to Oxford. One, Frederick Scopes, had gone sketching churches in northern France with Gilson during Easter 1912, but Tolkien’s own funds were relatively limited, and evaporated in the heat of Oxford life.
At Exeter College, Tolkien had tried to recreate the TCBSian spirit by founding similar clubs, first the Apolausticks and then the Chequers, which substituted lavish dinners for secret snacks and consisted of his new undergraduate friends. He joined the Dialectical Society and the Essay Club, and enjoyed chin-wagging over a pipe. One visitor eyeing the cards on his mantelpiece wryly commented that he appeared to have signed up to every single college association. (Some of these cards were his own work, drawn with characteristic humour and stylish flair: among them an invitation to a ‘Smoker’, a popular social affair, depicting four students dancing – and falling over – in Turl Street under the disapproving airborne gaze of owls clad in the mortarboards and bowler-hats of the university authorities.) Tolkien was elected ‘deputy jester’ to the most important of these bodies, the Stapeldon Society, later becoming secretary and finally, at a noisy and anarchic meeting on 1 December 1913, president.
For the TCBS, however, the centre of gravity had shifted from Birmingham to Cambridge, where Wiseman was now at Peterhouse with a maths scholarship and Gilson was studying Classics at Trinity. The group’s numbers there were swelled in October 1913 by the arrival of Sidney Barrowclough and Ralph Payton (the Baby).
But at the same time, crucially for Tolkien, G. B. Smith came up to Oxford to study history at Corpus Christi. Wiseman wrote to Tolkien: ‘I envy you Smith, for, though we have Barrowclough and Payton, he is the pick of the bunch.’ GBS excelled in conversational wit, and he was certainly the most precocious TCBSite, already regarding himself as a poet when he took Vincent Trought’s place in the cabal. He also shared some of Tolkien’s heartfelt interests, particularly Welsh language and legend; he admired the original stories of King Arthur, and felt that the French troubadours had left these Celtic tales shorn of their native serenity and vigour. Smith’s arrival in Oxford was the start of a more meaningful friendship with Tolkien, a friendship that grew apace in isolation from the constant waggishness that afflicted the TCBS en masse.
In Cambridge, by contrast, Wiseman found his spirits failing under the relentless badinage. Rob Gilson attributed this depression to the health problems that had stopped him playing college rugby, proclaiming ingenuously in a letter to Tolkien: ‘We have managed to relieve his boredom at times. On Friday he and I and Tea Cake and the Baby all went for a long walk, and had tea at a pub…We were all in the best of spirits – not that Tea Cake’s ever fail.’ Wiseman found much-needed refreshment when he saw Smith and Tolkien that term, but shortly afterwards wrote to the latter: ‘I am very anxious to breathe again the true TCBS spirit fostered by its Oxford branch. Teacake has so fed me lately that I verily believe I shall murder him if he has not altered by next term…’
Happily for Wiseman, when most of the old friends were reunited to play their December 1913 rugby match against the King Edward’s First XV a few days later, he was well at the back of the field and T. K. Barnsley was in the scrum. But after another two months the ill-assorted pair, both Methodists, had to form a delegation from Cambridge to the Oxford Wesley Society. Rob Gilson came down with them and wrote effusively afterwards: ‘We had such a splendid week-end: “Full marks”, as Tea-Cake would say…I saw lots of [Frederick] Scopes and Tolkien and G. B. Smith, all of whom seem very contented with life…’
Tolkien had reason to feel at ease at the start of 1914. In January, Edith had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in Warwick, where she had now made her home with her cousin, Jennie Grove; soon afterwards Edith and John Ronald were formally betrothed. In preparation for the momentous event Tolkien had finally told his friends about Edith; or rather, he appears to have told Smith, who apparently passed the news on to Gilson and Wiseman. Tolkien feared that his engagement might cut him off from the TCBS. Likewise, their congratulations were tinged with the anxiety that they might lose a friend. Wiseman said as much in a postcard. ‘The only fear is that you will rise above the TCBS,’ he said, and demanded half-seriously that Tolkien somehow prove ‘this most recent folly’ was only ‘an ebullition of ultra-TCBSianism’. Gilson wrote more frankly: ‘Convention bids me congratulate you, and though my feelings are of course a little mixed, I do it with very sincere good wishes for your happiness. And I have no fear at all that such a staunch tcbsite as yourself will ever be anything else.’ Would John Ronald reveal the lady’s name? he added.
The English course onto which Tolkien had transferred a year ago was a further source of contentment. The Oxford course allowed him to ignore almost completely Shakespeare and other ‘modern’ writers, in whom he had little interest, and to focus on language and literature up to the end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. This was the field in which he would work – with