Tolkien and the Great War

In the years up to 1914, the prospect of international conflict was often considered. Victorian affluence was ebbing away from Britain, struck by agricultural setbacks and then by the cost of the Boer War. But Germany, unified in 1871, was the braggart youngster among the European powers. Undergoing rapid industrialization, it was manoeuvring for a stronger role in Europe via expansion of its colonial grasp and saw Britain, with its powerful navy, as the prime opponent.

The coming war had cast its shadow on the worldview of Tolkien and his friends when they were still at King Edward’s. As early as 1909, W. H. Payton, an excellent shot and a lancecorporal in the school’s junior Officer Training Corps, had argued in debate for compulsory military service. ‘Our country is now supreme and Germany wishes to be. We should therefore see to it that we are sufficiently protected against the danger of foreign invasion,’ he declared. In 1910, Rob Gilson had called for an international court of arbitration to replace war. Tolkien led the opposition. He preferred traditional hierarchies, and for example he once (perhaps not entirely in jest) equated democracy with ‘hooliganism and uproar’, declaring that it should play no part in foreign policy. An equal distrust of bureaucracy, or internationalism, or vast inhuman enterprises per se, lay behind his attack on a ‘Court of Arbiters’. With the help of Payton he had successfully dismissed the idea as unworkable. They had insisted that war was both a necessary and a productive aspect of human affairs, though one schoolboy had warned of ‘bloodfilled trenches’.

The temperature had risen by October 1911, when the Kaiser’s sabre-rattling prompted the debating society motion ‘this House demands immediate war with Germany’. But others insisted Germany was primarily a trade rival. G. B. Smith claimed that the growth of democracy in Germany and Russia would curtail any threat of war, assuring the debaters, with his tongue as usual in his cheek, that the only causes for alarm were the bellicose Daily Mail ‘and the Kaiser’s whiskers’. The debating society did not declare war on Germany. Smith wildly overestimated the strength of democracy in both countries, underestimated the influence of the press, and failed to see the real danger posed by Wilhelm II, an autocrat plagued by deep-seated insecurities. Just two days past his seventeenth birthday, and making his maiden speech to the debating chamber, he can be forgiven for naïvety; but in none of these misapprehensions was he alone.

Despite industrial unrest, Home Rule agitation in Ireland, and increasingly militant suffragette activism, to many Britons the era was a time of material comfort and tranquillity stretching into futurity. Only the loss of Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition and of the Titanic, both in 1912, raised doubts about the security of such long-term illusions.

King Edward’s was a bastion of robust sportsmanship, duty, honour, and vigour, all backed up by a rigorous grounding in Greek and Latin. The school’s anthem instructed the pupils:

Here’s no place for fop or idler, they who made our city great

Feared no hardship, shirked no labour, smiled at death and conquered fate;

They who gave our school its laurels laid on us a sacred trust,

Forward therefore, live your hardest, die of service, not of rust.

There had been drilling at King Edward’s in the Victorian era, though nothing systematic; but in 1907 Cary Gilson obtained military permission to set up an Officer Training Corps as part of national reforms to boost Britain’s readiness for military confrontation. The OTC was captained by W. H. Kirkby, Tolkien’s first-year master (and a noted shot in the part-time Territorial Army set up in the same reforms). Several of Tolkien’s rugby-playing friends became officers in the corps and Tolkien himself was one of 130 cadets. The corps also provided eight members for the school shooting team, with Rob Gilson (an OTC corporal) and W. H. Payton excelling on the ranges. Though Tolkien was also a good shot, he was not on the shooting team, but in the OTC he took part in drills and inspections on the school grounds, competition against the school’s other three houses, and field exercises and huge annual camps involving many other schools.

The massed corps was presented to the king and inspected by field marshals Lord Kitchener of Khartoum and Lord Roberts, the liberator of Bloemfontein. The school Chronicle concluded: ‘It is quite evident that the War Office and the Military Authorities are expecting great things from the OT.’ One midsummer, Tolkien travelled to London with seven other King Edward’s cadets to line the route for the coronation of George V. The year was 1911, and gloriously hot; he wrote at the time that it had ‘kindled an immovable smile’ on his face. But as they camped in the grounds of Lambeth Palace on the eve of the big day, a long dry spell finally broke, and it rained. ‘Adfuit omen’, Tolkien later commented: ‘It was an omen.’* The contingent stood facing Buckingham Palace watching troops pass up and down under the eye of Kitchener and Roberts. They heard the cheers as the king set out, and finally they got a close-up view as the royal coaches passed right in front of them on their way back to the palace.

For now, these military preparations were an occasion for high spirits. From one Aldershot camp Tolkien brought back ‘harrowing’ tales of the devastation wrought among the cadets by punning – inflicted, no doubt, by his own circle. He had returned from another camp, at Tidworth Pennings on Salisbury Plain in 1909, with a real injury, but not one acquired in action. With characteristic impetuousness, he had charged into the bell tent he was sharing with seven others, leapt up and slid down the central pole – to which someone had fixed a candle with a clasp knife. The resulting cut looked as if it would leave him scarred for life.

By the time G. B. Smith was cracking jokes about the Kaiser’s moustache, Tolkien was embarking on life at Exeter College, Oxford, where, in step with his generation, he pursued military training. As soon as he arrived he enrolled in King Edward’s Horse. This cavalry regiment had been conceived during the Boer War as the King’s Colonials, and it recruited men from overseas resident in the British Isles. As such, it enjoyed a dubious status compared to other British military units (and was the only one administered from Whitehall), but royal patronage had helped it grow; it had been renamed after the new king, Edward VII. The large numbers of overseas students at Oxford and Cambridge made the university towns prime targets for recruiting drives, and by 1911 the regiment had a strong following in Exeter College. Tolkien joined it, presumably, because of his South African birth: most new undergraduates enlisted in the university OTC, but those with a ‘colonial’ background were expected instead to join King Edward’s Horse.

Within the regiment, the Oxbridge squadron’s members were considered a fractious and independent-minded lot, but they had good mounts borrowed from the local hunts. Tolkien had a strong affinity with horses, which he loved, and became a de facto breaker-in. No sooner had he broken one horse in but it was taken away. Another would then be given to him and he had to start the process again. His membership of the regiment was shortlived, however. In July and August of 1912 he spent two weeks with the regiment at its annual camp at Dibgate Plateau, Shorncliffe, just outside Folkestone on the South Coast. The gales howling up the English Channel from the south-west were so severe that on two nights almost every tent and marquee was levelled. Once, the regiment carried out field manoeuvres after dark and, rather than return to camp, billeted 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, Before and Afterwards, showing first the approach to a mysterious threshold and then a somnambulist figure 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…’