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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 the exception of his three unforeseeable years as a soldier – for all his professional life. Meanwhile ‘Schools’, his final university exams (properly the examinations of the Honour School of English Language and Literature), were a year and a half away, and for now he could afford to explore the subject at his leisure. He studied Germanic origins under the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon, A. S. Napier. William Craigie, one of the editors of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, taught him in his new special subject, Old Norse, in which he read the Poetic Edda, the collection of heroic and mythological lays that recount, along with much else, the creation and destruction of the world. Meanwhile, the young Kenneth Sisam tutored him in aspects of historical phonology, as well as in the art of finding cheap second-hand books. Tolkien already knew many of the set texts well, and could devote time to broadening and deepening his knowledge.
He wrote essays on the ‘Continental affinities of the English People’ and ‘Ablaut’, constructing intricate tables of the familial words father, mother, brother, and daughter in ‘Vorgermanisch’, ‘Urgermanisch’, Gothic, Old Norse, and the various Old English dialects, demonstrating the sound shifts that had produced the divergent forms. As well as copious notes on the regular descent of English from Germanic, he also examined the influence of its Celtic neighbours and the linguistic impact of Scandinavian and Norman invasions. He translated the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf line by line and sampled its various Germanic analogues (among them the story of Frotho, who goes seeking treasure from a ‘hoard the hill-haunter holds, a serpent of winding coils’). He speculated on the provenance of the obscure figures of Ing and Finn and King Sheaf in the Germanic literatures. Tolkien was enjoying it so much that he had to share his pleasure. Giving a paper on the Norse sagas to Exeter College’s Essay Club, he characteristically thought himself into the part and adopted what a fellow undergraduate described as ‘a somewhat unconventional turn of phrase, suiting admirably with his subject’. (We may guess that he used a pseudo-medieval idiom, as William Morris had done in his translations from Icelandic, and as Tolkien would do in many of his own writings.)
A fertile tension is apparent in all this; a tension within philology itself, which stood (unlike modern linguistics) with one foot in science and the other in art, examining the intimate relationship between language and culture. Tolkien was attracted by both the scientific rigour of phonology, morphology, and semantics, and by the imaginative or ‘romantic’ powers of story, myth, and legend. As yet, he could not entirely reconcile the scientific and romantic sides, but nor could he ignore the thrilling glimpses of the ancient Northern world that kept appearing in the literature with which he was dealing. Furthermore, his hunger for the old world was leading him again beyond the confines of his appointed discipline. When he was awarded the college’s Skeat Prize for English in the spring of 1914, to the consternation of his tutors he spent the money not on English set texts, but on books about medieval Welsh, including a new historical Welsh Grammar, as well as William Morris’s historical romance The House of the Wolfings, his epic poem The Life and Death of Jason, and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga.
For all his interest in science and scientific stringency, and in keeping with his irrepressibly ‘romantic’ sensitivities, Tolkien was not satisfied by materialist views of reality. To him, the world resounded to the echoes of the past. In one Stapeldon Society debate he proposed ‘That this house believes in ghosts’, but his idiosyncratic personal belief, nearer to mysticism than to superstition, is better expressed in a poem published in Exeter College’s Stapeldon Magazine in December 1913:
From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames, Standing in a vale outcarven in a world-forgotten day,
There is dimly seen uprising through the greenly veilèd stems, Many-mansion’d, tower-crownèd in its dreamy robe of grey,
All the city by the fording: agèd in the lives of men,
Proudly wrapt in mystic mem’ry overpassing human ken.
In its rather grandiloquent fashion (with a long line probably inspired by William Morris) this suggests that the enduring character of Oxford predated the arrival of its inhabitants, as if the university were meant to emerge in this valley. Here is an early glimpse of the spirit of place that pervades much of Tolkien’s work: human variety is partly shaped by geography, the work of a divine hand. Studying the literatures of the old North in Oxford, Tolkien’s imaginative faculties began to strain after the forgotten outlines of ‘mystic mem’ry’ which he believed had made the world what it is.
Tolkien wrote relatively little poetry before the Great War, and certainly did not think of himself as a poet per se, unlike G. B. Smith. In poems such as ‘From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames’, though, he took his cue not from the Anglo-Saxons so much as from Francis Thompson and the Romantics (Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ had inspired a drawing in 1913) and their search for a dimension beyond the mundane. Giving a paper on Thompson to the Essay Club on 4 March 1914, Tolkien depicted a writer who could bridge the divide between rationalism and romanticism, highlighting ‘the images drawn from astronomy and geology, and especially those that could be described as Catholic ritual writ large across the universe’.
The fairies of Tolkien’s early poem ‘Wood-sunshine’ may have been nothing more, on one level, than wood-sunshine itself: the imaginative embodiment of light dappling the leaves on tree-branch and forest-floor. Tolkien’s Romantic imagination, however, finds them more real than mere photons and chlorophyll. ‘Wood-sunshine’ may be seen as a plea to these ‘glinting reflections of joy / All fashion’d of radiance, careless of grief’, a plea from the mundane and suffering world for solace. Lightweight as this imagery may seem, it was linked to substantial themes. By 1914 Tolkien could formulate that link as a precept for readers of Francis Thompson, telling his fellow undergraduates, ‘One must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being’s harmony.’
Nothing as momentous as the events of the previous year seemed likely to befall Tolkien in 1914, and the year unfolded much as any other. When the Easter vacation arrived, his term as Stapeldon president expired and he handed over to his friend Colin Cullis, who had been a member of the Apolausticks and had co-founded the later Chequers Club with him. The Stapeldon spent much of the summer term preparing for Exeter College’s 600th anniversary: it failed to send out any of its usual insubordinate remonstrances to foreign powers because no ‘international affairs of sufficient importance had occurred’. On 4 June the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, was the guest of the university’s enthusiastic Anglo-German Club, which included Joseph Wright and Lewis Farnell, now the college’s Rector, or principal. Mrs Farnell found the prince oddly distracted until she mentioned the activities of the Officer Training Corps, about which he seemed eager to know as much as possible. The dinner, part of the celebrations of Oxford’s links with Germany, was just one of a spectacular outcrop of parties at the end of the summer term. Two days later it was Exeter College’s sexcentenary dinner, and Tolkien proposed the toast to the college societies (as befitted a member of so many). Then there was the ‘Binge’ for the Chequers Club, its elegant invitations drawn by Tolkien. Finally, starting on Tuesday 23 June, there were three days of social events marking the college’s 600 years, with a summer ball, a gaudy (a reunion for former members of Exeter College, or Old Exonians), a lunch, and a garden party. Some months later Farnell recalled: ‘All our festivities were enhanced by charming weather, and our atmosphere was unclouded by any foreboding of the war-storm.’
Term came to an end and so, almost immediately, did the old world. On 28 June, in the Balkan city of Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist fired a gun at the heir to the Austrian throne, fatally wounding him. International alliances were invoked and states stepped together into a danse macabre. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian empire’s friend, Germany, declared war on Serbia’s ally, Russia. A day later, fearing encirclement, Germany declared war on France. On 4 August 1914, to circumvent the heavily fortified French-German border, invading troops marched into Belgium. That day Britain declared war on Germany, having pledged to defend Belgian neutrality. Three days later, Lord Kitchener, now Minister of War, called Tolkien’s generation to arms.
TWO A young man with too much imagination
It is an icy day on the uplands of northern France, and to left and right hordes of soldiers advance across No Man’s Land in a confusion of smoke, bullets, and bursting shells. In a command dugout giving instructions to runners, or out in the narrow trench trying to grasp the progress of battle, is Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien, now in charge of signals for a muddy and depleted battalion of four hundred fusiliers. At the end of the carnage, three miles of enemy trench are in British hands. But this is the last combat Tolkien will see. Days later he plunges into a fever, and an odyssey of tents, trains, and ships that will finally bring him back to Birmingham. There, in hospital, he begins to write the dark and complex story of an ancient civilization under siege by nightmare attackers, half-machine and half-monster: ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. This is the first leaf of Tolkien’s vast tree of tales. Here are ‘Gnomes’, or Elves; but they are tall, fierce, and grim, far different from the flitting fairies of ‘Wood-sunshine’. Here is battle itself: not some rugby match dressed up in mock-heroic garb. Faërie had not entirely captured his heart as a child, Tolkien declared much later: ‘A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.’
Writing to his son Christopher, serving in the Royal Air Force in the midst of the Second World War, he gave a clear indication of how his own experience of war had influenced his art. ‘I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering,’ he said. ‘In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.’ The mythology ultimately published as The Silmarillion, depicting a time when Sauron of The Lord of the Rings had been merely a servant of the fallen angel Morgoth, arose out of the encounter between an imaginative genius and the war that inaugurated the modern age.
The tree’s development would be slow and tortuous. In 1914 Tolkien had barely begun working with the materials that would go into the building of Gondolin and Middle-earth. All he had was a handful of strange visionary pictures, some fragments of lyric poetry, a retelling of a Finnish legend, and a string of experiments in language creation. There was no sign that these things would ever be hammered into the mythic structure that emerged in late 1916, nor is the impact of war immediately apparent in what he wrote following Britain’s entry into the European conflict. This was a time of great patriotic outpourings among his contemporaries, epitomized by the elegant poetry of Rupert Brooke. G. B. Smith contributed to the flood with a poem subtitled ‘On the Declaration of War’, which warned its upstart enemies that England might be old
But yet a pride is ours that will not brook
The taunts of fools too saucy grown,
He that is rash to prove it, let him look
He kindle not a fire unknown.
Pride and patriotism rarely make good poetry. Tolkien, it seems, kept off the bandwagon. On the face of it, indeed, he appears just as impervious to influence from all things contemporary: not only friends and literary movements, but also current affairs and even personal experience. Some critics have tended to dismiss him as an ostrich with head buried in the past; as a pasticheur of medieval or mythological literature desperate to shut out the modern world. But for Tolkien the medieval and the mythological were urgently alive. Their narrative structures and symbolic languages were simply the tools most apt to the hand of this most dissident of twentieth-century writers. Unlike many others shocked by the explosion of 1914-18, he did not discard the old ways of writing, the classicism or medievalism championed by Lord Tennyson and William Morris. In his hands, these traditions were reinvigorated so that they remain powerfully alive for readers today.
A week after Britain’s entry into the war, while the German supergun known as Big Bertha pounded the Belgian forts around Liège, Tolkien was in Cornwall sketching the waves and the rocky coast. His letters to Edith reveal a mind already unusually attuned to the landscape, as when he and his companion, Father Vincent Reade of the Oratory, reached Ruan Minor near the end of a long day’s hike. ‘The light got very “eerie”,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes we plunged into a belt of trees, and owls and bats made you creep: sometimes a horse with asthma behind a hedge or an old pig with insomnia made your heart jump: or perhaps it was nothing worse than walking into an unexpected stream. The fourteen miles eventually drew to an end – and the last two miles were enlivened by the sweeping flash of the Lizard Lights and the sounds of the sea drawing nearer.’ The sea moved him most of all: ‘Nothing I could say in a dull old letter would describe it to you. The sun beats down on you and a huge Atlantic swell smashes and spouts over the snags and reefs. The sea has carved weird wind-holes and spouts into the cliffs which blow with trumpety noises or spout foam like a whale, and everywhere you see black and red rock and white foam against violet and transparent seagreen.’
But Tolkien was not eager to embrace the frightening new reality of war. Kitchener wanted 500,000 men to bolster Britain’s small standing army. In Birmingham the poor, manual workers or unemployed, were the quickest to step forward. Then British troops were driven with heavy losses from Mons in Belgium – their first battle in mainland Europe since Waterloo in 1815. At the same time, no regular army was left at home to defend against invasion. Now attention turned to the middle classes, and especially to young men such as Tolkien, without dependants. ‘Patriotism,’ thundered the Birmingham Daily Post, ‘insists that the unmarried shall offer themselves without thought or hesitation. ’ At the end of August the city looked to Old Edwardians, in particular, to fill a new battalion. Chivying them along was Tea-Cake’s father, Sir John Barnsley, a lieutenant-colonel who had been invited to organize the new unit. T. K. Barnsley tried to persuade Rob Gilson to join him in the ‘Birmingham Battalion’,* but the most Rob would do was help train the Old Edwardian recruits to shoot. By 5 September, 4,500 men had registered for the unit, enough for a second battalion and more, with Tolkien’s brother Hilary joining the rush. The volunteers, whose uniforms would not be ready for some weeks, were issued with badges so they would not be abused in the streets as cowards. Tolkien, who was not among the recruits, recalled later: ‘In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in.’ Meanwhile, casualties from Mons were filling the military hospital that had just been set up in Birmingham University, and Belgian refugees were arriving in England with stories of German atrocities.
With the public reproaches came hints from relatives, then outspoken pressure. Tolkien had no parents to tell him what to do, but his aunts and uncles felt that his duty was plain. Late in September, however, when he and Hilary were staying with their widowed aunt, Jane Neave, at Phoenix Farm, in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, John Ronald made it clear that he was considering carrying on at Oxford.
In many ways, Tolkien should have been predisposed to respond promptly to Kitchener’s call. He was Catholic, whereas the German invaders of Belgium were reputedly Lutheran zealots who raped nuns and slaughtered priests. He shared the cultural values that were outraged by the German destruction of Louvain, with its churches, university, and its library of 230,000 books that included hundreds of unique medieval manuscripts. And he felt a duty to crown and country.
But in 1914 J. R. R. Tolkien was being asked to fight soldiers whose home was the land of his own paternal ancestors. There had been Tolkiens in England in the early nineteenth century, but the line (as Tolkiehn) went back to Saxony. Ancient Germania had also been the cradle of Anglo-Saxon culture. In one of his notebooks that year, Tolkien painstakingly traced the successive incursions that had brought the Germanic tribes to the island of Britain. At this stage, as he later admitted, he was drawn powerfully to ‘the “Germanic” ideal’, which Tolkien was to describe even in 1941 (despite its exploitation by Adolf Hitler) as ‘that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe’. There was also the matter of academic fellowship. Germany was the intellectual fount of the modern science of philology and had hauled Anglo-Saxon into the forefront of English studies. That autumn, his old tutor Farnell relayed tales of German atrocities in Belgium, but Joseph Wright, who was now Tolkien’s friend and adviser as well as tutor, was trying to set up a lending library for wounded German soldiers who were being treated in Oxford. Such sympathies and society may not have been entirely forgotten, even under the glaring eye of Lord Kitchener on the recruiting posters. Though many of his countrymen who bore German surnames soon changed them to English ones (among them George V in July 1917), Tolkien did not, noting many years afterwards: ‘I have been accustomed…to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war…’
It is possible that his unconventional tastes in Germanic literature gave him a different view of war from that of most contemporaries. Embracing the culture of the ancient European North, Tolkien turned his back enthusiastically on the Classics that had nurtured his generation at school. They had become romantically entangled with Victorian triumphalism; in the words of one commentator, ‘As the long prosperous years of the Pax Britannica succeeded one another, the truth about war was forgotten, and in 1914 young officers went into battle with the Iliad in their backpacks and the names of Achilles and Hector engraved upon their hearts.’ But the names on Tolkien’s heart now were Beowulf and Beorhtnoth. Indeed, like the youth Torhthelm in his 1953 verse drama, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, Tolkien’s head was by now ‘full of old lays concerning the heroes of northern antiquity, such as Finn, king of Frisia; Fróda of the Hathobards; Béowulf; and Hengest and Horsa…’ He had become more entrenched, if anything, in his boyhood view that ‘though as a whole the Northern epic has not the charm and delight of the Southern, yet in a certain bare veracity it excels it’. Homer’s Iliad is in part a catalogue of violent deaths, but it is set in a warm world where seas are sunlit, heroes become demigods, and the rule of the Olympians is unending. The Germanic world was chillier and greyer. It carried a burden of pessimism, and final annihilation awaited Middangeard (Middle-earth) and its gods. Beowulf was about ‘man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time’, he wrote later in his influential essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’. ‘A young man with too much imagination and little physical courage’, as he later described himself, Tolkien could picture war only too well, if not the unprecedented efficiency mechanization would bring to the business of killing.
But the key to Tolkien’s decision to defer enlistment lay in his pocket. He was not well off, surviving on his £60 exhibition money and a small annuity. When he had gone to Cheltenham to win Edith back, on turning twenty-one, her protective landlord had warned her guardian, ‘I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured Gentl[eman], but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry, I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a Profession it would have been different.’ Now that Tolkien and Edith were engaged, he could not consider himself only. Having changed course and finally found his métier, though, he hoped to make a living as an academic. But that would be impossible if he did not get his degree. The much wealthier Rob Gilson told his own sweetheart eighteen months later:
He did not join the Army until later than the rest of us as he finished his schools at Oxford first. It was quite necessary for him, as it is his main hope of earning his living and I am glad to say he got his first – in English Literature…He has always been desperately poor…
So Tolkien told his Aunt Jane that he had resolved to complete his studies. But under the intense pressure he turned to poetry. As a result, the visit to Phoenix Farm proved pivotal in an entirely unexpected way.
Back before war broke out, at the end of the university term, Tolkien had borrowed from the college library Grein and Wülcker’s multi-volume Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie. This massive work was one of those monuments of German scholarship that had shaped the study of Old English, and it meant Tolkien had the core poetic corpus at hand throughout the long summer vacation. He waded through the Crist, by the eighthcentury Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, but found it ‘a lamentable bore’, as he wrote later: ‘lamentable, because it is a matter for tears that a man (or men) with talent in word-spinning, who must have heard (or read) so much now lost, should spend their time composing such uninspired stuff’. Boredom could have a paradoxical effect on Tolkien: it set his imagination roaming. Furthermore, the thought of stories lost beyond recall always tantalized him. In the midst of Cynewulf’s pious homily, he encountered the words Eala Earendel! engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended, ‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth sent unto men!’ The name Earendel (or Éarendel) struck him in an extraordinary way. Tolkien later expressed his own reaction through Arundel Lowdham, a character in ‘The Notion Club Papers’, an unfinished story of the 1940s: ‘I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English…I don’t think it is any irreverence to say that it may derive its curiously moving quality from some older world.’ But whose name was Éarendel? The question sparked a lifelong answer.