Tolkien and the Great War (2 page)
Read Tolkien and the Great War Online
Authors: John Garth
It is December 16th, nearly the dead of winter. Chill gusts buffet the flanks and faces of the attackers struggling to advance across a bare hundred yards or so of mud. They are a ramshackle group, some of them mere novices. The minute these young men muster a concerted effort, a few veterans press forward with all their energy and skill. But most of the time there is chaos. Again and again their opponents shrug off the assault and land a fearsome counterblow, so that all the guile, fortitude, and experience of the veterans can barely hold back the assault. Their captain, J. R. R. Tolkien, tries to bring his own experience to bear; but those around him are, in the words of an eyewitness, âa beaten pack'.
The year is 1913: the Great War is eight months away, and this is just a game. Not yet soldiers, Tolkien and his team-mates are Oxbridge undergraduates back in Birmingham for Christmas, and today, in accordance with annual tradition, they are playing rugby against their old school's First XV.
Just shy of twenty-two, Tolkien is nothing like the professorial figure now familiar from the covers of biographies, all tweed, kindly wrinkles, and ubiquitous pipe. John Ronald (as his old friends call him) cuts a lean, slight figure on the rugby pitch, but in his days as a forward in the King Edward's School First XV he earned a reputation for dash and determination, and now he plays for Exeter College, Oxford.
His mind is a storehouse of images: memories of terrified flight from a venomous spider, of an ogreish miller, of a green valley riven in the mountains, and visions of dragons, of a nightmare wave towering above green fields, and perhaps already of a land of bliss over the sea. The storehouse is not yet a workshop, however, and he is not yet the maker of Middle-earth. But after a mediocre effort in his Classics exams this year he has taken a
serendipitous stride towards it. He has said goodbye to Latin and Greek and is now tackling Chaucer and
Beowulf
, scrutinizing the origins and development of the English language. It is the affirmation of an early love for the Northern languages and literatures that will always fire his imagination. The first glimpse of Middle-earth is fast approaching. Far off in the unimagined future a cock crows in the courtyards of a city under siege, and horns answer wildly in the hills.
On the rugby pitch today, however, Tolkien is not at his best. He was meant to open an Old Boys' debate at the school yesterday with the proposition that the world is becoming over-civilized, but he was taken suddenly ill and had to back out.
His other former First XV team-mates on the field have largely given up rugby since leaving school. Christopher Wiseman, tall, leonine, and barrel-chested, used to share the scrum with Tolkien, but at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he has had to stop playing rugby and rowing because of an old heart problem. Today, he is relegated to the less aggressive three-quarter line, near the back of the field and next to another veteran, Sidney Barrowclough. There are others here who were never good enough to play in the First XV against other schools, but all King Edward's boys played a lot of rugby. For internal sports, the school was split into four groups, or âhouses'; and most of those in Tolkien's team on this December day once also belonged to his house. In truth, however, his team's
esprit de corps
comes not from the rugby pitch, but from the old school library.
Tolkien met Christopher Wiseman in 1905. Wiseman, at twelve, was already a talented amateur musician; one of his compositions from about this time ended up in the
Methodist Hymn-Book.
His father, the Reverend Frederick Luke Wiseman, who headed the Wesleyan Methodists' Birmingham Central Mission, had raised him on Handel and his mother Elsie had nurtured in him a love of Brahms and Schumann; his particular delight was in German chorales. But rugby was the start of his friendship with Tolkien. Both played in the red strip of Measures' house
(named after the schoolmaster who ran it), and partook in its bitter rivalry with the boys in green from Richards'. Later, they took their place in the scrum in the school's First XV. But they experienced a meeting of minds. Wiseman, a year younger than Tolkien, was his intellectual equal and chased him up the academic ladder at King Edward's. Both lived in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston: Christopher in Greenfield Crescent and John Ronald latterly a street away in Highfield Road. They would walk along Broad Street and Harborne Road between home and school immersed in passionate debate: Wiseman was a Liberal in politics, a Wesleyan Methodist by religion, and a musician by taste, while Tolkien was naturally conservative, a Roman Catholic, and (thought Wiseman) tone-deaf. Theirs was an unlikely partnership, but all the richer for it. They discovered that they could argue with an incandescence few friendships could survive, and their disputes only served to seal the intensely strong bond between them. In recognition of this, they called themselves privately the Great Twin Brethren. Even their closest friend on and off the rugby pitch, Vincent Trought, did not share this bond.
When Tolkien's final term at King Edward's arrived he briefly became Librarian. To help him run his little empire he recruited Wiseman, who insisted that Trought must join him as fellow sub-librarian. Tolkien's place at Oxford was by this time assured and he could relax. Soon the library office became unsuitably lively; but the coterie that gathered there could afford to test the Headmaster's patience because his son, Robert Quilter Gilson, was also in the thick of things.
All of Tolkien's friends were capable of intellectual seriousness. They dominated every school debate and play, and they formed the backbone of the Literary Society, to which Tolkien read from the Norse Sagas, Wiseman expounded on historiography, Gilson enthused about the art critic John Ruskin, and Trought delivered a remarkable paper remembered as â
almost the last word
' on the Romantics. By dint of their enthusiasm, this artistic little clique wrested school life from the hands of boys who would otherwise have controlled it. In the polarized
world of school politics, it was effectively a triumph for Measures' house over Richards' house, the red against the green; but to Tolkien and his friends it constituted a moral victory against cynics who, as Wiseman put it, sneered at everything and lost their temper about nothing.
Much of the time the chief goal of the librarians was much less high-minded, however, and they sought only to incapacitate each other with laughter. In the summer of 1911, the hottest in four decades, Britain boiled in a stew of industrial unrest and (in the words of one historian)
âthe sweltering town populations were psychologically not normal'
. The library cubby-hole became a hotbed of cultural stratagems, surreal wit, and tomfoolery. While the dead hand of exams laid hold of much of the rest of the school, the librarians brewed clandestine teas on a spirit-stove and established a practice whereby each had to bring in titbits for secretive feasts. Soon the âTea Club' was also meeting outside school hours in the tea-room at Barrow's Stores, giving rise to an alternate name, the Barrovian Society.
In December 1913, though Tolkien has been at Oxford for over two years, he remains a member of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, or âthe TCBS' as it is now known. The clique still meets for âBarrovians' and is still largely devoted to drollery. Its membership has always fluctuated, but Christopher Wiseman and Rob Gilson remain at its heart, along with a more recent initiate, Geoffrey Bache Smith. On the rugby pitch today, the TCBS is represented by all four, as well as by Wiseman's fellow three-quarter-back, Sidney Barrowclough. But Tolkien is missing an excellent full-back in Vincent Trought. The TCBS's first loss, he died nearly two years ago after a long illness.
The incentive for today's Oxford and Cambridge players is social as much as sporting: what with yesterday's debate, today's match, and tonight's dinner, this is a major reunion of old schoolfriends. It is this, not the rugby itself, that brings the highly sociable Rob Gilson to take his place in the scrum. (He also stood in at the last minute for the ailing Tolkien in the
debate.) His passion is for pencil and charcoal rather than mud and sweat. It is hard to say which feature most clearly declares his artistic nature: his sensuous, almost Pre-Raphaelite mouth or his calmly appraising eyes. His chief delight is in the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, and he can expound with warmth and clarity on Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia. Like John Ronald, Rob is often busy drawing or painting. His avowed object is to record the truth, not merely to satisfy aesthetic appetite (though one visitor has noted sardonically that his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, contain only one comfortable seat, the rest being âartistic'). Since leaving school he has travelled in France and Italy, sketching churches. He is studying Classics but wants to be an architect, and anticipates several years of vocational training after he graduates in 1915.
G. B. Smith, with Gilson in the scrum, considers himself a poet and has voracious and wide-ranging literary tastes, from W. B. Yeats to early English ballads, and from the Georgians to the Welsh
Mabinogion.
Though he used to belong to Richards' house, he gravitated towards the TCBS and he and Tolkien are growing ever closer now that Smith has begun reading history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a few minutes' walk from Exeter College. âGBS' is a witty conversationalist and delights in the fact that he shares his initials with George Bernard Shaw, the greatest debater of the age. Although he comes from a commercial family and agricultural stock, he has his eye on specialist historical research after he finishes his degree. But rugby football has never appealed to him.
Also in the scrum against his own better judgment is T. K. Barnsley, known as âTea-Cake', an unflappably light-hearted young man who frequently dominates the TCBS with his brilliant wit. Tea-Cake likes to affect laconic expressions such as âfull marks!' and âI've got cold feet' and to ride with reckless enthusiasm around Cambridge on a motorbike, never mind that such behaviour hardly befits a future Wesleyan minister. He and Smith have agreed to play on Tolkien's team only if Rob Gilson is there too. Rob calls that âa left-handed compliment':
in other words, they know his rugby playing is even worse than theirs.
So Tolkien's forwards are fatally compromised by the inexperience of Gilson, Smith, and T. K. Barnsley. The burden of the fight falls to the defensive three-quarter-backs, including the veterans Wiseman and Barrowclough. Barrowclough shakes off a reputation for apathy by charging half the length of the field through the enemy ranks to score first one try, then another. But from early on after the first try, the pressure from their younger opponents is unremitting, and only adroit tackling by Barrowclough and Wiseman keeps the school's lead down. At half-time the score is 11-5 to the school First XV. The teams swap ends, and with the wind in his favour Barrowclough scores his second try and the scrum-half again converts. In the final minutes, though, the school increases its score to 14-10. For all their camaraderie, Tolkien's ragged bunch retires defeated.
But there is dinner with old friends tonight, and the TCBS is not prone to take anything too seriously. These are happy days, and no less happy for being largely taken for granted. On leaving King Edward's in 1911, Tolkien wrote nostalgically in the school
Chronicle:
ââ
Twas a good road, a little rough, it may be, in places, but they say it is rougher further onâ¦
'
No one has foreseen just how rough the coming years will be, or to what slaughter this generation is walking. Even now, at the close of 1913, despite growing signs that war impends for this âover-civilized' world, the time and manner of its unfolding are unforeseeable. Before four years have passed, the conflagration will have left four of Tolkien's fifteen-strong team wounded and four more dead â including T. K. Barnsley, G. B. Smith, and Rob Gilson.
Of every eight men mobilized in Britain during the First World War, one was killed. The losses from Tolkien's team were more than double that, but they bear comparison with the proportion of deaths among King Edward's Old Boys and among former public schoolboys across Great Britain â about one in
five. And they match the figures for Oxbridge-educated servicemen of their age, the vast majority of whom became junior officers and had to lead operations and assaults. It has become unfashionable to give credit to Oxford and Cambridge, and to social élites in general; but it remains true that the Great War cut a deeper swathe through Tolkien's peers than among any other social group in Britain. Contemporaries spoke of the Lost Generation. âBy 1918,' Tolkien wrote half a century later in his preface to the second edition of
The Lord of the Rings
, âall but one of my close friends were dead.'
Before
If he had been a healthier child, war would have come upon John Ronald Reuel Tolkien before his seventh birthday. He was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, one of the two Boer republics that had won independence from British rule in South Africa. There his father managed a branch of the Bank of Africa. But Arthur Tolkien had come from England with his fiancée Mabel Suffield following shortly afterwards, and they had married in Cape Town. To the Dutch Boers in Bloemfontein they were
uitlanders
, foreigners, who enjoyed few rights and paid heavy taxes for the privilege; but the wealth generated by the region's gold and diamond mines drew many to accept the deal. A baby brother, Hilary, was born in 1894 but the elder boy suffered from the torrid climate, and the next year Mabel brought both children back to Birmingham for a break. They never returned. In February 1896, Arthur died from rheumatic fever. So Mabel Tolkien and her sons were spared the harsh shock of the Anglo-Boer war which erupted in late 1898 over
uitlander
rights.
Safe in England, Mabel raised the boys alone, taking them to live in a modest cottage in the village of Sarehole, outside Birmingham. There she taught them at home during a four-year rural idyll, and the climate and character of this older world etched themselves in the young John Ronald's heart: an utter contrast to what he had known until then. â
If your first Christmas tree
is a wilting eucalyptus and if you're normally troubled by heat and sun,' he recalled late in life, âthen to have (just at the
age when your imagination is opening out) suddenly found yourself in a quiet Warwickshire villageâ¦engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midland English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small, quiet rivers andâ¦rustic peopleâ¦' But in 1900 John Ronald gained a place at King Edward's and they moved back into industrial Birmingham to be nearer the school. Then, to the anger of Suffields and Tolkiens alike, Mabel embraced Catholicism, and for a while the boys went to a Roman Catholic school under the direction of the priests at the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien far outstripped his classmates and was back at King Edward's in 1903, but he remained a Catholic all his life. After his mother, who had been ill with diabetes, fell into a coma and died in November 1904, he felt she had martyred herself raising her boys in the faith.
Prior to Mabel's death, the family had lived for a while in rooms at a cottage in Rednal, Worcestershire, outside the city borders. But now their guardian, Father Francis Morgan of the Oratory, found accommodation for the boys in Edgbaston, and in their second set of lodgings, at the age of sixteen, Tolkien met Edith Bratt, a nineteen-year-old who also had a room there. She was pretty, a talented pianist and also an orphan, and by the summer of 1909 the two were in love. But before the year was over, Father Francis got wind of the romance and banned Tolkien from seeing Edith. Stricken but dutiful, he threw himself into his school friendships, the TCBS, and rugby, captaining his house team. He won a place at Oxford (at his second attempt) and £60 a year to fund his undergraduate studies in Classics.
Mabel Tolkien had communicated to her eldest son a taste for
drawing
. He used his first sketchbook for drawings of starfish and seaweeds. Another seaside holiday, at Whitby in 1910, produced evocative pictures of trees, landscapes, and buildings. Tolkien's artistic response was aesthetic and emotional rather than scientific. His figures and portraits were at best comical or
stylized, at worst rudimentary, and he remained modest about his abilities as a visual artist. His greatest strengths lay in decoration and design, exemplified famously by the iconographic covers of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien had also inherited via Mabel a flair for calligraphy from her father, John Suffield, whose ancestors had been platemakers and engravers. Mabel's own
handwriting
was highly stylized, with curlicued capitals and descenders, and crossbars slanting expressively upwards. For formal purposes, Tolkien came to favour a script based on the medieval âfoundational hand', but when he wrote letters as a young man he seemed to have a different style of writing for each of his friends, and later when drafting at speed he produced a scrawl resembling nothing so much as an electro-cardiograph image of a frenzied pulse.
Tolkien learned to read by the age of four and absorbed the children's books that were then popular: Robert Browning's âThe Pied Piper of Hamelin', or the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, which irritated him; tales of Red Indians; George MacDonald's
The Princess and the Goblin
, or Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, which stirred a desire for adventure. He particularly yearned for tales of dragons.
But fairy-stories were not the key to his boyhood tastes. â
I was brought up
in the Classics,' he wrote later, âand first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.' By the time he was eleven, an Oratory priest told Mabel he had read â
too
much
, everything fit for a boy under fifteen, and he doesn't know any single classical thing to recommend him'. It was through the study of classics, and particularly through school exercises translating English verse into Latin or Greek, that Tolkien's taste for
poetry
was awakened. As a child he had habitually skipped any verse he encountered in the books he read. His King Edward's schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, tried largely in vain to spark his interest in the mainstream giants of English poetry, such as Milton and Keats. But the Catholic mystic Francis Thompson won Tolkien's passionate approval for his metrical and verbal accomplishments, his immense imagery, and the visionary faith underpinning his work. Thompson, hugely
popular after his early death in 1907, appears to have influenced the content of one of Tolkien's first attempts at poetry, â
Wood-sunshine
', written as an eighteen-year-old. Like Thompson's long sequence âSister Songs', it dealt with a sylvan vision of fairies:
Come sing ye light fairy things tripping so gay,
Like visions, like glinting reflections of joy
All fashion'd of radiance, careless of grief,
O'er this green and brown carpet; nor hasten away.
O! come to me! dance for me! Sprites of the wood,
O! come to me! Sing to me once ere ye fade!
William Morris's use of verse in his pseudo-medieval romances was also to leave its mark on Tolkien's own early poetry.
Morris was important, too, because of his association with Exeter College, Oxford, where he had formed the self-styled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with fellow student Edward Burne-Jones (himself a former pupil of King Edward's School). Tolkien once likened the TCBS to the Pre-Raphaelites, probably in response to the Brotherhood's preoccupation with restoring medieval values in art. Christopher Wiseman characteristically disagreed, declaring the comparison wide of the mark.
Mabel's attempts to teach her elder son to play the piano foundered. As Humphrey Carpenter writes in his biography of Tolkien, â
It seemed rather as if words
took the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost regardless of what they meant.' He showed unusual linguistic propensities, in particular a keen sensitivity towards the characteristic sounds of different
languages
. His mother had started teaching him French and Latin before he went to school, but neither of these languages particularly appealed to him. At eight, however, the strange names on railway coal-trucks had given him a taste for Welsh. He was drawn to a different flavour in some of the names he encountered in history and mythology, writing later: â
The fluidity
of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter, captivated
meâ¦and I tried to invent a language that would embody the the Greekness of Greekâ¦' That was before he even began learning Greek itself, at the age of ten, by which time he was also reading Geoffrey Chaucer. A year later he acquired
Chambers'
Etymological Dictionary
, which gave him his first glimpse of the principle of âsound shift' by which languages evolve.
This opened a new world. Most people never stop to consider the history of the language they speak, just as they never ponder the geology of the ground they stand on; but Tolkien was already contemplating the evidence by reading Chaucer's Middle English. The ancient Romans had recognized that some words in Latin and Greek sounded alike â akin, some thought. Over the centuries, haphazard attention was paid to such similarities in a growing number of languages, and wild claims had been made for the original ancestor of all languages. But in the nineteenth century scientific rigour was finally applied to the subject and the discipline of comparative philology emerged. Its key realization was that languages do not change randomly, but in a regular way. Philologists could codify the phonological âlaws' by which particular sounds had changed at different stages of a language's history. Chambers' dictionary introduced Tolkien to the most famous of all, Grimm's Law, by which Jakob Grimm nearly a century earlier had codified the complex of regular changes that produced (for example) the words
patér
in Greek and
pater
in Latin but
father
in English and
vatar
in Old High German, all from a single unrecorded âroot'. These (though not all) languages were demonstrably related, in ways that were open to rational analysis; furthermore, by comparing them it was possible to reconstruct elements of their ancestral language, Indo-European â a language from before the dawn of history that had left no record whatsoever. This was heady stuff for a young boy, but it would shape his life.
By the time he met Grimm's Law, Tolkien had begun inventing languages of his own. This was partly for the practical fun of making secret codes and partly for sheer aesthetic pleasure. A pot-pourri of mangled classical words called Nevbosh (actually originated by a cousin) was followed in 1907 by the
more rigorously constructed Naffarin, influenced by the sounds of Spanish (and so by Father Francis, who was half-Spanish and half-Welsh). For his final four years at King Edward's, Tolkien was in the senior or First Class under the Headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, who encouraged him to look into the history of Latin and Greek. But soon his wayward tastes led him beyond the Classical world. A former class-teacher, George Brewerton, lent Tolkien an Anglo-Saxon primer, which he studied in his spare time. At school he excelled in German, winning first prize in the subject in July 1910, but by 1908 he had discovered Joseph Wright's
Primer of the Gothic Language
, and this long-dead Germanic tongue on the edges of written history took his linguistic heart âby storm'.
Others might have kept such recondite interests to themselves, but at school Tolkien was effusive about philology. Rob Gilson described him as â
quite a great authority
on etymology â an enthusiast', and indeed Tolkien once lectured the First Class on the origins of Europe's languages. Against the Classicist ethos drummed into King Edward's schoolboys he played the outsider with verve. He combatively told the literary society that the
Volsunga Saga
, the tale of the dragon-slayer Sigurd, displayed â
the highest epic genius
struggling out of savagery into complete and conscious humanity'. He even addressed one of the annual Latin debates in Gothic.
The corpus of Gothic is small, and to Tolkien it presented a tantalizing challenge. He would try to imagine what unrecorded Gothic was like. He invented Gothic words; not randomly, but using what he knew about sound-shifts to extrapolate the âlost' words on the basis of their surviving relatives in other Germanic languages â a linguistic method rather like triangulation, the process by which map-makers record the heights of landmarks they have not visited. This âprivate lang.' was an activity he rarely mentioned except to his diary because it often distracted him from âreal' school work, but into the Gothic project he drew as collaborator Christopher Wiseman. The self-deprecating Wiseman later recalled:
Reading Homer
with Cary Gilson sparked off in me what in Tolkien was already well alight, an interest in Philology. In fact John Ronald got to the point where he constructed a language L and another LL representing what L had become after a few centuries. He tried to inculcate me into one of his homemade languages, and wrote me a postcard in it. He said that I replied to it in the same language, but there I think he was wrong.
Philology was the focus of passionate argument between the two, and Wiseman said many decades later that the invention of languages was a cornerstone of their youthful friendship. That may seem a bizarre activity for teenage boys; but Tolkien did not think so, insisting later: â
It's not uncommon
, you know. It's mostly done by boysâ¦If the main mass of education takes linguistic form, creation will take linguistic form even if it isn't one of their talents.' Language-construction satisfied the urge to create, but it also met the desire for an argot that would â
serve the needs
of a secret and persecuted society, or' â in the case of the Great Twin Brethren â âthe queer instinct for pretending you belong to one.'
It is unclear whether Tolkien shared with Wiseman another venture, the invention of an âunrecorded' Germanic language,
Gautisk
, and it seems unlikely that the wider TCBS joined in his philological recreations at all.
*
But Tolkien's motivations in language-building were artistic rather than practical; and even if his friends were not collaborators, at least they would have been a discriminating and appreciative audience. After all, these
were boys who conducted debates in Latin â and took part in King Edward's annual performance of Aristophanes in the original classical Greek. Tolkien himself played an exuberant Hermes in the 1911 production of
The Peace
(his farewell to the school). Wiseman appeared as Socrates and Rob Gilson as Strepsiades in
The Clouds
a year later. Smith alone of the TCBS, being from the school's âmodern' or commercial side, did not study Greek; perhaps this is why he was relegated to the role of the Ass in one of the plays. They were directed by Tolkien's cigar-smoking housemaster, Algy Measures, and the boys feasted on a curious menu of buns, gooseberries, and ginger beer. âDoes nobody else remember these plays?' one Old Edwardian wrote in 1972. âThe grand parade of the chorus, clad in white vestments, down the full length of Big School playing on flageolets? Or Wiseman and Gilson munching gooseberries on stage as they chatted away as though Greek were their normal tongue?'
