Tolkien and the Great War (32 page)

Tolkien was not alone among latter-day writers in characterizing the individual's fate as the work of a malicious demiurgic power. Thomas Hardy pictured Tess Durbeyfield as a victim of an Olympian ‘President of the Immortals', while the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, in ‘
Soldier's Dream
', imagined merciful Jesus spiking all the guns but God fixing them again. In contrast, though, Tolkien's faith in God and the mythological method may be gauged by his personification of cruel destiny in satanic Melko rather than in Manwë or Ilúvatar; and by Melko's status as an actor in the drama rather than a metaphor. Túrin falls victim to the demiurge's curse on his father, Úrin, a soldier taken captive but defiant to Angband after battle.

In its scale, centrality, and tragedy, the
Battle of Unnumbered Tears
(though never directly recounted in the Lost Tales) inevitably bears comparison with the Somme – though it spans days at most and produces an outright victory for the enemy rather than a Pyrrhic victory for the allies. Nearly half of these countless, hopeful battalions of Gnomes and Men are killed. Tolkien provides an arresting and concentrated emblem for the terrible carnage in the Hill of Death, ‘
the greatest cairn
in the world', into which the Gnomes' corpses are gathered. Survivors, many of them driven to vagabondage, do not speak of the battle. Of the fates of fathers and husbands, families hear nothing.

Yet the Battle of Unnumbered Tears is much more than a military disaster. An epochal stage in a war that Tolkien saw as everlasting, it ushers in the enslavement of individual art and craft by impersonal industry and cold avarice: the thraldom of the Gnomes in Melko's mines, and their demoralization under the Spell of Bottomless Dread. Imagination thrives now only in scattered faëry refuges, such as Gondolin and Artanor, a ‘bulwark…against the arrogance of the Vala of Iron'. The majority of Men, meanwhile, having proved faithless in battle, are cut off from Elves and the inspiration that they represent.

Úrin's people, who stood firm, are corralled by Melko in shadowy Aryador, whence his wife Mavwin, with an infant
daughter to look after, sends young Túrin to fosterage in Artanor. This separation is only ‘the first of the sorrows that befell him', the tale notes, beginning a tally. Four times Túrin travels from a new home (Aryador, Artanor, the hidden Gnomish kingdom of the Rodothlim, and a village of human wood-rangers) into peril (near-starvation in the forest as a child, capture by orcs as a grown man, capture by the dragon Glorund, the dragon's return). In successive phases he draws nearer to happiness and heroic stature, but is then plunged into yet deeper anguish.

Savage irony is at work here. It is not simply that good times are replaced by bad: happiness and heroism are the very causes of sorrow and failure; their promise turns out to be not hollow, but false. By tremendous daring and ‘
the luck
of the Valar', Túrin's dearest friend, the elven archer Beleg, rescues him from orc captors; but in the dark, Túrin mistakes him for an assailant and kills him. In the final pages he finds a beautiful stranger wandering distraught in the woods, her memory a blank; but every step towards joyous union with Níniel ‘daughter of tears' (as he names her) is a step towards tragedy: she is his long-lost sister.

This final, most fiendish irony is set up by Melko's servant, Glorund. A creature apart from the mechanistic dragons of ‘The Fall of Gondolin', he belongs to the same species as Fafnir in the Icelandic
Volsunga Saga
and Smaug in
The Hobbit:
carnal monsters who ‘
love lies
and lust after gold and precious things with a great fierceness of desire, albeit they may not use nor enjoy them', in the words of the Lost Tale. His trail is desolation:

The land had become all barren and was blasted for a great distance about the ancient caverns of the Rodothlim, and the trees were crushed to the earth or snapped. Towards the hills a black heath stretched and the lands were scored with the great slots that that loathly worm made in his creeping.

Glorund's particular genius, then, is to undermine beauty and truth, either by destroying them or by rendering them morally worthless. His despoliation of treasuries, his desecration of nature, and his delight in irony are of a piece.

The contrast with ‘The Tale of Tinúviel' could not be greater. Beren could overturn mockery, but it vitiates Túrin's every achievement. The elven lovers escaped all prisons, but Úrin only leaves Angband at Melko's will, after years of extraordinary psychological torture. Tinúviel could hide in her enchanted cloak and Beren could shift his shape; but Túrin can only change his name. You can almost hear the laughter of Glorund when, on the eve of his unwitting incest, Túrin celebrates his foresight in taking the pseudonym
Turambar,
‘Conqueror of Fate': ‘
for lo!
I have overcome the doom of evil that was woven about my feet.' There is a hint that, if he had told Níniel his real name, her memory would have returned, thwarting calamity.

But a darkness falls between families, friends, and lovers (surely reflecting something of Tolkien's own wartime experience). Tolkien underlines the point with a mythographer's flourish, in a scene in which Níniel and Mavwin meet Glorund's eye: ‘
a swoon came
upon their minds, and them seemed that they groped in endless tunnels of darkness, and there they found not one another ever again, and calling only vain echoes answered and there was no glimmer of light.'

The narrative divides to follow first Túrin then, in a long flashback, his mother and sister, as the siblings move towards their collision. Thus the reader exchanges ignorance for infinitely more uncomfortable knowledge. We can taste the impotent misery of Úrin, whose torture is to watch from a place of vision in Angband as the curse slowly destroys his family. In an acutely distressing scene prior to the reunion of the fatal siblings, Túrin is similarly immobilized by Glorund while orcs take away the elven woman who might have been his own Tinúviel:

In that sad band
stood Failivrin in horror, and she stretched out her arms towards Túrin, but Túrin was held by the spell of the drake, for that beast had a foul magic in his glance, as have many others of his kind, and he turned the sinews of Túrin as it were to stone, for his eye held Túrin's eye so that his will died, and he could not stir of his own purpose, yet might he hear and see…Even now did the Orcs begin to drive away that host of
thralls, and his heart broke at the sight, yet he moved not; and the pale face of Failivrin faded afar, and her voice was borne to him crying: ‘O Túrin Mormakil, where is thy heart; O my beloved, wherefore dost thou forsake me?'

Knowledge does not bring power. Instead, when the isolating darkness in this tale lifts, the revelation can lacerate. For Turambar and Níniel at the end, the truth is unendurable.

‘The Tale of Turambar' would not be a success if the hero were simply a puppet in Melko's maleficent hands. The god's curse appears to work not only through external circumstance, the ‘bad luck' that haunts the family, but also through Túrin's stubborn misjudgements and occasionally murderous impulses. Whereas Beren survives his emotional and physical injuries with innate resilience, Túrin endures his traumas through sheer obduracy, never losing their imprint. He first becomes a warrior to ‘
ease his sorrow
and the rage of his heart, that remembered always how Úrin and his folk had gone down in battle against Melko'; and later he invokes the memory of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears to persuade the Rodothlim to cast aside their secrecy, courting disaster. The curse is often indistinguishable, then, from what might be called psychological damage.

Tolkien's declared aim was to create myths and fairy-tales, but there are haunting notes here from a more contemporary repertoire. One is naturalism. The desolation of Túrin's world is often brought home through modest but eloquent tableaux: his cries as a seven-year-old taken from his mother; the swallows mustering under her roof when he returns years later to find her gone; his wine-soaked hand after murder at the feast. The other is ambiguity. Túrin's victory over Glorund might be read as a final victory over his fate, yet it brings the curse to its full fruition by withdrawing the veil from Níniel's memory. His dogged struggle through serial tragedy is courageous, but it causes terrible suffering. Likewise Úrin's defiant words to Melko, ‘
At least none
shall pity him for this, that he had a craven for father.'

‘The Tale of Turambar' is not so much fairy-story as human-story,
told by a mortal occupant of the Cottage of Lost Play and immersed in what Tolkien later termed dyscatastrophe. Its only major flaw is the upturn at the very end, where the spirits of Túrin and Níniel pass through purgatorial flame and join the ranks of the Valar. Too similar to the climax of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel', and contrary to the dark spirit of ‘Turambar', it seems a clumsy way of depicting the consolatory Joy that Tolkien elsewhere reserved for those who have passed, not merely beyond life, but beyond the created world altogether.

Tolkien, still developing the story of Túrin many years later, wrote in 1951 that it ‘
might be said
(by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo'. Yet this is a judgement about criticism, not a denial of influence; and by the time he made the comment he had indeed moved far from the concept of unearthing lost tales. Through the narrator of ‘The Tale of Turambar' he acknowledges his debt, while declaring the fictional premise of the whole ‘Book of Lost Tales':

In these days
many such stories do Men tell still, and more have they told in the past especially in those kingdoms of the North that once I knew. Maybe the deeds of other of their warriors have become mingled therein, and many matters beside that are not in the most ancient tale – but now I will tell to you the true and lamentable tale…

To Tolkien the philologist, deriving a single story from these overlapping but disparate narratives must have seemed no more strange than reconstructing an unrecorded Indo-European root from related words in various languages. Yet this is neither plagiarism nor, in fact, reconstruction at all, but a highly individual imaginative enterprise. Figures such as Beleg, the fugitive slave Flinding, and bright-eyed Failivrin enter ‘The Tale of Turambar' unforeshadowed by Tolkien's sources; the background and web of motives is all his own; and in stitching disparate
elements together with many more of his own invention he brings the plot to a pitch of suspense and horror he rarely bettered. Most importantly, perhaps, Tolkien amplified the aspects of these myths and traditions that spoke most eloquently to his own era, replete with tragedy and irony.

Undoubtedly Tolkien meant the sequel to Túrin's story, ‘The Tale of the Nauglafring', to be the ‘lost tale' behind the garbled references in Norse myth to the mysterious Brísingamen, a necklace forged by dwarves, worn by the love-goddess Freyja, and stolen by the trickster Loki. Possibly it was this scheme that originally gave rise to the Silmarils, their fabulous radiance (relating
Brísingamen
to Old Norse
brísingr,
‘fire'), their theft by Melko, and their association with half-divine Tinúviel. However that may be, the curse of Glorund's hoard now brings Artanor to ruin as Tinwelint orders the gold to be made into a necklace for the Silmaril that Beren cut from Melko's crown.

The elf-king's dealings and double-dealings with the dwarven smiths form one of the least satisfying elements in the Lost Tales. Self-interested greed could have sharpened Tinwelint's wits, but instead it appears to stupefy him. The only real artistic flaw, however, is that the Dwarves, misshapen in body and soul, come close to caricature. The narrative briefly regains potency as Tinwelint appears resplendent in the Necklace of the Dwarves:

Behold now Tinwelint
the king rode forth a-hunting, and more glorious was his array than ever aforetime, and the helm of gold was above his flowing locks, and with gold were the trappings of his steed adorned; and the sunlight amid the trees fell upon his face, and it seemed to those that beheld it like to the glorious face of the sun at morning…

The procession of paratactic clauses, fusing annalistic distance with breathless excitement, became a hallmark of Tolkien's writing. So did what follows: a daring shift from the main event to another scene, cranking up the tension and foreboding before the denouement. We learn of Tinwelint's fate only when his stricken queen is presented with his head still ‘crowned and
helmed in gold'. His glorious ride to the hunt turns out to have been the swansong of Faërie in the Great Lands.

The muted tone of the rest of the tale suggests the ebb of enchantment. Artanor falls not with a bang, but a whimper. Not even Beren and Tinúviel are allowed to escape the decline as they reappear to reclaim the Silmaril. In their second span of life the resurrected lovers are now mortal, and the Necklace hastens Tinúviel's death; Beren ends in lonely wandering. Deprived even of the honour of a tragic ending, their exit reflects what Tom Shippey has called (with reference to the fate of Frodo in
The Lord of the Rings
) an ‘unrecognized touch of hardness' in Tolkien.

But now, probably in 1919 or 1920, he was contemplating a huge narrative enterprise, certainly mournful but nevertheless shot through with splendour and enchantment. He had arrived at the longest-planned story of all, to which the ‘Nauglafring' was merely the prologue. If the scheme had been realized, Christopher Tolkien calculates,
‘the whole
Tale of Eärendel
would have been somewhere near half the length of all the tales that were in fact written'
. Beyond the arrival of Tinúviel's granddaughter Elwing at the shoreland refuge of Tuor and the exiles of Gondolin, virtually nothing of the remainder of ‘The Book of Lost Tales' passed beyond notes and outlines. The tale would have recounted Eärendel's many hazardous sailings west and his final voyage into the starry skies, transfigured by suffering: a considerably more solemn figure than the blithe fugitive whom Tolkien had envisioned in his poem of September 1914. Meanwhile, the Elves of Kôr would march out into the Great Lands to cast Melko down from the pinnacle of his triumph.