The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (20 page)

Who won the “Great War”? Both combatants, one is tempted to reply. Lewis said that it had changed him more than his rival. Barfield’s “Great War” arguments, along with
History in English Words
and
Poetic Diction
, revealed to Lewis the fallacy of “chronological snobbery,” the assumption, as common now as then, that the present owns more of the truth than the past, that ideas no longer in vogue are most likely false. The “Great War” shook his confidence in materialism and undermined his belief that truth is discoverable exclusively through the senses. At the same time, it did nothing to dent his dislike of Anthroposophy. In
The Pilgrim’s Regress
(1933), as Cecil Harwood points out, Lewis places the land of
Anthroposophia
next to that of
Occultia
, and later he would trivialize Steiner’s teachings by seeing in them “a reassuring Germanic dullness.” Anthroposophy, with its astral planes, its Buddha on Mars, and its Spiritual Science, remained always beyond the pale. As for Barfield, he credited the “Great War” with teaching him how to “think responsibly and logically.” Lewis, he believed, was the more agile thinker, the more brilliant debater; what a pity, then, that Lewis’s materialism had led him to reject the higher insights of Anthroposophy and the great secret of the evolution of consciousness.

6

A MYTHOLOGY FOR ENGLAND

“He is improving but requires hardening.” So declared the Hull military medical board upon examining Tolkien on May 1, 1917, six months after his return from England. He was overjoyed to be back in “dear old Blighty” (a trench soldier’s affectionate term for Britain, derived, via the Raj, from the Hindi
bilayati
, “foreigner”), but the health that young men take for granted, and that he hoped soon would be his—trench fever usually runs its course in a couple of months—proved, despite the military board’s guarded optimism, elusive. He sickened, improved, and relapsed with agonizing regularity, each advance derailed by attacks of fever, headache, weakness, loss of appetite, or joint pain. The military issued him repeated reprieves from active duty, and he spent much of 1917 shuttling between his army unit, hospital, and brief but blissful visits with Edith, now pregnant with their first child.

Love ripened between the parents-to-be. Tolkien wrote, read, and drew, while Edith enchanted him with her piano playing and, one day in a “small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire,” with her dancing, offering to his exhausted eyes a vision of beauty and grace, a glimpse of paradise. “In those days,” he wrote, “her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and
dance.
” The forest interlude inspired him to write “Of Beren and L
ú
thien,” to his mind the narrative heart of
The Silmarillion
. A quasi-autobiographical tale, it recounts the love of Beren, a man, and L
ú
thien, an Elven princess he spies dancing in the woods, and their terrible trials in search of a magical jewel, culminating in L
ú
thien’s fateful decision to become mortal in order to remain with her beloved. Their sufferings, as many critics have noticed, echo the multiple ordeals, including separation, war, and religious hostility, faced by Tolkien and Edith during their youth.

On November 16, 1917, Edith gave birth in a Cheltenham nursing home to John Francis Reuel, after a painful and dangerous labor. Tolkien, who had been confined to an officers’ hospital in Hull since mid-August, was unable to visit until nearly a week after the birth. John’s baptism, with Father Francis in attendance, offered a few hours of normalcy, but the respite was illusory. During the next nine months, Tolkien fell prey to recurrent fevers, influenza, and gastritis, dropping nearly thirty pounds by mid-August. Compounding his trials, in late July the War Office erroneously ordered the emaciated young officer back to France. Five tense days later the directive was canceled, and in early September a medical board pronounced him completely disabled and dispatched him to a convalescent institution in Blackpool. This was to be his last prolonged hospital stay; by midautumn, he had returned to Oxford and civilian life, although his official discharge did not arrive for another six months, shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Tolkien left the army with the rank of temporary lieutenant, a fitting title, for he was never, at heart, a warrior; he had done his duty and helped to save England, but his greatest contribution to the war effort would come decades later, when
The Lord of the Rings
apotheosized, in its account of hobbits battling ultimate evil in a landscape of fantastic redoubts and talking trees, the achievements of ordinary Tommies and Doughboys among the barbed wire, rats, mud, and machine gun fusillades of rural France.

Opening a New World

Tolkien’s convalescence, despite the prolonged suffering it entailed, proved to be a blessing in disguise, for his recurrent illness prevented return to the front lines and gave him the leisure to assess, refine, and expand his mythology. His friends urged him on. A month after his return to England, he received a letter from Wiseman, apart from Tolkien all that remained of the TCBS, declaring that “if you do come out in print you will startle our generation as no one has yet.” As prophecy, this was hyperbolic, two generations off, and yet not entirely askew, for Tolkien startled his children’s and grandchildren’s generations as much as any author; it was, in any case, a welcome spur.

Tolkien aimed higher, however, than startlement; his ambitions soared to dizzying heights. He intended to bestow upon England a priceless gift: its own literary dowry, the mythology, fairy tales, and heroic legends it deserved but had never possessed. Olympian ambitions simmered in many young authors of this generation; it was just a few years earlier, in 1909, that James Joyce, as dissimilar to Tolkien in narrative strategy as any writer could be (although the two shared a Catholic upbringing and Catholic imagery) confessed to Nora Barnacle his aim to “become indeed the poet of my race.” As Tolkien recalled it years later, “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it has no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands … Do not laugh! But once upon a time … I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story … which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.”

Iceland boasted the Norse sagas, Finland the
Kalevala
, Germany the rich subsoil of folklore and legend unearthed by the Grimm brothers. Britain, however, had no native tales to offer, its mythological and folkloric potential snuffed out by the Norman invasion and the subsequent Latinization of the culture. Arthurian mythology, despite its inherent nobility and beauty, had in Tolkien’s eyes at least three fatal flaws. It owed too much to French poets like Chr
é
tien de Troyes, and Tolkien disliked all things French—its fussy food, its language teeming with “polysyllabic barbarities,” and now its battlefields, on which two of his closest friends had fallen. Stylistically, the Arthurian cycle was “too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive.” And it was openly Christian. Tolkien believed that while myth and fairy tale must reflect religious truth, they must do so subtly, never depicting religion as it appears in “the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.” The Arthur cycle failed the test. Nothing else would do: if Tolkien’s beloved land were to possess a mythology, it would be up to him to create it.

What inspired this wildly high dream? Other English writers—Langland, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Peacock, and Shelley among them—had elaborated extant myths or invented their own; Blake had gone further by imagining a primordial Britain (Albion) swirling with spiritual beings. But Tolkien’s plan to create a full-fledged mythological story-cycle in poetry and prose is unmatched in English literature. The idea may have come to him first while reading, at King Edward’s, the
Kalevala
. To encounter the Finnish national epic was, he said, to open “a new world,” to “revel in an amazing new excitement. You feel like Columbus on a new Continent, or Thorfinn in Vinland the Good.” Perhaps Tolkien saw himself as another Elias L
ö
nnrot, the physician and philologist who had created the
Kalevala
, scouring the Finnish countryside for traditional songs which he then wove, along with material collected by other ethnologists, into an epic tale stretching from the creation of the cosmos to the coming of Christ. The atmosphere is bleak, tragic, and violent, like much of Tolkien’s legendarium.

Tolkien first encountered the
Kalevala
in the Everyman’s edition, featuring a translation by William Forsell Kirby, an entomologist and popular author of works like
Familiar Butterflies and Moths
and
Marvels of Ant Life
who studied languages as a hobby (one can’t help noticing how many philologists, including the Grimm Brothers, M
ü
ller, Schlegel, Joseph Wright, Kirby, and Tolkien himself, were prodigies, polymaths, or both). Kirby’s rendition of the opening lines might have been written by Tolkien himself, so perfectly do they capture the young mythmaker’s aspirations:

I am driven by my longing,

And my understanding urges

That I should commence my singing,

And begin my recitation.

I will sing the people’s legends,

And the ballads of the nation.

This singing, as Tolkien conceived it, was to be “cool and clear,” distinctly northern, evoking Nordic snows rather than Grecian sands, but leavened by that “fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic, although it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things.” The literary voice was to be archaic, medieval, in the “heigh stile,” but modified for prose in the manner of William Morris’s romances.

With these qualifications in place, Tolkien’s stories flowed, often arising in his mind unbidden, “as ‘given’ things … always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing.’” This is a well-attested experience, as old as Plato’s
Meno
and much celebrated among the Romantics; thus Blake’s claim in a famous 1803 letter to be no more than a “Secretary” transcribing poems by “Authors [who] are in Eternity,” and Coleridge’s cognate image of the poet as “The Eolian Harp” (1795) sounded by divine winds to produce “such a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve / Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land.” There are parallels, too, with an Old English poem well known to Tolkien, that of Cædmon, the seventh-century cowherd who had a dream or vision in which a mysterious man orders him to tell (as St. Bede describes it in his
History of the English Church and People
) “the beginning of created things.” Inspired by grace, Cædmon sings a nine-line hymn of praise to God, which includes the first appearance in English poetry of
middangeard
, or Middle-earth, that portion of creation reserved for human beings, the land in which Tolkien’s legendarium would unfold:

Nu we sculon herigean heofonrices weard,

Meotodes meahte ond his modge
þ
ance,

Weorc wuldorf
æ
der, swa he wundra gehw
æ
s,

Ece drihten, or onstealde.

He
æ
rest sceop eor
ð
an bearnum

heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;

Þ
a middangeard moncynnes weard,

ece drihten,
æ
fter teode

firum foldan, frea
æ
lmihtig.

Now must we praise the guardian of heaven-kingdom,

the might of the measurer and his mind’s aim,

the work of the glory-father, as each of the wonders

the eternal lord set forth in the beginning.

First he shaped for the sons of men

heaven as a roof, the holy maker made.

Then middle-earth the guardian of mankind,

the eternal lord, afterwards established

to be a solid ground for men, almighty is the lord.

Cædmon’s hymn is the oldest-known Old English poem and stands, as such, at or near the origins of English literature; Tolkien could not have found a more perfect seed from which to grow his imaginary world. In keeping with the hymn, he always insisted that Middle-earth was neither supernatural nor fantastic—akin neither to heaven nor to Wonderland—but was simply the “objectively real world.”

Among Tolkien’s first tales in his newborn mythology is “The Cottage of Lost Play,” composed in late 1916 or early 1917, the fair copy being inscribed by Edith on February 12, 1917, from Tolkien’s pencil original into a “High School Exercise Book.” Set in the distant past, long before the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes entered Britain, “The Cottage of Lost Play” serves as a frame (a device ubiquitous in popular fiction of the era) for most of the early tales. A wandering sailor named Eriol (“One who dreams alone,” suggesting a Tolkien alter ego) arrives at the Lonely Isle of Tor Eress
ë
a, enters the enchanted Cottage of Lost Play in the town of Koromas, and there encounters kindly gnomes who recount the history of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s notes indicate that Tor Eress
ë
a, with its hills and hamlets and “broad and woody plain,” is primordial England, Koromas is Warwick (where Tolkien and Edith married), and Eriol is the father of Hengest and Horsa, the legendary brothers described in Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History
and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, who sailed from Jutland to England in the fifth century to fight the Picts. Middle-earth, then, includes England, but the England of an exceptionally generous imagination, a land inhabited not only by humans and fairies, but also by goblinlike Orcs (whose name Tolkien took from an Anglo-Saxon word for demon), Balrogs (cruel fiery monsters who wield whips or swords), Ainur or Valar (angels, godlike demiurges), Maiar (lesser Ainur), Melkor (the rebel angel, also known as Melko and Morgoth), and Eru Il
ú
vatar (the one God, creator of all things, modeled upon the biblical archetype). Tolkien details the interactions of these sublime or monstrous beings, in archaic England and in the divine enclave of Valinor, in a series of stories written, for the most part, between 1917 and 1920. The titles—“The Coming of the Valar,” “The Chaining of Melko,” “The Flight of the Noldoli,” “The Tale of Tun
ú
viel,” “The Fall of Gondolin,” and so on—nicely adumbrate the tumultuous heroic-fantastic content, a vast sweeping history encompassing the creation of the world and the rise, triumph, and fall of his vast ensemble of human and imaginary beings.