Tolkien and the Great War (37 page)

The disenchanted view has left us a skewed picture of an important and complex historical event; a problem only exacerbated by a cultural and academic tendency to canonize the best and forget the rest. Coming after the desperate cheer of frontline letters home, the newspaper and government propaganda and the stilted elegies of the war era, the former soldier Charles Douie thought that the new approach restored balance; but he added:

The authors of this poetry
and prose of horror have overstated the case in quite as great a degree as we understated it during the war. The sight of blood has gone to their heads. They can see nothing else…Are the prose and poetry of this age to be charged with disillusion and despair?

The disenchanted view of the war stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives.

‘The Book of Lost Tales', composed between 1916 and
c
.1920, is the same vintage as Charles Carrington's
A Subaltern's War
, largely written in 1919-20. Carrington's later words about his memoir apply equally to Tolkien's mythology. ‘
It is thus anterior
to the pacifist reaction of the nineteen-thirties and is untainted by the influence of the later writers who invented the powerful image of “disenchantment” or “disillusion”,' Carrington wrote. ‘I go back to an earlier stage in the history of ideas.'

The metaphorical uses of
disenchanted
and
disillusioned
have so overtaken the literal that it is easy to forget what they once meant. To say you are ‘disenchanted' with the government or a love affair or a career, for example, is to say that you no longer value them. Wilfred Owen was disenchanted with a whole set of archaic values, declaring that his poetry was not about ‘
deeds, or lands
, or anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War'. But Robert Graves's image of the end of innocence – wisdom scattering the nursery fairies – indicates the literal meaning of
disenchantment.
The Great War had broken a kind of spell.

Tolkien stands against disenchantment in both its literal and metaphorical senses; indeed, they cannot strictly be separated in his work. The disenchanted view, metaphorically speaking, is that failure renders effort meaningless. In contrast, Tolkien's protagonists are heroes not because of their successes, which are often limited, but because of their courage and tenacity in trying. By implication, worth cannot be measured by results alone, but is intrinsic. His stories depict the struggle to uphold inherited, instinctive, or inspirational values – matters of intrinsic and
immeasurable worth – against the forces of chaos and destruction. But Tolkien's world is literally enchanted, too. Not only does it contain talking swords, moving islands, and spells of sleep, but even its most ‘normal' objects and inhabitants possess a spiritual value that has nothing to do with any practical usefulness: no one has argued more energetically than Tolkien that a tree is more than a source of wood. Furthermore, according to ‘The Music of the Ainur', the world is a spell in progress, a work of
enchantment
– etymologically, a magic that is sung.

Tolkien's story of Túrin Turambar may appear to come close to the ‘disenchanted' mode of literature. The ironies of inescapable circumstance either deprive Túrin of victory or they cheat him of its fruits. However, Tolkien parts company with his contemporaries in his depiction of the individual's response to circumstance. Túrin's dogged struggle against fate sets the seal on the heroic status he achieves in combat. Fate may laugh at his efforts, but he refuses to be humbled.

Irony is sometimes accounted an absolute virtue in literature, as if depicting reversals of fortune were evidence of a wise detachment from life, or saying the opposite of what is meant demonstrated a wry wit and paid a compliment to the reader's cleverness. Tolkien recognized that ironic circumstance exists and must be portrayed, but it is clear that he did not account irony a virtue. He had stood with Christopher Wiseman when the latter complained, in late 1914, that the TCBS had become dominated by a waggish and sarcastic element ‘
who sneer
at everything and lose their temper at nothing'. His characterization of the dragon Glorund as the ironist who engineers Túrin's destruction illustrates his own disapproval of those who delight in mockery.

Tolkien's other narratives may stand further from ‘disenchanted' literature, yet they still frequently involve the ironic downturn characteristic of classic trench writing: the disaster or discovery that undermines all achievements and threatens to snuff out hope. That downturn, however, is not the pivotal moment that matters most in Middle-earth. Tolkien propels his plots beyond it and so reaches the emotional crux that truly
interested him: ‘eucatastrophe', the sudden turn for the better when hope rises unforeseeably from the ashes. He makes despair or ‘disenchantment' the prelude to a redemptive restoration of meaning.

From Tuor onwards he recorded how individuals are transfigured by extraordinary circumstances. His characters set out, more often than not, from a point something like Frye's ‘ironic' mode, in bondage, frustration, or absurdity, but they break free of those conditions, and so become heroes. They achieve greater power of action than ourselves, and so reach the condition of characters in the older modes identified by Northrop Frye in his cyclical view of literary history: myth, romance, and epic. So Tolkien dramatized the joy of victory against all odds in Beren and Tinúviel, whose courage and tenacity overcome not only Melko but also the mockery Beren has suffered in the court of Tinúviel's father. This liberation from the chains of circumstance makes his stories especially vital in an age of disenchantment.

Heroism does happen, as Tolkien vouched with characteristic reticence in his landmark 1936 paper on
Beowulf
: ‘Even to-day…you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them…' Courage had not changed since the days of ‘the old heroes…dying with their backs to the wall', he said. The metaphor is commonplace, but loaded with meaning in contexts ancient and modern, public and perhaps personal. It recalls how, in the Old English poem
The Wanderer
, the lord's retainers
‘eal gecrong / wlonc bi wealle'
– ‘all perished, proud beside the wall'. Tolkien might have remembered that Christopher Wiseman had used the same metaphor in his letter calling the TCBS to order after Rob Gilson's death: ‘
Now we stand
with our backs
to the wall, and yet we haver and question as to whether we had better not all put our backs against separate walls.' For Tolkien's inter-war audience, however, it would surely have evoked Field-Marshal Haig's inspirational order during the German Spring Offensive of 1918: ‘With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.' Through
his narratives of hard-won and partial victory, Tolkien suggests that we should go on, whether we can or not.

Like Milton, he also tries to justify the ways of God to Men. Following the introduction of discord into the Music of the Ainur, Ilúvatar asserts that ‘
even shall those
beings, who must now dwell among his evil and endure through Melko misery and sorrow, terror and wickedness, declare in the end that it redoundeth only to my great glory, and doth but make the theme more worth the hearing, Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous'. In a more sceptical era, it is easy to scoff at this as a kind of faith that is blind to the reality of suffering; but Tolkien was not blind, and in the years immediately prior to writing those words he had witnessed suffering on an industrial scale. Others who lived through the shocks and turmoils of his times sought for similar consolatory explanations of God's mysterious ways. Concluding his soldiering memoir,
The Weary Road
, Charles Douie wrote: ‘
Perhaps some day
later generations may begin to see our war in a truer perspective, and may discern it as an inevitable step in the tragic process by which consciousness has informed the will of man, by which in time all things will be fashioned fair.' Tolkien was not writing about later generations, but about the end of the world. F. L. Lucas, the classicist-soldier whose enlistment had precipitated Rob Gilson's, wrote that the purpose of tragic drama was ‘
to portray life
that its tears become a joy forever'. In Tolkien's myth, our immortal souls will be able to contemplate the drama in which we have taken part as a finished work of art. They will also join the Ainur in a second, greater Music, when Ilúvatar's themes will ‘be played aright; for then Ainur and Men will know his mind and heart as well as may be, and all his intent'.

Close to two decades separate the composition of ‘The Book of Lost Tales' from the publication of
The Hobbit;
closer to four divide it from the appearance of
The Lord of the Rings.
The ‘Silmarillion' continued to evolve until Tolkien's death, involving
major developments at every level of detail from cosmology to nomenclature. Though a full examination of the question would be out of place here, I would argue that most of what has been said in this postscript holds true for all this later work.

By the time
The Hobbit
appeared, Tolkien had long abandoned the identification of the Lonely Isle with Britain, and the story of a Germanic or Anglo-Saxon mariner hearing the ‘true tradition' of the Elves had dwindled to the occasional ‘editorial' aside in the ‘Silmarillion'. The myth was no longer, in any geographical or cultural respect, about the genesis of England. But the loosening of these links – together with the new scope for naturalistic portraiture that accompanied his move away from epic modes – meant paradoxically that Tolkien could now write about ‘Englishness' in a more meaningful way than in drawing linear connections through vast aeons. He could model hobbits directly on English people as he had known them in and around his cherished childhood home of Sarehole near Birmingham, borrowing aspects of custom, society, character, and speech. Hobbits, he said, constitute a community that is ‘
more or less a Warwickshire village
of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee'. He admitted, ‘I take my models like anyone else – from such “life” as I know.' A figure standing uncertainly at the doorway into adventure, Bilbo Baggins is an engaging mixture of timidity and temerity, but he learns and grows with astonishing speed, until he can look death calmly in the eye. Bilbo is simply much more like us, Tolkien's readers, than Beren or Tinúviel or Túrin could be. Meanwhile, the tincture of Englishness and the aura of 1897 draw this story closer to the First World War – the end of the era that hobbits evoke – than the Lost Tales that were actually written during and immediately after it.

It would be misleading to suggest that
The Hobbit
is Tolkien's wartime experience in disguise; yet it is easy to see how some of his memories must have invigorated this tale of an ennobling rite of passage past the fearful jaws of death. The middle-class hero is thrown in with proud but stolid companions who have been forced to sink ‘
as low as blacksmith-work
or even
coalmining'. The goblins they meet recall those of ‘The Fall of Gondolin', though in
The Hobbit
– because he made no bones about addressing a twentieth-century audience – Tolkien was much more explicit about the kind of evil they represent: ‘It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them…but in those days…they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.' The company approaches the end of its quest across the desolation created by Smaug, a dragon of Glorund's ilk: a once green land with now ‘neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished'. Scenes of sudden, violent ruin ensue (Tom Shippey sees elements of First World War attitudes in Bard the Bowman's defence of
Laketown
); we visit the camps of the sick and wounded and listen to wranglings over matters of command and strategy. And all culminates in a battle involving those old enemies, the Elves and the Orcs. Horror and mourning, two attitudes to battlefield death, appear side by side, the Orcs lying ‘piled in heaps till Dale was dark and hideous with their corpses', but among them ‘many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood'.

In 1916, from a trench in Thiepval Wood, G. B. Smith had written Tolkien a letter he thought might be his last. ‘
May God bless you
, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.' The 24-year-old Tolkien had believed just as strongly in the dream shared by the TCBS, and felt that they ‘had been granted some spark of fire…that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world…' At 48, however, Tolkien felt that the Great War had come down like winter on his creative powers in their first bloom. ‘
I was pitched
into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again,' he said in October 1940.

What he would have written had he not been ‘pitched into it all' is difficult to imagine. The war imposed urgency and gravity, took him through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form. Without the war, it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on a conflict between good and evil; or if they had, whether good and evil would have taken a similar shape. The same may be said for his thoughts on death and immortality, dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe, enchantment and irony, the significance of fairy-story, the importance of ordinary people in events of historic magnitude, and, crucially, the relationship between language and mythology. If we were lucky enough now to survey a twentieth century in which there had been no Great War, we might know of a minor craftsman in the tradition of William Morris called J. R. R. Tolkien; or we might know him only as a brilliant academic. Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs.