John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

Cynewulf’s lines were about an angelic messenger or herald of Christ. The dictionary suggested the word meant a ray of light, or the illumination of dawn. Tolkien felt that it must be a survival from before Anglo-Saxon, even from before Christianity. (Cognate names such as Aurvandil and Orendil in other ancient records bear this out. According to the rules of comparative philology, they probably descended from a single name before Germanic split into its offspring languages. But the literal and metaphorical meanings of this name are obscure.) Drawing on the dictionary definitions and Cynewulf’s reference to Éarendel as being above our world, Tolkien was inspired with the idea that Éarendel could be none other than the steersman of Venus, the planet that presages the dawn. At Phoenix Farm, on 24 September 1914, he began, with startling éclat:

Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup

In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;

From the door of Night as a ray of light

Leapt over the twilight brim,

And launching his bark like a silver spark

From the golden-fading sand

Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death

He sped from Westerland.

Tolkien embellished ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ with a favourite phrase from Beowulf, Ofer ýpa ful , ‘over the cup of the ocean’, ‘over the ocean’s goblet’. A further characteristic of Éarendel may have been suggested to Tolkien by the similarity of his name to the Old English ēar ‘sea’: though his element is the sky, he is a mariner. But these were mere beginnings. He sketched out a character and a cosmology in forty-eight lines of verse that are by turns sublime, vivacious, and sombre. All the heavenly bodies are ships that sail daily through gates at the East and West. The action is simple: Éarendel launches his vessel from the sunset Westerland at the world’s rim, skitters past the stars sailing their fixed courses, and escapes the hunting Moon, but dies in the light of the rising Sun.

And Éarendel fled from that Shipman dread

Beyond the dark earth’s pale,

Back under the rim of the Ocean dim,

And behind the world set sail;

And he heard the mirth of the folk of earth

And hearkened to their tears,

As the world dropped back in a cloudy wrack

On its journey down the years.

Then he glimmering passed to the starless vast

As an isléd lamp at sea,

And beyond the ken of mortal men

Set his lonely errantry,

Tracking the Sun in his galleon

And voyaging the skies

Till his splendour was shorn by the birth of Morn

And he died with the Dawn in his eyes.

It is the kind of myth an ancient people might make to explain celestial phenomena. Tolkien gave the title in Old English too ( Scipfæreld Earendeles Æfensteorran ), as if the whole poem were a translation. He was imagining the story Cynewulf might have heard, as if a rival Anglo-Saxon poet had troubled to record it.

As he wrote, German and French armies clashed fiercely at the town of Albert, in the region named for the River Somme, which flows through it. But Éarendel’s is a solitary species of daring, driven by an unexplained desire. He is not (as in Cynewulf) monnum sended , ‘sent unto men’ as a messenger or herald; nor is he a warrior. If Éarendel embodies heroism at all, it is the maverick, elemental heroism of individuals such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, who that summer had sailed off on his voyage to traverse the Antarctic continent.

If the shadow of war touches Tolkien’s poem at all, it is in a very oblique way. Though he flies from the mundane world, Éarendel listens to its weeping, and while his ship speeds off on its own wayward course, the fixed stars take their appointed places on ‘the gathering tide of darkness’. It is impossible to say whether Tolkien meant this to equate in any way to his own situation at the time of writing; but it is interesting that, while he was under intense pressure to fight for King and Country, and while others were burnishing their martial couplets, he eulogized a ‘wandering spirit’ at odds with the majority course, a fugitive in a lonely pursuit of some elusive ideal.

What is this ideal? Disregarding the later development of his story, we know little more about the Éarendel of this poem than we do about the stick figure stepping into space in Tolkien’s drawing The End of the World. Still less do we know what Éarendel is thinking, despite his evident daring, eccentricity, and uncontainable curiosity. We might almost conclude that this is truly ‘an endless quest’ not just without conclusion, but without purpose. If Tolkien had wanted to analyse the heart and mind of his mariner, he might have turned to the great Old English meditations on exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Instead he turned to Romance, the quest’s native mode, in which motivation is either self-evident (love, ambition, greed) or supernatural. Éarendel’s motivation is both: after all, he is both a man and a celestial object. Supernaturally, this is an astronomy myth explaining planetary motions, but on a human scale it is also a paean to imagination. ‘His heart afire with bright desire’, Éarendel is like Francis Thompson (in Tolkien’s Stapeldon Society paper), filled with ‘a burning enthusiasm for the ethereally fair’. It is tempting to see analogies with Tolkien the writer bursting into creativity. The mariner’s quest is that of the Romantic individual who has ‘too much imagination’, who is not content with the Enlightenment project of examining the known world in ever greater detail. Éarendel overleaps all conventional barriers in a search for self-realization in the face of the natural sublime. In an unspoken religious sense, he seeks to see the face of God.

The week before the start of the Cambridge term found Rob Gilson staying with Christopher Wiseman in Wandsworth, London, where his family had moved following his father’s appointment as secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Home Mission Department in 1913. It was also the week of the fall of Antwerp. Gilson wrote: ‘We are of course very mad and hilarious. Last night we went to see Gerald du Maurier in Outcast – such a bad play. I don’t know what we are going to do today and shall probably start to do it before we have decided.’ At the same time, on 4 October, the last Sunday of the long vacation, Tolkien was back in Birmingham, staying at the Oratory with Father Francis Morgan. T. K. Barnsley, who had now been appointed the first subaltern in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, was leading the new unit in a church parade at the city’s central parish church. On the Monday the recruits began training. Saturday’s Daily Post had carried a list of men accepted to serve in the 3rd Birmingham Battalion. Hilary Tolkien was soon packed off without ceremony to train at a Methodist college in Moseley as a bugler.

Back in Oxford, Tolkien confided in a Catholic professor that the outbreak of war had come as a profound blow to him, ‘the collapse of all my world’, as he later put it. Tolkien had been prone to fits of profound melancholy, even despair, ever since the death of his mother, though he kept them to himself. The new life he had slowly built up since her death was now in peril. Hearing his complaint, however, the Catholic professor responded that this war was no aberration: on the contrary, for the human race it was merely ‘back to normal’.

Yet ‘ordinary life’, as Tolkien had known it, was an immediate casualty of war, even in Oxford. The university was transformed into a citadel of refugees and war-readiness. The time-honoured flow of undergraduates had haemorrhaged: a committee to process student recruits had dealt with 2,000 by September. Only seventy-five remained at Exeter College, and in the evenings unlit windows loomed over the silent quad. Tolkien was stricken with severe second thoughts about staying and declared: ‘It is awful. I really don’t think I shall be able to go on: work seems impossible.’ The college had become part-barracks, with areas allocated to Oxfordshire Light Infantrymen and batteries of gunners, who came and went in a steady stream. Some of the younger dons had gone off to war, and so had many of the college servants; older men had taken their place. Tolkien was glad to be living for the first time out of college, at 59 St John Street (an address which came to be known as ‘the Johnner’), where he shared ‘digs’ with his last remaining Exeter friend, Colin Cullis, who was not able to join up due to poor health.