John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

Tolkien’s sound-shift ‘laws’ fill many dry pages of his early Qenya notebook, but they were as essential to Qenya as the changes codified in Grimm’s Law are to German or English. He often wrote as if, like Jakob Grimm, he too were merely an observer looking back at the unrecorded but nonetheless real past of a living language. Even in these phonological notes, Tolkien was already entering into his world as a fiction writer does. From this ‘internal’ viewpoint, the sound shifts were unalterable facts of observed history.

In practice, though, Tolkien also played God (or sub-creator emulating the Creator, as he would later have put it). He did not just observe history; he made it. Instead of working back from recorded evidence to reconstruct the lost ancestral ‘roots’ of words, as Grimm had done to arrive at a picture of ancient Germanic, he could invent Primitive Eldarin roots and move forward, adding affixes and applying sound shifts to arrive at Qenya. Furthermore, Tolkien could change a sound-shift law, and he sometimes did. Because each law should apply across the language, this might entail alterations to any number of words and their individual histories. Revision on that scale was a painstaking process, but it gave Tolkien a perfectionist’s pleasure. There was scope here for a lifetime’s tinkering, and he used it.

If these austere sound-shift laws were the ‘scientific’ formulae by which Tolkien generated his ‘romantic’ language – as essential to its personal character as DNA is to our own – inventing Qenya was also an exercise in taste as heartfelt as any art. Tolkien’s sound-pictures were always acute: the bassy kalongalan , ‘ringing or jangling of (large) bells’, and its alto counterpart kilinkelë , ‘jingling of (small) bells’; the elegant alternations of vassivaswë for ‘beating or rushing of wings’; or the tongue-twisting pataktatapakta , ‘rat-a-tat’. Qenya is more than onomatopoeic, though: nang -, ‘I have a cold’, and miqë , ‘a kiss’ (pronounced more or less as ‘mee-kweh’), mimic what the speech organs do when your nose is blocked or your mouth is amorously engaged. Of course, most concepts have no intrinsic connection with any particular sound or mouth-movement. Tolkien tried to match sound and sense much as an expressionist painter might use colour, form, and shade to evoke a mood. Derivation aside, only taste dictated that fūmelotmeans ‘poppy’, eressëa means ‘lonely’, or morwen , ‘daughter of the dark’, signifies the glimmering planet Jupiter.

Crucially, Tolkien used Qenya to create a world like our own, yet unlike. Its trees are ours but their names make them sound as if they are on the verge of communication: the laburnum is lindeloktë , ‘singing cluster’, while siqilissë , ‘weeping willow’, also means ‘lamentation’ itself. This is a world of austa and yelin , ‘summer’ and ‘winter’; of lisēlë, piqēlë , and piqissë , ‘sweetness’, ‘bitterness’, and ‘grief’. But enchantment courses through Qenya: from kuru ‘magic, wizardry’ to Kampo the Leaper, a name for Eärendel, and to a whole host of other names for peoples and places that emerged during a couple of years’ work on the lexicon. For Tolkien, to a greater extent even than Charles Dickens, a name was the first principle of story-making. His Qenya lexicon was a writer’s notebook.

At the start of March, Rob Gilson wrote inviting Tolkien to join Wiseman and himself in Cambridge. Smith was going too, and Gilson was eager to repeat the experience of the ‘Council of London’. Ever since that weekend he had been enduring the unaccustomed hardships of military training, living in a hut in an often flooded field, sometimes ill from inoculations, and suffering a growing sense of pessimism. ‘I have quite lost now any conviction that the war is likely to end within the next six months,’ Gilson wrote home. ‘If anyone with a gift of prophecy were to tell me that the war would last ten years, I shouldn’t feel the least surprise.’ He told Tolkien, ‘My whole endurance of the present is founded on the remembrance that I am a TCBSite…But another conclave would be the most perfect bliss imaginable.’ If Tolkien could not come to Cambridge the following weekend, Gilson would be ‘bitterly disappointed’.

Nevertheless, he did not turn up. On the Saturday the three wired an ultimatum calling on him to appear, or resign from the TCBS. It was not, of course, entirely serious. ‘When we sent the telegram,’ Wiseman wrote to Tolkien the following week, ‘we were groping for the thousand and first time in the dark for a John Ronald of whom there appeared no sound or sight or rumour in any direction…It always seems to us odd that you should so consistently be the only one left out of the TCBS.’

‘Schools’ were fast approaching, and Tolkien had to prepare for ten papers. Most of them covered areas in which he was an enthusiast: Gothic and Germanic philology, Old Icelandic, Old and Middle English language and literature. Volsunga Saga, The Seafarer, Havelock the Dane, Troilus and Criseyde: these he should have no trouble with. He had been familiar with some of this material for several years prior to joining the English course at Oxford, and ever since switching from Classics he had been breezily confident about doing well. But a week after the missed Cambridge meeting (as a three-day British offensive failed at Neuve-Chapelle) he headed off for the Easter vacation armed with set texts, and at Edith’s in Warwick he worked through the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale line by line, making thorough notes on vocabulary (such as attercoppe , ‘poisonheads’, which he later gave to Bilbo Baggins as a taunt against the spiders of Mirkwood).

His other work, poetry, occupied him too. At the end of term Tolkien had again found an audience for his poetry at Exeter College’s Essay Club (the club had in fact survived well beyond its November ‘last gasp’), which listened to him read ‘The Tides’, or as he had named his revision of the poem, ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’. G. B. Smith had seen at least ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ in manuscript, but now Tolkien wanted to submit a whole set of poems to the TCBS for criticism. He had typescripts made of various Eärendel ‘fragments’ and other poems and sent them to Smith at his Magdalen College billets.

Smith was perplexed. As a conservative and a lover of classical form, he found Tolkien’s wayward romanticism problematic. He also favoured the new simplicity of Georgian Poetry, an influential 1913 anthology edited by Edward Marsh, which included poems by Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Davies, and Walter de la Mare. Accordingly Smith urged Tolkien to simplify the syntax of ‘Sea Chant’ and others. He advised him to read and learn from ‘good authors’; although his idea of a ‘good’ author was not exactly congruent with Tolkien’s. However, he thought the poems ‘amazingly good’ and showed them to Henry Theodore Wade-Gery, a former Oxford Classics don who was a captain in Smith’s battalion and himself an accomplished poet. *Wade-Gery agreed that the syntax was occasionally too difficult, but like Smith he strongly approved of this love-poem:

Lo! young we are and yet have stood like planted hearts in the great Sun of Love so long (as two fair trees in woodland or in open dale stand utterly entwined, and breathe the airs, and suck the very light together) that we have become as one, deep-rooted in the soil of Life, and tangled in sweet growth.

The parenthetical aside introduces an eloquent delay, as if to suggest the duration of the lovers’ growth together before the final clause reveals the result of that long entanglement.