John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

Tolkien soon decided he would indeed try to follow Smith into the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers. His reasons are not recorded, but if he succeeded he would be going to war with his closest friend. He would also be surrounded by Oxford men who shared a literary outlook, and (a factor that should not be underestimated) training would take place in Wales, a land whose native tongue was rapidly joining Finnish as an inspiration for his language invention and legend-making.

On the day of the Gallipoli landings, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien to say that he had now read his poems, which Gilson had sent on to him a couple of weeks before. G. B. Smith had commended the verses, but until he saw them for himself Wiseman was far from convinced that his old friend from the Great Twin Brethren had now become a poet. ‘I can’t think where you get all your amazing words from,’ he wrote. ‘The Man in the Moon’ he called ‘magnificently gaudy’ and thought that ‘Two Trees’ was quite the best poem he had read in ages. Wiseman had even gone so far as to start composing an accompaniment to ‘Woodsunshine’ for two violins, cello, and bassoon. Plucking a simile from the world at war, he described the ending of another poem, ‘Copernicus and Ptolemy’, as being ‘rather like a systematic and well thought out bombardment with asphyxiating bombs’. Tolkien’s poems had astonished him, he said. ‘They burst on me like a bolt from the blue.’

April 1915, bringing the Great War’s first spring, could have been ‘the cruellest month’ T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote The Waste Land: halcyon weather, everywhere the stirrings of life, and enervating horror as news and rumour told of thousands of young men dying on all fronts. Closer to home, Zeppelins struck the Essex coast just where the Anglo-Saxon earl Beorhtnoth and his household troop had been defeated by Viking raiders almost ten centuries before. Tolkien, who was now studying that earlier clash between the continental Teutons and their island cousins in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon , was already familiar with the lines uttered by one of Beorhtnoth’s retainers as fortune turned against the English:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.

As Tolkien later translated it: ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’ Ancient it might be, but this summation of the old Northern heroic code answered eloquently to the needs of Tolkien’s day. It contains the awareness that death may come, but it focuses doggedly on achieving the most with what strength remains: it had more to commend it, in terms of personal and strategic morale, than the self-sacrificial and quasi-mystical tone of Rupert Brooke’s already-famous The Soldier , which implied that a soldier’s worth to his nation was greater in death than life:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

G.B. Smith admired Brooke’s poetry and thought Tolkien should read it, but the poems Tolkien wrote when he settled back in at 59 St John Street at the end of the month could hardly have been more different. On Tuesday 27 April he set to work on two ‘fairy’ pieces, finishing them the next day. One of these, ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, is a 65-line love poem to Edith. Hauntingly, it suggests that when they first met they had already known each other in dreams:

You and me – we know that land

And often have been there

In the long old days, old nursery days,

A dark child and a fair.

Was it down the paths of firelight dreams

In winter cold and white,

Or in the blue-spun twilit hours

Of little early tucked-up beds

In drowsy summer night,

That You and I got lost in Sleep

And met each other there –

Your dark hair on your white nightgown,

And mine was tangled fair?

The poem recalls the two dreamers arriving at a strange and mystical cottage whose windows look towards the sea. Of course, this is quite unlike the urban setting in which he and Edith had actually come to know each other. It was an expression of tastes that had responded so strongly to Sarehole, Rednal, and holidays on the coast, or that had been shaped by those places. But already Tolkien was being pulled in opposite directions, towards nostalgic, rustic beauty and also towards unknown, untamed sublimity. Curiously, the activities of the other dreaming children at the Cottage of Lost Play hint at Tolkien’s world-building urges, for while some dance and sing and play, others lay ‘plans / To build them houses, fairy towns, / Or dwellings in the trees’.

A debt is surely owed to Peter Pan’s Neverland. Tolkien had seen J. M. Barrie’s masterpiece at the theatre as an eighteen-year-old in 1910, writing afterwards: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live.’ This was a play aimed squarely at an orphan’s heart, featuring a cast of children severed from their mothers by distance or death. A chiaroscuro by turns sentimental and cynical, playful and deadly serious, Peter Pan took a rapier to mortality itself – its hero a boy who refuses to grow up and who declares that ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

But Tolkien’s idyll, for all its carefree joy, is lost in the past. Time has reasserted itself, to the grief and bewilderment of the dreamers.

And why it was Tomorrow came,

And with his grey hand led us back;

And why we never found the same

Old cottage, or the magic track

That leads between a silver sea

And those old shores and gardens fair

Where all things are, that ever were –

We know not, You and Me.

The companion piece Tolkien wrote at the same time, ‘Goblin Feet’, finds us on a similar magic track surrounded by a twilight hum of bats and beetles and sighing leaves. A procession of fairy-folk approaches and the poem slips into an ecstatic sequence of exclamations.

O! the lights: O! the gleams: O! the little tinkly sounds:

O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes:

O! the echo of their feet – of their little happy feet:

O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.

Yet ‘Goblin Feet’ turns in an instant from rising joy to loss and sadness, capturing once again a very Tolkienian yearning. The mortal onlooker wants to pursue the happy band, or rather he feels compelled to do so; but no sooner is the thought formed than the troop disappears around a bend.

I must follow in their train

Down the crooked fairy lane

Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,

And where silverly they sing

In a moving moonlit ring

All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on.

They are fading round the turn

Where the glow-worms palely burn

And the echo of their padding feet is dying!

O! it’s knocking at my heart –

Let me go! O! let me start!

For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!

O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!

O! the music of their feet – of their dancing goblin feet!

O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

Enchantment, as we know from fairy-tale tradition, tends to slip away from envious eyes and possessive fingers – though there is no moral judgement implied in ‘Goblin Feet’. Faërie and the mortal yearning it evokes seem two sides of a single coin, a fact of life.

In a third, slighter, piece that followed on 29 and 30 April, Tolkien pushed the idea of faëry exclusiveness further. ‘Tinfang Warble’ is a short carol, barely more than a sound-experiment, perhaps written to be set to music, with its echo (‘O the hoot! O the hoot!’) of the exclamatory chorus of ‘Goblin Feet’. In part, the figure of Tinfang Warble is descended in literary tradition from Pan, the piper-god of nature; in part, he comes from a long line of shepherds in pastoral verse, except he has no flock. Now the faëry performance lacks even the communal impulse of the earlier poem’s marching band. It is either put on for the benefit of a single glimmering star, or it is entirely solipsistic.