John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

The corpus of Gothic is small, and to Tolkien it presented a tantalizing challenge. He would try to imagine what unrecorded Gothic was like. He invented Gothic words; not randomly, but using what he knew about sound-shifts to extrapolate the ‘lost’ words on the basis of their surviving relatives in other Germanic languages – a linguistic method rather like triangulation, the process by which map-makers record the heights of landmarks they have not visited. This ‘private lang.’ was an activity he rarely mentioned except to his diary because it often distracted him from ‘real’ school work, but into the Gothic project he drew as collaborator Christopher Wiseman. The self-deprecating Wiseman later recalled:

Reading Homer with Cary Gilson sparked off in me what in Tolkien was already well alight, an interest in Philology. In fact John Ronald got to the point where he constructed a language L and another LL representing what L had become after a few centuries. He tried to inculcate me into one of his homemade languages, and wrote me a postcard in it. He said that I replied to it in the same language, but there I think he was wrong.

Philology was the focus of passionate argument between the two, and Wiseman said many decades later that the invention of languages was a cornerstone of their youthful friendship. That may seem a bizarre activity for teenage boys; but Tolkien did not think so, insisting later: ‘It’s not uncommon, you know. It’s mostly done by boys…If the main mass of education takes linguistic form, creation will take linguistic form even if it isn’t one of their talents.’ Language-construction satisfied the urge to create, but it also met the desire for an argot that would ‘serve the needs of a secret and persecuted society, or’ – in the case of the Great Twin Brethren – ‘the queer instinct for pretending you belong to one.’

It is unclear whether Tolkien shared with Wiseman another venture, the invention of an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, Gautisk, and it seems unlikely that the wider TCBS joined in his philological recreations at all. *But Tolkien’s motivations in language-building were artistic rather than practical; and even if his friends were not collaborators, at least they would have been a discriminating and appreciative audience. After all, these were boys who conducted debates in Latin – and took part in King Edward’s annual performance of Aristophanes in the original classical Greek. Tolkien himself played an exuberant Hermes in the 1911 production of The Peace (his farewell to the school). Wiseman appeared as Socrates and Rob Gilson as Strepsiades in The Clouds a year later. Smith alone of the TCBS, being from the school’s ‘modern’ or commercial side, did not study Greek; perhaps this is why he was relegated to the role of the Ass in one of the plays. They were directed by Tolkien’s cigar-smoking housemaster, Algy Measures, and the boys feasted on a curious menu of buns, gooseberries, and ginger beer. ‘Does nobody else remember these plays?’ one Old Edwardian wrote in 1972. ‘The grand parade of the chorus, clad in white vestments, down the full length of Big School playing on flageolets? Or Wiseman and Gilson munching gooseberries on stage as they chatted away as though Greek were their normal tongue?’

The TCBS revelled in a degree of outlandishness. Their humour was quickfire and often sophisticated; their interests and talents were many, and they rarely felt the need to draw anyone else into their circle. Another former King Edward’s pupil wrote to Tolkien in 1973: ‘As a boy you could not imagine how I looked up to you and admired and envied the wit of that select coterie of JRRT, C. L. Wiseman, G.B. Smith, R. Q. Gilson, V. Trought, and Payton. I hovered on the outskirts to gather up the gems. You probably had no idea of this schoolboy worship.’ In retrospect Tolkien insisted they had not set out to stand aloof from the ordinary King Edward’s pupils but, intentionally or not, they erected barriers.

On the rugby pitch, Wiseman had somehow acquired the title of ‘the Prime Minister’, and the TCBS elaborated this practice, with Tolkien as the Home Secretary, Vincent Trought as the Chancellor, and the acute and punctilious Wilfrid Hugh Payton (nicknamed also ‘Whiffy’) as the Whip. G. B. Smith, in tribute to one of his enthusiasms, gloried in the non-governmental title of the Prince of Wales. Furthermore, this was just one set of epithets out of a whole compendium. *In a note from Wiseman just before the TCBS coalesced, Tolkien is addressed as ‘My dear Gabriel’ and styled apparently the ‘Archbishop of Evriu’; the letter is signed ‘Beelzebub’ (perhaps to make light of the vast gulf between the two friends’ religious outlooks) and contains an entirely opaque reference to ‘the first Prelate of the Hinterspace, our mutual friend’. An air of playful pomp runs through their correspondence (such as it was before the Great War), so that instead of simply inviting Tolkien to visit, Gilson would write asking whether he would be ‘gracing our ancestral hearth’ and ‘making use of our roof-tree’.

Casting a critical eye on the era in which he too grew up, the author J. B. Priestley saw such wordplay as a sign of shallowness and self-indulgence in the ruling class, who were addicted to ‘a daft slang of their own (as they might have called it “a deveen privato slangino”), and…the constant use of nick-names’. The TCBS, however, hailed from the middle classes, a broad social spectrum. At the gentrified top was Rob Gilson, with his spacious home, his important father, and his aristocratic acquaintances; at the precarious lower end was Tolkien, an orphan in city lodgings. His ‘private lang.’ was no mock Italian; and while nicknames and mock-archaisms may have helped keep the Tea Club exclusive, they gently parodied the traditional social hierarchy.

Parody was the mode of Tolkien’s first published attempt at epic narrative. It was the natural choice, given that the piece was to appear in the King Edward’s School Chronicle. ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ deals not with war but with rugby, being the tongue-in-cheek account of a match in 1911. Its model was Lord Macaulay’s then-popular Lays of Ancient Rome , the source of Wiseman and Tolkien’s epithet ‘the Great Twin Brethren,’ and it is at least moderately amusing. In the guise of Roman clans it depicts the rival school houses, Measures’ in red and Richards’ in green, and it is full of boys charging around in names that are much too big for them. Wiseman surely lurks behind Sekhet , a nod to his fair hair and his passion for ancient Egypt. (Tolkien, it seems, did not then realize that Sekhet is a female deity. *)

Sekhet mark’d the slaughter,

And toss’d his flaxen crest

And towards the Green-clad Chieftain

Through the carnage pressed;

Who fiercely flung by Sekhet,

Lay low upon the ground,

Till a thick wall of liegemen

Encompassed him around.

His clients from the battle

Bare him some little space,

And gently rubbed his wounded knee,

And scanned his pallid face.

The archaisms and the illusion of combat give way to a bathetic contemporary cameo. The down-to-earth reality of the rugby pitch gently mocks the heroic pretensions of the literary mode.

The mock-heroism of ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ reflects, consciously or otherwise, a truth about a whole generation’s attitudes. The sports field was an arena for feigned combat. In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means. Honour and glory cast an over-arching glamour over both, as if real combat could be an heroic and essentially decent affair. In his influential 1897 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt had imagined a soldier spurring his men through bloody battle by echoing his old school cricket captain’s exhortation, ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ Philip Larkin, a much later poet looking back across the decades, described volunteers queuing to enlist as if outside the Oval cricket ground, and lamented (or exhorted): ‘Never such innocence again.’ A wiser age had depicted War as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but in the Edwardian era it was as if he were engaged in little worse than a spot of polo.