Tolkien and the Great War (9 page)

Smith and Wade-Gery were among a set of
‘other literary Oxford lights'
who, as Rob Gilson put it, ‘had gone in a body to officer the Lancashire Fusiliers'. The move perhaps reflected the mood of ‘mucking in together' by people from all walks of life, very different from the rancour and industrial class-strife that had preceded the war. For the battalion Smith was joining was known informally as the 3rd Salford Pals and had just been formed in an industrial suburb of Manchester.
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Its rank and file were drawn from towns of the East Lancashire coalfield. The Oxford University men duly took their place as officers beside the bankers and businessmen of Eccles, Swinton, and Salford. The ‘Pals' battalions, such as those in Birmingham which Hilary Tolkien, T. K. Barnsley, and Ralph Payton had joined, emerged from the parochial pride and close-knit friendships within English towns and villages, especially in the North: recruits would be largely drummed up en masse from a single place, and groups of friends would be encouraged to join together. It could be a haphazard process: the 3rd Salford Pals consisted of men who had been meant for another Salford unit but had missed the train.

The Lancashire Fusiliers had a fine reputation dating back to the landing of William of Orange in England in 1688, and in the Seven Years War its infantry had shattered the charge of the supposedly invincible French cavalry at Minden. After the
Napoleonic Wars, the Duke of Wellington described it as ‘the best and most distinguished' of British regiments. Most recently, during the Boer War, the Lancashire Fusiliers had suffered the heaviest casualties in the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, but had gone on to the relief of Ladysmith.

When G. B. Smith joined the 19th Battalion, the regiment had just etched its name bloodily and tragically in the history books again. As the Oxford term began, on Sunday 25 April 1915, the British-Anzac assault was launched at Gallipoli against the Turkish allies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The day was a foretaste of thirty-seven weeks to come: a disastrously unequal fight, with British and Anzac troops wading ashore under cruel cliffs surmounted by wire and machine-gun posts. Nevertheless, the worn word ‘hero' was being reforged in galvanizing fires. In the forefront of the assault, the Lancashire Fusiliers rowed into a hail of bullets at ‘W Beach' on Cape Helles. As they leapt from their boats, seventy pounds of equipment dragged many of the injured to death by drowning. On reaching the shore, others foundered on the barbed wire, which a preceding naval bombardment had failed to break. The beach was secured that day but 260 of the 950 attacking Fusiliers were killed and 283 wounded. In the eyes of many at home, however, the regiment covered itself in glory, and eventually it reaped a historic six Victoria Crosses for that morning on the beach.

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.

Dancing all alone,

Hopping on a stone,

Flitting like a faun,

In the twilight on the lawn,

And his name is Tinfang Warble!

The first star has shown

And its lamp is blown

To a flame of flickering blue.

He pipes not to me,

He pipes not to thee,

He whistles for none of you.

Tinfang Warble is a wisp of a figure, barely glimpsed. Meanwhile everything about the rather sugar-spun and Victorianesque marching figures of ‘Goblin Feet' is miniature; the word ‘little' becomes a tinkling refrain. Tolkien was clearly tailoring these poems for Edith, whom he would habitually address as
‘little one'
and whose home he called a ‘little house'. Late in life he declared of ‘Goblin Feet' – with perhaps a hint of self-parody – ‘
I wish the unhappy
little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.' Nevertheless, although these 1915 ‘leprechauns' have almost nothing in common with the Eldar of Tolkien's mature work, they represent (with the distant exception of 1910's ‘Wood-sunshine') the first irruption of Faërie into Tolkien's writings. In fact the idea that ‘fairies' or Elves were physically slight persisted for some years in his mythology, which never shed the idea that they fade into evanescence as the dominion of mortals grows stronger.

Tolkien's April 1915 poems were not especially innovatory in their use of fantasy landscapes and figures; indeed they drew on the imagery and ideas of the fairy tradition in English literature. Since the Reformation, Faërie had undergone major revolutions
in the hands of Spenser, Shakespeare, the Puritans, the Victorians, and most recently J. M. Barrie. Its denizens had been noble, mischievous, helpful, devilish; tiny, tall; grossly physical or ethereal and beautiful; sylvan, subterranean, or sea-dwelling; utterly remote or constantly intruding in human affairs; allies of the aristocracy or friends of the labouring poor. This long tradition had left the words
elf, gnome
, and
fay/fairy
with diverse and sometimes contradictory associations. Small wonder that Christopher Wiseman was confused by ‘Wood-sunshine' and (as he confessed to Tolkien) ‘
mistook elves for gnomes
, with bigger heads than bodies'.

In ‘Goblin Feet', goblins and gnomes are interchangeable, as they were in the ‘Curdie' books of George MacDonald, which Tolkien had loved as a child (‘
a strange race
of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins'). Initially, Tolkien's Qenya lexicon conflated them as well and related them to the elvish word for ‘mole', evidently because Tolkien was thinking of Paracelsus'
gnomus
, an elemental creature that moves through earth as a fish swims in water. Very soon, however, he assigned the terms
goblin
and
gnome
to members of distinct races at daggers drawn. He used
gnome
(Greek
gnōmē
, ‘thought, intelligence') for a member of an Elf-kindred who embody a profound scientific and artistic understanding of the natural world from gemcraft to phonology: its Qenya equivalent was
noldo
, related to the word for ‘to know'. Thanks to the later British fad for ornamental garden gnomes (not so named until 1938),
gnome
is now liable to raise a smirk, and Tolkien eventually abandoned it.

Yet even in 1915
fairy
was a problematic term: too generic, and with increasingly diverse connotations. Tolkien's old King Edward's schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, soon warned him that the title he proposed for his volume of verse,
The Trumpets of Faërie
(after a poem written in the summer), was ‘
a little precious
': the word
faërie
had become ‘rather spoiled of late'. Reynolds was thinking, perhaps, not of recent trends in fairy writing, but of the use of
fairy
to mean ‘homosexual', which dated from the mid-1890s.

For now, though, the fate of the word was not yet sealed, and Tolkien stuck pugnaciously to it. He was not alone: Robert Graves entitled his 1917 collection
Fairies and Fusiliers
, with no pun apparently intended. Great War soldiers were weaned on Andrew Lang's fairy-tale anthologies and original stories such as George MacDonald's
The Princess and the Goblin
, and Faërie's stock had surged with the success of
Peter Pan
, a story of adventure and eternal youth that now had additional relevance for boys on the threshold of manhood facing battle. Tinfang Warble had a contemporary visual counterpart in a painting that found a mass-market in Kitchener's Army. Eleanor Canziani's
Piper of Dreams
, which proved to be the belated swansong of the Victorian fairy-painting tradition, depicts a boy sitting alone in a springtime wood playing to a half-seen flight of fairies. Reproduced by the Medici Society in 1915, it sold an unprecedented 250,000 copies before the year was out. In the trenches,
The Piper of Dreams
became, in one appraisal, ‘
a sort of talisman
'.

A more cynical view is that ‘
the war called up
the fairies. Like other idle consumers, they were forced into essential war-work.' A 1917 stage play had ‘Fairy voices calling,
Britain needs your aid'.
Occasionally, soldiers' taste for the supernatural might be used to perk up an otherwise dull and arduous training exercise, as Rob Gilson discovered on one bitterly cold battalion field day: ‘
There was a fantastic “scheme”
involving a Witch-Doctor who was supposed to be performing incantations in Madingley Church. C and D Companies represented a flying column sent from a force to the West to capture the wizard.' On the whole, however, the fairies were spared from the recruitment drive and wizards were relieved from military manoeuvres. Faërie still entered the lives of soldiers, but it was left to work on the imagination in a more traditional and indefinable way. Though George MacDonald had urged against attempts to pin down the meaning of fairy-tale, declaring ‘
I should as soon
think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being', Tolkien made the attempt twenty-four years later in his paper
‘On Fairy-stories'
, in which he maintained that Faërie provided the means of recovery, escape, and
consolation. The rubric may be illustrated by applying it to the Great War, when Faërie allowed the soldier to recover a sense of beauty and wonder, escape mentally from the ills confining him, and find consolation for the losses afflicting him – even for the loss of a paradise he has never known except in the imagination.

To brighten up trench dugouts, one
philanthropist
sent specially illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem ‘The Land of Nod', with its half-haunting, half-alluring version of fairyland. To raise money for orphans of the war at sea, a
Navy Book of Fairy Tales
was published in which Admiral Sir John Jellicoe noted that ‘
Unhappily a great many
of our sailors and marines (unlike the more fortunate fairies) do get killed in the process of killing the giant.' Faërie as a version of Olde England could evoke home or childhood and inspire patriotism, while Faërie as the land of the dead or the ever-young could suggest an afterlife less austere and remote than the Judaeo-Christian heaven.