Part 3 (1/2)

They stayed at Rube and bayonet practice On the Friday, 30 June, they moved to another ha the attack began They were not to be in it, for their task was to wait in reserve and go into battle several days later, by which ti, reckoned that the German line would be smashed open and the Allied troops would be able to penetrate deep into enemy territory But that was not what happened

At 7 30 am on Saturday 1 July the troops in the British front line went over the top Rob Gilson of the TCBS, serving in the Suffolk regi them They scra up in straight lines as they had been instructed, and beginning their slow tra at least sixty-five pounds of ulPmnt-They had been told that the German defences were already virtually destroyed and the barbed wire cut by the Allied barrage But could see that the as not cut, and as they approached it the Geruns opened fire on the to a village called Bouzincourt, where the majority bivouacked in a field while a few lucky ones (including Tolkien) slept in huts There were clear signs that things had not gone according to plan on the battlefront wounded men in their hundreds, rave-digging; and a sinister smell of decay -The truth was that on the first day of battle twenty thousand Allied troops had been killed The German defences had not been destroyed toe wire had been scarcely cut, and the eneunners had shot down the British and French, line after line, as they advanced with slow paces, foret

On Thrusday 6 July the 11th Lancashi+re Fusiliers went into action, but only A' Company was sent down to the trenches and Tolkien stayed at Bouzincourt with the relanced once again at his ejection of lute from the other members of the TCBS He orried about Gilson and Smith, who had both been in the thick of the battle - and he was overwhelhted when later in the day G B Smith actually turned up at Bouzincourt alive and uninjured S to the lines, and he and Tolkienpoetry, the war, and the future Once they walked in a field where poppies still waved in the wind despite the battle that was turning the countryside into a featureless desert of mud They waited anxiously for news of Rob Gilson On the Sunday night A' Company came back from the trenches; a dozen of their number had been killed and more than a hundred wounded, and they told tales of horror Then at last, on Friday 14 July, it was the turn of Tolkien and B' Coo into action

What Tolkien now experienced had already been endured by thousands of other soldiers: the long ht-time from the billets down to the trenches, the stuh the communication alleys that led to the front line itself, and the hours of confusion and exasperation until the hand-over fronallers such as Tolkien there was bitter disillusionment, as instead of the neat orderly conditions in which they had been trained they found a tangled confusion of wires, field-telephones out of order and covered with mud, and worst of all a prohibition on the use of wires for all but the least ies (the Germans had tapped telephone lines and intercepted crucial orders preceding the attack) Even Morse code buzzers were prohibited, and instead the signallers had to rely on lights, flags, and at the last resort runners or even carrier-pigeons Worst of all were the dead men, for corpses lay in every corner, horribly torn by the shells Those that still had faces stared with dreadful eyes Beyond the trenches no- bodies All around was desolation Grass and corn had vanished into a sea of mud Trees, stripped of leaf and branch, stood as ot what he called the animal horror'

of trench warfare

His first day in action had been chosen by the Allied commanders for a major offensive, and his coade for an attack on the ruined hamlet of Ovillers, which was still in Gerain the enemy wire had not been properly cut, and un fire But he survived unhurt, and after forty-eight hours without rest he was allowed so-out After another twenty-four hours his company was relieved of duty On his return to the huts at Bouzincourt Tolkien found a letter from G B Smith: 15 July 1916

My dear John Ronald, I saw in the paper thisthat Rob has been killed

I am safe but what does that matter?

Do please stick to htfully depressed at this worst of news

Now one realises in despair what the TCBS really was

Oto do? Yours ever, G B S

Rob Gilson had died at La Boisselle, leading his men into action on the first day of the battle, 1 July

Tolkien wrote to Smith: I do not feel a member of a complete body now I honestly feel that the TCBS has ended' But Smith replied: The TCBS is not finished and never will be'

Day now followed day in the same pattern: a rest period, back to the trenches, more attacks (usually fruitless), another rest period Tolkien was a of the Schwaben Redoubt, a massive fortification of Ger theside the Lancashi+re Fusiliers against the French at Minden in 1759 Tolkien spoke to a captured officer who had been wounded, offering him a drink of water; the officer corrected his German pronunciation Occasionally there were brief periods of caluns were silent At one such moment (Tolkien later recalled) his hand was on the receiver of a trench telephone when a field-ers

On Saturday 19 August Tolkien and G B Sain on the following days, on the last of which they had aunder fire as they ate but surviving uninjured Then Tolkien returned to the trenches

Although there was no longer the sa as in the first days of the Battle of the Somme, British losses continued to be severe, and many of Tolkien's battalion were killed He hier he stayed in the trenches the greater were his chances of being a the casualties As to leave, it was ever iranted

His rescuer was pyrexia of unknown origin', as the medical officers called it To the soldiers it was sih temperature and other fever symptoms, and already thousands of men had reported sick with it On Friday 27 October it struck Tolkien He was billeted at Beauval at the time, twelve miles behind the lines When he was taken ill they transported him to hospital a short distance away A day later he was on a sick-train bound for the coast, and by the Sunday night a bed had been found for him in hospital at Le Touquet, where he remained for a week

But the fever did not die down, and on 8 Noveland Upon arrival he was taken by train to hospital in Birham So in a matter of days he found himself transported from the horror of the trenches to white sheets and a view of the city he kneell

He was reunited with Edith, and by the third week in Deceo to Great Haywood to Spend Christmas with her There he received a letter fro in the Navy: HMS Superb 16 December 1916 My dear J R, I have just received news from home about G B S, who has succu on December 3rd I can't say very hty God I may be accounted worthy of hi down the road in a village behind the lines when a shell burst near hih An operation was atterene had set in They buried hi before, he had written to Tolkien: My chief consolation is that if I aht - 1 am off on duty in a few reat TCBS to voice what I dreareed upon For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the TCBS Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the i to coht And do you write it also to Christopher May God bless you, s I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot

Yours ever, G B S

Part Three

1917-1925: The y

Lost Tales

May you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them G B Sin the great work that he had beenproject with few parallels in the history of literature He was going to create an entire ins in his taste for inventing languages He had discovered that to carry out such inventions to any degree of coes a history' in which they could develop Already in the early Earendel poe of that history; noanted to record it in full

There was another force at work: his desire to express his in to the inspiration of the TCBS His first verses had been unre reat prose-poean to write

And there was a third eleland He had hinted at this during his undergraduate days when he wrote of the Finnish Kalevala: I would that we had ed to the English' This idea grew until it reached grand proportions Here is how Tolkien expressed it, when recollecting it h! But once upon a ti since fallen) I had afroonic to the level of roer founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour froland; to my country It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our air (the cli Britain and the hither parts of Europe; not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that soenuine ancient Celtic things), it should be high, purged of the gross, and fit for thesteeped in poetry I would draw soreat tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for otherpaint and rand the concept may have seemed, but on his return from France, Tolkien determined to realise it Here noas the time and place: he was once lish countryside that was so dear to him Even Christopher Wise was about to happen He wrote to Tolkien: You ought to start the epic' And Tolkien did On the cover of a cheap notebook he wrote in thick blue pencil the title that he had chosen for his ical cycle: The Book of Lost Tales' Inside the notebook he began to compose what eventually became known as The Silmarillion

No account of the external events of Tolkien's life can provide ins of his y Certainly the device that linked the stories in the first draft of the book (it was later abandoned) owes so to William Morris's The Earthly Paradise; for, as in that story, a sea-voyager arrives at an unknown land where he is to hear a succession of tales Tolkien's voyager was called Eriol, a na One who dreaic, and heroic, cannot be explained as the mere product of literary influences and personal experience When Tolkien began to write he drew upon soination than he had yet explored; and it was a seam that would continue to yield for the rest of his life The first of the legends' that make up The Silmarillion tell of the creation of the universe and the establishi+ng of the knoorld, which Tolkien, recalling the Norse Midgard and the equivalent words in early English, calls Middle-earth' Some readers have taken this to refer to another planet, but Tolkien had no such intention Middle-earth is our world,' he wrote, adding: I have (of course) placed the action in a purely ih not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different

Later stories in the cycle deal chiefly with the fashi+oning of the Silive the book its title), their theft frooth, and the subsequent wars in which the elves try to regain them

Some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien's stories and his Christianity, and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write with such conviction about a world where God is not worshi+pped But there is no ious man It does not contradict Christianity but coends no worshi+p of God, yet God is indeed there, rew out of it, The Lord of the Rings Tolkien's universe is ruled over by God, The One' Beneath Hiuardians of the world, who are not Gods but angelic powers, themselves holy and subject to God; and at one terrible moment in the story they surrender their power into His hands

Tolkien cast his y in this fore, and yet at the saendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as a Christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshi+pped At the same time, to set his stories realistically' in the knoorld, where religious beliefs were explicitly Christian, would deprive theinative colour So while God is present in Tolkien's universe, He remains unseen

When he wrote The Sil the truth He did not suppose that precisely such peoples as he described, elves', dwarves', and malevolent orcs', had walked the earth and done the deeds that he recorded But he did feel, or hope, that his stories were in some sense an embodiment of a profound truth This is not to say that he riting an allegory: far froain he expressed his distaste for that forory wherever I sh his letters to readers of his books So in what sense did he suppose The Sil of the answer can be found in his essay On Fairy-Stories and in his story Leaf by Niggle, both of which suggest that a li reality or truth

Certainly while writing The Sila story He wrote of the tales that s, and as they cah continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart fro to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording as already there, so'

The first story to be put on paper - it ritten out during Tolkien's convalescence at Great Haywood early in 1917 - actually occupies a place towards the end of the cycle This is The Fall of Gondcylin', which tells of the assault on the last elvish stronghold by Morgoth, the priroup of the inhabitants of Gondolin randson of the king; here then is the link with the early Earendel poey The style of The fall of Gondolin' suggests that Tolkien was influenced by Williareat battle which forms the central part of the story may owe a little of its inspiration to Tolkien's experiences on the Somme - or rather to his reaction to those experiences, for the fighting at Gondolin has a heroic grandeur entirely lacking in modern warfare But in any case these were only superficial influences': Tolkien used notale Indeed its two most notable characteristics are entirely his own device: the invented naonists are elves

Strictly speaking it could be said that the elves of The Silrew out of the fairy folk' of Tolkien's early poems, but really there is little connection between the two Elves may have arisen in his mind as a result of his enthusiass' and Edith's fondness for little elfin people', but the elves of The Sil whatever to do with the tiny leprechauns' of Goblin Feet' They are to all intents and purposes men: or rather, they are Man before the Fall which deprived him of his powers of achievement Tolkien believed devoutly that there had once been an Eden on earth, and that inal sin and subsequent dethronement were responsible for the ills of the world; but his elves, though capable of sin and error, have not fallen' in the theological sense, and so are able to achieve much beyond the powers of men They are craftsmen, poets, scribes, creators of works of beauty far surpassing human artefacts Most important of all they are, unless slain in battle, i their work to an end while it is still unfinished or imperfect They are therefore the ideal of every artist

These, then, are the elves of The Sils Tolkien himself summed up their nature when he wrote of thee and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achieveination and desire'

As to the names of persons and places in The Fall of Gondolin' and the other stories in The Siluages Since the existence of these languages was a raison d'etre for the whole ood deal of attention to the business of uistic work associated with it cae quoted above) to occupy just asof the stories theet some idea of hoent about this part of the work

Tolkien had sketched a nues when he was an adolescent, and had developed several of theree of some complexity But ultimately only one of these early experiments had pleased hiuistic taste This was the invented language that had been heavily influenced by Finnish He called it Quenya', and by 1917 it was very sophisticated, possessing a vocabulary of many hundreds of words (based albeit on a fairly limited nue would have been, froe; and from this Prie, contemporary with Quenya but spoken by different peoples of the elves

This language he eventually called Sindarin', and he e that after Finnish was closest to his personal linguistic taste

Besides Quenya and Sindarin, Tolkien invented a nuh these existed only in outline, the complexities of their inter-relationshi+p and the elaboration of a faes occupied much of his mind But the elvish names in The Silmarillion were constructed almost exclusively from Quenya and Sindarin

It is iive an adequate account of how Tolkien used his elvish languages to make names for the characters and places in his stories But briefly, what happened was this When working to plan he would for on the e and subsequently in the other; the form finally used was most frequently that in Sindarin However, in practice he was often e in view of his deep love of careful invention, yet often in the heat of writing he would construct a na ins Later he disless', and he subjected others to a severe philological scrutiny in an attee and apparently inexplicable forrasped by anyone trying to understand hoorked As the years went by he caes and stories as real' languages and historical chronicles that needed to be elucidated In other words, when in this mood he did not say of an apparent contradiction in the narrative or an unsatisfactory nae it' Instead he would approach the problem with the attitude: What does this mean? I must find out'

This was not because he had lost his wits or his sense of proportion In part it was an intellectual game of Patience1 (he was very fond of Patience cards), and in part it grew froy Yet at other ties in some radical aspect of the whole structure of the story, just as any other author would do These were of course contradictory attitudes; but here as in so many areas of his personality Tolkien was a man of antitheses

This, then, was the rean while he was on sick-leave at Great Haywood early in 1917