Part 3 (1/2)

They stayed at Rubempre the next day, doing physical training and bayonet practice. On the Friday, 30 June, they moved to another hamlet nearer the front line. Early the next morning 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 time the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, 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 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day 1 July the troops in the British front line went over the top. Rob Gilson of the T.C.B.S., serving in the Suffolk regiment, was among them. They scrambled up ladders from the trenches and into the open, forming up in straight lines as they had been instructed, and beginning their slow tramp forward - slow be cause each man was carrying 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 wire was not cut, and as they approached it the German machine-guns opened fire on them.

Tolkien's battalion remained in reserve, moving 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, many of them hideously mutilated; troops detailed for grave-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 enemy gunners had shot down the British and French, line after line, as they advanced with slow paces, forming a perfect target.

On Thrusday 6 July the 11th Lancas.h.i.+re Fusiliers went into action, but only A' Company was sent down to the trenches and Tolkien stayed at Bouzincourt with the remainder. He reread Edith's fetter S news from home and glanced once again at his ejection of lute* from the other members of the T.C.B.S. He was worried about Gilson and Smith, who had both been in the thick of the battle - and he was overwhelmingly relieved and delighted when later in the day G. B. Smith actually turned up at Bouzincourt alive and uninjured. Smith stayed for a few days' rest period before returning to the lines, and he and Tolkien met and talked as often as they could, discussing poetry, 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' Company to go into action.

What Tolkien now experienced had already been endured by thousands of other soldiers: the long march at night-time from the billets down to the trenches, the stumble of a mile or more through the communication alleys that led to the front line itself, and the hours of confusion and exasperation until the hand-over from the previous company had been completed. For signallers 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 important messages (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 sh.e.l.ls. Those that still had faces stared with dreadful eyes. Beyond the trenches no-man's-land was littered with bloated and decaying bodies. All around was desolation. Gra.s.s and corn had vanished into a sea of mud. Trees, stripped of leaf and branch, stood as mere mutilated and blackened trunks. Tolkien never forgot 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 company was attached to the 7th Infantry Brigade for an attack on the ruined hamlet of Ovillers, which was still in German hands.

The attack was unsuccessful, for once again the enemy wire had not been properly cut, and many of Tolkien's battalion were killed by machine-gun fire. But he survived unhurt, and after forty-eight hours without rest he was allowed some sleep in a dug-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 this morning that Rob has been killed.

I am safe but what does that matter?

Do please stick to me, you and Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst of news.

Now one realises in despair what the T.C.B.S. really was.

O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to 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 T.C.B.S. has ended.' But Smith replied: The T.C.B.S. 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 among those who were in support at the storming of the Schwaben Redoubt, a ma.s.sive fortification of German trenches. Prisoners were taken, among them men from a Saxon regiment that had fought alongside the Lancas.h.i.+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 p.r.o.nunciation. Occasionally there were brief periods of calm when the guns were silent. At one such moment (Tolkien later recalled) his hand was on the receiver of a trench telephone when a field-mouse emerged from hiding and ran across his fingers.

On Sat.u.r.day 19 August Tolkien and G. B. Smith met again, at Acheux. They talked, and met again on the following days, on the last of which they had a meal together at Bouzincourt. coming under fire as they ate but surviving uninjured. Then Tolkien returned to the trenches.

Although there was no longer the same intensity of fighting 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 himself remained entirely uninjured, but the longer he stayed in the trenches the greater were his chances of being among the casualties. As to leave, it was ever imminent but never granted.

His rescuer was pyrexia of unknown origin', as the medical officers called it. To the soldiers it was simply trench fever'. Carried by lice, it caused a high 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 November he was put on board s.h.i.+p for England. Upon arrival he was taken by train to hospital in Birmingham. 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 knew so well.

He was reunited with Edith, and by the third week in December he was well enough to leave hospital and go to Great Haywood to Spend Christmas with her. There he received a letter from Christopher Wiseman, who was serving in the Navy: H.M.S. Superb. 16 December 1916. My dear J. R., I have just received news from home about G. B. S., who has succ.u.mbed to in juries received from sh.e.l.ls bursting on December 3rd. I can't say very much about it now. I humbly pray Almighty G.o.d I may be accounted worthy of him.

Chris.

Smith had been walking down the road in a village behind the lines when a sh.e.l.l burst near him; he was wounded in the right arm and thigh. An operation was attempted, but gas-gangrene had set in. They buried him in Warlencourt British Cemetery. Not long before, he had written to Tolkien: My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight - 1 am off on duty in a few minutes - there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off to-night. And do you write it also to Christopher. May G.o.d bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things 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 making of a mythology

Lost Tales.

May you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them. G. B. Smith's words were a clear call to Ronald Tolkien to begin the great work that he had been meditating for some time, a grand and astonis.h.i.+ng project with few parallels in the history of literature. He was going to create an entire mythology.

The idea had its origins in his taste for inventing languages. He had discovered that to carry out such inventions to any degree of complexity he must create for the languages a history' in which they could develop. Already in the early Earendel poems he had begun to sketch something of that history; now he wanted to record it in full.

There was another force at work: his desire to express his most profound feelings in poetry, a desire that owed its origin to the inspiration of the T.C.B.S. His first verses had been unremarkable, as immature as the raw idealism of the four young men; but they were the first steps towards the great prose-poem (for though in prose it is a poetic work) that he now began to write.

And there was a third element playing a part: his desire to create a mythology for England. He had hinted at this during his undergraduate days when he wrote of the Finnish Kalevala: I would that we had more of it left - something of the same sort that belonged to the English.' This idea grew until it reached grand proportions. Here is how Tolkien expressed it, when recollecting it many years later: Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story - the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths - which I could dedicate simply: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our air (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning 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 some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be high, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great 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 other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.'

Absurdly grand the concept may have seemed, but on his return from France, Tolkien determined to realise it. Here now was the time and place: he was once more with Edith and at Great Haywood, in the English countryside that was so dear to him. Even Christopher Wiseman far away at sea sensed that something 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 t.i.tle that he had chosen for his mythological 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 more than a superficial explanation of the origins of his mythology. Certainly the device that linked the stories in the first draft of the book (it was later abandoned) owes something 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 name that is explained as meaning One who dreams alone'. But the tales that Eriol hears, grand, tragic, and heroic, cannot be explained as the mere product of literary influences and personal experience. When Tolkien began to write he drew upon some deeper, richer seam of his imagination 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 establis.h.i.+ng of the known world, 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 imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental ma.s.ses was different.

Later stories in the cycle deal chiefly with the fas.h.i.+oning of the Silmarilli' (the three great jewels of the elves which give the book its t.i.tle), their theft from the blessed realm of Valinor by the evil power Morgoth, 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 G.o.d is not wors.h.i.+pped. But there is no mystery. The Silmarillion is the work of a profoundly religious man. It does not contradict Christianity but complements it. There is in the legends no wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d, yet G.o.d is indeed there, more explicitly in The Silmarillion than in the work that grew out of it, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's universe is ruled over by G.o.d, The One'. Beneath Him in the hierarchy are The Valar', the guardians of the world, who are not G.o.ds but angelic powers, themselves holy and subject to G.o.d; and at one terrible moment in the story they surrender their power into His hands.

Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie. He wanted the mythological and legendary 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 G.o.d that he wors.h.i.+pped. At the same time, to set his stories realistically' in the known world, where religious beliefs were explicitly Christian, would deprive them of imaginative colour. So while G.o.d is present in Tolkien's universe, He remains unseen.

When he wrote The Silmarillion Tolkien believed that in one sense he was writing 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 was writing an allegory: far from it. Time and again he expressed his distaste for that form of literature. I dislike allegory wherever I smell it,' he once said, and similar phrases echo through his letters to readers of his books. So in what sense did he suppose The Silmarillion to be true'?

Something 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 man may be given by G.o.d the gift of recording a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.

Certainly while writing The Silmarillion Tolkien believed that he was doing more than inventing a story. He wrote of the tales that make up the book: They arose in my mind as given things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already there, somewhere: not of inventing.'

The first story to be put on paper - it was written 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 a.s.sault on the last elvish stronghold by Morgoth, the prime power of evil. After a terrible battle a group of the inhabitants of Gondolin make their escape, and among them is Earendel,1 grandson of the king; here then is the link with the early Earendel poems, the first sketches for the mythology. The style of The fall of Gondolin' suggests that Tolkien was influenced by William Morris, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the great 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 no models or sources for his strange and exciting tale. Indeed its two most notable characteristics are entirely his own device: the invented names, and the fact that the majority of the protagonists are elves.

Strictly speaking it could be said that the elves of The Silmarillion grew 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 enthusiasm for Francis Thompson's Sister Songs' and Edith's fondness for little elfin people', but the elves of The Silmarillion have nothing 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 man's original 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 surpa.s.sing human artefacts. Most important of all they are, unless slain in battle, immortal. Old age, disease, and death do not bring 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 Silmarillion, and of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself summed up their nature when he wrote of them: They are made by man in his own image 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 achievement of imagination and desire.'

As to the names of persons and places in The Fall of Gondolin' and the other stories in The Silmarillion, they were constructed from Tolkien's invented languages. Since the existence of these languages was a raison d'etre for the whole mythology, it is not surprising that he devoted a good deal of attention to the business of making up names from them. Indeed the name-making and the Linguistic work a.s.sociated with it came (as he said in the pa.s.sage quoted above) to occupy just as much if not more of his attention than the writing of the stories themselves. So it is worthwhile (and interesting) to get some idea of how he went about this part of the work.

Tolkien had sketched a number of invented languages when he was an adolescent, and had developed several of them to a degree of some complexity. But ultimately only one of these early experiments had pleased him, and had come to express his personal linguistic 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 number of word-stems). Quenya was derived, as any real' language would have been, from a more primitive language supposedly spoken in an earlier age; and from this Primitive Eldarin'

Tolkien created a second elvish language, contemporary with Quenya but spoken by different peoples of the elves.

This language he eventually called Sindarin', and he modelled its phonology on Welsh, the language that after Finnish was closest to his personal linguistic taste.

Besides Quenya and Sindarin, Tolkien invented a number of other elvish languages. Though these existed only in outline, the complexities of their inter-relations.h.i.+p and the elaboration of a family tree' of languages occupied much of his mind. But the elvish names in The Silmarillion were constructed almost exclusively from Quenya and Sindarin.

It is impossible in a few sentences to give 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 form all these names with great care, first deciding on the meaning, and then developing its form first in one language and subsequently in the other; the form finally used was most frequently that in Sindarin. However, in practice he was often more arbitrary. It seems strange in view of his deep love of careful invention, yet often in the heat of writing he would construct a name that sounded appropriate to the character without paying more than cursory attention to its linguistic origins. Later he dismissed many of the names made in this way as meaningless', and he subjected others to a severe philological scrutiny in an attempt to discover how they could have reached their strange and apparently inexplicable form. This, too, is an aspect of his imagination that must be grasped by anyone trying to understand how he worked. As the years went by he came more and more to regard his own invented languages 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 name: This is not as I wish it to be; I must change it.' Instead he would approach the problem with the att.i.tude: 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 from his belief in the ultimate truth of his mythology. Yet at other times he would consider making drastic changes in some radical aspect of the whole structure of the story, just as any other author would do. These were of course contradictory att.i.tudes; but here as in so many areas of his personality Tolkien was a man of ant.i.theses.

This, then, was the remarkable work that he began while he was on sick-leave at Great Haywood early in 1917.