Читать книгу Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth - John Garth, John Garth - Страница 13

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.

Tolkien’s new poems, read as the imaginings of a young man on the brink of wartime military service, seem poignantly wistful. He was facing the relinquishment of long-cherished hopes. His undergraduate education was coming to its end in a matter of weeks, but the ever-lengthening war had taken away any immediate chance of settling down with Edith. Hopes of an academic career must be put on hold. As rumour filtered back from the front line, it was growing increasingly clear too that (to paraphrase the famous subtitle of The Hobbit) he could not go there and be sure of coming back again.

The rush of creativity was not over, but finally Tolkien adopted a quite different register for ‘Kôr’, a sonnet of sublimity and grandeur. Kôr was the name of a city in Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the tale of Ayesha, a woman blessed and cursed with apparently eternal youth. Haggard had been a favourite in the King Edward’s library; during the mock school strike of 1911 the sub-librarians called for a ban on ‘Henty, Haggard, School Tales, etc…that can be read out in one breath’. (The following year Tolkien had presented the school library with another Haggardesque ‘lost race’ yarn, The Lost Explorers by Alexander Macdonald. ) Tolkien’s 30 April poem was subtitled ‘In a City Lost and Dead’, and indeed Haggard’s Kôr is also deserted, the enduring memorial to a great civilization that flourished six thousand years before modern adventurers stumble upon it, but now is utterly lost to memory:

I know not how I am to describe what we saw, magnificent as it was even in its ruin, almost beyond the power of realisation. Court upon dim court, row upon row of mighty pillars – some of them (especially at the gateways) sculptured from pedestal to capital – space upon space of empty chambers that spoke more eloquently to the imagination than any crowded streets. And over all, the dead silence of the dead, the sense of utter loneliness, and the brooding spirit of the Past! How beautiful it was, and yet how drear! We did not dare to speak aloud.

Both men’s versions of Kôr are inhabited only by shadows and stone; but whereas Haggard’s is seen, with overt symbolism, under the changeful Moon, Tolkien’s city basks under the steadily blazing Sun.

A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned

Stands gazing out across an azure sea

Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground

Impearled as ‘gainst a floor of porphyry

Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;

And tawny shadows fingered long are made

In fretted bars upon their ivory walls

By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade

Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault

With shaft and capital of black basalt.

There slow forgotten days for ever reap

The silent shadows counting out rich hours;

And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers

White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.

The shift is significant. Haggard’s narrator sees the city as a symbol of transience, a memento mori, a mockery of its builders’ hubristic ambition: Tolkien holds the grandeur and the emptiness of his Kôr in a fine balance. Even empty, his city stands as an enduring tribute to its unnamed inhabitants – a mood that anticipates Moria in The Lord of the Rings. Life, though now absent from Kôr, retains its significance. Nihilism is replaced by a consolatory vision.

Tolkien’s Kôr differs from Haggard’s in other, more tangible ways. It is embattled and built atop a vast black hill, and it stands by the sea, recalling a painting he had made earlier in 1915: the mysteriously named Tanaqui. It is clear that Tolkien already had his own vision of a city quite distinct from Haggard’s; but his use of the name ‘Kôr’ now, instead of ‘Tanaqui’, may be seen as a direct challenge to Haggard’s despairing view of mortality, memory, and meaning.

The city of Kôr appears in the Qenya lexicon too, again situated on a shoreland height. Here, though, a more important feature cuts it well and truly adrift from Haggard. Tolkien’s Kôr is located not in Africa but in Faërie: it is ‘the ancient town built above the rocks of Eldamar, whence the fairies marched into the world’. Other early entries give the words inwë for ‘fairy’ and elda for ‘beach-fay or Solosimpë (shore-piper)’. Eldamar, Tolkien wrote, is ‘the rocky beach in Western Inwinóre (Faëry), whence the Solosimpeli have danced along the beaches of the world. Upon this rock was the white town built called Kor, whence the fairies came to teach men song and holiness.’ In other words, Eldamar is the ‘fairy sand’ of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’. The ‘rampart-crowned’ city, superhuman in scale, cannot, however, be the work of fairies like J. M. Barrie’s Tinkerbell. Barrie and his Victorian predecessors were no more than a starting point for Tolkien, as Haggard had been. These are fairies prone to dancing on beaches, yet not only capable of building enduring monuments but also laden with a spiritual mission. They span the great divide between innocence and responsibility.

But why is Kôr ‘a City Lost and Dead’ in the poem? The answer appears in notes Tolkien added to his little prose outline about Éarendel’s Atlantic voyagings, an outline that clearly preceded Tolkien’s great Adamic works of name-giving. It had referred to a ‘golden city’ somewhere at the back of the West Wind. Now he added: ‘The golden city was Kôr and [Eärendel] had caught the music of the Solosimpë, and returns to find it, only to find that the fairies have departed from Eldamar.’ Kôr, in other words, was left empty by the Elves when they ‘marched into the world’.

It is a melancholy glimmer of story that, some years later, would form a climactic part of Tolkien’s mythological epic. Perhaps the idea owed something to the fact that, in 1915, his familiar haunts were virtually emptied of his peers, who were heading across the sea to fight. If so, Tolkien’s vision encapsulated mythological reconstructions and contemporary observation in one multi-faceted symbol.

If these April poems were a sudden spring bloom, then the Qenya Lexicon was root, stock, and bough. It is impossible, and perhaps meaningless, to give exact dates of composition for the lexicon, which was a work in progress during much of 1915 and accrued new words in no discernible order. It was a painstaking and time-consuming labour, and must have been set aside as Schools drew near. On 10 May, though, Tolkien was still musing on his mythology and painted a picture entitled The Shores of Faëry showing the white town of Kôr on its black rock, framed by trees from which the Moon and Sun hang like fruit.

From this, Tolkien had to turn to less enticing work: the much-neglected preparation for the two Schools papers he would rather not have had to sit at all. There was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Henry IV; and other ‘modern’ literature such as the works of Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson, none of which suited his maverick taste.^* His preparation for these papers was perfunctory and saw the future Oxford professor of English borrowing introductions to Dryden and Keats from the library, as well as primers in Shakespeare and poetry, as late as the eve of his first paper.

Anxiety about his examinations was dwarfed by the fear of what lay beyond. Writing from Penmaenmawr at the start of June, G. B. Smith reassured him that the war would be over in a matter of months now that Italy had thrown its weight behind Britain and France. Smith, who shared his friend’s interest in the language and myth of Wales and had requested he send out a Welsh grammar, added: ‘Don’t worry about Schools, and don’t worry yourself about coming here.’ Four weeks would be quite enough time to sort out a place for Tolkien in the same battalion.

On Thursday 10 June, Tolkien started his exams. Just eight men and seventeen women in the whole university were left to endure the anticlimactic flurry of summing up three years’ work on English language and literature (or slightly less in Tolkien’s case) in ten sittings. In the middle of the ordeal, Smith wrote saying that Colonel Stainforth, his commanding officer (or ‘CO’), seemed certain to find space in the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers for Tolkien if he would write requesting a place. Schools finished the next week and Tolkien’s undergraduate life was behind him. Now for enlistment, training, and war.

Smith had sent a note on ‘matters Martian’ – advice on what kit to buy together with a facetious lexicon explaining the application procedure. The most important entry in Smith’s Concise Military Dictionary ran: ‘Worry: The thing to be avoided. Keep perfectly calm, and everything will settle itself.’ The policy worked for GBS, who was now a lieutenant. From Brough Hall, near Catterick Bridge in Yorkshire, where the Salford Pals had moved on midsummer’s day, Smith sent the reassuring suggestion, ‘Do not be afraid to bring a book or two, and a few paints, but let them be portable.’ Smith was now only a few miles to the north of Rob Gilson and the Cambridgeshires, who had marched out of their home town to Lindrick Camp near Fountains Abbey on 19 June. Gilson’s letters had dried up, however, and he was probably unaware of their proximity.

Tolkien was at last catching up with his friends and getting into step with this world in motion, yielding to the pressures he had resisted for almost a year. Unsurprisingly, he wasted no time and, in his own words, ‘bolted’ into the army. On 28 June he applied at the Oxford recruiting office for a temporary officer’s commission ‘for the duration of the war’. Captain Whatley of the university OTC sponsored his application and a Royal Army Medical Corps officer pronounced him fit. The form pointed out that there were no guarantees of appointment to any particular unit, but noting Tolkien’s preference a military pen-pusher scrawled ‘19/Lancs Fusiliers’ in the top corner.

Tolkien packed up the ‘Johnner’, his digs in St John Street, and bade farewell to Oxford, perhaps forever. When the English School results were issued, on Friday 2 July, he knew that his commitment to philology had been vindicated and that if he survived the war he would be able to pursue his academic ambitions. Alongside two women and an American Yale scholar, he had achieved First Class Honours. On Saturday the results were published in The Times and the next day Smith sent congratulations on ‘one of the highest distinctions an Englishman can obtain’. He again urged Tolkien to write to Colonel Stainforth.

After some time with Edith in Warwick, Tolkien went to Birmingham, where he spent part of the next three weeks with his maternal aunt, May Incledon, and her husband Walter, in Barnt Green, just beyond the southern limits of Birmingham – a house he associated with childhood security and early language games with his cousins Marjorie and Mary. Travelling on foot and riding the bus between Edgbaston and Moseley, he was consumed one day in thoughts of his mythology and, in his Book of Ishness, he wrote out a poem on 8-9 July entitled ‘The Shores of Faëry’ opposite his May painting of the same name. It describes the setting of Kôr. Eärendel makes an appearance and, for the first time outside the Qenya lexicon, essential and permanent features of the legendarium are named: the Two Trees, the mountain of Taniquetil, and the land of Valinor.

East of the Moon

West of the Sun

There stands a lonely hill

Its feet are in the pale green Sea

Its towers are white & still

Beyond Taniquetil in Valinor

No stars come there but one alone

That hunted with the Moon

For there the Two Trees naked grow

That bear Night’s silver bloom;

That bear the globed fruit of Noon

In Valinor.

There are the Shores of Faery

With their moonlit pebbled Strand

Whose foam is silver music

On the opalescent floor

Beyond the great sea-shadows

On the margent of the Sand

That stretches on for ever

From the golden feet of Kôr

Beyond Taniquetil

In Valinor.

O West of the Sun, East of the Moon

Lies the Haven of the Star

The white tower of the Wanderer,

And the rock of Eglamar,

Where Vingelot is harboured

While Earendel looks afar

On the magic and the wonder

‘Tween here and Eglamar

Out, out beyond Taniquetil

In Valinor – afar.

‘The Shores of Faëry’ is pivotal. Tolkien intended to make it the first part of a ‘Lay of Eärendel’ that would fully integrate the mariner into his embryonic invented world. He noted on a later copy that this was the ‘first poem of my mythology’. The key step forward was that here Tolkien finally fused language and mythology in literary art: the fusion that was to become the wellspring and hallmark of his creative life.

‘It was just as the 1914 War burst on me,’ Tolkien wrote later, ‘that I made the discovery that “legends” depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the “legends” which it conveys by tradition.’ The discovery offered a new life for his creation: ‘So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing “legends” of the same “taste”.’

He had for years been unable to reconcile the scientific rigour he applied in the strictly linguistic aspects of philology with his taste for the otherworldly, the dragon-inhabited, and the sublime that appeared in ancient literatures. It was as an undergraduate, he later said, that ‘thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests – opposite poles of science and romance – but integrally related.’

The Kalevala had shown that myth-making could play a part in the revival of a language and a national culture, but it may be that there was a more immediate catalyst. During the Great War, a similar process took place on a vast scale, quite impromptu. For the first time in history, most soldiers were literate, but more than ever before they were kept in the dark. They made up for this with opinion and rumour, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastical: stories about a German corpserendering works, a crucified Canadian soldier, and the troglodytic wild men of No Man’s Land who, the story went, were deserters from both sides. First World War history is often concerned with assessing the truth and impact of the seemingly more plausible ‘myths’ that have arisen from it: the ‘lions led by donkeys’, or the ‘rape of Belgium’. From the outset there were also myths of supernatural intercession. Exhausted British troops in retreat from Mons had apparently seen an angel astride a white horse brandishing a flaming sword; or a troop of heavenly archers; or three angels in the sky. The ‘Angels of Mons’ had forbidden the German advance, it was said. The incident had originated as a piece of fiction, ‘The Bowmen’ by Arthur Machen, in which the English archers of Agincourt return to fight the advancing Germans of 1914; but it had quickly assumed the authority of fact. At the same time that the war produced myths, the vast outpouring of Great War letters, diaries, and poetry enriched the languages of Europe with new words, phrases, and even registers, subtly altering and defining the perceptions of national character that were so important to the patriotic effort. All this was a living example of the interrelationship between language and myth.

If the early conception of an undying land owes something to Peter Pan, as the child’s dream-world of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’ seems to have done, Tolkien’s Valinor was less haphazard than Neverland, a version of Faërie that Barrie had filched audaciously from every popular children’s bedtime genre, with pirates and mermaids, Red Indians, crocodiles, and pixies. Yet Valinor was broader still in its embrace. Here the Elves lived side by side with the gods, and here mortal souls went after death to be judged and apportioned torment, twilit wandering, or Elysian joy.

The Qenya lexicon translates Valinor as ‘Asgard’, the ‘home of the gods’ where the Norsemen feasted after they had been slain in battle. Tolkien was undoubtedly developing the conceit that the Germanic Vikings modelled their mythical Asgard on the ‘true’ myth of Valinor. In place of the Norse Æsir, or gods, are the Valar.

In the same spirit, ‘The Shores of Faëry’ purports to show a glimpse of the truth behind a Germanic tradition as fragmentary and enigmatic as Éarendel’s. The mariner’s ship in ‘The Shores of Faëry’ is called Vingelot (or Wingelot, Wingilot), which the lexicon explains is the Qenya for ‘foamflower’. But Tolkien chose the name ‘to resemble and “explain” the name of Wade’s boat Guingelot’, as he later wrote. Wade, like Éarendel, crops up all over Germanic legend, as a hero associated with the sea, as the son of a king and a merwoman, and as the father of the hero Wayland or Völund. The name of his vessel would have been lost to history but for an annotation that a sixteenth-century antiquarian had made in his edition of Chaucer: ‘Concerning Wade and his boat Guingelot, as also his strange exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I passe it over.’ Tolkien, having read the tantalizing note, now aimed to recreate the ‘long and fabulous’ story. The great German linguist and folklorist Jakob Grimm (mentioning Wade in almost the same breath as Éarendel) had argued that Guingelot ought to be ascribed instead to Völund, who ‘timbered a boat out of the trunk of a tree, and sailed over seas’, and who ‘forged for himself a winged garment, and took his flight through the air’. Out of this tangle of names and associations, Tolkien had begun to construct a story of singular clarity.

On Sunday 11 July Christopher Wiseman wrote to Tolkien announcing that he was going to sea. In June he had seen a Royal Navy recruiting advertisement saying that mathematicians were wanted as instructors; now he would soon be off to Greenwich to learn basic navigation ‘and the meaning of those mysterious words port, and starboard’. Wiseman proclaimed himself thoroughly jealous of Tolkien’s First – he himself had only achieved the grade of senior optime, the equivalent of a second-class: ‘I am now the only one to have disgraced the TCBS,’ he said. ‘I have written begging for mercy…’

Behind the glib tone, Wiseman was seriously missing his friends. He wished they could get together for a whole fortnight for once. It was manifestly impossible. Smith had written to him repeatedly about an unwelcome sense of growing up. ‘I don’t know whether it is only the additional weight of his moustache, but I presume there must be something in it,’ Wiseman commented. He too felt that they were all being pitched into maturity, Gilson and Tolkien even faster than Smith and himself. ‘It seems to proceed by a realization of one’s minuteness and impotence,’ he mused disconsolately. ‘One begins to fail for the first time, and to see the driving power necessary to force one’s stamp on the world.’

When Wiseman’s letter came, Tolkien was freshly and painfully alive to this process of diminution. On Friday 9 July the War Office had written to tell him he was a second lieutenant with effect from the following Thursday. Kitchener’s latest recruit also received a printed calligraphic letter addressed ‘To our trusty and well-beloved J.R.R. Tolkien[,] Greeting,’ and signed by King George, confirming the appointment and outlining his duties of command and service. But Tolkien’s plans had gone awry. ‘You have been posted to the 13th Service Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers,’ the War Office letter announced.

When Smith heard, four days later, he wrote from Yorkshire, ‘I am simply bowled over by your horrible news.’ He blamed himself for not slowing Tolkien down in his headlong rush to enlist. Somewhat unconvincingly, he said the appointment might be a mistake, or short-term; but as things turned out he was right to guess that Tolkien would be in less danger in the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers than in the 19th.

Tolkien was not going to rendezvous with the 13th straight away. First he had to take an officers’ course in Bedford. He received the regulation £50 allowance for uniform and other kit. Smith had outlined his needs in his discourse on ‘matters Martian’: a canvas bed, pillow, sleeping-bag and blankets; a bath-and wash-stand, a steel shaving mirror and a soap-box; tent-pole hooks and perhaps a ground-sheet. All this would have to fit in a large canvas kit-bag. In addition he should equip himself with two or three pairs of boots and a pair of shoes; a decent watch; a Sam Browne belt, mackintosh, light haversack and waterbottle; and, most expensive of all, binoculars and prismatic compasses. ‘All else seems to me unnecessary,’ Smith had said. ‘My table and chairs I intend to be soap-boxes bought on the spot, also I mean to buy an honest tin bucket.’ Creature comforts, it was clear, were going to be few and far between.