The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (11 page)

While wooing and winning Edith, Tolkien also cultivated his relationship with the members of the TCBS. He stayed in close touch with Wiseman and Gilson, both at Cambridge, and became fast friends with G. B. Smith, who entered Oxford in 1913. Tolkien and Wiseman corresponded regularly, often discussing religion, which Tolkien affirmed as “the moving force and at the same time the foundation of both of us.” The TCBS fellowship culminated in the “Council of London,” held on December 13–14, 1914, at Wiseman’s family home, where the four friends, gathered around a gas fire, smoked pipes and hashed out their philosophies of life. Gilson later wrote of the “bliss” of this gathering, declaring that “I
never
spent happier hours.”

They were productive hours, too, for at this and later meetings the TCBS proclaimed themselves a force against corruption and a bastion of goodness, especially in the realm of art. The group’s aim, wrote Smith, was “to drive from life, letters, the stage and society that dabbling in and hankering after the unpleasant sides and incidents in life and nature which have captured the larger and worser tastes in Oxford, London and the world” and “to reestablish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everybody’s breast.” Despite its artlessness and prissiness, this declaration seems, in its moral and aesthetic program, an authentic forerunner of the Inklings. Tolkien shared in the general excitement, declaring a few years later, after learning of Gilson’s death in battle, that the TCBS “had been granted some spark of fire … that was destined to kindle a new light, or what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world.” It was not to be; he was, half-knowingly, describing what soon would become a solo mission.

Meanwhile, he plunged into the TCBS program with gusto, expanding the legend of
É
arendel, deepening his knowledge of Qenya by preparing a lexicon, the
Qenyaqetsa
, and producing
The Land of Pohja
, a painting, based on a tale from the
Kalevala
, that in its intricately repeating borders and elongated trees, its tints of purple, blue, and yellow, and its atmosphere of otherworldly mystery and magic, powerfully foreshadows his mature canvases. Soon the creative flow became a flood: paintings such as
Water, Wind, and Sand
;
Tanaqui
; and
The Shores of Faery
; poems, including “Kor: In a City Lost and Dead” and “The Shores of Faery,” in which appear some of the names and places that would later fill
The Silmarillion
. One poem, “Goblin Feet,” appeared in
Oxford Poetry 1915
. It was his first published piece of writing. The editor was his friend T. W. Earp, whose name may have been the origin of “twerp”—coining words from names was an Oxford passion at the time, but the attribution remains uncertain. A poem by G. B. Smith also made it into the volume, along with work by Aldous Huxley (writing as A. L. Huxley) and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose poem “Lay” is distinctly better than Tolkien’s. This is the first time Sayers’s path crossed that of the Inklings; it would not be the last. Tolkien’s contribution, drenched in Victorian fairy lore, describes a walk along a fairy path, lit by fairy lanterns, to the tune of fairy horns and the hum of fairy wings, rising to a crescendo of fairy-instilled ecstasy. That Tolkien calls the fairies in his poem goblins, leprechauns, and gnomes does nothing to disguise their conventional character, first cousin to the precious flower-fairies of Victorian lore. Later he would abandon this view of fairy folk—epitomized forever in the fraudulent 1917–1920 Cottingley photographs of tiny winged nymphettes prancing in the fields that caused a sensation in post–World War I England—for his far more formidable Elves, Goblins, and Orcs.

In June 1915, Tolkien took the examination for the Honours School in English Language and Literature. He earned a First, vindicating his move into the study of philology and Anglo-Saxon. Academic triumph, poems, paintings, first forays into private mythology, discovery of Finnish, heightened cultivation of his own imagined tongues—all came at breakneck speed. Everyone around him shared the same sense of urgency; the world was falling to pieces, and time was running out. War had erupted in 1914 and Oxford was now chockablock with soldiers. Tolkien, who as an undergraduate received military training in the King Edward’s Horse, a cavalry regiment (and earlier as a schoolboy in the King Edward’s School Cadet Corps), knew that sooner or later he would find himself on the front, where rumor placed the life expectancy of newly arrived soldiers at less than two weeks. Unlike many of his friends, he did not break off his studies to enlist, for he dreaded the dreariness and brutality of military life. But with examinations over, he applied to join the Lancashire Fusiliers, passed his physical, and received a commission as a temporary second lieutenant. He learned to signal in code, utilizing devices ranging from heliographs to carrier pigeons, an appropriate military role for a man more suited to language invention than the dispatching of enemy combatants. Even this congenial activity didn’t reconcile him to army life, however, and he lamented “those grey days wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing.” In March 1916, he graduated from Oxford—the ceremony had been delayed due to the war—and on March 22, he and Edith married at St. Mary Immaculate in Warwick, spending part of their honeymoon rehearsing versions of her new married name: “Edith Mary Tolkien, Mrs. Tolkien, Edith Tolkien, E.T., Mrs. J.R.R. Tolkien.” Even in the midst of training for battle, he had writing and painting on his mind, and he submitted a sheaf of poems,
The Trumpets of Fa
ë
rie
, to the publishing firm of Sidgwick & Jackson. The manuscript was rejected on March 31. It appeared that his fate—or doom—was closing in. On June 6, he sailed to Calais and joined the British Expeditionary Force in France. A poem he composed about this time is entitled “The Lonely Isle” and dedicated “For England.” The last words, “O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!” constitute Tolkien’s wistful adieu to his adopted land, his new wife, and perhaps his life.

Tolkien at War

Tolkien’s stay in France lasted five months. His experience differed little from that of other soldiers in what Robert Graves called the “soul-deadening” trenches: a nauseating diet of mud, cold, rain, lice, fleas, spoiled food, collapsing walls, soaked clothes, festering wounds, rotting corpses, packs of rats who fed on the corpses and grew large as cats, and now and then a dollop of fear or dash of pure terror. The trenches themselves were like elongated graves, ditches deep enough to hide a body, alive or dead, long and narrow, zigzagging to confound enemy shells. Paul Fussell estimates that the two opposing sides dug twenty thousand miles of trenches, nearly enough to circle the globe. “Theoretically,” he writes, “it would have been possible to walk from Belgium to Switzerland entirely below ground.”

Tolkien arrived at the front less than four weeks before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, an Allied offensive designed to repel German troops along the Somme River in northern France. It turned into the bloodiest conflict of the war, a prolonged tug-of-war in which clashing armies moved millimeters on the map over the course of months. The first day of the clash, July 1, 1916, was a debacle for Allied troops. Fussell calls the outcome “one of the most interesting in the whole long history of human disillusion.” Wave upon wave of British soldiers rose from the trenches to be mowed down by German machine gun fire, like hay before the scythe, with shouts and screams in the air, blood on the ground, hope evaporating in the heart. Henry Williamson, author of
Tarka the Otter
, was there:

I see men arising and walking forward; and I go forward with them, in a glassy delirium wherein some seem to pause, with bowed heads, and sink carefully to their knees, and roll slowly over, and lie still. Other roll and roll, and scream and grip my legs in uttermost fear, and I have to struggle to break away … And I go on with aching feet, up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the ruins of the first and second …

At day’s end, twenty thousand Allied forces had died, including Rob Gilson, the first but not the last of the TCBS to be killed in the war. Thirty-five thousand more lay wounded. As the battle progressed through summer and autumn, the Allied position improved, but only incrementally. The reason for the slow advance lay, at least in part, in stout German defense, inadequate Allied artillery, and bungled Allied intelligence. Exemplifying the last, alas, is a trench map now housed in the Bodleian Library, beautifully drawn on the battlefield by Tolkien in red and black ink, and containing incorrect information on German barbed-wire placements. He wasn’t at fault—he based his map upon false descriptions supplied by German prisoners of war—but rather a victim of the iron rule that truth is the first casualty in war.

How did Tolkien survive this unfolding nightmare? In large measure, as he had survived the deaths of his father and mother: through the love of others. There was Edith, of course, praying for him back home in England and tracking his shifting position, which he provided against army regulations by tattooing his letters to her with dots in a code that he and she had devised before his departure. And there was the TCBS—Smith in France, Wiseman aboard a ship in the North Sea—corresponding whenever the conflict allowed, reminding one another of their shared aspirations to greatness, of their shared love, of their very existence.

Then came the delayed news of Gilson’s death, and the realization that the German war machine had ripped apart the TCBS fellowship. Tolkien wrote to Smith on August 12 that he was “hungry and lonely,” that “something has gone crack,” that he felt “a mere individual at present.” Four months later his isolation deepened, when the hounds of war turned their teeth upon Smith, dead of gangrene poisoning from a shrapnel wound.

Cut off from his friends, from Edith, from England, Tolkien found solace in his faith, that inexhaustible well of hope that lay unperturbed beneath everything that happened, good or bad. He also made use of another means of renewal, mentioned in his August 12 letter to Smith when he refers to the “spark of fire” granted the TCBS; for Tolkien, this spark meant “finding a voice for all kinds of pent up things and a tremendous opening up of everything,” a voice that would “testify for God and Truth” through poetry, art, and language.

The war, to borrow a phrase from Samuel Johnson, had concentrated that voice wonderfully. It did the same for many young writers, whose art quickened under gunfire: Rupert Brooke dreaming of an English heaven, Wilfred Owen recording “the monstrous anger of the guns,” Isaac Rosenberg describing the “shrieking iron and flame / Hurled through still heavens.” Why this literary flowering during World War I? World War II produced only a handful of significant English writers, and subsequent conflicts have given rise to fewer yet. It may be that what Fussell calls the ironies of this particular conflict played a role: the most horrific of wars after the most halcyon of days, the reversion to barbarism after the heyday of the myth of progress. The war may have opened a gap between expectation and fulfillment that literature was uniquely prepared to occupy and investigate. Or it may be that the poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked this final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. If this is so, one may regard the traditionalism of the Inklings, not as a return to the past, but as the past still alive in the present, as the spirit of World War I poetry, the last articulation of ordered innocence, finding new voice amidst the nearly incessant wars of flesh, mind, and spirit that marked the twentieth century.

One cannot underestimate boredom, too, as an incentive to write. Men on the march or sighting along a gun barrel are unable to hold pen and pad; but the trenches meant long, desperate hours of waiting: time enough to pour out one’s heart and soul. Sometimes “you might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket but that’s all,” while on other occasions, more was possible. Tolkien pressed forward with the legendarium “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”

And there was yet another motive for his obsessive attention just now to his private mythos. Tolkien longed to
escape.
He had no desire to shirk his job as a soldier—his sense of duty was far too strong for that—but he wished, whenever the ebb and flow of battle allowed, to flee in his imagination the sorrow, pain, and ugliness of the trenches. “It is plain,” he would say years later, “that I do not accept the tone of scorn and pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used … Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” Another Great War writer, Siegfried Sassoon, knew the same impulse; he remembers “being huddled up in a little dog-kennel of a dug-out, reading
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and trying to forget about the shells which were hurrying and hurrooshing overhead.” Tolkien, lucky man, had a protected realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes in his poem “Babylon”: “The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his … Wisdom made him old and wary / Banishing the Lords of Faery.” It was not this way for Tolkien. As a child and as an adult, he escaped into Fa
ë
rie and found there, if not safe harbor, at least fair dreams.

In October 1916, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a virulent lice-borne illness. He was back in England by November 10, his days as a combatant over. During his convalescence, which lasted for the remainder of the war, he helped to edit and wrote the introduction to a posthumous—and undistinguished—collection of poems by G. B. Smith,
Spring Harvest
. Tolkien’s introduction is curiously businesslike, even cold, as if he knew the poems were bad and, while giving them a formal salute, wished to turn his attention to the future. And why not? New languages, new images, new legends, and new mythologies crowded his mind; World War I had stirred the waters and the return to England would open the floodgates.