Tolkien and the Great War Read Free Page B

have left four of Tolkien’s fifteen-strong team wounded and four more dead – including T. K. Barnsley, G. B. Smith, and Rob Gilson.
    Of every eight men mobilized in Britain during the First World War, one was killed. The losses from Tolkien’s team were more than double that, but they bear comparison with the proportion of deaths among King Edward’s Old Boys and among former public schoolboys across Great Britain – about one infive. And they match the figures for Oxbridge-educated servicemen of their age, the vast majority of whom became junior officers and had to lead operations and assaults. It has become unfashionable to give credit to Oxford and Cambridge, and to social élites in general; but it remains true that the Great War cut a deeper swathe through Tolkien’s peers than among any other social group in Britain. Contemporaries spoke of the Lost Generation. ‘By 1918,’ Tolkien wrote half a century later in his preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings , ‘all but one of my close friends were dead.’

FOUR
The shores of Faërie
    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