Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth Read Free Book Online Page B

duty to pass on what he had learned to the ‘other ranks’ and prepare them for battle. At this stage the training was basic, and physical. ‘ All the hot days of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration,’ Tolkien wrote with chagrin when winter came and these exertions were replaced by chilly open-air lectures. Such was military life in the early twentieth century, and it sharpened Tolkien’s dislike of bureaucracy. ‘What makes it so exasperating,’ he said later of life in camp, ‘is the fact that all its worst features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as “planners” refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by “organization”.’ Elsewhere he was comically precise, declaring that ‘war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3 x ) 2 when x = normal human crassitude’. The diligent, meticulous, and imaginative thinker felt like a ‘toad under the harrow’ and would vent his feelings in letters, particularly to Father Vincent Reade, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. Yet in retrospect, as Tolkien told his son Christopher in 1944, this was the time when he made the acquaintance of ‘men and things’. Although Kitchener’s army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together. Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy”, especially theplain soldier from the agricultural counties’. He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time he had been sitting in a tower not of pearl, but of ivory.
    Army life could not challenge Tolkien intellectually. His mind would inevitably roam beyond the job at hand – if there was one: ‘ It isn’t the tough stuff one minds so much,’ he commented, but ‘the waste of time and militarism of the army’. Rob Gilson found time amid his duties to work on embroidery designs for furnishings at Marston Green, his family home near Birmingham; G. B. Smith worked on his poetry, especially his long ‘Burial of Sophocles’. Tolkien read Icelandic and continued to focus on his creative ambitions. He later recalled that most of the ‘early work’ on the legendarium had been carried out in the training camps (and in hospitals, later in the war) ‘when time allowed’.
    Life in camp appears to have helped Tolkien extend the bounds of his imagined world in a quite direct way. Hitherto, Tolkien’s mythological poetry had gazed across the western ocean to Valinor. Now he began to name and describe the mortal lands on this side of the Great Sea, starting with a poem that described an encampment of men ‘In the vales of Aryador / By the wooded inland shore’. ‘ A Song of Aryador ’, written at Lichfield on 12 September, inhabits the twilight hours that Tolkien already favoured as a time when the enchanted world is most keenly perceived. But now the gulf between fairies and humankind seems vaster than ever. No goblin troop pads happily by, and no piper-fay is glimpsed making ecstatic music. Only, after the sun has gone down, ‘the upland slowly fills / With the shadow-folk that murmur in the fern’.
    Despite the mountains, the scene perhaps owes something to Tolkien’s situation, and even (with poetic exaggerations) to the topography of Whittington Heath, in the Tame valley, with a wood and a lake, and the distant heights of Cannock Chase to the west and the Pennines to the north. This was once the heartland of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that encompassed both Birmingham and Oxford, and with which Tolkien felt a special affinity. Lichfield was the seat of its bishopric and Tamworth, a few miles away, the seat of the Mercian kings.With its Anglo-Saxon subtitle, Án léop Éargedores