Tolkien and the Great War

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I finally have read John Garth's great book, Tolkien and the Great War. It is definitely worthy of all of the accolades that it has received. It really gives a good sense of how Tolkien's experiences -- and those of his close friends in the TCBS -- in the First World War really helped shaped the birth of his mythology. What I didn't realize is how much Garth traces the roots of that mythology in Tolkien's writings before he started the Book of Lost Tales. Definitely an important book for anyone interested in how Tolkien became Tolkien.

[solicitr]

I would be fascinated if someone could undertake a study of the pre-Somme poems and the earliest 'layer' of the Qenya Lexicon to tease out the threads of the earliest mythology.

Although 'mythology' may not be the best word for a stage that seems to me to have been largely static: the poems are tableaux, there is a sense of an earlier time, but there's no active movement of history.

I have a notion that the actual legendarium sprang up at the same time as the "second tongue," Gnomish, precisely because there was a second tongue. As soon as Tolkien postulated two languages, related but different, the historical linguistician in him would have immediately asked the key questions: why are they different? How were their populations separated? What different conditions led to their different natures?- and the answers came forth in legends. The Gnomes departed Elvenhome for Middle-earth, where they were promptly defeated and enslaved by Melko, their bodies and language both altered by their long thraldom (this idea is already present in both the Cottage of Lost Play and the Fall of Gondolin, the first Tales written).

Of course, Tolkien being Tolkien, he never wrote that tale (Gilfanon's). It was an end-state he worked towards, but as so often never reached; and ultimately the history he eventually wrote was considerably different.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As soon as Tolkien postulated two languages, related but different, the historical linguistician in him would have immediately asked the key questions: why are they different?

Of course, we know the answer to that question: because Tolkien was fascinated by both Finnish and Welsh.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

Late to the party, but I just finished this book. I'm tempted to say I was blown away by it, but that seems a peculiarly irreverent turn of phrase given the subject.

I've been reading about the Great War all summer, so I read it not just as an illumination of Tolkien but of the war itself. The main body of the book was indeed very interesting, watching the various languages and early elements fall into place, particularly the development from the twee "Goblin Feet" to the much more serious poetry and eventually the Lost Tales. I think that Garth is very accurate in speculating that had Tolkien not experienced what he did, most of what he wrote would have stayed in the arena of the "Happy Mariners". I did not realise just how formative the war was to Tolkien. He claimed that his experiences did not shape the plot, and I'm willing to believe that. It's the more fundamental aspects of his world view in which this is shown to me.

For example, one of the things that I find compelling about Tolkien is the never-endingness of the war between good and evil: no defeat is ever final, on either side. Middle-earth is locked in a war of attrition in a way. Each side continually fails to gain a decisive victory. I am aware that the Allied powers 'won' the First World War, but it still was not decisive, considering that we had to deal with direct fall out until at least 1993 and probably after. That is, I know, a small span of time within world history, but this ongoing conflict and the way in which the war was waged is not dissimilar to the ongoing conflict of Middle-earth.

There are so many other small revelations that were scattered throughout the book, connections that I never made. The Black Breath as shellshock, for example, and the war of machinery. One of the things that this book brought into relief for me was just how much of a war with machinery this was. WWII is machine against machine, but this is machine against man, and what man has any hope in the face of a machine gun or a shell? No wonder Saruman has "a mind of metal and wheels."

Then, one of my favourite motifs, there is Tolkien's fascination with the Northern spirit of (I paraphrase) "Spirit shall grow bolder as our strength lessens." That surely must have rung true during the Somme as whole units were obliterated in a single day. It is also somewhat like Haig's "With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end," which is essentially what Tolkien (if I recall correctly) said he observed about the batmen and privates he so admired. The northern spirit, the finding of strength through hardship and despair, pervades both the war and Tolkien's writing. Garth notes that, in contrast to other soldier-writers of the time, Tolkien sees worth in actions for their own sake. Tolkien's protagonists are heroes because of their actions, their courage, and their essential qualities, not because of their victories. Wilfred Owens, on the other hand, never writes about any kind of hero at all. The people he writes about have already been defeated, in a way, by their country, by their situation, by the lack of hope or redeeming qualities in their venture.

One sentence more than any other stood out to me in particular, on page 303:

The disenchanted view of the war stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives.

It seems to me that this is particularly what Tolkien countered. As Owens and Sassoon became nihilists, Tolkien seeks redemption, not only for himself but for the loss of the TCBS. I may be stretching too far, but it seems as though the disintegration of the TCBS is not at all unlike the passing of the elves. They take with them a certain grace and beauty and light, which is what the TCBS saw in themselves. (Incidentally, one of the impressions that this book also left me with was a certain jealousy of the TCBS.) He writes about how the darkness defines the light, about finding beauty amidst horrors which he is somewhat singular in. How many others can be said to be looking for any kind of good that came out of the war? The legacy we get is from the war poets and the blame of the Versailles conference terms and reparations. Tolkien sees things on a grander scale, looking at the highlights revealed by the shadows. Despite the sadness that I see pervading his work, there's something comforting about it.

Tolkien makes war integral to his tapestry rather than the ghastly tear in the fabric that others of the time portrayed it as. He is also reshaping ideas of war, but in a different mode. While others saw 'the war to end all wars,' he fitted it in as something almost necessary. War in Middle-earth is never good and rarely glorious, but it's also not depicted as a folly that needs to be done away with. Instead, war almost becomes a kind of dialectic.

It's interesting to me that Tolkien doesn't turn to Turambar, right away. Gondolin is cataclysmic, to be sure, but then there is the dark loveliness of the Tale of Tinúviel. Gondolin is overtly affected by Tolkien's experiences, Tinúviel less so. But it is only the Tale of Turambar that seems to have the disenchantment that features in the writing of so many of his contemporaries. Turambar seems like he would be the most analogous of any of the characters to an infantryman. Again, perhaps I'm stretching too far, but the infantrymen were often called 'lions led by donkeys.' They showed a great deal of courage and were led into death and despair by their countries for generally no obvious purpose and lost in a quagmire of mud and trenches. Túrin's mud and trenches are generally more metaphorical, but he is also plunged into his quagmire of horror by a higher authority, unseen and immovable. He's pitched over the top to deal as best he can. He has little hope of success or happiness, but he struggles on.

I'll stop there for now. I had so many thoughts whilst reading this, half of which of course I cannot recall now. So I will end by simply saying how glad I am to have read this. I am thinking I shall start rereading Tolkien's own works now, and I suspect I shall view them rather differently as a result.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Mossy, I would have no hesitation in saying that I was blown away by this book! When I was asked to be on a panel at the latest Mythcon on "Tolkien in the 21st Century" someone asked me what I thought was the most important work of Tolkien scholarship in the 21st Century thus war. I unhesitatingly answered "Tolkien and the Great War."

Great post! If you think of any of the other things that you thought about when you read the book, don't hesitate to comment on them. I really appreciate what you have to say!

And it is great to see you here!

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

I completely agree with you, Voronwë, and it's nice to see you, too.

Incidentally, it was this very thread that reminded me I had been wanting to read this book in the first place, so thank you. In recompense, I'm sure you'll be getting many more "And then this paragraph reminded me of WWI!" posts (and some of the reverse due to The Great War and Modern Memory for variety) in the near future.

[solicitr]

That was an absolutely fabulous post!

On the beginnings of the Lost Tales: Gondolin is certainly cataclysmic, and Melko's mechanical dragons certainly call to mind tanks and flamethrowers. But I think where the Great War experience is really felt lies in the background, the unwritten history to which Tolkien alludes throughout Gondolin: the travail of the Noldoli. In the very early conception, the Gnomes crossed the ocean and were almost immediately defeated in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, after which they suffered as thralls, save Turgon's folk who escaped to build Gondolin. It's that memory of recent catastrophe, rending the fabric of the Gnomes' lives which to me is perhaps evocative of the war-survivor.

Of course, I think an equal element was (of course!) linguistic, that the turn from Happy Mariners and Habbanan to the legendarium was sprung by the Second Language, Gnomish/Noldorissa. But that's another topic.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

On a somewhat unrelated, and yet totally connected note, let me add a comment that Tolkien made in "On Fairy-stories" (which I am reading in the Flieger/Anderson extended edition Tolkien On Fairy-stories). In his discussion contesting the contention of Andrew Lang and others that Fairy-stories are especially for children, he wrote about himself: "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quicked to full life by war. There is something incredibly profound about that statement, though I couldn't for the life of me say exactly what it is.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

Soli -- I agree with everything you said. Gondolin is more of a broad view of the war whilst Túrin is an on the ground, personal experience of it. Going back to an earlier point, Túrin is a hero by virtue of his courage and tenacity who spent most of his life in a virtual No Man's Land. I think I'm stretching for that comparison, but I do think it's interesting that Tolkien went big picture first. And I think you're completely right about the Great War experience being the broad backcloth to Tolkien's mythic backcloth.

Voronwë - I noticed that in Garth's book, as well. Fairy stories are an almost perfect metaphor for the war experience. Both thrust an individual into a place that was, for better or worse, previously completely beyond imagination and return him irrevocably changed. It's like a mental version of Frodo's return to the Shire.

Here, I'll just quote Flieger:

Both can change those who return so that they become 'pinned into a kind of ghostly deathlessness,' not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen or experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faërie can change out of all recognition the wanderer's perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was.

I never would have thought of that, but it makes such perfect sense. The war poets certainly tried to communicate what it was like. Tolkien was never directly trying to communicate his experience, I think, which in some ways makes his writing more interesting when examining it from this perspective. Instead of portraying the mud and death and to depict the visceral experience he gets more to the underpinnings of it all. Not the universality of the experience, necessarily, but he goes beyond the immediacy of it.

Looking at photos of the Great War, some of them almost do seem to come from a mythical world. Gas masks made people look like some bizarre alien creature. Look at the cover photograph of Tolkien and the Great War -- it's completey surreal.



That doesn't look like it should be a real place, especially with the counterpoint of the small figures in the middle of it all.

Incidentally, also just found this photo:



Remind you of anything? I'm sure it's coincidental, but striking nonetheless.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Fairy stories are an almost perfect metaphor for the war experience. Both thrust an individual into a place that was, for better or worse, previously completely beyond imagination and return him irrevocably changed.

That's exactly it!

[Dân o Nandor on Anduin]

It is a fantastic book, especially the Postscript which is a profound essay in its own right. I agree solicitr, a complete outline of the pre-Somme mythology would be interesting indeed.

Also, does anyone know if an essay has ever been done relating the 4 TCBSers with the 4 hobbits of LotR. I don't think Tolkien leaves all that much to compare other than the thrusting of 4 young friends into different theatres of a nasty war, but I'd find it hard to believe if no one's attempted it. It crosses my mind every time I open Garth's center photo spread.

[Aravar]

I keep meaning to go to the Lancashire Fusiliers Museum in Bury. As I understand it another battlion of the Fusiliers was involved in the first tank attack, but Tolkien's battlion had been stationed near that part of the line shortly beforehand. I have always wondered whether he might have seen the tanks before they were used, perhaps influencing the mechanical dragons.

[Inanna]

Remind you of anything? I'm sure it's coincidental, but striking nonetheless.

The Hobbits in the shire image which Frodo saw in Galadriel's mirror, right?

I must get this book.

[Elentári]

It reminds me of the silhouette photo of the Fellowship used on a lot of promo material for the film...

[Frelga]

I was thinking Dead Marshes.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

My point, although the resemblance to the Dead Marshes is certainly no coincidence.

Voronwë, thank you for saving me the trouble of trying to find The Shores of Faery. It would have been worth it though -- what a beautiful painting.

First off, I apologize if I’m going too far off both in my ramblings and in addressing not just Garth’s book but Tolkien and the War in general.

I just finished Paul Fussell’s brilliant The Great War and Modern Memory, which I cannot recommend highly enough. He does not mention Tolkien, but there were so many things that while reading seemed so very salient to me that I actually started keeping a list of page numbers on my wrist. (That’s where everyone keeps their lists, right? Right?)

One of the things that I’ve been puzzling over since finishing Tolkien and the Great War was Garth’s point about Tolkien’s use of romantic language and ideals. So much of WWI seems to be about disillusionment and the loss of ideals. There’s this complete disconnect with the capitalized nouns – Honour, Glory, etc. – that Tolkien holds so dear and that run throughout LOTR in particular. I came upon a passage in Samuel Hynes’ A War Imagined, however, that made such perfect sense. He’s quoting the essay of a soldier, Edward Tawney, who writes that it is not the soldiers but England that casts aside its ideals. The men who enlisted and were not conscripted – into which category the TCBS falls – tended to enlist for an idea, for England, for Duty’s sake, etc, and because of this, they needed to still believe in those ideas. They clung to them because they need that cause or principle for which they originally enlisted to be valid in order for their suffering and ordeals to be valid. Thus, those things which became propagandized had to somehow retain meaning for them. It was strange to me that Tolkien could still believe in such ideals – which he clearly does – even after experiencing not only the trenches but the death of half of the TCBS. Hynes, paraphrasing Tawney, says that they ended up feeling like “ghosts of their own past.” (Isn’t that, if you’ll excuse the pun, haunting?) Hynes also discusses how in the war against Germany many tried to disavow German Kultur and culture as well, including the Romantic tradition that Tolkien writes in as well as philology, etc. I know that Tolkien loved the Old English and Scandinavian literature even before all this started but it still struck me. Tolkien is so much in the German tradition, and in the mode of everything that England was trying to back away from. What Tawney himself says is “We are your ghosts,” and that’s just what Tolkien creates. In some ways, that's what Tolkien was himself. Starting from the scraps left of old literature, he is recreating from a ghost England’s past. He is the ghost of what England used to be, of the old ideas. He embodies the ghost of England that might have been.

In the same line, one of the criticisms of Tolkien seems to have been oversimplification. Orcs are Bad. Elves and Men are Good. According to Fussell this is all part of the war experience, too. Everything ends up being reduced to its most essential part – life and death, attack and defense, trench and no man’s land – and this simplification leads to ritual. Soldiers found significance in all kinds of things – morning and evening stand to, sunrise and sunset. By lending meaning to these events, by ritualizing them, they then end up being mythologized. Talking about the trend of Great War literature, Fussell writes that “the movement was towards myth, towards . . . the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant.” Of course is exactly what Tolkien then creates. That sentence could be a description of the elements that Tolkien’s work so potent. It’s the mythic feel that so few other authors manage to capture despite their best (and sometimes not best) efforts.

Fussell writes of Edward Blunden who, like Tolkien, tends toward an archaic prose:

In a world where literary quality of Blunden’s sort is conspicuously an antique, every word of Undertones of War, every rhythm, allusion, and droll personification, can be recognized as an assault on the war and on the world which chose to conduct and continue it. Blunden’s style is his critique.

This is getting back to the romantic language where I started, but could the same be said of Tolkien? Blunden is writing a war memoir, not high fantasy, but I don’t think that makes this any less applicable. They may be reacting to different things – after all, Tolkien started his affair with Old English and the Kalevala quite a bit before the war – but they are products of the same culture and the same war.

In a somewhat similar vein, Hynes quotes this passage by one Gilbert Murray:

Romance and melodrama were a memory, broken fragments living on of heroic ages int eh pasts. We live no longer upon fragments and memories; we have entered ourselves upon a heroic age.

Would Tolkien have agreed? I don’t think so. But what struck me about this is the similarity to Éomer’s line: 'These are indeed strange days. Dreams and legends spring to life out of the grass.” I do have to wonder if some of that stuck with Tolkien from the war. He spent so much time reading about epic battles that finding himself in the midst of one seems like it would give him pause despite the obvious differences between his battles and those of Beowulf and Finnish heroes. By transforming the technology into magic as he did with the fall of Gondolin, it’s not that far a leap.

I will leave off (for now – no worries, I have more thoughts which I will relate in as prolix a manner as possible) with this thought from Hynes: “The best war writing . . . was not emptied of all values, but only of the empty ones.” That’s it, isn’t it? Tolkien doesn’t write about “honour” and “glory”. He writes about the genuine article. That’s why Frodo and Faramir aren’t just heroes. They’re heroic in a way that means something. Somehow, Tolkien managed to take all those capitalized nouns that became empty propaganda and made them significant and added a depth that I know I have not yet plumbed.

Edited for clarity and non-sequiturs. Believe it or not, this is a pared down version of what I originally wrote, and some remnants that didn't belong got left behind.

[Primula Baggins]

Mossy, a brilliant post. I'm too tired to say much more than that, and that your final thought

Tolkien doesn’t write about “honour” and “glory”. He writes about the genuine article. That’s why Frodo and Faramir aren’t just heroes. They’re heroic in a way that means something. Somehow, Tolkien managed to take all those capitalized nouns that became empty propaganda and made them significant and added a depth that I know I have not yet plumbed.

cuts to the heart of why Tolkien and LotR speak to me so deeply. He isn't some relic of the past; it's not that he somehow preceded or ignored or denied the prevailing modern cynicism. He wrote past it, or through it. He wrote about what was real, the truth that lies behind the empty ritual words that cynics deride.

[Alatar]

Wonderful post Mossy.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Beautiful! Keep 'em coming.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

Gosh, thanks! But surely someone is going to argue with me? Point out something I missed? Stop me from going on at such length? No?

Well then, this is a quick (okay, and very rambly) Osgilliation, if you will, before I launch into my next monstrous essay. I was pondering all of this and how it fit with The Lord of the Rings (which, I must admit, I am far more familiar with than any of Tolkien’s other works) even though it is admittedly the most distanced. Tolkien said that of all the characters, he was most like Faramir which upon further reflection their war experiences are in some ways quite similar.

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise."

My impression from Garth is that, replace “Númenor” with England and you’ve got Tolkien speaking. In fact, it’s not far off from the poem which is ostensibly about Oxford. (I hope you know which one I’m talking about because I can’t find it.) They’re both scholars who ended up as soldiers – officers, no less - who profess a profound patriotism that is more than simple jingoism. But it’s more than that. Let’s start not with Faramir but with Denethor.

Denethor is the Steward, supposed to protect and defend Minas Tirith. He uses the palantír to assist him in this as a method of gaining intelligence and makes military decisions based on what he sees. In fact, this seems to end up being the sole basis of some of his decisions – there is no first hand experience. This is exactly how WWI generals both acted and were perceived as acting. Their intelligence was unreliable due to unreliable communications, as Tolkien would have been directly aware of given his office as a signaler. Particularly during battle, messages could take hours to get from the commanding officer to the infantry actually enacting the order, by which point it was frequently irrelevant anyway. Denethor’s information isn’t irrelevant so much as it is inaccurate, but he is either unaware of or apathetic to this fact. This is shown brilliantly in the scene in the movie where, juxtaposed with the charge on Osgiliath, Denethor sits in comfort and eats good food while being sung to as his men gallop to their deaths, just as the generals sat comfortably well behind the lines with frequently no idea of or connection to the reality. In fact, this is probably coincidental, but one of the things Joffre was known for was his strictly kept meal times completely regardless of the situation. Denethor ends up being the quintessential “Old Man” of the First World War, particularly considering how the infantry perceived both the old generals and the civilians who tended to be viewed as profiteers in some way. It’s not so much age as it is the complete disconnect. The politicians and generals frequently had no idea of the reality of the front. Denethor tells Pippin that this is what good generals do – hang back until the fighting is over, then move in to claim victory, which again is exactly what happened in the First World War. According to Hynes, many of the soldiers ended up feeling somewhat disenfranchised – like all of the men who had hung back from the fighting had secured their positions and gained from the sacrifice of the fighting men who really gained nothing. The “Old Men” of England kept sending the men in to be killed with little reaction to the actual situation. The Somme was considered to be going fairly well that first day – the same day that 20,000 British died. They looked at the evidence and saw no possibility of defeat. They kept going, using the same methods despite the evidence that their tactics were, shall we say, not the most effective. Denethor, given similar odds, instead despaired completely, and we all know what Gandalf and Aragorn think of that.

I think we also know Tolkien’s opinion, given his treatment of Denethor in comparison to that of Théoden. Théoden also starts out as an Old Man, both in attitude and in fact. He, however, rallies to the cause and instead of hanging back behind the lines charges out well in front of his men. His actions are not unlike many front line officers, in fact, whose death rate (if I recall correctly) was twice as high as that of the other ranks because they tended to run out first to encourage their men and thus get shot first. (The Germans also liked to target the officers who were, before uniform changes, easy to spot.) Denethor dies an ignoble death, trying to drag down his almost dead son with him, like the Old Men sending their metaphorical sons off to die. Théoden also dies, but he dies leading his men and thus gloriously, with the honour and respect which Denethor lacks. Although Tolkien lacks much of the anger at the older generation that his contemporaries tend to espouse, I don’t think it’s completely far-fetched to view Denethor and Théoden in light of the huge generation gap that the war created.

Turning back now to Faramir, let’s leave aside the fact that his war is conducted on horseback. He is sent on a mission that has little hope of success by a general who has lost touch with reality. He agrees to go despite his chances for success – a quality even the Germans noted in the men of the British Expeditionary Force. Finally, they are forced to retreat, defeated and having lost one third of their men. This was a common statistic in the First World War, particularly in 1916 when Tolkien was at the front. In fact, Faramir fared better than many on the Western Front. Although Denethor’s decision to defend Osgiliath seems to make strategic sense, given the actual facts it seems at best a desperate mission which will accomplish little. Faramir points out that they cannot afford to lose even few while the enemy can afford to lose a host. Although this wasn’t true for anyone in WWI, it is true that the attacker frequently suffered more than the defender – Allied casualties tended to be far heavier than German (who had more men to call on in the first place). And so Faramir, the intelligent, well loved, only remaining heir sets out to sacrifice himself for an almost impossible goal. Faramir is not just Tolkien, he’s the TCBS and Tolkien’s generation of officers. The highest casualities were among the university and public school educated. They’re called the Lost Generation for a reason. Particularly after the war, England came to see the dead as best and brightest, their potential heightened by their deaths, such as in the case of Wilfred Owen. They could also be the lost generation, as in wandering – many of the soldier-writers never really found their way out of the war. The Black Breath is practically shellshock. All those who are blighted with it have suffered deeply traumatic events aside from their brushes with the Nazgûl.

Faramir is also like Tolkien in that, unlike GBS and Gilson, he survived and was invalided out of the rest of the war. In A War Imagined, Hynes separates the people immediately after the war into five groups, and as I read his thoughts on each generation’s distinguishing characteristics, none of them seemed to fit Tolkien. This is another commonality between Tolkien and Faramir – both are invalided out of the war before the last big battle. Tolkien missed Passchendaele and the German offensives of 1918 thanks to his illness. I wonder if this is what made Tolkien who he was in part. His appreciation of fairy stories was, as he says, quickened by war, but I think it was more than interest. Tolkien was in the war long enough to appreciate it and to feel the effects of the despair and desolation. But I think he was invalided out in time and was thus saved not just from the danger of the trenches but from the cynicism that marks the rest of his generation. Faramir is healed by the king and by athelas, both of which come out of history to fix the present. Tolkien, too, turns too ancient stories to make sense of his times. Many from that time fell prey to this disillusionment with the war, but Tolkien in a way was reillusioned, finding new significance to old myths. Faramir too is scathed by his ordeal in a way both physical and mental, but he recovers to life and hope. Tolkien was in the war just long enough to experience the darkness that makes his writing more than mere fancy. I really wonder what would have happened, who he would have been, had he been in the war for longer.

Remember how I said this would be quick? Lies.