Twenty-First-Century Tolkien E-Book

Nick Groom

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 796

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'Fascinating.... Wonderfully exhilarating.' Mail on Sunday Finalist for The Tolkien Society Best Book Award An engaging, original and radical reassessment of J.R.R. Tolkien, revealing how his visionary creation of Middle-Earth is more relevant now than ever before. What is it about Middle-Earth and its inhabitants that has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world? And why does Tolkien's visionary creation continue to fascinate and inspire us eighty-five years on from its first appearance? Beginning with Tolkien's earliest influences and drawing on key moments from his life, Twenty-First-Century Tolkien is an engaging and radical reinterpretation of the beloved author's work. Not only does it trace the genesis of the original books, it also explores the later adaptations and reworkings that cemented his reputation as a cultural phenomenon, including Peter Jackson's blockbuster films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and the highly anticipated TV series The Rings of Power. Delving deep into topics such as friendship, failure, the environment, diversity, and Tolkien's place in a post-Covid age, Nick Groom takes us on an unexpected journey through Tolkien's world, revealing how it is more relevant now than ever before.

Leseprobe

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY TOLKIEN

NICK GROOM first read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien over forty years ago. For many years he taught the only UK undergraduate course on Tolkien, and he has published a number of influential papers in the field. Beyond that, he is primarily known for his work on cultural environmentalism and on the Gothic – the latter earning him the sobriquet of the ‘Prof of Goth’ in the media. He is currently Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, having previously held positions at the universities of Bristol, Chicago, Stanford, and Exeter, where he holds an Honorary Professorship.

‘Fascinating . . . Wonderfully exhilarating . . . In a rousing finale, Groom suggests that Tolkien is exactly the writer we need at this particularly perilous moment, as we emerge, Hobbit-like, from our holes and try to imagine a new kind of life in this post-pandemic age.’ Mail on Sunday

‘Each chapter displays a mastery of both the works in question – whether books or adaptations – and of the vast corpus of Tolkien scholarship. Narratives of literary production or of Hollywood bureaucratic processes rarely come as absorbing as Groom’s . . . Illuminating . . . Groom’s explorations of Tolkien’s sources . . . are always provocative and often ingenious.’ Literary Review

ALSO BY NICK GROOM

The Vampire

The Gothic

The Seasons

The Union Jack

The Forger’s Shadow

Introducing Shakespeare

The Making of Percy’s Reliques

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This revised and updated paperback edition

first published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Nick Groom, 2022, 2023

The moral right of Nick Groom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The author is grateful to Mick Ryan for permission to quote as an epigraph lines from ‘When Every Song Was New’, recorded by Mick Ryan and Paul Downes on the album When Every Song Was New (Wild Goose, 2013).

Illustrations by Leo Nickol

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.

The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-700-1

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-699-8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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To Joanne, Matilda, and Dorothy:thank you for looking after me.

Every song a new song, each song newly sung;

Every song a true song, only just begun: Every note ran true and sweet,

Every word with every beat,

Every tale a world complete –

When every song was new, when every song was new.

Mick Ryan, ‘When Every Song Was New’ (2013)

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Let us, therefore, not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations ofImmortality from Recollectionsof Early Childhood’ (1807)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Text

Foreword

1   Myriad Middle-Earths

2   Uncertainty

3   The Ambiguity of Evil

4   The Hesitancy of Good

5   Lucid Moments

6   Just War

7   Conclusion: Weird Things

Afterword: Power

Notes

Works Cited and Selected Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my undergraduate, postgraduate, and international summer school students at the universities of Exeter and Macau for the opportunity to discuss these ideas for several years with intelligent and knowledgeable readers and fans: it has been a pleasure and a privilege. Among Tolkien scholars, I owe significant debts to Mark Atherton, Andoni Cossio, Dimitra Fimi, Lynn Forest-Hill, Peter Gilliver, Andrew Higgins, Stuart Lee, Tom Shippey, Martin Simonson, and especially Will Sherwood. At Exeter, where I taught for several years, I would like to thank my colleagues Henry Bartholomew, Jo Esra, Karrie Anne Grobben, Eddie Jones, Tim Kendall, Joanne Parker, Esther Raamsdonk, Debra Ramsay, Mike Rose, and Andrew Rudd. A few words, phrases, and ideas are taken from my earlier publications on Tolkien, but I have endeavoured to present significantly new readings here, if not unharmonious with my previous work from which the occasional idea has been adapted.1

My present colleagues, including Man Yin Chiu, Josh Ehrlich, Rhett Gayle, Matthew Gibson, Victoria Harrison, Damian Shaw, and Sun Yifeng, have assisted in many ways that have meant a great deal to me, though their natural generosity of spirit means that they may not realize what a help they have been; likewise the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Professor Jie Xu and the Vice-Rector Professor Michael Hui have provided much-appreciated support. One dear friend and colleague has always gone the extra country mile during the difficult time in which this book was written: William Hughes – thank you, Bill, I hope that I can do the same for you one day. John Goodridge has greatly encouraged me in my work for some thirty years, and it was a pleasure to find that our interests dovetailed in this project; typically, John kindly read several chapters in draft, which I very much appreciated. I also received help, in different ways, from Nicholas Allen, Iago Elkin-Jones, Jonathon Green and Susie Ford, Ronald Hutton, Alan Lee, Siobhán McElduff, Andrew McNeillie, Mick Ryan, Reverend Paul Seaton-Burn, Lubna Speitan, Fiona Stafford, and Michael Suarez, SJ.

I am particularly grateful to Shaun Gunner and The Tolkien Society (which I first joined many years ago, and have since rejoined to find it equally welcoming, enthusiastic, and informed); it was a privilege to be the Guest of Honour at the Society’s 2022 AGM, after which I received welcome comments and communications following my talk – several of which were perceptive and refreshingly insightful and have belatedly informed this book. In particular, I had the pleasure of corresponding with Tolkien Society members Jennifer Brooker, Chris Walsh, and Jessica Yates – all of whom had written on similar areas. Brooker made a simply brilliant point about Great War passwords that I should have considered – ‘friend’ being the conventional response in the Allied Forces’ challenge ‘Friend or Foe?’; Walsh offered an incisive counterpoint (often in harmony) to many of my own suggestions; and Yates, typically perceptive and informed about everything in Middle-Earth, was very helpful about the Spiders.2 All three exemplify the support one can expect from members of The Tolkien Society.

The existence of this book, however, is primarily down to two people who have had an enduring impact on my life as a writer: James Nightingale, my editor at Atlantic, and David Godwin, my agent. Without them, there would be no Twenty-First-Century Tolkien. Furthermore, in production Atlantic favoured me with the most meticulous and learned of copy-editors – Tamsin Shelton; I am extremely grateful that she has applied her extraordinary editorial rigour to this book; any errors that remain are, of course, my own. My abiding debt to my family is, I trust, clear in my dedication.

Finally, I would like to remember those with whom I shared my early experience of reading Tolkien. My parents, Elisabeth and Michael, were very understanding when their young teenage son suddenly became captivated by Tolkien’s work, and they spent countless hours taking me to gaming events and what are now called LARPs, which must, at the time, have been mystifying to them; they also bought me many books by and about Tolkien, which I still treasure. But there were also a handful of people with me on the ‘frontline’ of Middle-Earth, some of whom, I am pleased to say, I remain in touch with: David Bennett, Mike Cattell, Martin Deacon, and Andy Morgan, as well as Jules Cowley, Michael Goodwin, and Neil Roberts. Thank you for those memories, which forty-plus years on have been stirred by writing this book.

Lastly, I should stress that in spite of comments in my conclusion, this is not a ‘lockdown book’ – it is a book about Tolkien, first conceived many years ago, if written under more recent, and more trying, circumstances. However, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is inescapable and has, I hope – at the end of things – provided an opportunity to show how Tolkien’s Middle-Earth writings are strikingly relevant today.

Nick Groom

Séipéal Iosóid

Notes on the Text

Terminology

In this book, the names of the prominent peoples of Middle-Earth are capitalized in the same way in which national or ethnic identities are capitalized, such as Danish, Roma, or Gothic: this distinction reflects individual languages and applies to Dwarves (evidently Tolkien’s preferred plural has been adopted), Elves, Ents, Hobbits, Humans, and also to Orcs (and, in The Hobbit, to Goblins too). However, this distinction does not imply that these peoples of Middle-Earth constitute different races: rather, they are different species.1 The ‘Race of Men’ is usually referred to as ‘Human’ in this study, as umbrella-terms such as ‘Mankind’ are now rightly considered patriarchal – even if these words were not consciously gendered when Tolkien was writing.

Moreover, intelligent species within Middle-Earth such as Dragons, Eagles, Spiders, and Trolls are generally capitalized – Tolkien himself tended to capitalize these, although inconsistently. I have chosen to capitalize Horses as well because they clearly have knowing sentience and a bearing on the plot, but not deer or dogs or smaller creatures, which barely feature in the texts under discussion. Wizards perhaps deserve to be capitalized as a distinct species, but the general use of this term outside Middle-Earth alongside Tolkien’s specific use within it would risk confusion.

‘Middle-Earth’ itself is Anglicized and therefore capitalized. Tolkien’s own preference for not capitalizing the second word of a name following a hyphen appears to derive from Nordic usage; however, this runs counter to his claim in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings to have ‘Englished’ the language, and one cannot, for example, imagine Sackville-Baggins being rendered ‘Sackville-baggins’.2 In any case, to use the form ‘Middle-earth’ would have created an inelegant inconsistency in my own title. Nevertheless, there is complete fidelity to other authors’ preferred capitalization in quotations and titles cited. The Shire is always given with the definite article, as this is how it appears on the map of Middle-Earth, and, again for consistency, ‘Bag End’ is unhyphenated throughout, which is Tolkien’s preferred style in The Lord of the Rings (but not The Hobbit). The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (first used in Latin in the eighth century AD, and in English by 1602) is generally used in preference to ‘Old English’ as it reflects the hybrid nature of English identities in the pre-Conquest period, and to resist the appropriation of the term by far-right groups.3

The First World War is usually referred to as the ‘Great War’, as would have been familiar to Tolkien. The Second World War, which went under a number of different names while Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, maintains its common appellation – although I was tempted to call it the ‘Six Years’ War’ after one of Tolkien’s counter-factual narratives.4The Silmarillion (italicized) refers to the published work of 1977, ‘The Silmarillion’ (sometimes ‘Quenta Silmarillion’) refers to unpublished drafts of the text as Tolkien was writing it.

References

Although there are several different editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in circulation, it is not difficult to access a digital copy to find a particular quotation. For this reason although references for all direct quotations are given, they are, for frankly sentimental reasons, keyed to the page numbers of my beloved and battered copy of the third edition Unwin paperback of The Lord of the Rings (1979), unless I am referring to material unique to the first, second, or subsequent editions; likewise The Silmarillion. The preferred text of The Hobbit is The Annotated Hobbit with an introduction and notes by Douglas A. Anderson (2002) as it includes important additional material – again, unless a point is being made about an earlier edition. To help distinguish between the books and the major films, the Peter Jackson movies of The Lord of the Rings are collectively called Rings, and his films of The Hobbit are collectively Hobbits.

Foreword

The love that dare not speak its name.

Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Two Loves’ (1894)

This is a book unlike other books on Tolkien and his visionary creation of Middle-Earth. To begin: I first read The Lord of the Rings aged thirteen, and was totally enraptured by Middle-Earth. The finest analogy I have found to my experience is in the words of the much-loved and greatly lamented writer Terry Pratchett, who described his first encounter with The Lord of the Rings in the most reverential terms: he read it as a teenager, babysitting on New Year’s Eve – ‘I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.’1

This book is about being inside the story, a wild story. It is not an (apparently) straightforward introduction to Tolkien’s world – not only are there plenty of such primers, guides, and encyclopedias, but they tend to get rapidly bogged down in the minutiae of Tolkien’s ‘legendarium’ or ‘mythos’ (his complex architecture of gods and goddesses, the intricate lore of the many peoples of Middle-Earth, and their entangled histories and tales across thousands of years). Within a few pages, these books are preaching to the converted and are lost in the arcana of the ‘Ainur’ and ‘Maiar’, and purveying imaginary deities to perplexed readers rather than doing what they should be doing, which is, simply, explaining the value of the writing. Neither is this book an academic study of the challenges that Tolkien’s work poses to his readers in such areas as the twists and turns of invented languages and alphabets, or the workings of Catholic theology. Such extreme erudition stifles the appreciation of the works as literature, and as a wider culture – indeed, this work could be deemed worthy but worthless; of undoubted scholarly significance, but of interest only to the cognoscenti.

In contrast, Twenty-First-Century Tolkien takes as its starting point the Tolkien phenomenon today: a multi-media mix and fix of literature, art, music, radio, cinema, gaming, fandom, and popular culture – a never-ending Middle-Earth. We cannot return to a purely literary Middle-Earth independent of, primarily, Sir Peter Jackson’s extraordinary films. We should therefore accept that any assessment of newly published works drawn from the Tolkien archives – as well as new adaptations of his tales and imagined histories – are inevitably going to be deeply coloured by the multifaceted twenty-first-century Tolkien ‘industry’, for want of a better term.

In that respect at least, Tolkien can be compared with Shakespeare: he is not simply an author and a body of work, but a vast and growing field of cultural activity and products. This ‘discourse’ – and I will try not to use that word again – combines Tolkien’s earliest influences and sources (from Beowulf to Peter Pan), biographical details (two world wars and half a century of university politics – mainly at Oxford), and an astonishingly rich variety of texts (poetry, drama, fiction, literary criticism, philological scholarship, and so forth) with the dazzling efflorescence of adaptations that began in his lifetime and have since expanded to Himalayan proportions. Even before the publication of the final volume of The Lord of the Rings (itself one of the bestselling books of all time), Tolkien had received a proposal for a BBC radio adaptation. The rage for adaptation is, however, seen most markedly, of course, in six films that in the past two decades have each grossed close on $1 billion.2 This stratospheric ascent has also happened remarkably quickly. In the case of Shakespeare it took at least a century for the reputation of th’ immortal Swan of Avon to take flight and another century for the Bard to become an international icon and the foundation of a global market; in the case of Tolkien it was already happening in his lifetime and was cemented within thirty years of his death. Since then, things have accelerated even more rapidly: the unparalleled worldwide success of Harry Potter, in tandem with the Tolkien film franchise, was achieved within a dizzying five years. We will never see such a phenomenon again. Never again.

This book is published to coincide with another major intercession in this passionately debated and zealously defended – and protected – artistic world. The Amazon Prime Video TV series of The Rings of Power is, at a rumoured $1 billion, the most expensive television series yet made; it premièred on 2 September 2022. The Rings of Power is set in the ‘Second Age’, thus pre-dating the events of The Lord of the Rings by several thousand years, yet including some of the same immortal characters – principally the rebel Elf warrior-queen Galadriel. This material is gleaned from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings (which run to 150 pages) and from passing evidence in the text (and, less so, in The Hobbit) such as that provided by songs and in fragments of historical detail. It is also worth pointing out that some episodes from the novel have in any case never been filmed (or been developed as games), so there may well be an opportunity to incorporate these incidents as well.

The viewers of this new series – and indeed the vast majority of those who enjoy Tolkien’s books, and the radio series, films, games, and artwork inspired by his work – have at best only a passing interest in Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval learning, the composition of his works, his obsessively detailed invented languages, or his Roman Catholicism. Any popular book on Tolkien needs to grasp this nettle: Tolkien is not only for the academics, the fans, and the self-styled experts, but has a far broader appeal. A straightforward example: among the ‘castaways’ on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs who selected The Lord of the Rings to accompany the Bible and the works of Shakespeare are figures as diverse as primatologist Dr Jane Goodall, mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, botanist David Bellamy, and folksinger Mary O’Hara – none of whom are philologists specializing in Old English.3

The appeal of Middle-Earth can best be addressed and enhanced, then, by moving Tolkien away from the dusty antiquarian and highly specialized commentaries and towards more contemporary ways of understanding the extraordinary creative achievement of his work. His writing is enthrallingly intricate, tentative and absorbing. This speaks to us today. Tolkien’s open and experimental approaches can demonstrate his striking relevance for the most pressing issues confronting the Human condition in the twenty-first century. Writing predominantly in the 1930s and 1940s, Tolkien clearly could not anticipate the crises of the present, but through often surprisingly prescient episodes and especially in the retelling and reinvention of his characters and narratives in different formats, his work is becoming a touchstone of current concerns. More and more, we are beginning to think through Tolkien.

So while there is always room for Tolkien purists – not least because through the volumes of Middle-Earth writings and specialist websites, Tolkien has become a culture that requires keen-eyed custodians, curators, and critics – mention of Tolkien or Middle-Earth or The Lord of the Rings is no longer rooted in the books. Rather, the books are the source of a radical typology of characters and places and plots that can be reinvented across film, television, and computer gaming, as well as art and music, LARP (live-action role-play) and tourism, and many other activities.4 There are, for instance, some 100,000 hits on the online art gallery DeviantArt simply for the word ‘Hobbit’.5

Consequently, the huge anticipated global audience for the Amazon Prime Video TV series may well benefit from a book on Tolkien that cuts across the past eighty-five years since the inaugural publication of The Hobbit to identify why the books and media adaptations have been so popular. The answer to this is definitely not that Tolkien invented, say, a highly complex language system for Elves (although this does have some curious implications), but rather, I suggest, because his writing is creatively open-ended, humane (and yet intensely aware of non-Human perspectives), and environmentally sensitive. In a word, Tolkien, in his many guises, offers a richly rewarding re-enchantment of the world – something we desperately need after a global pandemic, repeated national and international lockdowns, and growing social isolation, as well as in the wider, apocalyptic contexts of political extremism and instability, climate change, and ecological disasters such as snowballing species extinction. Tolkien’s vision increasingly has value today: more than ever, this is the Tolkien moment.

Twenty-First-Century Tolkien will accordingly consider areas such as uncertainty and the indeterminate, failure, friendship, the contradictions of his environmental imagination, the significance of things and objects (both inanimate and animate), and the weird and eerie in the books and films and games (and, more broadly, in Tolkien’s other work) – as well as Tolkien in a post-Covid age. I begin with the multiple Tolkiens that existed, then survey his often frantic professional life and attempts to write for the press, and outline his love of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval sources, before turning to the thorny problems of the composition of his major works.

After that, more treacherous waters: radio and film adaptations, and some spin-off computer games. Yet it cannot be stressed too strongly that this book does not privilege the published canonical texts over later reworkings. Most readers (if they read the books at all) now come to them through the Jackson films and/or computer games, and soon they will be coming to those Jackson experiences (and perhaps eventually the books) via the Amazon Prime Video series The Rings of Power. But Twenty-First-Century Tolkien respects this ‘multi-platform’ Tolkien in a non-hierarchical and, I hope, non-judgemental way. But although I say ‘non-hierarchical’, one cannot escape the books, and they have an immensely powerful and irresistible gravitational pull. The commentaries presented in the following pages are meant to open up the interpretation and appreciation of Tolkien’s work rather than closing it down, introducing unexpected contexts and readings derived from his unruly and wayward working methods, and the abundance of subsequent adaptations. So although my primary aim is to answer the question ‘Why Tolkien now?’, I certainly hope that those who have enjoyed the films but are yet to read the books might be moved to do so after reading my own book, this book. As the seventeenth-century printers John Heminges and Henry Condell said of an earlier writer (pretty well known today), ‘Read him, therefore, and again, and again, and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.’6

The huge amount of material inspired by Middle-Earth since the late sixties, when its sudden popularity on university campuses yoked it to rock music and the counterculture, and since then in everything from the genesis of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to Peter Jackson’s era-defining films means that I have had to be increasingly selective in my examples. This has been particularly the case in popular (and, admittedly, relatively unpopular) music. There are several volumes to be written in this area – I have only a few paragraphs. However, I hope that I have been fair, representative, and ultimately persuasive in my overall points, and that my examples are recognizable rather than recondite, and I am sorry if I have missed particular favourites here, or elsewhere – this book is, sadly, finite. But more to the point, perhaps – just listen to the music, any of the music.

Finally, in writing this book I have repeatedly been brought up against the extraordinary problem that many people unfortunately read The Lord of the Rings with their eyes shut, misreading it as a simple fairyland conflict between good and evil in which good inevitably triumphs. This reading is not only prevalent at the lowest level of ignorant commentators who make the most basic mistakes in the plot, but also among some of Middle-Earth’s most ardent fans. All I ask you, as readers or potential readers, is that you read the words on the page, and then attend – assiduously – to the films. Only at that point should you judge them and make of them what you will. But frankly, if Middle-Earth was a facile good/bad dichotomy, you would not be reading this book, and I would not have bothered to write it – in fact, it would not have been possible to write this book at all about a twenty-first-century Tolkien . . .

ONE

Myriad Middle-Earths

I smell a man of middle earth.

William Shakespeare,The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)

We begin:

HWÆT!

WĒ GĀR-DEna

in geārdagum

þēodcyninga

þrym gefrūnon,

hū ðā æþelingas

ellen fremedon.1

These are the opening lines of Beowulf (c.AD650–800), with which Tolkien would habitually begin his lectures. The poem was well over a thousand years old when Tolkien strode into the room, throwing out the lines. But today they may be oddly familiar too, having a Tolkienian timbre: those mysterious letters ‘þ’ and ‘ð’, those words ‘þēodcyninga’ and ‘æþelingas’: their meaning is present, if just out of reach.2

The lines can be translated as

Lo! [or ‘Behold!’, or ‘Hark!’, or ‘What!’, or even ‘Oi!’] We have heard of the glory of the kings of the Spear-Danes in days of yore – how those princes did valorous deeds . . .3

Listen . . .

How Many Tolkiens?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, John Ronald, Ronald, Philip, J.R.R.T. (and occasionally ‘JRsquared’), Gabriel, the ‘Home Secretary’, Lieutenant Tolkien, Professor Tolkien, Tollers, Fisiologus, N.N., Kingston Bagpuize, Oxymore, John Jethro Rashbold (‘J.J.R.’), Spurius Vectigalius Acer (or T. Portorius Acer Germanicus), Eisphorides Acribus Polyglotteus, Ruginwaldus Dwalakōnis, Rægnold Hrædmoding, Arcastar Mondósaresse.4 He was baptized Anglican, familiarly known as Ronald (a name he delightfully recognized as derived from Norse), and took the name Philip at his Roman Catholic confirmation. He was Gabriel or the ‘Home Secretary’ to close school friends (the T.C.B.S., see below), Tollers to close colleagues (the Inklings), and Rashbold in a semi-fictionalized account of himself. He rendered his name Vectigalius Acer in Latin and Eisphorides Acribus in ancient Greek (‘vectigal acer’ and ‘eisphorides acribus’ punning on the words ‘toll’ and ‘keen’), and, more literally, Dwalakōnis in Gothic and Hrædmoding in Old English – the latter for an Anglo-Saxon poem he wrote for the poet W.H. Auden’s sixtieth birthday in 1967 (by which time Auden had joined the Tolkien Society of America and renamed himself ‘Gimli’).5 He had earlier (1910–37) published poetry under the pseudonyms Fisiologus, N.N., Kingston Bagpuize, and Oxymore. Tolkien himself provided a derivation of his surname, stating in a letter that it was originally German, from Saxony – Tollkühn – and meant ‘foolhardy’ (hence, ‘Rashbold’); he then straightaway declared that he was more of a Suffield (his mother’s maiden name), and that it was to the Suffield side he owed his love of philology and mediaeval romance.6 Indeed, he identified as an Anglo-Saxon West Midlander with an affinity for the Welsh Marches and Wales.7 So there are many Tolkiens (or Suffields), not to mention his self-appointed artistic heirs; Tolkiens, Tolkienians, and Tolkienists may even perhaps merit their own collective noun: a gramarye.8

But what is interesting here is the very profusion of Tolkien’s names. We all have various nicknames, but Tolkien’s seem more manifold, deliberately proliferating, and in tension with Suffield. And this is also true in his writings.9 The character Aragorn is variously Estel, Thorongil, Strider, Aragorn, Isildur’s Heir, the Renewer, Longshanks, Elfstone, Wing-Foot, and Elessar Telcontar – names that, at least initially, often mean little to other characters or to us as readers, except to impart a sense of growing presence and inscrutable meaning. Gandalf, meanwhile, has so many names he even forgets the very name of Gandalf at one point: he is Olórin, Mithrandir, the Grey Wanderer, the Grey Pilgrim (and the Grey Fool to the sardonic Denethor), Tharkûn, Incánus, Greyhame, Stormcrow, Láthspell, and eventually the White Rider.10 Other names are less stable: Treebeard’s name is growing, or unfolding.11 These names are in part the consequence of the number of languages spoken in Middle-Earth, but also a feature of the fluctuating identities and changing status of the characters. Characters are defined and named by others, by circumstances, by context. They do not assert an individual identity, but are pluralistic, persistently fashioning and refashioning themselves, or being reinvented by other forces. This is most notable when Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White, but even characters such as Frodo bear different names, such as Mr Underhill, Elf-Friend, and Ringbearer – and this is something all-too-familiar in the current age of social media avatars: selfhood is no longer fixed, but fundamentally fluid. The many Tolkiens are also evident in his range of creative activities: lecturer and tutor, scholar and literary critic, philologist, editor, translator, poet, artist, children’s author, novelist, dramatist, cartographer, occasional (and memorable) performer, speculative linguist, and – it has to be said – experimental writer.12 Even Tolkien’s academic work hums with competing voices: his acclaimed lecture on Beowulf, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, includes phrases in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Middle English, as well as coinages from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’. And despite his professed dislike of allegory, this piece contains not one but two allegories on the poem’s treatment by critics and commentators.

Tolkien’s own constellation of shifting characters is borne out by his biography, so it is worth summarizing the chief events of his life to show how his changing names and revisions in his identity are reflected in his various roles and experiences.13 He was born on 3 January 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, a province of South Africa. The family was from Birmingham, but his father was a representative of the Bank of Africa, so from the beginning the young Ronald was a person in exile.14 While in Bloemfontein, Ronald was bitten by a ‘sun-spider’ or ‘camel spider’, and he later claimed, rather improbably, to remember racing through the grass away from the creature, as well as later paddling in the Indian Ocean.15 But he was not more than three years old at the time, so these memories are likely to be examples of Tolkien’s later ongoing reimagining of himself: a flight through an Edenic garden, a moment of childhood innocence bathed in a sunlit sea. As it was, both he and his mother were suffering so severely from the intense heat that in 1895 she returned to Birmingham with Ronald and his younger brother Hilary. He also claimed to remember parts of the three-week voyage to England: looking down at the sea, arriving at a harbour beyond which was a great city (Lisbon) – a vision highly suggestive of his later depictions of Elfland or Faërie as a magical isle reached only by enchanted craft.

In Birmingham he was brought up by his mother and her Suffield grandparents. His father was due to join them as soon as he could leave the bank, and in February 1896 Ronald dictated a letter describing himself to his father as ‘a big man’ because he now had a man’s coat.16 The letter was never sent. His father died the following day of a haemorrhage brought on either by rheumatic fever or typhoid.

In 1896, the single-parent family moved to the hamlet of Sarehole on the outskirts of Birmingham in 1896; this proved to be an idyllic and formative experience of the English countryside for Ronald. He learnt Latin and German at his mother’s knee, as well as admiring her beautifully calligraphic handwriting, and she read him Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books – which included the tale of the Viking hero Sigurd and the Dragon Fafnir.17 She also unexpectedly converted to Roman Catholicism, precipitating a family rift.

The tale of Sigurd and Fafnir, which appears in The Red Fairy Book as ‘The Story of Sigurd’, is worth pausing over. It is a key episode in the thirteenth-century Old Norse Völsunga Saga, which Tolkien later translated into taut, terse poetry, and in recalling his mother reading the tale aloud to him, he presents it as effectively the primal scene of his first encounter with Dragons. Lang’s version begins with a king dying on a battlefield because his sword breaks; nevertheless, the shards are kept by his pregnant wife to forge anew for their young son. She straightaway disguises herself as a maid to escape her husband’s foes, is captured by Danes, and questioned before the king because she looks too regal for a maidservant; consequently, she is treated well in the royal household and gives birth to Sigurd, who grows up in the palace. In time, Sigurd’s tutor, Regin, tells him of the Dragon Fafnir: Regin and Fafnir were originally brothers, but Fafnir killed their father and seized a hoard of cursed gold (other versions have Fafnir’s greed, or Dragon sickness, causing him to become a Dragon). Regin consequently seeks revenge, and persuades Sigurd to slay Fafnir, forging a razor-sharp sword from the shards of his father’s broken weapon. Sigurd hides in a pit and stabs the Dragon as it passes over him, and Fafnir curses the gold again as he dies. Regin then asks Sigurd to cut out Fafnir’s heart and roast it for him. As Sigurd does so, he licks his fingers and so tastes the heart, which gives him the power to understand the speech of birds – who are all chattering about Fafnir’s gold and Regin’s plans to betray Sigurd. Sigurd accordingly decapitates Regin, whereupon the birds sing a chorus that the warrior-maiden Brynhild lies in an enchanted sleep nearby. Sigurd equips himself with ‘the Helm of Dread’ from the hoard of Fafnir – a helmet that confers invisibility upon the wearer – and rides to Brynhild, imprisoned in a castle ringed by fire, and frees her. They of course fall in love, and Sigurd gives her a ring from the cursed hoard; he then rides off to another kingdom and meets the princess Gudrun, whose mother mixes a potion causing Sigurd to forget Brynhild and marry Gudrun. Gudrun’s brother, Gunnar, then determines to marry Brynhild, but cannot reach her through the circle of fire, so he magically disguises Sigurd as himself to rescue Brynhild a second time. They exchange rings, and Sigurd then gives the cursed ring to Gudrun. At the wedding feast, Sigurd comes to his senses, remembers everything, but keeps his peace. Brynhild and Gudrun then quarrel, and Brynhild recognizes on Gudrun’s finger the ring she had received from Sigurd and thought she had given to Gunnar – ‘and she knew it and knew all, and she turned as pale as a dead woman’.18 She accuses Gunnar of deceiving her, and drugs his younger brother with serpent’s venom and wolf’s flesh; he becomes maddened and slays the sleeping Sigurd – whereupon Brynhild’s heart breaks. Brynhild and Sigurd (and his mighty steed) are placed in a longship that is set alight and carried away on the tide, thus fulfilling the curse of the gold.

I have described Lang’s version of the tale in some detail to suggest the captivating hold it must have had over the young Tolkien’s imagination, and to draw out parallels with his later writing and with the work of his followers. A Tolkien buff will immediately recognize some of the contours of the tragic tale of Túrin Turambar here. Túrin attacks the fearsome Dragon Glaurung as it passes over him, and his assault is alluded to in The Lord of the Rings when Sam stands beneath Shelob, raising the sword Sting above his head as she impetuously impales herself upon the blade. Likewise, the complicated love interest is reflected in Túrin’s own relationships, although these are, catastrophically, incestuous, and also influenced by the tale of Kullervo in the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. The roasting of the heart, the slaying of Regin, the love triangle Sigurd– Brynhild–Gudrun, and Gunnar’s disguising of Sigurd are dark materials for a children’s tale, but they are part of an overall theme of masking, shifting appearances and multiple identities, concealment, and deceit. The story thus hinges on revelation and recognition – not least through the strange, unearthly language of birds – and on the fallout from slaying a Dragon. The cursed ring from the Dragon’s hoard is the key actor in this legend: it is both a prized treasure and a wedding band that brings misfortune to those who possess it; it is as if the ring has an inimical sentience. The long shadow of ‘The Story of Sigurd’ thus reaches not only into the comfort of Bag End, but as far as the self-destructive Dragon sickness of Thorin Oakenshield in the film The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). For Tolkien, such memories of reading were sifted and nurtured: they are a conscious and deliberately constructed personal history of language, landscape, letters, and legends – a shorthand for the formation of his character. This is not to say that they are false memories, but rather that his recollection is selective – if forgivable – selfmythologization.

In 1900, Tolkien passed the entrance exam to King Edward’s School, then housed in an imposing mediaevalist Gothic Revival building designed by Charles Barry, the architect responsible for the Palace of Westminster, which had been rebuilt in the three decades following 1840.19 As it was a four-mile journey to school, the Tolkiens regrettably left Sarehole for Moseley, a district of Birmingham near the railway. It was a ghastly move after four years in the countryside. There followed an unsettled period moving house and moving school, a period of home-schooling from his mother, and eventually a return to King Edward’s on a scholarship. Tolkien remembered that he was stimulated by the unfamiliar languages that now entered his life: he had his First Communion in Latin, he pondered the Welsh names painted on coal trucks that passed on the train tracks, and at King Edward’s he was introduced to Greek: ‘The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter captivated me. But part of the attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness (from me): it did not touch home.’20 Again, displacement and dislocation, and the lure of enigmatic meaning.

Then, in 1904, his mother became diabetic and died in November of the same year. It was a devastating blow; Ronald was just twelve years old. He and Hilary were taken under the care of Father Francis Xavier Morgan – an ebullient half-Welsh, half Anglo-Spanish pastor of the Birmingham Oratory – and lodged with a Suffield aunt.21 The two brothers spent most of their home time at the Oratory, where nearly every morning they served Mass before Fr Francis provided breakfast as they played with the Oratory cat.

At school, Tolkien immersed himself in language and literature. He read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and his English teacher introduced him to Anglo-Saxon and the epic poem Beowulf; he also taught himself Old Norse so he could now read of Sigurd and Fafnir, Brynhild and Gudrun in the original languages. Perhaps fancifully, Tolkien felt that Anglo-Saxon (and the later poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl in particular) was part of his West Midlands Suffield literary inheritance – but of course he was a young orphan seeking identity (or identities), and he seems to have found considerable solace in words and language. Words held a magic for him – they were the rich remains of previous epochs, carrying the history of the region, imbued with the cultures and values of the past, and at the same time the most sophisticatedly modern medium of thought and communication. And his memories of his mother were rooted in learning language.

While his best friend Christopher Wiseman was teaching himself Egyptian hieroglyphics, Tolkien had discovered the Gothic language in 1908 or 1909 via Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language. Little of Gothic survives – there is, for instance, no poetry – but it nevertheless stirred in him ‘a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer’.22 Tolkien also found the Gothic script beautiful, and enjoyed writing Gothicized inscriptions; and, undaunted by the lost vocabulary and literary culture, he simply invented missing Gothic words and ultimately wrote his own Gothic poetry. King Edward’s held an annual debate conducted in Latin, but Tolkien also addressed the assembly in Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and Gothic, displaying an extraordinary linguistic fluency, and, not content with languages ancient and modern, he began to invent his own. The first of these invented languages was perhaps a three-page letter in pictorial code to Fr Francis, but he also worked with his cousin Mary on Nevbosh, a ‘New Nonsense’ language, and then on a language based on Latin and Spanish he named Naffarin. In his last months at King Edward’s he discovered Finnish and the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, which would provide the foundations of another new language he would call Qenya, which he worked to perfect throughout his life.

At school, Tolkien enjoyed the male camaraderie of small clubs, forming the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, or T.C.B.S., named after a favoured tearoom at Barrow’s Stores where he would meet with his three closest friends. They debated and gave readings – Tolkien typically introducing his companions to Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Völsunga Saga. He was also a corporal in the school’s Officers’ Training Corps (the cadets), and sufficiently highly thought of to be one of eight King Edward’s cadets selected to attend the coronation of George V. By his final year at King Edward’s Tolkien was a Prefect, a Librarian, the House [Rugby] Football Captain, [Rugby] Football Secretary, Secretary of the Debating Society, an editor of the King Edward’s School Chronicle, and an actor in various school plays (including Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals, performed after his first term at university); he also received several school prizes. He was remarkably involved in the school and exceptionally industrious in his work. Any spare time not devoted to invented languages was spent painting or writing poetry. His earliest dated poem was written in March 1910, inspired by reading the poems of the Roman Catholic opium addict and one-time outcast Francis Thompson, of whom he was an ardent admirer, and also by seeing a stage production of Peter Pan in April 1910, which ‘I shall never forget . . . as long as I live’.23 Some of his poems were published in the school magazine, along with his reports on school activities and sports. But another form of solace had come with his friendship of Edith Bratt; she too was an orphan and, for a time, had a room in the same house in which Tolkien and his brother lodged. Their friendship rapidly blossomed into romance, necessarily conducted in secret, but news of their clandestine relationship soon reached Fr Francis. At the time, Tolkien was being tutored for a scholarship to study ‘Greats’ (classical Greek and Latin) at Oxford – a scholarship to cover expenses and fees being a necessity for one in Tolkien’s position. Fr Francis was severely disappointed in Tolkien’s behaviour, which he saw as a distraction from his academic studies, and moved the Tolkien brothers to new lodgings. Tolkien and Edith nevertheless continued to meet, leading Fr Francis to forbid contact until Tolkien’s twenty-first birthday, although the two did occasionally contrive to chance upon each other ‘accidentally’.

In 1910 (at his second attempt) Tolkien was awarded an Open Classical Exhibition to Exeter College, Oxford – an Exhibition providing less financial support, but, with an additional bursary from his school and the help of Fr Francis, it was sufficient to enable Tolkien to attend. He duly took up his place in 1911, reading Greats (or Literae Humaniores, as Classics at Oxford is known). There, in addition to his lectures and tutorials in ancient Greek and Latin languages, literature, history, and philosophy, he was tutored by Joseph Wright in Comparative Philology – Wright being the author of the Gothic Primer that had so enthralled Tolkien. He also attended Mass regularly, continued writing poetry (some of which was published in magazines), learnt to ride with a territorial cavalry regiment, and began teaching himself Finnish and Welsh. Clubbable as ever, Tolkien formed a literary society – the Apolausticks – and served as its first President, before this group transformed into the Chequers Clubbe.24 In the meantime he was elected to the Exeter College Essay Club (becoming President in his third year) and the Stapledon Society (the JCR, or undergraduate student body, of which he became President in his second year, and Secretary in his third year). He sometimes got involved in high-spirited student escapades, including taking and driving a bus full of excitable students around the centre of Oxford, and entertaining the Stapledon Society one evening who ‘listened with breathless interest to the respectively frolicsome, frivolous and fearful adventures which had befallen Messrs. Tolkien, Robinson and Wheway’.25 Notwithstanding this, he also won the college Skeat Prize for English in 1914, with which he bought William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings (Morris, coincidentally, having been an undergraduate at Exeter sixty years previously). During the vacations he painted, and at Christmas wrote and performed in little seasonal plays. He also travelled: in the summer of 1913 Tolkien was employed to take two Mexican boys being schooled in England to Paris to join family members, and to act as their tutor. Sadly, though, the trip proved to be highly traumatic as one of the boys’ aunts was killed in a traffic accident and Tolkien, not especially fluent in French or Spanish, had to make the arrangements to have her body repatriated to Mexico. The experience did little to warm him to the French or French bureaucracy.

Halfway through the second year of his four-year degree Tolkien was faced with university exams (Honour Moderations), which he not only needed to pass in order to remain at Oxford, but pass sufficiently well to retain the award of his Exhibition. His performance was frankly poor, only just placing him in the Second Class cohort, but he produced an exceptional paper in Comparative Philology – his saving grace. This led the college to recommend Tolkien switch courses to English Language and Literature, which would enable him to focus on language, philology, and Old and Middle English; he was also allowed to keep his Exhibition. He now had papers in Anglo-Saxon literature, Middle English literature, Chaucer, Shakespeare, English literary history, the history of the English language, Gothic and Germanic philology, and an optional paper in Scandinavian philology (which included his beloved Völsunga Saga).

In the midst of this in 1913 he came of age at twenty-one years, became independent of Fr Francis, and duly proposed to the staunch Anglican Edith. She would have to convert if they were to marry, and accordingly began taking instruction while Tolkien continued his studies throughout the year, visiting her when he was able to do so. Then came the signal experience of his generation. It was 1914; on 28 June Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, and by 5 August Britain was at war.26

Tolkien was permitted to finish his degree before joining up, although the delay was extremely uncomfortable and incurred family – and public – disapproval. There was an overwhelming expectation that all eligible men would enlist: Tolkien’s brother Hilary as well as many of his undergraduate peers joined up in the weeks immediately following the outbreak of war, many doubtless in response to hectoring propaganda demands to serve one’s country. In the event, Tolkien was able to drill with the Officers’ Training Corps and take classes in signalling in anticipation of enlisting when he completed his studies, even if university life – particularly the meetings of clubs and societies on which he relied for expressing his multifaceted mind – was severely curtailed. Undaunted, by October 1914 Tolkien had begun a translation of the Kullervo episode from the Kalevala, and read a paper on the Finnish epic to the Sundial Society at Corpus Christi College (at the invitation of his T.C.B.S. compadre Geoffrey Bache Smith), and in 1915 also read to the Exeter College Essay Club. The translation of Kullervo was never finished, but later, with the Sigurd story, formed the core of his Middle-Earth ‘Great Tale’ of Túrin Turambar.27 The four members of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society had endeavoured to keep the club active throughout university, and Tolkien spent a weekend before Christmas back together with the group, discussing their hopes and ambitions as writers and artists. Faced with war and the likelihood of one or all of them being killed, the group’s integrity and its role as a catalyst for the creative imagination began to verge on the sacred, especially for Geoffrey Bache Smith. For Tolkien too, this penultimate meeting seems to have drawn his emerging literary world into sharp relief.

By the second half of 1914, Tolkien was writing recognizable Middle-Earth poetry such as ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’, and he had read ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ to the Exeter College Essay Club on 27 November 1914 (see below). Indeed, by 1915 in addition to his undergraduate essays he appears to have been writing or revising poetry or painting regularly – sometimes on a daily basis. It is also worth bearing in mind that Oxford in the early years of the Great War was one of the crucibles of early Modernism and so buzzed with artistic innovation. Tolkien’s immediate undergraduate contemporaries included the immensely tall and near-blind writer Aldous Huxley, whose first collection of poetry was published in 1916. Tolkien also encountered Thomas Wade Earp – a charming, foppish aesthete and promiscuous gay socialite who was already moving in rarefied circles and on his way to becoming a notable art critic. Earp was some sort of cultural force of nature at the time, and it was inevitable that Tolkien would be drawn into his orbit: he was President of the Exeter College Essay Club when Tolkien read ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ in November 1914, and dined with him that evening; they had also debated together.28 Earp was also President of the Psittakoi (the ‘parrots’, founded by the radically minded Classicist E.R. Dodds in 1912), at which Tolkien read a piece of literary criticism in May 1915. T.S. Eliot was also in Oxford in 1914 and 1915, and apparently read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ at a meeting of the Psittakoi – although it is not known whether Tolkien was present on this occasion.29 But Tolkien clearly had a dalliance with the iconoclastic early avant-gardists at a personal level. Moreover, Earp was one of Tolkien’s first publishers: he included the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ in his edited anthology Oxford Poetry 1915, which appeared when Tolkien had already left Oxford and was on basic military training.

Despite being, unfortunately, a sickly piece of fairy verse that Tolkien would later disown, ‘Goblin Feet’ clearly caught the mood of the time and quickly gathered admirers. Fairy verse was a refuge from the war. In May 1916, the charity ‘Good Fairies for Unfortunate Fighters’ sent food parcels to prisoners of war, explaining that ‘soldiers who have fought and suffered for their country, turn to us, like children, for the one small pleasure they are allowed. Beneath the unromantic string and brown paper covering Parcels for Prisoners lies a whole world of dreams and memories.’30 Reproductions of Estella Canziani’s painting Piper of Dreams, or Where the Little Things of the Woodland Live Unseen, which pictured a seated Bombadil-like figure with his back against a tree and playing a pipe while fairies circle around him, sold some quarter of a million copies in 1916, the year in which military conscription was introduced.31

The fashion continued in the aftermath of the conflict. Ruth Fyleman’s Fairies and Chimneys had an edition published for schools each year from 1920 to 1925, and the collections of fairy stories edited by Andrew Lang, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen were republished.32 Cicely Mary Barker’s first book, Flower Fairies of the Spring, was published in 1923; Enid Blyton’s Real Fairies, a book of poems, was published in 1923, and The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies followed in 1924. ‘Goblin Feet’, meanwhile, was later included in the Longmans Book of Fairy Poetry (1920) in the impressively canonical company of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats, and in the popular Fifty New Poems for Children, first published by Basil Blackwell in 1922. As for T.W. Earp, Tolkien later recalled, perhaps with grudging affection, that Earp’s name and behaviour had inspired the mildly disparaging term ‘twerp’ – conceivably in exasperation among contemporaries that Earp was somehow ineligible for military service.33

Tolkien’s last months of undergraduate study culminated in his final ‘Schools’ examinations, which finished on 15 June. He immediately began acquiring his personal military equipment, and on 28 June applied to join the Lancashire Fusiliers on a commission for the duration of the war – his aim being to serve alongside his T.C.B.S. friend Geoffrey Bache Smith. His degree results were published on 2 July: he achieved First Class honours. Tolkien then returned to his poetry and painting, before being commissioned as a second lieutenant and undertaking his basic training at Bedford – meaning that he was forced to delay his graduation until March 1916. He specialized in signalling, which involved a number of devices and skills, from flying flags and launching rockets to learning Morse code and handling carrier pigeons – and he continued to write poetry while in training, planning to publish a volume of fairy poems. He moved to a billet at Lichfield, Staffordshire, and became part-owner of a motorbike so he could visit Edith in Warwickshire, and the T.C.B.S. met for the last time. During his training at Brocton Camp, near Lichfield, Tolkien and Edith were hurriedly married on 22 March 1916, and honeymooned for a week in Somerset. Warwickshire and Oxford were by now woven into the rich, ever-evolving tapestry of his imaginative creation, and after the newly-weds visited Cheddar Gorge that too joined those other, quintessentially English locations in his mind.

Tolkien left for France on 6 June 1916. There was little time or opportunity for writing, although he did take notebooks with him. He later commented: ‘You might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket, but that’s all. You couldn’t write. You’d be crouching down among fleas and filth.’34 It wasn’t actually quite all – he did write some poems, and he could still muse over and map out his legendary histories so that when he came to write them down they already had the mnemonic contours of oft-told tales.

Within the month, Tolkien’s unit were marching to the frontline, and on 1 July the Battle of the Somme commenced; nearly 20,000 Allied servicemen were killed on that first day. Tolkien himself was in the thick of the offensive, often living in dugouts and trenches. News then came that Robert Quilter Gilson, one of the T.C.B.S., had been killed. Although Tolkien himself escaped injury, by 27 October he was sick with Trench Fever (a debilitating louse-borne disease caused by the bacterium Bartonella quintana) and was sent behind the lines to a Red Cross hospital, before being shipped back to Britain in November and admitted to a makeshift ward at the University of Birmingham (nominated 1st Southern General Hospital). Within a month Geoffrey Bache Smith had died of shrapnel wounds; the T.C.B.S. had been reduced to two surviving members: Christopher Wiseman, who was serving in the Royal Navy, and Tolkien.

Tolkien’s recovery was slow, and perhaps while still in the 1st Southern General Hospital, he began The Book of Lost Tales, his first legendary cycle, and reworked the language Qenya by placing its origins in another invented language, Primitive Eldarin. Primitive Eldarin also gave rise to a third language, Goldogrin (later called Sindarin), which was elaborated with a grammar and a lexicon, and Tolkien began writing copious notes to add depth to his imagined territories, histories, and lore. Edith helped by transcribing the texts of Lost Tales from Tolkien’s drafts into ‘fair copy’ as his productivity increased and his legendarium became deeper and more complex.35 Tolkien was frequently transferred around the country, but they were often able to stay together. At one point in June 1917 the young couple visited a wood together and Edith danced among the hemlock. The scene made a profound impact on Tolkien: he was to recreate it in the key ‘Great Tale’ of Beren and Lúthien, the otherworldly love story that was the tale closest to his heart. It is usually overlooked that Edith was expecting their first child when she danced and was nearing the end of her first trimester, so was perhaps beginning to be visibly pregnant. Against the backdrop of the Great War and Tolkien’s persistent illness, this brings an extraordinary poignancy and sense of hope and the future to the scene.

Their first son, John, was born in November; a week later Tolkien received promotion to full lieutenant. The next year was much the same: light duties, frequent repostings, but also recurrent relapses with a sometimes shocking deterioration in his condition (in August 1918, for instance, he lost nearly two stone in weight). Tolkien nevertheless continued to write and paint, wrote an introduction to the poems of Geoffrey Bache Smith (published as A Spring Harvest in June or July of 1918), and began learning Russian and practising his Italian and Spanish. Apart from a period of some two months when he was assessed as fit for general duties and sent to the Humber Garrison, Tolkien stayed in Britain for the remainder of the war, convalescing or on light duties and training, eventually being deemed fit only for sedentary employment. He returned to Oxford with Edith and John, and began working for the Oxford English Dictionary as a lexicographer. Within a few days, on 11 November 1918, the war ended.

Tolkien’s work for the OED (which lasted until May 1920) included entries for wake and walrus, but more significantly his immersion back in academic philology stimulated him to refine further his invented language Qenya alongside further work on The Book of Lost Tales.36 Yet within six months he had abandoned the book, his first sustained attempt at a legendarium. This may have been partly in consequence of reading William Blake’s prophetic books for the first time, as in their calligraphy, illustrations, and mythic narrative scope he must have seen the remarkable congruence of Blake’s work with his own ambitions, as well as the heights to which he might – must – aspire. In addition to working on the Dictionary