Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth

eyes: in reality they are angels under ‘God Almighty, the creator who dwells without the world’. Although Tolkien later refined this religious element, and in The Lord of the Rings made it all but invisible to the inattentive eye, he never removed it from his conception of Middle-earth.
    The religious dimension helps to explain how the elves could come to ‘teach men song and holiness’. Tolkien’s conviction at this time appears not to have been far different from the view he propounded later in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’: that although myths and fairy-tales contradicted the Christian story, they were not lies. Because they were the work of human beings ‘subcreating’ in emulation of their own Creator, he felt that they must contain seeds of the truth. The idea was not entirely new, and had been expressed the other way round by G. K. Chesterton in his 1908 essay ‘The Ethics of Elfland’: ‘ I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.’ Before Christ, in Tolkien’s benighted Aryador, myth and Faërie would have been as close to that truth as the wandering peoples of Europe could attain. The Elvish religious mission, then, can be seen as a metaphor for the enlightening impact of fairy-stories.
    In literal terms, however, the Elves come from Kôr, which abuts the land of the Valar: they have lived alongside the angels. Tolkien’s synthesis of human supernatural beliefs is staggeringly ambitious. Habbanan, which also borders Valinor, is the place ‘where all roads end however long’ this side of Heaven itself. It is a vision, perhaps, to console those facing death: the Christian purgatory seen through a faëry glass.
There on a sudden did my heart perceive
    That they who sang about the Eve,
    Who answered the bright-shining stars
    With gleaming music of their strange guitars,
    These were His wandering happy sons
    Encamped upon those aëry leas
    Where God’s unsullied garment runs
    In glory down His mighty knees.

SEVEN
Larkspur and Canterbury-bells
    It was the darkest hour of the war so far for Tolkien. So it was for the Allies too. France had been bleeding at Verdun for fifteen pitiless weeks. Ireland, meanwhile, was simmering after the failed Easter Rising against British rule. But on Saturday 3 June 1916, newspapers proclaimed the biggest blow so far to British self-confidence. The Grand Fleet had finally met the German navy in battle and, it seemed at first, had got the worst of it.
    Guiltily, Christopher Wiseman had come to enjoy life aboard his vast ‘Dreadnought’ warship, much of it spent at anchor in Scapa Flow . The Navy breed were contemptuous of landlubbers like himself; he was teetotal, whereas many of the officers seemed to live for drink; and they spoke without moving their lips. But there were occasional trips to the town of Kirkwall on Orkney or, weather permitting, rounds of golf on the tiny island of Flotta. Once, indulging his passion for archaeology, Wiseman led an expedition to explore the prehistoric barrow of Maes Howe. Teaching was also becoming something of a hobby, even though the trainee midshipmen in his care, colourfully known as ‘snotties’, proved intractable. He taught them mathematics, mechanics, and navigation, but like a true TCBSian he also tried to plug the gap in their literary education. ‘The Snotty,’ he told Tolkien, ‘is the stupidest boy in existence, and withal the most conceited. However, I like them all very much…’ Occasionally the Superb would sweep the North Sea up to Norway, but the Germans were never to be seen: the naval blockade was working, and the sole danger seemed to be boredom.
    But on 31 May 1916, the 101st day of the Battle of Verdun, Germany’s High Seas Fleet ventured out of port and Britain’s Grand Fleet took the bait, racing out from Scapa Flow to meet them off the coast of Denmark.