Notes

Abbreviations and short titles used in notes

See bibliography for full details of books and papers. Where no author is given (except in the cases of Artist, Biography, and Family Album), the author is JRRT.

Correspondence dates in square brackets are those established by the author, sometimes tentatively, where a date is not given or is clearly in error.

Prologue

p.3

Rugby match: RQG to MCG, 30 November 1913; ‘a beaten pack’, match details: undated report, KESC, March 1914, 11-12.

p.4

JRRT ill: KESC, March 1914, 9.

CLW’s health and sport: KESC, December 1912, 86.

CLW’s musicianship (and his settings for ‘Sing we the King’ and ‘Trull’): Lightwood, The Music of the Methodist Hymn Book, 94-5, 398.

p.5

JRRT and CLW: CLW memoir, OEG. Their disputes: CLW to JRRT, 15 November 1914. Great Twin Brotherhood and Trought: ibid.; JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

Librarianship: CLW to JRRT, 27 April 1911.

Literary papers: KESC, March 1911, 19-20; April 1912, 28; July 1910, 79; December 1910, 92.

‘almost the last word’: CLW to JRRT, 27 October 1915.

p.6

Campaign against cynics: CLW to JRRT, 10 November 1914, 27 October 1915, 1 March 1916.

Light-hearted TCBS: CLW to JRRT, 5 June 1913, 10 November 1914.

1911, ‘the sweltering town populations…’: Ensor, 442.

p.7

KESC does not list T. K. Barnsley among the TCBS, probably because it only lists prefects.

Barnsley and GBS agree to play: RQG to MCG, 30 November 1913; TKB’s expressions: ibid., 17 and 22 February 1914.

p.8

‘’Twas a good road…’: unsigned KESC Editorial, July 1911, 53.

Four dead: the fourth was JRRT’s full-back, George Morley Smith.

pp.8-9

War dead: J. M. Winter, 1986, 92-9.

ONE Before

pp.11-12

Life up to 1910: Biography, 9-49.

‘If your first Christmas tree…’: 1964 interview with Denis Gueroult, BBC Sound Archives.

pp.12-13

Drawing: Priestman, 9, 12, 19; Letters, 377.

p.13

Handwriting: Biography, 18, 21, 57; Priestman, 8-10; Artist, 201; Letters, 377.

‘I was brought up…’: Letters, 172.

Reading: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 134-5; Letters, 311; read

‘too much…’: Mabel Tolkien, Biography, 28.

Poetry: Biography, 47-8; Letters, 213.

pp.13-14

JRRT on Francis Thompson: Stapeldon Society minutes, 4 March 1914.

p.14

‘Wood-sunshine’: excerpted in Biography, 47.

TCBS and Pre-Raphaelites: CLW to GBS, 30 August 1916.

‘It seemed rather as if words…’: Biography, 22.

‘The fluidity…’: ‘English and Welsh’, Monsters, 191.

pp.14-16

Languages: ‘English and Welsh’, Monsters, 191-2; Letters, 213-14, 357.

p.15

Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary: Bodleian Tolkien E16/8.

p.16

School record: KES class lists.

‘quite a great authority…’: RQG to MCG, 22 May 1914; RQG to EK, 10 March 1916.

‘the highest epic genius…’: KESC, March 1911, 19-20.

p.17

‘Reading Homer…’: CLW memoir, OEG. Language invention and friendship: CLW to JRRT, 10 November 1914, and Mrs Patricia Wiseman in conversation with the author.

‘It’s not uncommon…’: interview excerpted in Sibley, Audio Portrait.

‘serve the needs…’: ‘A Secret Vice’, Monsters, 201.

Gautisk: Parma Eldalamberon 12, iv, x-xi; advice from Arden R. Smith.

Sobriquets (footnote): RQG to JRRT 4 October 1911 and 21 March 1913.

p.18

The Peace: KESC, October 1911, 72; Biography, 49; the Greek Plays: William H. Tait in OEG, June 1972, 17; The Clouds: KESC, October 1912, 66. GBS as the Ass: KES photograph of The Frogs [July 1913].

‘As a boy…’ (C. V. L. Lycett); TCBS not aloof: Letters, 429.

Nicknames: CLW to JRRT, 27 April and 17 August 1911, 19 March and 20 November 1912; CLW memoir, OEG.

p.19

Classical tags (footnote): KESC, March 1909, March 1910, March 1911.

‘My dear Gabriel’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 27 April 1911. ‘gracing our ancestral hearth’, etc.: RQG to JRRT, 10 June 1913.

‘a daft slang…’: J. B. Priestley, The Edwardians, 82.

p.20

Macaulay’s ‘The Battle of Lake Regillus’: Yates, ‘“The Battle of the Eastern Field”: A Commentary’, Mallorn 13, 3-5.

‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’: KESC, March 1911, 22-7; ‘Sekhet, the lion-headed’: Haggard, She, 281.

p.21

‘Our country is now supreme…’: KESC, February 1909, 9.

‘hooliganism and uproar’; foreign policy: Stapledon Society minutes, 1 December and 7 November 1913.

‘Court of Arbiters’ debate: KESC, February 1911, 5.

p.22

Debate demanding war: KESC, October 1911, 79.

KES anthem, by Alfred Hayes (1857-1936): Trott, No Place for Fop or Idler, 1; The Annotated Hobbit, 344.

p.23

A good shot: Priscilla and Michael Tolkien, quoted in an unsigned report, Amon Hen 13, October 1974, 9.

OTC presented to the King: KESC, November 1910, 69, 73.

‘kindled an immovable smile’: unsigned editorial, KESC, June 1911, 33.

Footnote on Adfuit omen: T. A. Shippey to the author.

Coronation trip: KESC, July 1911, 59-60; Letters, 391 (which says the party was twelve-strong).

pp.23-4

Aldershot camp: KESC, November 1910, 69.

p.24

Tidworth Pennings camp: William H. Tait in OEG, June 1972, 17.

pp.24-5

King Edward’s Horse: James, The History of King Edward’s Horse, 1-53; The Stapeldon Magazine, December 1911, 117-18; JRRT service record.

JRRT and horses: Priscilla and Michael Tolkien, quoted in Amon Hen 13, 9. (The unsigned report says erroneously that Tolkien began his war service in King Edward’s Horse.)

p.25

‘In fact we have done nothing…’: unsigned ‘Oxford Letter’, KESC, December 1911, 100.

‘predominant vice…’: CLW to JRRT, 27 April 1911; ‘Very lazy’: Lorise Topliffe, ‘Tolkien as an Undergraduate’, Exeter College Association Register, 32.

‘a winger…’: The Stapeldon Magazine, December 1911, 110-11. ‘immensely attracted…’: Letters, 214. The popular edition that JRRT read was W. F. Kirby’s.

Kalevala overdue: RQG to JRRT, 4 October 1911.

p.26

Eliot’s Finnish Grammar was the first written in the English language. JRRT borrowed it from 25 November to 5 December 1911, 25 October to 5 December 1912, and 14 November 1914 to 16 January 1915 (Exeter College library register).

‘It was like discovering…’: Letters, 214. Kullervo: begun 1912 to 1913, according to Letters, 214-15, but ibid. 7 shows that Tolkien was still working on it in October 1914.

‘hurrying and febrile…’: Priestley, The Edwardians, 218.

Brooke and Housman: Parker, The Old Lie, 94.

p.27

Emily Annie Gilson’s death: KESC, June 1907, 36. Thomas Smith, commercial clerk: Corpus Christi Biographical Register 1880-1974.

‘The passing of certain…’, etc.: RQG to JRRT, 4 October 1911. ‘the old shrine’: CLW to JRRT, 19 March 1912.

Mock strike; ‘induce the Library…’: KESC, October 1911, 70, 73.

The Rivals: KESC, March 1912, 14; Biography, 57-8.

p.28

Trought’s death; ‘Poor old Vincent…’: CLW to JRRT, 21 and 22 January 1912.

Trought’s character; ‘some of his verses…’, etc.: KESC, March 1912, 4.

p.29

‘Ishnesses’: Artist, 34-40. Those named here were produced between December 1911 and summer 1913.

pp.29-30

Farnell: Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back; Letters, 7. His magnum opus was The Cults of the Greek States (1896-1909).

p.30

‘People couldn’t make out…’: interview excerpted in Sibley, Audio Portrait.

Joseph Wright: Letters, 397. Wright’s Comparative Grammar of the Greek Language was published in January 1912.

RCG had expected a First from JRRT: RQG to JRRT, 27 April 1913.

Farnell and German culture: Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 57.

Switch in courses: Letters, 397, 406.

‘I envy you Smith…’: CLW to JRRT, 20 November 1912.

GBS on King Arthur: KESC, February 1913, 5-6.

‘We have managed to relieve…’: RQG to JRRT, 2 November 1913.

‘I am very anxious to breathe…’: CLW to JRRT, 12 December 1913. CLW presumably refers to JRRT’s planned visit to Cambridge with GBS on 4 December (RQG to MCG, 30 November 1913).

Rugby match: undated report, KESC, March 1914, 11-12. ‘We had such a splendid week-end…’: RQG to MCG, 17 February 1914. Scopes, like GBS, was studying history at Corpus Christi.

p.33

‘The only fear…’: CLW to JRRT, 20 December 1913, written during a visit from GBS. ‘Convention bids me…’: RQG to JRRT, 4 January 1914, written when RQG had just received a summons from GBS to a TCBS meeting. There is no evidence for the view (Biography, 68) that JRRT wrote directly to RQG and CLW with news of his engagement. JRRT’s fear of being cut off from TCBS: GBS to JRRT, 9 February 1916.

p.34

‘hoard the hill-haunter…’: JRRT’s undergraduate translation from the Latin Gesta Danorum, by the twelfth-century Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus; Bodleian Tolkien A21/5.

Speculations on Germanic legend: Bodleian Tolkien A21/9. JRRT on Norse sagas: The Stapeldon Magazine, June 1913, 276.

Skeat Prize: The Monsters and the Critics, 192; Biography, 69. J. Morris Jones’s Welsh Grammar was published in 1913.

p.36

‘the images drawn…’; ‘One must begin with the elfin…’: Essay Club minutes.

‘international affairs…’: The Stapeldon Magazine, June 1914, 93.

p.37

Prince Lichnowsky: Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 327-8. Sexcentenary dinner: The Stapeldon Magazine, June 1914, 44-5.

Chequers Club ‘Binge’: Priestman, Life and Legend, 25-6.

‘All our festivities…’: L. R. Farnell, ‘Sexcentenary Celebration of the College’, in The Stapeldon Magazine, December 1914, 109.

TWO A young man with too much imagination

p.38

‘A real taste…’: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 135.

‘I sense amongst all your pains…’: Letters, 78.

p.39

Language experiments around the outbreak of war: JRRT headed one 1914 college notebook (Bodleian Tolkien A21/10) ‘Toleka, Oksuortia’, a rendering of his name and university in what looks like a nascent form of his 1915 invention, Qenya. Christopher Gilson has pointed out to the author that if -eka translates -kien (cognate with English ‘keen’), the name Toleka may reflect the emergence of the Qenya root EKE (Parma Eldalamberon 12, 35, with derivatives referring to sharp objects such as swords and thorns), perhaps inspired by Old English ecg, ‘edge’, and Old High German ekka. If Tolkien was on the path towards Qenya now, its true codification, however, did not take place until 1915. ‘But yet a pride is ours…’: GBS, ‘Anglia Valida in Senectute’, A Spring Harvest, 50.

p.40

Cornish drawings: Artist, 24-5.

‘The light got very “eerie”’, etc.: Biography, 70-1.

pp.40-1

Birmingham recruitment: Carter, Birmingham Pals, 35-42.

‘Patriotism insists…’: Birmingham Daily Post, 28 August 1914, quoted in ibid. 36.

p.41

T. K. Barnsley, RQG, and the Old Edwardian recruits: RQG to EK, 4 October 1914.

Hilary Tolkien enlists: Family Album, 39; Biography, 72; Heath, Service Record of King Edward’s School, 143. ‘In those days chaps joined up…’: Letters, 53.

p.42

Saxon paternal ancestry: Letters, 218; cf. Biography, 18-19. Germanic tribes: Bodleian Tolkien A21/10.

‘that noble northern spirit…’: Letters, 55-6.

Wright and the wounded Germans: E. M. Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright, ii. 459.

‘I have been accustomed…’: Letters, 37.

‘As the long prosperous years…’: Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 24.

p.43

‘full of old lays…’: ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’, Poems and Stories, 79.

‘though as a whole…’: KESC, March 1911, 19-20.

‘man at war…’: ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Monsters, 18.

‘a young man…’: Letters, 53.

‘I have nothing to say against Tolkien…’: C. H. Jessop to Stephen Gateley, Family Album, 34.

‘He did not join the Army…’: RQG to EK, 10 March 1916.

p.44

‘a lamentable bore’, etc.: JRRT to Paul Bibire, 30 June 1969, in Hostetter, introduction to ‘The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor’, Vinyar Tengwar 42, 6-7.

‘Eala Earendel…’: Grein/Wülcker, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, 5. During this crucial period (19 June to 14 October 1914) Tolkien also borrowed Earle’s The Deeds of Beowulf and Morris’s Old English Miscellany; Exeter College library register.

‘I felt a curious thrill…’: ‘The Notion Club Papers’, Sauron Defeated, 236; see also 285, notes 35 and 36, and Letters, 385.

p.45

‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’: LT2, 267-9; date clarified by Douglas A. Anderson.

‘over the cup…’, etc.: JRRT’s undergraduate translation from Beowulf, line 1208, Bodleian Tolkien A21/9; ‘magnificent expression’, he remarked.

Éarendel and OE ēar: Hostetter, ‘Over Middle-earth Sent Unto Men’, Mythlore 65, 5-10. See also Hostetter and Smith, ‘A Mythology for England’, Proceedings of the JRR Tolkien Centenary Conference, 282.

p.48

‘We are of course very mad…’: RQG to MCG, 7 October 1914. JRRT at the Oratory: Letters, 7.

Birmingham battalions: Carter, Birmingham Pals, 45-7, 63-4.

Despair: Biography, 30.

‘the collapse of all my world’: Letters, 393.

‘It is awful…’: Biography, 72.

pp.48-9

Wartime Oxford: Winter, ‘Oxford and the First World War’, 3-18. Exeter College: The Stapeldon Magazine, December 1914, 103-5.

p.49

‘the Johnner’: CLW to JRRT, 8 December 1916.

Undergraduate activities: Stapeldon Society minutes, 20 October 1914 (letters of support, ‘lowering clouds…’); 27 October (sub-rector, the Superman); 3 November (spelling reform, ‘no doubt…economising…’); 17 November 1914 (stringent economy).

pp.49-50

The Yser: Strachan, The First World War, i. 276. Orange Free State: ibid. 553.

p.50

Exonians and the university OTC: The Stapeldon Magazine, December 1914, 120.

‘We had a drill…’: Letters, 7.

Milton and Dante: RQG to MCG, 22 June 1913.

Rifles taken away: RQG to MCG, 5 November 1914.

‘Oxford “sleepies”’, etc.: Biography, 73.

Kalevala: Letters, 7, and Biography, 73.

p.51

Defence of nationalism: Stapeldon Society minutes, 17 November 1914.

‘I don’t defend “Deutschland über alles”…’: JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

Inherited linguistic aptitude: Letters, 213.

‘I am indeed…’: Letters, 218.

p.52

‘in a speech attempting…’ etc.: KESC, December 1910, 95.

‘The mythological ballads…’: Biography, 59. JRRT on ‘The Finnish National Epic’: Sundial Society minutes.

Essay Club meeting: Letters, 7-8.

p.53

GBS on ‘Éarendel’; ‘I don’t know…’: Biography, 75.

‘Earendel’s boat…’: LT2, 261-3. The only invented names (Kôr, Solosimpë, Eldamar) were additions; apart from these the plot outline certainly predates JRRT’s first onomastic experiments of 1915.

THREE The Council of London

p.54

GBS visits Cambridge; ‘Tolkien was to come too…’, etc.: RQG to MCG, 1 November 1914.

pp.54-5

Humorous styles of Barrowclough, CLW, and GBS: KESC, June 1912, 39-40. ‘a gift for rapping out…’: RQG to MCG, 1 November 1914. ‘I played Rugger yesterday…’: GBS to JRRT, 16 November 1916.

pp.55-6

Rift in TCBS: CLW to JRRT, 10 November (‘I should only go there…’, etc.), 15 November (‘I tell you, when I had finished…’, etc.), and 16 November 1914 (‘TCBS über alles’); JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914 (‘alien spirit’, etc.).

p.56

RQG enlists; fears missing ‘Council’: RQG to MCG, 6 and

10 December 1914. CLW delays enlisting: CLW to Dr Peter Liddle.

RCG urges delay: RQG to EK, 4 October 1914.

p.57

F. L. Lucas; ‘He is not at all the sort…’, etc.: RQG to MCG, 9 November 1914.

GBS undisciplined: GBS to JRRT, 12 January 1916.

‘much more like a fish…’: RQG to MCG, 6 December 1914.

GBS enlists: GBS service record; Heath, Service Record of King Edward’s School, 133.

‘Ave Atque Vale’ later appeared in Smith, A Spring Harvest, 53-4.

p.58

Cherry Hinton: RQG to MCG, 10 December 1914.

Wiseman hilarity: RQG to MCG, 26 April 1914.

pp.58-9

Council of London: RQG to JRRT, 1 March 1915 (‘absolutely undistracted…’, ‘I never spent…’); Letters, 10 (‘the inspiration that…’, ‘the hope and ambitions…’); Biography, 73. CLW memoir, OEG, says erroneously that the last TCBS meeting was ‘The Council of London…in the summer of 1914 in our house in Routh Road’. (They met again in Lichfield later in 1915.)

TCBS and ‘allowable distance apart’: JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

p.59

Kullervo: Letters, 214-15.

A poet: Biography, 73.

‘I sat on the ruined margin…’: March 1915 version (‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’), Artist, 45-6, 66. Later, JRRT recalled writing versions of this poem as early as 1910; The Shaping of Middle-earth, 214-15.

p.60

‘That Council…’: Letters, 10.

The Land of Pohja: Artist, 44-5.

Skeat’s Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Eliot’s Finnish Grammar (14 November 1914 to 16 January 1915): Exeter College library register.

Studied Finnish for sake of Qenya: Letters, 214.

Birth of Qenya: Parma Eldalamberon 12, iii-v.

‘an entirely different mythological world’: ‘A Secret Vice’, Monsters, 218; Letters, 345.

p.61

liri- and cognates (footnote): Parma Eldalamberon 12, 54.

pp.61-3

Qenya sound-shift ‘laws’: ibid. 3-28; vocabulary: ibid., 29-106.

p.63

‘I have quite lost now…’: RQG to MCG, 13 February 1915.

Hardships of training: ibid., December 1914 to March 1915.

‘My whole endurance…’, etc.; JRRT urged to visit Cambridge: RQG to JRRT, 1 March 1915; CLW to JRRT, 2 March 1915.

Ultimatum: RQG, CLW, and GBS to JRRT, 6 March 1915.

‘When we sent…’: CLW to JRRT, 11 March 1915.

pp.63-4

Confidence on English course: Biography, 63.

p.64

Vacation work: ‘Middle English Texts’, Bodleian Tolkien A21/6. JRRT borrowed vol. ii of Skeat’s Chaucer and Morris’s Old English Miscellany, a set text; Exeter College library register.

‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’: The Shaping of Middle-earth, 214.

JRRT’s poems circulate: GBS to JRRT [27 March 1915]; RQG to JRRT, 31 March 1915; CLW to JRRT, 15 April 1915.

GBS and ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’: Biography, 75. Eärendel ‘fragments’: GBS to JRRT [27 March 1915].

Georgian Poetry: GBS to JRRT [14 May, 25 June, 9 July 1915]. ‘good authors’; JRRT’s poems ‘amazingly good’: GBS to JRRT [22 March 1915]. GBS urges simplicity: ibid. [27 March 1915]. Conservative perplexity at JRRT’s Romanticism: ibid., 9 February 1916.

Wade-Gery: Barlow, Salford Brigade, 75, 79.

pp.64-5

Wade-Gery on JRRT’s poetry: GBS to JRRT [25 March 1915].

p.65

‘Lo! young we are…’: Biography, 74.

pp.65-6

‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon’: A Northern Venture, 17-20 (a close variant in LT1 204-6 is later; Hammond with Anderson, Bibliography, 247, 283). Favoured by GBS and Wade-Gery: GBS to JRRT [22 and 25 March 1915].

‘The man in the moon…’ (trad.): Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 346.

p.67

‘Glastonbury’: A Spring Harvest, 13-23. ‘the most TCBSian mosaic…’; sent to JRRT: GBS to JRRT [14 March]; [25 March 1915].

Abortive Oxford meeting: CLW to JRRT, 31 March and 5, 13, and 15 April 1915; GBS to JRRT, 13 April 1915.

GBS’s transfer: ibid., and GBS to JRRT [19 or 26 April 1915] (‘think often of the TCBS…’); Army List May 1915. It probably took place on 10 May 1915, the start of the second of his two army payroll periods (GBS service record). ‘You can be sure…’, etc.: GBS to JRRT [19 or 26 April 1915].

p.68

‘other literary Oxford lights’, etc.: RQG to Mrs Cary Gilson, 12 September 1915.

Origin of 3rd Salford Pals: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 99.

pp.68-9

Lancashire Fusiliers up to the landing of the 1st Battalion at Gallipoli: Barlow, Salford Brigade, pp. 15-19.

p.70

‘I can’t think where…’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 25 April 1915.

FOUR The shores of Faërie

p.71

‘Will shall be the sterner…’: ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, in Poems and Stories, 79.

p.72

Rupert Brooke: GBS to JRRT, 10 July 1915.

pp.72-3

‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’: references are to the earliest form, LT1, 27-30.

p.73

‘Indescribable but…’: Biography, 47.

pp.73-4

‘Goblin Feet’: Cole and Earp (eds.), Oxford Poetry 1915, 120-1; excerpted in Biography, 74-5.

pp.74-5

‘Tinfang Warble’: version published in a Catholic journal in Oxford referred to by JRRT as ‘I.U.M.’ (presumably the Inter-university Magazine, the journal of the Federation of University Catholic Societies), 1927, and LT1, 108 (Hammond with Anderson, Bibliography, 344). The earliest, unpublished form was shorter (Douglas A. Anderson to the author).

p.75

‘little one’, etc.: Biography, 67.

‘I wish the unhappy…’: LT1, 32.

Fading of the Elves: LT1, 32, 235; LT2, 142, 159, 281; Morgoth’s Ring, 219, 342.

p.76

‘mistook elves for gnomes…’: CLW to JRRT, 15 April 1915.

‘a strange race…’: MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin, 3.

gnome: Letters, 318, 449; The Peoples of Middle-earth, 76-7; Parma Eldalamberon 12, 67.

‘a little precious’: RWR to JRRT, 2 August 1915. ‘rather spoiled’: ibid., 19 September 1915.

p.77

‘a sort of talisman’: Charlotte Gear and Lionel Lambourne in Martineau (ed.), Victorian Fairy Painting, 153.

‘the war called up…’: Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 279-80.

The play she cites is Britain’s Defenders, or Peggy’s peep into fairyland, a fairy play, Samuel French, 1917, 6.

‘There was a fantastic “scheme”…’: RQG to MCG, 4 March 1915.

‘I should as soon…’: MacDonald, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’, The Complete Fairy Tales, 5.

Recovery, escape and consolation: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 145-54.

p.78

Philanthropist: Frank Pick, commercial manager of London Underground (Hutchinson, London Transport Posters, 21, and plate 16).

‘Unhappily a great many…’: Jellicoe, foreword to Pearce, The Navy Book of Fairy Tales.

pp.78-9

‘Kôr: In a City Lost and Dead’: LT1, 136.

‘Henty, Haggard…’: KESC, October 1911, 73; The Lost Explorers: ibid., July 1912, 17.

p.79

‘I know not how…’: Haggard, She, 262-3.

p.80

‘Kôr’ and Tanaqui: Artist, 47.

Qenya lexicon: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 35, 42, 48.

pp.80-1

Eärendel’s Atlantic voyagings: LT2, 261. The added phrases accord with the early lexicon entries mentioned already, and must date from the same time.

p.81

Qenya lexicon date: Christopher Gilson, ‘Chronology’, Parma Eldalamberon 12, x-xvii, argues that composition began no earlier than spring 1915. A few points may be added that suggest it began no later than April. First, the long loan of Eliot’s Finnish Grammar coincides with the creative breakthrough that followed the December 1914 ‘Council of London’. Second, the poem ‘Kôr’ accords perfectly with the lexicon at the very points where it differs from Haggard. Third, the lexicon was undoubtedly in existence by early July, yet JRRT is less likely to have found time to work on it in May and June than between December 1915 and April. The Shores of Faëry (painting): Artist, 47-8. The poem of the same title that accompanies the painting was probably added in July (Douglas A. Anderson to the author).

Shakespeare: Biography, 27-8; Letters, 88; Shippey, Author of the Century, 192-5.

p.82

Book loans: Exeter College library register.

‘Don’t worry about Schools…’: GBS to JRRT [5 June].

Welsh grammar: ibid. [14 May].

English finalists: The Times, 3 July 1915, 6.

Stainforth certain to take JRRT: GBS to JRRT [10 June 1915].

‘matters Martian’, etc.: GBS to JRRT [19 June 1915].

GBS promoted (on 16 June): The Times, 16 July 1915, 15.

‘Do not be afraid…’: GBS to JRRT [28 June 1915]. To Brough Hall Camp: ibid. [19 June 1915].

pp.82-3

RQG to Lindrick Camp: RQG to MCG, 19 and 22 June 1915.

p.83

‘bolted’: Letters, 53.

Enlistment: JRRT service record.

Schools results: The Times, 3 July 1915, 6. ‘one of the highest distinctions’, etc.: GBS to JRRT [4 July].

With EMB in Warwick: GBS to JRRT [4 July] 1915.

pp.83-4

‘The Shores of Faëry’ (poem): version from the ‘Book of Ishness’, Artist, 48-9. Variants appear in Biography, 76-7, and (alongside evidence for composition date) LT2, 271-2.

‘First poem…’: LT2, 271; start of a ‘Lay of Eärendel’: Biography, 76. Perhaps ‘The Shores of Faëry’ was meant to introduce the already existing ‘Eärendel fragments’.

p.85

Fusion of language and mythology: by contrast, September 1914’s ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ featured aspects of a Tolkienian cosmology but none of the nomenclature that would accompany them later; the name Éarendel was Old English, not Qenya.

‘It was just as…’, etc.: Letters, 231.

‘thought and experience…’: ibid., 144; see also 345.

Wartime rumours: Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 116-24.

pp.85-6

‘Angels of Mons’: ibid., 115-16; Gilbert, First World War, 58. Machen’s ‘The Bowmen’ appeared in the London Evening News on 29 September 1914.

p.86

Wartime language: Strachan, The First World War, i. 142.

Neverland and Valinor: on a copy of ‘The Shores of Faëry’ JRRT wrote much later ‘Valinor [?thought of about] 1910’ (LT2, 271). This was the year he saw Peter Pan; but it seems perhaps too early for the conception of Valinor.

pp.86-7

Guingelot: JRRT stated the influence of this name in a note from 1968 or later (The Peoples of Middle-earth, 371). Cf. The Lays of Beleriand, 143-4. ‘Concerning Wade…’: Thomas Speght, in Skeat’s Complete Works of Chaucer, v. 356-7 (borrowed by JRRT from Exeter College library over Christmas 1914).

‘timbered a boat…’, etc.: Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, i. 376-8; cf. Chambers, Widsith, 95-100, on Wade. For JRRT’s use of Germanic sources, see especially Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth.

p.87

‘and the meaning…’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 11 July 1915. Naval recruitment advertisement: CLW to Dr Peter Liddle.

p.88

‘You have been posted…’: Col. W. Elliot to JRRT, 9 July 1915 (Bodleian Tolkien).

‘I am simply bowled over…’: GBS to JRRT [13 July 1915]. Safer in 13th LF: ibid. [18 July 1915].

To Bedford; allowance: Col. W. Elliot to JRRT (Bodleian Tolkien). ‘All else seems to me…’, etc.: GBS to JRRT [19 June 1915].

FIVE Benighted wanderers

p.89

Report to Col. Tobin: Col. W. Elliot to JRRT (Bodleian Tolkien). At Bedford: Biography, 77. Comfortable: RWR to JRRT, 2 August 1915.

‘philosophick’: GBS to JRRT [22 July 1915]. Chances of transfer; ‘tact, tact, tact’, etc.: ibid. [23 July 1915].

pp.89-91

‘The Happy Mariners’: The Stapeldon Magazine, June 1920 (with ‘Earendel’ where I provide ‘Eärendel’). The 1915 form is unpublished. A 1940 revision appears in LT2, 273-6.

p.91

Waking of the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl: LT1, 15.

pp.91-2

‘Lost Tales’ cosmology and ‘the song of the Sleeper’: ‘The Hiding of Valinor’, in LT1, 215-16.

p.92

‘“The Happy Mariners” was apparently…’: LT2, 274.

pp.92-3

Submissions to Oxford Poetry: GBS to JRRT [23 July 1915]. GBS first proposed to submit verse in May (ibid. [14 May 1915]). In the event it included one poem apiece by JRRT and GBS, and three by Wade-Gery.

p.93

RWR: KESC, December 1921, 24; December 1922, 79-80; obituary, OEG, 1948.

Response to JRRT’s verse: RWR to JRRT, 19 July. Advice on publishing a collection: ibid., 2 August 1915.

p.94

Lichfield units (9th Lincolnshires, 13th and 14th Sherwood Foresters, 14th Manchesters); 50 officers: monthly Army returns.

View of high-ranking officers; ‘Gentlemen are non-existent…’: Biography, 77-8. Contrary to Carpenter’s assertion, this does not mean JRRT disliked the majority of other officers, the subalterns with whom he spent most of his time.

‘All the hot days…’: Letters, 8.

‘What makes it so…’, ‘toad under the harrow’, Fr Reade: Letters, 78. ‘war multiplies…’, ‘men and things’: ibid. 73. ‘a deep sympathy…’: ibid. 54.

p.95

‘It isn’t the tough stuff…’: Letters, 46.

Icelandic: Biography, 78. RQG’s designs: RQG to MCG. ‘early work’, etc.: Letters, 231.

pp.95-6

‘A Song of Aryador’: LT1, 138-9.

Impact of Mercian language and culture on JRRT: see Shippey, Author of the Century, 90-7, and The Road to Middle-earth, 111-16. For Tamworth as the capital of the Middle Kingdom in Farmer Giles of Ham, see ibid. 89.

p.96

Aryador: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 32 (with thanks to Patrick Wynne).

Aryan: Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, 126.

p.97

Gothic source of miruvōrë: JRRT note in Parma Eldalamberon 12, xi.

pp.97-8

‘Iumbo, or ye Kinde of ye Oliphaunt’: one of two poems comprising ‘Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, being The Freaks of Fisiologus’, The Stapeldon Magazine, vii. 40 (June 1927), 125.

p.98

The Irminsûl: Teutonic Mythology, i. 115-19; ‘works of the giants’: ‘Philology: General Works’, in Lee and Boas (eds.), The Year’s Work in English Studies 1923, 21. pelekus, parasu: Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, 122 (with thanks to Bill Welden).

ond: Letters, 410. See Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne, Vinyar Tengwar 30, 8-25.

pp.98-9

‘A Song of Aryador’: LTI, 138-9.

p.100

‘I am really angry with myself…’: RQG to JRRT, 13 September 1915. RQG received poems: ibid., 31 March 1915. Sent them on: CLW to JRRT, 15 April 1915.

RQG declares love for EK: RQG to MCG, 18 April, 10 June, and 17 October 1915. Her father’s warning: Wilson King to RCG, 30 November 1915.

‘a compartmented life’: JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

p.101

‘of course includes your missis’: CLW to JRRT, 4 February 1916.

Silence from RQG: GBS to JRRT [14 May, 28 June and 18 July 1915]. His summer and influenza: RQG to MCG. News of Oxford Poetry: MCG to RQG, 12 September. ‘I confess that I have often…’, etc.: RQG to JRRT, 13 September 1915.

Second sheaf of poems; ‘At times like this…’: RQG to JRRT, 17 September 1915.

pp.101-2

Council of Lichfield: ibid., 21, 23, and 24 September 1915. ‘that delightful…’: GBS to JRRT, 6 October 1915.

p.102

GBS and RQG on Salisbury Plain, ‘The rain stopped…’: RQG to MCG, 5 October 1915. ‘Songs on the Downs’: GBS, A Spring Harvest, 48. ‘The steps I have taken…’: GBS to JRRT, 6 October.

p.103

They visit Bath; ‘Gibbonian periods’: RQG to MCG, 17 October 1915. ‘I feel that we shall…’: GBS to JRRT, 6 October.

They urge JRRT to publish: RQG to JRRT, 5 October 1915; GBS to JRRT, 9 October 1915.

Cannock Chase camps: Whitehouse and Whitehouse, A Town for Four Winters. 3rd Reserve Infantry Brigade Officers’ Company: RQG to JRRT, 19 October and 21 November 1915.

p.104

‘These grey days…’: Biography, 78. ‘The usual kind of morning…’: JRRT to EMB, 26 November 1915, in Letters, 8. JRRT unhappy and EMB unwell: CLW to JRRT, 27 October 1915; RQG to JRRT, 21 November 1915.

pp.104-6

TCBS in London without JRRT: GBS to JRRT, 24 October 1915 (‘to drive from life…’, ‘It struck me last night…’); RQG to JRRT, 31 October 1915 (‘I never before felt…’, ‘I suddenly saw…’); CLW to JRRT, 27 October 1915 (‘I laughed a little…’, ‘bit of fun’, ‘war babies’, ‘woman was just…’, ‘You and GBS…’, ‘The TCBS stays…’). At school, CLW and JRRT had played rugby for Measures’ house against Richards’ house.

‘sons of culture’, etc.: GBS, ‘To the Cultured’, A Spring Harvest, 60. ‘I have never read anything…’: GBS to JRRT, 24 October 1915.

p.107

‘the fairies came…’: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 35.

pp.107-10

‘Kortirion among the Trees’: quotations are from the earliest published version, only slightly changed from the original MSS; LT1, 32-6.

p.108

‘Ah! like gold…’: The Lord of the Rings, 368.

p.109

‘England in June attire…’ etc.: Graves, ‘To Robert Nichols’, Fairies and Fusiliers.

p.110

Week of frost: RQG to MCG, 17 and 21 November 1915. ‘Kortirion’ textual history: Letters, 8; RQG to JRRT, 21 and 26 November 1915; RQG to Estelle King, 2 December. Stray workings: RQG to JRRT, 19 October. Tolkien recalled writing ‘Kortirion’ between 21 and 28 November in Warwick; yet he was back in camp by 25 November; LT1, 32.

pp.110-11

‘I am now 21…’: GBS to JRRT, 19 October 1915. Units departing Salisbury Plain: RQG to MCG, 17 November 1915; Carter, Birmingham Pals, 90-1. GBS’s movements, ‘It is impossible…’: RQG to JRRT, 21 November 1915.

p.111

Barrowclough: MCG to RQG, 12 September 1915; RW Reynolds to JRRT, 19 September 1915. T. K. Barnsley: Ross, The Coldstream Guards, i. 434; RQG to MCG, 27 August, 31 October 1915.

‘We are now so pledged…’: GBS to JRRT, 24 October 1915. 19th LF embark for France: Barlow, Salford Brigade, 73; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 99. Stedman, Salford Pals, 64. ‘to the peril…’: GBS to JRRT, 2 December 1915.

pp.112-13

‘Habbanan beneath the Stars’: LT1, 91-2.

p.112

‘perilmë metto…’: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 73.

p.113

‘I had always…’: ‘The Ethics of Elfland’, in Auden (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: a selection, 187.

SIX Too long in slumber

Codes and alphabets: Biography, 40; Priestman, Life and Legend, 13, 17, 18.

Milne: Thwaite, A. A. Milne, 167.

To Brocton Camp: monthly Army returns. Envelope codework: RQG to JRRT, 26 December 1915; CLW to JRRT, 30 December 1915.

pp.114-15

Equipment training: Biography, 78; JRRT provisional instructor’s certificate (Bodleian Tolkien).

p.115

Egypt rumour, ‘Imagine the general rejoicing…’, etc.: RQG to JRRT, 26 December 1915.

‘Donna’: the name RQG and his sister Molly gave to Marianne Dunstall when she married their father in 1909; RQG to MCG, 10 August 1909.

RQG and EK: RQG to MCG, 17 October and 8 November 1915; MCG to EK, 26 December 1915.

‘Kortirion’: RQG to EK, 2 December 1915.

‘What a wonderful year!…’: ibid., New Year 1915-16.

pp.115-16

CLW to the Superb: CLW to Dr Peter Liddle. ‘Then I plunge…’: CLW to JRRT, 30 December 1915. Cruiser Natal sinks: Gilbert, First World War, 222. Torpedo nets: Phil Russell to the author.

p.116

RQG embarks; ‘I wish I could describe…’: RQG to EK, 8 January 1916. Italy: ibid., 19 February 1916. New Testament and Odyssey: RQG to MCG, 7 January 1916.

Oxford Poetry 1915: Hammond with Anderson, Bibliography, 279-80. ‘The idols have fallen…’: The Oxford Magazine, 10 December 1915, 127-8.

p.117

‘The truth is…’: GBS to JRRT, 22 December 1915. ‘terrible fellow’, etc.: ibid., 12 January 1916. 2nd Manchesters: Platt papers.

pp.117-18

‘It is a strange and dreary…’: RQG to EK, 4 February 1916. ‘the real business of life’: RQG to MCG, 7 April 1912. RQG’s absurd vision: Lt. P. V. Emrys-Evans to RCG, 13 July 1916. (Emrys-Evans, 11th Suffolks, was later a member of parliament and under-secretary in the British Dominions Office.)

pp.118-19

‘a good friend of mine…’, etc.: GBS to JRRT, 3 February 1916. (The ‘three other heroes’ include Tolkien again, in addition to Gilson and Wiseman.)

19th

LF in Thiepval Wood trenches, 2-6 February 1916: war diary; Platt papers. Patrols: Winter, Death’s Men, 87-8.

2nd Lt. A. C. Dixon: CWGC.

p.119

The Trumpets of Faërie: Priestman, Life and Legend, 30; GBS to JRRT, 9 February 1916 (‘I remember how…’). JRRT must despatch ‘Kortirion’: ibid., 22 February 1916.

‘too many precious stones’: RQG to JRRT, 26 December 1915.

‘I am immensely braced…’: CLW to JRRT, 4 February 1916.

p.120

‘there was more form…’: RWR to JRRT, 10 March 1916.

pp.121-2

Quarrel over JRRT’s ‘freakish’ earlier poetry: CLW to JRRT, 1 March (‘Old days, Harborne Road…’, etc.) and 14 March 1916 (‘I say they are not…’, etc.).

‘the Eldar…’: JRRT, quoted in ibid.

p.122

‘lacking in the strings…’, etc.: RQG to EK, 14 January 1916.

p.123

‘Legend’: GBS, A Spring Harvest, 22.

p.124

blimp: JRRT, ‘Philology: General Works’, in Lee and Boas (eds.), The Year’s Work in English Studies 1923, 52. ‘Bosch’: GBS to JRRT, 12 January 1916. ‘I fully intended…’: RQG to MCG, 12 April 1916.

p.125

‘in a dirty wet marquee…’: ‘A Secret Vice’, Monsters, 199. ‘I have been reading up…’: JRRT to EMT, 2 March 1916 (Letters, 8).

November quatrain (‘Narqelion’): Douglas A. Anderson to the author. The second version appears in Mythlore 56, 48, with an analysis by Paul Nolan Hyde, and in Vinyar Tengwar 40, 8, with an analysis by Christopher Gilson.

pp.125-7

State of the mythology: this reconstruction is based primarily on the Qenya lexicon, along with the available poetry of 1915, and notes on Eärendel’s Atlantic wanderings and ‘The Shores of Faëry’ (LT2, 261-2; internal evidence suggests other outlines in LT2, 253ff., were written later). JRRT is unlikely to have risked taking the lexicon on active service, and its state circa March 1916 may be broadly surmised by excluding all entries lacking in ‘The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’, a list copied from it probably soon after he returned to England (Parma Eldalamberon 12, xvii-xxi). Some details appearing only in that list are assumed to postdate the initial lexicon phase, and omitted here. The reconstruction takes no account of unpublished poems, notes or outlines, and covers a period (beginning in early 1915) in which conceptions were probably very fluid.

Personal significance of Erinti, etc.: Gilson, ‘Narqelion and the Early Lexicons’, Vinyar Tengwar 40, 9.

Vocabulary for wartime: this selection takes no account of chronology of composition (in contrast to the reconstructed ‘state of the mythology’ above). Only enya, kasiën, makil and Kalimban, etc., seem likely to have predated the Somme. ‘the “Germanic” ideal’: Letters, 55.

p.129

‘bleed to death’: Gilbert, First World War, 221. ‘intolerable’, etc.: Letters, 53.

pp.129-30

Marriage: Biography, 78. ‘My goodness…’: GBS to JRRT, 9 February 1916. ‘on the contrary…’: CLW to JRRT, 1 March 1916. ‘The imminence…’: RQG to MCG, 9 March 1916. ‘I rejoice…’: RQG to JRRT, 9 March 1916.

p.130

‘always had something…’: RQG to EK, 10 March 1916. Degree ceremony: How, Register of Exeter College.

pp.130-3

‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’: quotations are from the November 1916 revision, ‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow’, LT2, 295-6.

p.130

Paternal ancestors in Germania: CLW saw only the revised poem, more than a year later; it is apparent that JRRT did not explain it all to him and, as CLW suspected (‘Perhaps I know too much or too little…’), some of his suppositions may be wrong. CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

p.134

Marriage service: Priscilla Tolkien in Angerthas in English 3, 5.

Honeymoon: Biography, 80. The Trumpets of Faërie: Priestman, Life and Legend, 30.

Farnley Park: CLW to JRRT, 14 March 1916. Test results: JRRT provisional instructor’s certificate (Bodleian Tolkien); Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition. Leave: JRRT to Capt. C. A. McAllard, 8 May 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien).

Mrs Kendrick: GBS to JRRT, 26 May 1916.

pp.134-5

Nuptial blessing: Priscilla Tolkien in Angerthas in English 3, P. 5.

p.135

‘Now spring has come…’: GBS, ‘April 1916’, A Spring Harvest, 65. ‘I wish another council…’: GBS to JRRT, 12 January 1916. Odyssey: ibid., 4 March 1916. April Fool’s: ibid., 6 April 1916.

pp.135-6

GBS at Great Haywood: GBS to JRRT, 23, 24, and 26 May 1916. ‘Nothing could be more…’: ibid. [1 June 1916].

p.136

‘There be still some…’: GBS, ‘April 1916’, A Spring Harvest, 65.

School exams, ‘The real days…’: CLW to JRRT, 14 March 1916. ‘oasis’: cited in RQG to JRRT, 22 June 1916.

‘The most magnificent…’: GBS to JRRT [23 July 1915].

p.137

‘world-shaking power’: cited in CLW to JRRT, 16 November 1914.

‘travail underground’: RQG to JRRT, 9 March 1916. ‘I have faith…’: ibid., 21 November 1915. ‘Providence insists…’: GBS to JRRT [13 July 1915].

‘Really you three…’: CLW to JRRT, 4 February 1916.

‘republic’: GBS to JRRT, 12 January 1916.

Embarkation orders: 13th LF adjutant to JRRT, 2 June 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien).

p.138

Plough and Harrow: Family Album, 39. Departure: Biography, 80. ‘Junior officers…’: Cater, The Daily Telegraph, 29 November 2001, 23.

SEVEN Larkspur and Canterbury-bells

From JRRT’s arrival on the Somme until the end of Chapter 10, unless otherwise stated:

JRRT’s movements are derived from his diary.

11th LF activities are drawn from the battalion’s war diary, supplemented by those of the 74th Brigade HQ; 13th Cheshires, 9th Loyal North Lancashires, and 2nd Royal Irish Rifles; the 25th Division and its signal company. Military histories consulted include principally The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 213-34; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers; Kincaid-Smith, The 25th Division in France and Flanders, 10-22.

Great War soldiers’ experience: especially Winter, Death’s Men, and for the Battle of the Somme itself Keegan, The Face of Battle.

Topography and weather: various sources, notably Gliddon, When the Barrage Lifts.

Scapa Flow: CLW to Dr Peter Liddle; CLW to JRRT, 4 February 1916. ‘The Snotty…’: ibid., 4 March [1917].

p.142

Jutland: CLW to Dr Peter Liddle (‘No one below decks…’); Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, iii. 100; The Battle of Jutland: Official Despatches, 123-5, 365-7.

p.143

Train journey: JRRT diary; 13th LF adjutant to JRRT, 2 June 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien).

Channel crossing: JRRT diary; ‘The Lonely Isle’, Leeds University Verse 1914-1924, 57. Gunship escorts were routine. RQG sketches: RQG to EK, 6 June 1916. Hoy: CLW to Dr Peter Liddle.

pp.143-4

Calais to Étaples: JRRT diary; Biography, 80.

p.144

Lt. W. H. Reynolds: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 124.

‘Habbanan’: LT1, 91. Details of a 25th Division officer’s life at Étaples come from the diary of Capt. Lionel Ferguson of the 13th Cheshires (hereafter ‘Ferguson diary’), who was there at virtually the same time as JRRT. (Contrary to Biography, 81, JRRT did not meet up with his battalion proper until he reached the Somme hinterland.)

pp.144-5

‘The Lonely Isle’: Leeds University Verse 1914-1924, 57. Dedication: LT1, 25.

p.145

‘I do pray for you…’: GBS to JRRT, 9 June 1916.

p.146

Spies; a ‘show’: Ferguson diary. Trench working party: RQG to RCG, 25 June 1916. ‘war was not now…’: RQG on sportsmanship, KESC, March 1910, 5. ‘the war at last…’: RQG to EK, 17 June 1916. ‘I have never felt…’: RQG to JRRT, 22 June 1916. Amiens cathedral: ibid., 7 May 1916. GBS tantalizingly near: RQG to EK, 6 and 8 May 1916. Fear for RQG’s sanity: CLW to JRRT, 1 March 1916; perhaps simply thinking of RQG’s sensitive nature. ‘I feel now as if…’: RQG to EK, 13 June 1916.

‘When it comes down to…’: ibid., 9 June 1916.

Peace rumour; ‘I often think of the extraordinary…’: RQG to RCG, 25 June 1916. Artillery barrage: Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 87-8.

pp.147-8

Étaples to Rubempré: JRRT diary; Biography, 81. The 11th LF did not travel with JRRT to Rubempré, though a draft of troops may have: the battalion received 248 new men in June.

p.148

Rubempré: Biography, 81; Ferguson diary; Platt papers.

pp.148-9

Provenance of 25th Division soldiers: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 93-4 and vol. ii. 146; Ferguson diary. Loos tradition: Evers memoir.

p.149

Platoon command: available evidence does not reveal whether Tolkien ever ran a platoon, a routine responsibility of many subalterns.

Officer numbers: 25th Division administrative staff war diary. JRRT in ‘A’ Company: mess accounts and other items (Bodleian Tolkien). No officers from 13th LF: Army Book officer lists, 1915-16. ‘were in many cases…’: Biography, 81. ‘the most improper job…’: Letters, 64.

p.150

Rubempré to Warloy-Baillon: 11th LF war diary. ‘My dear John Ronald…’: GBS to JRRT, 25 June 1916. ‘Larkspur and Canterbury-bells…’: RQG to EK, 25 June 1916. Bécourt château (footnote): Murphy, History of the Suffolk Regiment, 154.

p.151

‘One of the few…’: RQG to RCG, 25 June 1916. ‘It is no use harrowing…’: quoted in Lt. P. V. Emrys-Evans to RCG, 13 July 1916.

EIGHT A bitter winnowing

p.152

During the barrage: Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 115-20. Cavalry: Peacock, ‘A Rendezvous with Death’, 317-18, 325. ‘drum-fire’: Ferguson diary. ‘as if Wotan…’: Lewis, Saggitarius Rising, 103.

11th Suffolks on eve of battle: Murphy, The History of the Suffolk Regiment, 154; The First Day on the Somme, 113.

‘dear, stupid, agricultural platoon’: RQG to Estelle King, 9 April 1915.

p.155

‘I am astonished…’: RQG to MCG, undated, 1916. (Cf. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 234-6.)

‘just like corn…’: Jimmy Walton, 11th Suffolks, in Peacock, ‘A Rendezvous with Death’, 344.

‘the most absolute barrier…’: RQG to EK, 5 February 1916.

Order not to assist wounded: 11th Suffolks war diary.

pp.155-6

RQG’s death: Capt. C. L. Morgan to RCG, 12 July 1916 (‘perfectly calmly…’); Pte. A. Bradnam to MCG, 14 July 1916; Major P. F. Morton to RCG, 12 July 1916; Lt. P. V. Emrys-Evans to RCG, 13 July; a wounded company commander (perhaps Major Morton himself) quoted in Murphy, The History of the Suffolk Regiment, Cpl. Ashley Hicks, statement to Red Cross, 8 August 1916. There is a measure of agreement between these accounts.

p.156

RQG dead in trench: Pte. G. Gordon to RCG, 20 July 1916. Other accounts say RQG was the first to be wounded as the 11th Suffolks went over the top (Pte. W. Prentice, statement to the Red Cross, 17 August 1916); that he was hit by gunfire as he cut the enemy wire (MCG to Rachel King, 10 July 1916). As late as the fourth week in July, Cpl. H. Spalding reported seeing him alive in England (RQG service record). Gilson household: MCG to RQG, 26 June 1916. He probably never received this letter.

‘I hope I may never…’: RQG to EK, 6 May 1916. ‘in a big affair…’: Lt. P. V. Emrys-Evans to RCG, 13 July 1916. ‘It was the final…’: 2nd Lt. A. R. Wright (later Sir Andrew Wright, governor of Cyprus) to RCG, 18 July 1916.

Only Wright unhurt: Lt. P. V. Emrys-Evans to RCG, 13 July 1916.

Mass: JRRT diary. Padre averse to Catholics: Evers memoir. Chaplain in Royal Irish Rifles: Ferguson diary.

pp.157-8

Scenes and rumours at Warloy-Baillon and Bouzincourt, 1-4 July: Ferguson diary. Burials: Biography, 82.

p.158

‘German captive-balloons…’: JRRT, ‘Philology: General Works’, in Boas and Herford (eds.), The Year’s Work in English Studies 1924, 51.

34th Division losses: Peacock, ‘A Rendezvous with Death’, 329.

JRRT at Bouzincourt: Biography, 82. ‘the fiery trial’: GBS to JRRT, 9 June 1916; ‘You must expect…’: ibid., 25 June 1916.

‘ordeal’: RQG to JRRT, 22 June 1916.

74th Brigade movements, 5 July: 11th LF war diary; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 214. All four companies of the 11th LF left Bouzincourt (contrary to Biography, 83); as a matter of routine, some men remained behind.

pp.159-60

19th Lancashire Fusiliers, from June to 4 July: war diary, including GBS’s intelligence reports; Stedman, Salford Pals, 93-6, 106-12; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 134-6; Barlow, Salford Brigade, 74-5.

p.159

Intelligence officer: 19th LF war diary. (GBS’s predecessor had lost a hand while instructing a class in bombing; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 120.)

GBS’s location in wood: in his new role he would certainly have been with the commanding officer, Lt.-Col. J. M. A. Graham, who was here; Stedman, Salford Pals, 116.

p.161

GBS at Bouzincourt: perhaps arranging accommodation for his battalion, under the ad hoc personnel arrangements surrounding the battle. He was later official billeting officer (19th LF war diary).

Signal office shelled: 25th Division signal company war diary. 19th LF reorganize: Salford Pals, 113. Bouzincourt reunion: JRRT diary; Biography, 83.

pp.161-2

Traffic figures: from a 21-22 July census at Fricourt; Taylor, English History 1914-1945, 60.

‘That road was like…’: Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 36-7.

In eighty pages he describes a journey from Bouzincourt to battle at Ovillers on the same dates and almost exactly the same route as JRRT.

pp.162-4

To La Boisselle, 14 July: 11th LF war diary; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 220; Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 36-43; Brenan, A Life of One’s Own, 205-7; Evers memoir; Gliddon, When the Barrage Lifts.

p.163

‘Something in the make…’: Masefield, The Old Front Line. ‘like a volcano…’: The Times, July 1916, 9.

pp.164-6

11th LF supports the 7th Brigade, 14-15 July: war diaries of 11th LF, 25th Division HQ, 74th and 7th Brigade HQs, and 8th Loyal North Lancashires and 10th Cheshires (the 7th Brigade battalions that fought alongside Tolkien’s); Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 151; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 220-1.

p.164

First aid: Keegan, The Face of Battle, 266.

pp.164-5

La Boisselle and beyond, 14 July: Ferguson diary; Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 39, 43-4 (‘a new country…’), 56 (the ambulance and the dead), 89.

p.165

JRRT at Ovillers: Biography, 84, asserts that JRRT’s role was confined to signalling. In fact, in the face of high officer casualties, any subaltern faced possibly being put in charge of a platoon.

pp.165-6

Signals: Solano (ed.), Signalling, 11; ‘Summary of training circulars (advisory)’ issued to JRRT (Bodleian Tolkien).

pp.166-8

11th LF in the 74th Brigade attack on Ovillers, 15-17 July: war diaries of the battalion and brigade, the 25th Division HQ and signal company, 13th Cheshires, 144th Brigade, 1/4th Gloucesters and 1/7th Worcesters, and the 143rd Brigade and 1/5th Royal Warwickshires; Kincaid-Smith, The 25th Division in France, 14; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 151-2; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 221-2; ; Miles, Military Operations, 101; Stedman, Somme: La Boisselle, 95.

‘a treacherous, chaotic region…’: Brenan, A Life of One’s Own, 207 (on travelling to Ovillers via La Boisselle c.20-23 July).

p.167

Bodies and faces: Courtauld, Daily Telegraph, 10 November 1998 (interview with Norman Edwards of the 1/6th Gloucesters, who visited Ovillers on 20 July).

‘The flies were buzzing…’: Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 106-7.

No enemy shelling: 25th Division signal company diary. Sleep in dugout: JRRT diary. ‘Ours compared…’: Evers memoir. ‘A’ Company order: Bodleian Tolkien.

pp.167-8

1/5th Royal Warwickshires stranded: Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 87-8, and Soldier from the Wars Returning, 135; Brown, Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, 138-9.

p.168

‘I am quite well’: GBS to JRRT, 12 July 1916. ‘I am safe but…’: ibid., 15 July 1916.

NINE ‘Something has gone crack’

p.169

Somme offensive widely expected: Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, 260.

Field postcard: RQG to RCG, 30 June 1916. ‘never sends anything…’, etc.: RCG to RQG, 6 July 1916. Gilsons await news: MCG to Rachel King, 11 July 1916.

pp.169-70

Obituary: The Times, 11 July 1916, 8. Gilsons’ grief; ‘greatest friend’: MCG to Rachel King, 11 July 1916.

p.170

‘was loved by all those…’: Capt. A. Seddon to RCG, 3 July 1916. ‘loved by all the men…’: Pte. A. Bradnam to MCG, 14 July 1914. ‘I am almost glad…’: Major P. F. Morton to RCG, 12 July 1916. ‘everything to me…’: 2nd Lt. A. R. Wright to RCG, 18 July 1916.

pp.170-1

Bouzincourt to Beauval, 17-19 July: JRRT diary, including mess accounts listing sums owed to him by the officers against payments made to Harrison, Arden, and Kershaw. Which batman was assigned to JRRT is not known. Officer details: service records of Lt. W. F. Waite and Capt. W. I. Edwards; Fawcett-Barry papers.

p.171

JRRT and batmen: Biography, 81. Letter from Pte. T. Gaskin’s mother: Bodleian Tolkien (reproduced in Priestman, Life and Legend, 35).

Acting lieutenant: The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 222. Ad hoc promotions (not reflected in official papers) accompanying a more responsible job were the norm because of the high casualty rate. (C. E. Munday, 8 November 1916, addresses JRRT as Lieutenant; but a handwritten order from Lt.-Col. L. G. Bird, 7 August 1916, refers to him as Second Lieutenant; Bodleian Tolkien.)

pp.171-2

Signal officer’s staff and duties: 25th Division signal company diary; Solano (ed.), Signalling, 11-12. Signals under scrutiny: ‘Communications in the 25th Division’.

p.172

Attack order found at Ovillers: Macdonald, The Somme, 169-70. Capt. J. C. P. E. Metcalfe: service record; Hayter (ed.), Charlton and Newbottle; the Reverend Roger Bellamy to the author; Quarterly Army List.

pp.172-3

Auchonvillers, 24-30 July: on the front line between Praed Street and Broadway. War diaries of 11th LF, 74th Brigade and 25th Division signal company; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 222-3.

p.173

Mailly-Maillet, 30 July-5 August: ibid., 223; 11th LF war diary. Order to JRRT: from Lt.-Col. L. G. Bird, 7 August 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien).

Sucrerie trenches, 5-10 August: referred to by JRRT as ‘our second bout of trenches’, Letters 9; they were between Egg Street and Flag Avenue, and the communication (access) trench was called Cheer’oh (‘goodbye’) Avenue. 11th LF war diary; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 223-4.

Bus-lès-Artois, 10-15 July^: JRRT diary; 11th LF war diary; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 224. Nights in wood: Letters, 9.

pp.173-4

Poem: GBS to JRRT, 25 July 1916, identifies it only as ‘your thing about England’.

p.174

Brief letter from CLW: not extant because JRRT returned it to GBS. An empty envelope from GBS, postmarked 4 August 1916, implies that it was sent with no accompanying note.

‘such a life…’: GBS to JRRT, 11 August 1916.

‘No filter of sentiment…’: quoted in ibid.

‘Save that poetic fire’: GBS, A Spring Harvest, 72. The poem appears above in full.

p.175

‘Blighters’: Sassoon, The War Poems, 68.

‘To the Cultured’: GBS, A Spring Harvest, 72.

‘the entirety…’: quoted in GBS to JRRT, 19 August 1916.

‘the great work’: CLW to JRRT, 4 February 1916. ‘doubting Thomas’: GBS to JRRT, 19 August 1916.

p.176

‘the universal weariness…’, etc.: JRRT to GBS, 12-13 August 1916 (Letters, 10).

Lt. J. Bowyer (footnote): The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 313.

p.177

‘and I can’t help thinking…’, ‘He will come out…’: CLW to JRRT, 1 March 1916.

‘we shall not see it…’: RQG to JRRT, 31 October 1915.

‘the death of one…’: GBS to JRRT, 3 February 1916.

19th LF at Ovillers, 12-14 July: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 150; war diary. ‘They were lost…’: GBS intelligence report, ibid.

GBS’s duties: ‘Instructions for and duties of Brigade and Battalion Intelligence Officers’ (appendix to 1 July operation orders), 19th LF war diary.

Corpses: ‘Many German dead in trench 8b43 to 8c56’, said a report (25th Division war diary) on 14 July, before the 19th LF vacated it. They had seized half of this 640-yard stretch of trench; 19th LF war diary.

‘I am truly afraid…’: GBS to JRRT, 25 July 1916.

p.178

19th LF, 15 July-13 August: war diary. Conversion: Mitchinson, Pioneer Battalions in the Great War, 65.

‘Tonight I cannot sleep…’: GBS to JRRT, 15 August 1916. Search for JRRT: ibid., 19 August 1916.

pp.178-9

Signal officers’ course: ‘Communications in the 25th Division’; 25th Division signal company war diary.

p.179

‘I want you to regard…’, etc.: GBS to JRRT, 19 August 1916. Reunion: Biography, 85, asserts that they met at Acheux, where JRRT diary notes he slept every night from 15 to 23 August. But GBS, 19 August 1916, indicates no plan to travel to Acheux that day. It seems as likely that JRRT, hearing his friend had inquired after him, made his way to Hédauville.

End to doubt: GBS to JRRT, 19 August 1916. GBS’s recent writings: ibid., 25 July 1916.

‘a sacrifice of blood outpoured’, etc.: ‘For RQG’, GBS, A Spring Harvest, 69. ‘Let us tell quiet stories of kind eyes’, ibid. 71. ‘The Last Meeting’, ‘Memories’ and ‘Sun and shadow and winds of spring’, ibid. 58, 63, and 70, may also refer to RQG.

p.182

Birmingham battalions (footnote): Carter, Birmingham Pals, 103.

W. H. Payton: RQG to EK, 6 June 1916.

pp.182-3

R. S. Payton’s death; ‘Heaven grant…’: RCG to JRRT, 15 August 1916. With 14th Warwickshires on Somme: Carter, Birmingham Pals, 69, 173, 176-86.

p.183

Debating society: KESC, March 1912, 15-16. Character: ibid., June 1912, 41. ‘the Barrovian-par-excellence’: CLW to JRRT, 19 March 1912.

Speech Day: KESC, October 1916, 60.

pp.183-5

‘frequent meetings with JR’, ‘At first nebulous…’, etc.: CLW to GBS, 30 August 1916.

p.185

‘On the constitution…’: GBS to JRRT, 16 September 1916. Bouzincourt meal, 22 August: JRRT diary; Biography, 85.

The Earthly Paradise: Wade-Gery gave JRRT vol. v in Bouzincourt, date unknown; Douglas A. Anderson to the author.

TEN In a hole in the ground

p.186

‘That’s all spoof,’ etc.: Norman, Sunday Times Magazine, 15 January 1967.

Dugout: JRRT diary. ‘Kortirion’ revisions: Douglas A. Anderson to the author.

‘Some people talk…’: RQG to EK, 3 March 1916. GBS’s reading in France: ibid., 5 April 1916.

‘The Burial of Sophocles’: GBS to JRRT, 2 December 1915. GBS sends home JRRT piece: ibid., 25 July 1916.

‘ghastly gallows-trees’: Blunden, Undertones of War, 134.

p.187

‘The wood was never…’: Douie, The Weary Road, 141-2.

‘I think a lot…’: Letters, 231.

‘down in dugouts…’, ‘It did not make…’: Letters, 78.

‘The Old British Line…’: Blunden, Undertones of War, 25-6.

In GBS’s footsteps: 19th LF war diaries; Platt papers. ‘like a treasure’: GBS to JRRT, 12 January.

pp.187-8

Thiepval Wood, 24-7 August: 11th LF war diary.

p.188

End of course: 25th Division signals company diary. Military situation, 24 August: Stedman, Thiepval, 84; Cuttell, 148 Days on the Somme, 196.

‘always long…’: RQG to EK, 6 March 1916. ‘the joy of getting out…’: ibid., 26 February 1916.

Bouzincourt, 27-8 August: 11th LF diary; JRRT diary.

pp.188-9

Trench duty, 28-30 August: the 11th LF were in a series of small trenches south-west of Pole Trench; 11th LF war diary; 25th Division signal company war diary; ‘Communications in the 25th Division’; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 224-5; Cuttell, 148 Days on the Somme, 130.

p.188

‘I feel that if I survive…’: RQG to EK, 3 March 1916.

‘an appalling bit of line…’; ‘extraordinary cheeriness’: Evers memoir.

p.189

French language and cooking: Letters, 288-9. Wine: ibid. 314, 405.

France trip, 1913; ‘the vulgarity…’: Biography, 22, 67-8. ‘Gallophobia’: Biography, 129.

JRRT’s French: d’Ardenne, ‘The Man and the Scholar’, in Salu and Farrell (eds.), J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, 35.

‘I can see clearly…’: Letters, 111.

Westward, 6-12 September: 11th LF war diary.

p.190

‘endless marching…’, etc.: Family Album, 40.

Franqueville, 12-25 September: 11th LF war diary; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 225; Kincaid-Smith, The 25th Division in France and Flanders, 18.

New signallers for each battalion: 25th Divisional signal company war diary.

2nd Lt. L. R. Huxtable: service record; 11th LF war diary. To 13th LF: The Times, 28 July 1915; ‘L. R. Huxtable. 13th Lancs Fusrs. F & G Lines’ appears in Tolkien’s hand on an envelope attached to GBS to JRRT, 23, 24, and 26 May 1916.

Signal course: Potts papers. JRRT’s understudy: ‘Communications in the 25th Division’ states that one officer per battalion was trained at Franqueville as battalion signal officer.

Disagreement with superior; ‘I am intensely sorry…’: GBS to JRRT, 16 September 1916. J. C. P. E. Metcalfe in command: service record.

‘Hux’; shares tent: JRRT diary. In ‘A’ Company: Fawcett- Barry papers.

‘the first War…’, etc.: Letters, 111.

p.191

Military situation: Cuttell, 148 Days on the Somme, 199-200.

pp.191-3

Thiepval Wood, 27-29 September: ibid., 202; war diaries of the 11th LF, 74th Brigade, brigade signal officer, and 25th Division signal company; JRRT diary; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 163-5; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 225-8; Kincaid-Smith, The 25th Division in France and Flanders, 18.

p.192

Captive officer: Biography, 84-5.

‘If guards insufficient…’: ‘Summary of training circulars (advisory)’, issued to JRRT on 26 September 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien).

Captain shot: Roger Ganly; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1916, 235-6.

R. Mellor’s ‘Ode to a Fullerphone’ (footnote): in Jimmy, journal of the Royal Corps of Signals in the Middle East (with thanks to Louis Meulstee’s Wireless for the Warrior website).

p.193

2nd Lt. Stanley Rowson’s disappearance: Pte. Connor, in Rowson’s service record (‘I was blown…’); Fawcett-Barry papers.

‘Dear Sir…’: Mrs M. Sumner to the commanding officer of ‘B’ Company, 26 September 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien). The letter must have been passed to JRRT because he was battalion signal officer.

Englebelmer and Bouzincourt, 30 September-6 October: JRRT diary; 11th LF war diary.

pp.193-5

Ferme de Mouquet, Zollern Redoubt, and Ovillers Post, 7-18 October: JRRT diary; war diaries of the 11th LF, 74th Brigade, and 25th Division HQ and signal company; ‘Communications in the 25th Division’; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 228-9; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 170-1; and Cuttell, 148 Days on the Somme, 202-4.

p.194

Ferme de Mouquet map: 19th LF war diary.

Huxtable wounded: service record; JRRT diary.

p.195

Unit designations: ‘25th Division Code Letter Calls’, 11 October 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien). They are marked in crayon on a map incorporating intelligence for the attack on Regina Trench (Bodleian Tolkien; reproduced in Life and Legend, 32); ‘WF’ denotes JRRT’s battalion HQ in Hessian Trench, near the junction with Lancashire Trench. (The German position due north of battalion HQ is now occupied by Regina Trench Cemetery.) The 11th LF line of advance is bounded by vertical lines in purple crayon. The map appears, with westward extension, in 74th Brigade and 25th Division war diaries and was probably drawn by army cartographers, not by JRRT as stated in Family Album, 40. On the other hand, its red and black ink, title-lettering, and compass rose are reminiscent of his style; while the equally amateur RGQ spent much time making maps for his battalion and brigade (RQG to EK, 29 February 1916).

GBS’s worst apprehensions: GBS to JRRT, 19 October 1915. Mabinogion; ‘Raconteur…’; ‘his discovery…’: ibid., 10 September 1916. Lost lunacy; ‘Perhaps this note…’: ibid., 16 September 1916.

‘Thoughts of leave…’: ibid., 3 October 1916.

JRRT’s leave ever imminent: Biography, 85. ‘universal weariness’: Letters, 10.

‘There were times…’: Douie, The Weary Road, 168.

‘astonished that flesh…’: Alfred Bundy, quoted in Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, 225.

pp.196-9

Hessian Trench and Regina Trench, 19-22 October: JRRT diary; war diaries of the 11th LF, 74th Brigade, and 25th Division HQ and signal company; ‘Communications in the 25th Division’; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 229-34; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 171-3; Kincaid-Smith, The 25th Division in France and Flanders, 20-22; Miles, Military Operations, France and Belgium 1916, 463; Cuttell, 148 Days on the Somme, 204.

pp.198-9

Padre’s experience; ‘Some had the will…’, etc.: Evers memoir.

p.199

Horseback encounter with tank: Potts papers.

pp.199-200

Albert to Beauval, 22-28 October: JRRT diary; 11th LF war diary; The Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 233-4.

p.200

JRRT falls ill: medical board, 2 December 1916, in JRRT service record.

Lice blamed on German trenches: Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 47.

‘On one occasion…’: Evers memoir. The signals officer in the captured dugout could equally be Lt. W. H. Reynolds, Tolkien’s predecessor in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers and then his superior at brigade level.

p.201

Beauval to Le Touquet, 28-29 October: JRRT diary. The Duchess of Westmorland Hospital was officially known as the No. 1 Red Cross Hospital.

Battalion losses and drafts: figures for 28 June-22 October 1916; 25th Division adjutant and administrative staff war diaries.

Itinerary; fever: JRRT diary and service record.

Writes to Lt.-Col. L. G. Bird: Capt. E. Munday to JRRT, 8 November 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien).

The Asturias: Gibson and Prendergast, The German Submarine War 1914-1918, 21; Platt papers (describing a crossing on the same ship in June 1916). Impressions of a ‘Blighty boat’: Ferguson diary. Moribund wards: Keegan, The Face of Battle, 267.

‘sea-girdled…’: Tolkien, ‘The Lonely Isle’, Leeds University Verse 1914-1924, 57.

‘like a death’: Cater, The Daily Telegraph, 29 November 2001, 23.

pp.205-6

First Southern General Hospital: Brazier and Sandford, Birmingham and the Great War, 49, 154-8.

p.206

T. K. Barnsley: service record; CLW to JRRT, 16 November 1916. Molly Gilson: MCG to EK, 10 July 1916. Major L. Gamgee: ibid.; Hutton, King Edward’s School, Birmingham, 164; Heath, Service Record of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, 55.

Source of hobbit-name Gamgee: Letters, 88, 245, 348, 410.

‘Lt-Col Bird wishes me…’: Capt. E. Munday to JRRT, 8 November 1916 (Bodleian Tolkien). Lt. V. H. Kempson: Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 233.

‘Stay a long time…’, etc.: GBS to JRRT, 16 November 1916. Forwarded letter to CLW: ibid., 18 November 1916. ‘If you had offered me…’: CLW to JRRT, 16 November 1916. JRRT sends poems: ibid., 8 December 1916.

pp.206-7

‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow’: LT2, 295-7.

p.207

Medical board: JRRT service record. Correspondence address: 22 November 1916 form, ibid. JRRT considers Royal Engineers: CLW to JRRT, 8 December 1916. T. E. Mitton: KES register; Heath, Service Record of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, 102.

pp.207-8

Tavrobel: Parma Eldalamberon 11, 69. Haywood: LT2, 328.

Heraldic devices (footnote): Parma Eldalamberon 13, 93-6.

p.208

‘magnificent’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 8 December 1916.

p.209

‘rather below his usual standard’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 16 November 1916. Billeting officer; ‘Fur undercoats…’, etc.: 19th LF war diary. ‘sheer vacancy’: GBS to JRRT, 16 September 1916. ‘for such I am…’: ibid., 16 November 1916.

‘My career in the Army…’: GBS to JRRT, 12 January. ‘The Corps Commander…’: ibid., 18 November 1916.

‘engaging rascal’, etc.: RQG, report on GBS’s paper ‘Early English Ballads’, KESC, December 1911, 90. ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’: ibid., 3 February 1916.

p.210

Military writing: Keegan, The Face of Battle, 20-2. ‘Owing to hostile MG fire…’: GBS’s intelligence report, 1 July 1916, 19th LF war diary.

‘Who battled have with bloody hands…’: GBS, ‘We who have bowed ourselves to time’, A Spring Harvest, 49. ‘Shapes in the mist…’: ‘Memories’, ibid. 63.

Riding experiences: Ruth Smith to JRRT, 13 November 1916.

‘I hope I shall be able…’: GBS to JRRT, 16 November 1916.

p.211

GBS’s death: GBS service record; 19th LF war diary; Ruth Smith to JRRT, 22 December 1916 (‘after that he quickly sank…’). Words of CO (Major J. Ambrose Smith) to Ruth Smith: ibid., 26 December 1916.

pp.211-12

‘O seven times happy…’: GBS, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’, A Spring Harvest, 77. History of poem: ibid. 7; GBS to JRRT, 2 December 1915. Riposte to axiom about those the Gods love: ibid., 9 February 1916.

p.212

‘My dear JR…’: CLW to JRRT, 16 December 1916. GBS as his mother’s chief support: ibid., 18 January 1917.

Request for poems: Ruth Smith to JRRT, 22 December 1916. ‘The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’: Parma Eldalamberon 12, xvii-xxi, 29-106 passim. If JRRT left his Qenya lexicon at home when he went to France (as seems likely in view of Smith losing ‘The Burial of Sophocles’), perhaps this new word list was written in hospital in Birmingham so he could refamiliarize himself with Qenya. It adds little to the content of the lexicon (upon which he continued to work), and makes no attempt at alphabetical order.

‘almost fully formed’: Letters, 215. JRRT recalled that ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ was ‘written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916’ (Letters 221; cf. 366). At Le Touquet he had a high fever but by the end of the second week in November he was writing letters from the Birmingham University Hospital; his handwriting on a 22 November form (service record) was firm and assured. He also said the tale emerged ‘during sick-leave at the end of 1916’ (215; cf. 345). Other letters (345, 386) indicate that composition continued into 1917. Feasibly the tale was written after ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ (see Chapter 12), and the hospital in question might have been in Harrogate, where he spent most of March 1917.

pp.215-23

Aryador, etc.: where possible, names and other readings in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ are given as first written, in the text referred to by its editor, Christopher Tolkien, as ‘Tuor A’ (LT2, 202-3). But most quotations here are from the revised text, ‘Tuor B’ (which was written over the top of the original, largely obscuring it, and is published in LT2, 149-97). To give one illustrative example of the name changes involved, the shadow land of Aryador became by emendation to the first manuscript Mathusdor and then Dor Lómin, which was the name that endured.

p.215

‘he wandered…’: LT2, 151.

p.216

‘Now there dwelt…’: ibid., 153-4.

Tuor at 23: ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’, Unfinished Tales, 20. ‘Oxford “sleepies”’: Biography, 73. ‘dream of the gods’: LT2, 159.

‘hide their land…’: ibid., 162.

p.217

‘stand as long as Taniquetil…’: ibid. 171. ‘No tide of evil…’: LT2, 297.

‘That, I suppose…’: 1964 interview with Denis Gueroult, BBC Sound Archives.

‘little, delicate, beautiful creatures’: CLW to JRRT, 1 March 1916. ‘small and slender and lithe’: LT2, 198 (note 18).

p.218

kalimbardi, etc.: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 44. Calum(oth) (footnote): Parma Eldalamberon 13, 99. ‘folk of dreadful hate’: LT2, 160.

‘That you are going to win…’: RCG to JRRT, 14 August 1916. ‘for all the evil…’: JRRT to GBS, 12 August 1916 (Letters, 10; reading clarified by Douglas A. Anderson).

p.219

‘I’ve never had those…’: Norman, Sunday Times Magazine, London, 15 January 1967, 34-6.

‘I think the orcs…’: Letters, 82. ‘beauty and grace…’: ibid. 85.

‘they of the Heavenly Arch…’: LT2, 173.

p.220

‘the subterranean…’, ‘Their hearts…’: LT2, 159-60.

orc: Letters, 177-8; Morgoth’s Ring, 124, 422; JRRT, ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, in Lobdell (ed.), A Tolkien Compass, 171.

Balrog: Parma Eldalamberon 11, 21, 42; see also LT1, 240.

‘From the greatness…’, ‘beasts like snakes…’: LT2, 169.

‘smiths and sorcerers’, ‘iron so cunningly linked…’: ibid. 170. ‘by reason of the exceeding…’, ‘their hollow bellies…’: ibid. 176.

p.221

‘the icthyosaurus, jabberwocks…’: civilian Frederick Arthur Robinson, quoted in Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, 267. Ernst, Celebes: see Cork, A Bitter Truth, 170, 258-60. ‘The monster approached…’: The Times, 25 October 1916, citing the Dusseldorfer Generalanzeiger. ‘like fairy-tales of war…’: Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told.

pp.221-2

Road to hell: ‘Gylfaginning’ Chapter 49, in Snorri Sturluson, Edda.

p.222

‘Winter, and his blue-tipped spears…’ (footnote): LT1, 34. ‘wintry spell of Yelin’, etc.: written on the envelope of a letter from RQG to JRRT, 19 October 1915. Yelin, Yelur: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 105-6. ‘Yelur = Melko’ in the Qenya lexicon may have preceded the separate entry for Melko; both seem to have been added after Tolkien made the list of ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words’. In Gnomish, c.1917, Melko was labelled ‘Lord of utter heat and cold, of violence and evil’, with bynames Geluim, ‘Ice’, related to Gilim, ‘winter’; Parma Eldalamberon 11, 22, 38.

‘a binding terror’, etc.: LT2, 159. ‘drown his fear and disquiet’: ibid. 169.

‘unconquerable eagerness…’: LT2, 159. Thrall-Noldoli bent with their labours: ibid. 198 (note 18).

TWELVE Tol Withernon and Fladweth Amrod

p.224

‘You ought to start…’: CLW to JRRT, 18 January 1917.

There is no knowing when Tolkien had announced his plans for an epic, but it seems likely that Wiseman was here responding to a letter (no longer extant) written prior to Smith’s death, perhaps as early as November.

‘The Cottage of Lost Play’: name changes in or between the first, undated text and a fair copy begun by Edith Tolkien on 12 February 1917 match those in the early chart of names in ‘The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’, which clearly predated ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. The elf-king’s name Ing in ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ was emended to Inwë, his name in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. The sun-tree of Valinor was first Glingol, a name given in the latter to the tree’s seedling in Gondolin itself. Most interesting is the occurrence of Manwë as a name for an Elf (emended to Valwë): in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and all later mythological texts Manwë is the name of the chief of the Valar. (LT1, 13, 21-2; Parma Eldalamberon 12, xx; Parma Eldalamberon 13, 98-9.)

pp.224-5

Background of Ottor/Eriol; ‘the true tradition…’: LT2, 290-2. Animalic Otter: Wynne and Smith, ‘Tolkien and Esperanto’, in Seven 17, 32-3.

p.225

‘all who enter…’: LT1, 14.

pp.225-6

‘hearing the lament of the world’: ibid. 16.

pp.226-7

‘This was the Cottage…’; ‘the children of the fathers…’; ‘Of the misty aftermemories…’: ibid. 19.

pp.227-8

‘old tales…’; ‘lonely children…’; ‘shall be thronged…’: ibid. 20.

p.228

‘the Faring Forth…’: ibid. 17.

p.229

‘Golden Book’: LT2, 290-1; Parma Eldalamberon 12, 72; Parma Eldalamberon 11, 63. i·band a·gwentin laithra: ibid. 11-12.

‘the lost Tale of Wade’: Chambers, Widsith, 98. ‘So this world…’, etc.: ibid. 3-4. Recreating early Roman poems: Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, 405-9. Cf. Shippey, Author of the Century, 233-6.

‘Do not laugh…’: Letters, 144.

p.230

Support for Irish Home Rule: JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

‘as an ambition…’: Boas and Herford (eds.), The Year’s Work in English Studies, 1925, 59-60.

p.231

Poetic output in 1917: CLW to JRRT, 1 September 1917. End of leave; 23 January medical board: JRRT service record. ‘unreservedly glad’; ‘malinger…’: CLW to JRRT, 18 January 1917.

pp.231-2

Late February: service record. The 3rd LF commanding officer had been kept informed of JRRT’s situation since 15 December 1916.

p.232

‘Every day in bed…’: Biography, 95. It may be noted here that where Humphrey Carpenter’s account of 1917 does not seem to match JRRT’s service record, I have followed the latter.

Council of Harrogate: CLW to JRRT, 14, 15 (‘I am going to burst into…’, etc.) and 17 April 1917.

‘As you said, it is you and I now…’: ibid., 4 March 1917.

pp.232-3

Surviving TCBSites and GBS’s poetry: ibid., 18 January 1917.

p.233

Roger Smith’s death: ibid., 4 March 1917; service record; Ruth Smith to JRRT, 6 March 1917. Never knew of GBS’s death: ibid., 22 January 1917.

‘I suppose very few…’; ‘a few acres of mud’: CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

‘the starvation-year’: Letters, 53. The Asturias: Gibson and Prendergast, The German Submarine War 1914-1918, 164.

Shipping losses: Taylor, English History 1914-1945, 84.

p.234

Hornsea: Biography, 95. Musketry school: Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 304.

Holderness defences: Dorman, Guardians of the Humber, 13-65.

Wives’ visits to Thirtle Bridge: Cyril Dunn to the author. ‘Here some sixty…’: Platt papers.

Officers’ service fitness: weekly return of the British Army.

pp.234-5

11th LF officers: Fawcett-Barry papers; Lancashire Fusiliers’ Annual 1917, 317-18, 340-1, 348; service records of L. R. Huxtable and J. C. P. E. Metcalfe.

p.235

1917 photograph: Family Album, 41. Medical board, 1 May: JRRT service record. Patrols and Zeppelins: Mills memoir. Land and sea: Van De Noort and Ellis (eds.), Wetlands Heritage of Holderness, 15; Miles and Richardson, A History of Withernsea, 11, 237.

p.236

Books of Welsh: as well as J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Pedeir Kainc y Mabinogi, Smith bequeathed to Tolkien J. M. Edwards, Hanes A Chan; Thomas Evan, Gwaith / Twn o’r Nant; Samuel Roberts, Gwaith; William Spurrell, An English-Welsh Pronouncing Dictionary; and M. Williams, Essai sur la composition du Roman Gallois (Bodleian and English Faculty library catalogues, Oxford University).

Tol Withernon and Withernsea: Parma Eldalamberon 11, 3-4, 46, 71; Smith, The Place-names of the East Riding of Yorkshire and York, 26-7; Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names, 502-3; Phillips, Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire, Part 1, 72. With thanks to Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne.

pp.237-8

‘The Horns of Ulmo’: The Shaping of Middle-earth, 214-17. ‘the upholder’: Parma Eldalamberon 11, 43.

p.238

1 June medical board: JRRT service record. Messines: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 206-9.

Signals exam: Biography, 96. Minden Day: signed menu (Bodleian Tolkien).

Brooklands: Sheppard, Kingston-Upon-Hull Before, During and After the Great War, 114-15.

Passchendaele: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 219-21.

p.240

Edith’s return to Cheltenham: Biography, 96.

‘It is all the more distressing…’; ‘I am very anxious…’: CLW to JRRT, 1 September 1917.

‘Companions of the Rose’: CLW to JRRT, 1 September 1917 (‘There is of course no legislation…’); Douglas A. Anderson to the author.

‘Tinúviel’ textual history: LT2, 3; Letters, 345, 420. Biography, 97-8, implies erroneously that the inspirational walk at Roos took place in 1918, owing to a misreading of ‘1917’ that is repeated in Letters, 221 (Christina Scull to the author).

pp.240-1

‘Turambar’ textual history: LT2, 69. That it was written in 1917 (Biography, 96) seems no more than a guess. But an early outline (LT2, 138-9) contains almost exclusively Qenya names, just like the 1917 pencil version of ‘Tinúviel’, in contrast to the extant revisions of the two tales, in which Gnomish forms replace them. The Qenya name Foalókë shows the ‘Turambar’ outline is later than ‘The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’ of late 1916 (Parma Eldalamberon 12, 38).

p.241

State of the mythology: JRRT wrote his first Gnomish lexicon in pencil but over-wrote it in ink, probably late in 1917, obscuring most of the original definitions and germs of story. Additions to the Qenya lexicon continued, none of them datable. Beyond what has already been said here about ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, only the barest hints can be gleaned about the state of the mythology in 1917. The best view of the flow of creativity in 1917 and 1918 can be gained from the two lexicons; many of the mythological concepts in them are reproduced in appendices to LT1 and LT2. Most published excerpts of other ‘Lost Tales’ notebooks appear from internal evidence to have been written after the war. The mythological concepts outlined in the list here, not exhaustive, are drawn from the ‘Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa’; the first version of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’; 1917’s ‘The Horns of Ulmo’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, 215-7); the early pencil layer of the Gnomish lexicon, and the earlier or contemporaneous Gnomish grammar (Parma Eldalamberon 11); and matching Qenya lexicon entries.

Health: 16 October and 16 November medical boards, JRRT service record.

Birth of John Tolkien: Biography, 96-7.

‘The end of the war…’: Letters, 53.

‘when your kiddie…’: CLW to JRRT, 20 December 1917.

Patrimonial shares: Letters, 53.

Visits Cheltenham; Edith returns: Biography, 97.

Lieutenant: 19 January 1918 medical board (service record). Fever recurs; unit transfer: ibid.

p.243

Royal Defence Corps: weekly return of the British Army. Easington: Allison (ed.), Holderness: southern part, 21-31.

‘apparent lack of connection’: CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

pp.243-5

‘The Song of Eriol’: LT2, 298-300.

p.245

1918 an ordeal: CLW to JRRT, 16 December 1918. Health to April: JRRT service record. Return to 13th LF: Biography, 98.

Spring Offensive: Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 301-3.

p.246

Penkridge Camp: Biography, 98. Brocton Camp: JRRT service record.

Staffordshire interlude: Priscilla Tolkien in Angerthas in English 3, 6-7; Artist, 26-8.

Fladweth Amrod: Parma Eldalamberon 11, 35.

A Spring Harvest Hammond with Anderson, Bibliography, 280-1.

Gastritis: medical board, 4 September 1918, JRRT service record. Edith; ‘I should think you ought…’: Biography, 98 (which gives an account slightly at odds with JRRT service record). ‘a long nomadic series…’: Letters, 430.

Home convalescence: Graves, Good-bye to All That, 261. Blackpool: JRRT service record. Italian meal: signed menu (Bodleian Tolkien).

‘unwonted silence’: Douie, The Weary Road, 16.

‘for the purposes…’: Biography, 98.

p.249

New English Dictionary: ibid. 98-9; Gilliver, ‘At the Wordface’, in Reynolds and GoodKnight (eds.), Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, 173-4. Gratitude to Craigie: ‘Valedictory Address’, Monsters, 238. ‘We rejoice…’: anonymous ‘Oxford Letter’, KESC, December 1919, 76.

50 St John Street: CLW to JRRT, 27 December 1918; Biography, 99-100.

‘were acutely aware…’: Winter, ‘Oxford and the First World War’, in Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, viii. 18.

1919 reading: Exeter College library register.

‘set himself the task…’: Graves, Good-bye to All That, 257.

‘The Fall of Gondolin’: Exeter College Essay Club minutes, 10 March 1920.

1910 rugby XV: Biography, facing p. 82.

p.250

Numbers of war dead: Heath, Service Record of King Edward’s School; How, Register of Exeter College Oxford 1891-1921; Winter, ‘Oxford and the First World War’, in Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, viii. 19-20.

Colin Cullis: death certificate. T. E. Mitton: KES registration details; KESC, December 1914, 77-8, and March 1918, 86.

T. K. Barnsley: service record. GBS: Family Album, 41.

‘perhaps in the ever-famous “Johnner”’: CLW to JRRT, 8 December 1916.

p.251

‘We must contrive…’: ibid., 1 September 1917.

‘grand old quarrel’: ibid., 1 March 1916. ‘clash of backgrounds’; ‘the decay of faith…’ (quoting JRRT); ‘That huge atmosphere…’, etc.: ibid., 20 December 1917.

Lost track of each other: ibid., 16 December 1918. ‘So the TCBS will again…’: ibid., 27 December 1918.

p.252

Demobilization: JRRT service record; protection certificate, etc. (Bodleian Tolkien). Pension: granted in T. P. Evans to JRRT, 4 September 1919 (ibid.), but backdated to 16 July.

EPILOGUE ‘a new light’

p.253

TCBS would outlive war: CLW to JRRT, 1 March 1916. ‘What is not…’: ibid., 18 January 1917.

‘We believe in…’: GBS to JRRT, 9 February 1916.

Smith’s goal and method: CLW to JRRT, 27 October 1915.

‘re-establish sanity…’: GBS to JRRT, 24 October 1915.

‘he never lived…’: CLW to JRRT, undated [summer 1917].

Wiseman referred to the ‘tales of our trodden course’ promised in ‘We who have bowed ourselves to time’, Smith, A Spring Harvest, 49.

RQG’s trench-digging drill: uncredited, in William Allport Brockington, Elements of Military Education (1916), 300-2.

Brockington promised to name its originator in any second edition. (Lt. A. S. Langley to Cary Gilson, 1 November 1916; Brockington to Langley, 28 November 1916.)

pp.253-4

‘I can still ask…’: CLW to JRRT, 18 January 1917.

Finance minister: ibid., 8 December 1916. CLW’s career: CLW memoir, OEG; Mrs Patricia Wiseman. Music teaching: Lightwood, The Music of the Methodist Hymn Book, 94-5.

p.254

‘a new light’: Letters, 10.

‘The Music of the Ainur’: features of Qenya, together with the paucity of mythological detail in the original version (Manwë is named simply Súlimo) might suggest a date close to the composition of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’, which also has Solosimpë as a plural (for later Solosimpi) and likewise was written on slips rather than in notebooks like the rest of the Lost Tales. However, JRRT said ‘The Music of the Ainur’ was written in Oxford, while he was on the staff of the OED. He implied that it was the first tale he wrote after ‘Tinúviel’ and therefore that the rest of the Lost Tales came afterwards. (Letters, 345, LT1, 14, 45, 52, 60-1.)

‘The completed work…’; ‘the fugue…’: CLW to JRRT, 14 March 1916.

pp.254-5

Ainur: this soon became fixed as the plural of Ainu, but in the original manuscript Ainu is both singular and plural. For clarity, the account of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ in this chapter uses the later and better-known forms unless otherwise stated.

Ilúvatar, Sā: Parma Eldalamberon 12, 42, 81.

p.255

Ilúvatar’s gift of language: LT1, 232, 236.

‘unity and a system…’: ibid., 54.

‘Through him has pain…’: ibid., 55.

p.256

‘It is the tragedy…’: JRRT to CLW, 16 November 1914.

‘beauty in all…’, etc.: JRRT, quoted in CLW to JRRT, 20 December 1917.

‘the theme more worth…’: LT1, 55.

The Valar and the Germanic Gods: plot outline, LT2, 290.

p.257

‘reddened…’: LT1, 78.

‘who loveth games…’: ibid., 75.

p.258

‘Mayhap she…’, ‘a denial…’: ibid., 152.

Eldar: ‘a being from outside’ is the gloss of the cognate Egla in the Gnomish lexicon; the Qenya lexicon gives no original meaning. Parma Eldalamberon 11, 32, and Parma Eldalamberon 12, 35.

p.259

‘Vainly doth Ulmo…’: LT1, 120.

p.260

‘perhaps more poignant…’: 1964 interview with Denis Gueroult, BBC Sound Archives.

p.261

‘the large and cosmogonic’, etc.: Letters, 144. ‘One must begin with the elfin…’: Essay Club minutes, Exeter College library.

‘drawn with a team…’: Romeo and Juliet, I. iv.

‘a murrain…’: Letters, 143; cf. also 212 (for the Ents and Macbeth) and ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 111-12.

p.262

‘her skin was…’: LT2, 8.

Beren human in 1917 ‘Tinúviel’ (footnote): ibid., 52, 71-2, 139.

‘Rapunzel’: Lang, The Red Fairy Book, 282-5. Favourite book as a child: Biography, 22.

Tevildo, Tifil, Tiberth: LT2, 15, 45; Parma Eldalamberon 11, 70; Parma Eldalamberon 12, 90.

‘a mask…’: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 117.

‘His eyes were long…’: LT2, 16.

‘the greatest wolf…’: ibid., 31.

p.264

‘the first example…’: Letters, 149.

‘The consolation…’: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 153.

p.265

‘wonderful that shells…’: RQG to EK, 22 May 1916.

‘Such things seemed miraculous…’: Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 287-8.

‘I have a Silmaril…’: LT2, 37.

p.266

‘Soldier’s Dream’: Owen, The Collected Poems, 84.

‘the greatest cairn…’: LT1, 241; the reference in these notes to the burial of the Gnomes beneath this cairn is uncertain, but would be in keeping with all later versions of the story. ‘bulwark…’: LT2, 73.

Battle of Unnumbered Tears: LT1, 240-1; LT2, 70.

p.267

‘the luck…’: LT2, 79.

‘love lies…’: ibid., 85. ‘the land had become…’: ibid., 96.

p.268

‘for lo!…’: LT2, 102.

‘a swoon came…’: ibid., 99.

pp.268-9

‘In that sad band…’: ibid., 85-6. Mormakil, ‘Blacksword’, is Túrin’s pseudonym among the Rodothlim.

p.269

‘ease his sorrow…’: ibid., 74.

‘At least none…’: ibid., 71.

p.270

‘might be said…’: Letters, 150. Elsewhere (Letters, 214, 345) JRRT said Kullervo had been the germ of his legendarium, even if in the story of Túrin ‘it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending’. The Qenya lexicon (Parma Eldalamberon 12, 95-6) compares Turambar, ‘master of doom’, to Old Norse Sigurðr (sigr, ‘victory’, urðr, ‘fate, destiny’). JRRT studied Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex during his final year of Classics (Exeter College Library register).

‘In these days…’: LT2, 70.

p.271

Necklace of the Brísings: a genealogy of c.1930 calls Feänor in Old English Finbrós and his sons Brósingas, a reference to the fabled necklace of the Brósings (Beowulf, line 1199), which has been equated with the Norse Brísingamen. The Shaping of Middle-earth, 212.

‘Behold now Tinwelint…’: LT2, 231.

‘crowned and helmed…’: ibid., 232.

p.272

‘an unrecognised…’: Shippey, Author of the Century, 155.

‘the whole Tale…’: LT2, 253.

‘the very primitive undergrowth’: Biography, 59.

‘gnawing his fingers…’: LT2, 282.

p.273

Cannock Chase: G. L. Elkin, cited in The Lost Road, 413, suggests on the contrary that the High Heath is based on Hopton Heath, a few miles north-west of Great Haywood, where a Civil War battle was fought in 1643.

pp.273-4

‘And now is the end…’, etc.: LT2, 287-9.

p.274

‘So we lay down the pen…’: GBS, A Spring Harvest, 78.

p.275

‘blind, and a fool…’: LT2, 288. ‘a free virtue’, ‘everything should…’: LT1, 59.

p.276

‘ennoblement’: Letters, 220. ‘On a journey…’: ibid., 240. ‘the secret life…’: ibid., 149.

‘there liveth still…’: LT1, 56.

‘and who knows…’: ibid., 220. Nothing similar replaced this rejected draft text, but decades later JRRT returned to the idea that his legendarium might adumbrate the Christian story more or less explicitly; see Morgoth’s Ring, 351-2, 356.

pp.277-8

Chronology of composition: In 1964 JRRT remembered writing ‘The Music of the Ainur’ in Oxford, i.e., no earlier than November 1918. The Lost Tales of Valinor seem likely to have been composed after the creation myth, along with the tales of the Great Lands, including ink revisions of ‘The Tale of Turambar’ and ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’. A copy of lines from ‘The Tale of Turambar’ written in Rúmilian script refers to Tinwelint as Thingol, the name the elven-king was to keep. It must postdate almost all of the Lost Tales, which still have Tinwelint, except the third, typescript version of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, which has Thingol. According to Humphrey Carpenter, JRRT was using this version of the ever-changing Rúmilian script in his diary around June 1919. However, six or seven months seems a very short time for such a volume of complex writing. (LT1, 203; LT2, 312; Biography, 100-3; Parma Eldalamberon 13, 20; JRRT service record.)

orn, etc. (footnote): ‘Early Noldorin Fragments’, Parma Eldalamberon 13, 116.

Leeds: Biography, 102ff.

p.279

‘much interested…’, etc.: RWR to JRRT, 19 November 1917.

Poems sent to RWR: The Lays of Beleriand, 3, 150.

p.280

‘vast backcloths’: Letters, 144.

‘lacking in experience…’ (RWR); ‘the only form…’, etc.: CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

p.281

‘gave him opportunities…’: Wayne G. Hammond, Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal, Spring 2000, 62, quoted in Douglas A. Anderson (ed.), The Annotated Hobbit, 5.

‘I want you to get…’: CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

Christopher Tolkien named after CLW: Letters, 395.

p.282

Lewis’s ambitions: Rateliff, ‘The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and the Notion Club Papers’, in Flieger and Hostetter (eds.), Tolkien’s Legendarium, 200-1.

‘Only from him…’: Letters, 362.

EMT’s copies: LT1, 13; LT2, 146.

Elrond: Letters, 346-7; Douglas A. Anderson (ed.), The Annotated Hobbit, 94-6.

p.283

‘a new story…’: Letters, 27.

‘grew in the telling…’: ‘Foreword to the Second Edition’, The Lord of the Rings, xv.

‘which says for me…’: Letters, 420.

‘incurable bachelorhood’: CLW to JRRT, 20 December 1917.

TCBS reunion: Mrs Patricia Wiseman and Mrs Susan Wood, interview with the author.

p.284

‘lair’, etc.: Letters, 429.

‘I wish v. much…’: Letters, 431-2.

POSTSCRIPT ‘One who dreams alone’

‘dead spot’: Hynes, A War Imagined, 101. ‘Why I can write nothing…’: ibid. 105-6.

‘sheer vacancy’: GBS to JRRT, 16 September 1916. GBS’s poetry: CLW to JRRT, 16 November 1916.

pp.287-8

‘Companions of the Rose’; Tolkien productive in 1917: CLW to JRRT, 1 September 1917; Douglas A. Anderson to the author.

p.288

‘an age when…’: Letters, 225.

p.289

‘A horse is a…’: Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 22. A form of censorship: ibid. 174-5.

‘Those too old…’: Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 204.

‘how it was that Tolkien…’, etc.: Brogan, ‘Tolkien’s Great War’, in Avery and Briggs (eds.), Children and their Books, 356.

pp.289-90

Anti-Germanism and the breach with the past: Hynes, A War Imagined, 78.

‘philology itself…’: Tolkien, ‘Philology: General Works’, in Lee and Boas (eds.), The Year’s Work in English Studies, 1923, 37.

Romanticism tainted: Hynes, A War Imagined, 78.

p.290

‘No one ever influenced…’: W. H. Lewis (ed.), Letters of C. S. Lewis, 287.

‘animal horror’: Letters, 72. ‘The utter stupid waste…’: ibid. 75.

‘tutors’ in high diction: Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 21.

p.291

‘not being especially…’: Letters, 225. ‘the extraordinary…’: ibid., 225-6.

‘This sort of thing…’: ‘On Translating Beowulf’, Monsters, 55.

p.292

‘Wisdom made…’: Graves, ‘Babylon’, Fairies and Fusiliers. ‘The Western Front made…’: Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 291.

p.293

‘A real taste…’: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 135. ‘therapy for a mind…’, etc.: Brogan, ‘Tolkien’s Great War’, in Avery and Briggs (eds.), Children and their Books, 358.

Tolkien on ‘escapism’: ‘On Fairy-stories’, Monsters, 148-50.

‘Beowulf lying…’: Graves, Good-bye to All That, 304. Flammenwerfer: Letters, 133. ‘Very numerous…’: LT2, 174.

p.295

‘C’ Company disaster: The Lancashire Fusiliers Annual 1917, 215-20; Latter, Lancashire Fusiliers, 148; 11th LF war diary. ‘The problem was…’: C. H. David of the 25th Division’s Royal Field Artillery brigade, whose guns were covering this network of trenches at around this time (Imperial War Museum).

Beowulf, Beorhtnoth: ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son’, Poems and Stories, 103.

‘Aequam serva…’: Letters, 73.

‘whose instinct is…’: ibid., 211.

p.296

The Mabinogion: GBS to JRRT, 10 September 1916. The Earthly Paradise: Douglas A. Anderson to the author. Morris, Bunyan, etc.: Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 138-9, 135.

‘make no pretence…’: CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

p.297

‘Beneath the surface…’: Flieger, A Question of Time, 224.

The phrase ‘pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness’ comes from Tolkien’s discussion of J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose in unpublished drafts of ‘On Fairy-stories’, quoted more fully on p. 53 of Flieger’s book.

p.297

Eriol’s experience of Faërie: LT1, 47; LT2, 284, 287-9.

p.298

‘Did no feeling…’: Douie, The Weary Road, 222.

‘There is no difficulty…’: Shippey, Author of the Century, 248.

p.299

‘There was an arguing…’, etc.: Carrington, A Subaltern’s War, 35.

‘sick and weary’: LT2, 90. ‘moral impetus…’, etc.: Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 39.

p.300

‘something irrevocably evil’, etc.: Shippey, Author of the Century, xxx.

‘If in some smothering…’: ‘Dulce et decorum est’, Owen, The Collected Poems, p. 55.

p.301

‘the Myth of the War…’: Hynes, A War Imagined, 424.

p.302

‘a few acres of mud’: CLW to JRRT, 4 March 1917.

Frye’s modes and the war: Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 311-12.

‘Book after book…’: Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning, 293.

p.303

‘the authors of this poetry…’: Douie, The Weary Road, 7, 9.

‘It is thus anterior…’: Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning, 14. A Subaltern’s War was not published until 1929.

‘deeds, or lands…’: C. Day Lewis (ed.), The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, 31.

p.304

‘who sneer…’: CLW to JRRT, 10 November 1914.

p.305

‘Even to-day…’, etc.: ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Monsters, 16, 17.

‘Now we stand…’: CLW to GBS, 30 August 1916.

‘With our backs…’: ‘To all ranks of the British Army in France and Flanders’, Douglas Haig, 11 April 1918. I have echoed Vera Brittain – a voluntary nurse tending the wounded at Étaples at the time of the Spring Offensive – who noted the later tarnishing of Haig’s reputation but said, ‘I can think of him only as the author of that Special Order, for after I read it I knew that I should go on, whether I could or not.’ (Testament of Youth, 420.)

p.306

‘even shall those…’: LT1, 54-5.

‘Perhaps some day…’: Douie, The Weary Road, 226.

‘to portray life…’: Lucas, Tragedy: Serious drama in relation to Aristotle’s Poetics, 79.

p.307

‘more or less a Warwickshire village…’: Letters, 230. ‘I take my models…’: ibid. 235.

pp.307-8

‘as low as blacksmith-work…’: The Hobbit, 56. ‘It is not unlikely…’: ibid. 109. ‘neither bush…’: ibid. 257. ‘piled in heaps…’: ibid. 344.

p.308

Laketown: Shippey, Author of the Century, 40.

‘May God bless you…’: GBS to JRRT, 3 February 1916. ‘had been granted…’: JRRT to GBS, 12-13 August 1916.

‘I was pitched…’: Letters, 46.

p.310

‘One has indeed personally…’: Foreword to the second edition, The Lord of the Rings, xvii.

‘As far as any character…’: Letters, 232 (footnote).

‘My “Sam Gamgee”…’: Biography, 81.

‘Personally I do not…’: Letters, 303.

p.311

Survey of fiction writers: Cecil, The Flower of Battle, 1.

‘This war has the very…’: Lewis, ‘The Dethronement of Power’, Time & Tide 36 (22 October 1955); reprinted in Isaacs and Zimbardo, Tolkien and the Critics, 14.

‘the disillusionment…’: Shippey, Author of the Century, 156.

p.312

‘a recall from facile…’: Lewis, ‘Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’, Essay Collection: Literature, philosophy and short stories, 116.

p.313

‘I had seen something…’: Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 362.