Tolkien the Philologist-turned-Poet and Tolkien the Theologian: The TCBS, the Inklings, and John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War

Intro:

This is from reading John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth, which was enlightening beyond what I can say. But I will try to say some of it here.

I’ll start with the largest impact on my overall reading of Tolkien and the whole of the Inklings project. That effect was that I have someplace to put the Inklings within Tolkien’s literary career. An instance of progression would be what Garth traces as a path in which Tolkien (after his fundamental move in school from Classics to English Lit) went from being focused on philology to making a conscious turn to being a “poet,” which here means less about analyzing meter and rhyme than it means about ποιητής / poiētēs in the ancient sense, from the Greek verb  ποιέω / poiƏō, meaning “to make”—a maker of narratives. In ancient times, and up until after the war for Tolkien, this happened mostly in verse form (I would have to look up details, but I believe that the Hebrew Bible is among the first, if not the first, works of religious narrative prose: mythologies, stories of the gods, had always been in verse), but Garth notes that, with the work on the Book of Lost Tales after the war, Tolkien turned to narrative prose (p. 231). But the particular progression of import for my locating the In the preface to the Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien relates that, by the time he was penning The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his father was much more directly interested in theology and philosophy than he had been in his earlier philological days and early days as the poet of

Theology/philosophy was, I think, the defining link of the Inklings, or at least mysticism, to include Williams. They all studied medieval lit, but the real common thread was the philosophical/mystical/religious mode in which they all did it. Barfield was pretty much straight up a philosopher of language, building an interwoven epistemology and metaphysics in Saving the Appearances (one that shares strong affinities with the phenomenology of Husserl, although he makes absolutely no mention of the continental phenomenological tradition). The match-up between Tolkien’s theological turn and the close interaction with Lewis in the Inklings is, thus, pretty tight. For instance, in something like Loconte’s smaller volume A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, you get a lot of detail on Lewis as a motivator in finishing Lord of the Rings.

I can fit what was going on in Tolkien the poet/author of Middle Earth/Silmarillion into philosophical terms, e.g., Ricoaur’s art–life–art threefold mimesis: basically the more well-known statement that “art imitates life” is possible only because “life” first imitates art; we are able to make sense of “life” as having meaning only by constructing narratives out of our experiences, and to do this we need narratival categories, which we must get from narratives we have learned … this is why studying the legends is so important for JRRT, because he knew that they form the categories in our minds by which we interpret the experiences that make up our “life.” But in those early phases (especially before the material becomes the epic of good versus evil with the “Fall of Gondolin” [see more below], but even after that until LotR really takes on dimensions of the medieval theological exposition of good versus evil), Tolkien was not instantiating medieval theology in his art in the way he does at the time of writing LotR. As examples of what I am saying he was not yet doing in the earlier stages, I have written on the elements I see in LotR elsewhere in posts on courtly loveas symbolic of grace in a threefold model of grace and nature interplay takenfrom medieval theology, and I have written on Lembas bread not as the Eucharistas such, but as “sacramentality as such” (with elements of Euharistic imagery used for this end, but in a way that does not make Lembas actually an allegory of the Eucharist), and if I have not done it yet, I should and will do a post on the fact that, with Eowyn, as Aragorn says, “the shield arm is bad, but the main damage came through the sword arm” is, like the problem of Saruman succumbing to ring temptation, an instantiation of the medieval theological principle that any interaction of the will with evil, even in fighting it, while maybe absolutely necessary for a given situation, always has a negative impact on the will, with the sword arm being symbolic of the will as the arm of action rather than of defense.

But the TCBS was before all that, in the formative years of the Silmarillion, in the days of Tolkien the philologist working on the Quenya lexicon, Tolkien the poet of the mythology and the Book of Lost Tales, and Tolkien the author of the Middle Earth/Silmarillion, the last of which overlaps into Tolkien the theologically interested author of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings … and indeed, the author of the Silmarillion lasts through the author of the LotR, as he was working on the Silmarillion up through his death (as well as on the lexicon, a lifelong project), which was not published until after his death. So, that is the place of the Inklings in Tolkien’s career, the last of what I see as four stages: philologist of the lexicon, poet of the mythology, author of Middle Earth/Silmarillion, and author of Hobbit/LotR (but of course, the philology and poetry never left him). Of course, how you mean "before" depends on whether you think the TCBS could ever really end (see just below for some of the real struggle on that issue between the members) ... but it definitely at least started before the theology-incarnating of the LotR.

A first thing of interest here is just to tell the unfamiliar what the TCBS was. It is short for “Tea Club and Barovian Society,” which was an informal “club,” really more of a clique, that Tolkien had in late secondary school (high school) and through undergrad and through the war. And it was a lifelong friendship with all three of the other members—Christohper Wiseman, Robert Gilson, and G.B. Smith … but with Gilson and Smith, that was a much shorter time, for they both died in the war. One has to read Garth for oneself or Shippey or Carpenter to really get what this was for JRRT. This was not just a clique … it was a vision and a passion. At one point, the group sort of started expanding with a few others they met, but Tolkien actually stopped coming around because he and Wiseman saw the new blood as being too sarcastic and ironic and having at best a weak moral compass in thinking about things literary and cultural. As Wiseman complained to Tolkien in a letter, the new blood would make fun of anything but lose their temper about nothing (some things are important enough to lose one’s temper over), and both Wiseman and Tolkien felt they needed to bring the group back to being the four of them as core friendship and vision for having an impact in the world through writing.

There were two important “councils” of the TCBS, which was their name for a weekend when the four of them would all get together and talk, and eat and talk and walk and talk and smoke and talk and drink and talk: the councils of London and of Lichfield. Upon hearing that they liked to call their meetings “councils,” many an LotR fan will probably first think of this being a model for the council of Elrond. But, while I think this could also be that, I think it is more important to recognize it as the model of the “council” of Crickhollow, the night at the house at Crickhollow when Merry and Pippin are singing and splashing up a storm in the bath and then, after a hearty meal and while lighting their pipes, Merry, Pippin, and Sam tell Frodo that they know what he is up to and that there is no way he is preventing them coming along to help … on the eve of their setting out on a journey that would change them forever. That is why the London and Lichfield councils were more the model for Crickhollow than for Rivendell: they were the last times that JRR Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson, and G. B. Smith would meet all together before the latter two died in the Great War in 1916, the last time they would eat and drink and smoke and laugh and talk about their passion for making a mark in the world for the moral good through poetry and cultural writing as scholars.

When Gilson died first earlier in 1916, the differences in their emotional responses and thoughts about how it affected the identity of the TCBS put a lot of strain on the remaining three (Tolkien was in shock to such a degree that he felt that they were no longer a group with a whole-that-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts identity and that it was now just a collection of individuals, a whole that is only the sum of its parts; Wiseman and Smith vehemently disagreed, and sometimes in harsh language). And when Smith died toward the end of the year, it put even more strain on Wiseman and Tolkien’s friendship, which never dissolved but did take hits. It’s one of the things that always makes me think that Jackson/Walsh do have an insight into at least certain emotional cores in Tolkien. Wiseman and Tolkien years after the death of Gilson and Smith were like the look that passes between Sam and Frodo in Jackson’s movie when Frodo the nine-fingered wakes up in the bed after the main action is over, and Gandalf and Legolas are chuckling and laughing and Gimli is doing the I-like-to-talk-about-dwarf-drinking-prowess-a-lot-but-can't-actually-handle-that-much laughing that you really get only in the movies and Merry and Pippin are bouncing all over, but Sam stands in the doorway and they exchange a look: they are more deeply committed as friends now than ever they were before the whole thing, but that is precisely because they underwent some very heavy things together, things that leave heavy scars, including scars between the persons.

And I think I can sense here even a reason for some of Tolkien’s shortness regarding Charles Williams in later years, meaning his terse reply to the idea that he and Williams were big influences on each other. I write this in the immediate wake of the theater release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and there is an analogous issue discussed there … the issue of legends (Luke Skywalker criticizes his own legend). C. S. Lewis was pretty much the center of the Inklings (see Humphrey Carpenter’s book on the Inklings for more on that), and he was a very dynamic personality … which is exactly the stuff of legends. And legends can tend to eclipse the things that are back behind them, by which I mean that, in readers’ eyes, the Inklings, as the later group and the one with such a dynamic personality as Lewis at its center, will eclipse the TCBS in popular thinking about Tolkien.

And there are two problems with this. The first is just accuracy: Tolkien’s fundamental development in world/mythology building happened long before he met Williams. But the second problem and reason for tenseness at legends of Williams and Tolkien influencing each other greatly is the more important because the more personal: to eclipse the TCBS is to erase particularly Gilson and Smith from the picture of Tolkien the author, and so, in a sense, to erase the impact of their deaths on him … and that is very personal. Of course, those who do it don’t mean to do it; they’re just gits like myself in undergrad days getting all twitterpated learning Inklings lore, but I can now very much understand Tolkien’s irritation at the idea. Carpenter says he thinks Tolkien’s later statement was a bit overdrawn and that the evidence points to actually a fair bit of interaction, but I think the rebuttal can be made that Tolkien skewed the situation no more to the negative than do the legends skew it to the positive. And with somebody as well-studied and possessed of his faculties as Tolkien, things don’t really happen as “influence” in the way they happen for less strong-willed authors. Somebody like Tolkien might listen to a critique Williams had as a colleague and find useful and helpful things in it, but that’s a bit different from the "bosom buddies" picture generated in a legend about the Inklings. Much as I like Williams and much as I think some of his material dovetails and interacts with Tolkien's on the same matters (particularly Arthurian material), he and JRRT definitely did not both think of themselves as “the great twin brethren,” which was Tolkien and Wiseman’s nickname for themselves even before the TCBS.

The Real Big Deal

So, above I mentioned that I think Tolkien’s career is revealed to be in four stages, which is the amazing thing I really found in this book: the philologist of the Quenya Lexicon, the poet/author of the mythology and the Lost Tales, the author of Middle Earth, and the author of The Hobbit/LotR. What you really find in Garth is the progression of the first three stages, and the place that tipped me off to what was really being narrated was when Garth brought things right up to the point of Tolkien’s embarking (from what I can gather in the work, England’s of that time technical term for what we in the US now call  “being deployed”) for the actual front in Europe. At this point, Garth said this would be as good a time as any to look at the shape of the mythology at the point at which Tolkien embarked for Europe(pp. 124–28), meaning that Garth is not looking just at a point in the life of Tolkien, but at a moment in the life/progression of “the mythology” that would become Middle Earth.

That was the big revelation for me in this book that vastly broadened my horizon on Tolkien … and blew me away even more at how amazing his imagination was to encompass a progression like this. The massive thing here is that, before the mythology was Middle Earth as an alternate universe kind of thing … it was England. The whole thing started with his playing with words known from languages he studied, like old and middle English, Norse, and Finnish (see toward the end of Garth, I don’t remember what chapter, on the fact that his Quenya is strongly influenced by real-world Finnish and his Gnomish by real-world Welsh). The whole lexicon started as trying to come up with believable earlier words from which the known historical ones might have derived, like if, say (to go totally unrelated), one looked at the fact that the Sanskrit word for “war” literally means “desire for more cows” and then one conjectured back and made up a word for “invasion” that literally meant “cattle drive” … not sure if the logic works there, but it sort of captures the idea of making up background words for real presently-known historical words.

Basically, as best as I can put it, he was coming up with a background language for all the families of northern Germanic languages that fed into his own English. But, at the same time, the places he encountered all these wonderful words for which he wanted to provide a back-history were precisely in the legends, such as Beowulf, and he quickly realized that you cannot separate language from legend. And so the legends he began making up were meant to be the background mythology behind the earliest Norse and Old English legends, back beyond even those on the cusp of recorded literacy. On p. 259, Garth talks about “the hallowed prehistory of England.” While Valinor was a lost pathway, the Elves came from their to Aryador to teach mean “songs and holiness,” and Aryador is continental Europe, and “the Lonely Isle” to which the elves retreat upon failures in the mission is England. Again on 259, Garth discusses the Lonely Isle making “the final voyage to its current location just off the European coast.” On 273, Garth talks of “chronological narrative caught up with the Germanic wanderer’s own day.” The “wanderer” is the mariner bard who has collected and is telling the tales, so the moment of the “tale” is really the passing over from oral tradition of a prehistory to written accounts, precisely on the witness of the bard (see a few paragraphs below on Tolkien himself as the bard) … only this is the stuff that got lost when it happened in the real world: The Book of Lost Tales.

As does all mythology really, it hooked onto the present lived real world. I would have to go back and look through it all in the beginning to make sure, but in addition to what I just mentioned of Aryador being continental Europe (and yes, that is from the same ethnic term “Aryan” but a concept of it other than Hitler’s supremacist hijacking of it) and the Lonely Isle being Britain, I think that (if I remember Garth rightly .... I am writing this at a slight remove) Kotirion was basically Warwick, and there was likewise a mythological element representing larger Warwickshire (maybe Kor?) and another representing Oxford. The two place names in the last of Garth’s chapters, “Tol Withermon and Fladweth Amrod,” basically represent the last two stationings Tolkien had in the war, both of them defense stations in England (much scarier there during the German last push than things ever are here in the States) because he never regained enough strength during the war to return to Europe after he was sent back with “trench fever,” which kept making relapses, which probably saved his life, since the Ypres offensive to which he would have gone back was an even surer path to an Allied soldiers death than the disastrous Somme offensive from which he was sent home.

A distinct step in Middle Earth becoming a fit setting for the Lord of the Rings was when, after Smith’s death and his own return from the war, he wrote “The Fall of Gondolin,” in which, according to Garth, the mythology became for the first time fully an epic of good versus evil (see Garth, p. 217). This is a very distinctive stage: it's at the end of the "English mythology" stage just before it becomes fully the "Middle Earth" stage, and one could reasonably wonder whether there is something in this move to fully being emblematic of the struggle between good and evil that made possible, and even fitting, the creation of full-fledged Middle Earth, something more intangible alongside the material path I'll describe in a moment.

He never got around to publishing the version of the mythology in the Book of Lost Tales form, although it appears in volumes 1 and 2 of Christopher Tolkien’s epic series of publication of the background materials (from which he is now retiring in 2018 after, fittingly, publishing a definitive critical edition of Beren and Luthien). Tolkien himself actually had a place in the Book of Lost Tales. The bard Eriol, telling his tales for the elven queen of trees in the house of lore known as the cottage of lost play, is basically a stand-in for Tolkien himself (see Garth, pp. 224–25).

And this is one of the most interesting parts to me. He had to put the work mostly on the back burner for a while to concentrate on tutoring and then teaching, and basically supporting his young family. At the point just before he did so, his old secondary school or undergrad tutor (I think Reynolds was his name) had asked him what he was up to writing-wise, and Tolkien gave him a synopsis form of the main plot lines. A number of years later when he finally picked up serious work on the whole thing again, what he went from was not the actual material into which he had concretely shaped it before putting it on the back burner, but rather the outline he had sent to his old tutor … and without Eriol in the picture. And this, as I have said, is the point at which it became properly Middle Earth in its own right, as its own fictional place, no longer pre-England/Europe. The point at which Middle Earth was fully born was also the point at which the author completely removed himself from the page.

I know it might seem like a stretch to some, and I am definitely not trying to say any crackpot theory like “I think the Silmarillion is the secret key to hidden great meaning in Paul Simon’s songs,” let alone that Simon was intentionally encrypting Tolkien in his songs. And it may be only in my own head that these two things seem to resonate with each other so strongly. But I do think there is some similarity between what I have just been talking about as the disappearance of Tolkien from the text and about his whole world of themes, and maybe even his loss of his friends in the Great War, on the one hand, and on the other hand, one of Paul Simons’ songs that is among my top 5 favorites (he has too many good ones to have just one fave), “The Cool Cool River” from the Rhythm of the Saints album, the last lines of which run:

And these streets,

Quiet as a sleeping army

Send their battered dreams to heaven

For a mother’s restless son

Who is a witness to, who is a warrior

Who denies his urge to break and run

Who says: Hard times?

I’m used to them

The speeding planet burns

I’m used to that

My life so common it disappears

But sometimes even music

Cannot substitute for tears

Resonances

Finally, I’d like to connect reading Garth’s work with a couple other major strands I have tried to talk about in the posts in this blog. Some of these I will expound more and some of them I will simply give a quote from Garth and a link to my other post. Some will be more concrete and some simply jumping off points.

Incarnational Literature: As part of the whole thing of the mythology being first England is the fact that, for Tolkien, the landscape plays as large a role as anything else. On p. 230, Garth speaks of physical geography versus political geography (or at least, I think, simply political). In our book club on the Inklings, for which I read Garth’s book, the girl who leads the group and makes up discussion guides for each meeting had a question on an earlier reading of part of the Silmarillion to the effect of considering why maps seem to be such a thing for Tolkien. I think that the connection between geology and topography, on the one hand, particularly the former, and demography (consideration of identities of peoples), on the other hand, is an instance of the incarnational aspect of Tolkien’s literature: even the inanimate rocks and waters participate in the identity, just as the love that the elves have for wood and stone and water is the base for their “magic.”

Dream Think: Garth p. 226: “The two cottages, in Valinor and Kortirion, encompass between them a whole complex of relations between dream, reality, and story.”

Biblical Mode: The LotR accommodating theological exposition is kind of the same, or at least similar, mode as Paul’s non-narrative epistles being the “other half” of the New Testament. It's not the same genre (Paul is discursive communication and LotR is narratival instantiation), and that issue of genre definitely impacts meaning, but I also think there is something to the fact that both go to a level of theological concepts.

Biblical Studies and Contemporary Religious/Theological Discourse: On p. 228, Garth describes a “fluidity and stability of Tolkien’s mythopeic conceptions” that, for me, rings a bit like Joseph Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI) thought on the interplay of continuity and discontinuity in the Tradition of the faith. (The element Garth is talking about is a beautiful little bit: “While names evolved and the interrelationships of individuals and peoples changed almost beyond recognition through years of writing, rewriting, and recasting, these embodiments of quintessential elvishness—the house of lore and the queen of trees—recurred.”)

Fodder

These couple paragraphs are parts of my originally jotted notes here that did not make it into the main body of this post but I still think good to provide. A little bit rougher but I still think important points to me.

The point about Ricoeur's threefold mimesis of art–"life"–art is a point that will be entirely lost on those whose minds are saturated with scientism, whether they be actual scientists who have bought that mindset, which is actually a mythology beyond science itself, or they are reactionary religious people who, in their obsessive war on “science” and their desire to beat it on its own grounds have so thoroughly and deeply imbibed the core principles of the scientism that they think they are fighting [that scientific “fact” is the base mode of truth and that scientific discourse is the base mode of all discourse] that they have no cognizance of the fact … fortunately, at least for now, at least in the majority, the secularist scientismists who have won this battle for minds also do not realize that they have won.

The big question for me is how the material of Tolkien the poet feeds into Tolkien the philosopher. While he is doing more philosophical things in LotR, he is still doing them on the material provided by Tolkien the poet, who was born in the TCBS before the war. This provides me a model for understanding, in turn, what was the core of the Inkling: how did the material they studied, the literature, feed into their philosophical/mystical/religious thoughts being instantiated in their writing that mimics it (Tolkien is far and away the most thoroughgoing mimesis, and so he is to me the clearest picture of what was the core of the Inklings [this was part of an original statement in this post that reading Garth's big influence was locating the Inklings within Tolkien's career AND locating Tolkien within the Inklings, but it seemed too distracting so say that when what I went on to do was to dwell mainly on the first part, locating the Inklings era within Tolkien's own progression, so I dropped the opening statement back to just that ... but I still think that it is important to note that what Tolkien the theology-student author uses to do his theological instantiating was created previously by Tolkien the philologist/poet]).