Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War
©John Garth, 2006

This article examines J.R.R. Tolkien’s life as an undergraduate from 1911 to 1915, and the impact of the First World War on his Oxford college. The text here is a slightly revised form of a paper delivered on 21 August 2006 at the Oxford Tolkien Conference, “The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration”, held at Exeter College. It contains much research that fell outside the scope of my book, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (London: HarperCollins and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which focused on Tolkien’s friendships from King Edward’s School, Birmingham; his military career; and his academic and creative development. This article, by contrast, concentrates on his friendships and extra-curricular activities as an undergraduate.

This website is under construction. In due course I hope to add further articles, short and long, dealing with Tolkien and other matters.

J.R.R. Tolkien arrived at Exeter College in 1911 at the age of 19 as an Exhibitioner — the holder of a scholarship worth £60 a year — after a summer spent partly in the Swiss Alps, on the walking holiday that ultimately gave him inspiration for Rivendell and the Misty Mountains. But The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings lay far out of sight, and at this stage he had barely tapped into his creative potential: we have seen evidence of just two poems, “Wood-sunshine” and “The Tides”, written before this point. There was scant sign that Tolkien was anything more than a gifted young man in pursuit of a degree in Classics (also known as Literae Humaniores or “Greats”) amid a host of sociable distractions. By the time he left Exeter in the summer of 1915, the world had gone to war; Tolkien had outgrown his minority, become engaged, and abandoned Classics for English. He had also begun a sequence of visionary artworks, produced a spate of poetry, and — leaving now the creative pursuits of other students far behind — he had begun inventing both a language and a world for it to describe. His association with Exeter was long-lasting: his eldest son John in turn took his Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature here in 1939; he himself became honorary fellow at the start of 1958, when he was Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, and he left £300 to the college in his will.1 But during the years surrounding the First World War, this college witnessed the transformation of an undergraduate into the creator of Middle-earth.

Antecedents
An antecedent may be observed in another schoolboy who had arrived at Exeter College from King Edward’s School, Birmingham, six decades earlier, and in the friend he made here. Edward Burne-Jones had matriculated alongside William Morris in 1852 and vowed with him to forge an artistic brotherhood for a “crusade and Holy Warfare against the age, ‘the heartless coldness of the times’”.2 Morris and Burne-Jones had been disappointed by the standard of Oxford teaching at that time and had headed off to greater things, but not before the university had quickened their interest in medievalism, and not before they had left their own medievalist mark, notably in the Arthurian fresco at the Oxford Union and the tapestry in Exeter College Chapel — visions that seemed to reunite the seat of learning with a gilded romantic past. Tolkien once compared his informal King Edward’s School club, the T.C.B.S., to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood which Burne-Jones joined; and when he arrived at Exeter he was probably already interested in the precedent set by him and Morris.

By 1911 Britain was engaged in an arms race with Germany, but international tensions were only a dim backdrop to a slightly feverish gaiety in the population at large, and young Oxbridge undergraduates were no exception. In the words of a close contemporary of Tolkien’s, this was Oxford “in the last years of the Affluent Age — absurd, delightful, totally irresponsible, and totally self-assured — moulded on a way of life that appeared unshakeably pre-ordained yet was about to vanish like the fabric of a dream.”3

Having left school feeling like a “young sparrow kicked out of a high nest”, Tolkien was clearly determined to make up for his loss by boisterousness that descended occasionally into bumptiousness.4 His first two years at Exeter College were far from industrious. He and other Old Edwardians at Oxford were an inactive bunch, as one (possibly Tolkien himself) confided anonymously in their former school newspaper: “In fact we have done nothing; we have been content with being.”5 Exeter was as good a place as any to do nothing. His food was provided in hall or brought by a college servant or “scout” to his rooms, a bedroom and sitting-room on Staircase 8 in the first year and Staircase 7 in the second year; these were in the Tudor-style “Swiss Cottage” (since demolished) that stood at the Broad Street end of Turl Street.6 His college library borrowings for classics are almost non-existent: only one in his entire first year, Grote’s History of Greece, signed out for less than two weeks.7 The Oxford “sleepies” stopped him from working — a by-product of what the Exeter College fellow Lewis Farnell called “the inertia of the Thames valley which is against all reforming disturbance”.8 Yet the “sleepies” do not seem to have stopped him from enjoying himself. He might entertain friends for breakfast, or chat late into the night over a pipe. His longest account of undergraduate life describes how he and a friend “captured” a bus during a “ragging” by students.9 He sketched shady Turl Street from his window and, for the cover of a smoking concert invitation, he added a foursome of students staggering along tipsily under the Nazgûl-like gaze of proctors in the form of owls.10 Tolkien played tennis; he also continued playing rugby, though standards were higher than at school and he did not excel.11

Social life
An Exeter contemporary found the college filled with “young sportsmen and future parsons”.12 But in recent years it had been more popular among Catholic students than any other college; they attended St Aloysius’s in the Woodstock Road, the church that gave its name to Sebastian Flyte’s Catholic teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited.13 At the outset, Tolkien was taken under the wing of a couple of Catholics in the year above him, one them probably Tony Shakespeare, a law student who had been born in Harborne outside Birmingham and had attended the Oratory School — home of Tolkien’s guardian, Father Francis Morgan.14 In a letter of October 1914 Tolkien tells his wife-to-be Edith Bratt, facetiously or otherwise, that Shakespeare and fellow classicist Lionel Thompson (himself an Anglican) had “prevented me doing work on the sabbath, as I had proposed to do”.15

Despite the support of friends who shared his faith, the first few terms passed, Tolkien later confessed, “with practically none or very little practice of religion”. He later came to feel that his failings and misdemeanours, recorded at the time in a diary, were a reaction to the fact that he was forbidden by his Catholic guardian from seeing the Anglican Edith until 1913, when he reached the age of 21.16 He recalled, “It was extremely hard, painful and bitter, especially at first. The effects were not wholly good: I fell back into folly and slackness and misspent a good deal of my first year at College.”17 Such comments should be taken with a grain of salt: Tolkien, intensely scrupulous in matters of religion, was prone to discomfort and self-recrimination over the slightest lapse, and certainly never strayed from the Roman Catholic faith into which he had followed his mother at the age of eight. In fact, his crimes as a student were probably no more unusual than the regret he felt looking back from a more mature perspective. The diary of an American friend at Exeter, Allen Barnett, gives a glimpse of the grim reality of one typical day in 1913: “Went back to the jolly inn in the morning with Tolkien and we both got quite merry and made awful fools of ourselves when we got back to college. He put white shoe polish in my four-in-nines [apparently a kind of traditional American braided rug]…”18 By chance a national daily newspaper, The Daily Graphic, affords a glimpse of another day in the lives of Tolkien and Barnett when they went to look at the charred remains of a boathouse destroyed the night before by militant suffragettes; a photograph shows the two undergraduates at the forefront of the onlookers, small and indistinct but perfectly recognisable.19 (Barnett, who was a farmer’s son and Rhodes Scholar, has since acquired some fame in relation to the dubious idea that hobbits were inspired by his tales of simple Kentucky tobacco-growers.20) Exeter’s Sub-Rector, responsible for discipline, noted that Tolkien was “v. lazy” and had been warned in summer 1912 that he might lose his annual scholarship money, but that his behaviour since had “much improved” — hardly surprising, given that £60 then was the equivalent of roughly £4,000 now. Perhaps one incident of 1913 escaped the Sub-Rector’s attention, however: a town-versus-gown dust-up that also involved fellow Exonian Austin Blomfield. On 12 May the Stapeldon Society, the closest thing the college had to a student union, called upon Tolkien, who held the elected post of Deputy Jester, for an account of his “adventures” on the previous night.

With the modesty of the true hero, he attempted to minimise his share in the proceedings and introduced Mr Blomfield in the new role of dauntless champion of the ’Varsity’s honour. Mr Blomfield thereupon proudly exhibited an abrasion on his comely countenance, caused it would appear by the stupid mistake of a townee who thought his face to be another portion of the anatomy and kicked it accordingly.

Tolkien “then went on to describe his arrest and subsequent release and told how on returning to the College he had delighted the spectators by a magnificent, if unavailing, attempt to scale the Swiss Cottage and had spent the rest of the evening in climbing in and out of Mr Barnet’s [sic] window.” Despite some ambiguity in these society minutes, it was indeed Tolkien, not Blomfield, who was arrested and scaled the Swiss Cottage. In a letter the following month, his schoolfriend Rob Gilson, now at Cambridge, commented: “Rumours of your adventures and encounters with the arms of the law have reached me in vague form and I await expectantly the promised explanation to the TCBS assembled.”21 Christopher Tolkien has told me that when his father recounted the incident many years later, he added that he had heard one of the police officers say to another, “Let’s take this little one,” before grabbing him from behind.

College societies
Not all of Tolkien’s extracurricular activities were so disreputable. The King Edward’s School Chronicle noted: “Tolkien, if we are to be guided by the countless notices on his mantlepiece, has joined all the Exeter Societies which are in existence.”22 With a fellow classicist, Colin Cullis, Tolkien attended the Essay Club, which was then newly revitalised, and was elected Critic in 1914. In the Stapeldon Society, he began at the bottom, in the College Charges Investigation Committee in 1912, but in late 1913 he rose to Secretary. The minutes, in his flowing hand, brim with humour and delight in language:

Mr Massiah-Palmer made a lewd remark, which it is sad to note was received with thunderous mirth. A maggot, moldiewarp, or mealie-worm saved from drowning in coffee was rescued from Mr Staples clutches and attended to by Mr Kindersley the noted insect-fancier.23

Finally Tolkien was elected Stapeldon President for the Spring term of 1914. His report of that meeting is a mock epic:

At the 791st meeting of the Stapeldon Society held on December 1st 1913 one of the world’s great battles between democracy and autocracy was fought and won, and as is usual in such conflicts the weapons of the democracy were hooliganism and uproar…

Long before the officers had even passed the curtain the ominous sounds of a gigantic house athirst for their blood could be heard. Even in the Porch a dull booming murmur like the bay of the Bloodhound in “Red Axe” reached the ears of loafers; who promptly swelled the throng, entering when the door jammed, by way of the windows…

Tolkien goes on to explain that the outgoing President, R. H. Gordon, had foolishly brought a bottle of port in to drink, a bad example promptly followed by the rabble. A misplaced presidential ruling added to the combustible atmosphere:

The House — especially typified by Mr H.S. Price — flushed in his face and with the veins of anger bulging in his forehead [—] protested against this ruling with an extraordinary uproar the like of which has never been heard in this room before. Man after man arose to speak flushed with the wine of wrath, and man after man was quashed, crushed, and squashed into oblivion with the magic of Rule 9 section (b); until the House began to resent Rule 9(b) as a personal foe, and to heave with an uncontrollable antagonism on each mention of it.

The only way in which members in the further corners could tell of the progress of business was by the changes of colour in the presidential countenance, which ranged from a rich violet to a dull cream.…

When Mr Trevor Oliphant arose with the white face of bitter determination, and demanded that the House go back to Private Business for the discussion of the shelved constitutional question, all bounds, all order, and all else was forgotten; and in one long riot of raucous hubbub; of hoarse cries, brandished bottles, flying match-stands, gowns wildly flourished, cups smashed, and lights extinguished, the House declared its determination to have its will and override the constitution. From the midst of this uproar a Red Devil of Fu-ji-ya leapt from Mr Palmer’s bosom and hit the secretary [Tolkien himself] square on the nose.

For precisely one calendar hour did the House battle with noise and indignation for its desire. It was at one time on the point of dissolving and becoming another society; at another it was vociferating for Rule 40; at another for Rule 10; at another for no Rules at all, or for the President’s head, or his nether-garments.

The meeting ended, Tolkien notes, with “a vote of admiration for the rock-like obstinacy with which the President had withstood this unparallelled storm of rebellion and insubordinate riot”.24

The Apolausticks
Beyond the college, Tolkien also attended meetings of Old Edwardians and he read papers to bodies including Corpus Christi’s Sundial Society and the Psittakoi (“Parrots”), devoted to the discussion of literature.25 These official societies and gatherings were not enough to satisfy Tolkien’s social needs. At Exeter he also wanted a comitatus like the T.C.B.S. — a like-minded band of brothers with whom he could conspire — and with Colin Cullis he founded one.26 Undergraduate societies were by no means unusual: the 22 clubs whose records are held in Exeter’s archive must be a fraction of the many that have come and gone at the college.27 The Greek-derived name of the one Tolkien and Cullis set up, “the Apolausticks”, suggests other core members were classicists too. Apolaustic means “Concerned with or wholly devoted to seeking enjoyment; self-indulgent”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. A supporting quotation refers to “The lordly, apolaustic, and haughty undergraduate” — so the club’s name neatly combines arrogance and self-mockery.28 Among the club’s self-indulgences were not only “large and extravagant dinners” that left a hole in Tolkien’s pocket, but also “papers, discussions, and debates”, though it seems unlikely that in the pre-war era they would have developed the kind of cultural idealism seen later in the T.C.B.S.29 Members identifiable in a group photograph include Allen Barnett, his heavy-set, glowering, moustachioed face easily recognisable.30 Also an Apolausticks member was Michael Windle, son of the vicar of Odiham in Hampshire, a classicist in Tolkien and Cullis’s year and a budding anthropologist; he was related to the leading Catholic scientist Sir Bertram Windle and, according to Barnett’s reminiscences, a particularly close friend to Tolkien.31Another member was Harry Sibree Price, born in Handsworth, Birmingham, and a noted solo chorister, whom we have already seen in the riotous Stapeldon meeting “with the veins of anger bulging in his forehead”. The last Apolaustick positively identifiable was Werner William Thomas Massiah-Palmer — he of the Red Devil of Fu-ji-ya — the privately educated son of a Cornish butler and his German wife.32 All these are in the published photograph of the Apolausticks. Another friend, seemingly absent from the picture, was probably Henry Allpass, with whom Tolkien apparently corresponded during the war; at Exeter to read German, he was a member of the socialist Fabian Society and was once called “the best topical poet in Oxford”, publishing his technically sophisticated light verse in the university’s Isis newspaper.33 When Tolkien recalls his own abortive attempt to write “a diary with portraits (some scathing some comic some commendatory) of persons or events seen” before he turned to “The Book of Lost Tales”, he seems to be describing the kind of writing in which Allpass specialised.34

Extracurricular work
Amid all this clubbability, Tolkien had not been entirely lazy. In his first term, he had been inspired by his new environment to write poetry, one fragment of which, “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” was eventually published in the college’s Stapeldon Magazine beneath another by his contemporary, H. R. Freston.35 More important than poetry, though, had been his discovery in the college library during his first term back in 1911 of Sir Charles Eliot’s Finnish Grammar. In due course, it led Tolkien eventually, as we shall see, to spend long hours on his old hobby, the invention of languages, with a lexicon of what he came to call Qenya, the language of the Elves. He later compared the discovery of this ostensibly dry little book to Keats’s first glimpse inside Chapman’s Homer — a fairly bald statement of his growing preference for non-classical learning.

Failure at classics
Tolkien was not uninterested in work per se, but only in his chosen degree course. His real passion for story had once been awakened by Homer, and his first encounters with poetry had been when he was asked to translate it into Latin at school, but he later said that his “love for the classics took ten years to recover from lectures on Cicero and Demosthenes”.36 According to his Times obituary, the problem was that there was no resident classical tutor at Exeter when Tolkien arrived, but this does not appear to have been the case: the subject was taught there by the college’s respected classicist fellow Lewis Farnell, assisted from Hilary Term (January to March) 1912 by the young, brilliant Eric Arthur Barber.37 It seems that Tolkien simply let himself down. On reaching the age of 21 and becoming engaged to Edith Bratt at the start of 1913, he promised her he would work harder and began a tally of hours spent at the grindstone.38 There was a flurry of library borrowings: Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Electra and Aeschylus,’s Eumenides, Agamemnon and Choephoroe,though not the hated Cicero and Demosthenes, whom candidates were expected to translate. However, it was too late: he achieved a mediocre Class II in his mid-course Honour Moderations. He was not alone: of the seven candidates fielded by Exeter, Colin Cullis, Michael Windle and R.H. Gordon fared just as badly, two did even worse, and only the diligent Lionel Thompson achieved a First.39

Switch to English
Perhaps it was fortunate for Tolkien that Lewis Farnell, Exeter’s new Rector or principal, was one of those who had helped agitate for the establishment, in 1894, of Oxford’s Honours School (or faculty) of English Language and Literature. The study of English literature was generally sneered at as somehow essentially feminine until the mid-years of the 20th century. At Oxford, it had accordingly been given, as Farnell recalled, “a firm basis of philological science; so as to fend off the sarcastic criticism of opponents” — perfect for Tolkien, who had been saved from an ignominous Third in Mods by a perfect alpha in philology, and who had no taste for “modern” writers later than Chaucer. The English School was still in its infancy by 1913, and Tolkien only discovered its existence while browsing the Examination Statutes.40 Farnell, who also had a deep affection for things Germanic, suggested that Tolkien switch to English, and discreetly arranged for him to retain his £60-a-year Exhibition money, even though technically it was meant to fund a classicist.41 Tolkien’s pleasure in his new course spilled over into his extracurricular life, when he presented a paper on the Norse sagas to Exeter’s Essay Club in the Summer term of 1913, adopting (as the college’s Stapeldon Magazine reported) “a somewhat unconventional turn of phrase, suiting admirably with his subject”: probably a pseudo-medieval idiom, as William Morris had in his translations from Icelandic.42 Yet Tolkien’s curiosity still led him away from the narrow course confines. Farnell and his new tutors must have been alarmed when he spent his Skeat Prize money in spring 1914 not on funding his English studies but on medieval Welsh and books by Morris that lay well outside the syllabus.43

Tolkien just before the war
It was now the year of the still unforeseen war, yet nothing as momentous as his 1913 coming of age, engagement or change of course seemed likely to befall Tolkien. Furthermore, he still showed little sign of becoming a prolific coiner of verse, prose or even imaginary languages. At best he was beginning to define the ground he would later occupy, through papers such as the one on Norse sagas or another, in March 1914, on the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, in which he depicted a writer who could bridge the divide between rationalism and romanticism, highlighting “the images drawn from astronomy and geology, and especially those that could be described as Catholic ritual writ large across the universe”. “An attitude of humility befitting immaturity was necessary towards F[rancis] Thompson’s most profound expressions of mature spiritual experience,” he told the Essay Club.  “One must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being’s harmony.” The successive metaphors of childlike receptivity and orchestral scale strikingly anticipate the “Book of Lost Tales”: both “The Cottage of Lost Play”, written more than two years later, and “The Music of the Ainur”, still five or so years in the future. Writing up this report of Tolkien’s talk, his friend Lionel Thompson (no relation of Francis) commented: “One was conscious that he had felt himself into perfect harmony with the poet.”44 But perhaps for now Tolkien was too busy to find time to explore his own creativity or, indeed, to feel the need for such an outlet at all — what with his English work, his presidency of the Stapeldon in the spring term and the Essay Club in the summer term, and his involvement in the forthcoming 600th anniversary of Exeter College.

Sexcentenary
The Sexcentenary was felt so significant that renovations of the college hall had been set in motion 10 years previously, and had only just been completed. The previous Rector, W.W. Jackson, had handed over to Farnell in 1913 after 26 years service, feeling the younger man would be more capable of making the necessary preparations. The Stapeldon Society, under its new president, Colin Cullis, spent much of the summer term 1914 getting ready, and omitted its customary habit of sending letters of congratulation or condemnation to monarchs and governments worldwide because no “international affairs of sufficient importance had occurred”.45 At the Sexcentenary Dinner on 6 June when the undergraduates entertained the Rector and Fellows, Tolkien sat with most of the friends already mentioned: Tony Shakespeare, Lionel Thompson, Henry Allpass, Massiah-Palmer, Cullis, and 13 others including the classics don E.A. Barber.46 Tolkien proposed the toast to the college societies (as befitted a member of so many).47 On 18 June there was the “Binge” for the Chequers Club, apparently another dining society he had founded; he drew its elegant invitations.48 Finally, from 23 to 25 June, there were three days of Sexcentenary events: a ball, a reunion for Old Exonians, a garden party with the Blue Hungarian Band, a service in the chapel, and a grand lunch at which the Chancellor of the University, Lord Curzon, proposed the toast of Floreat Exon.

Outbreak of war
Some months later Farnell recalled: “All our festivities were enhanced by charming weather, and our atmosphere was unclouded by any foreboding of the war-storm that has burst upon us. And now the memories of last term are as a golden vista seen across a dark and perilous flood.”49 The old world had come to an end just as the summer term did, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June. On 4 August, when Tolkien was in Warwick with Edith, Britain declared war on Germany, and three days later, Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, called upon Tolkien’s generation to fight. Tolkien’s summer vacation was personally momentous. He opted not to enlist; a frightening decision at a time when able-bodied men out of uniform might be verbally or even physically abused in the streets. And in a development that may not be entirely unrelated, he wrote his first poem to have a real claim to being part of the literature of Middle-earth, “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star”, in which, tellingly, the hero spurns the chartered courses of other celestial bodies in pursuit of something undefined and elusive, but ethereally fair. The poem came to him as he slogged through the poetry of Cynewulf in an Anglo-Saxon volume he had borrowed from Exeter College library.50

Exeter at war
By October, Oxford was becoming a military camp for the first time since the English Civil War. Quaintly, Farnell the Rector was giving lessons in the use of the sabre. Instruction in signalling, Tolkien’s later military specialism, was given in the front quadrangle to students in the Officer Training Corps or OTC.51 As an editorial in the college magazine observed, “We are becoming accustomed to the tramp of troops on the Turl, to the sound of early-morning bugles, to the sight of convalescent soldiers and Belgian refugees in the streets of Oxford.”52 The college was now partly acting as billets for the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantrymen and various batteries of gunners; men who stayed a day or two before moving on.53 Several of the Fellows had gone off to war and so had many of the servants, to be replaced by older men. Whereas 59 freshmen had matriculated with Tolkien in 1911, now there were only 28 new arrivals. The undergraduate population was reduced to just 75, and falling, as more and more students found their moment to enlist. Tolkien declared: “It is awful. I really don’t think I shall be able to go on: work seems impossible. Not a single man I know is up except Cullis.”54 Many of his friends would have left Exeter by now anyway, having completed their degrees a year before Tolkien, who had changed courses in midstream. Harry Allpass and Allen Barnett were embarking on careers as teachers. But of the 19 who had dined with Tolkien for the Sexcentenary, R.H. Gordon, Michael Windle, Massiah-Palmer, Lionel Thompson and 10 others joined the Army in 1914. So did Harry Price, the chorister, though he came back at weekends to rehearse the Christmas carol service; and Austin Blomfield, who was preparing now to fight Germans instead of Oxford townsfolk. Lieutenant Thompson looked “very healthy and well in his new uniform”, Tolkien told Edith in October.55 But in the evenings the quad was silent under darkened windows. He was relieved to be living for the first time out of college, at 59 St John Street where he shared “digs” with Colin Cullis, who was debarred from military service due to poor health.56

Military training
In lieu of enlisting in Kitchener’s army, Tolkien enrolled at Oxford in the university OTC. His military training had indeed begun in the officer training corps at King Edward’s School, but on matriculating at Exeter he had enrolled instead in a cavalry regiment, coincidentally named King Edward’s Horse, which recruited residents of Britain born overseas. By 1911 the regiment had a strong following in Exeter College, with its considerable overseas contingent, and Tolkien presumably joined because of his South African birth. However, for reasons perhaps not unconnected with a thoroughly wet and wind-blown two-week annual camp on the exposed South Coast, he had been discharged at his own request in January 1913.57 Now Tolkien was one of 25 Exonians on the university OTC’s Course II, for those who wished to delay enlistment, which meant about six and a half hours’ drill and one military lecture per week.58To those on the other course, who wished to join up as soon as possible and therefore spent considerably more time drilling, he cheekily provided advice at one Stapeldon Society meeting, as the minutes record:  “Class II OTC in the person of Mr Tolkien then gave Class I and others valuable hints on drilling a Co[mpan]y entitled ‘Jones best ever-ready word of command, always useful, will never wear out, Hip hop.’”59 He wrote to Edith: “We had a drill all afternoon and got soaked several times and our rifles got all filthy and took ages to clean afterwards.”60 And yet he was grateful: “Drill is a godsend. I have been up a fortnight nearly, and have not yet got a touch even of the real Oxford ‘sleepies’.”61

Kullervo and Cohen
Reinvigorated, he worked on a version of the story of Kullervo, from the Finnish mythological poem the Kalevala, in Morrisian prose.62 It was a dark tale for dark times, from which seed his story of Túrin Turambar was to evolve in the following years.  The tale of a brash young man, a fugitive from slavery, who unwittingly seduces his sister, precipitating their successive suicides — it seems strange that this so captured the imagination of a fervent Roman Catholic that he kept rewriting it for the rest of his life. An overriding attraction of the Kalevala was the sounds of the Finnish names, the remote primitivism and the Northern air. The initial appeal of the Kullervo element was perhaps its maverick heroism, youthful romance and despair: Tolkien had been through a prolonged and enforced separation from Edith Bratt. The deaths of Kullervo’s parents may have struck a chord, too, with the orphaned Tolkien.

It is also possible that he had in mind an incident from his time at Exeter College, when the wider world was buzzing with news of the deaths of Captain Scott and his polar expedition. One of the other Exhibitioners from Tolkien’s matriculation year, and apparently his sole Exonian predecessor in reading English, had been one Sydney Abraham Cohen, from London. Quiet but popular, he was a keen tennis player and, in the words of his friend Henry Allpass, “a hard-reading man”; he liked to work into the small hours. One Monday evening in February 1913, Cohen invited Allpass to his rooms, and after some minutes’ conversation went to his desk on the pretext of fetching a cigarette holder. He took out a revolver and for several minutes toyed with it, pointing it at his own head and declaring: “I wish I had the courage to shoot myself.” Allpass told him to put the gun down but did not think him entirely in earnest; Cohen had often expressed the same thought before. Standing in front of the fireplace, Cohen suddenly raised the gun once more to his head and fired. The doctor who answered Allpass’s summons found Cohen sitting on the sofa, gun at his feet, bleeding from a wound to his temple; his speech was unintelligible and he died a few minutes later. At an inquest in Exeter College’s hall the following day, the bursar said Cohen had always seemed quite cheerful, with nothing in his manner to distinguish him from other undergraduates. Yet Allpass revealed that he had talked a deeply depressed Cohen out of killing himself two weeks previously, on the day he had bought the gun for that express purpose. Contrarily, Cohen had expressed a theory that one was justified in taking one’s life when one was happy. The inquest jury, headed by Jackson (who had still been Rector at this point) and including Farnell, Barber, and other dons, returned a verdict of “suicide while of unsound mind”, and the Coroner censured Allpass for failing to alert others about Cohen’s suicide threats.63 This strange and tragic incident may have been Tolkien’s closest encounter with suicide when he was writing his “Story of Kullervo”.

Earp
While working on the tale in late 1914, Tolkien enthused about the Kalevala to another friend who had been at his Sexcentenary dinner table. He refers to him in a letter to Edith as “that quaint man Earp I have told you of”.64 The Sub-Rector was more forthright about Tommy Earp: alongside a list of exam failures, he jotted simply “A freak.”65 In fact Earp — the only son of an affluent Liberal MP (by then deceased) — was homosexual or bisexual, and has been described as “the last, most charming, and wittiest of the ‘decadents.’”66 The war forced Earp, formerly a rather retiring oddball, to look beyond Exeter College for company, and he was now busily transforming himself into an inveterate networker. Soon he would be playing host in his rooms on Beaumont Street (round the corner from St John Street) to a new undergraduate poetry circle, the Coterie, which included Aldous Huxley and Tolkien’s future Leeds colleague Wilfred Roland Childe, and which provided the first English audience for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, read by T.S. Eliot himself.67

Thanks to a reference by Tolkien, T.W. Earp is immortalised in an OED etymology as “the original twerp”.68 The two must have disagreed about almost everything. They had jousted in college debates such as one at the Stapeldon Society in 1912 when Tolkien spoke with Sydney Cohen for the motion, “This House deplores the signs of degeneracy in the present age”, but lost against Earp; and another in 1913 when Tolkien had supported the claim that “The cheap ‘Cinema’ is an engine of social corruption” — which Earp had also won.69 Yet now, when almost all of Tolkien’s other friends had vanished from the college, this aesthete, who never enlisted to fight, was a willing listener to panegyrics about the Finnish epic, and the two dined together, notably just before Tolkien read “The Voyage of Éarendel” out loud at “an informal kind of last gasp” for the Essay Club in November.70

College societies during the war
In this way, urged on by Farnell the Rector, Tolkien and his few fellow undergraduates strove to maintain the college societies, the heartbeat of Exeter life. The Stapeldon Society, a shadow of its former self, sent letters of support to King Albert of Belgium and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.71 On a note of rather surreal normality, Tolkien was tasked with pursuing the long-standing question of the redecoration of the Junior Common Room, the undergraduates’ meeting place, with Austin Blomfield’s father, Sir Reginald, the architect responsible for the Sexcentenary renovation of the college Hall and later for the Menin Gate at Ypres. But the students were warned that war would mean going short on luxuries such as redecoration, and the Sub-Rector (now E.A. Barber) told Tolkien that student entertainments were unduly wasteful and must be banned.72 Tolkien poked fun at the freshmen for not taking baths, “no doubt,” he said, because they were “economising with the best of intentions in this time of stress”; and he tried to engage the interest of his peers in a debate on a pet subject: “This House approves of spelling reform”.73 High spirits managed to survive the darkening of the days, and much fun was had over a municipal decision to tear up Oxford’s tramlines. Earp declared that this constituted the destruction of a valuable link with the past, and the Stapeldon Society petitioned the town clerk for the honour of receiving a tramline, or part of one, “fashioned as Mr Tolkien aptly suggested in the shape of a link with the past”.74 When the request was actually granted, and seven feet of iron arrived at the college, the undergraduates were delirious:

The bubbling flow of wit now culminated in an Arizonean war-whoop. Immediately after the First Year were despatched for the tramline. The carnival procession then set out headed by the officers elect (who were not carried on the tramline). The House following the venerable relic and showing a respect for it profound not to say excessive. At each corner of the quad Mr Rogers whooped. On arrival at its “summer home” the emblem was christened Duschy Wow-wow by the President-Elect breaking a champagne bottle against it.75

At another meeting, in November 1914, one of the American students, Henry Furst (regarded by the Sub-Rector as “a worthless and dangerous fellow”), regaled the Stapeldon Society with an astounding but vainglorious account of how he had ventured into the university town of Louvain in Belgium after its capture by the Germans. “Mr Furst then gave an account of his heroic performance in Louvain. He and his journalistic friend arrived just as the city was in flames. Most opportune. They met four girls in the market place — lovely girls. Also opportune. A German soldier gave Mr Furst a canary, which got loose and being a continental canary made for the warmest place, a burning house whence it was rescued by Mr Furst amid cheers from a Belgian peasant, a private of the Landsturm and Mr Daw [sic]. The President then presented Mr Furst with the Order of the Iron Cross as a token of esteem from the House.”76 (A letter to The Times from the journalist friend, A.J. Dawe, has rather more to say about the situation in Belgium: the two civilian adventurers saw houses torched, their occupants shot dead as they fled, and children walking through piles of corpses.77) Later in the meeting that heard Furst’s account, Tolkien spoke against the topical motion “This House deprecates an ideal of nationalism”. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the light of what German national pride was doing to Belgium, his pro-nationalist arguments did not sway the House, which backed the anti-nationalist motion by a two-thirds majority.78

National myth, Finnish and Qenya
Yet Tolkien’s ideal of nationalism had nothing to do with imperial might trampling small nations. It placed him entirely on the Belgian side, against the aggressor Germany. As he expressed the ideal at the time, “I don’t defend ‘Deutschland über alles’ but certainly do in Norwegian ‘Alt for Norge’ [All for Norway].”79 To him the nation’s greatest goal was not power over others, but cultural self-realisation. Indeed, a key part of the appeal of the Kalevala for him was the fact that it was a national myth, the embodiment in poetic language of one cohesive culture’s imagination and values. Right now the Finnish national myth brought into focus his personal yearning for a parallel national mythology for England.80 A few days after the debate on nationalism, he once more borrowed Eliot’s Finnish Grammar from the college library, and immersed himself in it through the Christmas vacation. Looking at these apparently disconnected and ephemeral events with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see how they now directed him towards the key discovery of his creative life, as he described it later: “that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition.” Evidence of the truth of this lay all around him, in the urgent word-coining and rumour-mongering that are part of war. The discovery offered a new life for his creation: he would invent not only a language, as he had done in various rudimentary ways in the past, but also the mythological world in which it existed.81 Thus both Qenya and the Eldar came into being, and with them Middle-earth. The absence of so many of his friends, combined with the approach of Finals (always a good time to find ways of escape from study), and a wartime need to seize the day, doubtless all contributed to the sudden flowering of Tolkien’s creativity in 1915.

Opening up
A key part was played in this “tremendous opening up of everything”, as Tolkien described it, by his former friends from King Edward’s School, the T.C.B.S, who circulated his poetry among themselves and commented on it.82 However, Exeter College provided an immediate audience, with Tolkien reading to the Essay Club not only “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star” but also, at the end of the spring term, his old poem “The Tides”, now revised and retitled “Sea Chant of an Elder Day”, and perhaps other poems of which we have no record.83 The college even makes an appearance of sorts in his lexicon of Qenya, which provides names for a handful of places of special significance to Tolkien in England, or Tol-eressea, the Lonely Isle, as he now mythicised it. Thus Kor is Warwick, where Edith lived, and Taruktarna is Oxford itself; but Estirin or Exeter merits a lexicon entry not because Tolkien had an affinity with the Devonshire city but, plainly enough, because it gave his college its name.84 And Tolkien’s “quaint” friend T.W. Earp proved his value by overseeing the earliest publication of a Tolkien fantasy, the much-derided “Goblin Feet”, as editor of Oxford Poetry 1915.85

Goodbye to all that
Tolkien’s time as an undergraduate came to an end in a flurry of borrowings from Exeter College library — the Cambridge History of English Literature as well as introductions to Dryden, Keats and Shakespeare: titles which show clearly the areas of his course which he had neglected. For a week, starting on Thursday 10 June, Tolkien sat his final exams, or “Schools”, with another 24 candidates in English from across the university; despite all his early indolence and his recent creative distractions, he was one of the four who achieved First Class Honours.86 Then, yielding to pressures he had resisted for almost a year, he packed up the home he had shared with Colin Cullis at St John Street and “bolted” into the army.87 Until the war was over, he seems to have returned to Oxford only once — six days before he married — for his long-delayed degree ceremony on 16 March 1916.88 That day he started an uncharacteristically personal poem, “The Wanderer’s Allegiance”, which addresses Oxford in wartime, a shadow of the joyous, carefree, scholarly, youthful university Tolkien had known up to 1914:

along thy paths no laughter runs
While war untimely takes thy many sons…

The lost fellowship of college life is invoked amid the tragedy of the war, the past now unnervingly present in a visionary moment, as “old days come to life again”, restoring light to the darkened rooms of the undergraduates who have enlisted to fight:

I see thy clustered windows each one burn
With lamps and candles of departed men.89

The image anticipates by nearly three decades one of Tolkien’s most famous sequences, “The Passage of the Marshes” in The Lord of the Rings, where once again candles burn supernaturally, lit by soldiers who have gone to war unreturning. Within three months, Tolkien himself was fighting in the Battle of the Somme.

Post-war Oxford
After Armistice Day in 1918 Tolkien, still an army officer but now officially free to seek employment, asked to be stationed at Oxford “for the purposes of completing his education”.90 He moved back into St John Street, this time with Edith and their one-year-old son John, and found work as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary. Soon he was supplementing his income by giving tuition, mainly to women students, and pillaging Exeter College library for general reference works on English language and literature as well as texts of Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.91 He remained an honorary member of the college and continued to involve himself in its societies. Its undergraduate population had fallen to just seven in 1918, almost all of them foreigners and all of them ineligible for war work despite their repeated applications; but students were now flooding back from the armed forces, and new freshmen was arriving too, “acutely aware of stepping into the shoes of dead men” , in the words of one historian.92

Exeter’s war dead
Because they came from the class that provided the army with its junior officers, the war had cut a swathe through Tolkien’s friends, both the close and the casual, both from school and from Exeter College.93 Of the 57 who had matriculated here in his year, 23 died as a result of the war — two in every five. Out of 771 Exonians who had served in all, 141 had been killed — equivalent to the college’s entire intake of students over two-and-a-half years at pre-war matriculation rates. In due course, Sir Reginald Blomfield furnished the chapel with a war memorial on which all their names are recorded. Four-fifths of these had died in France or Belgium, including nine at the Battle of Loos in 1915 and ten on the Somme in the first month of the battle there in 1916.94 Of the 17 undergraduates who had dined with Tolkien at the Sexcentenary dinner on the eve of the war, eight were dead by the end of 1919 either as a result of war or the Spanish Influenza epidemic that came on its heels. Of the Apolausticks, Allen Barnett had indeed survived his two years’ service with the U.S. Army, and had returned to Kentucky to teach; he was still corresponding with Tolkien in the Second World War, and sending him food parcels in the austere late Forties.95 Captain Harry Sibree Price of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles came home to work in the London Stock Exchange. But Michael Windle, “long remembered among us,” as The Stapeldon Magazine put it, “as the keenest of oarsmen, hardest of workers, and a tall, splendid young officer of the finest type”, was killed at Loos on 25 September1915.96 The day before, he had written home:

We moved up here last night, and all day long I have been listening to the biggest cannonade I’ve yet heard. I wish I could give you some idea of it. The sound that preponderates is like the regular thump of a steamship’s engines. But across this from time to time comes the thunder-clap of a gun being fired, or a shell exploding, while the shells as they pass moan like the wind in the trees.

His classical education had not deserted Windle as a 2nd lieutenant with the Devonshire Regiment:

Thucydides is a gentleman whose truth I never appreciated so thoroughly before. In his description of the last great effort of the Athenians to break out of Syracuse he tells how the officers lectured and encouraged their men right up to the last moment, always remembering another last word of counsel, and wishing to say more, yet feeling all the time that however much they said it would still be inadequate. Just the same with us now. We’ve all lectured our platoons, but something still keeps turning up, and after all we can only play an infinitesimal part in Armageddon!

The letter, published in The Times a few weeks after his death, was supplemented there by a piece of Windle’s poetry, a lament for the lost past.97 The first student to arrive at Exeter on an Exhibition established to help the sons or brothers of the college’s war dead was his younger brother, H.A.J. Windle.98 In February 1919 Spanish Flu, together with typhoid contracted in Salonika, killed Massiah-Palmer, who left a wife and young daughter. Even Colin Cullis, unfit to fight, who had spent the war working as an interpreter, did not long survive the war: he died in London of pneumonia, brought on by the same terrible flu epidemic, just after Tolkien was demobilised in July 1919.99 Of other Exonians I have named, Lionel Thompson and the Catholic Tony Shakespeare both lived to old age, Thompson as Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint, Shakespeare as a Birmingham solicitor. The aesthete T.W. Earp went on to an influential career as an art critic but squandered, some felt, a much richer potential; the pugilistic Austin Blomfield followed his notable father into architecture; the Louvain adventurer Henry Furst remained mad, bad, and dangerous to know, yet left a string of literary translations from Italian.100 But at Gallipoli on 12 August 1915, Staff Captain Trevor Oliphant disappeared along with his entire battalion, the 5th Norfolks.101 Second Lieutenant Henry Allpass, who had witnessed the 1913 suicide of Sydney Cohen, was reported missing on the Somme battlefield in September 1916, and his name is engraved on the Thiepval Memorial there, along with 70,000 other British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never found.102

Tolkien’s legacy
In a recent account of his college’s part in the First World War, the Exeter history don John Maddicott writes:

Those who served did little publicly to record their experiences, and Exeter turned out no Graves or Sassoon or Blunden; though it did produce one or two of those many subalterns, brought up on Horace and Propertius, who wrote nostalgically about home, family and country in the innumerable volumes of minor verse which were a more characteristic product of the war.103

Allpass was one such minor poet; another was H.R. Freston. But of course there is another Exonian soldier–writer whom Doctor Maddicott passes over: J.R.R. Tolkien, an author in a category of his very own, who left no crop of First World War poems per se, whether sadly nostalgic or bitterly ironic. Yet Tolkien’s writings were shaped by the war.

At Exeter College during the war, T.W. Earp had “set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years” (in the words of Robert Graves), preserving the minute-books of many societies which had become entirely dormant but were now being revitalised.104 Oxford was now heaving with young men eager to revive the life of the mind after the war. The Essay Club elected Tolkien once more to the post of Critic in June 1919, and on 10 March 1920 provided the first public audience for a story from his legendarium. Among those listening were Nevill Coghill and Hugo Dyson, later both members of the Inklings. Coghill, who was rather over-awed by Tolkien’s collegiate and military seniority, and by his budding reputation as a philologist on the OED, had been deputed to invite him to speak. He recalled the encounter later:

And he said, in his abrupt and very quick-spoken manner, “Yes, certainly.” It was extraordinarily difficult to hear what he said sometimes, because he spoke so rapidly, and without biting off words at the end. And so I said, “Well, what will be the title of your essay,” and he said, hastily, “The Fall-of-Gondolin.” And I said, “I beg your pardon.” He said, “The Fall-of-Gondolin.” So I said, “The Fall of Gondolin?” “Yes, that’s right.” So I wrote it down, never having heard of Gondolin you see, and I spent a week, then, trying to swot up in Bodley what Gondolin was, but there was no mention of it anywhere, you see.105

This was Tolkien’s first prose mythological narrative, an epic of war which he had written in a cathartic outpouring in hospital and on leave after his return, as an invalid, from the Somme at the end of 1916. The minutes for the meeting that followed from Coghill’s invitation suggest a mixture of amazement and bemusement among the Essay Club literati:

As a discovery of a new mythological background Mr Tolkein’s matter was exceedingly illuminating and marked him out as  a staunch follower of traditions, a treatment indeed in the manner of such typical Romantics as William Morris, George Macdonald, de la Motte Fouquet etc. We gathered likewise that the reader’s acquaintanceship with Scandinavian saga and legend was not a little. … The battle of the contending forces as represented by the Gongothlin and the followers of Melco was very graphically and astonishingly told, combined with a wealth of attendance to detail interesting in extreme.106

It is curious to see here no attempt to relate the mythological war to the real one; yet this oversight has been true of many responses to Tolkien ever since. Nevertheless, Tolkien could hardly have become the writer he did but for his experiences of war; his writings, although never directly about those experiences, were fundamentally shaped by them. Those experiences encompassed not only his time as a soldier, in training camp, battle or hospital, but also his final year as an undergraduate — the first year of the Great War, when Middle-earth was born. Apart from his four months on the Somme in 1916, when work was virtually impossible, he continued for the rest of his life on the creative path he had begun at Exeter College.

This provisional version of “Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War” appears with permission of Stratford Caldecott, editor of the proceedings of the Oxford Tolkien Conference, forthcoming, in which an extended version will appear.

Footnotes:

© John Garth 2006