Free Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth

revolution of sorts: a cultural and spiritual revolution. Like so many of his major ideas, this thought seems to have appeared first in his early lexicon of Qenya. There he had written that it was from Kôr, west over the ocean, that ‘ the fairies came to teach men song and holiness’. Song and holiness: the fairies had the same method and mission as the TCBS.
    â€˜ Kortirion among the Trees ’, a long November 1915 poem and Tolkien’s most ambitious work so far, laments the fairies’ decline. The Qenya lexicon calls Kortirion ‘the new capital of the Fairies after their retreat from the hostile world to the Tol Eressëa’: to the ‘Lonely Isle’, implicitly the island of Britain. Aryador might have borrowed from Whittington Heath a few topographical features, but Kortirion is Warwick, in a mythic prehistory: ‘the city of the Land of Elms, / Alalminórë in the Faery Realms’, and Alalminórë is glossed ‘Warwickshire’ in the Qenya lexicon. However, the lexicon tells us that Kortirion was named after Kôr, the city from which the Elves came over the western sea on their mission into ‘the hostile world’. So Tolkien’s Elvish history presents a double decline, first from Kôr across the sea to Kortirion, then from Kortirion down the years to Warwick.
    This provided an elegant ‘explanation’ for the presence in fairy-tale tradition of two apparently contradictory versions of Faërie. The Canterbury Tales mentions both. Chaucer’s Merchant depicts Pluto and Proserpine as the king and queen of fairyland, which is therefore a land of the dead; and here Chaucer was tapping into a tradition in which Faërie is an Otherworld like the Arthurian Avalon, the Welsh Annwn, or the Irish land of eternal youth, Tír na nÓg. However, the Wife of Bath recalls that, in King Arthur’s day, all Britain was ‘fulfild of fayerye’ and the elf-queen danced in many a meadow; yet now, she says, ‘kan no man se none elves mo’; so now Chaucer was drawing on the rival tradition, of a fairyland that once flourished openly inour own mortal world but had since faded from general view. Tolkien’s idea was that each of the two traditions could represent a different stage in Elvish history. When Elves dwelt openly here in mortal lands they (or some of them at least) were exiles from an Otherworld Faërie cut off by perilous enchanted seas.
    The double decline in Tolkien’s Elvish history is matched by two levels of nostalgia. Of Kôr the original and splendid, now empty, Kortirion was merely a consolatory memorial built in defeat. Of Kortirion, modern Warwick knows next to nothing:
O fading town upon a little hill, Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,
    Thy robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still; The castle only, frowning, ever waits
    And ponders how among the towering elms
    The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms And slips between long meadows to the western sea –
    Still bearing downward over murmurous falls One year and then another to the sea;
    And slowly thither have a many gone Since first the fairies built Kortirion.
    The lengthy ‘Kortirion’ gave Tolkien room to make the most of his imagery. Trees yield some extraordinary extended metaphors: trunks and foliage are seen as masts and canvas on ships sailing off to other shores, and the wind-loosed leaves of autumn are likened to bird wings:
Then their hour is done,
    And wanly borne on wings of amber pale
    They beat the wide airs of the fading vale And fly like birds across the misty meres.
    The image anticipates Galadriel’s song of farewell in The Lord of the Rings: ‘ Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!’ The Ents of Fangorn Forest are a long way off, but already in ‘Kortirion’ tree and leaf arefar more than objects of beauty: they count the seasons, they sail