Free Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth Page A

or soar away, they entangle the stars.
    In this 1915 poem, Tolkien struck the first note of the mood that underpins his entire legendarium: a wistful nostalgia for a world slipping away. The spring and summer represent the lost past when Elves walked England openly. Winter is the harbinger of mortality:
Strange sad October robes her dewy furze
    In netted sheen of gold-shot gossamers,
    And then the wide-umbraged elm begins to fail;
    Her mourning multitudes of leaves go pale
    Seeing afar the icy shears
    Of Winter, and his blue-tipped spears
    Marching unconquerable upon the sun
    Of bright All-Hallows.
    More immediate concerns, perhaps, also register in Tolkien’s poem. The summer to which ‘Kortirion’ looks back may be seen as a symbol of both childhood and the pre-war past, and winter, with his on-coming army, as the uniquely lethal future allotted to Tolkien’s generation.
    However that may be, the poem confesses that autumn/winter ‘is the season dearest to my heart, / Most fitting to the little faded town’. This seems a paradox, but ‘fitness’, the accord of symbol and meaning, was essential to Tolkien’s aesthetics, as can be seen from the careful matching of sound to sense in his invented languages. Another young soldier-poet, Robert Graves, said during the Great War that he could not write about ‘England in June attire’ when ‘Cherries are out of season, / Ice grips at branch and root’. But ‘Kortirion’ actually discovers beauty in the way the autumn embodies the evanescence of youth or elfinesse.
    The overriding metaphor of the seasons also provides a note of consolation, suggesting not only loss and death but also renewal and rebirth. To similar effect, the fairies of faded Kortirion sing a ‘wistful song of things that were, and could beyet’. Thus it is not sadness that finally prevails in ‘Kortirion’ but an acceptance approaching contentment.
    The mood is most apparent in the poem’s sense of rootedness. In contrast to Éarendel or the envious figure in ‘The Happy Mariners’, the voice hymning Kortirion concludes that it has no desire for adventure:
I need not know the desert or red palaces Where dwells the sun, the great seas or the magic isles,
    The pinewoods piled on mountain-terraces…
    The sentiment is central to Tolkien’s character. Later, when he had put the years of enforced wandering behind him, he rarely travelled far except in his imagination. It was landscape and climate more than political statehood that fired his idea of nationalism. The spirit of place, so potent in Tolkien’s mythology, seems to have emerged fully fledged just as the subaltern poet was swept into a life outdoors and on the move: his eye was sharpened, but so was his longing for home, which Warwick had come to embody. Stray workings for this latest poem (relating to the army of winter) suggest that he may have begun the poem shortly after arriving at Penkridge Camp, with its grey waste, its boredom and its grind. But Tolkien created the Elf-haunted town of Kortirion from life when, following army inoculations, he spent a week of frost and clear skies with Edith in Warwick. On his return to camp, he sent her a copy of the poem and then wrote out another, despatching it at the end of November to Rob Gilson for circulation among the TCBS.
    â€˜ I am now 21 years of age, and cannot help doubting whether I shall ever be 22,’ G. B. Smith had written from Salisbury Plain in mid-October. ‘Our departure for France is almost within sight. The King is going to inspect us shortly. I hope he will be duly impressed by this member of the TCBS.’ The Salford Pals were waiting to move out along with eleven other battalions, including Ralph Payton’s and Hilary Tolkien’s, all of whichbelonged to a single vast army division encamped around Codford St Mary. In November, Smith worked hard to finish a long poem of his own,