Thursday 3 September 2009

War...


At 9:00am on this day 70 years ago, Britain sent a second ultimatum to Germany. At 11:00am, having received no reply from the Germans, Britain declared War on Germany. At 11:15am, the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced this act by radio. Many years later, Priscilla Tolkien recalled that: ''I had gone to Mass with my father and Christopher at St Gregory's Church in the Woodstock Road. Father Douglas Carter, the parish priest and a friend of the family, offered to anyone who wanted to stay to hear the announcement on his wireless, but my father, visibly upset to be at war, said we should go home to my mother who was listening to the wireless in the kitchen.'' Consequently, the Tolkien family cancelled a planned holiday at Sidmouth.

The outbreak of War did not have a drastic effect on Tolkien himself (at least in the early days, lives were altered forever by the Second World War, and unlike Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien's biographer, with whom I disagree on many points, I will not attempt to say that the War had no immediate effect on Tolkien, it did), although life at the University of Oxford changed (Pembroke College was partly taken over by the British Army and the Ministry of Agriculture, the Fellows and Undergraduates having to remove to other spaces), as did the life of his three sons John, Michael and Christopher. John, the eldest, who had read English at Exeter College, was at this time training at the Venerable English College in Rome for the priesthood. Michael, who spent a year at Trinity College reading History, enlisted as an anti-aircraft gunner. Christopher (still at school then, but later following his brother Hilary to Trinity College to read English) became in the early 1940s an RAF officer. Only Priscilla, the youngest (aged only 10 years at the time) remained at home. Domestic life at the Tolkien home became disrupted, with the accommodation of evacuees, two women from Kent among them, a mother and daughter, whose husbands and father had gone off to the Continent; Tolkien kept hens during the War to increase the supply of eggs, and Tolkien himself took up duties as an air raid warden, having to sleep so many nights of the week in a damp, dingy hut (which was the ''headquarters''). Unusually, however, Tolkien did not work for the War Office, nor any other government office.

In a letter that Tolkien sent to his son Michael on 9th June 1941 (when he was an Officer cadet at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst), Tolkien wrote this:

''I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the 'Classics.' You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to 'broadcast,' or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge - which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more sanctified and Christianized...'' (The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, no.45).

Tolkien despised Hitler, and the Nazi-race doctrine (which was, incidentally, his chief objection to a German publishing house publishing The Hobbit in 1938 - he said, in response to their question about whether he was an ''arisch'' (of purely Aryan extraction): ''Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?...I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.'' The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, no.29). But the quotation above sheds an interesting light on Tolkien's view of Hitler, at least as regards his profession as an Oxford don, a man who described himself as a ''student of the Northern tongues.''

Fr Finigan and I discussed these matters this evening after Benediction. We both agreed that the notion that the War did not have much of an effect on Tolkien was rubbish, and that The Lord of the Rings contains ''elements'' that can be applied to modern warfare (I have done my best not to mention allegory. Tolkien repudiated any such reading of his magnus opus, that Mordor represented Russia or Germany (because it was in the East), and that Orcs represented Nazis/Communists etc). It is worth noting that in The Hobbit (a book designed for children)Tolkien narrates that most modern machines, used in the application of torture, were invented by Goblins:

''Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pick-axes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for the killing of large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help...'' (J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, Chapter IV, Over Hill and Under Hill, p.60.)

At the risk of becoming tedious, I shall leave it at that. If I get any comments or questions, I shall perhaps devote other posts to them. I hope you've enjoyed reading this post, and that it was not all incomprehensible! God bless.

One last remark. Tolkien did not altogether approve of the RAF, and commented to his son Christopher once that his joining the RAF rather reminded him of Hobbits mounting the winged steeds of the Nazgûl for the defence of the Shire! The above photo needs no explanation, but depicts Neville Chamberlain waving the piece of paper bearing the signature of the Reich Chancellor, which portended, for Chamberlain at least, ''peace in our time.''

2 comments:

  1. Somewhere one can access the old newsreel footage of Chamberlain returning from his craven betrayal of Czechoslovakia, footage accompanied by such uncritical adulatory praise ("the whole Empire rejoices in its deliverance" - for a year, while another people got enslaved) as to be sick-making. It's a wonder the Czechs and Slovaks ever forgave Britain and France for refusing to aid them in their hour of need, subjecting them to horrors under the Germans and then the Russians for fifty years.

    And to think that, as the Germany army itself knew, the Czech defences and army were so strong as to have been able to defeat attack in 1938 - if Chamberlain and the others had stood and fought, they would have defeated Germany in a short campaign, Hitler would likely have been overthrown, and WWII would never have happened, nor its sequel, the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Communists.

    I have very hard feelings toward Chamberlain, that deluded Unitarian.

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  2. An excellent blog. I get a very strong sense from JRRT`s letters of a profound sympathy for Catholic Poland, effectively abandoned by the UK once Stalin had been won as an ally.
    TLOTR is one of the great war books of the 20th century and should be classed with epics like Wasilly Grossmann`s LIFE AND FATE or even THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM. "Fantasy?" If only it were . . .

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