A Hobbit on the Western Front: JRR Tolkien's First World War

Note: This post was originally supposed to go up on September 22nd, Hobbit Day. Due to an injury I was forced to postpone until today. 

I am a huge JRR Tolkien fanatic. Since first reading The Hobbit as a child, I have become nearly obsessed with the world created by Tolkien. I've read all of the works he published during his lifetime, as well as all of those published by his son Christopher after the author's death. The older I get the more fascinated I become not just by his works, but by the man himself. Tolkien was many things; an Oxford scholar, a linguist and philologist fluent in dozens of languages, a fantasy author, a caring husband and father, and for a brief period during the First World War, a soldier.

Twenty four year old Tolkien in 1916

Our story begins in 1911 while Tolkien was attending King Edward's School in Birmingham, England. Like many high school aged boys, Tolkien kept a tight circle of friends who in 1911 formed a club, the "Tea Club, Barrovian Society" or TCBS. Named for the fact that the group met for Tea at a local store called Barrows, the group consisted of a core group of Tolkien and his three closest friends, Christopher Wiseman (Tolkien's best friend and namesake of the author's son), Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson. Additional members were included in the periphery; Ralph Payton, Sidney Barrowclough, Thomas Barnsley, Vincent Trought, and Wilfrid Payton. The group was close until they moved on to their college careers, and continued corresponding, sometimes with gaps, for the next several years.

Gilson, Tolkien, Wiseman, and Smith in military uniforms

Tolkien then attending Oxford, where he began studying languages and, inspired by his intellectual friends,

Edith Tolkien

began writing poetry. In a poem written September 24, 1914 Tolkien first used some of the themes and words which we would later find in his Middle Earth writings. It was also at this time that Tolkien became secretly engaged to his lifelong love, Edith.

When the war broke out in 1914, Tolkien faced a difficult decision. He was only a year away from being able to graduate, and Tolkien felt no particular hatred for Germany or any great level of particular patriotism. His ancestors had originated in Saxony, and Tolkien was already by this time fascinated by Germanic languages and mythology. On the other side of the coin, he faced immense pressure to enlist immediately. Nearly all of his friends did so, and he might be publicly shamed and mocked by many in the British public who believed any young man refusing to fight was simply a coward. This is a fascinating topic all on its own and I hope to one day to a full post on it; public pressure for young men to go fight was staggering. It came from all walks of life; family members, friends, and the clergy. Groups of women formed a "white feather" movement, and would shame men they met in civilian clothing by handing them a white feather, a physical symbol of cowardice. Tolkien himself would later write "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly."

Public pressure to go to war was immense

As a compromise, Tolkien entered into a program similar to today's ROTC: he would defer his enlistment until graduation, but would receive limited military training while still in school with the idea that he would join the Army as an officer at graduation. In April 1915 this finally came to fruition; Tolkien graduated at the top of his class from Oxford. While a great success all in its own right, the class was small - only 8 men and 17 women sat through their exams. The rest had joined the war effort.

Upon graduation Tolkien was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Many of Tolkien's friends and academic colleagues, including G.B. Smith, had joined a "literary" unit of officers in the

A Webley revolver, the only weapon Tolkien regularly
carried throughout the war. 

Regiment's 19th Battalion, nicknamed the "Salford Pals" after the fact that the officers and enlisted men were mostly groups of friends who had signed up for the war together from the town of Salford. By the time Tolkien graduated however this unit was full, and so he was assigned to train with the Regiment's 13th Battalion in Staffordshire. Tolkien hated army life, and took as many opportunities as he could to visit friends or Edith.

Because of his skill in linguistics, Tolkien was assigned to become a signal officer. These were the men responsible for sending and receiving messages while a unit was at the front, and as a result they had to have some familiarity with cryptology and code words. It was also, luckily for Tolkien, a relatively safe job as these men spent most of their time in command dugouts. In early 1916 it became obvious that Tolkien was being shipped out, and he and Edith married.

One June 4,1916 Tolkien was shipped overseas, the last of the TCBS to do so. At this point in the war the Western Front was already a meat grinder, and Tolkien did not expect to survive the war. He would later write: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death."  The day before, on June 3rd, Tolkien learned that his best friend Christopher Wiseman had been aboard the battleship HMS Superb at the battle of Jutland; thankfully though Superb had received no hits and Wisemen survived. However, morale across the British military took a blow as a result of the battle; the invincible British navy had been fought to a draw by the Germans and Tolkien left for France in an even worse mood than he would have been otherwise.

HMS Superb

Tolkien hoped to serve overseas with the British 32nd Division, of which G.B. Smith's 19th Lancashire Fusiliers were a part. Tolkien was needed elsewhere however, and was assigned to serve with the 11th Lancashire in the 25th Division. He was now sure he would not be serving with any friends, and to make matters worse his luggage had been lost in transit and he was forced to purchase substandard replacements, including new bedding. Tolkien would then spend days in Etaples, the British base for new recruits on the continent while he awaited orders from his new unit. He was equipped with a gas mask, helmet, and rifle, and spent the days bored and exhausted. During this time he created a code made up of dots to bypass military censors who might be reading his mail so that Edith could keep track of where he was.

The reason for the holdup in orders was apparent by the middle of June; the British would be launching a great offensive which, it was hoped, would end the war. Tolkien arrived northeast of Amiens to join his unit two days before the offensive was set to begin. Many of the men in Tolkien's unit were new recruits, and the next couple of days were spent training, trying to get them up to speed for the planned attack. Most of the enlisted men were working men from Lancashire whom Tolkien soon grew to admire. However, most of the officers were career soldiers whom Tolkien found gruff, uneducated, and rude and unlike many he made few friends in the army. To his immense relief, during training, Tolkien learned that his unit was being used as a reserve, and would not be used in the first wave of attacks. On July 1st, the Battle of the Somme began.

On the first day of the Battle, Tolkien's close friend and TCBS member Rob Gilson took command of a

British soldiers overlooking "Sausage Valley", near
where Robert Gilson was killed in action

platoon in the Cambridgeshire Battalion. After going over the top his unit fell under heavy fire, and Gilson was killed by an exploding shell. Of 16 officer's in Gilson's unit, only one returned from the attack alive and unwounded. Rob Gilson was the first of Tolkien's close friends to die on the Somme, but he was not the last.

On July 3rd Tolkien came under enemy fire for the first time while stationed in the ruined village of Bouzincourt, three miles behind the front line. German artillery bombarded the town, but every shell missed the British troops sheltering there. After finally being cleared to move out of cover (German aircraft, artillery, and balloons were a major threat even this far behind the line) Tolkien's unit was assigned the grim task of digging graves for the thousands of men killed so far on the Somme. On July 6 Tolkien's unit moved out for combat, but he remained behind to assist the 25th Division's signal corps. The same day G.B. Smith arrived in the village, having seen heavy combat in the last few days; more than half of his battalion had already been killed or wounded. They spent the next few days discussing poetry and literature, wondering what had happened to Gilson (neither knew of his death yet), and trying to keep each other distracted.

Tolkien was ordered to move out with the 11th Lancashire on July 14th. That night they arrived at the destroyed village of La Boisselle and moved into former German lines which had been taken in a previous assault. Here Tolkien saw bodies, German and British, strewn across the barbed wire and the mud of no-man's land. At 2 AM the next morning the 11th Lancashire took part in an assault on German positions. During this time Tolkien stayed behind the main body of men, working feverishly to maintain communications between this new front and British lines. Despite their best efforts though, the British were soon beaten back.

The rest of that weekend the Lancashire men and Tolkien were involved in repeated attacks on the Germans at Ovillers. Late in the day Sunday they led a final charge which forced the Germans to surrender, and Tolkien spent the next day, Monday, July 17th sleeping near the front. He had been in constant combat for the last 50 hours and had just taken part in the Capture of the Schwaben Redoubt, one of the few major British victories during the Somme. Upon arriving back at Bouzincourt, Tolkien learned that Gilson was dead.

German trenches on the Somme. Tolkien's unit were responsible for capturing
the Schwaben redoubt, on the top right of this photo. 

Tolkien would remain, apart from bouts with illness, at the front until October, and took part in several British attacks on German positions. At one point he bedded down with a Anglican chaplain, who would later describe the lack of sleep that he and Tolkien suffered from due to constant attacks by lice and other vermin which infested the trenches. Tolkien's war finally ended on 27 October, 1916. The lice had given him trench fever, and he was invalided back to England the next month. He spent the remained of the war either in hospitals or in garrison or training duties due to his shattered health. He was made a First Lieutenant in 1918, and was finally discharged from the army in 1920.

During the war nearly all of Tolkien's friends were killed. In addition to Gilson, G.B. Smith was killed on December 3, 1916, when he died of his wounds four days after being hit by shrapnel on the Somme. On July 22nd Ralph Payton was killed in unknown circumstances just a few miles from where Tolkien was stationed; his body was never found. Thomas Kenneth Barnsley was killed on August 1, 1917, in Ypres Belgium. The year before, shortly before being promoted to Captain, Barnsley had been buried alive by an artillery strike but had survived. Wilfrid Payton was killed, also in unknown circumstances, on July 22, 1916.

The war had killed all but one of Tolkien's close friends, Christopher Wiseman. Tolkien himself had survived the war, but carried the scars of it for the rest of his life. He would write late in life "One has indeed personally to come under the the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression... by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."  Tolkien continued to be occasionally hampered by ill health for the rest of his life, before dying in 1973. By this point he had become a knight, an influential scholar, and a world-renowned fantasy author.

The war had quickly aged Tolkien. He is photographed here near the publication of the Hobbit in 1937

Tolkien's distaste for war and all things "evil" can be seen throughout his writing. In later life he would make more friends, including CS Lewis, nearly all of whom had also survived the terrors of the Great War and who would live through the Second World War as civilians. These experiences surely affected their outlooks and, to one degree or another, shaped their written works.

There are a few good books on the subject. By far the best is Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth by John Garth. The book explores Tolkien's early years through the end of the war in great detail, and gives detailed examinations of his written works during this period. Garth gives way more detail and depth to this topic, and I can't recommend this book enough.

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War: How JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918 by Joseph Loconte came out last year, and I haven't had a chance to read it, but it has gotten excellent reviews and it's at the top of my reading list.

And finally, if you haven't , read some of Tolkien's work!

That's it folks, I'll see you soon!