The Real JRR Tolkien by Jesse Xander;

Author:Jesse Xander;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literally Figures
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2021-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Remembrance

There is something about death in Middle-Earth that speaks directly to Tolkien’s four months of active combat in World War I. It does not have the sanitised remoteness of death in myth, it is direct, ugly, random, and painful. Battles in Middle-Earth may be epic in scale, but they do not feel epic in a positive sense; they feel nightmarish, overwhelming and frightening. The sense of fatality that the main characters have, usually hobbits, unaccustomed to fighting, is palpable. And yet they do not flee.

No hobbits are pressured into active service as Tolkien and his friends were, but there is still no sense of desire for battle-glory. Bilbo is swept up in a gruesome dispute between two refugee populations, fanned by Elven interests and interrupted by the forces of a grieving son seeking vengeance. Frodo and Sam are tossed this way and that over Middle-Earth by the Orcs who captured them, and Merry and Pippin end up fighting alongside communities they had scarcely even heard of prior to their quest.

‘One War is enough for any man.’1 So wrote Tolkien to his son Michael in 1940, after he followed in his father’s footsteps by volunteering for service in active conflict. However, Michael, an officer cadet at Sandhurst at the time of his father’s letter, was far more suited to military life than his father, by Tolkien’s own proud admission.

Not that being suited for the military was necessarily enough to save you, as Ronald knew all too well by the end of his brief time in the military. The boisterous former TCBS-ite T.K. ‘Tea Cake’ Barnsley seemed to be flourishing on the battlefield, and had become a captain. In August of 1916, T.K. was completely buried alive by a trench mortar, though he miraculously survived, and returned to England to recover in a military hospital before entering back into the fray. However, almost exactly a year after his brush with death, his luck ran out. In August 1917, he was stationed near Ypres, and stopped to console a captured prisoner of war. This moment of pause cost him his life, and he was killed in action.

Barnsley was not the only member of the wider TCBS lost: Ralph Payton, nicknamed ‘the Baby’ at school due to being the younger of the two Payton brothers who were members of the TCBS, joined up early during his time at the University of Cambridge, much like T.K., serving in the same battalion as him (the 1st Birmingham). He fell before his friend, killed in action on 22 July 1916. His name is inscribed on Thiepval Memorial, but his body was never identified. He was survived by his older brother, Wilfrid Payton, another member of Tolkien’s broader schoolboy friendship circle. By the end of the war, five of the nine members of the broader TCBS were dead; four of them felled during the Great War.

But what of Ronald? His military career started on 15 July 1915, and was hardly illustrious in spite of the huge personal toll it took on the young scholar.

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