The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 1: Chronology. Christina Scull

Wade-Gery.

      19 October 1915 Smith, now at No. 6 Camp, Codford St Mary, Wiltshire, writes to Tolkien. Tolkien should let him know as soon as possible if he is coming to Bath, and inform Gilson by telegram so that he can book rooms. – Gilson writes from No. 3 Camp, Sutton Veny, to Tolkien at Brocton Camp, *Staffordshire, forwarded to him at Penkridge, Rugeley (i.e. Rugeley Camp on Cannock Chase). See note. Gilson is likely to be sent to the front very soon, and if at all possible would like the T.C.B.S. to meet the next weekend.

      24 October 1915 Smith writes to Tolkien at Whittington Heath from the Wisemans’ house in London. He has heard from Tolkien that he cannot join them for the weekend. Tolkien seems to have been depressed about various matters, one of which is that Edith is ill. Smith thanks Tolkien for sending more poems and is particularly impressed with The Happy Mariners and Dark Are the Clouds about the North. Smith and Gilson have not gone to Bath, but on impulse have joined Wiseman in London. There they have reaffirmed the principles of the T.C.B.S. and have decided ‘once again on the work it will have to do after the war is over: to drive from life, letters, the stage and society that dabbling in and hankering after the unpleasant sides and incidents in life and nature which have captured the larger and worser tastes in Oxford, London and the world: … to reestablish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everybody’s breast’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford).

      27 October 1915 Wiseman writes to Tolkien, giving an account of the previous weekend.

      31 October 1915 Gilson writes to Tolkien at Whittington Heath, giving his account of the weekend 23–24 October. He was very sorry that Tolkien could not come; he feels that the T.C.B.S. is not complete unless all four are present.

      November 1915 Tolkien moves with the 13th Battalion to Rugeley Camp in Staffordshire. – G.B. Smith goes to France with the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers.

      November 1915–early 1916 While stationed at Cannock Chase Tolkien takes the opportunity to visit Phoenix Farm, Gedling. Colin Brookes-Smith will later recall that Tolkien arrived on an AJS motor cycle, and one morning allowed Colin to ride it up the road and back. Probably during this period Tolkien also participates in the cutting up of a poached deer, an event to which he will later refer during lectures on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at Oxford. See note.

      ?21–28 November 1915 Tolkien writes a poem, Kortirion among the Trees (*The Trees of Kortirion); one of its earliest copies will be inscribed ‘dedicated to Warwick’. A fair copy will be dated ‘Nov. 21–28’, and a later typescript inscribed ‘Warwick, a week’s leave from camp – written largely in a house in Victoria Street [where Edith and Jennie Grove live] and in [mine?] in Northgate St.’ In fact Tolkien is in camp on 25 and 26 November, from which he writes on each date to Edith (see below), and in the second letter says that he has ‘written out a pencil copy of “Kortirion”’ (Letters, p. 8). This suggests that Edith knows about the work already, that Tolkien may have begun the poem during a visit to Warwick and continued to work on it when he returned to camp, and that after writing out the pencil copy on 26 November he made further alterations (27–28 November) before making the dated fair copy. – To a fair copy of the poem Tolkien will append a prose introduction which explains that Kortirion was a city of the fairies (later Elves) in the Lonely Isle ‘after the great wars with Melko and the ruin of Gondolin’, built ‘in memory of their ancient dwelling of Kôr in Valinor’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 25). It is clear that he intends Warwick to be the site where earlier had stood Kortirion, whose memory still lingers, and his mythology to be particularly connected with England (the ‘Lonely Isle’). Although the date of this prose introduction is uncertain, its sentimental yet hopeful tone, so like that of the poem, suggests that both were written at roughly the same time. If that is so, several very notable elements have been added by Tolkien to his rapidly growing mythology. On one early copy he gives the poem a subsidiary (but not entirely legible) title in Qenya, Narqelion la . . tu y aldalin Kortirionwen, ‘Autumn (among) the Trees of Kortirion’. On one of the surviving working sheets he drafts four lines of a poem in Qenya on a similar theme (*Narqelion). By now, Tolkien has developed his invented language to the extent that he is able to use it in composition.

      21 November 1915 Gilson writes to Tolkien that the last he has heard from him is a letter Smith showed him in London. He hopes that Tolkien is no longer depressed and that Edith is now better. – Hilary Tolkien lands in Boulogne with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

      25 November 1915 Tolkien writes to Edith from Rugeley Camp.

      26 November 1915 Tolkien writes to Edith from Rugeley Camp, giving an account of his day:

      The usual kind of morning standing about and freezing and then trotting to get warmer so as to freeze again. We ended up by an hour’s bomb-throwing with dummies. Lunch and a freezing afternoon. All the hot days of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration, and now we stand in icy groups being talked at! Tea and another scramble − I fought for a place at the stove and made a piece of toast on the end of a knife: what days! [Letters, p. 8]

      He has written out a pencil copy of Kortirion among the Trees; he first intends to send it to the T.C.B.S. as he owes them all letters, then decides that he will send it to Edith and make another copy for the T.C.B.S.

      28 November–4 December 1915 Tolkien writes a poem, The Pool of the Dead Year (and the Passing of Autumn).

      December 1915 Tolkien moves with the 13th Battalion to Brocton Camp on Cannock Chase.

      1 December 1915 Tolkien’s poem Goblin Feet is published in Oxford Poetry 1915. The volume also includes ‘Songs on the Downs’ by G.B. Smith and three poems by H.T. Wade-Gery.

      2 December 1915 Smith, now in the trenches in France, writes to Tolkien in care of the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers, 3rd Reserve Brigade, Officers Company, Brocton Camp. He asks for the long letter Tolkien promised in his last postcard that he would send.

      20 December 1915–9 January 1916 British and allied troops evacuate Gallipoli.

      22 December 1915 Smith writes to Tolkien, thanking him for various letters and commenting on Oxford Poetry 1915 and Goblin Feet. Smith and Wade-Gery agree that they and Tolkien are the best contributors to the volume.

      26 December 1915 Gilson writes to Tolkien in care of the 3rd Reserve Brigade, Officers Company, P Lines, Brocton Camp. Tolkien has written to him about some problems, as Gilson remarks on ‘the extra blackness of your fate in these dark days’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford). He has just forwarded Kortirion among the Trees to Wiseman, and has made a copy for Smith. He likes the poem very much though he makes one or two criticisms.

      30 December 1915 Wiseman writes to Tolkien at Brocton Camp. He has been posted to the HMS Superb. He has received Kortirion among the Trees from Gilson, and will write about it later.

1916

      1916 Tolkien paints a watercolour, The Day after the Day after Tomorrow. On the verso of the sheet is another picture, Wrenching a Slow Reluctant Truth, presumably done at same time.

      ?January–February 1916 Tolkien writes *Over Old Hills and Far Away, another ‘fairy’ poem about the piper Tinfang Warble. The manuscript has an apparently contemporaneous note, ‘Jan[uary]–Feb[ruary] 1916’. A later typescript of the poem will be inscribed ‘Brocton Camp, Christ[mas]–Jan[uary] 1915–16’.

      7 January 1916 Gilson writes to inform Tolkien that he is leaving for the front on 8 January.

      12 January 1916 Smith writes to Tolkien at Brocton Camp, full of praise for Kortirion among the Trees: ‘it is a great and a noble poem’ (Tolkien Papers,