Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

The War

During Tolkien’s first attempts of poetry in 1914 and the first half of 1915 the Great War fully occupied many European states. A lot of his contemporaries joined the army but he really wanted to finish his university studies first, he was so close. He joined the Oxford army program which allowed him to train without interrupting his studies and in June 1915 he achieved a first-class degree. Confident he will get a job at a university after the war he enlisted as a lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. While preparing to sail to France in 1916 he kept working on his ideas of Earendel, the Mariner who became a star, and also his invented languages.

With this prospect he and Edith decided to get married before he left, they could not be sure he will ever come back. They did so on the 22^th of March 1916 in a Catholic church in Warwick and in June he left for France. He actively fought on the Western Front, but got sick with “trench fever” in October and was sent back to England. He recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith for Christmas. By this time he knew two of his T. C. B. S. friends – Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith – had died in the war. The last letter he received from G. Smith encouraged him to start with his dream – creating a whole mythology.
During his recovery in the beginning of 1917 he wrote a story “The Fall of Gondolin”, part of The Book of Lost Tales as he originally named what was later to become The Silmarillion. It was quite peaceful time for Ronald and Edith and she became pregnant with their first child. Tolkien was expected to come back to France once he is healthy, but he fell ill again and this did not change for most of the year. He even missed the birth of his first son – John Francis Reuel, because he could not leave the hospital on time. He came back to the army, but it was almost clear he would not be sent to France ever again. Edith with little John moved close to his camp and they tried to spend as much time together as they could. They used to go for walks into the nearby forest, Edith danced and sang for him and he was happy. This later inspired another story from Silmarillion – the story about a mortal man Beren who falls in love with a beautiful elvish girl Lúthien Tinúviel, when he sees her dancing in the forest. This story always remained Tolkien’s favorite one, for it mirrors his passionate love for his wife. Many years later after her death when writing a letter to his son Christopher he wrote: “… she was (and knew she was)
my Lúthien. (…) Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance.“⁸

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