Goblin caves at the North Pole! The Father Christmas letters penned by Tolkien tell us some surprising things about the Arctic. They borrow penguins from Antarctica and feature a polar bear who can speak, write and draw. The North Pole is an actual pole and there’s no sign whatsoever of an ocean under all that ice.
Writing these letters to his children gave Tolkien licence to be wildly counterfactual. This was an old desire that also gave his more serious legendarium a flat earth, an earthly paradise and trees that bore the sun and moon.
But in these gossipy, funny, episodic mini-tales he could freely indulge in absurd unrealities – and freely borrow too – without needing to worry about inner consistencies. If he wanted names for North Polar Bear’s nephews, he could make them Finnish (Paksu and Valkotukka, ‘Fat’ and ‘White-hair’). If he wanted a language for Father Christmas’s elf-secretary, he could just borrow it from Middle-earth Quenya (Mára mesta an ni véla tye ento, ‘Good-bye until I see you next’).
I’ve always been interested in Tolkien’s gift for invention, and it seems appropriate to talk about it now at the time of giving and in the context of the Father Christmas letters.
Several enduring aspects of his inventiveness have become clearer to me over the years. Among them is the urge simply to entertain: dressing up as a berserker, falling downstairs, and many other japes – besides writing, of course. Another is the opportunistic grabbing of ideas, to be used immediately or stored up for later. I was delighted when, researching The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, I realised that he used a 1947 Icelandic eruption as grist for the climactic Mount Doom scenes in The Lord of the Rings.
So here’s a possible trigger for one of the longest and most interesting letters from Father Christmas – the 1932 one, in which North Polar Bear (NPB) discovers secret goblin caves at the North Pole.
Tolkien’s paper ‘Chaucer as a Philologist’ (1934) is an analysis of northern English dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales. Tolkien argues that Geoffrey Chaucer displays a philological interest in the dialect, as shown by the speech of two Northern clerks in the tale. I’ve never read this paper closely before copy-editing OUP’s forthcoming Tolkien on Chaucer, edited by John Bowers and Peter Steffenson.
So last week I enlarged on the comments about the name Wetwang that I’ve made in The World of J.R.R. Tolkien. Before we reach Wetwang in Middle-earth, this week I come to what Tolkien says about Wetwang in Middle English. It’s a fitting week to talk Chaucer, because the British Library (which I visited last night for its current exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination and for a talk by the wonderful Susan Cooper) has just made available online digitised images of all its Chaucer manuscripts.
I’m in the middle of copy-editing an upcoming edition of Tolkien’s work on Chaucer, edited with commentary by John Bowers and Peter Steffenson, for Oxford University Press. Tolkien on Chaucer (Opens in a new window)will include the complete text of ‘Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeves Tale’, first published in Transactions of the Philological Society in 1934.
Working on it has brought to my attention a reference by Tolkien to the Yorkshire place-name Wetwang which I didn’t take into account when writing about this name in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien. I sat down this morning to write a brief piece about this for you, but it has sprawled to beyond it’s borders (rather like the marshland itself) and filedl the sluggish regions of my Saturday. So I’m going to divide it up over several weeks. Today I’ll expand on my brief account in Worlds.
It’s not every day that you receive an award also given to the director-general of Syrian antiquities, the director of archaeology at Troy and the director of the Colosseum in Rome. But that day came for me on 3 September.
Before I get onto that, I want to mention some other great news, which will have an ongoing impact on my work on Tolkien. I’ve been elected a member of the Senior Common Room (SCR) of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. I’ve also joined Oxford Tolkien 50, ‘a project of Tolkien scholars and students in the University of Oxford, featuring a series of conferences, events, and exhibitions, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death’. I’m very grateful to Giuseppe Pezzini, Tolkienist, classicist and Fellow of Corpus, for making both of these things happen.
The “Communicating the Ancient” (“Comunicare l’Antico”) Award is given by Sicily’s Naxos Taormina Archaeological Park “to Italian and foreign scholars and personalities engaged in the dissemination of archaeological, historical and philological research, but also to institutions and museums that have implemented important strategies of valorisation and communication to the general public”.
On screen, I answer questions from Angelica Russo, right, while Carmelina Longo translates
No one can possibly disagree that the other “Comunicare l’Antico” award recipients are all far more deserving than me. They are far more eminent, too. There were Mohammad Nazir Awad, director general of Syria’s museums and antiquities; Rustem Aslan, director of archaeological excavations in Troy; and Alfonsina Russo, director of the Colosseum archaeological park in Rome. There were also a professor emeritus of the University of Perugia, the research manager of Italy’s Institute of Cultural Heritage Sciences, and the mayor of Agrigento, Italy’s Capital of Culture 2025.
But as I said in my thankyou remarks, it was an honour to act as a proxy for Tolkien on the weekend of the 50th anniversary of his death:
Thank you. I am deeply honoured to receive this wonderful award. I am also proud to find myself in the company of such prestigious recipients. I am sure that really this award goes to J.R.R Tolkien, who died on 2 September 1973, 50 years ago this weekend. I am sitting in Oxford, where I have spent the weekend at a conference to mark this anniversary and I have seen and heard the effects of the inspiration he has given to so many people – experts in medieval languages and literature and in many other fields. I see Tolkien as a figure who stands at a doorway to the past and, like Janus perhaps, also faces us in the present. His message to us is not to forget the things that matter: the wisdom and beauty of the ages, the glory and peace of the natural world. I am delighted to have been able to use my own experience and abilities as a researcher and writer to help other people deepen their understanding of Tolkien and therefore of the past. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for this award.
I was nominated by Oronzo Cilli (author of Tolkien’s Library), who has my deepest thanks for his support. We both hoped to attend the awards ceremony at Naxos Taormina. Alas, it clashed with my prior commitment to the Tolkien 50 conference at Corpus Christi College, so I had to accept remotely, on a big screen. This is the closest I’ll ever get to the Oscars experience, and it was not without its entertainment value as the Sicilian tech team and I struggled to establish audio while my face loomed large over the stage.
The award was presented by Fulvia Toscano, council member for culture at the municipality of Giardini Naxos, and received on my behalf by Gabriella Tigano, director of the Archaeological Park of Naxos Taormina. Translator Carmelina Longo fielded questions from host Francesca Russo about Tolkien, then conveyed my answers and my thankyou comments.
Since the awards, I’ve been almost entirely off social media while trying to complete a book proposal in the midst of an untimely torrent of editorial work. But this was momentous for me. In fact it’s my third award, ever – following the Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship (2004) for Tolkien and the Great War and the Ashurst Cup for Literary Merit (1978) for a story I wrote, aged 12, under the heady influence of the newly published Silmarillion.
In a guest post, Allan Turner, Tolkien scholar and formerly Lecturer in English at the University of Jena, Germany, provides a musical insight into A Spring Harvest, the 1918 anthology of Geoffrey Bache Smith’s poetry co-edited by his friendJ.R.R, Tolkien. Smith, a member of Tolkien’s T.C.B.S. circle and a ‘wild and wholehearted admirer’ of his early mythological writings, died of wounds on the Western Frontin 1916. Just months later, Tolkien wrote his creation myth, The Music of the Ainur.
Several of the poems in the poems of Geoffrey Bache Smith, edited posthumously by his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman as A Spring Harvest, express a melancholic sense of loss. However one stands out to me as a particularly successful evocation of mood-music, as its title suggests: ‘Schumann: Erstes Verlust’. This is the name of a piano piece, no. 16 in Schumann’s Opus 68, Album für die Jugend (Album for the Young), which Schumann originally composed for his own children. It has always been a favourite for learners of the piano, but is not very often heard in professional recitals, so his close familiarity with it suggests that Smith was an amateur player himself. After all, he was writing at a time when recording was in its infancy, so that people were used to making music for themselves, either alone or with friends. Anyone who doesn’t know it (and sadly, not many young people have the opportunity to learn the piano nowadays) can listen to it here.
The title means ‘first loss’, and the correct form should be ‘Erster Verlust’; it’s notable that either Smith or Tolkien (as editor) or both got their German grammar wrong, so perhaps Smith was writing from memory. However, the music is quietly wistful rather than tragic. The argument of the poem is so slight as to be almost non-existent: a shadowy ‘she’ has gone and the poet’s feeling of despondency is reflected in the dismal late autumn landscape. Here, the mood is everything. This is the poem in full (with images of Schumann and Smith respectively).
Schumann: Erstes Verlust
O, dreary fall the leaves, The withered leaves; Among the trees Complains the breeze, That still bereaves.
All silent lies the mere, The silver mere, In saddest wise Reflecting skies Forlorn and sere.
Would autumn had not claimed its own And would the swallows had not flown.
Skies overcast! Leaves falling fast! And she has passed And left the woodland strown, The woodland strown, The silver mere, The dying year And me alone.
Skies overcast! Leaves falling fast! Does she that passed Dream of the woodland strown, The woodland strown, The silver mere, The dying year, And me alone?
Not even the most ardent Smith fan would claim that there is anything original about falling leaves, grey skies and the wan light on a pool as symbols of human melancholy, nor is the migration of swallows as a sign of changefulness going to surprise anyone. Similarly, there is no description of individual features that would make the scene come to life in the reader’s imagination. In many poems, including perhaps some in the present collection, such stereotyping would be grounds for criticism, but not in this case. That is because the poem is intended as pure music inspired by the mood of Schumann’s piano piece.
The musicality lies above all in the sounds of the words. Since the lines are almost all short, mostly with only two main stresses each, there is frequent rhyming; in the first stanza, in fact, the rhyming words are almost reduced to single pattern, since leaves/bereaves differs from trees/breeze only by an additional soft fricative. The technique here is quite similar to that used by the French poet Paul Verlaine in his ‘Chanson d’automne’. (We know that Smith was good at French, since he acted in a French play at King Edward’s, so it’s quite likely that as a budding poet he was interested in trends on the other side of the Channel.)
Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur D’une langueur Monotone.
(The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.)
The poem comes from Verlaine’s first collection, published when he was 22 years old, so about the same age as Smith when he was writing his poems, in a section entitled ‘Paysages tristes’ (sad landscapes), which could also describe so many of Smith’s settings. Verlaine also focuses on a wind and dead leaves, but he establishes an explicit link between the landscape and himself: he feels himself being blown back and forth inwardly like leaves in the breeze, whereas for Smith, as in so many of his poetic landscapes, the scene is purely external without reference to any personal emotions.
However, the musicality comes also from the structure of the poem. In contrast to many other poems in A Spring Harvest, which conform to traditional forms and metres such as the sonnet, the four-line ballad stanza or the long narrative verse-paragraph in iambic pentameter, ‘Erster Verlust’ is much freer in form, with lines of different lengths. The second stanza echoes the first, the fifth repeats the fourth almost word for word, while the two longer lines in the middle seem to act as a pivot. What lies behind Smith’s experiment in sound?
The key is to be found in the Schumann piece that it recalls, not only through the evocative sound patterns but through the whole structure. If you listen to it played on the piano, you will recognise that the words of the first three stanzas correspond exactly to the notes and phrases of the music. The second stanza which echoes the first is the poet’s translation into words of the composer’s repetition, with an altered cadence, of the first 8 bars. As the music moves into a more flowing variation of the first motif, so the poem expands into the two longer lines.
Allan Turner sings G.B. Smith’s poem ‘Erstes Verlust’ to Schumann’s music
The relationship in the last part is more complicated, since the music develops into specifically pianistic figuration in which the two hands imitate one another before reaching a patch of chordal writing, the movement of which can only be hinted at in language, although the rhythm of the last two lines of the poem can be clearly heard in the final phrase of themusic. Furthermore, Schumann indicates that the second half of the piece is to be repeated, which provides the basis for Smith’s very atmospheric echo in the last two stanzas.
Let me be clear: I’m not claiming that Smith wanted to turn a favourite piece of music into a song, because that simply would not have worked given the pianistic nature of the composition. It’s simply an evocation of the mood of the music, using the structure of the piano piece but calling upon the resources of language. For me it is a finely crafted poem, a small work of art which can only suggest the talent that Smith might have been able to develop if he had lived longer.
Allan Turner’s impromptu performance of Smith’s poem to Schumann’s music was part of his presentation at the conference G.B. Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien: a meaningful friendship, held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 21–22 March 2023, from which this post has been extracted and enlarged by Allan. To watch his whole conference talk, just go back to the beginning of the video above.
I’ve posted this on social media already but I’m going to put it here too because, well, I like it.
Writing about Tolkien’s unfinished Númenor time-travel novel The Lost Road, I almost inevitably mistype it as “The Lost Toad”. That would be rather a different story. His driving (“Charge ’em and they’ll scatter!”) is said to have reminded Oxford contemporaries of Mr Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
Mr Toad took out his map and spread it with a flourish on the shiny bonnet of his new car while he held up the damp and mouldy invitation in his other hand.
“You see, Ratty? I knew I was right. ‘Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road, through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode’ – here he paused to chortle to himself – ‘and through the wood of hanging trees and the gallows-weed…’ So we’ll be there in a jiffy, you wait and see!”
Mole and Ratty threw each other an apprehensive glance.
Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows, in his driving gear, by the inimitable E.H. Shephard
I’ve just returned from the first-ever conference focusing on Geoffrey Bache Smith, his poetry, and his influence on his great friend, Tolkien. In a previous post, I spotlighted an under-appreciated aspect of Smith: his sense of humour. In this new post, I will offer some more evidence – in a video this time – and simultaneously make good on a promise I made in that earlier post.
Geoffrey Bache Smith and others in The Frogs by Aristophanes at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, 1913
On the serious side, Smith persuaded Tolkien to become a poet and was therefore truly instrumental in turning him into the author we know. Smith sent Tolkien a letter from deepest danger in the trenches of the Great War to declare himself a ‘wild and whole-hearted admirer’ of the first Middle-earth writings, and to urge him to publish them. One of the many ironies of that world war is that although Tolkien could find no publisher for his own poetry, he was able to edit Smith’s poems for publication (A Spring Harvest, 1918). You see, Smith had been killed on the Somme battlefield in 1916, and (as Dr Stuart Lee made clear in his conference paper) there was a demand for good poetry by dead soldiers.
But when Smith wasn’t being serious (and often when he was, too) he could also be very, very funny. His friends knew and loved this about him, and I provide some evidence of this in Tolkien and the Great War. But I knew of nothing beyond the occasional quip… until I realised that an anonymous piece in their old school newspaper was actually Smith’s work. You can read that in earlier blog post, The dream of Geoffrey Bache Smith.
At the conference I grabbed the opportunity to unburden myself of an embarrassing secret that I’ve kept for 20 years. Now don’t get too excited – it’s not embarrassing in that way. It’s a research error that I corrected quietly as soon as I realised what I’d done. But I think it’s a useful cautionary tale for researchers in general. This is what I intended to write about when I said in that previous G.B. Smith post that ‘a mildly embarrassing tale hangs thereto, which I will save for another blog post’.
However, having now told the story at this week’s conference, with all the essential illustrations, I have decided to share the video right here… The link picks up where my seven-minute contribution begins.
The final slide doesn’t seem to have made it into the streaming video, so I reproduce it below. It relates to my final question: whether G.B. Smith (pictured top left as an adult) is one of the cadets in the same 1907 King Edward’s School photograph that Tolkien has been identified in. Tell me what you think. And note that Smith, just 13 at the time, had a 16-year-old brother at the school, Roger. Roger Smith is not known to appear in any surviving photograph, but Tolkien scholar Kris Swank has perceptively noted that the face at top centre in the picture below might actually be his.
Videos of all the talks and discussions at this week’s conference have been shared on YouTube by Corpus Christi College, which hosted the delightful event. Links have been handily gathered here by Trotter of the Tolkien Collector’s Guide.
One of the revelations was that Smith had actually managed to publish more of his poetry during his lifetime than we had ever realised, as Oronzo Cilli demonstrated after some serious detective work. Another was that during his brief Oxford University undergraduate life, he had spent much energy and enjoyed some success at the Oxford Union Debating Society, as Grace Khuri showed. In my own talk, I offered fresh information and insight on Smith’s background, friendships and prospects – including a glimpse of his roots in Mordor (!) and a surprise secret nod, in one of his poems, to his local football team, West Bromwich Albion.
I mention here only the biographical and bibliographical talks, but there was much more. Highlights for me included Allan Turner’s sober assessment of Smith’s poetry as literature – including an unexpected and beautiful rendition of one poem as a song – and Kris Swank’s exploration of a single motif from Longfellow to Smith to Tennyson. For the first time, this week A Spring Harvest received the attention it deserves. Giuseppe Pezzini, Douglas A. Anderson and Oronzo deserve many thanks for organising the conference.
In a guest post, Oxford English Dictionary historian and lexicographer Peter Gilliversheds new light on one of the most curious characters to cross the young J.R.R. Tolkien’s path
The classical scholar E.R. Dodds, who matriculated at Oxford a year after Tolkien, wrote in his autobiography Missing Persons: ‘If on leaving Oxford I had been asked which of my English contemporaries were most likely to achieve fame as writers I should have named without hesitation T.W. Earp and Aldous Huxley.’ He would surely have been surprised to learn that the fate of achieving fame as a writer was to fall, not upon Earp, but upon his Exeter College contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien. But who was this figure who showed such promise?
Thomas Earp as Oxford Union president (Oxford Chronicle, 5 December 1919)
I first encountered Thomas Wade Earp (1892–1958) in what I imagine is the most common way for people to encounter him today: a couple of brief mentions in Tolkien’s letters. To his fiancée Edith in 1914, Tolkien writes: ‘I went and had an interesting talk with that quaint man Earp I have told you of and introduced him (to his great delight) to the ‘Kālevalā’ the Finnish ballads.’ In a 1944 passage, Tolkien tells his son Christopher that he probably met the poet Roy Campbell around 1919–21 ‘when he was a lad, as he lived in O[xford] at the time when we lived in Pusey Street (rooming with Walton the composer, and going about with T.W. Earp, the original twerp …)’.
The second of these references points to the other way in which Earp is likely to come to people’s attention: as the person whose initials and surname are thought to be the origin of the word twerp, denoting a silly or annoying person. The current entry for twerp in the Oxford English Dictionary not only quotes the 1944 Tolkien letter but also quotes Campbell himself in 1957 as saying Earp ‘gave the English language the word twirp, really twearp, because of the Goering-like wrath he kindled in the hearts of the rugger-playing stalwarts at Oxford, when he was president of the Union, by being the last, most charming, and wittiest of the “decadents”’. The entry also notes that Earp arrived at Oxford in 1911, which is relevant because it predates the earliest evidence cited, a 1925 slang glossary. Despite this, the dictionary opts for caution, simply describing the word as ‘Of uncertain origin’.
The Oxford English Dictionary entry for twerp, published in 1986
As an OED lexicographer as well as a Tolkien fan, perhaps it was inevitable that at some point I would begin to wonder about T.W. Earp in two different ways.
Firstly: how much truth is there in the suggestion that the word twerp originates in the ‘wrath … of the rugger-playing stalwarts at Oxford’ (amongst whom, at least initially, Tolkien could be numbered)?
And secondly: who was this man, who evidently created a lasting impression in the minds of at least three of his Oxford contemporaries, but who is now largely forgotten; and how much did Tolkien actually know him?
I’d like to look at these two questions in turn.
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The OED entry for twerp is of course not the last word on the subject; the entry has not been significantly revised since it first appeared in Volume IV of the Supplement to the OED in 1986. When it does come up for revision, extensive research – of a kind that has only become possible in the last twenty years or so – will be carried out, and among other things this will involve seeking out the earliest available evidence for the word. It will also, of course, take advantage of research that has already been carried out by other scholars.
One well-known instance of the word which allegedly takes its history back to the First World War – namely its use in the popular wartime song ‘Bless ’Em All’ – has been investigated by the veteran slang lexicographer Jonathan Lighter. Although it seems likely that the song may have been written down by the songwriter Fred Godfrey in 1917 – possibly based on a song that had been in circulation among servicemen long before that – no version of the lyrics, and no recording, dating earlier than 1940 (when it was popularized by George Formby) has been traced. And there is some evidence to suggest that the key line – ‘There’s many an airman just finishing his time, there’s many a twerp signing on’ – may have been introduced as part of a rewrite of what had originally been a rather more ribald song (in which the first word of the title was often replaced with something much stronger than ‘bless’) to make it more acceptable for public consumption.
So far, so inconclusive. But my own private research has turned up some definite evidence that the word was in circulation before the OED’s current first date of 1925; and the evidence points fairly clearly to an American origin, and – perhaps disappointingly – away from a connection with T.W. Earp.
My earliest evidence of all (so far) is to be found in the 1917 issue of Corks and Curls, the student yearbook of the University of Virginia, in an anonymous comic piece entitled ‘Mr Dooley at the Corner’. At one point Mr Dooley (apparently Irish) says ‘Dammed if ye ain’t a hell iv a p’lite twerp!’ (In fact I recently discovered that the same quotation was independently discovered by another word sleuth, Stephen Goranson.)
Other instances of the word from the next few years in American student publications suggest that it had some currency as a piece of student slang. (It may have been given wider circulation by Cole Porter: in 1921 the Harvard Lampoon published a poem entitled ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding’ – another of the countless parodies of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha – which seems to have come from his pen, and in which a frustrated Hiawatha lambastes an incompetent organ-blower as ‘Little Twirp, the Chronic Nit Wit’. Furthermore, after some fairly extensive searching, I have failed to turn up any instances of twerp (or twirp, or twearp) in Oxford – or indeed British – sources earlier than 1925.
Harvard Lampoon’s ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding’ may have given twirp wider circulation from 1921
So what are we to make of the fact that two men who knew T.W. Earp at Oxford before 1920 both associated him with the word? Tolkien will have met Earp at Exeter College in 1911, the year in which both men matriculated at the college; Roy Campbell met him shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time in early 1919. At what point did Earp begin to be referred to as a twerp?
The evidence points to the word being a piece of pre-existing American slang, which at some point made its way across the Atlantic, to be picked up by some Oxford wit who noticed how it could be made to fit Earp’s name, and thus become a stick with which the University’s sporting hearties could beat him. In the absence of proof of its currency before 1917, the window during which twerp could have been brought to Oxford while Earp was still a student – he left in 1920 – is narrow. There were certainly American students at Oxford – including some at Exeter – under the Rhodes Scholarship scheme who could have brought their slang with them. But the lack of positive evidence so far (and I have looked quite hard!) is puzzling. Perhaps the research that eventually goes into the revision of the OED entry will turn up something conclusive.
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Tolkien and Earp, left and right, flank other Exeter College students at matriculation in 1911 (digital image: Neil Holford)
Thomas Wade Earp was born on 26 Aug 1892, the son of the prosperous Newark brewer (and civic dignitary) Thomas Earp. He was born in London although his parents were at that time resident in Newark, where his father had just been elected Mayor for the second time. He was educated at Magnus Grammar School, where his father had been chairman of the governors and a major benefactor; in 1911 he won a scholarship to Exeter College, making him an exact contemporary of Tolkien. Both men lost no time in becoming active in Exeter College’s various societies and clubs, and their paths will have crossed constantly, not least as they were (initially) both studying classics. John Garth is probably right that ‘The two must have disagreed about almost everything’, but it does at least seem that they were interested in some of the same subjects, most notably literature; and by the summer of 1914 they were on sufficiently good terms to dine and socialize together (the signatures of both men appear on a menu card for a ‘Chequers Clubbe’ dinner on 18 June and on Tolkien’s copy of the programme for Exeter College’s Sexcentenary Ball on 23 June).
And now I come to my second question: who was Earp, and what was the nature and the extent of Tolkien’s dealings with him?
As soon as I began to investigate him, he quickly emerged from the shadows as a vivid figure, who may well not have been Tolkien’s cup of tea, but whom he may well have had good reason to cultivate, and who struck their contemporaries as someone marked out for fame – even if he failed to fulfil this early promise. In writing about him here I earnestly hope that I can raise his stock, and maybe persuade someone to find out (and write) more about him.
John Garth is one of the few Tolkien scholars who has written anything about him at all, and I draw here both on his notes on Earp in Tolkien at Exeter College and on research notes which he has generously shared with me. I have also found useful material in Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond’s indispensable J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.
Earp (circled) and Tolkien (hands on vine) at their college’s sexcentenary celebrations in 1914 (Exeter College)
But of course the summer of 1914 also saw the world changed utterly with the outbreak of war. By the time both men had returned to college in the autumn, Tolkien was preparing for war service; Earp, by contrast, would not be enlisting, and in fact seems to have contrived to continue studying at Exeter throughout the war.
There are various accounts of how he managed this; according to one, he ‘fooled the Conscription Board by getting into a very hot bath just before the session and presenting himself in a parboiled state which baffled the examiners’; according to another, he exercised his ‘unique talent for twitching his eyebrows, wrinkling his nose, and waggling his ears … to such horrifying effect that the Tribunal found him unfit for service’.
Quite apart from his escaping military service, there were also the college authorities to be satisfied, and here there is another puzzle: how did Earp contrive to remain an undergraduate for nearly a decade (so that Tolkien could return to Oxford after the war and find him still in residence, still presiding over various college societies)? It has been alleged that he repeatedly – possibly as many as eleven times – failed to pass the scripture examination known as ‘Divvers’, which was a prerequisite for graduating; but it seems distinctly odd that Exeter College allowed him to do so without sanction. (A few years later John Betjeman would be sent down from Oxford by his college after failing for only the second time.) Further investigation in the Exeter College archives is needed.
Whatever the explanation, Earp was able not merely to establish himself on the Oxford undergraduate ‘scene’, but to maintain his position over an extended period. And his position was unquestionably a literary one. Besides his regular contributions to Exeter College’s various literary societies, he was becoming a published poet, with four poems included in a 1914 anthology of student writing entitled Oxford Poetry. Further poems appeared in the successor volume Oxford Poetry 1915, of which he was now a co-editor – and which included, alongside a further six of his own poems, Tolkien’s ‘Goblin Feet’, one of his earliest published pieces. He went on to co-edit several subsequent volumes of the series.
During this time he also became a good friend of fellow undergraduates Aldous Huxley and Philip Heseltine (later better known as the composer Peter Warlock); and in 1916 Huxley introduced him to the exotic artistic milieu of Garsington Manor, where the legendary Ottoline Morrell held court, and where such figures as D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, and various members of the Bloomsbury Group were regular guests. The same year saw the publication of Earp’s own anthology Contacts, and other poems: an impressive achievement for an undergraduate.
It’s clear enough that Earp had the knack of ‘getting on’ in the literary world; and, as such, one can see why Tolkien, who hoped to achieve something with his own poetry, might seek to cultivate his company, notwithstanding the huge differences between the two men in outlook and perspective. For Earp was clearly a ‘literary man’ of a very different cut from Tolkien.
A recollection of the future novelist and publisher Leonard Strong, from 1916, gives a flavour of his person and personality: ‘a young man who was already a legend in the university. A lock of long, soft, fair hair drooped over his forehead, seeming to come halfway down his thin pale face. From under the lock two dark eyes looked out, the liveliest, most alert, most humorous eyes I had seen. This was T.W. Earp, focus and centre of undergraduate literary life.’
His voice, it seems, was also memorable: a striking number of his contemporaries referred to it as ‘high’ and ‘quavering’, and some years later Dylan Thomas even christened him ‘Flute’, a foil to his own ‘Snout’.
Strong also recalls how Earp ‘made me a member of a group which met once a week to read aloud what they had been writing, and exchange criticisms’ – showing that this form of ‘writerly colloquium’ was to be found in Oxford decades before the Inklings, even if Tolkien might have run a mile from this particular incarnation of it.
Earp himself was very conscious of not ‘fitting in’ to the heartier side of life at Exeter College. Some autobiographical notes he made in the 1940s refer to his ‘living in pre-Raphaelite ambience’ among ‘queer characters’. The notes recall Earp being given the mock-honorific post of ‘Public Orator’ in the college’s undergraduate body, the Stapledon Society ‘as an excuse for being ragged’ – that is, made boisterous fun of, something that was meted out especially to aesthetes. More bitterly, these notes refer to the ‘brutality of “Freshers’ Port” and rags’. Freshers’ Port was evidently some kind of alcohol-fuelled initiation. ‘Rags’ (OED: ‘a boisterous prank or practical joke’) were the kind of activities that Tolkien, of course, engaged in when venting his more boisterous side.
1919 issues of the shortlived modernist Coterie magazine, co-edited by the precocious Earp while he was still at Oxford
By the end of the war Earp was firmly established as an Oxford ‘literary type’, and also as something of a literary entrepreneur. The annual volumes of Oxford Poetry – with Earp as co-editor – continued to appear; another volume of his own poetry, The Gate of Bronze, appeared early in 1919; and the same year saw the publication of the first three issues of Coterie, a self-consciously modernist literary magazine, published in London but with Earp and other Oxford figures on its editorial board, which during its short life (the seventh and last issue appeared in late 1920) managed to attract contributions from an impressive array of writers including Eliot, Huxley, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Herbert Read, and Edmund Blunden. Nor was Coterie his first publishing venture: in 1916 he and Huxley had launched – using some of Earp’s own money – the Palatine Review, which lasted about as long as Coterie. His contemporary Eric Whelpton recalls him around this time as ‘the uncrowned king of the undergraduates […] his rooms in Beaumont Street had become the port of call of many writers, poets and painters passing through Oxford.’
He had also assigned himself another role, and one that would have some significance for Tolkien. Robert Graves – who had come to know Earp at Garsington, and pigeonholed him and his fellow writers as ‘exceptionally nice people but a trifle decayed, as you might say’ – recalled in his memoir Good-bye to All That that he ‘had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years – as president and sole member, he said, of some seventeen undergraduate social and literary societies. In 1919, still in residence, he handed over the minute-books to the returning university. Most of the societies were then re-formed.’ One of the ‘re-formed’ societies was Exeter College’s Essay Club, where Tolkien would soon give a reading of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, the first time any substantial vision of Middle-earth was given a public audience.
T.W. Earp photographed (with another Garsington guest) by Lady Ottoline Morrell. ‘A lock of long, soft, fair hair drooped over his forehead, seeming to come halfway down his thin pale face. From under the lock two dark eyes looked out, the liveliest, most alert, most humorous eyes I had seen,’ L.G. Strong recalled. (Picture: National Portrait Gallery)
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1919 was quite a momentous year for Earp. As mentioned above, it was early in this year that he made the acquaintance of one of the ‘poets passing through’, the 17-year-old Roy Campbell. Earp seems to have been greatly taken by this young (and very beautiful) young man, to the extent that in the summer (or possibly in 1920) he took him on an extended trip to Paris; they are supposed by some to have had an affair, although nothing lasting came of it (indeed both men later married, in 1922). In rather surprising contrast, 1919 also saw Earp elected president of the Oxford Union: by no means an obvious move for a poet with strongly aesthetic leanings, but his term of office (Michaelmas term) seems to have been a successful one. He was praised for ‘his ready wit and courteous manner, with that poetic touch of diffidence peculiarly his own’.
But politics – an obvious future for presidents of the Union – was not where Earp’s heart lay: it was in the world of letters that he wished to shine, and indeed where he had already begun to do so. He had already established good connections to literary London; and when at last he ‘went down’ from Oxford – shortly after stepping down as president of the Union – he moved seamlessly from the role of a student ‘decadent’ to a darling of London café society. It no doubt helped that he was wealthy: he had recently inherited £40,000, and used some of the money to acquire a flat in Regent Square, where various of his friends lodged with him from time to time, including Huxley, Roy Campbell, and Russell Green, another Oxford littérateur (who had edited some issues of Coterie).
In fact London café society would prove to be an inadequate milieu for Earp to spread his wings: he would also disport himself in Paris. His visit with Roy Campbell had evidently given him a taste for the City of Light, where for some years he kept a permanent room at the Hotel Foyot (handy if you can afford it, as he evidently could). An unidentified Exeter College contemporary, writing a dispatch from Paris for the New York Herald in 1924, described Earp as having been ‘hovering between London and Paris for I don’t know how many years’. Extraordinary stories began to accumulate about his escapades in both capitals: a mock duel with wooden swords in the Jardin de Luxembourg, ending with pink champagne at the Café de Flore; being given a cellarful of Chinese wine by his London drinking companion, the composer Constant Lambert (at whose wedding he was a witness); passing out under a tarpaulin in a Covent Garden barrow after a heavy night and waking up the next morning to find that he had been wheeled to a distant part of London.
The Hotel Foyot in Paris, where the young Earp kept a room for several years (Credit: Musée Carnavalet)
Earp evidently knew how to have a good time; but work mattered to him as well as play. He still cherished aspirations as a writer, and continued to write poetry, although there were to be no anthologies after The Gate of Bronze, and in fact he seems to have found it increasingly difficult to bring his own writing projects to fruition (a problem with which Tolkien could of course have sympathized).
He continued to develop close relationships with other writers, notably Dylan Thomas, who could regularly be seen drinking with him in the pubs of London’s Fitzrovia; Thomas even addressed a poem to him, beginning
When next shall we stumble to the stutter of our lewis-gun carols From bombazine-bosomed bar to a bliss of barrels, Two period percies frescoed with ladders and banting, Two spoonered swiss pillars [i.e. piss swillers], tumble falsetting and ranting?
(His criticism of another poet, D.H. Lawrence, led to the latter writing a rather less complimentary poem about him: ‘I heard a little chicken chirp: | My name is Thomas, Thomas Earp, | And I can neither paint nor write, | I can only put other people right.’)
But it was as an art critic that Earp truly found his métier. He wrote the catalogue to Giorgio de Chirico’s first British exhibition in 1928; he became a sensitive critic and champion of the work of Augustus John (and also a close friend: John painted his portrait on several occasions). He wrote art criticism for the New Statesman for a decade, and for the Daily Telegraph for a little over twice as long. He became best known as an expert on French painting – publishing an important monograph on Van Gogh in 1934 – and also on French literature. (A biography of Stendhal was one of his great unfinished projects, although he did manage to publish a translation of Stendhal’s own autobiographical Souvenirs d’Égotisme and of one of his novels.)
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Thomas Earp with Osbert Sitwell (‘the author’) and others in Oxford, 1919 (Picture: Gabriel Atkin. Reproduced from Sitwell’s Noble Essences or Courteous Revelations, 1950)
It has to be said that Earp’s output and reputation as a writer falls far short of what had been predicted for him by his Oxford contemporary E.R. Dodds. But I wonder whether he deserves to be remembered rather more for his capacity for friendship.
It is not just that he seems to have ‘known everyone’, although the list of his friends and acquaintances is really quite staggering (Max Beerbohm, Aleister Crowley, Salvador Dalí, Serge Diaghilev, Havelock Ellis, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Alberto Giacometti, Oscar Hammerstein, James Joyce, Henry Moore, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Man Ray, and Bertrand Russell, to name but a few, in addition to those already mentioned). It is striking how, when looking through the reminiscences of so many of these luminaries, one finds ‘Tommy’ (as almost everyone called him) recalled, not merely as someone they knew, but someone they were extremely fond of.
Dylan Thomas, for example, ‘spoke of him [according to the artist and critic Michael Ayrton] with an affectionate awe, as if it were miraculous that this gentle and improbable individual should exist at all’. In fact the qualities of gentleness and diffidence, even shyness, recur in these recollections, all the way back to his undergraduate days; it strikes me as unusual for someone so mild and unassuming – he gave his recreation in Who’s Who as ‘silence’ – to have such a presence in the memories, and indeed the hearts, of so many.
There is a lot more that could be said about Tommy Earp. But I hope that I have been able to sketch the outlines of a personality and a life that are of at least some interest. I would certainly like to know more about the relationship between ‘that quaint man Earp’ and the Exeter College contemporary who referred to him as such; perhaps the more detailed picture of their shared context will shed some light on what that relationship was likely to be, but my second question about Thomas Wade Earp remains only partially answered. For a fuller answer, further research, in the Exeter College archives and elsewhere, is needed. I look forward to the discoveries that that research will bring.
Peter Gilliver
You can read more about the young J.R.R. Tolkien and his student friends in John Garth’s Tolkien at Exeter College: How an Oxford Undergraduate Created Middle-earth is now available in a new improved edition with revised and updated texton silk-finish paper andwith colour cover.
It’s not often you stumble upon a piece of writing by a key member of Tolkien’s school circle, the T.C.B.S. Today I am pleased as Punch to be able to present such a piece by G.B. Smith, to mark his 127th birthday.
G.B. Smith in his army days – with added colour
Our memory of Smith is burdened with poignancy. He survived the entire five-month Battle of the Somme only to be hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell days after it the battle had finished and miles from the trenches. The wound was so light that he walked to the casualty clearing station. Three days later he was dead from an infection, gas gangrene.
His would seem just another of the innumerable futile deaths in that futile war but for the fact that it gave retrospective force to a letter he had sent Tolkien months earlier, telling him: ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.’ He was thinking of Tolkien’s invented mythology, of which Smith declared himself ‘a wild and wholehearted admirer’ – the first Middle-earth fan.
Smith certainly had a capacity for deep seriousness – seen all through A Spring Harvest, the volume of verse that Tolkien co-edited for publication in 1918.
But he was also a gifted humorist, parodist and joker – as the only identifiable photograph of him demonstrates. It shows him as the Ass in the 1913 school production of Aristophanes’ The Frogs (and a mildly embarrassing tale hangs thereto, which I will save for another blog post).
G.B. Smith as the Ass in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, 1913
These lighter, brighter aspects of Smith meant much to his friends. It feels good and right to remember them. So it pleases me immensely to share this anonymous skit, published around the time of his 18th birthday in October 1912.
It is very funny, and that’s all I have to say on the matter. Well, nearly all.
I spotted the article when browsing the Chronicle, the newspaper produced by schoolboys at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. In fact I certainly saw it when reading through issues of the Chronicle for my research for Tolkien and the Great War about 20 years ago. But the piece is anonymous, and I did not linger long enough to see the evidence that it is by Smith.
There are two bits of evidence, one objective, the other subjective.
First, the piece, titled ‘Träumerei’ (‘Dream’, ‘Daydream‘ or ‘Reverie’), expresses the anxieties of the Secretary of the school’s Debating Society. It is in the October 1912 Chronicle, and the editorial that opens this issue tells us (p.62): ‘The Library and the Debating Society are this year in the hands of Barrowclough, the Debating Society in those of Smith. Both these societies have exceptionally brilliant programmes for this session, but the attendances at their meetings have, so far, been scarcely satisfactory, though we hope to see an improvement in this respect as time goes on.’ (Sidney Barrowclough was another T.C.B.S. member at this time, and so was the writer of the editorial, Ralph Stuart Payton.)
Second, the subjective evidence. In ‘Träumerei’ Smith imagines meeting several great figures of the past and seeking their advice. The first speaks the kind of language the young Tolkien also delighted in: an English stripped of Norman French influences. The last is George Bernard Shaw, leading debater of the era; as I note in Tolkien and the Great War (p.7), it tickled Smith that they shared the same initials. And another of the figures is Samuel Johnson, whose birthplace Smith visited with fellow TCBSite Robert Quilter Gilson on the last weekend the core four members ever met (September 1915). Here Smith displays his knack for 18th-century literary stylings. After another trip with Smith, to Bath, Gilson recalled that the pair had conversed mostly ‘in Johnsonian and Gibbonian periods. G.B. Smith composes excellent Gibbon.’ And excellent Johnson too, it seems.
So without further ado except to thank the Governors of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham for permission to reproduce this piece, here is ‘Träumerei’ by G.B. Smith.
[This was published in Oxford Today, the university’s alumni magazine, ahead of the 2012 London Olympics. The most dated things about it are the reference to a certain Mayor of London by the name of Boris, and Oxford Today itself, which has since been replaced by Quad magazine.]
Mexico, 1968. The world watches as athletes of 108 nations file in. Past or future Oxford students step forward for Britain, including David Hemery (St Catherine’s) who will win gold in the men’s 400m hurdles; and also for Sierra Leone, New Zealand, the United States, and Norway (King Harald no less, Balliol). The flame from the Olympian grove is plunged into the cauldron high on the ramparts and, on cue, 10,000 pigeons are released. These are dizzying heights for all present.
Literally so for the pigeons. It is 2240m above sea-level and, as Jock Mullard of Keble remembers, ‘Many had difficulty flying and returned rapidly to earth; we spent many happy minutes capturing pigeons.’ Epic and slightly shambolic, the scene recalls both the classicism and the amateurism in which the Olympics were revived in the 19th century. These themes, worth savouring as Britain prepares to host the ever bigger and brasher Olympics, are intertwined in the story of how Oxford and Oxonians have been involved in the modern Games…
John Garth 