Winter is Coming

My grandfather rarely spoke about the War. I believe it was because what he’d seen and lived through was so awful words could not describe it, nor hearts sustain it. 

Wars are often thought of as inevitable. A permanent affliction of humanity like the seasons. That famous soldier and President U.S Grant urged preparation for war as he felt;

“War never changes. War is like winter and winter is coming.”

Ulysses S Grant

But other voices speak of war as crime;

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

Ernest Hemingway, 1946

At times the sheer amount of death that war entails makes a mockery of either side being a winner.  Henri Barbusse described such an encounter;

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”

We commemorate the dead and the heroes that return but somehow the wounded, the injured and the vile process of dying and its horror is rarely captured adequately, but Captain Edwin Vaughan came close when he wrote;

“The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.”  

War is about killing and any method that achieves that end, whatever the cost is too often deemed okay.

“I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”

 Nurse Vera Brittain, 1933

Conflict can occur when two argue and disagree but when language fails its purpose then we have war as Margaret Atwood so succinctly put it;

“War is what happens when language fails.”

We have had two World wars and they are a part of our history taught in schools.  But it is impossible to educate any of us about future wars, their nature and their outcome. The horror is too great, the loss of life too terrible to convey to young minds but one of the greatest minds considered it deeply and made this heart stopping prediction;

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Albert Einstein

Of course, people fight wars for reasons and Tolkien gave a powerful reasons;

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

However even war that begins with reasoned justification  and thoughtful serious reflection and reluctance  can conclude in the mindless celebration of mass murder; 

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

Voltaire

“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”

Albert Dietrich, Army Gi, Pacifist Co: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich

I like the way Dietrich makes this clear distinction between being prepared to die but not to kill.  These letters written between these identical twins one a soldier and the other a pacifist have been compiled into a wonderful book about war and life.

The specific reasons for a war of course will have very little effect on the suffering of those who die as a consequence as Mahatma Gandhi pointed out;

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

Margaret Atwood suggested in her earlier quote that war is a failure of language whereas John Steinbeck felt it was a more fundamental failing than that;

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”

John Steinbeck

And our choice to go to war has consequences not just on those who fight or are killed, because that very choice shapes the life we all lead in endless ways.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Perhaps the most horrific thing about war is that it recalibrates all that we normally value as humans.

“Consider human ignorance and inconsistency. A man who kills another man is punished by execution, but a military genius who kills one hundred thousand of his fellow creatures is immortalized as a hero. One man steals a small sum of money and is imprisoned as a thief. Another pillages a whole country and is honoured as a patriot and conqueror. A single falsehood brings reproach and censure, but the wiles of politicians and diplomats excite the admiration and praise of a nation. Consider the ignorance and inconsistency of mankind. How darkened and savage are the instincts of humanity!”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 287

I am not sure why thoughts of war have come to me at this time of a pandemic sweeping the world.  But doesn’t war seem particularly pointless when humanity is trying to marshal its defences against a virus that is 0.000125 mm across and not even a living thing?  Fundamentally does this not remind us that we are one family and if we cannot work together for the best of humanity then we are less than the most inferior of us all.

Tolkien - life, myths, books, legends

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 to 1973) was a professor and English writer best known for his fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. He taught at Oxford university.  

He was actually born in South Africa and when a very small child was bitten by a very large Baboon spider in his garden. (Perhaps giving him the idea of that seen with Frodo and the spider!)

Baboon spider

At the age of three, he was on a visit to the UK with his mother when his father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever. This loss left the family without an income and so they moved to Birmingham in the UK where they would be close to his mother's parents. He had an aunt Jane who owned a farm called Bag End. (Could this be the inspiration for Bilbo's home?)

Bag End

The more one reads of his childhood and life the more it becomes clear how much he used all his experiences, including the spider, in his literary works.

His mother, Maple Tolkien, home tutored her 2 children and found that the young Tolkien showed a propensity for languages, such as Latin, at a very early age.  Unfortunately, Mabel died of diabetes when Tolkien was only 12. It would be another two decades before insulin, a treatment for diabetes, would be discovered. In Edgbaston, Tolkien lived close to Perrot’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks.  

Perrot's Folly

Towers must have had a big impression as they two seemed to crop up in his tales in slightly different forms.

Tolkien was also very interested in the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones. 

In his early teens, Tolkien invented, with his cousin, a complex language called Nevbash. The second constructed language he created was completely his own, Naffarin.  As well as making up new languages he took time to learn Esperanto. After university, he went with a party of 12 friends to Switzerland and hiked from Interlaken to Murren. 

He spoke of this grand adventure with much joy and the scenery would have been startlingly similar to that which would be experienced by Bilbo passing through the Misty mountains.  

Tolkien was in the British Army during World War I and served as a second lieutenant responsible for commanding enlisted men from the industrial heartland of Lancaster. As he later lamented,

"The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in 1 million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity”.

He was at the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and came down with trench fever from the ever-present lice in the trenches. Token’s battalion was almost completely wiped out in the brutal battles while he recovered in a hospital in England.  (Lice caused 15% of all sicknesses in the British army at that time). Many of his closest school friends died on those bloody muddy fields. In fact, he said by 1918 all but one of his closest friends were dead.

Token translated Beowulf in the 1920s and gave an acclaimed lecture entitled ‘Beowulf: The monsters and the critics’.  Tolkien insisted that this poem was not just

‘a mine of historical data into which some fantastical monsters have inconveniently strayed but a work of art in which the monsters are foils for an entire cultural attitude to life, death and courage’.

The ancient story begins and ends with a funeral and is an epic old English poem of 3182 lines. It is probably the oldest surviving poem in old English and one of its most important. A manuscript found of Beowulf has been dated between 975 to 1025 A.D. and is found in the Nowell Codex in the British library.  The oral tradition that this manuscript recorded dated from much earlier, and it is believed to have been composed between 700 and 750 A.D.  The poem mixes fiction with 5th- and 6th-century history.  The tale of monsters and battles has an epic timeless quality and would have been recited in huge halls for centuries.  Beowulf mentions characters like Ohthere (530 Ad) and his son (575 AD) and their graves have subsequently been discovered in Upplands, Sweden.

The mount at Lejre on the left has been excavated showing epic finds but the other mound on the right has not yet been examined. Who knows what more finds lie beneath?

In Denmark excavations at Lejre have revealed that a hall was built there in the mid-six century, exactly the time period of Beowulf (Beowulf mentions kings of the Skjöldung dynasty) and where Scandinavian tradition said it was. It is now thought that much of Beowulf is from real historical characters from six century Scandinavia. John Niles, a former university professor and an expert on the Lejre site, said that researchers in the area have found now evidence of a series of great halls dating between 550 and 1000 A.D.

Beowulf is written in a language that sounds very much like Tolkien’s Elvish tongue.  Tolkien would enter his lecture room, at Pembroke College in Oxford reciting Beowulf loudly in its original tongue with dramatic power and effectiveness. W H Auden once wrote to tell him “what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.”

Pembroke Hall, Oxford

Tolkien spoke many languages including Latin, French, German, Middle English, old English, Finish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh and mediaeval Welsh.  No wonder when it came to making up new cultures and languages and traditions he found himself peculiarly equipped for this fictional landscape.  

Years later during the Third Reich, a German publisher wrote demanding to know if Tolkien was of Aryan extraction, in other words, non-Jewish in order to permit publication of his book in Germany.   Tolkien wrote a cold response correcting their misunderstanding of what Aryan actually meant.  Who better to clarify their erroneous perspectives than this gifted and creative professor.

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” 

For a long period, after writing some of his earlier books, he got tired of writing about Hobbits.  He felt had covered everything in The Silmarillion in enough detail, which had not met with public acclaim.  His publisher pushed for something more like the Hobbit again but Tolkien had lost interest in the topic.  Then decades later his son was sent to the front lines in the second world war and Tolkien began sending instalments to him, set in Middle Earth.  Tales of courage, heroism and danger, fear and suffering with long hard journeys that ended up in his famous book, The Lord of The Rings.  I like that Tolkien became more not less forgiving of others in his old age as this quote of his indicates.

“For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realise that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

In creating new races, legends, languages and history he never forgot to embed messages in his stories that are epic, timeless and touch the spirit.

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

"Song of Aragorn" from The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

A Tale of Daniel aged 8 on Rhodes

Life from a Greek Island

My youngest son, Daniel and his struggles with the Greek Language on Rhodes.

Daniel’s teacher has been off sick and the replacement is a young student teacher.  She doesn’t know that Daniel is Irish and has a very limited knowledge of Greek.  For some reason he’s anxious she does not discover this.  He finds it makes life so much more interesting to bluff his way.  Apparently, she asked him to write some sentence about how a rabbit moves. I.e. a rabbit hops.  Daniel didn’t know the Greek word for hop so he wrote instead that “He liked rabbits”.  He doesn’t mind her thinking he’s a stupid Greek, he just doesn’t want her to guess he’s not Greek like all the rest.  It’s become a kind of game for him and he’s really enjoying it! 

He says there is a Greek boy in his class called Paris who knows only one expression in English, “R U urt?”.  He cannot say anything else in English.  Whenever Daniel falls, or is pushed into something or someone in the playground, Paris will run the full length of the playground to get his line into use.  Daniel says he has begun to associate pain with Paris’ face looming over him pronouncing  with evident delight, “R U urt?”.

Daniel is definitely a bit of a character!  At School assembly my eldest son crosses himself with the rest of the children.  We told him he didn’t have to but he says he should respect to their religion.  Which I understand.  My middle son does not cross himself but stands in line and tries to be the best he can.  Finding the middle way. Daniel does not stand in line and does not cross himself.  Even worse, when the entire 150 children and dozen teachers all turn to face the Greek flag and sing their national anthem slapping their chests in loyalty, Daniel turns his back on the flag and faces the other way!  What have we reared?