Tolkien and the Great War Read Online Free PDF Page A

famous subtitle of The Hobbit ) he could not go there and be sure of coming back again.
    The rush of creativity was not over, but finally Tolkien adopted a quite different register for ‘Kôr’, a sonnet of sublimity and grandeur. Kôr was the name of a city in Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the tale of Ayesha, a woman blessed and cursed with apparently eternal youth. Haggard had been a favourite in the King Edward’s library; during the mock school strike of 1911 the sub-librarians called for a ban on ‘ Henty, Haggard , School Tales, etc…that can be read out in one breath’. (The following yearTolkien had presented the school library with another Haggardesque ‘lost race’ yarn, The Lost Explorers by Alexander Macdonald. ) Tolkien’s 30 April poem was subtitled ‘ In a City Lost and Dead ’, and indeed Haggard’s Kôr is also deserted, the enduring memorial to a great civilization that flourished six thousand years before modern adventurers stumble upon it, but now is utterly lost to memory:
I know not how I am to describe what we saw, magnificent as it was even in its ruin, almost beyond the power of realisation. Court upon dim court, row upon row of mighty pillars – some of them (especially at the gateways) sculptured from pedestal to capital – space upon space of empty chambers that spoke more eloquently to the imagination than any crowded streets. And over all, the dead silence of the dead, the sense of utter loneliness, and the brooding spirit of the Past! How beautiful it was, and yet how drear! We did not dare to speak aloud.
    Both men’s versions of Kôr are inhabited only by shadows and stone; but whereas Haggard’s is seen, with overt symbolism, under the changeful Moon, Tolkien’s city basks under the steadily blazing Sun.
A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned
    Stands gazing out across an azure sea
    Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground
    Impearled as ‘gainst a floor of porphyry
    Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;
    And tawny shadows fingered long are made
    In fretted bars upon their ivory walls
    By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade
    Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault
    With shaft and capital of black basalt.
    There slow forgotten days for ever reap
    The silent shadows counting out rich hours;
    And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers
    White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.
    The shift is significant. Haggard’s narrator sees the city as a symbol of transience, a memento mori , a mockery of its builders’ hubristic ambition: Tolkien holds the grandeur and the emptiness of his Kôr in a fine balance. Even empty, his city stands as an enduring tribute to its unnamed inhabitants – a mood that anticipates Moria in The Lord of the Rings. Life, though now absent from Kôr, retains its significance. Nihilism is replaced by a consolatory vision.
    Tolkien’s Kôr differs from Haggard’s in other, more tangible ways. It is embattled and built atop a vast black hill, and it stands by the sea, recalling a painting he had made earlier in 1915: the mysteriously named Tanaqui. It is clear that Tolkien already had his own vision of a city quite distinct from Haggard’s; but his use of the name ‘Kôr’ now, instead of ‘Tanaqui’, may be seen as a direct challenge to Haggard’s despairing view of mortality, memory, and meaning.
    The city of Kôr appears in the Qenya lexicon too, again situated on a shoreland height. Here, though, a more important feature cuts it well and truly adrift from Haggard. Tolkien’s Kôr is located not in Africa but in Faërie: it is ‘the ancient town built above the rocks of Eldamar, whence the fairies marched into the world’. Other early entries give the words inwë for ‘fairy’ and elda for ‘beach-fay or Solosimpë (shore-piper)’. Eldamar , Tolkien wrote, is ‘the rocky beach