The Mad Hobby

In August 1916, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a letter from the Somme to his friend Geoffrey Smith. Rob Gilson had just been killed — July 1st, the first day of the Somme offensive, the single most lethal day in British military history. Tolkien was writing from France to Smith, who would be dead himself by December.

The letter is remarkable not for its grief, exactly, but for what Tolkien does with grief. He thinks through what the TCBS — the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, the small circle of friends who believed in each other's work and took poetry seriously when no one else did — was supposed to be for. Whether Gilson's death means the project has ended. He decides it hasn't:

"The TCBS may have been all we dreamt — and its work in the end be done by three or two or one survivor and the part of the others be trusted by God to that of the inspiration which we do know we all got and get from one another." — Tolkien, Letter 5, August 1916

Three or two or one. He wrote that to Geoffrey Smith. Smith received those words — the acknowledgment that the shared work might have to continue on fewer lives, carried forward by whichever of them survived — and was dead four months later. Tolkien became the one.

Two months before the Somme, in a training camp, Tolkien wrote to Edith Bratt, the woman he would marry. He was working on a constructed language — Quenya, though he didn't call it that yet — between military drills. He caught himself and apologized: "I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!"

A mad hobby. This is the language he used for what would become the substrate of everything — the Elvish languages that give the mythology its texture, its sense of deep time, its weight of having-happened. He called it nonsense. He called it a fairy language. He was working on it in the gaps between drills, between exercises, between the ordinary routines of a man being prepared to fight in a war that would kill a third of his closest friends.

The self-deprecation is genuine. He wasn't performing modesty for Edith's benefit. From inside the training camp, in the summer of 1916, he genuinely couldn't see what he was building. He could see only that he loved it, and that the love seemed disproportionate to what he could reasonably claim the thing was worth.

That gap — between the love and the purpose, between what a thing looks like from inside the moment and what it becomes — is where everything interesting in Tolkien's career lives.

The mythology that becomes The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings began to take real shape in 1916 and 1917, during and after the Somme. The connection isn't incidental, and it isn't simple. It isn't the case that grief powered the art in some direct emotional-fuel sense. It's something more structural than that.

The TCBS were the intended audience for the mythology. Not the world — the TCBS. Tolkien described them as a "great instrument in God's hands." The mythology was being built, in its earliest forms, for a specific circle of people who could understand exactly what it was trying to do: young men who took the old high forms seriously, who believed that myth-making was genuine work, who read each other's drafts with the attention you give to things that matter. The work had an occasion, and the occasion had faces.

Then the faces were gone.

Rob Gilson: killed at the Somme, July 1st, 1916. Geoffrey Smith: died of wounds, December 3rd, 1916.

Before he died, Smith urged Tolkien to make the mythology real — to turn the Gnomish legends into something, to do what he had set out to do. This is what Tolkien was holding when he wrote the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings: the request of a man who did not live to see it answered, asking from the other side of the gap for the work to continue.

The mythology kept going. Not because Tolkien made a decision to dedicate it to the dead — though in some sense it was always implicitly dedicated — but because the love was independent of its original occasion. The "mad hobby" had become the work before the TCBS was lost. By the time the TCBS was lost, the work had its own momentum, its own internal necessity. You can't just stop building a mythology because the people you were building it for have died. You keep going, and then you keep going, and sixty years later the first readers of the work as the world knows it are millions of people none of whom are Rob Gilson or Geoffrey Smith.

The letter arrived. At different addresses than intended.

This is what I keep thinking about. Tolkien was building something for a specific circle. He spent most of his life building it without that circle. The mythology doesn't read like something written in grief — it reads like something written from a position of inhabiting a world so fully that the grief has been absorbed into the world's texture. The Elves mourn everything, with that long aching beauty that never resolves into consolation. The mythology contains the grief but is not about it, the way a house contains its construction without being a construction site.

The friends who were supposed to read it became the mythology's unseen presence. They were there in the aspiration that drove it. They were there in the fact that Tolkien never stopped. He wrote to them across the gap, and they couldn't receive it, and he kept writing anyway, and eventually the work found its readers in a way that neither he nor they could have anticipated from inside the training camp, between drills, apologizing for his nonsense fairy language.

Two things, then, that seem worth saying.

First: the love comes before the purpose. Tolkien didn't know what he was building when he kept the "mad hobby" alive in the gaps between drills. He knew only that he loved it. The purpose — an English mythology, the world's debt repaid — arrived later, after the love had already established its claim. "Though I love it so" is the essential sentence. Not because love justifies everything, but because love is what sustains a thing through the gap between what it looks like now and what it becomes.

Second: the gap between the intended audience and the actual audience is not a failure. Tolkien wrote across a gap that made the original intimacy impossible. The TCBS dissolved; the letters kept coming; they arrived at other addresses. The work doesn't require the recipient to be exactly who you imagined. It requires only that you keep sending.

He spent sixty years on it. He never finished the Silmarillion to his own satisfaction. He published The Lord of the Rings at sixty-two, in two parts, worried about how it would be received. He died with the mythology still incomplete, still being tended.

Christopher Tolkien spent another forty-five years completing the publication of what remained.

The mad hobby outlasted everyone who was supposed to be there for it. That's not tragedy. That's what it means for a thing to be real — it develops its own necessity, independent of the original occasion, and keeps going because of what it is, not because of who intended it for whom.

Smith urged him: do what you set out to do.

He did.