Tolkien and Vaughan Williams Meet on a Train

Tolkien and Vaughan Williams Meet on a Train

Tolkien in the early 1920s

For years I’ve had this idea for a one-act play: the great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams meets medievalist, philologist, and (by the way) best-selling writer J.R.R. Tolkien on a train. That’s pretty much all I’ve got.

What would they talk about? I don’t know: books? Music? The War? They could complain about modernism? Walking in the countryside? Their favorite tweed jackets or waistcoats?

Vaughan Williams in the early 1920s

You see the problem. Not a lot of potential for dramatic tension or explosive action. I don’t know who the audience would be for such a play, though some have been produced with even flimsier premises—My Dinner with Andre, for example. So, why is this notion so pleasing to me?

To answer this question, let me take you into my classroom. I promise: there will be no quiz. Most of you will probably be at least somewhat familiar with Tolkien, but fewer of you will have heard of Vaughan Williams unless you are a classical music enthusiast. When I teach Tolkien I begin by having students listen to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I offer them no context. The past few times I have done this, I have asked them to watch this video, preferably with good headphones:

Many students—even those who say that they don’t like classical music—find the video profoundly moving, though it takes some discussion and searching to locate the sources of that profundity. Though I generally steer them toward this conclusion, they usually agree that it’s as if the music were a manifestation of all of the sorrow and the transcendence that people have felt in that ancient cathedral for hundreds of years.

Vaughan Williams wrote the piece for this particular space, Gloucester Cathedral, where it was first performed at a festival in 1910. (In the video, Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra tried to recreate the conditions of the premier performance in the same venue a century later.) The musicians are divided into three ensembles, each of which occupy a different part of the cathedral: a large string section, a smaller section of nine strings, and a string quartet. This divided ensemble creates an unusual sense of space in the music, which has the striking effect of suggesting temporal space—the echo of music and consciousness from a distant past. Tallis’s original theme dates to 1567, which is before the modern musical system of major and minor keys had replaced the ancient modal scales. The Phrygian mode that Tallis uses for the theme immediately makes it sound “old” to most people, as it does not resolve into the major or minor cadences that our ears have come to expect, but rather, it seems to us to shift between major and minor moods. And yet, Vaughan Williams transforms the theme with modern orchestration and rich harmonies so that it becomes old and new simultaneously: we are firmly in the present, but we are feeling the past. It’s a kind of musical magic trick.

It is a magic trick that is analogous to what Tolkien accomplishes in The Lord of the Rings. Like Vaughan Williams, Tolkien draws upon ancient material—Icelandic sagas, Norse myth, Old English poetry—to create something new, a response to the modern world which contains much of the sorrow and transcendence of medieval art and culture. Like Vaughan Williams, Tolkien creates a poignant sense of loss with regard to past culture while acknowledging the inevitability of change, and it is the layering of the present and the past, a sort of cultural palimpsest, that makes possible the power of the aesthetic effects of his books.

But the two men share more than a sense of nostalgia, which was, after all, endemic among those born in the late nineteenth century. Though Vaughan Williams was twenty years older than Tolkien, they had some important generational experiences in common, and they responded to these experiences in analogous ways. Both men were collectors of past culture: Vaughan Williams collected English folk melodies and incorporated them into his work, while Tolkien did the same with regional English dialects and older iterations of the Germanic languages.

Crucially, they both served in the Great War, Tolkien as a signals officer and Vaughan Williams as an ambulance driver.

Cultural histories often treat the Great War as an historical fissure that marks a transition to modernism in literature, art, and music. And while Tolkien and Vaughan Williams are not usually considered modernists, their war experiences had a profound impact on their art. For Tolkien, his wartime service was an incubator: he spent countless hours between actions working on his invented languages and mythologies. This was not simply an escape, however. Two of his closest friends, both of whom shared his enthusiasm for ancient languages and poetry, died on the battlefield, and he viewed his continued work at least partly as a tribute to their memories. His later work is filled with moments that resonate with his war experiences—the submerged spirits of ancient battle casualties in the Dead Marshes in The Two Towers being an oft-cited example.

Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, stopped composing during his service and for some time afterwards. The war affected his health and damaged his hearing, and, like Tolkien, he lost friends and fellow artists—most notably the promising young composer George Butterworth. He did not produce a major work after the war until 1922, a remarkable drought for such a prolific artist. This work was the Pastoral Symphony. While the title inevitably recalls Beethoven’s symphony of the same name, it is very different in tone from its famous predecessor. Whereas Beethoven’s symphony views the country as a delightful escape from the city, full of babbling brooks and dancing peasants, Vaughan Williams’s countryside is haunted by loss. The symphony makes me think of Tolkien’s Frodo in The Return of the King, whose homecoming is marked by an unshakable melancholy, as his body is marked by a wound that never fully heals. At one point in the second movement of the symphony, a lone trumpet sounds like a bugle at a military funeral, and in opening of the final movement, the wordless voice of a solo soprano hovers in the air over a quiet timpani accompaniment—a lament for the dead.

It is my hypothesis that despite the significant differences of their war experiences, both Tolkien and Vaughan Williams emerged from the war as transformed artists. From this point, their antiquarianism, their obsession with ancient forms and folk memory, would be irreversibly fused with both the threat and the promise of modernity—of mechanization, of death on an industrial scale, of the gradual diminishing of English landscapes and older cultural forms that they both treasured.

Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony marks a prime example of this fusion. It is as relentlessly violent and terrifying as any symphony in the repertoire, a sonic nightmare of mechanized destruction. Coming to the Fourth after listening to the first three symphonies (the third of which is the Pastoral) is a shock: there is nothing in the earlier music that will prepare the listener for this violence.

The analogous response to this in Tolkien’s work has been well documented, most viscerally in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, which, for all of their flaws, brilliantly realize the nightmare of mechanization and industrial warfare, as well as the ecological violence that they visit upon the earth.

Surprisingly, however, despite these nightmarish visions of the violence of modernity, it would be a mistake to characterize the whole of their respective works as pessimistic. Rather than simply transforming their world from light to darkness, the experience of the war seems to have tempered naive nostalgia into a clear-eyed but hopeful realism. Of course, realism may seem the most inappropriate category for these two artists, especially for Tolkien, who was, after all, the unwitting inventor of modern fantasy. I mean realism here not in the traditional, literary sense, but rather as an understanding of the inevitability of change and of the dwindling of the past. (Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings laments that the elves are fighting the “long defeat,” as they are destined eventually to leave Middle Earth.) But instead of responding to these realizations with despair, both artists employ what they value from past culture to forge new artistic forms.

For example, the trajectory of Vaughan Williams as a symphonist from the Fifth through the Ninth symphonies is astonishing and is perhaps the most quietly experimental musical cycle of the twentieth century, despite his reputation as a conservative composer. While he never abandoned tonality, and he would return to the flavorings of folk modality, each subsequent symphony radically recast the potential of creating new, powerful musical statements, of forging new forms out of old material. And, of course, Tolkien created something entirely new. The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion cannot really be called novels in the modern sense of the word, but neither are they simply imitations of medieval heroic literature. They are entirely new; they look both backwards and forwards.

So, if Tolkien and Vaughan Williams had met on a train, they would have had a lot to talk about. Maybe I’ll finally write that one-act play after all.