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Tolkien’s Friends
From “Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth” John Garth HMH, Jun 11, 2013 -
As Europe plunged into World War I, J. R. R. Tolkien was a student at Oxford and part of a cohort of literary-minded friends who had wide-ranging conversations in their Tea Club and Barrovian Society. After finishing his degree, Tolkien experienced the horrors of the Great War as a signal officer in the Battle of the Somme, where two of those school friends died. All the while, he was hard at work on an original mythology that would become the basis of his literary masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
In this biographical study, drawn in part from Tolkien’s personal wartime papers, John Garth traces the development of the author’s work during this critical period. He shows how the deaths of two comrades compelled Tolkien to pursue the dream they had shared, and argues that the young man used his imagination not to escape from reality—but to transform the cataclysm of his generation. While Tolkien’s contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.
From “The True Story Behind ‘Tolkien’ Is Just As Interesting As ‘Lord Of The Rings’”
While studying at King Edward’s School in 1911, Tolkien met Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman. The young men formed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (“T.C.B.S.” for short) because the young men enjoyed drinking tea in, among other places, the school library in secret. Tolkien stayed in touch with Gilson, Bache Smith, and Wiseman throughout the years. But this friendship group and secret society was a predecessor to the most formative of literary groups in Tolkien’s life, The Inklings. Existing at Oxford during the 1930s and ‘40s, the informal literary group counted Tolkien and his friend, author C.S. Lewis, as members. Additional members including scholars, poets, critics, and authors like Owen Barfield; Adam Fox, the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford; New Zealand scholar J.A.W. Bennett; Lewis’ older brother Warren Lewis; and Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien. Readings of members’ works-in-progress (Tolkien shared his earliest LotR drafts with the Inklings) and discussions were held in Lewis’ rooms at Magdalen.
From “9 Things You Should Know About J. R. R. Tolkien”
2. After graduating from Oxford University in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army to fight in World War I. In his first year of service he took part in the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in human history, where more than 1 million men were killed or wounded, including many of Tolkien’s friends. “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead,” he would later write. As biographer Bradley J. Birzer says, “Though he spent less than a year in the war, if affected him deeply. Tolkien had lost several of his closest friends, and their loss, he believed, gave him an even greater duty to carry on their jointly conceived project, which was to do God’s will in the world.”
From http://www.tolkiengateway.net/wiki/T.C.B.S.
T.C.B.S. is an acronym for Tea Club, Barrovian Society. J.R.R. Tolkien and his friends at King Edward's School in Birmingham met regularly at the Barrow Stores, which is where T.C.B.S. got their name. The core members were considered to be the "big four" of Tolkien, Geoffrey Bache Smith, Christopher Wiseman, and Robert Gilson.[1] The friends continued to stay in contact with each other's literary work until 1916. Sidney Barrowclough and the Payton brothers, Ralph and Wilfrid, were younger than Tolkien and continued it for some time after they left. Almost all of them died in World War I. Of Tolkien's close personal friends, only Christopher Wiseman survived the war,[2] a fact which greatly affected him [3].
Members
- Christopher Luke Wiseman
- Lieutenant Geoffrey Bache Smith
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Lieutenant Robert Quilter Gilson
- Ralph "the Baby" Payton
- Sidney Barrowclough
- Captain Thomas "Tea Cake" Kenneth Barnsley, Coldstream Guards
- Vincent Trought
- Wilfrid "Whiffy" Payton
References
- J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien (eds.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 5, (dated 12 August 1916)
- J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien (eds.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 350, (dated 24 May 1973)
- John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, passim
- “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch” By David Doughan MBE
- “J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: A Literary Friendship and Rivalry” OCTOBER 1, 2006
- “The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams”
- “A Well of Wonder: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and The Inklings” (Mount Tabor Books)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/90xh9i/ralph_payton_1...