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for ever
    From the golden feet of Kôr
    Beyond Taniquetil
    In Valinor.
    O West of the Sun, East of the Moon
    Lies the Haven of the Star
    The white tower of the Wanderer,
    And the rock of Eglamar,
    Where Vingelot is harboured
    While Earendel looks afar
    On the magic and the wonder
    â€˜Tween here and Eglamar
    Out, out beyond Taniquetil
    In Valinor – afar.
    â€˜The Shores of Faëry’ is pivotal. Tolkien intended to make it the first part of a ‘Lay of Eärendel’ that would fully integrate the mariner into his embryonic invented world. He noted on a later copy that this was the ‘ first poem of my mythology’. The keystep forward was that here Tolkien finally fused language and mythology in literary art: the fusion that was to become the wellspring and hallmark of his creative life.
    â€˜It was just as the 1914 War burst on me,’ Tolkien wrote later, ‘that I made the discovery that “legends” depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the “legends” which it conveys by tradition.’ The discovery offered a new life for his creation: ‘So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing “legends” of the same “taste”.’
    He had for years been unable to reconcile the scientific rigour he applied in the strictly linguistic aspects of philology with his taste for the otherworldly, the dragon-inhabited, and the sublime that appeared in ancient literatures. It was as an undergraduate, he later said, that ‘ thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests – opposite poles of science and romance – but integrally related.’
    The Kalevala had shown that myth-making could play a part in the revival of a language and a national culture, but it may be that there was a more immediate catalyst. During the Great War, a similar process took place on a vast scale, quite impromptu. For the first time in history, most soldiers were literate, but more than ever before they were kept in the dark. They made up for this with opinion and rumour, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastical: stories about a German corpserendering works, a crucified Canadian soldier, and the troglodytic wild men of No Man’s Land who, the story went, were deserters from both sides. First World War history is often concerned with assessing the truth and impact of the seemingly more plausible ‘myths’ that have arisen from it: the ‘lions led by donkeys’, or the ‘rape of Belgium’. From the outset there were also myths of supernatural intercession. Exhausted British troops in retreat from Mons had apparently seen an angel astride a white horse brandishing a flaming sword; or a troop of heavenly archers; or three angels in the sky. The ‘ Angels of Mons ’had forbidden the German advance, it was said. The incident had originated as a piece of fiction, ‘The Bowmen’ by Arthur Machen, in which the English archers of Agincourt return to fight the advancing Germans of 1914; but it had quickly assumed the authority of fact. At the same time that the war produced myths, the vast outpouring of Great War letters, diaries, and poetry enriched the languages of Europe with new words, phrases, and even registers, subtly altering and defining the perceptions of national character that were so important to the patriotic effort. All this was a living example of the interrelationship between language and myth.
    If the early conception of an undying land owes something to Peter Pan , as the child’s dream-world of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’ seems to have done, Tolkien’s Valinor was less haphazard than Neverland, a version of Faërie that Barrie had filched audaciously