Don’t Let the Fellowship Die

Since my great awakening to the world of Lord of the Rings just last year, I’ve been taking a deeper dive back into the saga as well as the life of Tolkien himself. I’m currently reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of the late author as I am rereading each of the main books. It’s been a wonder to peak behind the curtain and see what inspired the man and the myths he would weave.

            A certain part struck me today. I was reading through Part II of Carpenter’s work, which entails Tolkien’s part in the Great War. His words describing trench warfare conjured up clear images of the Dead Marshes. Frodo gave eyes to what so many young men – Tolkien included – witnessed in the horrors of a pointless war. Such a vast number were lost to the Dead Marshes of our own Earth. The despair must’ve been palpable.

            In the midst of such suffering, Tolkien held fast to the fellowship he had with the T.C.B.S., the club of his youth in which the four members sought to give life to myths of their own after the fashion of the ancients. Though the members were often apart in the war, they still kept up as regular contact as could be managed, but even these dreamers were not immune from death.

            Rob Gilson was the first of the Four to be killed. To Tolkien, it was like the end of an era, though he was encouraged by G. B. Smith that the T.C.B.S. still lived on. The remaining three men still felt the loss acutely. Can one even recover from the breaking of such a tight-knit Fellowship? And yet there were further fractures to come.

            G. B. Smith would soon succumb to the evils of the battlefield. Yet shortly before his and Rob’s death, he wrote an encouraging note to his friend Tolkien, which made me stop and ponder for a while.

            My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolved the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off to-night. And do you write it also to Christopher. May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not here to say them, if such be my lot.

                                                                                    Yours ever,

                                                                                                G. B. S.

            Even in death, their Fellowship would live on in the words they spoke. Did Smith or any of the other Four ever dream what their imaginations would yield so many decades later? Tolkien indeed lived in his friend’s blessing, as the lives and memories of the Four became intertwined with the ancient Fellowship of Middle-Earth.

            Oh, that we would bring meaning like that back into our lives and relationships again!

~Sourced from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, published 1977