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The Wars of the Glorfindels - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

One cannot say enough in a few brief sentences what Tolkien's early friends meant to him: he, Smith, Gilson, and Christopher Wiseman had formed the core of a small clique they called the Tea Club, Barovian Society (T.C.B.S.) when attending school. These four were particularly close, and all of them served in war in some capacity. Tolkien and Wiseman lived through the experience. When he replied to Smith's letter about Gilson's death, Tolkien wrote "I do not feel a member of a complete body now. I honestly feel that the T.C.B.S has ended." Smith wouldn't allow that to happen, however. "The T.C.B.S. is not finished and never will be," he said. By the end of that year Smith himself would be dead. On December 16, 1916, Christopher Wiseman wrote to his friend Ronald Tolkien, "I have just received news from home about G.B.S., who succumbed to injuries received from shells bursting on December 3rd. I can't say much about it now. I humbly pray Almighty God I may be accounted worthy of him." Smith's spirit must have been infectious to Tolkien, as was Gilson's. Gilson's father had been the headmaster of King Edward's School in Birmingham, and it was the elder Gilson who had encouraged Tolkien to pursue the study of classical linguistics. It was with the T.C.B.S. that Tolkien became entranced with "Beowulf", "The Pearl", "Sir Gawain", and "Volsungsaga". Carpenter says that Smith, a late member of the T.C.B.S., was so knowledgeable and influential with the others that they "began to wake up to the significance of poetry -- as indeed Tolkien was already doing." One of the last letters Smith had written to Tolkien contained the following:

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, dissolve 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.

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