Dear Rev. Waddington-Feather,


Pardon me if I have mistaken your identity, but I am writing to follow up this comment I believe you put on the BBC News website this summer. If I have reached the wrong Rev. Waddington-Feather, I apologize.

The story is quite remarkable, and has stirred up interest among numerous fans of J. R. R. Tolkien's work, of whom I am one. What I am curious to know, is whether you believe it is an actual account of an adventure of his, or whether what Mr. Michael Tolkien relayed to you was literally a "nightmare" that his father suffered, possibly repeatedly, in his sleep during that war.

The question has come up mostly through my own ignorance, I suppose. But my general understanding of the Somme battlefield conditions in the summer and fall of 1916 is that British officers did not ride their horses anywhere near the front line, where they would have made prominent targets above the trenchlines. Nor was it very easy to wander across No-Man's-Land, through triple-wire on a continuous front, much less ride back leaping trenches on the way. Nor were German cavalry lancers stationed on the front lines any more than the British were: cavalry were held in the rear, in reserve, waiting, as the saying goes, for the "breakout that never came."

Not that Tolkien could not have suffered such a nightmare! Strange states of mind are a commonplace in war, and if in fact he rode a mount as a signals officer, he may well have felt just as vulnerable and disoriented when riding at night in the rear areas as the dream episode conveys.

And amorphous fears reappear easily in our heads, transformed into new shapes. As you probably know, Tolkien (and his son!) had a life-long recurring dream involving an entire landscape being overcome by a vast dark wave. He employed this image to great effect in his myth of the downfall of Numenor, and it recurs in Faramir's mind in The Lord of the Rings. Yet Tolkien admitted he never actually experienced such an event (unless it was a childhood lost memory of a seashore visit). The mythological power he gave it in his writing is almost independent of the actual origins, of course.

Finally, I would ask you if you remember how much of your account comes from the actual language of J. R. R. T. as relayed to you via Mr. M. Tolkien; and how much is your own retelling of what you remember hearing or learning? The language is so specific, and also so colorful, that it seems possible that your memory of the communication has become the basis of a kind of "tale" rather than being a verbatim transcript of what Prof. Tolkien told his son so many decades ago.

Thanking you in advance for any consideration you may be able to give me, I am