Quote:
Hmmmm-- no horse for combat; but with all that stuff to lug around (carrier pigeons, telephones, rolls of wiring?) perhaps he had regular access to a pack horse.
|
I think you'll find that the telephones and telegraph had been installed by sappers before the Lancashires went into the line and were a permanent fixture of the trench network. Carrier pigeons were an emergency measure: the battalion wouldn't have carried many, and may not have carried any at all. Equipment of that nature would in any case have been carried along with the general battalion stores, and it's unlikely that one subaltern would have had access to a personal horse. As I said, infantry tended to use pack horses and wagons for transporting heavy goods, not for riding, and pack-horses don't usually make good mounts. There's as much wish-fulfillment in dreaming of riding a horse when stuck in the most immobile war of recent times as there would be in dreaming one were waking up at home.
Davem: in terms of the psychological conclusions it's a third-hand account: J.R.R. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien to Rev. Waddington-Feather, with no indication of the passage of time between transmissions. What I've said about waking impressions was intended to point out how the subconscious mind might draw symbols from the milieu of the Western Front, later replaying them in sleep as the dream described by your source. I wouldn't suggest that Tolkien would have done anything so pointless as to make up a dream, but the memory can play tricks, and we don't know how long after the experience he told it to his son, and thus how far back Michael Tolkien was remembering. I don't think that anyone is actually inventing anything, I'm just not so sure how much could have been misremembered. Nonetheless, as you say, a fascinating piece of Tolkieniana. I wonder how often Michael Tolkien discussed dreams with his father, since we now have his descriptions of two of them.