J.R.R. Tolkien as Hermes — Aristophanes’ The Peace, King Edward’s School, Birmingham, Speech Day July 1911. Photograph from the Tolkien family papers.
Before he invented Elvish, before the One Ring, before there was even a hobbit in his head, a 19-year-old Tolkien put on a Greek costume and played the messenger god Hermes in a school production of Aristophanes’ The Peace. That’s him front and center with the caduceus staff, looking like he’s about to deliver an urgent telegram from Olympus.
The Peace is the one where a farmer named Trygaeus rides a giant dung beetle up to heaven to rescue the goddess Peace from a pit. Yes. A giant dung beetle. Tolkien was 19 and already practicing for the part where he’d later write about giant eagles and fell beasts — the man had a thing for divine animal transport.
The cast was basically the original Fellowship. Tolkien performed alongside Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith — the four friends who would later become the T.C.B.S. (Tea Club and Barrovian Society), the literary brotherhood that Tolkien credited with keeping him alive and writing in the trenches of WWI. Three of the four survived the war; only Tolkien and Wiseman made it home. Smith and Gilson are on the school’s Roll of Honour.
Also in the cast: Leslie Sands and Alfred Fawdry, both of whom would also die in the war. The photo is a frozen moment of five schoolboys in laurel wreaths who had no idea they were posing for one of the most bittersweet photographs in English literary history.
And the choruses were set to music-hall tunes, because King Edward’s School in 1911 believed — correctly — that Greek comedy performed to vaudeville melodies was the only correct way to do classics.
Tolkien went on to Oxford a few months later, where he’d found his legendary clubs, and the rest is, well, Middle-earth. But somewhere in the chain of causes that produced The Lord of the Rings is a Birmingham schoolboy in a toga holding a staff, playing a god who delivers messages. The messenger of the gods, who would one day write the longest message in the history of fiction.
Fun fact: the caduceus he’s holding is the exact same staff Hermes used to guide souls — and it’s now the universal symbol for medicine. The god of thieves, messengers, and doctors all in one. Tolkien played a deity with one of the most overloaded job descriptions in mythology, and it shows.
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