The Great War and Middle-earth

[1] J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English Roman Catholic writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

[8] The scholar of literature David Kosalka similarly writes that Tolkien created his mythology, as the poets and novelists Friedrich Gundolf and Robert Graves did to a lesser extent, to find meaning for his Great War experiences.

He gives as examples William Golding with his 1954 Lord of the Flies and his 1955 The Inheritors; T. H. White with his 1958 The Once and Future King; George Orwell, in his 1945 novella Animal Farm; and Kurt Vonnegut, in his 1966 Slaughterhouse-Five.

[12] He describes how Tolkien went against the tide of modernism followed by the war poets, preferring romances and epic adventures from writers like William Morris and Rider Haggard, and medieval poetry such as Beowulf.

Garth writes that Tolkien chose to use a "high diction", something that he knew could be abused, and created an "even-handed depiction of war as both terrible and stirring".

[14] In Garth's view, The war imposed urgency and gravity, took [Tolkien] through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form.

The same may be said for his thoughts on death and immortality, dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe, enchantment and irony, the significance of fairy-story, the importance of ordinary people in events of historic magnitude, and, crucially, the relationship between language and mythology.

Among the few connections he admitted are firstly that if any of his characters resembles him, it is Faramir, the scholarly military commander, "with a reverence for the old histories and sacred values that helps him through a bitter war".

[22] Secondly, Frodo's gardener Sam, who acts as his servant on the journey to destroy the Ruling Ring in Mordor, is in Tolkien's words "indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself".

It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when 'everything is now ready',[b] the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heavensent windfalls as a cache of tobacco 'salvaged' from a ruin.

[c] The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy-tale was wakened into maturity by active service; that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf) 'There is good rock here.

'[24] Garth comments that other resemblances could be added to Lewis's list, including Frodo's impatience with his parochial Shire Hobbits; the sudden descent into danger and mass mobilisation; the fierce courage of ordinary people, motivated by camaraderie and love; the "striking absence" of women in the story; the machine-dominated mind of Saruman.

[25] Further, Garth writes, Lewis did not mention elements of The Lord of the Rings that might appear unrealistic, but which nevertheless echo the First World War: the Eye of Sauron's "sweeping surveillance"; the shifting of reality to dream on "long marches, or into nightmare in the midst of battle";[26] the "lumbering elephantine behemoths" and "previously unseen airborne killers" on the battlefield of the Pelennor Fields;[26] the "Black Breath" of the Nazgûl that fills even the bravest with despair; and "the revenge of the trees for their wanton destruction" by Saruman.

Gondolin was forced to fight through treachery, while the Zimmermann Telegram, proposing a secret military alliance between Germany and Mexico, brought the United States into the war.

[34] Both Croft and Garth noted a resemblance between the monsters created by Melko for use against Gondolin, and the British Mark I tanks which joined the Battle of the Somme that Tolkien saw.

[34][33] Both the scholar of English literature Chris Hopkins and the historian Michael Livingston, writing in Mythlore, note that the "battle-scarred landscapes"[35] of Middle-earth resemble those of Flanders in the Great War.

[36] Frodo comes home to the Shire with what Livingston suggests is post-traumatic stress disorder (known to Great War soldiers as shell shock).

[35] Hopkins observes, too, that while Tolkien portrays the Ringwraiths as wholly evil, their footsoldiers the Orcs are clearly brutal but their speech is often a source of comedy, with grumbling conversations and "jokey idioms" that recall urban working-class soldiers' dialect from the Great War.

It depicts him in delirium with trench fever on the front line,[39] beginning "to hallucinate scenes from the books he is yet to write",[40] and thus visually linking the war to his legendarium.

The northern part of the Western front 1915-16, showing the Battle of the Somme where Tolkien saw action
Tolkien stated that Sam Gamgee was based on the batmen he knew in the war. [ 22 ] Photograph of a British officer, General Montgomery , being given a scarf by his batman.
Tolkien's friend and fellow-Inkling C. S. Lewis , who had fought on the Western Front, noted the realism of The Lord of the Rings with details like "flying civilians". [ 24 ] Photograph of fleeing French civilians near Bapaume
Garth suggests that the revenge of Fangorn 's trees for Saruman's "wanton destruction" could have been prompted by the sight of shattered forests on the Somme battlefield. [ 26 ]
German Flammenwerfer on the Western Front, 1917
"Beasts like snakes and dragons of irresistible might": [ 33 ] a British Mark I tank near Thiepval where Tolkien fought on the Somme in September 1916
Frodo's sad return to the Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings has been likened to the return of shell-shocked soldiers to England. [ 35 ]
The 2019 biopic Tolkien links the Great War to Middle-earth by showing Tolkien, in delirium , hallucinating a fire-breathing dragon from what may be a Flammenwerfer in no-man's land . [ 38 ] [ 39 ]