Tolkien and the Wars

J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for his two fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was first copyrighted in 1938. Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings was originally published in three volumes of two books each. The first two volumes were "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers" first copyrighted in 1954. The third volume was "The Return of the King" first copyrighted in 1955

When The Lord of the Rings (hereafter referred to by the popular abbreviation LotR) was first published, there was a popular notion that the book was in some way meant as an allegory for the Second World War, the Cold War, or the state of affairs in England after the Second World War. In the Foreword to the second edition of LotR (1966), Tolkien wrote "The real war does not resemble the legendary war either in its process or its conclusion."⁽¹⁾ In Tolkien's Foreword to the 1973 Ballantine edition (and including in many subsequent editions) was a more substantial disclaimer of that idea, wherein Tolkien informs his readers "The crucial chapter, 'The Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels." Tolkien continues and reminds the readers "One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." ⁽²⁾ Those close friends, specifically Geoffrey Smith and R.Q. Gilson had been lost in the First World War. They were killed during the Battle of the Somme - an absolute horror which Tolkien had participated in (as second lieutenant, 11^th Lancashire Fusiliers⁽³⁾) for six months, until 'Trench fever' took him back to England. ⁽⁴⁾

Tolkien did not in his Forward discuss the possibility of his narrative being rooted in the World War I, and from the context one might have inferred that Tolkien would disclaim the possibility as he specifically states "... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." and "...the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences." ⁽⁵⁾ In further argument against "biographical reductionism"⁽⁶⁾, Tolkien stated, "I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention for the author's work . . . and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest." ⁽⁷⁾

Never-the-less, Friedman feels confidant in stating "it seems apparent that what his generation knew as the Great War has left a discernible imprint on the encounters of his soldiers in the War of the Ring." As evidence, both Friedman and Brogan discusses the similarities between passages within LotR and the works of Tolkien's contemporaries.

Friedman discusses Tolkien's landscapes. Frodo and Gollum's passages of the Dead Marshes within "The Two Towers" ("For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water,' he said with horror. 'Dead faces!'" ⁽⁸⁾) is likened against descriptions by British soldiers on the Somme, such as Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer ("Floating on the surface of the flooded trench . . . the mask of a human face . . . detached . . . from the skull." ⁽⁹⁾, Max Plowman's A Subaltern on the Somme ("as I look upon these evil pools I half expect to see a head appearing from each one." ⁽¹⁰⁾), and John Masefield's The Old Front Line ("liquid gathers in holes near the bottom, and is greenish and foul and has the look of dead eyes staring upward."⁽¹¹⁾).⁽¹²⁾

There are also comparisons to be made between Masefield's no man's land ("crested and scabbed with yellowish tetter, trickling and oozing like sores discharging pus"⁽¹³⁾), Willfred Owen's description ("pockmarked like a body of foulest disease . . . its odour the breath of cancer") and Tolkien's approach to Mordor (partially called "Noman-Lands" ⁽¹⁴⁾ --"Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air."⁽¹⁵⁾)

Tolkien was not entirely oblivious to this debt from his experience. He wrote "Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence on either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme."⁽¹⁶⁾

The terrain was not the only aspect of the wars to which comparisons can be made. Considerations of the technology are herein relevant. Tolkien's Nazgul "Out of the black sky there came dropping like a bolt a winged shape, rending the clouds with a ghastly shriek" ⁽¹⁷⁾ is not unlike David Jones' description of incoming rounds In Parenthesis ("Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came - bright, brass shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt" ⁽¹⁸⁾) or Fredrick Manning's description of the rounds in Her Privates We ("Something rushed downward on them with a scream of exultation, increasing to a roar before it blasted the air asunder and sent splinters of steel shrieking over their heads. . . ."⁽¹⁹⁾).

The effects on the men between the Nazguls (". . . its defenders throw themselves to the ground, or stand, 'letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands'" ⁽²⁰⁾) and the incoming rounds ("Private Ball stands fixed, letting his mess-tin spill at his feet, or as Manning's Tommies cringe like 'men seeking shelter from a storm." and "he had lived like a hunted animal . . . hiding in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and roaring overhead in search of human flesh." ⁽²¹⁾) were not so far different either⁽²²⁾.

Brogan demonstrates, in similar manner, Tolkien's downfall of Sauron (". . . as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell" ⁽²³⁾) can be likened to a Sassoon's shell burst ("Against the clear morning sky a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. Slowly its dingy wrestling vapors take the form of a hooded giant with clumsy expostulating arms. Then, with a gradual gesture of acquiescence, it lolls sideways, falling over into the attitude of a swimmer on his side. And so it dissolves into nothingness." ⁽²⁴⁾)⁽²⁵⁾

Tolkien's goblins are largely based on the goblins of George MacDonald.⁽²⁶⁾ Because of this William H. Green feels it is important we should look to where they differ. On this Green notes, "Tolkien's [goblins] are nevertheless gifted in the design and use of tools of destruction. They are blamed for the destructive inventions of the machine age, especially weapons of mass destruction, "for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them" (60). Here Tolkien is projecting on MacDonald's goblins his own vision of twentieth-century evil, the tanks, explosives, and machine guns that made their devastating appearance in the Great War, where he saw action at the battle of the Somme. Though Tolkien disliked mainstream modern authors such as D. H. Lawrence, he shared with many of them a demonizing of technology."⁽²⁷⁾

We find an open confession that at least one of Tolkien's characters was born of his wartime experience, despite Tolkien's frequent denials that current or recent history had any influence on LotR: "Discussing one of the principal characters in The Lord of the Rings he wrote many years later: 'My "Sam Gamgee" is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself." ⁽²⁸⁾ This is not insignificant when one considers his growing importance throughout LotR and Tolkien's comment to his son Christopher "Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit."⁽²⁹⁾

Tolkien has an orc snarl "Don't you know we're at war?"⁽³⁰⁾. This is obviously the same as the common "Don't you know there's a war on?"⁽³¹⁾

There is also a matter of "the polarization of consciousness - what [Fussell] calls 'the gross dichotomizing' - imposed by the war - the habit of reading the world and all experience as a struggle between out sire and 'the enemy'" ⁽³²⁾ Fussell writes "'We' are all here on this side: 'the enemy' is over there. 'We' are individuals with names and personal identities; 'he' is a mere collective entity. We are visible; he is invisible. We are normal; he is grotesque. Our appurtenances are natural; his, bizarre. He is not as good as we are . . . Nevertheless, he threatens us and must be destroyed . . ."⁽³³⁾ Brogan points out "'He', the reader of Tolkien must reflect, is Sauron, who never loses his name or his title 'the Dark Lord', but is nevertheless alluded to, more and more frequently, as 'the Enemy' as The Lord of the Rings proceeds."⁽³⁴⁾

Fussell "remarks that in this world of trenches, day and night are reversed: it is the night which is filled with busy activity"⁽³⁵⁾ This recalls Mordor (". . . the ost easterly of the roads followed them . . . Neither man nor orc moved along its flat grey stretches; for the Dark Lord had almost completed the movement of his forces, and even in the fastness of his own realm he sought the secrecy of night."⁽³⁶⁾).

Even 'the Road' has significance. T. E. Hulme wrote "You unconsciously orient things in reference to it. In peacetime, each direction on the road is as it were indifferent, it all goes on ad infinitum. But now you know that certain roads lead, as it were, up to an abyss." ⁽³⁷⁾ Brogan comments "It can need no stressing that the road taken by Sam and Frodo leads them, precisely, to an abyss.⁽³⁸⁾

When Major Warren Lewis, brother to C.S. Lewis, finished reading The Lord of the Rings (on November 19^th, 1949), he recorded his impressions in his diary: "A great deal of it can be read topically - the shire standing for England, Rohan for France, Gondor the Germany of the future, Sauron for Stalin, ... etc." Ellison states "... the impressions left on such an intelligent and sympathetic reader and observer as C.S. Lewis' brother are clearly genuine and spontaneous. They can hardly be dismissed out of hand."⁽⁴⁰⁾

Ellison first compares one of Warren Lewis's brother's descriptions (from as early as 1934) of the Nazi apparatus ("the death in the concentration camps; arrests and disappearances; Himmler and the Gestapo") against the "Numenorean" chapters of Tolkien's The Lost Road ("Numenor, in the years immediately preceding its annihilation, has become a fascist-style dictatorship displaying all the distinctive ingredients of such. Militarism is dominant; youth is regimented; informers and secret police are everywhere; unexplained disappearances happen; "torture chambers" are rumored to operate; a minority is persecuted. Over it hangs a pervasive atmosphere of retribution - of a coming holocaust and the dissolution of the existing fabric of life." ) Tolkien was writing against the background of Stalinist Russia as well as Nazi Germany.⁽⁴¹⁾

Ellison compares Tolkien with George Orwell. "'The Party', and 'Big Brother' [from 1984], exercise power for its own sake; like Morgoth and like Sauron, they require no ideological 'rationale' for their policies or their activities. 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever", says O' Brien to Winston Smith; and that is no more and no less that what would become of Middle-earth if Sauron were to recover the ring and, 'cover all the lands in a second darkness.'"⁽⁴²⁾

More telling comparisons are to be made however between Orwell's Coming Up for Air with the early chapters of LotR. "A small and insignificant land, contented with its way of live, and also perhaps a trifle complacent about it, becomes aware of a vague and distant menace, not properly understood or entirely comprehensible. 'The land of Mordor . . . like a shadow in the background of their memories . . . ominous and disquieting . . . away from east and south there were wars and growing fear. Orcs were multiplying again in the mountains. Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons. And there were murmured hints of creatures more terrible than all these, but they had no name.' It is evident that the Hobbits' satisfaction with their way of life largely arises out of their sense that its conditions have always been what, as the story of LotR opens, they are. 'In olden days they had of course, been often obliged to fight to maintain themselves in a hard world; but in Bilbo's time that was very ancient history.' This is exactly the basis of Bowling's nostalgia for England as he felt it to have been before 1914. None of the inhabitants of the little Oxfordshire town in which he lived at that time, says Orwell, could conceive of a state of affairs when 'things were different.' The threat posed by the dictatorships of the 1930's was, of course, widely seen in individualistic, as well as nationalistic terms. Bilbo Baggins and 'Fatty' Bowling are particular manifestations of a general trend, already well established in its hold on popular imagery. The novels of Franz Kafka, The Good Soldier Schweik, the films of Charlie Chaplin., all represented, in their own way, variations on the theme of the "little man: confronting power and authority in all its forms, totalitarian or otherwise. It was a fruitful subject for cartoonists, political or more general in their aims. Orwell's last "hero", Winston Smith, takes it to its logical conclusion."⁽⁴³⁾

Ellison also comments upon how the tension of the war builds in LotR versus how WWII built in the minds of the English: "... one may continue by remarking on the odd but diverting impression of amateurishness pervading much of The Fellowship of the Ring; not on Tolkien's part, one hastens to add, but on that of the participants. 'And you are lucky to be alive too, after all the absurd things you have done since you left home', says Gandalf to Frodo at Rivendell. He too, though, has been markedly 'slow in the uptake', in reaching vital conclusions about the Ring, in the light of all the evidence that he had had available to him. If there is really a war in progress, being fought in order to meet and destroy a deadly menace of worldwide proportions, is not this a somewhat casual way of preparing for it, and carrying it on? Tolkien himself remarked on the evident contrast of tone between the bult of FotR, and LotR as a whole. Does this not faintly recall the wholly distinct atmosphere that pervaded the early months of wartime; the sense of unreality that acquired the nickname of 'the Phoney War'. A sense of unreality that, in the months before Churchill became Prime Minister, arose from indications apparent to everybody of general unpreparedness, incompetence in high places, and military bungling of this and that kind. It was not long, of course, before this sense faded from everyone's consciousness as the total dedication and professionalism with which war came to be carried on, took over on all fronts and at home. 'Total war' came to mean concentration on everyone's part, in or out of the forces, on the single objective of the defeat of the Axis powers to the exclusion of everything else. The latter course of the War of the Ring seems to reflect this attitude of mind, as much in regard to Gandalf as in any other respect. When he reappears, to the astonishment of Merry and Pippin, amid the debris of Isengard, he has changed in a way they find difficult to understand. He act as a briskly professional commander in the field; with, 'ten thousand orcs to manage', he has no time on his hands for acting as a father-figure for a pair of rather puzzled hobbits. In a similar fashion the 'Strider' of the earlier stages of the 'History of the War of the Ring' becomes more impersonal and remote as 'Aragorn', as the nature of his role changes, and becomes, as the war moves towards its final issues, concentrated on leadership in the field, and in battle."⁽⁴⁴⁾

And there is the issue of spies. "The chapters which cover the hobbits' stay in the 'Prancing Pony' at Bree offer a different sort of suggestion or echo. Frodo, who has been alarmed, first byt the appearance of several of the Men in the Common Room of the inn, and then by his conversation with Strider, and the hints dropped by the latter, is sufficiently alarmed to start wondering if all the Breelanders are not in league against him, and 'to suspect even old Butterbur's fat face of concealing dark designs". The result is that Strider faces a distinctly cold reception from both Frodo and Sam where he subsequently makes his appearance in the parlour where they had previously held their supper; and Sam's hostility continues after the arrival and reading of Gandalf's letter. Anyone old enough to recall it will remember the national obsession with spies and 'fifth-columnists' that was particularly prevalent in the early years of the war; and how a suspicious atmosphere was inclined to accumulate around any person whose status or antecedents were not readily apparents or explainable. National advertising was promoted to encourage it, although the most trivial remark was liable to be relayed to some office or operation's room in Berlin. 'Careless talk costs lives' was a slogan for the times which could as well fit the mood of Strider's hints and warnings to Frodo and others, following the Common Room episode. Of course, the significance of impressions such this lies in the 'applicability' of the fictional tale, as Tolkien would have put it. The episode in question might equally call to mind the parallel of 'Reds Under the Bed', or any other instance of national or public scaremongering.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Denethor's suicide, by self-immolation on a pyre: "we will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed from the West," echos popular imagery that became associated with the death of Hitler ". . . the story of Hilter's last days embraces the imagery of the half-insane ruler surrounded by his court, immolating himself to the accompaniment of the sacrificial deaths of servants and adherents".⁽⁴⁶⁾

Finally there is a matter of the anticlimax to LotR and the sense of the same that accompanied WWII. "The notion which had gained some currency (absurd though it no doubt was) that the degredation of the Shire under Saruman was intended to reflect conditions in Britian under the Labour government elected in 1945. . . .This sense of anticlimax, a feeling of 'this is not what we have just spent six years of our lives fighting for', would have been there whichever party had been in power after 1945, and whatever policies it had followed, and of course the situation had been much the same after 1918. The parallel was drawn because many people felt that here, at the end of LotR, just as everywhere else in it, they saw embodied the truth of their own experiences, bother their hopes and their fears, for the present and future."⁽⁴⁷⁾

Having read the evidence presented directly by Friedman, Brogan, and Ellison, and indirectly by host of others, and despite any disclaimers Tolkien wrote to the contrary, Tolkien's work has legitimate roots within both World Wars. That is not to say that Tolkien's work should again be interpreted as a form of allegory. Or even that one should go digging for what Tolkien would much rather you didn't find. It is merely to say that the two wars did have some influence on how the story came to be told. Having concluded this, we can now go back to sleep, reenter Middle-earth, and continue to engage in such escapism as The Lord of the Rings readily invites us into and was most assuredly written for. (Or was it? But that, my friends, is a whole nother can of worms, which I shall leave for someone to pry open and delve into.)

1. Ellison, John A., "'The Legendary War and the Real One' The Lord of the Rings and the Climate of its Times", Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, (Mallorn: High Wycombe, Bucks, England, 1989), p. 17.

2. Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings, (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1991), pp. 10-12. See also Friedman, Barton, "Tolkien and David Jones: The Great War and the War of the Ring" , CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, (CLIO: Fort Wayne, IN, Winter 1982), p. 115. And see also Brogan, Hugh, "Tolkien's Great War", Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 352.

4. Crabbe, Katharyn F., J.R.R. Tolkien, (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.: New York, 1981), pp. 13-15. Also, Brogan, p. 353.

7. Carpenter, Humphrey, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1981), p. 288. See also Brogan, ibid., p. 354.

9. Sassoon, Siegfried, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, (Coward, McCann, Inc.: New York, 1930), p. 215.

10. Plowman, Max, A Subaltern on the Somme (E.P. Dutton: New York, 1928), p. 133.

16. Carpenter, The Letters..., p. 303. See also, Brogan, ibid., p. 367 and Tolkien, ibid., p. 969.

19. Manning, Frederic, Her Privates We, (G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1930), p. 285.

21. Gibbs, Philip, The Struggle in Flanders, (George H. Dorn: New York, 1919), p. 217.

24. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, indirectly quoted in Brogan, ibid., p. 353, originally quoted in Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, 1977), p. 302.

26. Carpenter, The Letters..., p. 178. See Also Green, William H., The Hobbit: A Journey into Maturity, (Twayne Publishers: New York, 1995), p. 70.

28. Carpenter, Humphrey, Tolkien: A biography, (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1977), p. 81. Also Brogan, ibid., p. 354.

32. Brogan, ibid., p. 361. According to Brogan who claims great debt to Fussell, Fussell did a comprehensive survey of literature from the Great War. Almost all writers affected by the war, except Tolkien, are discussed in his work.

39. Tom Shippey asks the question "One might ask, post-which war?" ["Tolkien as a Post-War Writer", Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and the Genres of Myth and Fantasy Studies, (Mythloew: Altadena, CA, Winter 1996), p. 84.] Shippey goes into a fascinating discussion of Tolkien's view of "Evil" and juxtaposes this against his interpretation of William Golding, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, and T. H. White (at least so far as each of their views of "Evil" have been understood). He concludes his discussion "I would argue, then, that Tolkien can be seen as in essence a post-World War II writer; one of a group of English writers whose subjects were war and evil; who drew their subjects from their own life-experience, little affected or assisted by the views of official culture, whether literary or political; and who wrote in non-realistic modes essentially because they felt they were writing about subjects too great aand too general to tie down to particular and recognizable settings. The views of this group about evil, widely different though they were, were similar in that they challenged the comfortable opinions of sheltered contemporaries..." [ibid., p. 92.] As intriguing as Shippey's discussion is, I felt the discussion actually had little to do with either war and failed to convince me of Tolkien's role as necessarily a post-war writer for either War. I can't help but to feel he was hired to comment upon the one topic and not having much to say tried to cleverly disguise that he was actually working on another topic.

42. Ellison, ibid., p. 19. See also Shippey, Tom, "Tolkien as a Post-War Writer, Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and the Genres of Myth and Fantasy Studies, (Mythloew: Altadena, CA, Winter 1996), p. 86.

43. Ellison, ibid., pp. 19-18. (Note: The publisher mistakenly reversed these pages.)