J.R.R. Tolkien may well be one of the most revered writers in the history of the English language. Tolkien is best known for his works surrounding the fantasy world of Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and Children of Hurin, along with several other books he has written illustrate the world of Middle Earth vividly. Creating a whole new world was not easy and in doing so he borrowed a great deal from his own personal experience. Tolkien’s life as a Catholic, a war veteran, and a student of Anglo-Saxon literature all had profound impacts on how he wrote and shaped the themes within Middle Earth. However, out of all of these influences on Tolkien’s writing, none was as pronounced as his war experience.
Tolkien’s service during World War I would alter his outlook on life forever. He said himself that “An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience” (qtd in www.nationalgeographic.com). In 1917, Tolkien was commissioned as a signal officer and sent to the front. He deeply appreciated this chance to associate with the common man. The military experience gave him a better sense of how the average citizen led his life and sharing in the same experience instilled in him a greater sense of equality with his fellow man. Many of Tolkien’s friends died in the trench warfare and he likely would have been killed himself had he not suffered repeatedly from trench foot and was removed from the front multiple times (Carpenter 72-87). Tolkien said later that “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead” .
One of the themes within the Middle Earth legendarium is how nothing is left untouched by war. In every war within Middle-Earth, literally nothing is left as it was before. Tolkien experienced horrors while in the trenches of World War I and wanted people to feel the pain and recognize the devastation that it brings. He depicts machines of war wreaking havoc among picturesque landscapes. War is necessary in Tolkien’s books, but terrible nonetheless.
Tolkien wrote at the same time as many writers who were experiencing cultural disillusionment (www.tolkienlibrary.com). In America these authors are known as the “Lost Generation”. Tolkien’s cultural background was separated from this group by the Atlantic but his writing can express some of the same feelings of disillusionment. He was in France, during the war. His writing was a form of speaking out against the horrors of war. War is terrible in Middle Earth, just like in the real world. Tolkien’s writings didn’t focus on the actual gruesomeness in battles but more on the aftermath and the impact on the society, the culture, and the individuals involved. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has many battles of epic scope with heroic deeds but you also get the heartbroken mothers and the empty halls. Every victory comes at a great price. The loss of life even among the victors is staggering which mirrors the casualties in WWI where both sides lost thousands of soldiers in a single assault.
Each character leaves home, loses friends, and must sacrifice something for the greater good of the world. Many of the characters are changed forever as a result of the hardships they’ve been through. Even though good wins out in the end, Gandalf and the Elven lords lose some of their greatest abilities when their rings of power cease to work. Frodo, Sam, and Bilbo all make journeys to Valinor in order to recover from their ordeals as ring-bearers , and Frodo never recovers from his wounds that he suffered from while fighting the Witch-King or from the loss of the ring. That is something Tolkien focused on, the not-so-obvious wounds that one suffers in war. These can be the most haunting for years to come and are the ones that are more than fatal.
The impact on the homes of the characters is another way Tolkien tried to convey the destruction of the battle between good and evil. The scouring of the Shire at the end of The Return of the King is perfect in giving the message that nothing is left untouched by war . The Shire’s pastoral landscape, which is very similar to Warwickshire, where Tolkien grew up, is ravaged by the takeover by Saruman. Only special soil from the elf land of Lothlórien can even spark a recovery for the Shire. The four Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings (Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin) are also loosely based on Tolkien and three of his closest friends from Oxford. These four were inseparable and started a group they called the ‘Tea Club, Barrovian Society’. They would remain close friends until two of them were killed during the fighting of World War I (www.tolkiensociety.org).
Another more obvious reference to his war experience is from an early draft of what would become The Fall of Gondolin in The Silmarillion (www.tolkienlibrary.com). The Elven city of Gondolin is assaulted by Morgoth’s army, which included iron machines with “internal fires” that powered them. These were used as a form of assault vehicles and personnel carriers for the orcs that operated them. These are Tolkien’s version of tanks that made their first appearance in World War I near the Sommes where he was stationed during the war. Tanks are similar in that they are armored personnel carriers with engines (internal fires) that shoot flame (artillery shells) at their enemies. These tanks were replaced by dragons in later versions of the story.
The enemies that are faced within the books are all corrupt and militaristic counterfeits of what they used to be. Elves are turned into orcs, Ents into trolls, wolves into wargs, and etc. Jane Chance wrote; “Orcs (as Morgoth’s parody of Elves) represent art gone wrong, warped to military service, its immortality translated into invasive multiplication” (Chance 66).
Tolkien remained staunchly antiwar as World War II began while he wrote The Lord of the Rings. When his own son, Christopher, was in the Royal Air Force, he wrote this to him;
Nothing can amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connection with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, ‘for the liberation of the Shire’. (Letters 111)
It is with this mindset that he sent his son to war and his analogy to The Lord of the Rings betrays the antiwar sentiments within the books he was writing.
World War I was not the only war Tolkien lived through. Tolkien lived in England and wrote during World War II. In much of The Lord of the Rings parallels can be drawn to World War II. The experience of living in England while being attacked by Germany can be compared to the sieges and attacks on Helms Deep and Minas Tirith. In Helms Deep the people of Rohan retreat to a place of ancient strength that has saved them time and time again from defeat but instead this time the wall is breached and the fortress nearly falls to the onslaught of Uruk-Hai . The Island of Great Britain had long been a safe haven for the British people as the English Channel protected them from invasion but the German Luftwaffe penetrated that defense so that everyone in England felt the fear of a possible attack. Although there never was an invasion, the fear was there. This is also similar to the Gondorians and Minas Tirith . Their ancient city had long been protected but when Sauron’s armies laid siege to it, it became terrible. Fear pervaded the city as orc catapults shot flaming stones into the homes of the Gondorians and Nazgûl attacked from the skies. In England, cities were under constant bombing attacks which spread fire throughout the cities and caused citizens to look at the skies with fear.
The set ups of the War of the Ring and World War II are also similar. In The Lord of the Rings, the world is limping along for many generations, never quite able to recover from the first war with Sauron that nearly destroyed the world. In the time between that war and this one, there was never complete peace. The old alliances broke up and the rumor of a far away evil grew. The enemy secretly grew in power until finally he began to strike out with new allies and his opposition divided. Europe was far from recovering from World War I when World War II broke out. The world was in economic depression and as the allies licked their wounds, Germany secretly grew in power led by an evil man who in the end had to be stopped.
Tolkien was raised in the Warwickshire countryside by his mother, a devout Catholic who was estranged from both sides of her family when she abandoned Anglicanism. Tolkien would regard her sacrifice very highly after she passed away from diabetes, which was fatal at the time. He and his brother were left in the guardianship of a priest named Father Xavier. These two were inspired by him and their mother to remain Catholics their entire lives. This manifests itself primarily in The Silmarillion which reads a lot like the Bible. It is an ancient history containing various stories during which the world is created, evil develops and the ensuing battle against it.
The initial creation mirrors the creation of the Earth in Genesis and after a while definite parallels in the theology are apparent . Tolkien’s focus for his legendarium was not the religion but the battle between good and evil and the evils of war, but he drew heavily on his own Christianity. In Middle Earth there is one all-powerful god, Eru Ilúvatar who creates all life and the Earth, Arda; angels below him carry out specific deeds, Valar. One of these angels becomes corrupted and becomes jealous of the god’s power and desires it for himself, Melkor (like Satan), and is cast out. The angels or Valar have saints or Maiar (Wizards) who serve them on the Earth while Melkor has his own corrupted demons, Maiar (Balrogs). Tolkien himself called the Lord of the Rings a “fundamentally religious and Catholic book” (qtd in Sejdinaj). Many people have argued that this was the main influence on Tolkien’s writing. However Tolkien started writing what would eventually become The Silmarillion from an army hospital bed in 1917. Both World Wars proved to be catalysts for his writing (The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954) which leads one to conclude that his writings are in response to these horrific wars.
One of the first parts of The Silmarillion to be written was the story of Beren and Lúthien. This story chronicles the love story between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an Elven princess . Beren first came upon Lúthien singing and dancing in a forest and fell in love with her and she soon after fell in love with him. Lúthien’s father disapproved of Beren since he was human and therefore mortal. He gave Beren a seemingly impossible task in order to win his daughter’s hand in marriage. To his great surprise Beren nearly completed the task and Lúthien’s father gave his blessing to the union. However Beren was killed soon afterward and Lúthien died of grief (the only way other than battle for an elf to die). Lúthien’s spirit cried to the Lord of the Dead about her inability to see Beren again and both Lúthien and Beren were restored to life as mortals to live out their lives together.
Tolkien’s primary influence here is his own love for his wife. Edith Tolkien was the love of J.R.R. Tolkien’s life, with their falling in love as teenagers and then renewing their love and becoming engaged at age 21(Carpenter 44 & 61-62). Throughout their lives Tolkien would refer to Edith as his Lúthien (Carpenter 97). The meeting of Beren and Lúthien was actually inspired by an event between Edith and Tolkien. Once on leave she took him into the woods and danced among the trees, just as Lúthien was when Beren first saw her. Tolkien and Edith’s love is rare and Tolkien put a similar love into his stories. The love transcending death or separation can even be drawn from the time when the two of them were forbidden to correspond with each other and their renewal of their love afterwards. The analogy of the love the Tolkiens shared for each other is evident in their burial. The two are interred in a single grave with a headstone that reads; Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889-1971; John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973 (Carpenter 260).
Even here though, the war has serious influence on the story. Some parts of the story are similar to events where Tolkien’s military service separated the two, when Beren is captured by the evil Morgoth. In the story Lúthien goes to rescue Beren and finds him imprisoned with his dead friend beside him . This is similar to Tolkien’s war experience when he was ‘imprisoned’ in the hospital by the evil power ‘war’ after his friends had died. The war separated the two after they had been married for only two months but strengthened their relationship even more. It was another effect of the war on his life.
The last major source of inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came from his interest in Anglo-Saxon languages. The languages within Middle Earth have startling resemblances to the Anglo-Saxon languages such as those from which he translated Beowulf into English. The foundation of the Elven language Quenya is easy to see as based upon Anglo-Saxon. One example is this poem he discovered as a young man in an Old English class:
Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended
“Hail Earendel brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men.” (Carpenter 64)
This poem holds not only the inspiration for the name of Middle Earth, but Eärendil is the name of both the morning star in Middle Earth but a mythological seafarer of great strength in that world. Such examples as the language and names are relatively insignificant influences however when so much of the story and message can be derived from Tolkien’s war experience.
When reviewed, one must acknowledge the very many influences on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing. There is of course obvious influence of his wife on the Lúthien and Beren story, some influence on the mythology of creation by his Catholic beliefs, and the language from his studies of Anglo-Saxon; however significant this may be, Tolkien’s history with war shapes the experiences of the books. This is what drove him in writing about Middle-Earth. The wars are what influenced the actual happenings. His feelings on conflict are what he depicted in the horrendous outcomes of the battles that are fought throughout the books. These are the feelings he conveys most strongly because these are the feelings he wants the reader to understand. War is sometimes necessary but when it is, sacrifices must be made and once touched by such battles an individual will never again be the same.
Works Cited:
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. Print.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954. Print.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954. Print.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955. Print.
Harvey, Greg. The Origins of Tolkien's Middle-Earth for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2003. Print.
Johnson, Judith A. J. R. R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Questia. Web. 22 Mar. 2010.
Chance, Jane, ed. Tolkien the Medievalist. London: Routledge, 2002. Questia. Web. 22 Mar. 2010. Print
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Print.
Tolkien, John, Humphrey Carpenter, and Christopher Tolkien. The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), 1981. Print.
Clark, George, and Daniel Timmons, eds. J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-Earth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Questia. Web. 3 May 2010.
Sejdinaj, Jeny. "The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth." Catholic Education 10.1 (2006): 110+. Questia. Web. 3 May 2010.
Watson, George. "The High Road to Narnia: C. S. Lewis and His Friend J. R. R. Tolkien Believed That Truths Are Universal and That Stories Reveal Them." American Scholar Wntr 2009: 89+. Questia. Web. 3 May 2010.
Wood, Ralph C. "Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien." Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 55.4 (2003): 315+.Questia. Web. 3 May 2010.
Wood, Ralph. "J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century." The Christian Century 21 Nov. 2001: 24+. Questia. Web. 3 May 2010.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences.html. Web. 4 May 2010
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/booksabouttolkien/tandthegreatwar/description.htm. Web. 4 May 2010
http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html#2. Web. 4 May 2010
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/879-John_Garth_interview.php. Web. 4 May 2010
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