Tolkien and the Great War

[Voronwë the Faithful]

If anyone tries to stop you from going on at such length, they are going to have me to deal with.

I'll try to come up with something intelligent to say in response to your posts at some point, but honestly I am just enjoying getting to read what you have to say. I find it extremely interesting and insightful.

[Alatar]

Likewise. Keep it coming Mossy!

[Elentári]

Let me express my enthusiasm and gratitude for this thread - I am going to suggest it (& Garth's book!) as background reading to my son who is studying the Great War for his History GCSE...

[axordil]

I really should read TATGW, if only to see if there's any mention of one of my pet notions, that the resonance between the Rohirrim and the Americans is more than coincidence: a younger, less refined but more vital culture coming to save the older, established one, arriving in the nick of time. It's not an exact analogy with either WW I or WW II, but a bit of both.

I know I'm not the only one to spot this.

[solicitr]

Another winner of a post!

Allied casualties tended to be far heavier than German (who had more men to call on in the first place)

There I'm not so sure. At the same time the Somme was raging, the Germans were hurling innumerable troops into the meat grinder of Verdun, with some 400,000 casualties. It's probably more accurate to say that frontal assaults on the Western Front were, generally, hopeless and bloody (the Germans' development of "Hutier" or infiltration tactics late in the war was a partial solution.)

I'm not sure Denethor is so much a portrait of Haig though, as he is of a politician. (Think Churchill and Gallipoli). For military leadership-from-behind, Tolkien gives us this: "the Captain of Despair does not press forward, yet. He rules rather according to the wisdom that you [Denethor] have just spoken, from the rear, driving his slaves in madness on before."

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

I really should read TATGW, if only to see if there's any mention of one of my pet notions, that the resonance between the Rohirrim and the Americans is more than coincidence: a younger, less refined but more vital culture coming to save the older, established one, arriving in the nick of time. It's not an exact analogy with either WW I or WW II, but a bit of both.

TATGW doesn't mention that (it sticks pretty close to Tolkien's own experiences), but it's interesting. I like it. It's not an exact analogy but it's pretty close.

Kind of an aside, but --

There I'm not so sure. At the same time the Somme was raging, the Germans were hurling innumerable troops into the meat grinder of Verdun, with some 400,000 casualties. It's probably more accurate to say that frontal assaults on the Western Front were, generally, hopeless and bloody (the Germans' development of "Hutier" or infiltration tactics late in the war was a partial solution.)

The Germans did start off with a larger population though, and in the beginning at least had more men to call up. According to John Keegan -- I'm going to get these numbers wrong -- the French had something like 80% of eligible men already enlisted at the initial mobilization while the Germans had only used 50% of those available. That's not quite right, but Germany (and Austro-Hungary probably) had more untapped population. This balance certainly tipped eventually, but they did have an initial advantage in manpower. I have no idea, but I'm wondering if the losses at Verdun were less painful to them due to the freeing up of forces from the Eastern Front in 1917.

I'm not sure Denethor is so much a portrait of Haig though, as he is of a politician. (Think Churchill and Gallipoli). For military leadership-from-behind, Tolkien gives us this: "the Captain of Despair does not press forward, yet. He rules rather according to the wisdom that you [Denethor] have just spoken, from the rear, driving his slaves in madness on before."

I completely agree. He could represent many aspect of the "Old Man" type, but particularly the politician. That's an interesting quote that you pull out, especially the comment on "madness", considering that this was the first time that shell shock was really recognized.

I must say, it's really a delight to be discussing all this with such fine persons as yourselves.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That warms my heart.

[solicitr]

"I really should read TATGW, if only to see if there's any mention of one of my pet notions, that the resonance between the Rohirrim and the Americans is more than coincidence: a younger, less refined but more vital culture coming to save the older, established one, arriving in the nick of time."

One also wonders if when T was writing the Appendices etc in the late 40s there was something of this in the two great Númenórean interventions, coming over the Sea with numbers and power beyond anything in Middle-earth: the first under Tar-Minastir genuine succour to Gil-galad, and the second under Ar-Pharazôn not so selfless.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

Going back a long ways to Dan’s proposition of a comparison between the TCBS and the hobbits, I have to agree that it’s not possible to make a direct comparison. The hobbits have no Geoffrey Bache Smith, the TCBS no Sam Gamgee for instance. That said, the parallel is definitely there in more general terms, with the four friends from a country background suddenly finding themselves in the midst of untold horrors. CS Lewis did, I know, say that Tolkien was uninfluenceable, but in this respect I must disagree: so much of the spirit, and some of the specifics as well, are so clearly products of Tolkien’s early years and his cultural background particularly as evidenced in WWI.

The hobbits are so clearly pre-war English in a way that I never quite realized before. Beyond Tolkien’s own love of rural England, pastoralism was apparently a major trend in Edwardian culture that particularly showed up in poetry, as in “Goblin Feet” and Tolkien’s other early poetry. This trend became hugely important in the trenches. Apparently English soldiers frequently carried around copies of “Country Life” which is obviously what Bilbo would keep on his coffee table. One man describes how his unit set about doing competitive gardening while out of the line, with the comment that they were “gardeners camouflaged as soldiers.” If that’s not Sam Gamgee, it’s only because he’s not very well camouflaged. Despite (or because of) the industrialism, the pastoral past became more cherished as it became further away. This started even before the war, with the view that rural England was the more genuine, authentic England. This pre-existing view was, however, heightened for the men who fought. England comes to mean the countryside. It’s the perfection of “Goblin Feet” combined with the nostalgia of “The Happy Mariners” that creates this idea of England as a garden. I’m guessing the soldiers’ taking up of this imagery had to do with the absolute desolation that all of the artillery created, but it’s still kind of astonishing how far it goes. I think it’s summed up best by the Latin “Et in Arcadia Ego, -- “Even in Arcadia, there am I.” England was Arcadia to them. But the speaker there is Death, and according to Fussell that’s a peculiarly British understanding of the line and one that certainly must have been extremely present during the war. In Tolkien’s case, of course, Arcadia is England is the Shire. The Shire IS that good and that beautiful, but it’s still corruptible. I know this has been hashed over before and better so I won’t go over it again much. It’s just this juxtaposition of Arcadia/The Shire and Death/the reign of Sharkey, the cure for which is a return to the Shire’s original pastoral nature. (As a side note, I also think that it’s interesting that the cure for the Black Breath, which could easily be compared to shellshock, was athelas – a plant.) In some ways, I think the scouring of the Shire is a representation, not purposefully necessarily, of what happened to England during and after the war. After the war, the pre-war period was seen as this perfect Golden Age that was lost, which is a role that the Shire certainly plays for the four adventurers and many others as this wonderful little incorruptible corner of the world. Even after Sharkey, they’re able to rebuild. But in England’s case, Sharkey’s men were there to stay.

Tolkien has said outright, I think, that the Dead Marshes are based on what he saw in the war and in a way I can’t quite get at I think it’s very telling that where Frodo and Sam encounter the most dead is not on a battlefield or a cemetery but in the middle of nature. Not nice nature, but the perversion of it, like No Man’s Land with its dead men buried in shell holes where they fell in what had been France’s farmland. Both are Death in a former Arcadia. This goes beyond the war, I think. Tolkien isn’t looking just beyond the war because of course (despite what I may appear to think these days) he wasn’t writing an allegory. Nature restores the destruction of war. This looking to the past as a way to save the current situation pervades his stories, with Aragorn the lost king coming to save the foundering kingdom for instance.

One particular element of this awareness of nature that Fussell discusses at length is a new awareness of the sky at this time (which he attributes to Ruskin’s Modern Painters), an awareness which I see running throughout all of Tolkien’s work. If Fussell is to be believed, in fact, this would not have been present even 50 years previously, and moreover this fascination with the sky is particularly in sunrise and sunset. These two times were particularly relevant to soldiers because of morning and evening stand-to, which was when attacks were thought most likely to occur. This also meant that everyone was deeply aware of when the sun rose and fell and there was a tendency to observe it carefully. I note this particularly in relation to the Ride of the Rohirrim (which I have always loved) and the Pelennor Fields. There is that ray of sunlight coinciding with Frodo’s encounter with the fallen king which pierces the darkness before sinking, but that moment is so full of meaning. Also, one of the most beautiful sentences:

And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.

Even the sound of the words is lovely. And again, it is the ‘swift sunrise’ which counterpoints with the rain being rolled back (like the rain that frequently flooded the soggy trenches of Flanders) that illuminates the first glimpse of Valinor.

Some of Arda’s most important and basic elements of the overarching myth are in the sky and trees, and who are the highest Valar? Varda the queen of stars and Manwë of the air and wind. The whole Silmarillion is structured around jewels containing the light of the trees that functioned as the first equivalents of sun and moon, combining the two major natural elements into one.

If I may:

Though here at journey's end I lie
In darkness buried deep, [. . . ]
Above all shadows rides the Sun
And Stars for ever dwell.
I will not say the Day is done,
Nor bid the Stars farewell.

You’ll never convince me that that’s not at least inspired by the trenches, and all of the places that it looks are heavenward – the sun, the stars, and above all shadows. The sky is, naturally, the only place really visible outside of the trenches. You can’t exactly pop your head over the parapet to see how the poppies are getting on this year. The sky is the one element that remains completely untouched in the war. The landscape and architecture that got in the way is frequently reduced to barely recognizable ruins, but nothing can touch the beauty of the sky, of the sunrises and the stars. Consider Edward Blunden who, like Tolkien, tends toward an archaic style: “The officer and I, having nothing to do but wait . . . sat in the trench considering the stars in their courses.”

Blunden almost could have written the Shire himself and particularly the Scouring. He described ‘a whole sweet countryside amuck with murder,’ to which a reviewer added that, to him, ‘the sight of a rich and fruitful land [France], much like his own, laid waste was an additional torment.” Fussell uses the phrase “an insensate destruction against a background of the unbearably beautiful” which pretty much describes Tolkien’s writing. He goes on to say that “Blunden’s style was his critique. It suggests what the modern world would look like to a sensibility that was genuinely civilized.” He’s looking back to the pastoral images of England not as escapism but as a very willful opposition to the war, using images that could be trite in a way that makes them quietly forceful. Although of course Tolkien was already fascinated by the Norse and Finnish mythologies before the war ever started, I wonder if that switch to a completely imagined world as supposed to reconstructing works from fragments was something to do with what Fussell describes above. The world somehow broke after the war, so Tolkien created a new one not to escape but to make sense of and to counter the one he lived in. The Shire was the world he lived in, or at any rate wanted to live in, and he had to go away and back again. Away to the war and back to England, away to Arda and thus back to England. I wonder if Arda would have been Marred in the same way without the war. I suspect it would have, given Tolkien’s feelings about industrialism, but the war must have heightened this. The agonies of the earth in Melkor’s wake sound not unlike the shelled out Western Front.

I’ll leave off there. There are so many ways in which this is evident in Tolkien’s writing that I’ve probably left out about 90% of it, but it’s time to get this post off my computer while it still has some vestige of coherence.

[solicitr]

O Scildearm-maegdh! I thik you've topped yourself with this one! Seriously, you should assemble these posts into an article for publication. They're that good.

You know, your comments about Edwardian pastoralism really rang a bell because it just happens that I've been reading Saki lately, and it's striking how much of this is present even in that urbane and cynical author; in fact his stories often involve Nature taking revenge, gentle or savage, on clueless (and usually urban) humans.

The sense of longing and regret for a vanished past: how Tolkienian is that! The Cottage of Lost Play is full of it, there is sadness beneath the twee jollity; and of course Gondolin is a tale of exile, destruction, and mourning. If it is the case, as I have guessed, that the invention of a second language sparked the writing of narrative and history, nonetheless the languages are relics of Arcadia, and the narratives the history of its loss.

Athelas: Note also that it's an herb- in the hand of the True King. While I don't deny the Christian symbolism, it's also an echo of the Loss Tolkien felt in his own country: Sharkey's ruffians' downfall begins when they are openly confronted by a King's Messenger - a legitimist intervention against the minions of that uber-politician Saruman. The Shirefolk had always kept the King's Laws long after there was no King, "being both ancient and just;" and ruffians and monsters alike were dubbed folk who "had never heard of the King." After all, Edward VII was the last British monarch to exercise any sort of power.

MSA, what do you think may have been the literary fruit of Tolkien's Army experience not in the trenches, but in the rear- the giant camps in Staffordshire and at Etaples, and in reserve behind the lines in Picardy? An army's imposition of itself simply by marching and camping on the landscape produces something unnatural, soulless and ugly to a Tolkien, I would think.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

O Scildearm-maegdh! I thik you've topped yourself with this one! Seriously, you should assemble these posts into an article for publication. They're that good.

I strongly agree. I'd even help make contact.

[vison]

Very well done, MoS.

I wish I had read this yesterday, yesterday being Armistice Day - Remembrance Day as we call it now.

Earlier in the week, the CBC radio program "Rewind" broadcast an old documentary, or rather parts of an old documentary, that featured actual, real, in-the-moment recordings made on the front line the the Battle of the Somme began. The sound quality was necessarily very poor, but not so poor that you couldn't hear the deadly bedlam, the stutter of machine guns, the thud of artillery shells, the monstrous almost-below-hearing noise of bombs. Men's voices, shouting.

A minute of it in a recording was horrible, but if you try to imagine hours, days, weeks, months of it? The wonder is that they didn't all go mad.

From my first reading of LOTR I understood that Tolkien must have been in the War. And certainly no man who survived it could have survived unscathed. I am sure that only by spending as much time as possible in his dreams could a man like Tolkien get through it without going completely insane. When I was a child the Veterans' hospitals still held men with "shell shock" from the Great War.

My one tiny carping criticism is this: most of the men in the British lines were those despised town dwellers. Little, underfed, undereducated, ignorant, Cockneys and Geordies and Clydesiders. They fought too, they died in their hundreds of thousands. They didn't know the Arcadia they were fighting for, and they never would.

[solicitr]

My one tiny carping criticism is this: most of the men in the British lines were those despised town dwellers. Little, underfed, undereducated, ignorant, Cockneys and Geordies and Clydesiders. They fought too, they died in their hundreds of thousands. They didn't know the Arcadia they were fighting for, and they never would.

Well, that's true of the BEF and especially the New Army as a whole: but Tolkien's Lancashire Fusiliers were recruited almost entirely from the country. The Merseysiders were in the Liverpools (King's Regiment).

[vison]

My one tiny carping criticism is this: most of the men in the British lines were those despised town dwellers. Little, underfed, undereducated, ignorant, Cockneys and Geordies and Clydesiders. They fought too, they died in their hundreds of thousands. They didn't know the Arcadia they were fighting for, and they never would.

Well, that's true of the BEF and especially the New Army as a whole: but Tolkien's Lancashire Fusiliers were recruited almost entirely from the country. The Merseysiders were in the Liverpools (King's Regiment).

Yes. But I just hate it when they're left out. They would have been bored to tears in Hobbiton. No cinema, no music hall. Birds singing and waking them up too early. Toffs walking around with their noses in the air. Dull country dwellers with who'd never left their village. But Bert and Tommy were "British", too, and gave up every bit as much for something they would never have, and were despised while they were doing it.

[solicitr]

But Bert and Tommy were "British", too, and gave up every bit as much for something they would never have, and were despised while they were doing it.

As were the Sams- I don't see that any of them (that survived) got anything from the war. It's not like England or Britain was improved, or saved (the Kaiser's ambitions never looked across the Channel). All that the charnel-house achieved was a temporary setback to German militarism.

But I appreciate the 'despised' part. Too, too true.

[vison]

But Bert and Tommy were "British", too, and gave up every bit as much for something they would never have, and were despised while they were doing it.

As were the Sams- I don't see that any of them (that survived) got anything from the war. It's not like England or Britain was improved, or saved (the Kaiser's ambitions never looked across the Channel). All that the charnel-house achieved was a temporary setback to German militarism.

But I appreciate the 'despised' part. Too, too true.

I find it nearly unbearable, to be honest. I started writing a long Remembrance Day post, but had to give it up. I can't be rational about it.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

Sharkey's ruffians' downfall begins when they are openly confronted by a King's Messenger - a legitimist intervention against the minions of that uber-politician Saruman. The Shirefolk had always kept the King's Laws long after there was no King, "being both ancient and just;" and ruffians and monsters alike were dubbed folk who "had never heard of the King." After all, Edward VII was the last British monarch to exercise any sort of power.

That's an excellent point. I wonder if this looking to monarchy also had to do with the rise of anarchy and the rash of assassinations going on while Tolkien was growing up in the nineties. The War of course was also so much about disorder and the overturn of, well, everything that the return of an older (and better) order is almost a refuge. I'm working my way through a book of WWI poetry and there's an epitaph by Rudyard Kipling which says simply 'If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.' Aragorn's return is almost a direct argument against this kind of thinking, of blame for the Old Men and the Generals (despite Denethor).

(I'll get back to your final point, soli, when I've got a bit more time. To be honest, I was kind of pleased that no one had so far pointed out the gaping hole in my ramblings.)

My one tiny carping criticism is this: most of the men in the British lines were those despised town dwellers. Little, underfed, undereducated, ignorant, Cockneys and Geordies and Clydesiders. They fought too, they died in their hundreds of thousands. They didn't know the Arcadia they were fighting for, and they never would.

You're completely right and I certainly didn't mean to forget about them. I was only referring to the people whom I'm guessing Tolkien would have associated with or who would have left impressions. And of course most of the writing and art we have are from those people -- the officers, the educated -- so they created the war in our cultural imagination. It's an admittedly skewed view.

I wish you had posted what you wrote for Remembrance Day. I would have loved to read it.

[vison]

I see you mention Rudyard Kipling. Kipling moved heaven and earth, used all his influence, to get his son into the army - Jack had been found unfit to serve due to poor eyesight. He was in France for 6 weeks and went missing at the Battle of Loos (I think) and was, of course, killed in action. He was 18 years old.

That's about all I can say about that. It is so inexpressibly sad.

Next year, maybe I'll be in a better frame of mind.

Meanwhile, your posts are most excellent and while I don't always agree, I always enjoy them.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

I actually started writing this post last year was actually active. It never felt quite right and still doesn't. I suspect that after all this time it is overwritten, so if the phrasing is awkward, that's why. I hope it answers the question posed at least somewhat.
Seeing as how it is now Armistice Day in France and England, where it counts, this seemed a fitting day to finally put it up, in some small odd way to honour the day.

MSA, what do you think may have been the literary fruit of Tolkien's Army experience not in the trenches, but in the rear- the giant camps in Staffordshire and at Etaples, and in reserve behind the lines in Picardy? An army's imposition of itself simply by marching and camping on the landscape produces something unnatural, soulless and ugly to a Tolkien, I would think.

First off, I should note that it has now been a year since I read Tolkien and the Great War and the library made me return their copy (What will they think of next?), and ages and ages since I read either the Lost or the Unfinished Tales, so please take all of this with a small heap of salt and maybe a little pepper for extra measure.

The first thing that occurs to me is the fact that there are almost no happy homecomings in Tolkien’s writing. “Home” is either gone or somehow altered. Sometimes this is catastrophic, the most extreme example being Túrin and the destruction he leaves in his wake. Everywhere that he calls home is eventually ruined. Sometimes, though, it’s more psychological, a feeling of alienation. If I recall correctly, that’s one of effects of the Cottage of Lost Play, isn’t it? There’s a sort of longing for it, a knowledge in the real world that one isn’t quite right there, which is also how Tolkien felt about the English country of his childhood. Granted, the war couldn’t have been farther from the Cottage of Lost Play, but this goes back to what we were discussing about fairy stories; a lot of vets did have that experience – even though home was subjectively better, they no longer fit there. Even Bilbo returns to find all of his belongings and his home being sold off at auction, with some of his neighbors happier to have his things than to have him returned. Frodo finds the Shire twisted beyond recognition and his deeds all but forgotten or ignored there. As he explains to Sam, the Shire has been saved but not for him. He’s not bitter about that like many of the WWI vets were, but it’s that’s same sense of home no longer being what it was.

I’m going to guess that Tolkien’s reaction in some ways was quite similar to Frodo’s. Even leaving out that sense of alienation, Tolkien had such a strong sense of England as home that to go back, to be reprieved to the safety of his homeland only to be shut up in dismal camps away from the countryside in favor of a mechanized warfare may have seemed bitter, not to mention that his dearest friends were still in harm’s way. It’s almost too neat: Frodo leaves his idyllic home and returns to Sharkey’s industrialized countryside; Tolkien leaves his arcadian childhood home and returns to the monotony of dreary camps and hospitals. And of course, even when he is finally discharged entirely, Geoffrey Bache Smith and Rob Gilson are already dead. Even had he returned to a perfect house with Edith and no worries, that cannot but have marred his return. To sum up those two paragraphs: in Tolkien’s writings, no one really gets to go home again because, for various reasons, the home that they remember simply isn’t there anymore. (I do have more to say on this, but I’m going to leave that for my next essay so…stay tuned.)

Speaking of hospitals, it struck me in rereading that the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is never really finished by Tolkien. I realize this is partly because the hobbits don’t experience it, but it tapers out. We know they win, but how? Helm’s Deep gets such a grand ending and Isengard is given a good accounting, even if it is after the fact. But Pelennor? Aragorn, Faramir, Merry, Pippin, Éowyn, Legolas, most of the characters we have any kind of interest in end up in the Houses of Healing either because they are wounded or to visit/assist the wounded. The Pelennor Fields is epic. Helm’s Deep only gets a chapter but the battle for Minas Tirith gets a pretty solid part of Book V with the mustering of armies and the various parts of the battle and whatnot. A skirmish it is not. And yet Tolkien leaves this grand sweeping scene he’s set up for us and instead gathers everyone into the Houses of Healing. One main character (Merry) and two secondary characters (Éowyn and Faramir) don’t even make it to the final battle the Gates. I could of course be wrong, but I doubt that would have happened without his experience of being sick through most of the war. The attitude towards this in particular reflects his own time in the “Houses of Healing” to me. It shows up a bit in The Children of Húrin as well – Sador Labadal and the lame Brandir, neither of whom can fight, are both given important roles in the narrative and appear to have more wisdom than Túrin himself. Aerin is acknowledged and honoured as someone who gives what aid and healing she can in Dor-lómin. And finally, there’s Ioreth. Ioreth recognizes the King for who he is not by a crown or crest or even a noble bearing; it’s his power to heal. Healing is the reveal of the King, and I do think that comes straight from his experiences both up the line and behind it. This is not, as far as I know, present in any source text that Tolkien may have drawn upon – even Arthur who ‘healed’ Britain for a while was not a healer. Beowulf is never a healer; he’s a warrior to the exclusion of all else. It’s the importance not just of waging war but of mending what it has broken. I’ve read in quite a few places the medical care for British wounded was exemplary. There was no worry about quality of treatment, which Tolkien certainly would have had many opportunities to witness, and this is in some part what Aragorn embodies. He may lead people into death and danger, but he is also responsible (sometimes directly) for their treatment.

I bit afraid to wander to far into this territory for fear of projecting, but I do wonder if Merry and Éowyn’s feeling of being stranded back in Minas Tirith were shared by Tolkien in 1917-18. There are cases where men would for various reasons be invalided back to England but feel compelled to return to the front. (It’s certainly true in the cases of Sassoon and Owen, both of whom requested to be sent back up the line.) Some felt this intense need to be back at the front, in part because they felt like they had abandoned their men and in part because “home” had become it’s own kind of hell thanks to uncomprehending and uncaring civilians. Tolkien never got to that point. That is evident in his writing. In fact, I’d say that his war experience was in some ways perfect – he was there long enough to give him the sense of darkness and loss but not long enough that this soured into the cynicism or despair that characterized others of his time. I do wonder if he, like Sassoon, felt some guilt for being safe whilst his comrades were very much in the line of fire or even just felt cut off, much like Merry and Pippin’s reaction to being potentially left behind at Rivendell. Faramir is the reasonable side of this, saying that it would be unwise if not impossible to follow the Captains to the Black Gate, but there’s still that sense of being stuck away from the action. Túrin also struggles with this and it usually leads him to terrible things. He does the same thing over and over, in Doriath, and Nargothrond, in Brethil: he does not want to be left out of the fight, so he figuratively goes over the top and attacks regardless of realistic outcomes. And it seems that what he is frequently driven by is fear of being left out of the fight, preferring to go out and face his fate rather than hide from it, which is not unlike Haig’s favourite philosophy, which was summed up by Blackadder as “a brilliant plan that involves us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy.” As a signaler, Tolkien wouldn’t necessarily have had to do the walking very slowly part, but given that he was in the thick of the Somme he certainly was around when others had to. Both the French and British commanders were, like Túrin, also enamored of the offensive spirit and felt the need to attack regardless of how much advantage that would actually bring. The British in particular were frequently sent out on patrols into No Man’s Land which were both costly and frequently ineffectual. Túrin is a bit more subtle, but he doesn’t exactly like living in stealth mode. He constantly feels in danger of being out of the fight; Tolkien, conversely, spent most of the war being forcibly out of the fight. Given that The Children of Húrin was started in 1918, Túrin is surely in some way influenced by these factors.

Separating Tolkien from that action was the sea. If I remember correctly, the sea seems to be one of the things that really impressed itself upon Tolkien’s consciousness during this time. I suspect that it is in this case similar to the sky of the trenches. If I may borrow your phrasing, the sea defies the army’s imposition. It can be mined and filled with U-Boats and battleships, but nothing can ever truly change the beauty of light upon water or the music of the waves upon the shore. To conveniently quote my own signature and the Ainulindalë, “. . . In the water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the sea, and yet know not what for what they listen.” Eärendil brings together those two elements rather nicely, actually. A mariner of the sky, the two elements of nature that could never be truly disfigured by any war or army, and particularly one who embodies the moon with the light of the trees. Eärendil is elemental, light, sea, and sky. He was Tolkien’s first figure and he is, in some ways, the purest, being above and no longer of the earth and earthly conflicts despite the fact that he saves mankind from that conflict he can no longer take part in. And again, there’s that sense of separation from the main battle.

This is even more speculative than the rest of this post, but the nature of Melkor once he retreats to Angband and of Sauron could perhaps be traced back to the war as well. Even when in the trenches, it was very unusual to see the enemy unless you were directly attacking. A lot of the violence was long range, carried out by artillery or by snipers and machine gunners hidden in their pillboxes. If the enemy could see you of course he could shoot you. Companies wired themselves into their trenches and stayed below the parapet to avoid being shot because of course, if yours is the only head sticking up, the Germans are probably going to see it and take aim. If you did go out into No Man’s Land the last person you wanted to see was the enemy. I don’t remember where I read this, but the sight of a German was something to be remarked on because it wasn’t frequent. This may have been especially true for Tolkien since he was a signaler and wouldn’t even have been up with the infantry who would have encountered Germans during raids, etc. He was at the front, but not in a way that really encountered the other side. Even if he hadn’t been a signaler, so much was done with artillery and gas that it was easy to kill lots of people without ever seeing them. This must have been exacerbated by how much of the war Tolkien spent enlisted but in England. He’s still working for the army, still technically engaged in fighting the war, but the actual battle is so far away. He meet the enemy in combat despite being a soldier. The Dark Lords also seem to favour this long range method. Melkor wreaks his destruction in person sometimes, but he also spends a lot of time up in the North, using other instruments to do his deeds. Sauron is NEVER seen in LOTR. His soldiers and emissaries appear, but Sauron himself might as well be invisible. LOTR wouldn’t be any different if he were. Both Melkor and Sauron are in some ways more ideas than they are actual embodied creatures. Beren and Lúthien do directly go up against the former but they have to go and find him. Túrin is destroyed by Melkor but never once battles with him directly. Frodo and Sam destroy Sauron without ever seeing him. The enemy is frequently far off but he tends to be as vague as he is sinister in many cases. Melkor also weaves destruction into the very fabric of Arda, which is Arda Marred. Nothing really escapes, but it is particularly shown against the violent destruction of the physical earth, which sounds rather similar to the ruin of No Man’s Land and the twisting of everything created by the artillery. This surely wasn’t limited to the front, however, since of course the huge bodies of men training in England and the camps can’t have exactly done the landscaping any favours. The war marred everything, which Tolkien may have experienced even more forcefully once he returned home and found that home wasn’t what it had been.

Finally, this is also complete speculation because I honestly can’t remember if I’m making things up or if Garth actually discussed this, but Tolkien was part of the more administrative side of things in the camp, wasn’t he, and also dealt with training. A lot of men would have passed through on their ways to the front, and thus to being killed and maimed in various unpleasant ways. So my speculation is that he saw both sides of the mechanization of war – the war machines in terms of tanks and machine guns, but also the bureaucracy of it and I don’t think that’s something that would have seemed very good to him. His heroes are the small people, the hobbits, the ordinary ones, and the turning of such into fodder for the cannon to be ground out and shipped to France like so much cargo, which is also the way that Sauron treats his orcs. They’re disposable. I seem to remember Garth saying that the orcs and that whole side of the War of the Ring didn’t represent the Germans so much as it represented all of the bad things that he observed in both the Axis and the Entente powers. Orcs are explicitly disposable – Sauron couldn’t care less about losing one or two to Shelob, or to in fighting, accidents, etc. The heroes of the story, the hobbits and men of Rohan and Gondor mourn for their losses and honour them. They sing for Boromir, they raise mounds to the fallen Rohirrim, even Snowmane has a grave and epitaph. Lives are not needlessly thrown away in the way that Sauron does. No one is replaceable to Gandalf and Aragorn’s side. Sauron had so many that they didn’t matter as individuals. It’s fairly common knowledge how Tolkien felt about industrialization; it would follow that the mechanization of life and death would also disquiet him. Thus the analogy not of Sauron/Melkor to German, but to the ravages of war in general. This, to Tolkien, was the real enemy: not a country or a ruler, but loss of beauty and individuality, the mechanization of life and death.

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Great post Mossy. A lot to think about.