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Page: Profile: Wren's Nest News Local
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Article: 8554
[Art/Music/lit]
Date Posted:
11/28/2003
9:23:53 am EST
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Comments: 4
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Battle of the Somme... and Lord of the Rings
Author: Ian Adamson Source: The Belfast Telegraph (UK)
Title: BATTLE OF THE SOMME... AND LORD OF THE RINGS
JRR Tolkien never forgot what he called the "animal horror" of trench warfare. The sights which he experienced at the Somme, the images, sounds and the people he met, stayed with him until his death in 1973.
But from that horror came the inspiration for his great work, The Lord of the Rings.
A new blockbuster movie in the Lord of the Ring trilogy is due to hit cinemas just before Christmas.
Meanwhile an exhibition opening in Northern Ireland on Monday will focus on the dark reality behind the fantasy - the horror which Tolkien and friends ,like the Belfast writer CS Lewis, author of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, experienced in the trenches.
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Community Thoughts: There are 4 comments posted | Reverse Sort |
| TTT | Nov 29th. at 5:48:20 am EST |
by Raven (NJ) - wc_xemail
The war may not have been the conscious basis for his writing, and there were many influences, but no-one who hasn't experienced combat could have that sense of vividness, horror, and grim reality to their descriptions of it. My great-uncle survived the Somme (and Palestine, and Belgium) somehow or other. I remember him as a small, lively man, and it was strange to think that he volunteered well underage, that his true age was known (he was officially labelled a "boy soldier") , and that so many of the men who fought in that war were several years underage.
To my mind, Theoden's characterisation in TTT was a wonderful portrayal of the kind of frontline officer that many men knew: resolute in front of the men, while despairing at the madness of it all, the guilt of having to send their men into certain death with no hope of rescue. Tolkien was an officer and would have lived that experience. To see TTT especially is to have the horror of WWI writ large on the screen; whether Tolkien consciously intended it or not, it is obvious. LOTR is one of the great war "romances", and one of the greatest anti-war books of all time, in my estimation.
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| The War To End All Wars | Nov 29th. at 2:32:49 am EST |
by Wild_Huntsman (Toronto, Ontario) - wc_xemail
Tolkien said he didn't write the Lord of the Rings and his other tales as metaphors for anything. If there is simile in his writings, it is descriptive and impressionistic and based on his experiences, on the ugly things he witnessed and lived through. The years of war were devastating for everyone who went. They couldn't help but be changed by their experiences. Yet from the violence he draws a strong sense of compassion for everyone who had to endure those hardships.
All Tolkien's writings reflect a deeply felt loathing for the modern industrial world. The first world war was the culmination of that mentality, the assembly-line approach to everything. He loved nature, he loved the countryside and green, living things. Every good character in his stories is either an artisan or a farmer or some trade we would see in the agrarian middle-ages. The Orcs are the world of inferior, cheaper and soulless mass-production. They destroy the living forests to feed the fires of mass industy and Tolkien's description of Mordor could as easily be a description of the barren waste of no-man's-land as the slag-heaps of a steel-mill or smelter.
He obviously didn't write his epics to be an allegory of modern warfare, but the soul-crushing military machine of a modern conscript army is very evident in his discription. In later letters, his son even uses the term orcs as slang to talk about the militaristic martinets who insist on mindless regimentation to a ridiculous degree. It's an apt description. He knew such people, every army is full of them, and he didn't like them. The kind who unquestioningly sent men out and over the top even though they had almost no chance of survival, the way Sauron throws his minions at the walls without regard for their worth.
It's that experience and awareness that all soldiers, on both sides, suffered also prompts him to give all characters depth. When Sam overhears Gorbag and Shadrach grumbling together at Cirith Ungol, they become almost sympathetic characters. They are certainly not one-dimensional nor are they mindless throwaway plot devices. They are in Sauron's army and they may be bred as brutal creatures, but they still go to war as reluctantly as everyone else.
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| Yes And No | Nov 28th. at 1:26:35 pm EST |
by Chris (Seattle, WA) - wc_xemail
Okay, yes. Tolkien served on the western front, participating in the event that shattered the psyche of western culture. I have no doubt that marked him as surely as it did all, veteran and civilian, who survived it.
That said, the good professor clearly states in his introduction to the Lord of the Rings that the war-time experiences of himself and others, including both World Wars, were in no way a conscious basis for the story. I don't have the books handy, but Tolkien lists examples of how the story would differ, were the wars its basis. 'The dark tower would not have been destroyed, but occupied, ' or words to that effect.
Now, despite that, I find it inconceivable that his experiences did not inform his work. Of course they did. But so did his love of languages and heroic literature, especially that of northern europe, in which the setting, tone and style of all the Middle-Earth books are so firmly fixed; much more firmly, it seems to me, than in even so traumatic an experience as the First World War.
I mean no offence to anyone, but if an author specifically says he did or didn't do something for some reason, I find it more polite to take him at his word than try and second guess him. I immediately thought of the wars when I first read LotRs, but if Tolkien says that's not what they're about, then I'll believe that.
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| Wow... | Nov 28th. at 9:48:46 am EST |
by Danika (Perth, Western Australia) - wc_xemail
I love LOTR....it always fascinates and saddens me when I think of what went through Tolkien's mind when he got his inspiration for the story. Everytime I watch it, I like to imagine what it would've been like for him and am amazed how he could take that experience and create something so detailed and awesome from something so sad and terrifying. Tolkien truly is one of the best writers ever (well, i think so anyway!) . Much better than Shakespeare...I can relate to and understand Tolkien!
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