![]() ![]() “A real taste for fairy-stories,” Tolkien once explained, “was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.” War was a catalyst for Tolkien: it was an unprecedented experience that galvanized him to write stories unlike anything the world had ever seen before. There is a distinct causality between Tolkien’s experiences in combat and the literature he would write (and re-write, and revise, and re-write again) over the fifty-seven years that ensued. ![]() That mythos would not be called the The Silmarillion until the book’s publication in 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death, but its disparate pieces were brought to life both in the midst and in the aftermath of the Great War: Morgoth and the fall of Gondolin Eä and the Undying Lands Ainulindalë and the War of Wrath. More stories followed shortly after, snippets of a larger world beyond the scope of any fairy-story Tolkien would have encountered in his childhood, but which would eventually become the grand mythos of Middle-earth, itself. They were “fairy-stories,” so-called: little vignettes, concerning gnomes and sprites and elf-like creatures, the kinds of stories with which Tolkien had been loosely enamored “since I learned to read.” It wasn’t until he was invalided back to England with trench fever during the Battle of the Somme-where two of Tolkien’s closest friends were killed-that “Tolkien wrote out…the haunting epic of Gondolin, a city of high culture which is destroyed in a hammerblow by a nightmarish army.” It was in between his duties as officer that Tolkien began to lay the narrative foundations of what would become Middle-earth. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Battalion Signaling Officer to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, seeking relief-however temporary-from boredom, chaos, and brutality with pen strokes and scraps of paper, writing “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.” The roots of The Lord of the Rings broke ground during the war: there was 2 nd Lt. Tolkien’s epic never found its way onto any “Best-Of” lists of war literature? Why, in spite of the overwhelming number of parallels, has it never been counted among the greatest novels to emerge from the events of World War I? So why, in all the years since its publication, has J.R.R. Looking past the Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, kings, and Istari, past the natural and unnatural magic, past the One Ring and its maker, war rests firmly at the heart of The Lord of the Rings. It borrows heavily from that grandest of traditions set forth by works like Beowulf and The Wanderer-Old English warrior poetry, by turns heartbreaking and bloody, meant to be spoken-and its author was steeped in the same fetid waters that brewed the most famous novels to come out of the Great War in which he fought: All Quiet on the Western Front, Parade’s End, A Farewell to Arms… Right, photo taken at the Battle of Passchendaele, 1917. Left, shot from the film, The Lord of the Rings. Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.War Without Allegory: WWI, Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians. WORLD WAR II ONLINE KEYMAPPING NOT SAVEING HOW TO
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