The influence that World War I had on Tolkien and his writing

Tolkien and the Great War

by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

In honor of Armistice Day my article for Imaginative Conservative this week explores the influence that World War I had on Tolkien and his writing.

It is from these first hand experiences of war that Tolkien was to find the ground and content for a fantasy that was empowered by vivid realism. Writing in his essay on fairy stories, Tolkien records, “A real taste for fairy stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.”

C.S. Lewis, who was himself wounded in the battle of the Somme, recognized the landscape of war in Tolkien’s masterpiece. Reviewing The Two Towers and The Return of the King for Time and Tide in 1955, Lewis writes, “This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when ‘everything is now ready.’ The flying civilians, the lively vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground…that is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the dwarf). ‘There is good rock here This country has tough bones.’ ”

The realism of the great battle which takes place in The Lord of the Rings springs from Tolkien’s war experiences, but so does the key friendship of the story.

Read the whole article here.

..............

Source: www.patheos.com