yr12_induction_kristensen_s

=**How were Tolkien’s writings affected by his experiences of the World War I?**=

In this essay I want to have a look at how [|J.R.R. Tolkien's] participation in [|World War I] may have had an effect on his later writings, with focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, the //[|Lord of the Rings]//. For although Tolkien was not a World War I writer who portrayed his experiences, there are some traces of the war below the surface. For anyone who lived through such a time surely had to be marked by it in one way or another, for as Tolkien wrote in the Preface of "The Lord of the Rings,": //"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."//

**Landscapes**
In Tolkien's fictive world the most obvious similarity to the real world seem to be the landscapes. Mordor, where the evil in the //Lord of the Rings// is the strongest, and parts of the lands around it, Tolkien himself has admitted in one of his letters that: //"the Dead Marshes and the Morannon owe something to Northern France after [|the Battle of the Somme]"//. When Tolkien described the lands ruined by evil in The Lord of the Rings, he clearly seems to draw the pictures he remembered from the front in the war.

The no-man's land in Northern France and Tolkien's [|Mordor] also have many similarities, like the shell craters in France which are similar to the pits and hole in Mordor, the lack of life both places, and the almost or completely destroyed nature.

The Dead Marshes is also a landscape that has very much inspiration from the Western Front. There the rotting forms of the soldiers from a war about three thousand years earlier lie in the swamp. On the Western Front there were also dead soldiers lying in pools of mud, and this is without doubt something Tolkien would have seen several times during his time in the trenches, and would not have forgotten. The Dead Marshes also reflect the battlefields of Flanders (picture below), where men drowned in the mud. Duckboard path in Flanders (photo form WWI, taken from [|here])

**Characters**
But not only the world in which Tolkien’s writings are placed is effected by his war time experience. Also some of the significant characters in his writings have a flare of the humans he knew through the war. For example many people believe that the four hobbits are influenced by the four main members in [|T.C.B.S.], where Tolkien and his close friends were before the war.

The two hobbits Sam and Frodo are an example of this. Much of what they suffered through, like hunger and thirst, where things that were a part of the everyday life of a soldier at the Western Front, as there was often a lack of food and water, because the supplies could not reach the front. The stench of dead bodies at the front, is also something which Tolkien used to describe places were evil had been at work, as for example in the Dead Marshes.

Since Tolkien was an officer under the war, he got assigned a [|batman] – a sort of servant who looked after his belongings and took care of him. Tolkien respected these men, and they and several other “normal” soldiers in his battalion were his inspiration for the character Sam Gamgee. As Tolkien himself later wrote in one of his letters; //"My 'Sam Gamgee' is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself."// Samwise Gamgee; Tolkien's picture of the brave English soldiers.

**Never ending war**
Both in Tolkien's writings and in WWI it seemed as if the people were caught in a never-ending war. Each victory in the war was just a little setback for the enemy and a great loss of lives for themselves. In both places the feeling that they were fighting an unwinnable war was present. A soldier who survived the war would always have to bury someone they had known, but also their enemies, like on the picture below. In Tolkien's writings this often takes place, and when the dead were their friends they are always shown as much respect as possible.

Czechoslovak burying German soldiers (picture from [|this page])

**After the war**
When the War of the Ring is over, all the four hobbits return home, but to different fates, somehow like the veterans of the WWI. Merry and Pippin, who have been in battle, but not in the horrors of Mordor, were like the soldiers how were sent to war, but were not sent to the trenches. They resume their old lives without too much trouble, and manage fine. Sam and Frodo were more like the soldiers who had to spend time in the trenches. Sam manages to put the war behind him, but Frodo doesn't. Frodo becomes an image of a shell-shocked veteran, and he does not cope well with his old life, and eventually leaves Middle-earth.

**Ending of an era**
There is yet another similarity between WWI and //The Lord of the Rings//, and that's the sense of loss and sorrow. In both cases very many people have died, the world as it was known up till then was changed, and it seemed hard to go back to the way everything was before after all the terror experienced. Both places it took a long time till the rebuilding of the shattered homes and counties were done, and people could go on and live their lives like they had used to do. Neither in the real world or in Tolkien's fictive one is there a happy ending. So many people had died for something they wouldn't be able to enjoy any more.

//"… Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them so that others may keep them."// //"The Grey Havens," The Return of the King//