He had three weeks of training at the British camp at Étaples, during which he was transferred to the 11 th Lancashire Fusiliers. Tolkien's battalion was sent to France in June 1916. The terrible casualty rate among the British forces made it clear that he might never return from France. Tolkien decided to marry his long-time love, Edith Bratt, in March, 1916. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 13 th Lancashire Fusiliers and eventually was appointed battalion signaling officer.
Us army greenbooks professional#
Encouraged by his TCBS friends, Tolkien began to express himself through poetry, taking his first steps towards finding his voice as a writer.Īfter taking First Class Honors at Oxford in 1915, Tolkien enlisted in the New Army, the volunteer army that succeeded Britain's small professional army, which had been decimated early in the war. His three closest friends, fellow members of a schoolboy club they called the TCBS (Tea Club and Barrovian Society, named for their fondness for meeting for tea at Barrows stores) also enlisted. Unwilling to leave Oxford, he joined the Officer's Training Corps, which deferred his enlistment until after he had finished his degree. Tolkien was at Oxford working on his degree in English Language and Literature when England declared war on Germany in 1914. Yet at the same time it gave him an appreciation for the virtues of ordinary people, for friendships, and for what beauty he could find amidst ugliness. It interrupted his career, separated him from his wife, and damaged his health. World War I represented everything Tolkien hated: the destruction of nature, the deadly application of technology, the abuse and corruption of authority, and the triumph of industrialization.
Even though Tolkien denied that his writing was based on his life, he once wrote to his son Christopher regarding his war experiences: I took to 'escapism': or really transforming experience into another form and symbol with Morgoth and Orcs and the Eldalie (representing beauty and grace of life and artefact) and so on and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since and I still draw on the conceptions then hammered out. I think it is likely that Tolkien drew on his memories of fighting on the Western Front while writing The Lord of the Rings perhaps because at the time he was writing it, England was again engaged in total war with Germany, a war that in many ways was the continuation of the one in which he had served. However, it is also true that people are shaped by times in which they live. Tolkien himself stated that the war had only a limited influence on his writing. They surface in the sense of loss that suffuses the story, in the ghastly landscapes of places like Mordor, in the sense of gathering darkness, and in the fates of his Hobbit protagonists. Instead, Tolkiens war experiences are sublimated in his fiction. These writers directly portrayed their war experience in their stories and poetry. Tolkien is not a World War I writer in the sense that, say, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, or Ernest Hemingway are.
It is dangerous to assume that an authors life experiences are directly reflected in his or her fiction. While The Lord of the Rings is clearly not an allegory of World War I, there are a number of similarities between it and the war that hint at a connection between them. What struck me while re-reading the book as an adult was how much parts of it sounded like accounts of World War I.
I first read The Lord of the Rings as a seventh grader at the time, I didnt look beyond the surface of the story. Tolkiens service in the British Army during World War I may have influenced his fiction, particularly The Lord of the Rings. This essay takes a speculative look at how J.R.R. Tolkien, forward to The Lord of the Rings By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead. 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. JRR Tolkien and World War I - Nancy Marie Ott | Special Guest | JRR Tolkien and World War I