Sam falls into the muck…”and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere…For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. You may remember a scene in the book The Lord of The Rings, and in the movie, where the small group of hobbits that accompany Frodo, including Samwise Gamgee, are moving through a swampy quagmire on their way to return the mysterious and powerful ring to where it came from. Tolkien is well remembered for his fantasy series, “The Lord of the Rings.” The kernel of the mythology…arose from a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks near Roos on the Holderness Peninsula to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber garrison. Tolkien said of the book, “The mythology and languages first began to take shape during the 1914-1918 War. It is clear that Tolkien’s experience of war was the catalyst for his “The Lord of The Rings.” It caused him to write a collection of stories that were unlike anything the world had seen before. More stories followed that began to shape a world that was far larger than the fairy tales of his youth, eventually becoming the grand myth of Middle-earth, which would be published under the name “Silmarillion” four years after his death in 1977. When he was evacuated back to England, recovering from the effects of the trench fever, he wrote out the haunting epic of Gondolin, in which a city of high culture is destroyed by a nightmarish Army. Tolkien grew up, like most English kids, reading the Anglo-Saxon myths about Beowulf and the poems of the Wanderer, fairy tales, and vignettes concerning gnomes and sprites and elf-like creatures. Like all combat, it was often 90% boredom interrupted by 10% of abject terror and destruction. Tolkien, in those times of boredom, in between his duties as a signal officer, was writing with his pen on scraps of paper, sometimes in grimy canteens, or in bell-tents along the trenches under candle light, even in dugouts under shell fire. It was there that he began laying out the foundational narrative that would eventually become Middle-earth. You might be able to imagine, too, that trench warfare was not a 24/7 reality. It does not take a great deal of imagination to think what the living conditions were like in those trenches, or the health issues that would arise from such conditions. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings battles and the fact of war that occupies a central role in the tale, were shaped by this experience. From July to October of 1916, Tolkien was in the trenches with his Lancaster Fusiliers at the Somme. Indeed, he lost two of his best friends who were killed in action there. The horror of this battle can be seen in its casualty counts. The casualties numbered over 1 million, including more than 300,000 killed in action. British forces alone suffered 420,000 casualties, including 125,000 deaths. Tolkien would be among those casualties being invalided back to England, suffering from what was called “trench fever,” a louse-borne disease. The Lord of the Rings was born out of war. Tolkien served as a Signal Officer in WWI. against a seemingly overwhelming, powerful, implacable, cruel and violent force bent on bringing the whole of Middle-earth under its rule. Indeed, it is a book about war, all out, world engulfing, desperate war, that pits a coalition of beleaguered races of humans and elves, dwarfs, hobbits, etc. with the 11th Lancaster Fusiliers serving as the battalion Signal Officer. His greatest known work is, of course, The Lord of the Rings. This majestic fantasy that has captured the imagination of young and old since it was published in July 1954, is a masterful tale of a great struggle. Lewis as well, in that he too was a combat veteran of the Great War, WWI. Tolkien the masterful writer of the epic fantasy, The Lord of The Rings. Lewis was one of the Inklings, as was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who we know better as J.R.R. They called themselves “The Inklings” and came together there because they all shared an abiding interest in literature and the power of narrative, that is, story-telling, particularly through the writing of fantasy, to reveal truths and universal human values. In the 1930s and 40s a group of writers and Oxford University professors used to meet regularly at a local pub in the university town of Oxford.
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