John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), better known by the initials placed in front of the surname, J.R.R. Tolkien, became world famous because of the literary universe he created, “Middle Earth”, where he set novels such as The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, in addition to being one of the greatest representatives of the literary fantasy genre, was also a great university researcher. His field of expertise was philology, the historical and etymological study of languages.
An extremely important fact about Tolkien's life is his participation in the First World War. Just like your friend and also a writer, Ç. S. Lewis, and thousands of young intellectuals of the same time, Tolkien had to go to the front of the battle when the war was already in advanced process in the year of 1916. In previous years, battles such as Yes, in Belgium, where toxic gases, had already shown the catastrophic face of war. In 1916, two other battles would produce an unprecedented carnage, the Battle of Verdun and the Somme. Tolkien participated in that last one.
The grouping of the British armed forces to which Tolkien was linked was the First Battalion of the "Lancashire Fusiliers”, who was present at theSomme's Battle. In that battle, on the first day of combat alone, there were 30,000 British soldiers wounded and nearly 20,000 dead. The impressions of this battle had populated Tolkien's imagination for many years. The visions of men torn apart, mutilated, with deformed faces and rotting bodies led him years later to the elaboration of the image of the lake of the dead, in The Lord of the Rings, and also to the image From orcs, with its marked physical deformity.
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Before going to war, Tolkien had already married Edith Bratt and he sent his wife several letters. In some of them, he mentioned the situations he went through in the middle of the war, the meditations on the work he wanted to do again in Oxford, where he worked as a teacher, ideas for the development of the Elvish language and other fictional elements that would be incorporated into his construction.
On one of the combat occasions, Tolkien contracted trench fever and was hospitalized. During this period, he began writing the short stories “The Fall of Gondolin” and “The Birth of Eärendil”, as he himself reports in a letter to the publisher Houhgton Miffin Co, in July 1955:
“The Fall of Gondolin (and The Birth of Eärendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The central part of the mythology, the question of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren, arose from a small clearing in the forest full of “hemlocks” (or other white umbelliferae) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula—where I occasionally went when I was freed from regimental duties when I was at the Humber Garrison in 1918.”
Unlike authors like Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Jünger, who wrote their novels “Nothing New on the Front” and “Steel Storms”, respectively, portraying the events of World War I realistically, Tolkien preferred to incorporate these events allegorically into his works of fiction. fantastic.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
FERNANDES, Claudio. "J.R.R. Tolkien in World War I"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/guerras/jrr-tolkien-na-primeira-guerra-mundial.htm. Accessed on June 28, 2021.
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