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Indeed, as he later acknowledged, one of the great heroic figures in The Lord of the Rings is based on his firsthand knowledge of the men in the trenches of the Great War: “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.”
Tolkien’s love of the English countryside, his attachment to nature, rebelled against the chaotic industrialization of his day. His dissent found an imaginative outlet: the bucolic world of the hobbits, the region of Middle-earth known as the Shire.
The house of his famous hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, takes its name—“Bag End”—from his aunt’s farm in Worcestershire. “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size),” he admitted. “I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.”16 In contrast, Tolkien viewed the overreliance on technology, “the Machine,” as a step toward dominating others. The act of “bulldozing the real world,” Tolkien wrote, involves “coercing other wills.”17 Hence, the hateful realm of Mordor is sustained by its black engines and factories, which
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Reflecting on his experiences years later, Tolkien acknowledged that his taste for fantasy was “quickened to full life by war” and that “the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914–18 war.”46 Much of the “early parts” of his epic, he explained, were “done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”47 In other words, Tolkien had begun to lay the foundation for his war trilogy.
JRRT Bio
Tolkien the soldier lived among these “ordinary men,” fought alongside them, witnessed their courage under fire, joked with them, mourned with them, and watched them die. Thus the “small people” who fought and suffered in the Great War helped inspire the creation of the unlikely heroes in Tolkien’s greatest imaginative work. Like the soldiers in that war, the homely hobbits could not have perceived how the fate of nations depended upon their stubborn devotion to duty.
Jrr bio
L: “These fiendish German atrocities—” K: “But are not fiends a figment of the imagination?” L: “Very well, then; these brutish atrocities—” K: “But none of the brutes does anything of the kind!” L: “Well, what am I to call them?” K: “Is it not plain that we must call them simply Human?”27
