Here is why Tolkien’s work has been called a modern story, a “descent into hell” in its description of the sufferings of war.74 Perhaps, in a sense, Tolkien has written a kind of war diary after all: an account of the pains and terrors of combat, yet clothed in the language of myth. “It might indeed be seen in certain respects as the last work of First World War literature,” writes Brian Rosebury, “published almost forty years after the war ended.”
