A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

by Joseph Loconte

Later in the story, as Sam and Frodo pass through the Dead Marshes on their approach to Mordor, they enter a landscape deeply reminiscent of the battlefields in France and Belgium: the bomb-wracked craters swollen with water, filth, and the remains of the fallen; the painful whiff of mustard gas; the noxious stench of death. “The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught the breath and parched their mouths,” wrote Tolkien. “Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about.” Here, as at so many places along the Western Front, was a land desecrated and diseased beyond healing.71