Tolkien as a War Writer By Jeet Heer National Post (December 18, 2003). When we think of the great literature that emerged from the wars of the 20th century what usually comes to mind are brutally realistic books that document the savage folly of mechanized warfare, works such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. At first glance, the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, including his masterful trilogy The Lord of the Rings, would seem the polar opposite of such harshly realistic war books. Set in the mythical kingdom of Middle Earth and populated with dwarves, elves, and hobbits, The Lord of the Rings series deals with a universe far removed from the grim reality of modern war. Yet like Remarque, Tolkien was a survivor of the killing fields of the First World War and his imagination was fundamentally shaped by that experience. In his own way, Tolkien was a much a war writer as any author of the last century. The central fact of Tolkien's life was that in 1915, when he was 23 years old, he joined the Lancashire Fusiliers and witnessed the full horrors of trench warfare. "When the war was over and Tolkien was recovering in a hospital bed in England, he discovered he had only one friend left alive," notes Roger Sale in his 1973 book Modern Heroism, which contains an acutely intelligent discussions of Tolkien's work. As Tolkien once noted, for him "a real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." The first part of this sentence is easy enough to understand: as a young man Tolkien had a passion for tracing the root origins of words and after the war he became a distinguished scholar of old languages, eventually becoming the Merton Professor of Literature at Oxford University. In that position he was almost a walking caricature of an absent-minded professor, an otherworldly brainiac who frustrated students by often muttering pedantic asides in Gothic, Erse or Welsh. Significantly, as a scholar Tolkien's wrote a very influential essay on Beowulf which argued that other critics had trivialized this primordial English epic by ignoring the fact that war was a central theme in the story. It is more difficult to riddle out what Tolkien meant when he said that his "taste for fairy-stories" was "quickened to full life by war." To realize the full implication of this statement, we have to understand that for Tolkien fairy tales do not involve imagining a new world, but rather the "recovery" of an older and more primary vision of life. (And as a wounded war veteran, Tolkien was alert to the medical implications of the word "recovery"). "Fairy stories let us see or discover the world as we were originally meant to see it," Roger Sale. "We are left to imagine that the stupidity, barbarity, squalor, and horror of war drove a sensitive young imagination toward the conviction that he was seeing the very opposite of life as it was meant to be seen. The horrors of World War I were trite, those of fairy tale brilliant and profound." Like many writers who grew up before the First World War, Tolkien had a youthful passion for medieval romances, which enjoyed a great vogue in the long twilight years of Queen Victoria and the dawn of the 20th century. Tales of King Arthur and his court, as well as other knightly heroes, were staple boyhood reading. These stories of chivalry and honour would be oddly parodied by actual experience when the young boys who read them found themselves on the front line. "The experiences of a man going up the line to his destiny cannot help seeming to him like those of a hero of medieval romance if his imagination has been steeped in actual literary romances or their equivalent," notes Paul Fussell in his classic book The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). "For most who fought in the Great War, one highly popular equivalent was Victorian pseudo-medieval romance, like the versified redaction of Malory by Tennyson and the prose romances of William Morris. Morris's most popular romance was The Well at the World's End, published in 1896. There was hardly a literate man who fought between 1914 and 1918 who hadn't read it and been powerfully excited by it in his youth." Because they inherited this old-fashioned literature of chivalry, the writers who fought in the First World War had a great difficulty in finding an appropriate language to describe their experiences. They had been taught to write about war with words like vanquish, gallant, plucky, manly and ardent. Yet such words seemed unbearably false when compared to the reality of mass slaughter. How could you speak of chivalry in a world where both sides used poison gas? It was the special achievement of Tolkien to take the older language of medieval romance and revitalized it for a modern world. Rather than celebrate the gallant knights of old, Tolkien imagined a quieter type of heroism very distinct from the glory-lust of traditional military culture. While The Lord of the Rings does justice to the chivalric races such as elves and dwarves, Tolkien's heart laid with the more peaceful Hobbits, who are slightly complacent in their love of home and hearth. To appreciate how untypical the Hobbits are, compare them to another famous creation of fantasy literature: Robert E. Howard's Conan. We read Conan stories to thrill at the prospect of defeating our foes and ruling like Genghis Khan. Whereas Conan pursues power, the Hobbits give it up. At the heart of Lord of the Rings are two gentle Hobbits — Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee — who are heroic precisely because they renounce power: they have the ring and choose to destroy it. Many other aspects of Tolkien's story derive from his war experience. Some critics have complained about the fact that Middle Earth seems like an all boys club, with female characters kept at the margins. Even the talking trees (the ents) are manly vegetation, the female ents having gotten lost in an earlier age. Yet surely Tolkien's strong sense of male comraderie and same-sex fellowship is rooted in his war experience. There were women near the trenches in a variety of capacities but during his crucial years Tolkien lived in a world of "men without women" (to borrow a resonant Hemingway title). Several subtle war themes identified by Fussell are present in Tolkien's work: for example, the strong strain of pastoral celebration in the trilogy as well as the emphasis of the dawn (the time of the set-to in the great war). Even the number three, so important in Tolkien's work is an echo of other war literature. Tolkien was not a pacifist. He thought wars were sometimes necessary, although always cruel. Yet he was keen to remind his audience that even a just war exacts a high price. The Return of the King, the final volume of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is dominated by an elegiac and mournful tone. Even though evil is defeated, the horrors of war have permanently tainted the world. In the end, the Hobbits no longer feel quite at home in the cozy land they had helped save from destruction. There is a strong feeling that the best elements of the world have passed away, as Tolkien might have felt about friends he lost on the battlefield. The first two films in Peter Jackson's filmic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings have been excellent. With the release of the final episode, I'm slightly antsy. Will Jackson be able to capture the moral seriousness of Tolkien's vision and show us the tragic price of war? If Jackson does do justice to this supremely important side of Tolkien, then these three films will stand as a cinematic masterpiece.