The Great War’s Influence on Tolkien’s Writing
by
Ardil
World War I was the defining event in the consciousness of the generation in England that fought it.[1] Among the members of this generation was one, J. R. R. Tolkien, who would later become author of some of the best-loved literature of all time.[2] It is therefore interesting to examine Tolkien’s experience of the Great War, and its impact on his writing. John Garth, in his book, Tolkien and the Great War, has assembled a biography of Tolkien focused on World War I, interleaving insight gleaned from Tolkien’s letters and papers, poetry, prose, and biographical information. The Great War influenced Tolkien’s writing in three primary ways: his loss of close friends and club members, which gave his writing purpose; his newfound respect for the lower classes; and finally, the wealth of images and feelings which he would use as source material for his well-loved imaginary worlds.
Several important friendships developed from Tolkien’s love of languages. Tolkien was fascinated with the study of languages,[3] to the point where he later became a professor of philology. He studied Anglo-Saxon, Finnish, Icelandic, and many others, but also created some of his own, among which are Nevbosh, which he created with a cousin,[4] and the better-known Quenya and Sindarin. He shared his love of languages and deep discourse with a tight-knit club. He formed a club, called the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), with some like-minded friends.[5] Tolkien, being an orphan, was cared for by the Catholic Church, specifically by Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, and got his education because of scholarships arranged through the Church.[6] Because he had no family of his own, he cared for the TCBS members as family. The core group shared a vision to change the world for the better.[7] He regularly wrote letters to his friends on the front lines, sending his poetry for their criticism. When all but one of his closest friends died, later in the war, he felt deeply the conviction that he should carry on what they had started.[8]
Tolkien had reached combat after all of his friends, in 1916. He wanted first to finish his degree, because he deemed a degree to be necessary in order to make a living. Tolkien stated that “war was the collapse of all my world”[9] Oxford had been emptied. Only 8 men and 17 women remained to take exams in June 1915.[10] His experience in a deserted college probably gave him some basis to describe devastated cities. Tolkien was one of 25 in the Oxford Training Corps who wished to delay enlistment, “which meant about six and a half hours’ drill and one military lecture per week.”[11] Later, he would train as a signals officer and be present at the Battle of Somme[12]. All of these were experiences which would add realism to the depictions of wars and armed forces in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.
One of the positive outcomes of the war was the leveling of class differences. Tolkien’s time in the war allowed him to better know members of the lower classes, and develop a type of admiration for the lower-class soldiers,[13] – an admiration that is reflected in The Lord of the Rings character Sam Gamgee. Tolkien explains that “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion [sic] of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.”[14] In contrast to Frodo Baggins, one of the richest hobbits in the Shire,[15] his cousin Meriadoc Brandybuck, heir to Brandy Hall,[16] and Peregrin Took, son of the Thain of the Shire,[17] Samwise Gamgee was simply a working class gardener. Sam went on a journey, acting, essentially, as a batman for Frodo. The others also treat him as a servant: ‘Sam! Get breakfast ready for half-past nine! Have you got the bath-water hot?’[18] Sam, by his faithfulness and cheerful service, brings Frodo across Middle-Earth to Mordor, at great cost to himself. He even gives up his rations for Frodo: ‘“You can’t go on much longer giving him all the water and most of the food.” “I can go on a good way though, and I will.”’[19] Later, he uses his gift from the elven queen Galadriel - a box of magical soil - to re-grow all of the trees in the shire, instead of using it for his own personal good.[20] He planted also received one mallorn tree seed, which he planted in Bag End - not his property, at the time, though it was later given to him when Frodo went to Valinor, the elven paradise.[21] Of all of the characters, Sam is the lowest-class, the true hero, and the one who chooses the quietest life at the end.
Tolkien didn’t like his superiors, and wrote that ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed.’[22] Tolkien found that he had ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy”, especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.’[23]Again, Tolkien’s admiration of the lower classes is plain in Farmer Giles of Ham, in which the common man Giles succeeds where the nobles fail. It depicts a dragon ravaging the countryside, destroying property, killing, and burning the forest. The king and his knights, knowing this, were decided that it would not do to send all of their best men on a dragon hunt before the tournament on St. John’s day. The dragon is driven away – not by the king’s knights, as “their knowledge of the dragon was still quite unofficial”[24] – but by Farmer Giles. The dragon promises to reward all of the townspeople richly if he is allowed to live, and leaves for his lair. The king, hearing that the dragon is to bring his treasure to the village of Ham, he brings all of his knights and servants and sets up camp there. When the dragon does not return, he sends Giles with a few knights on a dragon-hunt. On seeing the dragon, the knights all flee or die. Giles, however, is successful in extracting gold from the dragon and then brings it back to Ham, where the king is waiting to claim it all. Luckily, this story has a happy ending, but it is plain to see how Tolkien feels about leaders telling the lower classes to go into suicidal positions, while sitting in luxury themselves, awaiting whatever treasure the soldiers bring them.
One thing that really comes out in Tolkien’s works is his profound dislike of technology. Tolkien envisions a world where forests are able to take revenge on those who would cut them. The elves, his “Good People”,[25] use almost no technology to speak of, instead relying on the natural way of things. The orcs, however, at the beginning of the siege of Minas Tirith, were “digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring,”[26] and “swiftly setting up, each behind the cover of a trench, great engines for the casting of missiles.”[27] Goblins, also evil creatures, invented “the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once.”[28] Morgoth, Sauron’s former master, was not the Kaiser, but ‘the tyranny of the machine over the individual.’[29] Though he had a distaste for mechanical things beforehand, the war redoubled his hate for technology.
Many different creatures also were created based off of things in the war. The Orcs, Tolkien created to represent the combined evil on both sides of the war.[30] The Elves represented the combined good and pity on both sides.[31] During the siege of Gondolin, giant iron dragons, resisting all means of destruction, carry orcs to attack the city, symbolizing the tanks of World War One.[32] It is also possible that the Nazgul on their winged mounts were meant to represent airplanes, with flechettes, small metal darts that were poured by the bucketful from airplanes over enemy trenches. Also, it seems plausible that the Southrons were meant to portray the Ottoman Empire, because “the drawing of the scimitars of the Southrons was like a glitter of stars,”[33] and scimitars originated in the Middle East, and were used by Ottoman officers.[34] This would agree with geography, as the Ottoman Empire was southeast of England.
Another link to the war is the battlefields. Tolkien wrote that ‘the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.’[35] The Dead Marshes especially resemble the Somme, with corpses lying in water-filled holes made years earlier by a Morgoth’s mace, which are not unlike shell-holes. Also, Mordor’s general atmosphere, the mud, filth, and stench, all seem to represent the trenches.
While he drew broadly on his experiences as source material, the Great War also influenced his choice of genre - in fact, his works are considered by many to have inaugurated a genre, fantasy, by writing fairy stories intended primarily for adults. The reason that he liked fairy-stories, and later came to write them, was because, in his case, “A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood and quickened to full life by war.”[36] Tolkien was bored with military lectures and things of that sort, so he saw languages and fairy-story writing to be escapes from boredom and circumstances.[37] Because he was of the opinion that people should use fairy-stories to escape the daily pain of life,[38] is likely that he wrote fairy-stories for this purpose.In a famous essay, Tolkien wrote:
“There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of [modern technology]. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death. And even when men are not facing hard things such as these, there are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape, and old ambitions and desires (touching the very roots of fantasy) to which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation.”[39]
He further notes that fairy-stories instruct and inspire us: the point of the wedding between the princess and the frog is not about interspecies marriage, but the “necessity of keeping promises.”[40]
Also, Tolkien was especially concerned with what he called “the consolation of the happy ending.”[41] His wartime experience had taught him that even for the victors in the war there was no happy ending: the dead could not return; the suffering that had harmed many could not be undone; the widows and orphans and bereaved parents’ grief remained. As an antidote to this, he offered fantasy as a way of pointing to “a story of a larger kind”[42] which he considered to be an underlying truth of life:[43] the Christian faith. Garth illustrates Tolkien’s meditation on the worth of fairy story by applying Tolkien’s “recovery, escape, consolation” rubric to the great war: “Faerie allowed the soldier to recover a sense beauty and wonder, escape mentally from the ills confining him, and find consolation for the losses affecting him - even for the loss of a paradise he has never known except in the imagination.”[44]
One of the clearest indications of the war affecting his writing was in a letter to his son, Christopher, in which he wrote, “I sense among your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it from festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.”[45] During the war, Tolkien wrote poetry that gives us a glimpse of “the anger shared by many of Tolkien’s generation, whose world seemed to have been consigned to disaster by the negligence of their elders.”[46] Tolkien later said that “parting from my wife then… it was like a death.”[47] Tolkien had not been expecting to see her again,[48] and he incorporated similar farewell scenes into his writing.
What is most amazing is that Tolkien was able to take those experiences of death and loss during the Great War and produce from this background stories so enjoyable, rather than tragic, to read. He does not make it humorous,[49] or dry and cynical, nor yet light and joyful, but soberly and nobly profound, as befits the greatest author of all time.
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Footnotes
[1] Spielvogel, Jackson J., Western Civilization, (New York, NY: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2009), 768-769.
[2] “Tolkien’s work has been translated into twenty-five languages; it has reached… twelve million viewers.” quote from the back jacket flap on The Return of the King.
[3] Also known as philology
[4] “Nevbosh - new nonsense,” Ardalambion, Unknown, http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/nevbosh.htm (accessed January 4 2018)
[5] Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 43.
[6] Ibid., 6.
[7] Ibid., 137.
[8] Ibid., 254.
[9] Ibid., 48.
[10] Ibid., 82.
[11] Ibid., 50.
[12] Ibid., 114, 187-193.
[13] Ibid., 68.
[14] Ibid., 310.
[15] Tolkien, John R. R., Fellowship of the Ring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954), 29.
[16] Ibid., 24.
[17] Tolkien, John R. R., Return of the King, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955), 381.
[18] Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, 81.
[19] Tolkien, Return of the King, 216.
[20] Ibid., 303.
[21] Ibid., 304.
[22] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 94.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Tolkien, John R. R., Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1969), 93.
[25] Tolkien, The Hobbit, 179.
[26] Tolkien, Return of the King, 95.
[27] Ibid., 96.
[28] Tolkien, John R. R., The Hobbit, (Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1966), 73.
[29] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 300.
[30] Ibid., 218-219.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 220-221.
[33] Tolkien, Return of the King, 114.
[34] See image here: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/19/bd/e3/19bde330c71295781a246a30c08754ed.jpg.
[35] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 310.
[36] “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien (Posted by Brainstorm Services), December 4, 1947 (Posted 2004), http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf (accessed January 2, 2018), 14.
[37] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 125.
[38] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 22
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid., 23.
[43] Zaleski, Philip, Zaleski, Carol, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. (New York, NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015), 213
[44] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 78.
[45] Ibid., 38.
[46] Ibid., 131.
[47] Ibid., 138.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Except Farmer Giles of Ham.
Several important friendships developed from Tolkien’s love of languages. Tolkien was fascinated with the study of languages,[3] to the point where he later became a professor of philology. He studied Anglo-Saxon, Finnish, Icelandic, and many others, but also created some of his own, among which are Nevbosh, which he created with a cousin,[4] and the better-known Quenya and Sindarin. He shared his love of languages and deep discourse with a tight-knit club. He formed a club, called the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), with some like-minded friends.[5] Tolkien, being an orphan, was cared for by the Catholic Church, specifically by Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, and got his education because of scholarships arranged through the Church.[6] Because he had no family of his own, he cared for the TCBS members as family. The core group shared a vision to change the world for the better.[7] He regularly wrote letters to his friends on the front lines, sending his poetry for their criticism. When all but one of his closest friends died, later in the war, he felt deeply the conviction that he should carry on what they had started.[8]
Tolkien had reached combat after all of his friends, in 1916. He wanted first to finish his degree, because he deemed a degree to be necessary in order to make a living. Tolkien stated that “war was the collapse of all my world”[9] Oxford had been emptied. Only 8 men and 17 women remained to take exams in June 1915.[10] His experience in a deserted college probably gave him some basis to describe devastated cities. Tolkien was one of 25 in the Oxford Training Corps who wished to delay enlistment, “which meant about six and a half hours’ drill and one military lecture per week.”[11] Later, he would train as a signals officer and be present at the Battle of Somme[12]. All of these were experiences which would add realism to the depictions of wars and armed forces in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.
One of the positive outcomes of the war was the leveling of class differences. Tolkien’s time in the war allowed him to better know members of the lower classes, and develop a type of admiration for the lower-class soldiers,[13] – an admiration that is reflected in The Lord of the Rings character Sam Gamgee. Tolkien explains that “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion [sic] of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.”[14] In contrast to Frodo Baggins, one of the richest hobbits in the Shire,[15] his cousin Meriadoc Brandybuck, heir to Brandy Hall,[16] and Peregrin Took, son of the Thain of the Shire,[17] Samwise Gamgee was simply a working class gardener. Sam went on a journey, acting, essentially, as a batman for Frodo. The others also treat him as a servant: ‘Sam! Get breakfast ready for half-past nine! Have you got the bath-water hot?’[18] Sam, by his faithfulness and cheerful service, brings Frodo across Middle-Earth to Mordor, at great cost to himself. He even gives up his rations for Frodo: ‘“You can’t go on much longer giving him all the water and most of the food.” “I can go on a good way though, and I will.”’[19] Later, he uses his gift from the elven queen Galadriel - a box of magical soil - to re-grow all of the trees in the shire, instead of using it for his own personal good.[20] He planted also received one mallorn tree seed, which he planted in Bag End - not his property, at the time, though it was later given to him when Frodo went to Valinor, the elven paradise.[21] Of all of the characters, Sam is the lowest-class, the true hero, and the one who chooses the quietest life at the end.
Tolkien didn’t like his superiors, and wrote that ‘Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed.’[22] Tolkien found that he had ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy”, especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.’[23]Again, Tolkien’s admiration of the lower classes is plain in Farmer Giles of Ham, in which the common man Giles succeeds where the nobles fail. It depicts a dragon ravaging the countryside, destroying property, killing, and burning the forest. The king and his knights, knowing this, were decided that it would not do to send all of their best men on a dragon hunt before the tournament on St. John’s day. The dragon is driven away – not by the king’s knights, as “their knowledge of the dragon was still quite unofficial”[24] – but by Farmer Giles. The dragon promises to reward all of the townspeople richly if he is allowed to live, and leaves for his lair. The king, hearing that the dragon is to bring his treasure to the village of Ham, he brings all of his knights and servants and sets up camp there. When the dragon does not return, he sends Giles with a few knights on a dragon-hunt. On seeing the dragon, the knights all flee or die. Giles, however, is successful in extracting gold from the dragon and then brings it back to Ham, where the king is waiting to claim it all. Luckily, this story has a happy ending, but it is plain to see how Tolkien feels about leaders telling the lower classes to go into suicidal positions, while sitting in luxury themselves, awaiting whatever treasure the soldiers bring them.
One thing that really comes out in Tolkien’s works is his profound dislike of technology. Tolkien envisions a world where forests are able to take revenge on those who would cut them. The elves, his “Good People”,[25] use almost no technology to speak of, instead relying on the natural way of things. The orcs, however, at the beginning of the siege of Minas Tirith, were “digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring,”[26] and “swiftly setting up, each behind the cover of a trench, great engines for the casting of missiles.”[27] Goblins, also evil creatures, invented “the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once.”[28] Morgoth, Sauron’s former master, was not the Kaiser, but ‘the tyranny of the machine over the individual.’[29] Though he had a distaste for mechanical things beforehand, the war redoubled his hate for technology.
Many different creatures also were created based off of things in the war. The Orcs, Tolkien created to represent the combined evil on both sides of the war.[30] The Elves represented the combined good and pity on both sides.[31] During the siege of Gondolin, giant iron dragons, resisting all means of destruction, carry orcs to attack the city, symbolizing the tanks of World War One.[32] It is also possible that the Nazgul on their winged mounts were meant to represent airplanes, with flechettes, small metal darts that were poured by the bucketful from airplanes over enemy trenches. Also, it seems plausible that the Southrons were meant to portray the Ottoman Empire, because “the drawing of the scimitars of the Southrons was like a glitter of stars,”[33] and scimitars originated in the Middle East, and were used by Ottoman officers.[34] This would agree with geography, as the Ottoman Empire was southeast of England.
Another link to the war is the battlefields. Tolkien wrote that ‘the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.’[35] The Dead Marshes especially resemble the Somme, with corpses lying in water-filled holes made years earlier by a Morgoth’s mace, which are not unlike shell-holes. Also, Mordor’s general atmosphere, the mud, filth, and stench, all seem to represent the trenches.
While he drew broadly on his experiences as source material, the Great War also influenced his choice of genre - in fact, his works are considered by many to have inaugurated a genre, fantasy, by writing fairy stories intended primarily for adults. The reason that he liked fairy-stories, and later came to write them, was because, in his case, “A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood and quickened to full life by war.”[36] Tolkien was bored with military lectures and things of that sort, so he saw languages and fairy-story writing to be escapes from boredom and circumstances.[37] Because he was of the opinion that people should use fairy-stories to escape the daily pain of life,[38] is likely that he wrote fairy-stories for this purpose.In a famous essay, Tolkien wrote:
“There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of [modern technology]. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death. And even when men are not facing hard things such as these, there are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape, and old ambitions and desires (touching the very roots of fantasy) to which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation.”[39]
He further notes that fairy-stories instruct and inspire us: the point of the wedding between the princess and the frog is not about interspecies marriage, but the “necessity of keeping promises.”[40]
Also, Tolkien was especially concerned with what he called “the consolation of the happy ending.”[41] His wartime experience had taught him that even for the victors in the war there was no happy ending: the dead could not return; the suffering that had harmed many could not be undone; the widows and orphans and bereaved parents’ grief remained. As an antidote to this, he offered fantasy as a way of pointing to “a story of a larger kind”[42] which he considered to be an underlying truth of life:[43] the Christian faith. Garth illustrates Tolkien’s meditation on the worth of fairy story by applying Tolkien’s “recovery, escape, consolation” rubric to the great war: “Faerie allowed the soldier to recover a sense beauty and wonder, escape mentally from the ills confining him, and find consolation for the losses affecting him - even for the loss of a paradise he has never known except in the imagination.”[44]
One of the clearest indications of the war affecting his writing was in a letter to his son, Christopher, in which he wrote, “I sense among your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it from festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.”[45] During the war, Tolkien wrote poetry that gives us a glimpse of “the anger shared by many of Tolkien’s generation, whose world seemed to have been consigned to disaster by the negligence of their elders.”[46] Tolkien later said that “parting from my wife then… it was like a death.”[47] Tolkien had not been expecting to see her again,[48] and he incorporated similar farewell scenes into his writing.
What is most amazing is that Tolkien was able to take those experiences of death and loss during the Great War and produce from this background stories so enjoyable, rather than tragic, to read. He does not make it humorous,[49] or dry and cynical, nor yet light and joyful, but soberly and nobly profound, as befits the greatest author of all time.
Primary Sources
- “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien (Posted by Brainstorm Services). December 4, 1947 (Posted 2004). http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf (accessed January 2, 2018)
- Tolkien, John R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954.
- Tolkien, John R. R. The Hobbit. Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1966.
- Tolkien, John R. R. The Return of the King. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company,
- 1955.
- Tolkien, John R. R. Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. New York, NY: Ballantine, 1969.
Secondary Sources
- Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
- Spielvogel, Jackson J. Western Civilization. New York, NY: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2009.
- Zaleski, Philip., Zaleski, Carol., The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. New York, NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Footnotes
[1] Spielvogel, Jackson J., Western Civilization, (New York, NY: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2009), 768-769.
[2] “Tolkien’s work has been translated into twenty-five languages; it has reached… twelve million viewers.” quote from the back jacket flap on The Return of the King.
[3] Also known as philology
[4] “Nevbosh - new nonsense,” Ardalambion, Unknown, http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/nevbosh.htm (accessed January 4 2018)
[5] Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 43.
[6] Ibid., 6.
[7] Ibid., 137.
[8] Ibid., 254.
[9] Ibid., 48.
[10] Ibid., 82.
[11] Ibid., 50.
[12] Ibid., 114, 187-193.
[13] Ibid., 68.
[14] Ibid., 310.
[15] Tolkien, John R. R., Fellowship of the Ring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954), 29.
[16] Ibid., 24.
[17] Tolkien, John R. R., Return of the King, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955), 381.
[18] Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, 81.
[19] Tolkien, Return of the King, 216.
[20] Ibid., 303.
[21] Ibid., 304.
[22] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 94.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Tolkien, John R. R., Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1969), 93.
[25] Tolkien, The Hobbit, 179.
[26] Tolkien, Return of the King, 95.
[27] Ibid., 96.
[28] Tolkien, John R. R., The Hobbit, (Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1966), 73.
[29] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 300.
[30] Ibid., 218-219.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 220-221.
[33] Tolkien, Return of the King, 114.
[34] See image here: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/19/bd/e3/19bde330c71295781a246a30c08754ed.jpg.
[35] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 310.
[36] “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien (Posted by Brainstorm Services), December 4, 1947 (Posted 2004), http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf (accessed January 2, 2018), 14.
[37] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 125.
[38] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 22
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid., 23.
[43] Zaleski, Philip, Zaleski, Carol, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. (New York, NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015), 213
[44] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 78.
[45] Ibid., 38.
[46] Ibid., 131.
[47] Ibid., 138.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Except Farmer Giles of Ham.