LEWIS AND TOLKIEN AND WAR

Think this talk will run short so I can take questions from all three courses.

Both served in WWI in France. Both would feature major battles in their fantasy works. But the influence of the war(s) is largely speculation.

SLIDE - LIST OF TOLKIEN BATTLES in entire legendarium.

Lewis has seven of them, but not one in each book. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe has one. The Horse and His Boy has one. Prince Caspian has three; The last Narnia book is, in fact, called The Last Battle, which has a massacre and a battle to end all battles

in the Narnian version of the book of Revelation.

SLIDE - Tolkien’s war diaries are preserved, Lewis not so much.

Tolkien did not romanticize war, as those who took the Iliad with them into battle. He was more of a far o Beowulf and the Finnish epics, more pessimistic about the end.

Tolkien, before going to war, would write about drills: “These grey days, wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing, are not enjoyable.”

SLIDE - Married Edith before he left, knowing it was unlikely he would

come back. No money, no prospects, going to war, loved her since 16, but guardian forbade him to even communicate with her until 21. She broke off engagement with another man to marry him. They were deeply in love until her death. He wrote many poems to and about her, and Beren and Luthien is the greatest love story in his legendarium, written on their headstones. Luthien foresook her immortality to be with the human and mortal warrior Beren. When he was killed, she appealed to the Valar (angels) to restore him to life and he lived (resurrection). Tolkien died 2 years after her, in 1973. She died of diabetes, insulin still in the future. In 1916, when he went off to war, parting from her, as he wrote, “it was like a death.” He had a sort-of Morse code of

dots to show her where he was in France, since the censors wouldn’t allow the actual location info.

Began what would be posthumously published as The Silmarillion, the foundation for his later Hobbit and LotR epic.

Quenya is based on Finnish and Sindarin is based on Welsh. The first, the language of lore, was created when T was an undergrad, and the latter, the language of war, adventure and tragedy, after the Somme.

SLIDE - He was in a batallion sent to the battle of the Somme, 11th Lancashire Fusilliers. 1916. Second Lieutentant.

WW1, Tolkien said of war: “a real taste for fairy stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood and quickened to full life by war.”

Hated the “animal horror” of war. Plus the destruction of trees, his favorite things (reference Macbeth).

“The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propogandists)…”

Did not get along with his superiors. “What makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as “planners” refuse

to see) is always magnified by indefinitely by “organisation”.

“War multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)^2 when x=normal human crassitude.”

He certainly did not write in the trenches – “that’s all spoof,” 50 years later, “you might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket, but that’s all. You couldn’t write … You’d be crouching down among flies and filth.”

Writing his son in WWII, Christopher, who was in the RAF, “I sense amongst all 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 just festering…. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.” – Silmarillion

At one point Tolkien was in charge of 30 German soldiers who had surrendered. When he offered them water, in German, one of them corrected his pronounciation!

SLIDE - TCBS = The Tea Club and Barrovian Society, four men. Early Inklings. “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”

Thought the TCBS could leave the world a better place than they found it. Thought artists like Shaw and Ibsen did away with Victorian and Georgian morals, but did not replace it with

anything positive. England needed a positive, not a negative addressing.

One of every eight Brits were killed in WW1. Good and evil were on BOTH sides.

“One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends was dead.”

Tolkien went into signalling, which likely saved him, but was also his strong suit. For what it’s worth, so did A. A. Milne. Carrier pigeons.

Of WWII, Tolkien would write that it was the first War of the Machines. WWI was man against machine, but WWII was machine against machine. The machines had won. The tide of history turned at the Somme with the tank (elephants in LotR).

ELEPHANTS CLIP

Somme: the biggest battle the world had yet seen and the worst defeat in British military history.

Out of the 100,000 to enter No Man’s Land, more than half were killed in two days.

Also first to be filmed for propaganda newsreels. More people in England

saw the 1916 silent movie The Battle of the Somme than saw Star Wars in 1977. Some 20 million flocked to the movie palaces to see it. Many shots and scenes were reenactments and training camp footage. Hard to get 1910s cameras into the right position for good shots, but there are some real shots, and cameramen then as today were in as much danger as the soldiers.

SOMME CLIP

The last to die of the TCBS charged Tolkien with carrying on the mission of the group, and to ‘say the things’ they wanted to say to the world. For Tolkien, this was to write his great mythology. He started with poems. Scores of them.

A poem he wrote, most directly linked with the war:

In unknown days my fathers' siresCame, and from son to son took rootAmong the orchards and the river-meadsAnd the long grasses of the fragrant plain:

Many a summer saw they kindle yellow firesOf flaglilies among the bowing reeds,And many a sea of blossom turn to golden fruitIn walled gardens of the great champain.

There daffodils among the ordered treesDid nod in spring, and men laughed deep and longSinging as they laboured happy laysAnd lighting even with a drinking-song.

There sleep came easy for the drone of beesThronging about cottage gardens heaped with flowers;In love of sunlit goodliness of daysThere richly flowed their lives in settled hours -But that was long ago,And now no more they sing, nor reap, nor sow;And I perforce in many a town about this isleUnsettled wanderer have dwelt awhile.

Wars of great kings and clash of armouries,Whose swords no man could tell, whose spearsWere numerous as a wheatfield's ears,Rolled over all the Great Lands; and the Seas

Were loud with navies; their devouring firesBehind the armies burned both fields and towns;And sacked and crumbled or to flaming pyresWere cities made, where treasuries and crowns,

Kings and their folk, their wives and tender maidsWere all consumed. Now silent are those courts,Ruined the towers, whose old shape slowly fades,And no feet pass beneath their broken ports.

There fell my father on a field of blood,And in a hungry siege my mother died,And I, a captive, heard the great seas' floodCalling and calling, that my spirit cried

For the dark western shores whence long ago had comeSires of my mother, and I broke my bonds,Faring o'er wasted valleys and dead landsUntil my feet were moistened by the western sea,Until my ears were deafened by the hum,The splash, and roaring of the western sea -But that was long agoAnd now the dark bays and unknown waves I

know,The twilight capes, the misty archipelago,And all the perilous sounds and salt wastes 'tween this isleOf magic and the coasts I knew awhile.

Lewis’ review of LotR:This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven sent windfalls as a cache of tobacco “salvaged” from a ruin.The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy tale was wakened into maturity by active service; that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli, the dwarf),“There is good rock here. This country has tough bones.”

The author of the book that is my main source adds:

And he goes on to list even more items that might have come from warfare.

The Dead Marshes (in The Return of the King) owes something to the Somme, by Tolkien’s own admission. It’s one of his few acknowledgements of influence.

Tolkien was not injured, but did come down with “trench fever” and ended up being sent home. 1917.

He wrote the first piece, a narrative, of his legendarium, “The Fall of Gondolin.” A story of a great battle, which would owe not a little to his experience of the Somme. But also “the an actual conscious reaction from the War – from the stuff I was brought up on in the “War to end wars” that kind of stuff, which I didn’t believe in at the time and believe in less now.”

English becoming a universal language, esp with USA on world stage, was a loss. Nationalist, but in the best way.

He had, he said, “a deep sympathy and feeling for the ‘tommy’ especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.”

“My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

There is actually a Sampson Gamgee who created a surgical tissue, gamgee-tissue, in English history.

SHOW CLIP OF BATTLE OF FIVE ARMIES

Guillermo del Toro who just won a Golden Globe for the Shape of Water originally was going to direct the three

Hobbit movies. 1937 Hobbit, one book. LotR 1954, three books, three films.

Del Toro left the project, but before he did, he spent his mornings writing and afternoons looking at material related to Tolkien to help him understand the writer's work. He watched World War I documentaries and asked for book recommendations from Jackson, who is a collector of World War I memorabilia. Del Toro felt Tolkien's experiences in that war influenced his stories. He perceived the main themes as loss of innocence, which he likened to the experience of England after World War I, and greed, which he said Smaug and Thorin Oakenshield represent. Quote from del Toro: "The humble, sort of a sturdy moral fibre that Bilbo has very much

represents the idea that Tolkien had about the little English man, the average English man."

Side note: There are a handful of great WWI movies (Paths of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, All Quiet on the Western Front, Sergeant York, War Horse, Gallipoli, African Queen, Hell’s Angels, the list goes on….) The Trench, 1999, is actually about the Battle of the Somme, stars future James Bond Daniel Craig.

Tolkien: Warfare – many races – like the coalitions of WWII. Elves and Dwarves don’t get along. Teamwork to succeed.

Last note is there is a film called Middle Earth in development that

would be a biopic of Tolkien’s early life, love of Edith and experience in the war.

SLIDE - LEWIS

Lewis would say his experience of war was “in a way unimportant.” But it’s hard to buy this. “I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier.” – from Surprised by Joy

Lewis enlisted while still a teen. 1917 was sent. Also succumbed to trench fever in 1918.

Wounded by shrapnel from a German shell in 1918 in the assault on Riez du Vinage, killed the man standing next to him.

Just prior to the explosion, “I ‘took’ about sixty prisoners – that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-grey figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all had their hands up.”

Lewis would write about “the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass,” … “shows rarely and faintly in memory” and is “cut off from the rest of my experience.”

He cocooned himself, as though it happened to someone else. His way to cope.

He would turn to writing, poetry at the time, and was an atheist. He would write his “First Friend,” Arthur Greeves, with whom he corresponded until his death in 1963: “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”

SLIDE - Promise to Paddy Moore -- The young men promised each other that if one of them were to be killed in combat, the other would look after his friend’s parent. (Remember Jack’s mother died when he was 8). Paddy died and Jack was hospitalized in

England. His own father would not come to see him, but Paddy’s mother did often, Janie Moore, who Jack would call “Mother” 20 years his senior.

A relationship and questionable life with his mother for 30 years. Relationship with Janie Moore, “mother.”

SLIDE - Side note on Warnie: He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Royal Army Service Corps and was sent to France in 1914 to serve with the 4th Company 7th Divisional Train in the British Expeditionary Force.

After World War I, Warren served in such postings as Belgium, Aldershot, Sierra Leone, Colchester, Woolwich,

and two tours of duty in China. He retired in 1932 with the rank of Captain, after 18 years of active service. He was granted the provisional rank of Major when recalled to active service in 1939. He was transferred to the Reserve of Officers in Oxford in August 1941, after being evacuated along with his unit from Dunkirk (also a great war movie, by the way).

He retired and lived with his brother, but constantly falling prey to alcoholism. Hospitalized repeatedly. He lived to the age of 77, dying in 1973, the same year as Tolkien died.

WWII talks on the BBC turned into Mere Christianity. Return to faith after atheism was current after WWI.

When children were evacuated from London, four came to stay with Lewis. Their noise bothered him, but he turned it into the initiating event of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as children are sent to a professor’s house that has the wardrobe that is the entryway into Narnia.

SHOW CLIP OF DAGORHIR NERDS

THANK YOU SIDE AND QUESTIONS