World War I and The Lord of the Rings

So in my family, the weekend closest to our birthday is Our Birthday Weekend. We get to choose where to go, where to eat, and what to do. On my mom’s birthday weekend, she and I watch all three extended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So, since today is my mom’s birthday, this week’s post is about Lord of the Rings.

I’ve been looking forward to this topic for a while. If you’re shaky on what happened during World War I, which I definitely was, Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon is absolutely worth the $15 it costs. It’s a six episode, twenty hour podcast series on World War I, giving a very humanistic view of what happened in addition to explaining how it started and what made it so special. Everything I know about World War I, I know from that series.

Circling back around to Lord of the Rings: if you didn’t know, J.R.R Tolkien was a soldier in World War I, and he started crafting Middle Earth while he was out in the trenches. While a true historian and LOTR book nerd could absolutely give a more thorough breakdown of its influence, I’m going to focus on three main points: industrial warfare, Samwise Gamgee, and the orcs.

The first point is technical but important. World War I was the first time warfare was conducted on an industrial scale. Armies of millions were unheard of until the French Revolution, because Napoleon was the first one to start conscripting citizens. Before that, you had your professional armies, and that was it, putting your numbers in the thousands. And of course, the Industrial Revolution was only a few decades prior, which meant that there were hundreds of scientific advances waiting to be tested in the field. While smaller countries had fought in that time period, the five big European powers of the time (Austria-Hungary, Germany, England, France, and Russia) hadn’t tested their new strength yet.

World War I was the first war that had casualty numbers in the millions, and it was all thanks to industrial warfare.

Germany made the most efficient use of these advancements, and there are many written accounts of people’s awe and fear in the face of their new army. (Remember that Germany in World War I was not the evil force that it was in World War II.) Moving an army of millions takes a lot of calculations and a lot of supply lines. Picture it: row after row of soldier marching down the same stretch of road, completely unbroken, for three days straight. Can you imagine seeing that as someone who has never even imagined it before? As someone who has never seen anything happen on that scale?

You can see some of that horror in Lord of the Rings. Distinctly medieval societies are faced with the war machine of the orcs, and their hearts break in the face of it. The Ents openly mourn the resources harvested by the war machine, and the King of Rohan is horrified by the sheer numbers that lay siege to the city. Orcs are slaughtered in droves, and they climb over the dead bodies of their brethren and keep marching forward. In World War I, people started to use the piles of dead soldiers as cover from enemy fire.

The second point is much more personal. Samwise Gamgee is all about creature comforts. As Frodo buckles under the concentrated trauma that the Ring sets on his shoulders, Sam supports him with kindness and memories of home. He brings salt and spices from the Shire all the way to Mordor. He makes sure that Frodo eats despite all the horrors around them, tries to keep him warm, to cheer him up.

We don’t know exactly when Tolkien conceived different parts of what would become Middle Earth, but I think that it’s easy to imagine him making up the hobbits in the trenches. It’s easy to imagine him feeling starved because the supplies couldn’t reach him, and imagining a society that has six, eight, ten meals a day, just because they can and because they want to. He remembers his idiosyncratic and annoying neighbors and family members with nostalgia, and he puts those feelings into Hobbiton. It’s easy to imagine him reaching the first draft of Frodo’s journey through Mordor, and asking himself, what would Frodo need to get through these darkest of times? And he thinks back, and he remembers thinking of home. He remembers missing salt and spices, and the comfort of a friend. He remembers feeling like he couldn’t possibly take it anymore. And he writes all of that into Frodo and Sam.

The third and final point is somewhat of a point of contention. I’ve seen Lord of the Rings criticized for its one-dimensional villains, for the overtones of prejudice and xenophobia, and I won’t say that those criticisms are wrong. Still, I think that the reason that Tolkien wrote the orcs and Uruk-Hai as pure evil is fairly simple.

One of the worst parts of World War I was that there was no justification for it. WWI was a war of fear and panic. It was fighting because you would be overtaken the moment that you stopped pushing back. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of incidents through the war where the soldiers realized this, laid down their arms, and made temporary peace with each other. They celebrated Christmas, or worked together to stem a flood. There was no evil in World War I. There were only kin on the other side of No Man’s Land.

At its very core, LOTR is so compelling because it is born out of Tolkien’s attempts to process the violence and trauma of World War I. He brings romance and meaning into their war, he validates and centers Frodo’s trauma and exhaustion, he lets the free people of Middle Earth achieve victory in the face of impossible odds – and, as a vital part of all that, their enemy is pure, undiluted evil.

Tolkien was a man, a very human man. Perhaps LOTR would have been a better, more loyal portrayal of the horrors and bitterness of war if the enemy had been just as complex and meaningful as the men, elves, and dwarves. But that wasn’t the story that Tolkien wanted to tell. Tolkien knew the horrors of war, and he was tired of them.

So Tolkien told a story where there were good guys and bad guys, and the good guys won. I really think it was that simple. The orcs didn’t represent any human nation, because there is no romance in war against other people. He could only imagine romance in war against evil.

For now, that’s as much as I have to say about that. Still, I’ve been watching the LOTR movies with my mom for years now, and it was only after learning about World War I that I started to feel like I truly understood the world that Tolkien built. There’s so much wish fulfillment. And isn’t that true of everything written by people?