Dan Snow's History Hit - J.R.R. Tolkien and the First World War

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth is perhaps the most captivating fantasy world ever created. His mythology and folklore continues to influence the work of writers, film-makers, musicians and artists to this day. He first conceived of the idea during the First World War, and built his world to examine the fear and courage, despair and hope that he witnessed. So how exactly did this brutal, bloody war help to shape Middle-earth? Dan is joined today by John Garth, an award-winning Tolkien biographer and author of Tolkien and the Great War, to tell us about Tolkien's life and how the conflict influenced his writing.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the greatest writers of the last hundred years. Not only the author of fantasy, like The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but the inventor, really, of the entire genre of fantasy. Without him, we would have none of those gigantic fantasy brands across gaming, art, movies, books that we know and love today. But what in turn made Tolkien? Well, I'm going to find out. I'm going to talk to John Garth. He's a writer. He's an expert. He's a biographer of Tolkien. He is in Oxford at the time of this conversation. He's just been addressing a conference about Tolkien and he's walking those very same cloisters and corridors that Tolkien would have walked. He's probably gone to the Eagle and Child pub where Tolkien used to

sit and drink beers with C.S. Lewis every Tuesday when they lived there. John talks me through Tolkien's early life, where he grew up, how his bucolic rural childhood in the Midlands of England came to impact his writing, the way he wrote about the Shire, and of course, how the First World War, the smash landscape of the Somme, changed him and his writing and ideas. Many of you, I'm sure, are fans of The Lord of the Rings. I certainly loved the books growing up. I'm about to launch into them with my kids at the moment, so wish me luck. But I do think, having had this conversation with John, I feel like my appreciation for those prose, for those books,

is now going to be hugely enriched. So, enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off.

And the shuttle has cleared the tower. John, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Well, first of all, can we just clear something up around here? Did J.R. Tolkien ever go to New Zealand? He did not. So all those people who visualise the Lord of the Rings ever go to New Zealand? He did not. So all those people who visualise the Lord of the Rings landscape

as being New Zealand-y are damn right wrong. And how would you characterise, John, how would you characterise those lunatics who go for a Lord of the Rings tour to New Zealand when they could get in a car, a bus or a train ideally and go to the Highlands of Scotland to look around the landscape there? I don't know if Tolkien ever went to the Highlands of Scotland to look around the landscape there. I don't know if Tolkien ever went to the Highlands of Scotland, so that might be equally crazy.

They could come to Oxford and walk around in the medieval cloisters, which always makes me think of a high courtyard in Minas Tirith. I think, listen, we're going to just go easy on your cosplay fantasies there. I love the way you, every time you smash open the door to your great hall, I can see that you're channeling a certain person there. But in that case, I'm going to have to work with the Highlands and Islands Tourist Authority because they sell Highlands heavily as a Tolkien. Right. It's a bit like, you know, Queen Elizabeth I slept here with Tolkien these days. We're going to take that one offline. We'll deal with that one later on. Okay. John, who was Tolkien? In fact, he didn't come from any of these places at all, did he? Where does the Tolkien story begin? He was very young because he couldn't cope with the torrid climate.

And then he settled just outside Birmingham, a little hamlet called Serhole. There's still a Serhole mill there, which went on to inspire the mill in Hobbiton. So he had this rural childhood where he was a bit of an outsider because all the local kids were farmer's boys and he was a little bit hoity-toity. A little or fauntleroy, he said in retrospect. But again, that kind of fed into his image of the Shire in Lord of the Rings. And in a really interesting way, into Sam Gamgee, he said, my Sam Gamgee is a reflection of the privates and my Batman that I knew in the first war and recognise as so far superior to myself. And he says also he reflects the village boys of youth. So he's kind of like been Tolkien imagining someone transplanted

from this little hamlet that he grew up in and going to the trenches and becoming a private there. And there's something there about the sort of, is there, am I reading too much, the sort of geeky middle-class boy who has this admiration for, perhaps, is there any condescension about an admiration for the kind of horny-handed sons of the soil that he sort of grew up near but was always slightly apart from? He was fascinated by their dialect because from very, very young, he was interested in languages. So I suppose in that sense, he was an observer, but also a communicator. He was early on a very good storyteller. He entertained his younger brother with stories about the local people. He turned the local miller into the white ogre. I wonder

whether that extended to telling stories about, or even to, the local boys. Interesting. Okay. And there was a local farm called Bag End. That was where his aunt lived. It was a little way away, actually. That was in Worcestershire. There are small sort of tips of the hat in his books. They're not about the people and places that he knew specifically, but there are sort of private nods in there. On a sort of theorist level here, with your extraordinary knowledge of these things and his history, does that enrich the reading of these books? Do you need this kind of knowledge to reach a kind of unlock a different level, like a game in the books? Or can they just be read?

Absolutely no knowledge coming into it. Are they just as good if you take them as they are? Well, put it this way. I read The Lord of the Rings when I was a small nine-year-old and the book was almost as big as me. And I managed to enjoy it absolutely over and over again in my childhood. But yes, as time has gone on, because I don't read an awful lot of fantasy literature these days. The thing that Tolkien's inspired me to read is history,

because he conveys such a realistic sense of a background and a history that you can explore. That has enabled me to use Tolkien as a kind of conduit to wider learning. And it always reflects, often reflects back on my reading of The Lord of the Rings and does enrich it. Yeah, it's enriched it for me, especially to explore Tolkien's experiences in the First World War, to read books like Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon and recognise these remarkable parallels with the mood and some of the events in parts of The Lord of the Rings. Well, listen, John, you're among friends here. Your early reading of fiction led you to a lifetime of historical reading. I think the listeners of this podcast will recognise that

and accept you as a brother. He was homeschooled, but then his mum died. Tell me about that, those teenage years. His father died back in Southern Africa while he and his brother and mother had come away for a long visit. So the long visit turned into a permanent move. And then when he was 12, their mother died. She was diabetic, which was pretty much fatal in those days. And I think that, you know, the world dropped away for him then. Their mother trusted

them to the care of their Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan. And it seems to have been a very wise decision because, well, aside from the fact that Tolkien grew up a devout Catholic, because of his mother and ongoing involvement with the local church, Father Francis Morgan was a very affable, positive, and quite a wise man in an understated way. And I think that gave Tolkien a solid background. He called him his second father. And meanwhile, Tolkien had a place at the most prestigious school in Birmingham, King Edward's School. And he started to make friends there who became really vital for his early development.

And, you know, they're part of the story that I tell in my book, Tolkien and the Great War. It's, in a sense, a group biography about these young men going to war and how that experience brings them together. Were they typical? I mean, they were quite scholarly. They liked writing poetry, reciting poetry. Would this have been that kind of late Edwardian public school atmosphere, or were they a little bit more intellectual than some of their

peers? They were very bright kids. The fact that they may have written poetry wasn't so rare for people who had an education. It was a bit like having a piano in the family sitting room. It was much more common then than it is now. Basically, they started off this thing called the TCBS, the Tea Club and Barovian Society. The Tea Club was founded in the school librarian's office because they were student librarians. And they found a way of brewing tea in the office, which I presume means they used a Bunsen burner

because I can't think what else they could have used in those days. It was strictly not allowed, you know. And then the Barovian society, when the school wasn't open, they'd go to Barrow's stores, to the tea rooms there. So they liked tea and they liked chat and they kidded around. It gave them a sense that they were a real clan with a distinctive view of the world, you know, often a satirical, ironic view. But then as the First World War arrived and they had gone their separate ways to Oxford and Cambridge, things turned much more serious. And the four core members of this group,

they kicked out all the others because they felt that they needed to be a more serious group now. They kicked out all the jokers and comedians. And they were kind of reading their letters. At times, it's very uplifting and inspiring. And at times you think, God, they're prigs. Because they go to the theatre and they hate Ibsen, the immorality that this kind of thing is injecting into British society. They see the world as being a place that's crumbling. I mean, obviously, the war, it felt like that,

but in a moral dimension too. And they actually had this joint idea. This is just at the time when Tolkien, in conversation with them, had decided that he was going to be a writer, a poet initially. They felt that this was a joint enterprise in some way. I think that in conversation, a lot of his ideas would start to evolve. And they felt that this project was a way of bringing a new light or rekindling an old light, as Tolkien put it, into a very

troubled and dark world. As you say, they went off to Oxford and Cambridge. When war did break out, did they all make the decision to join up? How did they see this struggle? So there were four. Two of them joined up by the end of 1914. So they went through one more term as students, and they decided by the end of that, you know,

they were already doing university OTC, officer training corps training. And they decided, got to go and do my duty. Two of them, Tolkien and his friend Christopher Wiseman, did not. They both seemed to feel that they needed just to complete their final years of their study. They were nearly at the end of their respective courses. Tolkien wasn't especially well off, but he was already engaged to be married. So he had future responsibilities to think about. So he stuck around and came out of Oxford with a first in June 1915.

And in those first few months, this is when his mythology erupted. In fact, the very first Middle Earth hero, Erendil, the Star Mariner, who Bilbo sings a song about in Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings, was invented in a poem that Tolkien wrote in September 1914. Do you think the war is an important backdrop to that? On the Western Front, there was a sort of neo-chivalric, you know, the idea of archers from Agincourt appearing in the clouds above retreating British troops, you know, was this now in the air? Or he was always interested in fantasy, perhaps? He was a big fan of George MacDonald, who wrote children's stories, fairy stories. The Princess

and the Goblin was one of them. The Tolkien's Orcs kind of owe quite a lot to that. He was a fan of William Morris's romances, which were often set among the Goths, ancient Germania, and their fights against the Romans or the Huns, which have an element of fantasy to them. Fantasy, as we know it then, didn't really exist. It's actually a product of what Tolkien did. It's people trying to write in the mould of Tolkien. But yes, you're absolutely right. You read the letters of these friends and they're out on the Western front and they are reading Paradise Lost or Dante's Inferno or Homer. They're reading myth and legend and Mallory. Yes, absolutely. Tolkien's handle on it is always quite maverick, following his own path.

And in fact, that very first poem I mentioned about the star mariner Erendel. The story is this sailor sails across the flat earth and he sails off the edge into the sky and he becomes the evening star. The poem talks about him flying his own course because the planets, of course, don't follow the same course as the fixed stars as they were known, while these regiments of stars or battalions of stars are doing their orderly thing so i think that's really a reflection of what tolkien had chosen to do that year i'm going to stay at oxford and build my knowledge and my imagination too while everyone else is off conforming doing their duty they were joining up in the absolute droves at the time weren't they They were joining up in the absolute droves at the time, weren't they?

Did he come under pressure to sign up? Was he, so what, from family, from community? Yeah, he said the family really piled on him to join up. It's amazing, isn't it, really? You think about this and the losses that were to come out of that kind of pressure. And, you know, he remembered the fear of being handed a white feather in the street, that kind of treatment that people in civvies received. He was in the OTC. He was working hard to train alongside his final year studies.

But when he finished, he said, I bolted into the army. It was obviously just a huge relief to get on with it by that time. huge relief to get on with it by that time. And he trained for a year with the Lancashire Fusiliers, who just covered themselves in glory at Gallipoli in April of 1915. He specialised in signalling, of course, because of his linguistic specialisms. Didn't do very well as a signaller, nearly failed his exams, but went on into the Somme, where he became a signals officer, the battalion signals officer from mid-July 1916. You listen to Dan Snow's History, we're talking about Tolkien, the making of the man and the writer, more coming up.

To be continued... kings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I've been to the trenches where Tolkien served on the Somme. Was he present at that terrible bloodletting on the first day? No, he wasn't. He was a few miles back from the front line. His division was in reserve. So what Tolkien would have seen or felt too is that communal feeling that today was going to be the big push, the big breakthrough.

The thing that a whole week of artillery was preparing for. And then the day goes on and little news comes back from the front and more and more wounded come back in their thousands. And the hospital facilities are absolutely overwhelmed. in their thousands and the hospital facilities are absolutely overwhelmed. So that was probably one of the big wake-up calls for Tolkien and everyone like him. His first taste of battle was at Ouvier-la-Boisselle, a little hilltop village around the 14th, 15th of July, where his battalion actually, they were in action there for a couple of days. And they managed to do two things, which I think are quite relevant to Tolkien's own writing.

One is that they helped to rescue another battalion that had got itself stuck, overexposed by advancing too far and was under severe enemy fire. So they were a bit like the cavalry coming in to save the day for that beleaguered group. And that's a real motif you see in Tolkien, the Rohirrim arriving at Minas Tirith and the horns blowing in the hills. So point number two, the other thing they achieved, they actually took the stronghold. Tolkien's battalion, they took a lot of prisoners from the German stronghold. So again, this wasn't the war is an ironic and hopeless struggle over a few yards of mud. There were definite achievements made

in Tolkien's own small area of the Somme. Did he end up like Sassoon and Owen of deeply troubled by war itself? Or do you think he thought, yeah, I made a difference? Yeah, I think he did think I made a difference. And I think you see that in his letters to his sons when the Second World War came around, because he says, you know, I would much rather be there with you fighting now than sitting here uselessly. And he said during the First World War, I think, overall, despite all the evils on our side, this is a fight between good and evil.

Overall, despite all the evils on our side, this is a fight between good and evil. I suppose he saw it as not a clash of empires. He wasn't an imperialist, by the way. He didn't like the British Empire. But as Britain standing up for smaller nations and fighting the aggressor. But one of the things that I learned while researching that book was that, of course, writers like Owen and Sassoon, Robert Graves, were the minority. Their view of the war, although it's now everyone's view of the war, because we're taught that literature in schools, was not their keynote. They weren't well known during the First World War. That literature of disenchantment, disillusionment really erupted in the late 20s with All Quiet on the Western Front and Sassoon's books and Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War and so on.

in Tolkien's division and wrote a very fine book describing more or less what Tolkien would have seen, felt that the writers of Disillusion had gone too far. They had kind of censored the other side of things, the stoicism, the humour, the achievements, however small, and kind of rendered those achievements by ironising them, appeared to render them as nothing. I think there's a lot of anger there. And Lord of the Rings, you could say that Tolkien is a believer in just war, right? It's not like a pacifist book. It's a book about war, if absolutely necessary. Tragically, sometimes it needs to be fought against terrible evil and can be entered into with gusto. Well, kind of, yeah. But Lord of the Rings is a really complex book and it works to my mind as a kind of dialogue between different views of war. You get all that heroic stuff with the trumpets blaring and flags flying and whatever. are absolutely bowed down by fear.

There's this real motif he uses where when you feel fear, you become like a beast. You're down on all fours, crawling, maybe blinded with fear. And the journey of Frodo and Sam into Mordor is remarkably like a journey into a Somme landscape. The scene in front of the Black Gate of Mordor

with its poisoned mounds and blasted gaping holes and its poisonous grey mud. And it's very evocative. So definitely in terms of the physical experience of war and the treeless landscapes. And because obviously the First World War, all living things, buildings destroyed, trees absolutely ruined on the battlefield or some, mud, living underground, especially during the day, you couldn't put your head above ground. Those things surely feel very important. And I think the psychological stuff the characters go through, so they spend a lot of their time stooping and hiding from the sense

of being watched, being watched by things that are flying overhead too. Although these things are whatever pterodactyls with wraith-like figures on their backs, there's still the sense that something is going to fly over you. It's an observer. You will be seen and then you're in real peril. But as they go on, you know, Frodo undergoes something like a psychological collapse. And Sam Gamgee, his quasi-Batman, is there becoming the figure who keeps them going forward. So there's a real kind of stoicism about this. At this point, it's not an exciting adventure story. It's a very focused view of people traveling through great, great danger and what it does to their minds. Yeah, survival feels like victory half the time. And we should say we've referred to Batman a

couple of times. So just give us that sort of curious distinction and relationship in this early 20th century army. So you had an officer who may well have probably been to a private school. And then you would have a servant, right? A Batman, a servant drawn from the ranks, so from a very different background, but they would become very close, would they? Yeah, but potentially. C.S. Lewis said that he became like a father to him. I'm sure that was a pretty common experience. We don't know anything about Tolkien's relationship with his own Batman, he says in one letter, except what may appear in Sam Gamgee. So you've got to assume that there was some closeness there. Tolkien certainly looked back

and felt that he was not a good officer. He was too distracted. He was making up elvish languages part of the time when he was supposed to be training. He was bored. You're learning military rote. That's not what he was built for. He would become quite creative when bored. Tolkien was invalided out near the end of the Somme. He took part in one last action where again, his battalion took prisoners from a German trench, Regina Trench in October, 1916. And then they all marched out to be congratulated by upper ranks right up to Haig. But while Haig was congratulating Tolkien's battalion, Tolkien was lying in a hospital bed with trench fever, which he received from a bite from a louse as these things went.

And he was shipped home in fever and then had to deal with the fact that, you know, he'd lost a lot of friends during this awful battle, you know, one on the very first day of the song. And then one that he learned about just before Christmas in 1916, his friend, Geoffrey Bagesmith, he was the man who had persuaded him to try writing poetry. And I think Tolkien had an awful lot of stuff to process, an awful lot of stuff to process. And I think you can't say Tolkien had shell shock, he had war trauma. We don't know. To put it more positively, we may assume that he did not, because there's nothing in his medical records to say so. But I suspect that his creativity, which came out very quickly,

he wrote his first battle story in convalescence and in hospital in early 1917, the fall of Gondolin, where there were these dragons or monsters or beasts that are actually described like they are made of metal. They roll over things, they crush walls, they have troops inside them. They sound like tanks, which had just debuted on the Somme in Tolkien's sector around Tiefval in September 1916. safety valve, but also a way of turning something incredibly bleak and distressing into something powerful and moving. Yeah, I'm also very struck in the first world by how much medieval imagery there is. Lots of swords and armour and in a completely industrial war, although there was hand-to-hand fighting and there was weirdly some simulacrum of medieval, you know, they would occasionally kind of bludgeon each other

in these terrible fights. But on the whole, it's about planes and, as you say, the smell of oil and a very different landscape. And yet a lot of the recruitment posters, lots of the artists, the postcards, lots of the memes were quite George and the Dragon. So obviously there was some sort of fantastical medieval thing going on at that time as well.

And Joan of Arc, of course, for the French. It was really an encounter between a Victorian medieval revivalism and the modern machines of war. And I guess that soldiers were prone to try to see themselves in those terms. It was certainly a good recruiting tool. But even when you were out on the battlefront, C.S. Lewis, again, he writes a little bit about his time at Arras. And he says that, when I heard the first bullet whistled by, I thought, this is war. This is what Homer knew. So I think it was a kind of deflective shield for them in the face of battle, if they could manage to see it in those terms. That whole discourse, language,

symbolism of medievalism did become deeply unfashionable because it had been used in propaganda. It became questionable. The great book, Paul Fussell, The Great War of Modern Memory, which begins with a vocabulary list of words, euphemisms like steed instead of horse, foe instead of enemy, and things like that. Euphemisms taken from Thomas Mallory and medieval writings and so on, that became tainted by their use during the war so that those famous war poets, Owen and Sassoon and Graves and so on, pardon the phrase, they wouldn't be seen dead using that kind of antiquated language. And I think a side effect of all that is that modernists, people who have rejected that kind of language, and who embrace life as an ironic experience, like those poets of

disillusionment did, modernists really can't be doing with people like Tolkien because they assume, as he uses that kind of language, he uses that kind of imagery, that he's just a kind of gung-ho patriot with nothing to say. I don't think that's fair at all. That's a fascinating point. So you're saying he's writing Elvish. So his experience in the trenches is not just a sort of forming him as a writer in a general sense. He's literally jotting things down as he's crouching in dugouts over scraps of paper and coming up with ideas and writing stories. I think more than that, he was working on Elvish while he was in training camps in Britain. We know he wrote a few poems while

out of the front line in France, not mostly published yet. Hopefully there will be one day, because I'm fascinated to know what they say, whether there are poems that grapple directly with the war he was experiencing rather than filtering it through medieval and mythological prism. But he did say you couldn't really write, you'd be crouching down among the flies and filth. So I think mostly it was processing stuff percolating so that when he came out and was well enough to put pen to paper, he had some really powerful stuff to put down. How did we get from there to writing Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and things? What was his journey after the war? He survives the war. He's lucky to survive.

He was very lucky to survive. I think we have to thank that Laos, probably, because his battalion went on to Ypres. It was basically wiped out in the 1918 German spring offensive. It's a circuitous route. So he kept writing. He wrote something called the Book of Lost Tales, which he continued to write and rewrite throughout his life. And it ended up being unfinished, but pieced together by his son, Christopher Tolkien, as The Silmarillion, published in 1977, four years after Tolkien died. But meanwhile, here's the key thing, really. He did try to express his experience through that. There are stories that examine the awfulness of an ironic situation where the hero is powerless to do anything good and effective. There are stories of the opposite kind where the heroes really do achieve marvellous

things. But nonetheless, because these heroes are kind of medieval men or elves of great stature and ability, I think that Tolkien, there was a limit to how far he could use his own experience in writing those stories. But then he started telling stories to his own children. And by the end of the 1920s, he had four children, and he had begun The Hobbit. And because The Hobbit features someone who's, to all intents and purposes, an Edwardian, Bilbo Baggins, to all intents and purposes, an Edwardian, Bilbo Baggins, he could then send Bilbo into danger and strangeness and examine the effect that has on Bilbo's character, how he builds his courage, how he deals with fear. And a lot of that, I think, is quite acute psychologically, especially for a children's book. And you see the same thing happening in The Lord of the Rings,

which his publishers demanded as a sequel, because The Hobbit, when it appeared in 1937, not a book Tolkien planned to be published. The publisher heard about it through the grapevine and kind of wrested it out of his hands. And they wanted more Hobbits. Tolkien didn't want to write more about Hobbits. He wanted to finish The Silmarillion, but he ended up sitting down to the Lord of the Rings and the Second World War was approaching and it acquired gravitas from that. And also because I think the Second World War and seeing his own sons join up and train, and in one case suffer, his son Michael was shell-shocked. It's a reflection, or many parts of it, are a reflection of Tolkien's own experience of soldiering

and of the world breaking down into war. Just a last point, you mentioned Tolkien sort of invented this genre. I mean, that's such a huge, huge thing to do, isn't it? To kind of open up an entirely new slice of writing and filmmaking. So you think that Game of Thrones, Dungeons and Dragons, all of this kind of swords and dragons sort of material, we all owe that to Tolkien. Yeah, I think we do. And actually to a great extent, even gaming, because that kind of evolved people trying to do a Dungeons and Dragons thing for gamers. I think some of that goes right back to this enormous explosion

of Tolkien fandom in the 1960s in the USA, which was partly connected, oddly enough, with the peace movement there. It's an extraordinary phenomenon. John, last question. Would you agree with me that the Lord of the Rings films are bad? Would you agree with me that the Lord of the Rings films are bad? I think the Lord of the Rings films are quite useful for bringing people to the books. They've certainly done that. I like some of them. They've got a seriousness which they might not have had.

I think that's good. Okay. I've just cancelled myself by saying that heretical thing. Thank you very much, John, for coming on this podcast and talking about Tolkien, what an extraordinary life he had. Tell us what your book's called. Tolkien and the Great War. That's my first book. My second book, which also has a big chapter on the influence of the war on Tolkien, is called The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien. Perfect. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast, John Garth. Thank you, Dan. My pleasure.