![]() ![]() The British reformed an old alliance with France, once their most despised enemy, to conquer a greater threat from the East, and the British alliance with Belgium was also based on an all but forgotten treaty signed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars in Lord of the Rings (at least in the movies), men and Elves reforge their old alliance after centuries of somewhat icy relations. The allies in WWI would have sympathized with Theoden's question, phrased in the movie as "What can men do against such reckless hate?", and taking slightly different form in the book. Other examples of echoes of the war that are more subtle and general: the common impression of Orcs as inherently wicked, cruel, and beastly foreigners from the east mirrors the British soldiers' opinion of the Germans, whom they usually called "Bosches" or "Huns" (the reasons why each of these names became popular is the subject of ongoing debate among historians to this day). And as I have already mentioned, "Noman-Lands" is an extremely unsubtle reference to the "No Mans Lands" of WWI - the uninhabitable, ravaged strip of ground between your front line trenches and those of your enemies. This is almost exactly the way Tolkien describes the Brown Lands/Noman-Lands, and he attributes this appearance to similar causes- a great battle that once raged there. Nothing green was left after the first few weeks. Plants and trees were erased from the land, and nothing but earth, mud, craters, and shattered corpses of men, horses, and trees remained. The shells radically altered the landscape. Because WWI was bogged down in the trenches and mostly stationary for almost 4 years straight, and because the only way to kill soldiers in trenches without a direct assault was artillery, the same long, narrow strip of ground was subjected to an endless artillery bombardment for year after year. I've already alluded to the obvious analogy between the Dead Marshes and the Somme the Brown Lands - also referred to as "Noman-Lands" bear similar comparison to WWI battlefields. On the one hand, I may be reading too much into this, but on the other hand, Tolkien would undoubtedly have remembered the infamous "sawback bayonets". German high command demanded the bayonets be redesigned, but soldiers took matters into their own hands by filing off the saw teeth. There are numerous accounts of British troops mutilating German soldiers found carrying these "sawback bayonets". British troops in WWI were disgusted by the original German bayonet's design, because the back of the blade had saw teeth, it caused gruesome wounds that were difficult to treat. For example, the Orc knife Pippin uses to cut his bonds has a saw edge. Other possible echoes of Tolkien's experience on the Western Front are less obvious. The Two Towers, Book IV, Chapter 2: "The Passage of the Marshes" The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails on the lands about. … Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. He showed a rare lack of subtlety in choosing to refer to an area near the Dead Marshes, at one point in LotR, as "Noman-Lands", which is so close to the infamous "No Mans Land" of WWI as to almost seem lazy.ĭreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome by far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. He didn't try very hard to conceal the fact that the Dead Marshes especially were directly inspired by the horrors of the war in general and the Somme in particular. No grass or bushes or even weeds, just mud and churned up soil. No trees still alive, only shattered stumps. Without getting into a history lesson, imagine seas of shell craters full of mud several feet deep and rotting corpses and body parts strewn about. ![]() ![]() ![]() But he served through most of the Somme Campaign, and saw firsthand the horrors of war and the uniquely appalling conditions in which the fighting in Northern France and Belgium took place. I know Tolkien often downplayed the influence his experiences as a messenger in World War I had on his writing, but he wasn't being entirely truthful- perhaps the memories were too horrific to think about or discuss openly. ![]()
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