How Tolkien created Middle-earth
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"My ‘Samwise’ is indeed ... largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself."
https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-fi...
Basically, large groups of young men from the same community (hundreds to thousands), would all join up patriotically into the same battalion. After all, if they were going to join a war, they might as well join together with those that they know and already have bonds with. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences were those same entire battalions could be wiped out in a single day (like at the Somme), and now you had a community losing nearly all of it's young men at the exact same time, with hundreds of families in the same area now missing a son at the exact same time. As one would expect, the effects of this would be devastating mentally, and demographically enough so as to destroy smaller communities that had sent the majority of their sons and now no longer had fathers for the next generation.
The units recruit from specific geographical areas.
Moreover, a battalion was a unit of around a thousand men, so the "pals battalions" -- where men were encouraged to volunteer by being allowed to serve with people they knew -- ended up being drawn from extremely narrow geographical areas. There were pals battalions of men who all worked in the same factory, of men who'd all attended school together, of the players from the local football club and all their fans. So when one of these battalions got wiped out, as many did in the battles of the Somme, a very specific community would suddenly more or less cease to exist.
IIRC some ancient Greek states exploited romantic partnerships to increase esprit de corps in cadres of men. Part of the thinking seemingly being that one wouldn't flee the battlefield and leave a sexual partner so easily as otherwise.
Of course what's good for making a fighting force isn't necessarily good for the rest of society. Or at least there's a cost to that benefit.
The pals battalions were the government's attempt to solve this problem. They offered potential recruits a kind of carrot: groups of men could join them together, with the guarantee that the group would be kept together in the same unit. You and your mates could go down to the recruiting office and sign up to support each other for the duration. Going to war is a scary thing, so that was an appealing proposition.
An unspoken stick accompanied the offer, of course. It was understood that if not enough volunteers could be found a draft would probably come eventually, and if you were drafted, you'd just get thrown into whatever unit the government chose to toss you into. So if you were a man of military age you were probably going to end up in the ranks one way or the other -- but if you volunteered, you could at least do your service among friendly faces.
The combined carrot and stick worked beyond the government's wildest expectations, drumming up a huge New Army (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener%27s_Army) in just a few months. But then that New Army got fed into the meatgrinder of the Somme, and the plan that had seemed so brilliant revealed its dark side as communities across Britain woke up to the realization that none of their men would be coming home.
An aside, the Royal Armoured Corps in the UK is regionally source, and artillery is to a little extent.
What do you have in mind?
I've already booked my tickets - the exhibition is the most significant for years (if not ever) and will move from the UK to New York later in the year. And then Paris.
Now that I think about it, Tolkien and works related to him seem to have set the bars for a few things - worldbuilding, fantasy literature, epic films, etc.; not to mention more than a few things that have been directly inspired by his works.
It's kind of weird that it's so old, it was published on vinyl in 1970, and according to wikipedia, this album hit the top 40 in the UK (idk why but I just automatically assumed it was much more recent, and not well known). So, it came out right around the same time that Zeppelin was putting out their first albums, and LZ IV also had several songs referencing lotr. Makes me wonder if rock musicians who wrote lotr-themed music was a sterotype/trend in the 70s.
If I had, to I might ascribe to the fact that the 60s and 70s apparently had a resurgence in popularity of Lord of the Rings as a new generation discovered the works.
This for some reason reminded me of a video in which Larry Wall says that Hobbits embody the three virtues of a programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G49RUPv5-NU
That production may have been encouraged by Jeff Wayne's 1978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wayne%27s_Musical_Version...
You can also see the same progression in the covers of Dragon Magazine over the years. The artwork for the first 5 years or so was often not the greatest technically, but there was much more variety than in later years when the magazine got slicker and fancier.
I think Tolkien's own artwork fits into this mold. It was very simple, but it captured a feel that is often lacking in more recent artwork, and let's not forget the immortal Hildebrandt brothers, who's style I always loved. Their character work was always amazing, but their architecture could be really bland. But ultimately it was a simple style that really captured the spirit of the books and the times in which they were done.
That said, the newer sets do still produce art with that charm from time to time. But it's much rarer than it used to be.
My sense is he did a lot of work in parallel and let the world find itself among many mediums.
It's a pretty well-known thing that he was a linguist first, wrote the hobbit to read his children as a story that fit in with the languages and mythology he'd already developed, and only ever considered publishing them because his friends (including C.S. Lewis) badgered him about it.
The world of the Lord of the Rings exists solely for the purpose of providing an explanation for the evolution of his made up elvish languages, which was the real interest of this professor of linguistics. That it was published at all was an accident of the fact that people liked the bedtime story he wrote for his son (The Hobbit) which drew inspiration from his linguistically-driven worldbuilding.
It seems so different from every other book Ive read(only hobbit-RotK).
Like did he add fluff in the forest because of publishing standards at the time?
I like the passage that they find trolls from Hobbit still turned to stone the most...
In stark contrast, Narnia (also read to me by dad at about the same time) seemed so small as to be a shoe-box diorama.
In my childhood imagination, Narnia was about the size of the Shire (perhaps with Bree thrown in for a sense of 'far off').
The most telling evidence for this is how drastically the story and characters change from the beginning to Bree when looking at first draft compared to published text. It took a lot of wildly divergent drafts to get to Bree, with the texts rapidly evolving. My favorite example of this is that the Strider character was originally named Trotter, and he was a hobbit that wore wooden shoes. This type of slowly building story, where layer upon layer of idea built on top of each other is not really present for most of Two Towers and Return of the King.
It was almost like Tolkien was a train that gained momentum as it went forward.
The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... .
Notable things about Tolkien's writing process:
- LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take.
- When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity.
- Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered.
- Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).
Edited to remove bad reference to Nanking Massacre. The point is that glorious battle stories with simple morals are prevalent, and are a big part of Tolkein's stature.
It seems more likely that Tolkien was drawing on much older (thousands of years) stories about the same thing.
There is about no likelihood that Tolkien heard about a despicable war crime committed by an Axis power, involving an evil, flagrant disregard for human life, and decided to use that as material for two of his "good" characters. Nothing in Tolkien's works, worldview, or influences aligns with that sort of thought. This is the author who despised German publishers inquiring about his Aryan descent, even though, being of German heritage and a prominent scholar of Anglo-Saxon/Norse/Germanic literature, Tolkien could have perfectly flattered the Nazi mythology [0]. But in your opinion, while hating Hitler and the Nazis for treating Jews as second-class citizens (in 1938, when the persecution was not yet elevated to mass execution), he simultaneously decided, "well, this Japanese massacre of innocent civilians sounds like a fun bit of material, I'll use that"?
More realistically, the influence, as most of his influences, is in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature, where accounts and songs of battles often make them appear almost like sport, with contests and even gamification. I suppose that is one method of mentally bracing oneself for such a horrifying activity, and for attempting to process the event afterwards. It is part of a common mindset of soldiers at war, one that even the Japanese murderers were engaging, albeit in a perverted misuse. In that view, both Tolkien and the Japanese were drawing from a (very) distantly related source, but much different in purpose, and certainly neither influenced by the other.
[0] https://io9.gizmodo.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr-tolk...
It was very much a good vs evil feeling at the time. You can look at propaganda pieces of the time.
Here's an example of his thought on WWII:
> I have just heard the news. Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly : destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well – you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?
http://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/letters/letter-chris...
If you read his full letters, you will discover that davidy's ideas about what Tolkien thought, and what he represented in LotR, are tremendously wrongheaded.
There are plenty of examples of nuanced war stories, with more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil," for example by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. But the path of reading those books starts in adulthood.
> more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil,"
Unfortunately, whether you like or or not, there is a such thing as evil for most people. You appear to like "nuance", which appears to be code for some sliding relativistic scale. Yes, dehumanization is bad, but that's not what Tolkien is doing when he talks about evil, whether you think so or not. That's why, for example, torturing information out of Orcs is unjustifiable in-story regardless of circumstance - because to engage in such an act is to be an Orc, which is a mode of being (alluded to in the Letter I quoted)- or why taking up the Ring causes good to be perverted into evil.
There is evil in the world. Auschwitz was evil. The Famine-Genicide in the Ukraine was evil. The Gulags were evil. The death of (tens of) millions of Chinese during the Great Leap Forward was (the result of) evil. One could go on. Many people, and I'm one of them, would reject any nuance that tried to diminish and explain away these evils. Do I want to understand what I can do to prevent them? Sure.
There should be room for both nuanced stories and grand narratives.
Whether you see this as Tolkien glorifying warmongering or him commenting on the psyche of war that made such acts possible is up to each reader to decide.
In contrast, bad men are handled quite differently. Shortly after Frodo and Sam meet Faramir in The Two Towers they find themselves on the edges of a battle between the Rangers and a company of Haradrim (supposedly "evil" men from the East):
> Sam, eager to see more, went now and joined the guards. He scrambled a little way up into into one of the larger of the bay-trees. For a moment he caught a glimpse of swarthy men in red running down the slope some way off with green-clad warriors leaping after them, hewing them down as they fled. Arrows were thick in the air. Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.
> It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace – all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind.
Though this is certainly the most explicit instance of a character questioning whether another is truly evil, the theme is present throughout the novel.
(Excerpt copied from "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit", the fourth chapter in The Two Towers, pages 660-661 in the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Lord of the Rings as published by HarperCollins in 2004.)
Another comment includes the phrase "orc-crowd" from one of Tolkien's letters. Perhaps Tolkien (to comment on him personally this time) decided to vilify certain behaviours, which is a common enough response.
No, I disagree. Tolkien was emphatic that his stories were not allegories for anything at all.
If you were right, then why would Tolkien also have bad humans? Why not just make all of the enemy into orcs/trolls/etc? Why have the dichotomy if not to show that humans are capable of being both bad and good, thus separating them from truly evil creatures like orcs?
> Or, the story has no real relevance at all because it's pure fantasy.
Yes, that's correct. The story is pure fantasy; it doesn't serve to "teach" about anything. It's literally just a story.
> LoTR probably mainly rose to prominance due to the Hobbit being sold as a children's tale, the provenance my comment starts with.
I think LOTR became prominent because it literally invented modern high-fantasy and created a gigantic world the scope of which had never really been seen before. The Hobbit touched on it, but LOTR really goes into far more depth about many things than The Hobbit ever did.
I think the GP is saying the same thing, but from another perspective (and I agree). Effectively, the GP says:
the enemy were literally not humans so Tolkien literally "dehumanizes" the enemy.
Another way to to look at it: In the Lord of the Rings, you can identify someone's character by their appearance and 'race': Orcs are evil; odd-looking people (some in Bree, IIRC) are questionable; Elves are just and wise; Dwarves are greedy and sturdy; etc.
> odd-looking people (some in Bree, IIRC)
"The Southerner", who is later speculated to in fact be a rather human-looking orc if I remember right.
The following StackExchange post illustrates further the questions that Tolkien was trying to figure out: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/26725/what-is-the-...
Never let your ignorance get in the way of your righteousness, friend.