> 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
Paul Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory” (which I highly recommend) tied comments like these to the change in mentality of the (primarily) English upper classes and gentry. Just living and working closely with working and agrarian class soldiers led to a realization that yes, they struggled with poor boots through no fault of their own (an example Fussell quotes), only visible because for the first time they saw them as comrades due to the shared experience in the trenches.
And that changed the mentality of many in the upper classes, who came back from the war and voted liberal or even labour when before that would not have been even imagined.
This essay talks about the effect of capitalist colonialism in Viet Nam (I agree with the author’s point here) but Tolkien’s experience reflected the consequence of an interesting domestic shift in the British isles, as industrialization increased the separation between the classes. Contrast the comradeship of Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: a group of aristos and a mob of peasants looking for money and just a change of being stuck on the land: the trench experience was a forced reversion to a social propinquity common from ~800s to the 1700s.
* I don’t mean to imply there is a “correct” reading: it’s an adventure story, a masterful recreation of the tradition of the Sagas, and other things. But even as a naive 12 yo in the 1970s I realised it was a deeply conservative story.
Not a reactionary one: Tolkien doesn’t appear to want to go back. But a recognition of what (in his mind) was lost. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!
That sense of loss IMHO is much better captured by T. H. White’s roughly contemporaneous “Once and Future King”, a much more sophisticated, but less filmable, book.