# WWI and Tolkien



## _postman (Jun 18, 2009)

Hello

I'd like to ask, please if Tolkien would have, (or could have) written _The Silmarillion_ (or _Book of Lost Tales_) without the experience of the Somme? 

Rather than 'opinion', is there textual evidence?

Thanks.

High1


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## Ithrynluin (Jun 24, 2009)

This bit from _The Letters_ does not pertain to _The Silmarillion_, but you might find it interesting:



> _226 From a letter to Professor L. W. Forster 31 December 1960_
> The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.


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## _postman (Jun 24, 2009)

Hello Ithrynluin

Many thanks for your reply and the quote you have posted.

Tolkien here is suggesting that '*the* *plot*' of _The Lord of the Rings _(or the way the story develops) was not influenced by either WWI or WWII. I can quite understand that except, as he states, for some landscape (Dead Marshes, etc).

So it would seem that he would have written _The Silmarillion_ (and _The Lord of the Rings_), anyway - regardless of WWI.

And yet, that nagging question: why _now_? Why write _this_ book _now_? Other authors of Tolkien's time, I am thinking of, say Forster's _Howard's End_, bemoan that the England they know and care for (the mean the rural England where they had wonderful country houses) was having to contend with the rise of the machine, growing urbanisation, etc.

These themes are identical to those which Tolkien discusses, or which are part of the fabric of, _The Silmarrillion_ and _The Lord of the Rings_. This, then, would answer the question 'why now?'.

Maybe the plot and its development _specifically_ (in both books) were uninfluenced by WWI, while its historical timing was not a coincidence? I can't imagine Tolkien, for example, talking about a land 'passing away' and 'distant memory' at the time Britain broke the Spanish Empire, or defeated Napoleon, or colonised India. 

I'm just trying to put his work into some kind of historical and social perspective.

Cheers

Postman


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