World War I and The Lord of the Rings: The Trenches of Moria
The Lord of the Rings created the very image we have today when we think of the fantasy genre. Many fans find inspiration in a small hobbit’s journey to save all of Middle-Earth. But what if the story of the ring of power is not so clear-cut? Is Frodo destroying The Ring a story of overcoming odds or one of reasserting societal norms? J.R.R. Tolkien started writing about Middle-Earth in the trenches of World War I where is was on the front lines for four months. His British culture and life in The Great War are far more present in The Lord of the Rings than Tolkien would have ever liked to admit. Many place Tolkien’s work as an allegory while Tolkien himself made it very explicit that The Lord of the Rings was by no means an allegory for war. This analysis by no means disagrees with Tolkien’s assertion. The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory for war. However, through the lens of World War I poets, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it becomes clear that the trilogy was not left untouched by Tolkien’s experience in war.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon share similar imagery for two supposedly separate genres. Tolkien uses the same graphic imagery on the Orcs as Wilfred and Sassoon use in their depictions of the atrocities of World War I. However, while Wilfred and Sassoon used these styles to criticize the British government, Tolkien utilizes the same technique to justify mass violence against an entire race in Middle-Earth. This tactic depicts the Orcs as a one-dimensional evil resulting in the fellowship being the clear “good guys”. This kind of similarity continues in the fellowship’s embodiment of Victorian class systems that Tolkien, Owen, and Sassoon experienced through their own immediate instatement as officers due to their higher class status. The fellowship reflects the British military ranking by class in World War I; while the Orcs of Moria and the Orcs throughout the trilogy are the one-dimensional evil that represents a clear and present ‘other’. Only when the fellowship follows the Victorian class paradigm that Sassoon and Owen condemn, are they able to defeat the ‘other’ that embodies the barbaric acts of World War I. Therefore Tolkien’s text suggests the belief that the British hierarchy was the reason Britain claimed victory over the gruesome lack of humanity that was the evil of World War I. The Lord of the Rings then argues for a recede from social progress through a refusal of class mobility ending in any resemblance of a good result.
“Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man”: The Fellowship as high-class officers
Tolkien is arguing that only those with the divine right to the higher classes can fix the world by ridding it of such violent evils like World War I and Sauron’s armies. If the Orcs accepted their lower status in the hierarchy, the tragedy of the war for Middle-Earth would have never happened. This reinforces the concept of the “Great Chain of Being” in the belief that nobody of lower class, such as an Orc, have the right to try to defy the system. By the end of the trilogy, the fellowship keeps its class system values in its destruction of Sauron’s armies and The Ring. Middle-Earth is rebuilt according to the societal structures Owen, Sassoon, and many others have criticized. The marriage of Aargorn, the King of Man, and Arwen, an Elven princess, cements the old social order into the future of Middle-Earth. Together they reaffirm the hierarchy by restoring the Elves and Men to their rank above the Orcs. Tolkien is then holding onto the class systems Britain firmly had in place at the beginning of the war that Sassoon and Owen also experienced. Sassoon writes of these very issues in his memoirs; which he encountered before going off to war. The following is from Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, a novel that takes experiences from Sassoon’s life and incorporates them into the fictional character, George Sherston. At this point in the novel, George Sherston looks back on his first servant, “…he never