Understanding Tolkien: The Great Wars Part II

Big Bertha was a forty-seven-ton howitzer used by the German army in World War I. It fired a high explosive projectile weighing one thousand, eight hundred and seven pounds. Weapons like these allowed armies to drop hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives on and around enemy lines, creating massive shell holes, erasing buildings, and burying men alive.  

World War I saw massive advancement in warfare. Indirect fire allowed artillery to shell positions out of sight, aircraft allowed for more accurate bombardments. Machine guns allowed a few men to fill the air with hundreds of bullets a minute, making offensive maneuver almost impossible. Put another way, in World War I, mankind learned to kill his fellow men with incredible efficiency and cruelty.

This was Tolkien’s life as he came of age in the trenches. The Somme, which had been a quiet sector of the line prior to the assault, became a blackened, muddy wasteland covered in corpses and gas by the time he left the lines. The technological advancement that had been so touted as Europe’s salvation before the war showed itself to be more destructive than helpful. And the rest of the century did not refute this assertion. Immediately after World War II ended with its unrestricted bombing campaigns on civilian population centers, England and the rest of the world stared the potential for a third war in the face, as the Soviet Union and America eyed each other nervously across the Iron Curtain. This time, it appeared that mankind had indeed built a doomsday device in the atomic bomb.

If, as I discussed in Saturday’s post, evil is in some way a part of man, then technology amplifies that. As the old Saxon proverb states “A man does as he is when he can do what he wants”. Tolkien was born in an age that saw incredible technological growth, and that growth was dwarfed by what came in his lifetime. But he did not see technology through the rosy glasses of many of his contemporaries. The industrialization of the Western Front in World War I, the use of airplanes in the Blitz and his son’s service in the Royal Air Force, and the arrival of the atom bomb on the world stage all occupied a very central place in Tolkien’s mind as they happened. They were not merely academic issues to philosophize about, but events that affected him and close members of his family.

Toward the end of World War II, he wrote to his son Christopher,

“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 Machine are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?” (Letter 96)

For much of Tolkien’s adult life, the world was either at war or attempting to recover from it. Tolkien began studying in Oxford late in 1911, and died in 1973 at the age of 81. World War I raged from 1914-1918, and was followed by a worldwide depression until World War I started in 1939, ending in 1945. Almost immediately, the iron curtain went up and the Cold War began, lasting until several years after Tolkien’s death. It is important to note that this was very, very different from living with the threat of terrorism as we do. The enemies in Tolkien’s time could and did wipe cities off the map, and there was the constant threat that the Cold War could go hot at any moment.

This meant that for Tolkien, resisting evil was not a theoretical question. He lived it, and it brought home two very powerful facts. First, mankind is, apparently, incapable of defeating evil in any final way. “The War To End All Wars” did no such thing and in fact laid the necessary ground work for a second, more terrible war, which in turn led to a third. Because of the fact that evil was within man, mankind could no more rid itself of it than it could rid itself of life.

Secondly, resisting evil comes at great cost. Tolkien’s closest friends were all killed in World War I, and England lost nearly an entire generation of young men, the flower of the nation. Take a moment and watch this clip from the last episode in Season 4 of the show Blackadder. The show is British humor in full form with all the bawdy humor that entails, but that slips to the side here, as Blackadder and his companions prepare to go over the top. At an earlier moment in the episode George (played by Hugh Laurie) realizes that of all his classmates, he’s the only one left alive, and here he realizes that if he dies, no one from his class will ever return to England.

England fought the war much more personally than we did here in America. Their history and culture is older than ours, and the war stomped directly through it. Several years ago, I took a trip to England, going through the guild house in Norwich which was built in the early fifteenth century. Our guide was a little old lady who had lived in Norwich her whole life. The building had been slightly damaged during the blitz, including destroying the spectacular stain glass window which has since been reconstructed. “I’m one of the few people who remembers what it looked like before the blitz.” she said.

England lost much during the war, much of its future in its young men and women, and much of its history. Tolkien did not merely have a front row seat to this, he lived it. He did not flee to the Orkneys to write about the moral superiority of pacifism, nor deplore the evils of man. He fought in one war on the battlefields, and did his part to support the Homefront in the others and confronted in a real way the evil that showed its face in the 20^th Century.

This coming Saturday, in Tolkien and the Ancients, we’ll look at the old stories that helped give Tolkien some perspective on the evil he saw around him. I for one and looking forward to writing about things at least a bit more cheerful. Hope you’ve enjoyed the series so far and are intrigued enough to hang on till things brighten up. On another note, I’m gearing up for NanoWrimo, so stay tuned for a post on that as well. Thanks for reading, don’t forget to comment, and have a great Monday!

Understanding Tolkien: The Great Wars Part I

In 1909, Norman Angell published his book Europe’s Optical Illusion (later re-titled The Great Illusion). In it he argued that because of the interconnected business interests of the European nations, war had lost its benefits and was thus highly unlikely in the future.

This merged well with the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of the day; many in Europe believed that with the combined influences of science, technology, and business, mankind was advancing beyond his “barbarous” state and was approaching utopia. I mention this to underline the incredible shock that it was for the European world to find, in a few short years, the instruments of their salvation turned to their destruction across the world.

As a student and later a professor at Oxford, Tolkien was a very involved participant in this world that hoped for salvation by progress, though his hopes for salvation rested elsewhere, and he saw the utter destruction of these hopes first in World War I, then World War II, and beyond. These experiences led Tolkien to what I would argue are four separate facts about evil that heavily influenced his writing.

First, evil is ugly, the muddy trenches of the Western Front and the killing camps of the Nazis made that clear. Second, evil is in some way a deep part of man. With the highly educated and prosperous elite of Europe causing so much of the suffering, this was the only conclusion that made sense. Third, technology served to amplify, not suppress, mankind’s capacity for evil and destruction. Fourth, it led Tolkien to understand on a personal level what it meant to resist evil.  

The Somme

If one had to point to a single day as the most important in shaping Tolkien’s, and England’s, view of the world in the 20^th Century, it would be difficult to find one more compelling than July 1, 1916, the first day of The Somme. We have, to an extent, been jaded to the industrialization and mechanization of warfare through both news media and war movies, but in World War I this was not the case. Generals still thought cavalry charges were effective attacks on machine gun emplacements, frontal assaults on entrenched troops with accurate and rapid firing rifles was still considered best policy. If you are not familiar with the history of World War I, I encourage you to take a moment and look through some of the documentaries on this channel here, especially this 15 minute one on the Somme.

Tolkien in 1916. Picture from Wikipedia.

I ask you to watch these because authors cannot be detached from their experiences, and if we want to understand an author, we have to understand to some small degree the world they lived in. Tolkien served as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. During the battle he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig Salient, watching as thousands of his comrades were killed around him.

Like Lewis, who’s Unman in Perelandra shows evil to be petty, gross, and repulsive, Tolkien saw evil too close to imagine it to be a “plausible and pleasant place” as Edmund Wilson wished Mordor had been portrayed in his review “Oo those Aweful Orcs”.  Academics, far removed from the horrors of the World Wars and often willfully ignorant or forgetful of them, have long opposed Lord of the Rings on the grounds that it does not truly wrestle with evil, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The Western Front was undeniably ugly; the constant shelling created a muddy hellscape filled with rats, lice, and poison gas. For the men who lived there, being rotated along the lines, it was a thunderous and authoritative rebuttal of the idea that mankind was somehow “beyond good and evil”, or that the two were simply variations on one another.  

On a more petty scale, as The Hobbit was being published in Germany in 1938, the German publishing house wrote to Tolkien asking for clarification of his ancestry, specifically if there were any Jews in his family tree. Tolkien wrote two responses for Stanley Unwin to choose from, one a scathing rebuttal in which he laments “that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” Within the context of the rise of Nazi Germany, it was one more example of the ugliness of evil, this time in the form of racism. (While the true horror of Auschwitz and Dachau were not revealed till after the war, the treatment of the Jews was known, if largely ignored by many, late in the 1930s. It continued to grow and be more recognized as the war continued, while Tolkien was in the heart of writing The Lord of the Rings.) It is difficult to imagine someone describing the early racial riots throughout Germany as “pleasant and plausible”, and it is because Tolkien lived solidly in the real world that he recognized this.  Tolkien thought deeply in philosophy as we will discuss later, but he did not hide from the realities of his time as did many of his contemporaries.

The terrible thing about this ugliness, was that it came directly from man. The horror of World War I did not spring from starvation in England, nor a barbaric backwards culture in Germany. Europe was in great prosperity before the war, and all of Europe, not least Germany, was incredibly well educated, more educated than any comparable population in human history. They were, to borrow a phrase, healthy, wealthy, and wise, at least according to their own reckoning.  So whence then did this evil come?

The unnerving truth, which refused to go away, was that it was a part of mankind. We couldn’t escape it because it was in us. William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, wrote

“I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” (Hot Gates p. 87)

Tolkien had other beliefs that shaded his understanding of evil, but the overwhelming reality that came out of the Great Wars was that mankind was its own worst enemy, and apparently the more educated and prosperous he was, the greater his likelihood of industrializing the destruction of his fellow man.

               

                In Part II, which will be posted on Monday, I will look at how technology changed the face of evil for the Twentieth Century and finally what the Great Wars taught Tolkien about resisting evil. Next Saturday, in Tolkien and the Ancients, I will look at how Tolkien’s understanding of the Old Stories provided context and perspective for the problems posed by the Twentieth Century. Don't forget to follow this blog so you don't miss a thing.

                Leave a comment and let me know what you think! I’m still planning out the second half of this series, so let me know if there’s something in Tolkien you’d like me to cover specifically. Thanks and I hope you’re all having a great weekend!