Tolkien: The Inspiration Behind his Work

J.R.R. Tolkien stood in a “woodland glade filled with hemlocks” in Yorkshire England, where he was serving in the army and recovering from trench fever in 1972. His wife Edith was with him, and there she started dancing, leaving the memory deep within his conscience. That experience evolved into the first epic of Middle Earth, Beren and Lúthien. “She was the source of the story that in time would become the chief part of the Silmarillion” (Letters 420). Indeed, it’s not hard to find parallels between the story of two lovers and Tolkien’s own life. However, it was hardly the first time (or the last) that his experiences made their way into his writing.

The story of Beren and Lúthien features Beren, a man, who discovers Lúthien, an immortal elf, dancing in a “woodland glade” and falls in love with her. However, the lovers’ plight is doomed since her father decreed they cannot get married until Beren recaptures one of the Silmarils, a hopeless task, from the crown of Morgoth, the dark enemy. Beren and Lúthien tells how the pair strove against all odds and through death and back to gain the jewel so they could be together. Similarly, Tolkien was forbidden by his guardian to see Edith because she was Protestant and he, Catholic (Tolkien 12). When his ban expired, Tolkien returned to her only to be once again swept away by World War I, where the pair would have to undergo more struggles before their story could be completed.

During his service in the war, Tolkien went through active service at the front and was present during the famous Battle of the Somme. During the fighting, the Lieutenant started writing to escape from the “boredom, chaos, and brutality” of war (Kambury). His experiences from the battle were the inspiration for the dark land of Mordor, the Dead Marshes, and The Fall of Gondolin, a story about the fall of a great city defeated by a dark army, to name a few (Kambury). After the battle of the Somme, Tolkien came down with trench fever and had to be transported back to England where he spent months in recovery. By the time he returned home, all but one of his close friends had been killed and he found his home forever changed by war and industrialization (Kambury). Similarly, in the Lord of the Rings, Frodo returns home from his quest to find his country ravaged and everything he had loved about it destroyed.

Both before and after the war Tolkien had created and studied languages as a hobby (Doughan). Quenya, his most developed language at the time, was incorporated into the new world that he had created to become the native language of the elves. His love of languages had inspired even the name for his fantastical world, “Middle Earth.” The name came from a poem he had read in college in Old English. A line read “Ofer middangeard monnum sended” which means “over Middle Earth sent to men” (Doughan). This referred to the earth as the area “between the heaven above and hell below.”

Though the name of Middle Earth had been based on a language, his stories were designed to revise mythology to recreate the mythology of England. He did all this while a professor in University (Kambury). Then, one day when grading papers, he wrote on an empty page “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” for no reason whatsoever (Doughan). After this, he set about exploring and writing about hobbits’ nature. He told the finished product to his children and, eventually, that line became the famous first sentence to The Hobbit. He later went on to create and publish the Lord of the Rings and complete many other stories, including Beren and Lúthien. When his wife Edith died in 1971, Tolkien had Lúthien inscribed on her grave and later Beren on his own. He mourned “Now she has gone before Beren, leaving him indeed one-handed, but he has no power to move the inexorable Mandos” (Letter 417).

Works Cited

Doughan MBE, David. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch. The Tolkien Society.

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/biography/. Date accessed Dec 5, 2018.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Mind of a Genius. Newsweek, 2017, p17. Date accessed Dec 5, 2018.

Kambury, Rachel. War Without Allegory: WWI, Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings. The United

States World War One Centennial Commission. Oct 8, 2018. https://www.worldwar1

centennial.org/index.php/articles-posts/5502-war-not-allegory-wwi-tolkien-and-the-lord-of-the-rings.html. Date Accessed Dec 5, 2018.

Tolkien, J.R.R. Letters of Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1981, pp. 417, 420-421. Edited by

Humphrey Carpenter. Date accessed Dec 16, 2018.