“Ronald had been, from the start, an observant child, quick to mark details around him—the shop signs along Maitland Street; the gray blue of the Indian Ocean, where he once was bathed; the wilting boughs of the eucalyptus tree at his first Christmas. Brought to his father’s bank office, he would find pencils and paper and make simple drawings of what he’d seen.”
Anyone who has ever voraciously read all through Lords of the Rings—or struggled just to make it through The Hobbit—already knows that J.R.R. Tolkien was the type of author who loved details. He is the fantasy novel genre’s equivalent of Charles Dickens; a writer who never met a detail he didn’t think was important. This quote occurs very early in this biography and serves to quickly establish the importance of setting in the writing of Tolkien. The references here to the Indian Ocean, eucalyptus trees at Christmas, and the impact they had upon his imagination—recreating the sights he’d seen in simple drawings—all serve as a kind of foreshadowing of the narrative style to come. The opening paragraphs also serve to underscore how the environment in which one is born and raised as a child impacts the development of a writer’s stylistic elements.
“Middle-earth itself called to days of the past. Though its mythology told of darkness and evil spirits, it also sang of a golden age of heroes and glory—a stark contrast to twentieth-century war, hunger, and cruelty. Evil, Ronald believed, could never be totally erased, but it could wither and fail against strength and imagination.”
The writing of Lord of the Rings covered an enormous chunk of the author’s life, beginning in 1937 and not seeing completion until almost the dawn of the 1950s. Anyone with only a slight familiarity with history should be able to identify the single most significant historical event taking place during that time period. World War II illuminated darkness that lay hidden not in the hearts of evil men, but in every man. To learn for the first time that people who were perfectly normal could be subsumed by the agency of the architects of evil that was the Nazi Party was the generating force behind the ever-altering and constantly changing process of mapping the story of Frodo’s efforts to overcome the power of the Ring. Tolkien was at work writing the story during the darkest days of the war when it seemed quite possible Hitler would triumph as well as the end when evil did finally succumb to pure brute strength and the imagination of scientists producing the “magic” of atom-splitting.
“Ronald would never forget the horrors of war or the courage of the average soldier who fought beside him. He spent nearly three months at the Somme, crawling among corpses, the trees above him tilting like black skeletons, branches broken and shorn of leaves. After storming a huge fortification of German trenches, he cradled a dying soldier in his arms. Blood oozed over him and, in a moment of unusual silence, a field mouse darted across his fingers.”
With Tolkien’s talent for writing and his obsessive quest for details and the darkness of humanity in times of war to fuel his imagination, it is little wonder that entire sections of Lord of the Rings are vivid portraits of battle. Though often term a quest story and an epic saga of good versus evil, there are also many parts of the trilogy that are nothing less than battlefield reportage except that human adversaries have been replaced by weird fantastical creatures. Just as the unimaginable evil of World War II fuels the story’s larger themes of good versus evil, it was Tolkien’s own wartime experiences during the first world war that provides the stimulus behind these battle sequences which punctuate Frodo’s quest. The corpses, skeleton-like trees, blood, and vermin all are tangibly experienced in his writing but with the distancing power of being situated within the imagined world of fantasy.
