1 Tolkien soldier

It borrows heavily from that grandest of traditions set forth by works like Beowulf and The Wanderer—Old English warrior poetry, by turns heartbreaking and bloody, meant to be spoken—and its author was steeped in the same fetid waters that brewed the most famous novels to come out of the Great War in which he fought: All Quiet on the Western Front, Parade's End, A Farewell to Arms…

Looking past the Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, kings, and Istari, past the natural and unnatural magic, past the One Ring and its maker, war rests firmly at the heart of The Lord of the Rings.

So why, in all the years since its publication, has J.R.R. Tolkien's epic never found its way onto any "Best-Of" lists of war literature? Why, in spite of the overwhelming number of parallels, has it never been counted among the greatest novels to emerge from the events of World War?

The roots of The Lord of the Rings broke ground during the war: there was 2nd Lt. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Battalion Signaling Officer to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, seeking relief—however temporary—from boredom, chaos, and brutality with pen strokes and scraps of paper, writing "in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire."

It was in between his duties as officer that Tolkien began to lay the narrative foundations of what would become Middle-earth. They were "fairy-stories," so-called: little vignettes, concerning gnomes and sprites and elf-like creatures, the kinds of stories with which Tolkien had been loosely enamored "since I learned to read." It wasn't until he was invalided back to England with trench fever during the Battle of the Somme—where two of Tolkien's closest friends were killed—that "Tolkien wrote out…the haunting epic of Gondolin, a city of high culture which is destroyed in a hammerblow by a nightmarish army."

More stories followed shortly after, snippets of a larger world beyond the scope of any fairy-story Tolkien would have encountered in his childhood, but which would eventually become the grand mythos of Middle-earth, itself. That mythos would not be called the The Silmarillion until the book's publication in 1977, four years after Tolkien's death.

Taking Tolkien's adamant refusal of all things allegorical and The Lord of the Rings together pushes our understanding of the novel (and it is a single novel—don't let the separate volumes fool you) into an interesting place—one that rejects simplification and generalization in favor of something more dynamic. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings for many reasons, chief among them to build a house for his created languages, and to provide Britain with a mythology beyond the well-worn lore of King Arthur and his Knights.

Many texts are created with the help of the writers' diligent minds about this soldier and other soldiers around the world, which show the author's conflicts at that time. Sometimes the dragon and the bloody city can be the only sign of the anger of that time.

But Tolkien community is different from most of them because it will be never old.

Hannah Ahmadi