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uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond

Mon, 3:56pm
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I read “The Black Gate Opens” to my small boys last night
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and it struck me all at once that I recognized the lifeless, blasted landscape outside the Morannon. He takes such pains to describe it, more than once, with its heaps of rubble, pockmarked with craters like the surface of the moon. It’s no-man’s-land, from the Great War, and of course it made sense in his heart that the final climactic military engagement of his story, the drearily hopeless one, should be set on the same landscape he had to stare at for so long in his own great personal jeopardy. Is this just me reinventing the wheel? Is this a connection everybody else has made already? How forcibly it must have struck him, a landscape with not a single leaf of greenery on it to name and describe. I rather suspect it was almost involuntary, inevitable, that when he imagined a doomed, principled assault on hell itself, the memory of that landscape between the trenches just asserted itself on the scene.
(This post was edited by uncle Iorlas on Mon, 3:58pm)
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CuriousG
Gondolin

Mon, 4:52pm
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was that it was both a bomb-blasted, war-ravaged northern France in WW1, and also the result of industrial pollution. Sometimes I wonder if Tolkien stood at a chalkboard and listed "best places" like the Shire, Rivendell, Lorien, and then in the next column listed Mordor and the opposites of all of the traits in the first column. I actually don't think he was that systematic, because it feels more organic to read his descriptions and not like a pro/con bullet point list, but still, they are opposites.
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Lissuin
Doriath

Tue, 3:18am
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Yes, it's impossible to ignore Tolkien's own war experiences, isn't it?
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I was about five years old when my own lovely, funny grandfather died, so I only heard his WWI story from my father's generation much later. His experience, though, affected the family deeply and gave me a sad fascination with that war. I've visited the battlefields in France where his American regiment fought. You find museums and grand monuments surrounded by quiet communities and well-tended farmland there now. Black and white photos and film from that era give us a rather flat, unreal, third-hand impression of those horrific events. Color movie film turns those scenes into at least a second-hand feeling of movement and immediacy. "War Horse" (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafBTls8RuA was a tearjerker for me. Think Rohan and riderless horses. "They Shall Not Grow Old" (2017) , Peter Jackson's colourized documentary using WWI footage, gave us a living, breathing, talking record of soldiers' day-to-day life, as well as horrific views of Tolkien's no-man's-land, just as they lived them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds It certainly brought my grandfather's experience home to me. "Tolkien" (2018), the biopic with Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien, leaned into fantastical (I use that Middle English form intentionally) Middle-earthish appearances of evil entities on the French battlefields, as well as scenes of industrial smoke and grime of that period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ1vn85iQRE Old battlefields like Gettysburg Pennsylvania, the Somme and Passchendaele are green and peaceful parkland now, the antithesis of battlefields as Tolkien experienced and wrote of them. The monuments and the cameras and Tolkien's writing remind us how horribly wrong it can go, lest we forget. Unfortunately, we humans tend to forget all too quickly. We let down the Shire, Rivendell, and Lorien much too easily. When will we ever learn? Bless the artists who poke us awake now and then.
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noWizardme
Gondolin

Tue, 6:20pm
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Yes, I think the Black Gate, and the Dead Marshes too, might have memories of the trenches embedded in them. On a more general level, CS Lewis' book review of LOTR included:
This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven sent windfalls as a cache of tobacco “salvaged” from a ruin.... C S Lewis' review of Lord of the Rings. (Like Tolkien, Lewis fought in World War I) And I think there might be an emotional level or connection too. I'm currently reading "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest" by Wade Davis. It's a history of the three big British attempts to climb Mt Everest in the 1920s. ("British" in a 1920s sense, since key members of the expeditions were Canadian or Australian, not to mention the Indians, Nepalese and Tibetans involved). This is much-covered subject matter of course, but I'm finding Davis' anthropological eye gives an interesting take on it. And in any case, he is a fine writer. Davis' own website says of the book "In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain’s elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope." He makes a good case for that in the book. And it has been occurring to me that there's an arguable similarity with Tolkien here. Tolkien exploring a fictional world rather than an only-just-accessible-to Europeans corner of the real one. Its not just a matter of paralles such as the first (1921) Everest expedition having to walk 400 miles 'off the map' just to approach Everest and see how it might be climbed (if at all) seeming a bit like our hobbit hereoes setting off into the unknown. It's more the Edwardian era public schoolboy who went to war feel of both storeis, I think. I had a bash a few years back at Tolkien's Hobbit travellers in the tradition of Imperial-era travel adventures and when I've finished Davis' book I might see whether his ten years of research into that culture gives me some more ideas, or quotes to butress them with. Anyway I'll stop there - my ideas on this aren't yet fully-formed so I'm not ready to put it at all clearly yet (if at all).
~~~~~~ "I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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CuriousG
Gondolin

Tue, 7:20pm
Post #5 of 5
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This is much-covered subject matter of course, but I'm finding Davis' anthropological eye gives an interesting take on it. And in any case, he is a fine writer. Davis' own website says of the book "In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain’s elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope." I've never understood why climbing Everest was such a big deal in its day, this global event that electrified minds, but as a sort of antidote to WW1, I can see it now, similar to the Apollo Moon landings: "Look what great things humanity can do, and no one has to shoot a gun to do it."
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