Greetings,
I've recently discovered Corey's podcast and have been enjoying them thoroughly. I'm a long time Tolkien Fan and credit discovering the Hobbit when I was a child for my lifelong love of reading.
This post isn't related to any particular Course material, but is something that continually crosses my mind as I listen to the many archived podcasts, and I'm sure will cross my mind again. That thought being the impact of Tolkien's War experience on his writing. I do not know if a thorough exploration of Tolkien's War service has been conducted here, but it's been my personal opinion for a while now that the impact of WWI on Tolkien's writing seems to be tangential or "footnoteish" in most academic explorations of his work. With the bulk of Tolkien's life being dedicated to academia and with more academics than soldiers analyzing his writing, I suppose thats natural. However, even though Tolkien disavows all use of allegory, I think that the horrors, the trauma, and the life altering impact of service in the trenches (with many friends being killed in the meat grinder) could not have but fundamentally altered the worldview and life philosophy of the man, and poured forth in his work either consciously or otherwise.
Having years of military and law enforcement experience, I see many things in TLOTR that seem to be strongly influenced by military service. Just today I was listening to a 2009 podcast discussing the nature of knowledge and information in TLOTR. Of note was the discussion about the debate between Gandalf and Elrond over sending Pippin and Merry on the quest. The line (and I paraphrase) "if they knew what was before them they would fear to go..." and Gandalf response couldn't but make me think about two young Englishmen eager to go to the front. Probably as Tolkien and his friends thought when they enlisted. To have discouraged Tolkien and his friends from joining the War effort may have been "wise", but in the end "they would still wish that they had dared and been shamed and unhappy". These men were from a different age and time and believed in Glory in War. At least when they had no first had experience yet. Im strongly reminded of the line in Patton: "Thirty years from now when your sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, 'What did you do in the great World War Two?' You wont thane to say, 'Well your granddaddy shoveled @#$% in Louisiana.' "
The entire relationship between Frodo and Sam is almost blatantly that of an upperclass British Officer and his working class/enlisted batman (if you don't know what a Brit Military batman is/was you simply HAVE to google it).
The "fundamentally changed" Hobbits returning home look like so many groups of soldiers who maintain the bonds forged in war after they return home.
Frodo in the final chapters displays what we now know as PTSD in an almost classic sense. Strong bouts of depression on anniversary dates of woundings and loss of comrades is a common occurrence. I but wonder if Tolkien himself experienced it's effects, and I have to assume that he saw many young British men came back from that War "wounded and never to be made whole again". Only with no Haven to escape from.
I have always admired TLOTR as an uplifting example of how a man scarred by his war experiences transformed those horrors into a story of "mingled beauty and grief" in an attempt to make sense of the reality he experienced. If I was more organized/eloquent/and able to express my thoughts I would try to use TLOTR as a reading for returning Soldiers as Bryan Doerries has been using The Iliad and the Odyssey.
I've recently discovered Corey's podcast and have been enjoying them thoroughly. I'm a long time Tolkien Fan and credit discovering the Hobbit when I was a child for my lifelong love of reading.
This post isn't related to any particular Course material, but is something that continually crosses my mind as I listen to the many archived podcasts, and I'm sure will cross my mind again. That thought being the impact of Tolkien's War experience on his writing. I do not know if a thorough exploration of Tolkien's War service has been conducted here, but it's been my personal opinion for a while now that the impact of WWI on Tolkien's writing seems to be tangential or "footnoteish" in most academic explorations of his work. With the bulk of Tolkien's life being dedicated to academia and with more academics than soldiers analyzing his writing, I suppose thats natural. However, even though Tolkien disavows all use of allegory, I think that the horrors, the trauma, and the life altering impact of service in the trenches (with many friends being killed in the meat grinder) could not have but fundamentally altered the worldview and life philosophy of the man, and poured forth in his work either consciously or otherwise.
Having years of military and law enforcement experience, I see many things in TLOTR that seem to be strongly influenced by military service. Just today I was listening to a 2009 podcast discussing the nature of knowledge and information in TLOTR. Of note was the discussion about the debate between Gandalf and Elrond over sending Pippin and Merry on the quest. The line (and I paraphrase) "if they knew what was before them they would fear to go..." and Gandalf response couldn't but make me think about two young Englishmen eager to go to the front. Probably as Tolkien and his friends thought when they enlisted. To have discouraged Tolkien and his friends from joining the War effort may have been "wise", but in the end "they would still wish that they had dared and been shamed and unhappy". These men were from a different age and time and believed in Glory in War. At least when they had no first had experience yet. Im strongly reminded of the line in Patton: "Thirty years from now when your sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, 'What did you do in the great World War Two?' You wont thane to say, 'Well your granddaddy shoveled @#$% in Louisiana.' "
The entire relationship between Frodo and Sam is almost blatantly that of an upperclass British Officer and his working class/enlisted batman (if you don't know what a Brit Military batman is/was you simply HAVE to google it).
The "fundamentally changed" Hobbits returning home look like so many groups of soldiers who maintain the bonds forged in war after they return home.
Frodo in the final chapters displays what we now know as PTSD in an almost classic sense. Strong bouts of depression on anniversary dates of woundings and loss of comrades is a common occurrence. I but wonder if Tolkien himself experienced it's effects, and I have to assume that he saw many young British men came back from that War "wounded and never to be made whole again". Only with no Haven to escape from.
I have always admired TLOTR as an uplifting example of how a man scarred by his war experiences transformed those horrors into a story of "mingled beauty and grief" in an attempt to make sense of the reality he experienced. If I was more organized/eloquent/and able to express my thoughts I would try to use TLOTR as a reading for returning Soldiers as Bryan Doerries has been using The Iliad and the Odyssey.