Tolkien and the Second World War

When Major Warren Lewis, brother to C.S. Lewis, finished reading The Lord of the Rings (on November 19^th, 1949), he recorded his impressions in his diary: "A great deal of it can be read topically - the shire standing for England, Rohan for France, Gondor the Germany of the future, Sauron for Stalin, ... etc." Ellison states "... the impressions left on such an intelligent and sympathetic reader and observer as C.S. Lewis' brother are clearly genuine and spontaneous. They can hardly be dismissed out of hand."⁽⁴¹⁾

Ellison first compares one of Warren Lewis's brother's descriptions (from as early as 1934) of the Nazi apparatus ("the death in the concentration camps; arrests and disappearances; Himmler and the Gestapo") against the "Numenorean" chapters of Tolkien's The Lost Road ("Numenor, in the years immediately preceding its annihilation, has become a fascist-style dictatorship displaying all the distinctive ingredients of such. Militarism is dominant; youth is regimented; informers and secret police are everywhere; unexplained disappearances happen; "torture chambers" are rumored to operate; a minority is persecuted. Over it hangs a pervasive atmosphere of retribution - of a coming holocaust and the dissolution of the existing fabric of life." ) Tolkien was writing against the background of Stalinist Russia as well as Nazi Germany.⁽⁴²⁾

Ellison compares Tolkien with George Orwell. "'The Party', and 'Big Brother' [from 1984], exercise power for its own sake; like Morgoth and like Sauron, they require no ideological 'rationale' for their policies or their activities. 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever', says O' Brien to Winston Smith; and that is no more and no less that what would become of Middle-earth if Sauron were to recover the ring and, 'cover all the lands in a second darkness.'"⁽⁴³⁾

More telling comparisons are to be made however between Orwell's Coming Up for Air with the early chapters of LotR. "A small and insignificant land, contented with its way of live, and also perhaps a trifle complacent about it, becomes aware of a vague and distant menace, not properly understood or entirely comprehensible. 'The land of Mordor . . . like a shadow in the background of their memories . . . ominous and disquieting . . . away from east and south there were wars and growing fear. Orcs were multiplying again in the mountains. Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons. And there were murmured hints of creatures more terrible than all these, but they had no name.' It is evident that the Hobbits' satisfaction with their way of life largely arises out of their sense that its conditions have always been what, as the story of LotR opens, they are. 'In olden days they had of course, been often obliged to fight to maintain themselves in a hard world; but in Bilbo's time that was very ancient history.' This is exactly the basis of Bowling's nostalgia for England as he felt it to have been before 1914. None of the inhabitants of the little Oxfordshire town in which he lived at that time, says Orwell, could conceive of a state of affairs when 'things were different.' The threat posed by the dictatorships of the 1930's was, of course, widely seen in individualistic, as well as nationalistic terms. Bilbo Baggins and 'Fatty' Bowling are particular manifestations of a general trend, already well established in its hold on popular imagery. The novels of Franz Kafka, The Good Soldier Schweik, the films of Charlie Chaplin., all represented, in their own way, variations on the theme of the "little man": confronting power and authority in all its forms, totalitarian or otherwise. It was a fruitful subject for cartoonists, political or more general in their aims. Orwell's last "hero", Winston Smith, takes it to its logical conclusion."⁽⁴⁴⁾

Ellison also comments upon how the tension of the war builds in LotR versus how WWII built in the minds of the English: "... one may continue by remarking on the odd but diverting impression of amateurishness pervading much of The Fellowship of the Ring; not on Tolkien's part, one hastens to add, but on that of the participants. 'And you are lucky to be alive too, after all the absurd things you have done since you left home', says Gandalf to Frodo at Rivendell. He too, though, has been markedly 'slow in the uptake', in reaching vital conclusions about the Ring, in the light of all the evidence that he had had available to him. If there is really a war in progress, being fought in order to meet and destroy a deadly menace of worldwide proportions, is not this a somewhat casual way of preparing for it, and carrying it on? Tolkien himself remarked on the evident contrast of tone between the bulk of FotR [Fellowship of the Rings] and LotR as a whole. Does this not faintly recall the wholly distinct atmosphere that pervaded the early months of wartime; the sense of unreality that acquired the nickname of 'the Phoney War'. A sense of unreality that, in the months before Churchill became Prime Minister, arose from indications apparent to everybody of general unpreparedness, incompetence in high places, and military bungling of this and that kind. It was not long, of course, before this sense faded from everyone's consciousness as the total dedication and professionalism with which war came to be carried on, took over on all fronts and at home. 'Total war' came to mean concentration on everyone's part, in or out of the forces, on the single objective of the defeat of the Axis powers to the exclusion of everything else. The latter course of the War of the Ring seems to reflect this attitude of mind, as much in regard to Gandalf as in any other respect. When he reappears, to the astonishment of Merry and Pippin, amid the debris of Isengard, he has changed in a way they find difficult to understand. He act as a briskly professional commander in the field; with, 'ten thousand orcs to manage', he has no time on his hands for acting as a father-figure for a pair of rather puzzled hobbits. In a similar fashion the 'Strider' of the earlier stages of the 'History of the War of the Ring' becomes more impersonal and remote as 'Aragorn', as the nature of his role changes, and becomes, as the war moves towards its final issues, concentrated on leadership in the field, and in battle."⁽⁴⁵⁾

And there is the issue of spies. "The chapters which cover the hobbits' stay in the 'Prancing Pony' at Bree offer a different sort of suggestion or echo. Frodo, who has been alarmed, first by the appearance of several of the Men in the Common Room of the inn, and then by his conversation with Strider, and the hints dropped by the latter, is sufficiently alarmed to start wondering if all the Breelanders are not in league against him, and 'to suspect even old Butterbur's fat face of concealing dark designs'. The result is that Strider faces a distinctly cold reception from both Frodo and Sam where he subsequently makes his appearance in the parlour where they had previously held their supper; and Sam's hostility continues after the arrival and reading of Gandalf's letter. Anyone old enough to recall it will remember the national obsession with spies and 'fifth-columnists' that was particularly prevalent in the early years of the war; and how a suspicious atmosphere was inclined to accumulate around any person whose status or antecedents were not readily apparent or explainable. National advertising was promoted to encourage it, although the most trivial remark was liable to be relayed to some office or operation's room in Berlin. 'Careless talk costs lives' was a slogan for the times which could as well fit the mood of Strider's hints and warnings to Frodo and others, following the Common Room episode. Of course, the significance of impressions such this lies in the 'applicability' of the fictional tale, as Tolkien would have put it. The episode in question might equally call to mind the parallel of 'Reds Under the Bed', or any other instance of national or public scaremongering."⁽⁴⁶⁾

Denethor's suicide, by self-immolation on a pyre: "we will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed from the West," echos popular imagery that became associated with the death of Hitler ". . . the story of Hilter's last days embraces the imagery of the half-insane ruler surrounded by his court, immolating himself to the accompaniment of the sacrificial deaths of servants and adherents".⁽⁴⁷⁾

Finally there is a matter of the anticlimax to LotR and the sense of the same that accompanied WWII. "The notion which had gained some currency (absurd though it no doubt was) that the degredation of the Shire under Saruman was intended to reflect conditions in Britian under the Labour government elected in 1945. . . .This sense of anticlimax, a feeling of 'this is not what we have just spent six years of our lives fighting for', would have been there whichever party had been in power after 1945, and whatever policies it had followed, and of course the situation had been much the same after 1918. The parallel was drawn because many people felt that here, at the end of LotR, just as everywhere else in it, they saw embodied the truth of their own experiences, bother their hopes and their fears, for the present and future."⁽⁴⁸⁾