The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot by Jay Richards & Jonathan Witt

Author:Jay Richards & Jonathan Witt [Richards, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586178239
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2014-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Pacifism

Tolkien had more reason to hate war than many of us do. From June to October 1916, he served with the Lancashire Fusiliers on the front lines at the River Somme in France. He languished in cramped and disease-ridden trenches where months of bombardment by mortar and machine-gun fire resulted in prodigal death and destruction, but little military progress. The no-man’s land between Allied and German trenches was so forbidding that the bodies of fallen men could remain strewn for months without burial—no doubt a source for the dead faces that Frodo, Sam, and Gollum encounter in the Dead Marshes. When the Battle of the Somme ended on November 18, 1916, the Allies had lost 615,000 and cost the Germans 500,000, for an advance of less than eight miles.39

By the end of the “War to End All Wars”, many millions of Europeans had died from injuries in battle, and millions more—both military and civilian—had died from disease and hunger. Two of Tolkien’s three closest friends were killed in the same year, with one of them, Rob Gilson, dying on the very first day of the Battle of the Somme. Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease born by body lice, and spent the last two years of his service convalescing and, for a time, manning the sea wall in southern England.40

The Allies won the war, but Britain was never the same. “Until August 1914,” A. J. P. Taylor wrote, in his English History, 1914-45, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. . . . All this was changed by the impact of the Great War.”41

Americans entered the war very late, lost about 120,000 troops, and never fought on home soil, so it is hard for contemporary Americans to fathom the traumatizing effect of heavy industrialized warfare on the psyche of Europeans born in the nineteenth century.42 On August 3, 1914, even before the horrors had begun, British statesman Edward Grey told his friends: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”43 And indeed, rather than solving anything, World War I, a war ignited by little more than happenstance and rash judgment, laid the foundations for the even more global Second World War.

Tolkien, in other words, experienced war in a particularly ugly and nearly futile form, an experience that undoubtedly lent him a great sympathy for pacifists of the brave and sincere sort. While he never advocated pacifism, he does create a respectful space for it in The Lord of the Rings while simultaneously suggesting its limits. After Frodo and Sam are rescued from Mount Doom and the free peoples celebrate in military dress, Frodo swears off such attire, having no desire to carry a sword.

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