(Nancy Marie Ott)
[J.R.R.] Tolkien's battalion was sent to France in June 1916. He had three weeks of training at the British camp at Étaples, during which he was transferred to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. As battalion signaling officer, Tolkien was responsible for maintaining communication between officers in the field and the Army staff responsible for directing the battle. This information would be used to direct artillery fire to where it was needed, send or withdraw reinforcements, and support any gains the attackers made against the German lines.
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Fortunately for Tolkien, his battalion was assigned to the reserves at the beginning of the battle. It did not take part in the initial British attack on the dug-in German positions on the Somme, which failed to achieve its predicted breakthrough and led to massive loss of life. (Of the 100,000 British soldiers who entered No-man's land on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 were killed outright; another 40,000 were wounded.) His battalion was ordered into the trenches about a week later. Day after day of tours in the trenches and rest periods interspersed with attacks followed. The Battle of the Somme continued for months as the British unsuccessfully attempted to break through the German lines, although they did manage to push them back.
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Tolkien took part in two major offensives against the Germans. On his first day in the trenches, his battalion was part of an unsuccesful attack on Orvillers, a village held by the Germans. The barbed wire had not been cut and many men in his battalion were killed by machine gun fire. His battalion also took part in the attack on the Schwaben Redoubt (a strongly fortified German position) at the end of September, 1916.
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Tolkien's time in the army was not completely wasted in terms of his creative life. As he later wrote to his son Christopher, some of the earliest development of his mythology and languages was done in canteens, at lectures, in crowded and noisy huts, by candle-light in tents, and even in dugouts under shell-fire. He admitted that it did not make him a good officer. Despite the action he had seen, Tolkien was not wounded.
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In late October, Tolkien contracted trench fever (a disease carried by lice) and was sent home to recuperate. He spent the rest of 1916 and early 1917 in hospital until his fever finally subsided. He was then posted to camps in England until the end of the war. Tolkien was reunited with his wife Edith and their first child was born during this period. He also began composing some of the tales that would later become The Silmarillion.
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The most noticeable way in which Tolkien's wartime experiences are expressed in The Lord of the Rings is in his descriptions of the landscapes of evil. Key elements of the landscapes of Mordor, the desolation of Mordor, and the Dead Marshes are directly inspired from the landscapes of the trenches and No-man's land of World War I. Tolkien clearly drew on his memories of the Western Front when describing the lands ruined by Sauron. As he later stated in one of his letters, "The Dead marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme."
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The parallels between the landscapes of No-Man's Land and Tolkien's landscapes of nightmare are striking. Mordor is a dry, gasping land pocked by pits that are very much like shell craters. Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins even hide in one of these pits when escaping from an Orc band, much as a soldier might have hidden in a shell hole while trying to evade an enemy patrol. Like No-Man's Land, Mordor is empty of all life except the soldiers of the Enemy. Almost nothing grows there or lives there. The natural world has been almost annihilated by Sauron's power, much as modern weaponry almost annihilated the natural world on the Western Front.
The desolation before the gates of Mordor is another savage landscape inspired by the Western Front. It is full of pits and heaps of torn earth and ash, some with an oily sump at the bottom. It is the product of centuries of destructive activity by Sauron's slaves, a destruction that Tolkien stated would endure long after Sauron was vanquished.
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The landscape of the Dead Marshes is also inspired by the Western Front. As Frodo, Sam, and their guide Gollum cross the Marshes, they see the ghostly, rotting forms of the dead soldiers of a war that had swept across the region thousands of years before.
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These men and other men in Tolkien's battalion served as inspiration for the character Sam Gamgee. As Tolkien later wrote, "My 'Sam Gamgee' is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself." Sam represents the courage, endurance and steadfastness of the British soldier, as well as his limited imagination and parochial viewpoint. Sam is stubbornly optimistic and refuses to give up, even when things seem hopeless. Indeed, the resiliency of Hobbits in general, their love of comfort, their sometimes hidden courage, and their conservative outlook owe much to Tolkien’s view of ordinary enlisted men. These traits enabled British soldiers not only to survive their tours of duty on the terrible battlefields of France, but to bravely attack and counter-attack the Germans.
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It's often theorized that Orcs represent German soldiers. There certainly are similarities between them. Orcs are almost caricatures of the German enemy of trench warfare: the hordes of gray, pitiless warriors who overwhelm the brave and outnumbered defenders of the West. [...]
The description of the sack of Gondolin in The Book of Lost Tales, Part II, written in 1917, has an eerie similarity to the type of industrialized warfare that Tolkien would have witnessed during the war. Morgoth’s dark and remorseless forces use great iron vehicles that seem much like tanks. Their sheer numbers and powerful, fiery weapons overwhelm the valiant Elvish warriors of Gondolin.
However, Tolkien himself dismissed claims that the Orcs represented a particular race or ethnic group, much less wartime Germans.
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Although the War of the Ring progresses in a very different manner than World War I did, the sense of their both being endless, unwinnable wars is much the same.
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The fates of Sam Gamgee, Frodo Baggins, Pippin Took and Merry Brandybuck after they return to the Shire are in many ways reflections of the fates that faced veterans returning after the war. [...]
[Sam] was able to put the terror of his wartime experiences behind him and successfully coped with the trauma of his journey to Mordor. [...]
On the other hand, Frodo could not put the War of the Ring behind him and had a difficult time coping with the trauma he suffered. In many ways, he is like the shell-shocked veteran of the trenches whose minds and spirits never recovered from the horrors they witnessed.
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Much that was beautiful in Europe lay in ruins. Millions of young men who would have contributed much to society were dead or maimed, their families and communities overwhelmed at dealing with this trauma. There was personal grief at the deaths of loved ones, and grief at the death of a way of life. In many ways, the new Modern age seemed a lesser one.
The Lord of the Rings is suffused with a similar sense of grief and sorrow. It too is about the end of an era.
Fonte:
http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/040102_02.html
Mais:
http://literatura.uol.com.br/tolkien-na-grande-guerra-293749-1.asp
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIV0hIcXF6VkFoSUU
