A Hobbit on the Somme

World War I had a major creative impact on Tolkien, informing the universal themes that make his novels so vivid. Brooding evil arises out of the East, a grand alliance of forces forms in the West, and a war for the future of civilization takes place in a nightmarish lunar landscape filled with surging armies and killing machines—the very things Tolkien experienced firsthand in World War I. In particular, male friendship, fortified by the shared hardships of warfare, stands out in Tolkien’s writings, and it jars modern readers to read Tolkien’s foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “By 1918,” he writes, “all but one of my close friends were dead.”