Modern and Medieval Warfare in Tolkien's Middle-Earth Alethea Gaarden Mercyhurst University

Inklings Forever Volume 9 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Ninth Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Article 6 Friends 5-29-2014 The aW rs We Sing of: Modern and Medieval Warfare in Tolkien's Middle-earth Alethea Gaarden Mercyhurst University Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Gaarden, Alethea (2014) "The aW rs We Sing of: Modern and Medieval Warfare in Tolkien's Middle-earth," Inklings Forever: Vol. 9 , Article 6. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol9/iss1/6 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume IX A Collection of Essays Presented at the Ninth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM on C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS Taylor University 2014 Upland, Indiana The Wars We Sing of: Modern and Medieval Warfare in Tolkien’s Middle-earth Alethea Gaarden Mercyhurst University Student paper award winner Gaarden, Alethea. “The Wars We Sing of: Modern and Medieval Warfare in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” Inklings Forever 9 (2014) www.taylor.edu/cslewis The Wars We Sing of: Modern and Medieval Warfare in Tolkien’s Middle-earth Alethea Gaarden Mercyhurst University As a species, war is arguably our most In this paper, I will suggest that complex, costly and destructive undertaking; Tolkien unifies modern and medieval visions General Patton once famously observed that of warfare by presenting war as a narrative “Compared to war, all other forms of human experience; in Middle-earth, as in the real endeavor shrink to insignificance.” It is only world, war can only be processed and by placing war in the context of narrative, by communicated as story. Examined in this saying “The Battle of Britain had an enduring way, The Lord of the Rings is not a story of impact on the country,” or “this is what the either modern or medieval warfare, though Battle of the Somme meant to our family,” or Tolkien certainly employs elements of both. “fighting in the Pacific changed me forever” Instead, it is in large part a story about war that the experience of war becomes stories: an examination of the ways in which comprehensible, and throughout history cultural narrative of war are constructed and these narratives have been expressed as maintained. stories. Certainly, J.R.R. Tolkien was no The individual experience of war stranger to war. As a medievalist, he studied always takes place in a specific cultural texts such as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and context. A French knight in Charlemagne’s The Nibelungenlied, all of which focus on service who fought the Saracens at the Battle violence, conflict, and heroism in combat. of Roncevoux Pass would have a very Tolkien was also a veteran of World War I; he different perspective on wartime experience served at the Somme, and as he notes in the than a French soldier who served under foreword to The Lord of the Rings, “By 1918 Pétain at the Battle of Verdun. Even if by all but one of my close friends were dead” some miracle these two hypothetical soldiers (The Fellowship of the Ring xi). Particularly were to fight in precisely the same battle given Tolkien’s own combat experience, one under precisely the same conditions, they could easily take issue with Tolkien’s decision would not perceive the battle or their place to tell stories of war in a medieval, within it in the same way. As the military mythological, and heroic setting. In the wake historian John Keegan observes in his book of the World Wars that devastated Europe, is The Face of Battle, the deafening noise of a The Lord of the Rings indeed a return to an World War I battlefield would likely be outdated and horrifically misguided vision of enough to disable a medieval soldier, never warfare? In what way could a novel about mind the howitzers, machine guns, and kings, cavalry charges and valiant deeds on poison gas (324). Even more significantly, the field of battle communicate truth about soldiers from very different cultures and time the mechanized, impersonal meat grinder of periods do not necessarily see themselves or 20th century combat? their place within society in the same way. The Wars We Sing of · Alethea Gaarden Yuval Noah Harari notes that soldiers in the Tolkien develops Middle-earth as a world Renaissance and earlier eras were often every bit as ancient, complex, and deeply- willing to endure great hardship because they rooted as medieval England. One believed that it gave their lives meaning and consequence of this rich history is that purpose: winning glory in combat was a characters in Middle-earth can react to means of advancing their own honor and, by places that are important to their own extension, that of their families (67). But in cultures in much the same way than an post-Enlightenment cultures like those in Englishman of Tolkien’s day might react to Europe and the United States, the goal of life the fields of Agincourt, Waterloo, or—should is no longer the accumulation of personal and he wish to revisit old stomping grounds—the familial honor but the development of the battered, desolate plains of the Somme. John self. Harari suggests that the trauma of Keegan, in his book The Second World War, modern warfare is caused at least in part frequently points out the significance that because it poses a threat to “[soldiers’] historic and mythic place-names could hold. understanding of life as the continuous Bazeilles, for example, a small town near process of developing and improving an Ardennes in northern France, “was a place of enduring entity called ‘self’” (68). In other legend in French military history; it was there words, the differences between modern and in 1870 that the elite colonials had fought to medieval war narratives are not simply a the death against the Germans in ‘the house function of the changed nature of combat. of the last cartridge’” (73), but by 1940 the Instead, they are a product of the changing Germans had occupied the town at last. paradigms of participant individuals and Similarly, during the abortive battle for cultures, and war narratives are therefore Greece in 1941, “the British made their last dependent on the culture in which they are stand at Thermopylae, where the Spartans constructed. Because Tolkien develops had fallen defying the Persians 2500 years Middle-earth as a secondary world of before” (158). significant depth and complexity, his In Middle-earth, which in the Third characters have the opportunity to inhabit Age has largely fallen into ruin, there is no their own cultures, and to engage with shortage of ancient battlefields, and many of elements of other cultures. In The Lord of the them are referenced throughout the text. Rings, Tolkien uses important cultural Even Gollum knows his history, or at least features including [1] geography and a sense parts of it. When Frodo and Sam trudge of place, [2] a sense of lost glory and past through the Dead Marshes in The Two Towers, greatness, [3] literature, poetry, and song, they see corpses in the water, and Gollum and [4] distinct differences between cultures, tells them that “There was a great battle, long in order to shape and express his characters’ ago. .tall Men with long swords, and terrible war narratives. Elves, and Orcses shrieking. They fought on It is significant that many, if not all, the plains for days and months at the Black copies of The Lord of the Rings include a map Gates. But the Marshes have grown since of Middle-earth. These maps, like the ones then, swallowed up the graves; always that Frodo and Merry pour over during their creeping, creeping” (261). time in Rivendell, are simultaneously history, Clearly, geography—particularly the myth, and geography. In her paper geography of historic battlefields—is used as “Archaeology and the Sense of History in a system of reference in Lord of the Rings as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth,” Deborah Sabo well as in the real world, in large part because notes that “Tolkien was clearly sensitive to it ties the events of the present into a the fact that the life of a people, their beliefs culturally-significant past. By comparing the and all events that go to make up their past to the present in this way, Tolkien is also history, are intimately bound up with place” able to foster a sense of lost glory and past (91-92). Throughout his legendarium, greatness within Middle Earth: not only are The Wars We Sing of · Alethea Gaarden his characters aware that they are walking cultural narrative that turns events into through bloody and thus hallowed ground, tragedies. The fall is possible, and made all but they are often able to make comparisons the more horrible, because of the pride that between their own martial journeys and came before it. those of the historic figures who came before A similar sense of loss and lessening them. When Aragorn sees Weathertop in The echoes through The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring, he offers the hobbits a broken sword of Elendil is a mark of Gondor’s piece of the watchtower’s history, saying: “It fall from pride, as is the withered White Tree is told that Elendil stood there watching for in the Citadel of Minas Tirith; indeed, the city the coming of Gil-galad out of the West, in the is itself evidence of cultural decay within the days of the Last Alliance.” Merry presses once-great kingdoms of men.

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