In the rent earth of the Somme Valley, he laid the foundation of his epic trilogy.<\/p>\n
The descriptions of battle scenes in \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d\u009d seem lifted from the grim memories of the trenches: the relentless artillery bombardment, the whiff of mustard gas, the bodies of dead soldiers discovered in craters of mud. In the Siege of Gondor, hateful orcs are \u201cdigging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring,\u201d\u009d while others maneuver \u201cgreat engines for the casting of missiles.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
On the path to Mordor, stronghold of Sauron, the Dark Lord, the air is \u201cfilled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths.\u201d\u009d Tolkien later acknowledged that the Dead Marshes, with their pools of muck and floating corpses, \u201cowe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
In a lecture delivered in 1939, \u201cOn Fairy-Stories,\u201d\u009d Tolkien explained that his youthful love of mythology had been \u201cquickened to full life by war.\u201d\u009d Yet he chose not to write a war memoir, and in this he departed from contemporaries like Robert Graves and Vera Brittain.<\/p>\n