The New Statesman

Fairy tales were not – or not just – entertainment for children, writes John Gray.⁠
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As JRR Tolkien frames the genre in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy Stories”, they comprised complete and coherent “secondary” worlds, alternate realities formed by their “sub-creators” as refuges from disenchantment. Middle-earth may never have existed, but the simple pastoral life it conjures up represents an alternative to a desolate, machine-governed modernity.⁠
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Freely admitting that The Lord of the Rings was an exercise in escapist myth-making, Tolkien insisted that seeking escape from mechanisation was both natural and rational. The crucible of his mythology was his experience as a front-line officer in the First World War. Deployed to France in June 1916, he arrived just before the Battle of the Somme. At the time it concluded in September of that year, it was the bloodiest single battle in modern history, with more than a million casualties, including over 300,000 deaths. On its first day (1 July 1916), British forces alone suffered more than 57,00 casualties, nearly 20,000 of them fatalities. Exposed to artillery bombardment and the filthy carnage of the trenches, Tolkien contracted trench fever and was evacuated back to Britain in October 1916. The illness – spread by lice – saved his life. By 1918, all but one of his closest prewar friends were dead and his battalion almost annihilated.⁠
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As DJ Taylor, the critic, novelist and biographer of George Orwell, notes in this engaging and illuminating study, Tolkien dismissed any suggestion that his work reflected his life in any direct fashion. Writing to WH Auden, a lifelong admirer, he described himself as a writer “whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythological and legendary dress”.⁠
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Read John Gray's review of The King Under the Mountain: In Search of JRR Tolkien by DJ Taylor⁠
“A shadowy silent world”: Tolkien’s deathly landscapes resemble the front as depicted in We Are Making a New World (1918) by Paul Nash. Image via Alamy