Tolkien in the trenches
From Graham Tayar
Sir: I think Charles Moore (whom I much respect as a columnist) is wrong about J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (The Spectator’s Notes, 12 November) when he says that it, like Four Quartets and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, combines ‘the Christian imagination with the experience of 1939–45’. The professor told me when I spent a long day with him in 1972 that he disliked allegory (although he used Christian imagery), that the book was started well before the second world war began, and that Mordor was based on the trenches in the first world war, where Tolkien had served. It was, he said, an attempt to write a really long story — based on invented languages — a myth for England, which he hoped to present to the Queen!
Graham Tayar London NW5
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