Transcript WWI JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings - IB

WWI
JRR Tolkien
and The Lord of the Rings
JRR Tolkien’s
WWI Biographical Background
• Second lieutenant as a Batallion Signaling Officer
• June 1916 sent to the Somme in France.
•He fell ill with trench fever* and sent back to England
http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-tolkiene.html
Trench Fever:
*an infectious disease characterized by the
sudden onset of fever with headaches, sore
muscles, bones, and joints, and outbreaks of
skin lesions on the chest and back
Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings
European Theater during WWI
In the course of the war the areas of Northern France and Flanders
were transformed into deadly mud swamps with slithery clay and shell craters
filled with water and corpses. Innumerable soldiers lost their footing and
drowned in those treacherous pits.
The Two Towers
Shelled out swamp the Sommes
Mordor
(...a wide almost circular pit, high banked upon the west.
It was cold and dead, and a foul sump of oily many-coloured
ooze lay at its bottom. In this evil hole they cowered...)
Passchendaele, Belgium
Passchendaele, Belgium
The Journey through the Dead Marshes,
The Two Towers
Passchendaele, Belgium
Passchendaele, Belgium
Mordor
Passchendaele, Belgium
Beaumont Hamel, (the Somme)
Mordor