In August 1914 the United Kingdom entered the First World War. Despite of the general enthusiasm, Tolkien elected not to straight away volunteer for the British Army, instead he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. After finishing university in 1915 Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early 1916, and participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig and Regina. During the attack on Regina he got trench fever, a disease carried by the lice. He was invalided to England 8 November 1916. Though Tolkien started writing the Lord of the Rings only in 1954, he still had vivid memories of the horrendous events of the Great War. Many of these memories and experiences are incorporated into the part of the book where the Hobbits and Sméagol reach Mordor. Frodo, Sam and Sméagol enter the land of Mordor through the Dead Marshes. This area bears a strong resemblance of the Somme. Weather conditions made the trenches of the Somme harrowing: rain turned the area into a sea of mud. The corpses of the half-drowned soldiers were everywhere, their faces turned black and green, a side effect of the rain. These horrifying images inspired Tolkien when he created the Dead Marshes which are reeking wetlands that lay northwest of Dagorlad and southeast of …show more content…
The terrain at Minas Morgul bears a great resemblance to the No-man’s Land at Somme. The No-man’s land was “like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness” (Deutsch). Similarly, the getaway of Mordor is a barren wasteland. The land is marked by heaps of ripped earth and ash. The pits are comparable to shell craters that were churned up by artillery bombardment. The Dark Lord’s power annihilated the area, much as modern welfare technology annihilated nature at the Western