Since fellow blogger Brian Murphy asked, and encouraged, I thought the least I could do is follow through and post this. Granted, I realize it is not perhaps a great paper, and will likely do nothing to further Tolkien studies (or Owen Studies for that matter) it did get me a 91.. there are a few errors, but I don't happen to have access to the graded paper on Turnitin.com any longer now that the class is over. So, Tolkien aficionados and masters, please go easy on me.. I'm sure I made mistakes.. but I am after all only an enthusiast.. and desperately was trying to find a way to tie something I enjoyed into yet another boring freshman paper.. so if you have any constructive criticisms to offer I am of course all ears, as I will be writing many, many more papers over the remaining years of my college career, and am always looking for ways to improve.
Eng 1102
18th April 2012
“Tears
Unnumbered”
War
is a grand undertaking, perhaps even the grandest, but it is also the most
futile. The desire to wage armed conflict, to willingly distress and demolish
another’s country is to confess a uniquely selfish worldview. Wars tend to
begin not on the front lines, but in offices in national capitols. The people
who start the war, do not fight the war, and thus do not truly understand the
nature of war. However, the people who fight the war are left with a great deal
of time to pontificate on their situation. They wonder why they are there, what
the people fighting on the other side are really like, and if perhaps it is not
more likely that their alleged foes are just people like them. The soldier has
time to write letters, though censored, to their loved ones at home. Anthony
Fletcher asks the poignant question, “What did men confess and what did they
conceal, how far did they relate life as it really was? Tones of reassurance
were crafted, omissions were adopted in response to degrees of anxiety at home.”
(1)Ultimately, historians cannot know exactly what the individual thoughts of a
soldier were, but a level of certainty can be gleaned by carefully reading the
letters, poems, and stories produced by soldiers. If one is judicious in their
reading of soldiers poetry, stories and letters, a common theme begins to
emerge. The overriding theme is that of futility. This theme is of the loss and
futility of armed conflict as seen by those who witness it at its basest level,
quite literally in this case by the people in the trenches, and is brought home
repeatedly in a myriad of disparate genres, by a veritable cornucopia of
writers.
One
of the most spectacular battles of World War 1 was the Somme offensive,
“Opening on 1 July 1916, the Battle of the Somme was the Anglo-French attempt
to break through the German lines by means of a massive infantry assault”
(Gilbert, 258), its legend has grown due to its grotesque casualty rate,
“20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the battle of the
Somme” (Gilbert, 541). But its horror and callous lack of humanity caused
writers and poets to spring up with great alacrity. It was during this battle
or others like it that Soldier-writers created art in the midst of this chaos
and death. These writers created under horrendous conditions, during stolen
seconds of peace, or in the wards of convalescent hospitals while recovering
from illness or injury. Heather Lusty, in her paper, Shaping the National Voice, pontificates on the nature of the
soldier poet,
Their poetry
became a way for these soldiers to refashion their war experiences and express
them via a new medium, allowing each of them to reconnect with the world and
reconstruct their personal identities in a different world. These poets also
reveal their own anxieties about their own participation in the war, the
responsibility each bore for the lives and losses of their men, and the
pressures of class and rank, all of which contributed to the specific
manifestations of their psychological and traumatic reactions to the war. ( 7)
It is always worth keeping in mind
just what conditioned these writers worked under. This essential context can
bring tremendous insight to the reader, turning them from passive consumers,
into critical thinkers.
Wilfred Owen is
one such writer. In his poem “Dulce et Decorum est”, often considered one of
the greatest poems to emerge from World War 1, Owen writes a graphic and
chilling description of a poison gas attack. Providing the reader a grotesquely
detailed glimpse of what happened when a soldier was unable to secure his
protective gear in time. It is not the gas attack, or the soldier’s death,
which makes the poem so moving, but the anger that Owen seethes with and
directs at the warmongers at home, which truly makes the poem great. Here is a
man who is willing to buck the demanded patriotism to write down his true
feelings about the waste of war. Owen writes in the final stanza a bitter
renunciation of this callow call for duty and glory,
“My
Friend you would not tell with such high zest
To
Children desperate for some ardent glory,
The
old lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro
patria mori.” (1)
When this Latin
phrase is translated, it reads: “it is a sweet and fitting thing to die for
your country” (Ward, 18). In Owen’s capable hands this exultation to duty and
sacrifice for the homeland drips with cynicism and irony. John Hughes writes in
his own analysis of the poem, “the undeflectable intensity and antiwar intent
of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and Owen’s concern, as he said, with unconsoling
truthfulness” (1) and I cannot help but agree with this summation of the poem.
Further echoes of this understanding are provided by writer Max Saunders when
he writes “Like much First World War writing, the poem is not only about the
horror of war; the need to represent that horror with unflinching realism, so
that what Owen called ‘the pity of war’ can be weighed, and rendered without
euphemism or sentimentality.” (62) This leaves one conclusion, Owen is writing this
heart-wrenching tale in order to provide the audience with as accurate a
picture as possible, to convey the event as closely to the truth as he is able,
in an effort to show how pointless this death was.
This leads us to
Owen as a writer. Candace Ward writes in her introduction to a short collection
of Owen’s poetry that, “Owen’s poetic skills were honed by the nature of his
war experiences”. (18) Owing to the realism
it truthfully seems as if he has poured a great quantity of experience
and anguish into his work, but due to the lack of any sentiment except anger
his poem nearly comes across as callous during his blunt and straight forward
rendering of a man’s death, and the non chalant way in which his comrades react
to it.
In
contrast to Owen’s starkly unsentimental realism, a very different sort of
writer emerged from the same conflict, indeed separated from Owen by scant
miles, the two men, both commissioned second lieutenants, and both sharing a
fondness for the language of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, this writer was
J.R.R. Tolkien. Whereas Owen wrote with a realist’s pen, Tolkien wrote with
stylus of Fantasy. Tolkien, who, after the war went on to create the world of
Middle-Earth as described in his books The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
among others, was not immune from the seeping influence of his experiences in the
trenches. Tolkien’s painful memories of the war are particularly present when
his characters cross the region known as “The Dead Marshes” in The Lord of the Rings,
“’I
don’t know, ‘ said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. ‘But I have seen them too. In
the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces,
deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and eil, and noble faces
and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all
foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.’ Frodo hid his eyes in
his hands.” (627)
Following this
line of thought that what Tolkien is describing is a memory of his experiences
in the Somme it is useful to look at other sources. One such source is John
Garth, who writes in his book Tolkien and
the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth,
“Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes, a scene of morbid desolation
that has become, in effect, a short hand symbol for the trenches”. (311) In
this short passage the reader can catch a glimpse of the horror which the men
on the western front encountered on a daily basis. Even though the book is a fantasy
and it tells the story of invented characters experiencing this horror while
inhabiting an invented world, the overwhelming grotesqueness that is present is
equal to the stark realism present in Owen’s poem. Ultimately, as Tolkien winds
down his story and his characters, returned from the war, now diminished are
unable to escape their experiences the reader is left wondering what it must
have been like for the real life men whom the author based his characters upon.
Even though one is written as Fantasy with a dash of sentimentalism and the
other an unsentimental injection of Realism, the sense of loss and the futile
nature of war is equally present if the reader cares to look.
This complex
frustration and anger at loss and senseless violence that is present in both
Owen and Tolkien, and many other writers who have lived through war, is, while
not always consistently apparent always seems to be just below the surface if
you know where to look. I believe that author and Doctor Mark J. Stillman, in
his analysis of war writers, sums up the situation best, “If we listen
carefully and ignore the incessant drone of ever beating drums, we might catch
wind of distant voices from the past, sometimes speaking foreign tongues, but
relating the same elegiac tale. Each distinct voice belongs to a chorus echoing
the ageless anger of Achilles.” (485) Though subtle, especially in works that
are not presented as realistic, this anger is present. It tends to be directed
at the needless loss of compatriots at the whims of politicians who sit safe
behind the lines, and order men to their deaths. Nevertheless, like so many
others, the war claimed Owen’s life scant days before the armistice was signed.
Tolkien narrowly escaped that fate due to illness. Both Wilfred Owen and J.R.R.
Tolkien experienced similar situations during their own private experience in
war. These two writer’s stories and experiences have been preserved for
posterity, and every year thousands of people read them and they perhaps enrich
some. The writers have shown us the truth, fantastically or realistically, that
war is a dirty, messy business in which lives are ruined, typically for naught,
and the lot of the common soldier to cope with this reality is their greatest
strength. These writers beseech the reader
not, not to listen to the drums of war, and certainly not to feel
patriotism towards one’s country, But to be circumspect in your desire, either
to take up arms against another or seen someone else to do it in their stead. It
is up to the readers to come to terms with this idea and make the most of it in
their own lives, while not succumbing to the incessantly beating drums of those
who are ever ready to send soldiers to die on some far away field, be it for a
few yards of ground or a few pennies off the price of a gallon of gasoline.
Works
Cited.
Fletcher, Anthony. "Between
The Lines." History Today 59.11
(2009): 45-51. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 26 Mar. 2012.
Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great
War: The Threshold of Middle Earth. 1st edition. New York: Mariner Books, 2005. 310-311. Print
Gilbert, Martin. The First World
War: A Complete History. 1st edition. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. Print
Hughes, John. "Owen's DULCE ET
DECORUM EST." Explicator 64.3
(2006): 164. MasterFILE Premier. Web.
6 Apr. 2012.
Lusty, Heather. “Shaping the
National Voice: Poetry of WWI” Journal of
Modern Literature, 30.1
(2006): 199-209. Project Muse. Web. 24 Mar. 2012.
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum
est” Literature:
an introduction to reading and writing. 5th
compact edition. Edgar V. Roberts, Robert Zweig. New York: Longman an imprint
of Pearson, 2012. 625. Print.
Saunders, Max. "Friendship And
Enmity In First World War Literature." Literature
& History 17.1 (2008):
62-77. History Reference Center. Web. 11 Apr. 2012.
Stillman, Mark J. "War Poets
And The Ageless Anger Of Achilles." Military
Medicine 176.5 (2011): 484- 485.
Consumer Health Complete - EBSCOhost. Web. 6 Apr. 2012.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the
Rings. 1954. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 620-635. Print.
Ward, Candace. ed. World War One
British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others. 1st edition. New York: Dover, 1997. 18.
Print.
