In TLOTR...?

Question

The thought just struck me but do you think Sauron from middle-earth was based on a dictator in the 1940s.. I mean J.R.R.Tolkien did fight in WWII. And if so, who is he more alike... cause i am stuck in between hitler and stalin.

Answer 1

If you look at the prefaces to the books, he does discuss this, but denies that there is a close a correlation (intentional anyway) between the books and the war.

Answer 2

Sauron would be more equivalent to Hitler, since he was at war with the Shire, which would equate with England. If you buy this analogy, Saruman would equate with Stalin, who was supposedly a key ally against Hitler, but secretly made an alliance with him.

The analogy works fairly well, but Tolkien denied that there was any intentional comparison.

Answer 3

Like was said, Tolkien denied any suggestion that the story was an allegory for the war. If it was part of his subconcious though, I would think it would probably be Stalin. When the books were written, Hitler was long dead, but the USSR was on the rise, threatening to encroach acrss the West.

Answer 4

not did but his son did
On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. She replied saying that she was already engaged but had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love; Edith returned her ring and chose to marry Tolkien instead.[21] Following their engagement Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence.[22] They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, on 22 March 1916.[23]

Tolkien graduated from the University of Oxford (where he was a member of Exeter College) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915. As the United Kingdom was engaged in World War I, Tolkien joined the British Army and served as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers.[24] His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme until he came down with trench fever on 27 October 1916 and was moved back to England on 8 November 1916.[25] Many of his close friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. Tolkien's Webley .455 service revolver is currently on display in the Imperial War Museum, London in a World War I exhibition. During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant.

When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock: "We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers".[26] This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.[27]

Christopher Tolkien was born in Leeds, England, the third and youngest son of J. R. R. Tolkien. He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and then at the Oratory School. During World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, after which he read English at Oxford University.

He had long been part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins, and then as a teenager and young adult offering much feedback on The Lord of the Rings during its 15-year gestation. He had the task of interpreting his father's sometimes self-contradictory maps of Middle-earth in order to produce the versions used in the books, and he re-drew the main map in the late 1970s to clarify the lettering and correct some errors and omissions.

Later, Tolkien followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a lecturer and tutor in English Language at New College, Oxford from 1964 to 1975.

In 2001, he received some attention for his resistance to The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. He expressed doubts over the viability of a film interpretation that retained the essence of the work, but stressed that this was just his opinion. [1]

Christopher Tolkien currently lives in France with his second wife, Baillie Tolkien, who edited J. R. R.'s The Father Christmas Letters for posthumous publication. They have two children, Adam Tolkien and Rachel Tolkien. His eldest son by his first marriage, Simon Tolkien, is a barrister and novelist.