Bethberry, I would like to contribute, but for some reason, this computer I'm using (at work) is blocking me from accessing that thread.
I think you're right in what you say - unfortunatley, at the moment I can't read it so I'm going on what you've just said here.
I don't think its so much a case of tolkien 'allegorising' WW1, more a case of him mythologising his experiences. So we have 'tanks' at the destruction of Gondolin - as Garth says its almost like the way their described is tanks seen through 'enchanted eyes'. But there's also, in the Black Breath a kind of mythologising of the poison gas which struck down so many of his comrades - except there was no Aragorn to draw them back. In the morgul knife wound, where the blade breaks off & festers in the wound, do we see an echo of the shrapnel wound which killed his friend GB Smith, who died from gas gangrene, after the wound became infected? (no Elvish medicine to save him)
Or how about in the flying Dragons, & especially the Nazgul on their Fell Beasts - are we seeing another mythologising of the aircraft, appearing in war for the first time.
In the TCBS we have four idealistic young men, who, like the Elves of Tolkien's first conception, who come into the west to teach men 'songs & holiness', who want to bring the world back from what they percieved to be athiesm & decadence & corruption.
Its not that Tolkien is allegorising the war, as I said. But what we see throughout his life is the loss of beauty & peace, & its replacement by war & ugliness & destruction - from the rural beauty of Sarehole, to the noise & ugliness of Industrial Birmingham with the loss of his mother; from the beauty & peace of undergraduate life in medieval Oxford, & his visits to Edith in the 'fading' town of Warwick (Kortirion among the trees) to the horror of the Somme - & I hadn't, in my ignorance really understood how horrible till I read this book.
What Garth's book shows is how deeply this time affected Tolkien creative work, which before the war was the dreaming of a young man, with poems like Goblin Feet, about a beautiful fairyland 'over the hills & faraway', to the magnificent creation he later constructed.
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