Mordor inspired by Nazi Germany?

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreword to 'The Lord of the Rings'

As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical...The crucial chapter, 'The Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in my mind, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels.

The War of the Ring does not emulate WWII in the least, per the author. If anything, the battle and horror in the story reflect Tolkien's recollections of WWI:

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreword to 'The Lord of the Rings'

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

Originally Posted by burrahobbit

That being said, the physical descriptions of Mordor are very clearly based on "no man's land" in WW1 which Tolkien experienced firsthand. So not Nazi Germany, and not politically any kind of Germany, but geographically related to German activities in some abstract way.

Precisely, burrahobbit. The no-man's land of Mordor reflects Tolkien's memories of the barren no-man's land of the Somme, just as the Dead Marshes reflect the bloated, dead bodies of his comrades-in-arms floating in flooded bomb craters, and the valiant charge of the Rohirrim on Pelennor Field represents the last formidable cavalry charges of WWI (Tolkien being a cavalry man himself), before mechanized war and machine guns made cavalry obsolete.

But the political climate of Middle-earth does not reflect WWI Europe anymore than it does WWII. One could just as well equate Sauron to Kaiser Wilhelm's bloody imperialism and compare the Haradrim to the Turks, and the Hobbits as wild-eyed and innocent English boys naively marching towards the blood-strewn fields of Flanders. But one would be just as wrong.

[alatar]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

The War of the Ring does not emulate WWII in the least, per the author. If anything, the battle and horror in the story reflect Tolkien's recollections of WWI

Much agreed.

Towards the end of Summer, I came across a brown patch on one of the backyard stepping stones. Upon closer examination, I saw that it was composed of ants - some alive, but most of them dead. What struck me was the shear number of ants, as they collectively made an area about the size of a circle with a radius of about 6 inches.

As I live in a temperate zone, these are not huge Amazonian army ants that are the size of small dogs. No, these were the typical brown-colored carpenter ants (I surmised, as I don't even pretend to be an entomologist) native to the region.

The swarm was again sizable, but again they were mostly dead. I couldn't see any signs of their demise - no chemical residue, no child-sized foot prints, no magnifying glass burns. Just dead ants.

Out came the hose. Whatever it was with the ants, they - the living and the dead - were washed away, and now that we're into Fall, are long forgotten.

***

At least sixteen million people died as a result of WWI, the war that J.R.R. Tolkien experienced. Here's how some of his contemporaries saw that time (all quotes and poems taken from Martin Gilbert's The First World War):

Originally Posted by Captain Spears

In the splendor of conquest, or at rest, troops could try to forget realities of the battlefield, but for those who were at the Front, or even near the front as it moved swiftly forward, a new, harsh world was beginning to impinge upon the accepted conventions of armies at war. For Captain Spears, who had been with the French Fifth Army for the previous two weeks, that moment came on August 20, as he sat on a hill with a French officer overlooking the fields, towns and villages of the Sambre valley south of Charleroi. 'A dog was barking at some sheep. A girl was singing as she walked down the lane behind us. From a little farm away on the right came the voices and laughter of some soldiers cooking their evening meal. Darkness grew in the far distance as the light began to fail. Then, without a moment's warning, with a suddenness that made us start and strain our eyes to see what our minds could not realise, we saw the whole horizon burst into flame.'

'A chill of horror came over us. War seemed suddenly to have assumed a merciless, ruthless aspect that we had not realized till then. Hitherto it had been war as we had conceived it, hard blows, straight dealing, but now for the first time we felt as if some horrible Thing, utterly merciless, was advancing to grip us.'

Originally Posted by A.P Herbert

This is the Fourth of June

Think not that I never dream

The noise of that infernal noon,

The stretchers' endless stream,

The tales of triumph won,

The night that found them lies,

The wounded wailing in the sun,

The dead, the dust, the flies.

The flies! oh God, the flies

That soiled the sacred dead,

To see them swarm from dead men's eyes

And share the soldiers' bread!

Nor think I now forgot

The filth and stench of war,

The corpses on the parapet,

The maggots on the floor.

Isaac Rosenberg
The wheels lurched over the sprawled dead
But pained them not, thought their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night to night and now.

Earth has waited for them
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!

Originally Posted by Wllfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eye writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick with sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

As above, it wasn't a country or person that Tolkien was equating with Mordor; it was WAR! It was this ugliness, this waste of lives, the destruction of the world, the pitiful sacrifices on Mars' altar, the suffering of those just trying to find a quiet place (just think for a moment of all of the children!) - that I think was what Tolkien saw as the 'evil,' not some specific European country.

Reading the book with the stories and poems like those above, I couldn't help but be touched by the huge mess the whole affair was...and yet, for what? What did it accomplish again? Ask someone on the street to see if they even know about what had taken place.

All of it washed away by some big hose?

[Mithalwen]

I saw a documentary about the Coventry blitz a couple of weeks ago and although I grew up on stories about it (my father and both sets of grandparents lived through it) seeing news footage of it for the first time renewed the impact and made me wonder if the horror of the Blitz had influenced (inspired seems the wrong word) the liquid fire of Isengard and the assault of fire on Minas Tirith:

"A power and mind of malice guided it . As soon as the great catapults were set ...they began to throw missiles marvellously high, so that they passed right above the battlements and fell thudding within the first circle of the City; and many of them by some secret art burst into flame as they came toppling down".

[The Mouth of Sauron]

Considering that the average blond blue-eyed Rider of Rohan appeared to be modelled on equestrian Aryans and the men of Gondor kept referring to "lesser men", perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to accuse Sauron of Nazi sympathies.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by alatar

Out came the hose. Whatever it was with the ants, they - the living and the dead - were washed away, and now that we're into Fall, are long forgotten.

Reminds me of the passage in Appendix A on Arwen's fate at Cerin Amroth:

Originally Posted by JRRT

There at last when the mallorn leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are uttterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea.

Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old.

Originally Posted by alatar

Reading the book with the stories and poems like those above, I couldn't help but be touched by the huge mess the whole affair was...and yet, for what? What did it accomplish again? Ask someone on the street to see if they even know about what had taken place.

All of it washed away by some big hose?

And this reminds me of Tolkien's contrast of--not modern war poetry but-- Beowulf with an imaginary (for the sake of discussion) theme from the life and death of St. Oswald.

Originally Posted by The Monsters and the Critics

It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant than this imaginary poem of a great king's fall. It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important. At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts -- lixte se leoma ofer landa fela -- and there is a sound of music; but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voice to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps.

It is quite possible that anyone who feels this with Tolkien would understand not to make comparisons with the Nazi regime. This is not to gainsay Mithalwen's point about the Blitz nor alatar's about War.

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by alatar

Out came the hose. Whatever it was with the ants, they - the living and the dead - were washed away, and now that we're into Fall, are long forgotten.

This, and Bethberry's quote from the Appendices about Arwen's passing, remind me of a poem by Carl Sandburg:

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

The atrocities of war -- and the tendency of people to forget them over time -- is nothing new. I never felt that Tolkien was thinking of any one specific war in his depictions of it -- although most certainly, his experiences in WWI were a huge influence on some aspects of it -- but rather, the horror that war has been from the first. I think that it is often a mistake to believe than any authorial voice reflects a single influence or opinion (unless of course the author has said it does), and like any person, Tolkien's views of war would have been formed by the many things -- his personal experiences, his studies, his religious beliefs, etc. -- that formed him. The Nazis are probably in there somewhere, but by influence, not intent, I believe.

[alatar]

Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

The Nazis are probably in there somewhere, but by influence, not intent, I believe.

The waste and destruction that took place during WWI was, to me, what Tolkien thought of as 'evil,' not a particular group. Like when he speaks through Sam who sees the Southroners marching, knowing that the one particular soldier wasn't evil, seemingly, but just caught up on the wrong side and maybe even forced to fight.

We see something 'evil' and compare it to something we know, as maybe Tolkien did. Anyway...

Both sides in the real war not only had to contend with 'the enemy,' but those enemies we all face - deprivation, starvation, disaster, atrocity, etc. Think of those that were lost, not via a bullet, but by the mud that drowned them, or the cold that froze them, or the virus, bacterium or amoeba that infected them. And then there were those clever inventions, such as gas, that not only killed, but tortured as it slowly did so.

There are monsters about, but where's Grendel in all of that?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by alatar

There are monsters about, but where's Grendel in all of that?

Are you mourning the absence of Grendel?

[alatar]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Are you mourning the absence of Grendel?

Thought that she and her brother Hansel escapes the Witch's belly?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by alatar

Thought that she and her brother Hansel escapes the Witch's belly?

I think they might have been hosed?