Tolkien always was weak on beginnings and endings. In all of his career, he never really wrote an ending, and the only beginning he ever wrote was The Beginning. Stories never end; they just become someone else’s story.
And the steward thrown off.
That makes it sound like he was snug at home while his chums went off to war. He was an officer with the Lancashire Fusilliers. Although he only spent 5 months on the front and was deemed unfit for duty after being struck with Trench Fever he did see front line duty during the Battle of the Somme. He saw more horror than most of us can imagine and did lose most of his classmates.
It’s simple, plain, and humble, just like Sam and most hobbits. It’s also understatement, which is quite British.
I certainly did not intend it that way.
If it had been an American writing the story, Sam would have married Julia Roberts and moved to Hollywood.
Right after kicking Sauron in the nuts, causing him to fall into the lake of lava in Mt Doom. Sam blows a smoke ring from his pipe, turns, and saunters away from the resulting explosion and collapse of Barad Dur without looking back, and mutters his catchphrase, “I’ll cook you some taters one of these days, I will”.
All in slo-mo, of course!
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Sancho had to go to keep the gentleman out of trouble, but was glad to be back when the nutcase finally was ready. Frodo off to asylum on Tol Erresea.
Eh, Rosie Cotton was much hotter than Julia Roberts.
Does Julia Roberts use Nair ™ on her feet?
:dubious:
And there he is with only Alice Wroke and ten billion SVU to console him. Plenty of scope to find a new definition there.
No, she doesn’t. Neither does Rosie Cotton.
Then it’s Julia, hands down.
From the Foreword to LOTR, p.6:
[QUOTE=J.R.R. Tolkien]
as the years go by it seems now 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.
[/QUOTE]
Foreword, p.6:
[QUOTE=J.R.R. Tolkien]
It was during 1944 that, leaving the loose ends and perplexities of a war which it was my task to conduct, or at least to report, I forced myself to tackle the journey of Frodo to Mordor. These chapters, eventually to become Book IV, were written and sent out as a serial to my son, Christopher, then in South Africa with the R.A.F.
[/QUOTE]
I can’t begin to imagine what it was like for JRR to see his sons off to another world war, when he’d seen firsthand what the first one was like.
(That’s just one of the things I’d like to see a Tolkien biopic cover. If they ever MAKE THE DAMN THING ALREADY, that is.)
And sadly, for many other Fathers.
Well, and that’s kinda The Thing. You may go off and have great adventures. You may fight in a big bloody war that kills most of your generation and changes the world.
But if you live through it, you’re going to go home, and you’re going to try to return to a normal life. Because that’s what there is left to do.
The line “Well, I’m back” reminds me most of is in a totally different genre. It’s the “‘Have a carrot,’ said the mother bunny” from the end of Margaret Wise Brown’s children’s book The Runaway Bunny. I’d have a hard time saying why, but ISTM that they do essentially the same thing in two very different books.
John Garth’s book Tolkien and the Great War would make an excellent source for a film about Tolkien’s early life.