![]() It seems highly unlikely that the same batman would have stayed with him during these reassignments, particularly the later ones, which were prompted by his chronic ill-health after the Somme. Perhaps this isn’t surprising: Tolkien was attached to four different units- the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers, his training battalion in 1915–16 the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, the battalion he served with on the Somme in 1916 and the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers and the 9th Royal Defence Corps, with which he guarded the Yorkshire coast in 1917–18. That doesn’t mean he had a whole team ministering to his needs, but that for some reason his batman was replaced at least once. Furthermore, the Minchin letter shows Tolkien had more than one batman. I take this to mean that Tolkien had exclusive use of a batman, rather than being just one of several officers pooling the batman’s services - a point of ambiguity in the papers kept by Tolkien that I have seen. This, and memories of those rural roots, bring the hobbits vividly to life.Ī further detail in the Minchin letter is that Tolkien refers to “ my batmen”, rather than simply “the batmen” as in the Carpenter quote. But the fear, the resourcefulness, the demoralisation, the courage, the sorrow, the innocent laughter in the face of dreadful odds: all these things he had known, and he infused his fiction with them. Many of the dangers he describes in The Lord of the Rings may be fantastical, though many are not and others are only symbolically so. He had seen, and felt, how war could change those who went through it. ![]() By silently linking his hobbits with the boys of 1901, who had grown into the young men of 1914, Tolkien was able to draw directly upon the war into which he and those men were then hurled. Tolkien’s comment to Minchin also provides support for a point I have made in various talks on how the Great War shaped The Lord of the Rings. Amid all Tolkien’s astonishing inventiveness, and alongside the vast knowledge of matters mythological and medieval that he poured into his legendarium, this is a point too easily overlooked: contemporary life, especially the life he knew in his formative years, was a powerful well-spring of creativity in The Lord of the Rings. 230)-that is, a village like Sarehole in 1897, Queen Victoria’s 60th year on the throne and Tolkien’s fifth on earth. This dovetails well with his statement elsewhere that the society of the Shire is “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee” ( Letters p. It gives the extra dimension that in portraying Sam, Tolkien had also drawn on memories of lads from the rural outskirts of Birmingham, where he had lived between the ages of three and eight. Tolkien’s phrasing in the letter sent to Minchin is different, and very interesting too: “My ‘Samwise’ is indeed (as you note) largely a reflexion of the English soldier-grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” Regarding the fictional Sam Gamgee’s link to the First World War, Carpenter’s Biography quotes Tolkien as saying, “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” A batman, in military parlance, was a soldier who (as well as being required to fight) was tasked with looking after an officer’s kit, cooking, and cleaning. It seems a pity that more of it wasn’t used-it runs on for a further 1,100 words. It seems to have been known to Carpenter only in a draft version, from which he provided excerpts in The Letters of J.R.R. Cotton Minchin, has gone up for auction, and it is indeed a pleasure to read-wide-ranging, ruminative, written in Tolkien’s distinctive voice and handwriting. The letter, written on 16 April 1956 to H. However, now we see Tolkien making a near-identical statement in reply to a fan of The Lord of the Rings. Was it from some unpublished and unknown set of autobiographical notes-if indeed Tolkien ever wrote such a thing? We could only ponder. The precise source of the quotation has always been a mystery-a frustration to later writers on Tolkien, like myself, who like precision and context. Tolkien: A Biography, in which he quoted Tolkien saying that Sam Gamgee was partly inspired by soldiers he had known in the First World War. ![]() He could be less guarded in private, as Humphrey Carpenter revealed in his 1977 J.R.R. Tolkien, like a good poker player, kept his cards close to his chest, and gave very little away about the impact of experience upon his fiction.
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