Something interesting I noticed as we were watching everyone's videos this week was that all but one of the stories seemed to have clearly been impacted by Tolkien's experiences fighting in WW I. However thinking about it I realized that I didn't notice anything so obvious on the surface within the hobbit and the lord of the rings.
So I am now thinking about what parts of those stories might be drawn from Tolkien's experience. The first things that came to my mind were the battle of five armies and the battle on the fields of Pelennor. These are the only two truly large-scale battles that we read about in the hobbit and the lord of the rings. I am thinking that these two massive battles, and the way that the buildup for them casts a shadow across each of the books means that they are either consciously or unconsciously representing the way that WW I tended to involve long times of relatively small scale conflict mostly consisting of skirmishes, building up to the massive battles like the battle of the Somme.
Thinking about it this way Tolkien's experience may really have substantially informed the way that these two stories were written, even though they were focused on the small but important adventures of the characters we cared about, they were inevitably drawn into these huge battles, much as it could have felt being a soldier in WW I.
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