10 Mind Blowing Facts You Never Knew About The Lord Of The Rings
8. Much Of The Trilogy Is Based On Tolkien's Experiences In WW1
World War 1 was the war that changed literally everything. Pretty much everything about the modern world would not exist if this war hadn't thrown everything into chaos. And of course, Tolkien might not have written his masterpiece if his life wasn't forever changed by the experience of the war to end all wars.
From the Dead Marshes, to its anti war message, to the book's bleak as hell ending for Hobbiton when Frodo returns home, one of the things that makes this book so powerful is how Tolkien channeled his trauma and experience from the first world war into the narrative.
The first world war exposed Tolkien to the absolute depths the human spirit and morality could sink to, and although Lord Of The Rings is still a rather optimistic novel at the end of the day, plot points like the fate of Hobbiton in the novel's original ending, and philosophies introduced in the book like that of the Long Defeat (the belief that good will inevitably fall to evil, however many small or large victories it may gain along the way) remind the reader that this is still a book written by a man who saw most of his best friends die horribly in an explosion in a muddy trench.