Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Foreword by J.R.R. Tolkien

For the 1965/1966 edition of The Lord of the Rings released in the United States by Ballantine Books, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a five-page foreword giving context to his writing process, explaining inspirations behind the story, and rebuking his critics. While Tolkien insisted in this essay, just as he did in letters to fans and during interviews, that little in the book was based on reality, the influence of industrialization and the World Wars, trends in music and art, and historical discoveries affected his ideology presented in the novels. I will use the literary criticism theory of cultural studies to examine this foreword by describing important events that occurred concurrently with the many drafts of the manuscript. Future posts will demonstrate how these events influenced the text itself and my hypothetical animated musical.

Near the beginning of the letter, Tolkien explained that one of his primary interests was writing “the mythology and legends of the Eldar Days” (viii). These books were never completed in his lifetime and were released posthumously after editing by his son, Christopher Tolkien, with assistance from other writers. Tolkien describes The Lord of the Rings as “an account, as it were, of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told”. (iix) As discussed on several threads hosted by the online forum Reddit, the setting of Middle-earth feels post-apocalyptic, as if the golden age of the world has already passed. While the acclaimed Peter Jackson film has beautiful cinematography of New Zealand, a boon for the national tourist industry, its breathtaking landscapes are a far cry from the original depiction of the books. Outside of protected lands like Lothlorien, Rivendell, and the Shire, the world is made of crumbling buildings and ecological devastation, familiar to anyone who has survived in a warzone or grown up in a former mill town.

While Tolkien wrote in his foreword, “As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical.” (x), the imagery of the book strongly reflected his surrounding environment as the land he loved was ruined by industry and war. He lamented that “The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten…” (xi) as smaller, family-owned mills were replaced by industrial complexes. This time is described as the Second Industrial Revolution or Technological Revolution with modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing and gas, sewage systems, telegraphs and electric lighting, and railroads becoming widely available across Western Europe and in the United States. For Americans, the timeline can be considered between the American Civil War and World War I. While life became easier during this time, and life expectancy steadily rose from 40 years in 1870 to nearly 80 years today, rapid industrial expansion led to widespread pollution and the loss of natural landscapes.

Even more traumatic than witnessing the destruction of his childhood home was Tolkien’s experience in World War I. He was drafted at age twenty-three, roughly the same mental age as Merry and Sam during the War of the Ring; more on aging and calculations of ages for the Races of Middle-earth will appear in future posts. In the foreword, Tolkien abruptly confessed 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.” (xi) His experience in war contrasts the experience of the Fellowship, where all but one of its members survive. According to the International Encyclopedia of the First World War, technology used during this conflict, which included aircraft, submarines, machine guns, and poison gas, was vastly superior to weaponry used in prior wars and set new standards for warfare. These new methods of murder led not only to higher death rates in combat but also a new form of mental illness: shell shock.

According to the paper “Shell Shock and PTSD: A Tale of Two Diagnoses”, published by Dr. Mary C. Vance and Dr. Joel D. Howell in 2020, Royal Army Medical Corps psychologist Charles Samuel Myers first described the condition in a 1915 article published by the Lancet. His descriptions of the disorder were ambiguous, much like the writings of Tolkien, and the causes of the disorder were poorly understood. The British government did not consider shell shock a serious illness and sought “to return a soldier to the front lines as quickly as possible” (Vance & Howell). The military attempted to abolish the term in 1918, but it returned with the start of World War II. Across the water in the United States, the diagnosis was likewise not taken seriously. The deceiving headline “SHELL SHOCK NOT SERIOUS.; Physically Sound Soldiers Are Immune, Allied Surgeons Find” appeared in the New York Times on September 2, 1918 and supported the notion that men with shell shock were not sick, just weak.

In the aftermath of the Great War and subsequent Great Depression, Tolkien began writing what became The Lord of the Rings. The year was 1936, the same year that the famous Summer Olympics were held in Berlin, Germany and featured American track & field athlete Jesse Owens dominating the sprints. The games were nearly boycotted by other nations, as Adolf Hitler had published a diatribe against Black and Jewish athletes in the Nazi-run newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. Government officials from these nations knew that Nazi Germany had enacted and expanded the Nuremberg Laws during the fall of 1935, declaring that people with any amount of non-Aryan ancestry were no longer German citizens and had no human rights. Prior to the games, Nazi police forced hundreds of Jews and Romani into concentration camps. Leaders of nations participating in the Olympics were aware of these human rights violations yet did not intervene.

Tolkien continued writing “at intervals” in 1937, 1938, and 1939 as unrest grew across Europe. The Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, pitted the republicanos with their ideology of anti-fascism and communism against the nacionales with their ideology of fascism and totalitarianism. Aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the nacionales won a war that led to the creation of artworks such as Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica and the 1999 Spanish-language film La lengua de las mariposas. At the same time in Russia, Joseph Stalin ordered Yezhovshina or the Great Purge, a genocide against anyone declared an “enemy of the people”, whatever that meant for the given day.

Tolkien admitted that by the beginning of World War II in 1939, “the tale had not yet reached the end of Book I” (ix). He “halted for a long while” (ix) at Balin’s Tomb in Moria, a chapter now called “A Journey in the Dark”. The discovery of a genocide at the fictional burial ground of the dwarf leader, known in The Hobbit as the closest friend of Bilbo, despite the protagonist’s instance of being the “companion of Thorin” (The Hobbit, 289), parallels Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 and the openings of the first concentration camps, events targeting Jews and other oppressed minorities. Tolkien freely explained that he portrayed dwarves as a Semitic culture based on their language and mannerisms. The practice of writing dwarves as Jews originated in medieval Europe and was originally rooted in anti-Semitism. This inspired composer Richard Wagner to create the scheming dwarf Alberich and clownish dwarf Mime in his opera Sigfried, part three of Der Ring des Nibelungen. No wonder these works were popular in Nazi Germany and are unofficially banned in Israel.

After a hiatus in 1940, Tolkien “came to Lothlorien and the Great River in 1941” (ix), a year where war continued in Europe and the Holocaust officially began. As Tolkien plotted his beloved story through charts, maps, and linguistic documentation, the Nazi German regime recorded genocidal deaths with the same meticulousness, allowing historians to calculate a death toll of at least 17 million victims. Across the water in Hawaii, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to enter the war. Not all news from this year involved the worldwide conflict or directly affected the life of the author. The world of animation was rapidly changing. In California, unionized workers of the Screen Cartoonist Guild (SCG), a predecessor of today’s Animation Guild IATSE Local 839, who were employed at Walt Disney Productions, organized a four-month strike to protest the firing of unionized employees and unfair pay. But the world was not completely bleak in the history of animation. Bugs Bunny made his first named appearance in the eight-minute cartoon “Elmer’s Pet Rabbit”, while Tom and Jerry make their first named appearance in the short “The Midnight Snack”.

By 1942, Tolkien began writing out of order, as he started Book III, following the surviving members of the Fellowship minus Sam and Frodo, and then continued on to the first and third chapter of Book V, which covered the same group of seven characters. He skipped Book IV as Sam and Frodo go to Mordor, and then he stopped completely, as “Foresight had failed” (iv). Elsewhere in the world, World War II continued as the Manhattan Project to build nuclear weapons began in December of that year. Like the animation industry, the music industry encountered major changes. Big Band music ended abruptly as unionized musicians entered the longest strike in entertainment history. Since singers were not considered musicians by the unions, crooners like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra rose to the top of the charts, and the solo artist became the enduring trend in music.

Not until 1944 did Tolkien write Book IV as a correspondence between himself and his son Christopher. At the time, Christopher was stationed with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in South Africa. This youngest branch of the British military was founded in 1918 near the end of World War I and greatly expanded its capacity throughout World War II. While South Africa was safe from the conflict of the war, the colony endured its own internal political unrest. The year before, in 1943, South Africans formed the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) inspired by the ideology of Leon Trotsky. According to South African History Online, the party “aimed to unite, on a federal basis, members of the three main 'ethnic groups' - Africans, Coloureds and Indians - irrespective of religions, castes, or 'tribes'.” In the years to come, the party would suffer and disband under Apartheid, a period of state sanctioned racial segregation that lasted from 1948 until the early 1990s, just before I was born.

Tolkien took another five years to finish the books as he was busy in his career as a professor, taking a new role as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College in the University of Oxford. During this time of personal turmoil for Tolkien, the world grew in its understanding of mental health, changing taste in the arts, and discoveries from our shared human past.

Shell shock or PTSD were still not well understood during the mid-1940s, while the medical understanding of other conditions — including autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other neurodivergent disorders — was in its infancy. In 1944, German child psychologist and likely Nazi sympathizer Hans Asperger published “Die "Autistischen Psychopathen" im Kindesalter”, or “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Children” to describe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with specific focus on a variant formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome. The first diagnosis of autism was given a year earlier in 1943 by Jewish American child psychologist Dr. Leo Kanner to ten-year-old Donald Triplett, a savant with an incredible memory, love of learning languages, and talent for music. While diagnosing historical figures and literary characters is impossible, despite what pop psychology books like Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder might imply, several characters within The Lord of the Rings display textbook symptoms of PTSD and neurodivergent disorders. The parallels are unsurprising considering that Tolkien survived two wars, spent a lifetime in academia, and was likely inspired by the lives of his peers. As observed in a 2009 essay by George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, many academics have quirks consistent with diagnostic symptoms for neurodivergent conditions that are dismissed as the signs of genius or being an absent-minded professor but considered unusual outside the bubble of the academy.

Music played a major role in encouraging patriotism throughout the war. In the United States, composer Aaron Copeland and dancer Martha Graham debuted the ballet Appalachian Spring, a reimagining of traditional American music that garnered Copeland a Pulitzer Prize in Music. Later in 1944, Italian American conductor Arturo Toscanini debuted an NBC radio version of Ludwig von Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, a political statement against tyranny during which the female protagonist disguises herself as a man to rescue her imprisoned husband, a character decision found regularly in both fiction and military history.

By 1945, World War II ended after the deaths of European Axis leaders and the nuclear bombing of Japan. Countries affected by years of war began the process of reconstruction. When describing the effect of this clean-up on the ending of The Return of the King, Tolkien wrote, “it has been supposed by some that ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does not…” (xi) The United Nations formed during a conference in California, and its special agencies UNESCO and UNICEF were established the next year in 1946. European countries signed peace treaties, released colonies, and promoted Western style democracy in Asia. The world attempted to return to normalcy, but the way of life before the war had faded.

Even as the recent idealized past was no longer attainable, researchers made discoveries about the more distant human past. Tolkien imagined The Lord of the Rings as a transcription of a previously lost text, and such a discovery was shared in the real world in 1947 as the Dead Sea Scrolls were recovered from caves at Qumran, West Bank, Israel. These works were written in three distinct languages — mostly Hebrew, with some in Aramaic and Greek — just as Tolkien imagined his books to be written in Westron, with passages in Sindarin and phrases from Quenya, Khuzdûl, and the Dark Tongue of Mordor. As for the content of the scrolls, all books of the Hebrew Bible were present with the exception of Esther, along with other religious and philosophical texts. These works predated the concept of a canonical Bible and include many other seemingly unrelated texts in the same way that Tolkien’s theoretical copy of The Red Book contained The Hobbit, a collection of six books of prose to make The Lord of the Rings, an academic paper on hobbit culture that served as a prologue in The Fellowship of the Ring, and various appendixes appearing in The Return of the King.

Further discoveries were made concerning evolutionary history. The skull of a human ancestor nicknamed Mrs. Ples was found in a South African cave in 1947, adding to the growing list of prehistoric remains with catchy names like Java Man, found in Indonesia during 1891, and Cheddar Man, found in England during 1903. The media circus of the Scopes Trials had long ago died down with its close in 1925, although it had ignited an ongoing culture war. Three years after the excavation of Mrs. Ples, in 1950, Pope Pius XII led the Catholic Church in the statement “Encyclical Humani Generis” describing its stance on evolution: “the Church does not forbid that… research and discussions… take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution… both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged”. The Church did discredit polygenism in the document, or the idea that human races had different origins, a belief found in the creation stories of many religious traditions, including those of Middle-earth.

After finishing his timeline, Tolkien reiterated several statements he had previously made in interviews and letters to fans: “The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story… Some who have read the book… have found it boring… I have similar opinions of their works… It is not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points…” (ix). He also complained about Americans, who he calls “those Across the Water” (xii), that published his book without his consent, “dealings one might expect of Saruman in his decay rather than from the defenders of the West” (xii). The lack of standardized international copyright was a major issue for earlier authors as well. Charles Dickens famously dedicated The Pickwick Papers to copyright advocate and MP Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, which did not prevent Philadelphia publisher Carey, Lea & Blanchard from selling an unauthorized edition.

Tolkien lived and wrote through a time of immense conflict in modern history, and while he did not base the events of his books on any single event in the real world, the parallels between the bleakness and the hope that he knew versus the world shown in the text are undeniable. The Lord of the Rings presents one man’s reflection of his own experiences, even as the story is set in a fictional past.