Trying to tell someone's whole life story can be a tricky business, just ask the filmmakers
behind Tolkien.
The Lord of the Rings author lived a long and full life, but life is complicated, and
it'd be practically impossible to fit everything into a two-hour movie.
Here are a few of the things the Tolkien movie ignored.
J.R.R.
Tolkien was still young when he was uprooted from the idyllic, rural landscape that was
Sarehole, and in the film, we see his distraught mother telling him they're going to have to
move into the dark, industrial smog of Birmingham.
Tolkien is inconsolable, and it's no wonder, it's a huge change, after all.
But it's never explained why they moved in the first place.
Tolkien was born in South Africa, but neither Tolkien nor his mother could handle the rough
climate.
Mabel and her children returned to England for a short vacation and, while they were
there, Tolkien's father died.
The family was left with no way to support themselves, and while they did have extended
family in the area, something happened in 1900 that would have lasting consequences:
Mabel and her boys converted to Catholicism.
That conversion and her devotion to her new religion completely ostracized Mabel and her
children from the rest of the family.
It was after that estrangement from their relatives that Mabel and the boys moved to
a Birmingham suburb…and found another family in the Catholic Church.
Mabel died only four years later, after being diagnosed with diabetes.
Tolkien would later write that her death came on the heels of
"...killing herself with labour and trouble to ensure [her children] keeping the faith."
Anyone who's ever tried to get between a pair of teenage love-birds knows just how difficult
it can be, so when the film shows Father Francis Morgan ordering a young Tolkien to stop seeing
the orphan girl he's fallen in love with, it seems strange that he agrees with barely
an objection.
But there's way more to that story than what's depicted on screen.
Father Francis wasn't just a priest, he was appointed the boys' official guardian by their
mother before her passing.
Tolkien was acutely aware of the price his mother had paid for her conversion to Catholicism.
He saw her as a martyr for her faith, estranged by her family and willing to suffer and sacrifice
so he and his brother might find comfort in the church.
Turning his back on the wishes of his priestly guardian may have strained that relationship,
but knowing just how important faith was to his mother makes it easier to understand why
he would have given in.
But there was something else at work here, too.
While the film stresses that the ban on seeing Edith allows Tolkien to pay more attention
to his studies, Father Francis had two other reasons for opposing the pairing: the age
difference, and the fact that Edith Bratt was Protestant.
The movie also doesn't make it quite clear what the writer's role in the war actually
was.
As you might expect, an Oxford man didn't tend to become any old grunt the trenches,
and Tolkien was no different.
Just after finishing his degree, Tolkien joined up with the Oxford University Officers' Training
Corps.
He and his battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers, were dispatched to France in June 1916, and
Tolkien's official job duties included acting as a battalion signaling officer.
That basically meant he was responsible for reporting the movement of troops in the field
to senior officers, until he, like so many other young men, was sent to the front lines
of the Battle of the Somme.
He spent around four months living in the trenches, where he witnessed the horrors that
undoubtedly influenced his later writing.
"When the fear takes him and the blood and the screams and the horror of battle take
hold, do you think he would stand and fight?"
When Tolkien was sent to the front lines, he was thrown into a world of staggering violence.
An estimated 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Somme offensive,
while another 37,000 were wounded.
Shortly after he arrived in France, Tolkien met up with his old friend, Geoffrey Smith,
and the two found quickly found themselves in the midst of what Tolkien called the "universal
weariness" of war.
A few months after joining the front lines, Tolkien fell ill with trench fever, a potentially
deadly disease caused by the lice that infested the unsanitary conditions of the trenches.
He checked in sick on October 27th and was back in Birmingham by November 10th, but despite
the impression given in the film, that wasn't the end of his wartime service.
Tolkien spent the next few months in and out of various hospitals and eventually joined
up with a battalion responsible for training new recruits.
He transferred a few more times, spent another stint in the hospital, and then two things
happened: Edith gave birth to their first son, and Tolkien was transferred to a coastal
defense force.
Another relapse in June 1918 saw him officially deemed unfit for service, but it wasn't until
July 16th 1919, months after the end of the war, that he was officially demobilized and
granted a disability pension.
It's already difficult to truly understand the horrors of war, but the reality of the
trenches during World War I are almost completely unimaginable.
Naturally, the tragedy tends to continue even after the last shots are fired, but the Tolkien
film didn't really get into the lasting effects of the war.
All seems well and good once Tolkien returns to Blighty, and Tolkien did repeatedly profess
in real life that his time in the war had next to no influence on his writing, save
for the Dead Marshes owing something to the devastated, post-Somme landscape of France.
But elsewhere, he wrote:
"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience…One has indeed
personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression."
That was from a foreword to Lord of the Rings, and it's argued that Frodo's strange, distant
behavior at the end of The Return of the King is Tolkien's depiction of something he would
have often seen: shell-shock.
"It's been four years to the day since Weathertop, Sam.
It's never really healed."
Today, this is known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
There's no denying that the war, especially what Tolkien called "the animal horror of
trench warfare," left its mark on the writer, and it seems a shame the film didn't touch
on it at all.
Tolkien does touch on its title character's post-war life at Oxford, but one of the things
that's left out is the fact that he was good friends with another Oxford scholar and fantasy
writer: C.S. Lewis.
The two bonded not only over their love of myths, legends, and language, but also over
their shared experiences in World War I, and their love of stories where heroes fought
against insurmountable odds.
Occasionally, however, they argued over their faith, and Lewis was adamant he wouldn't be
pulled back into the Christian world he'd left behind.
The Christian overtones in Lewis' most famous works make it clear that Tolkien was at least
a little convincing during their arguments over religion, although Tolkien was never
shy about voicing his dislike for the Narnia series…partly because, in his opinion, it
was too overtly Christian.
Tolkien and Lewis had one other big thing in common: a shared dislike of Walt Disney.
A series of private letters between the two condemned the animator and businessman for,
among other things, his unflattering depiction of the dwarves in Snow White and his "unoriginal"
Evil Queen.
When Tolkien was attending King Edward's School, he made three friends who would come to embody
his ideals of friendship.
They formed the Tea Club, Barrovian Society, or TCBS, and if you're just going by the film's
plot, you'd be forgiven for thinking that was the only society he ever joined.
But Tolkien adored groups like that, and he was actually member of a few.
One was the Inklings, which was an Oxford-based group founded by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
They started meeting for a pint on Monday mornings and would discuss topics such as
literature, theology, whatever poetry they happened to be working on, or what was going
on at the school.
Eventually, they invited other writers along to their meetings as well.
C.S. Lewis had this to say about the group:
"What I owe them all is incalculable.
Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?"
And then there's the Coalbiters.
Tolkien had originally named the group "Kolbitar" as a reference to the practice of sitting
around a roaring fire and telling stories.
That society was focused on the Old Icelandic sagas, myths, and language, and even those
with a cursory knowledge of Tolkien's work knows how much he loved those subjects.
At the end of the film, a contented and happy Tolkien is seen surrounded by his loving wife
and their children, and it's implied that all is right in his world.
He's also a teacher at Oxford by that point, but letters penned by the real Tolkien hint
that he wasn't actually all that enamoured with teaching.
You can start with the fact that he wrote the opening line of The Hobbit while he was
supposed to be grading exam papers.
Tolkien would later write that the only thing he remembered about starting to write the
book was that he was in the middle of what he called the "everlasting weariness of that
annual task."
And he often wrote to fellow teachers complaining about just how draining it could be.
In 1964, he responded to a young teacher who had originally written to him to tell him
that his stories had captured the imaginations of her unruly class.
Tolkien typed her a letter in response, then added:
"All teaching is exhausting, and depressing, and one is seldom comforted by knowing when
one has had some effect.
I wish I could now tell some of mine (of long ago) how I remember them and the things they
said, though I was (only, as it appeared) looking out of the window or giggling at my
neighbour."
Tolkien offers only a few glimpses as to just how much of an impact the natural world had
on the famous fantasy author.
He mourns the loss of afternoons in the woods of Sarehole, sure, but as far as the film
is concerned, that's just the anguish of a boy being taken from his home.
But the film glosses over his strong feelings about the environment.
"I think in his heart Frodo's still in love with the Shire, the woods, the fields, little
rivers."
The devastation Tolkien witnessed during the Battle of the Somme brought him to the conclusion
that industrialization and machinery only served to divide people, while forests acted
as a universal refuge.
In the days he spent recovering from the illness he contracted during the war, he and Edith
spent time in the forest around Roos.
This is a scene depicted in the movie, when she dances for him among the trees.
Even at Oxford, Tolkien had a tree that he was so fond of it later became known as "Tolkien's
tree."
Unfortunately, this black pine, whose twisting branches were said to be an inspiration for
the Ents, didn't have a happy ending.
It was cut down in 2014, over 200 hundred years after it was planted, after its branches
began to fall off.
When the announcement was made, Oxford academics acknowledged Tolkien's lifelong love of trees,
a love that went back as far as his own childhood.
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