No Tolkien

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

No Tolkien

Parts 1-2

by Eric Oppen and Steve Payne

Author says, what direction would fantasy fiction have taken if Tolkien had died on the Somme?

On 27th October 1916, on this day a Signals Officer, Second Lieutenant John Tolkien of the Lancashire Fusiliers died in No Man's Land at the Battle of the Somme.

The Death of Tolkien

In October 1911, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. He initially studied Classics but changed to English Language, graduating in 1915.

Tolkien trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for eleven months before receiving his Commission. He was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the British Expeditionary Force, arriving in France on 4 June 1916.

His wife Edith later wrote: ~ Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my husband then ... it was like a death . By 1918 all but one of his close friends were dead.

On 28th October 1916, on this morning the Reverend Mervyn S. Evers emerged from a captured German dugout, planning to return across No Man's Land to the British trenches.

Three soldiers - a Brigade Machine Gun Officer and two Signals Officers - had spent a very long night with the Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusilliers who recalled ~

We dossed down for the night in the hope of getting some sleep, but it was not to be. We no sooner laid down than hoards of lice got up. So we went round to the medical officer, who was also in the dugout with his equipment, and he gave us some ointment which he assured us would keep the little brutes away.

Cruel Note of Irony

We anointed ourselves all over with the stuff and again lay down in great hopes, but it was not to be, because instead of discouraging them it seemed to act like a kind of ors d'oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigor. .

One of the soldiers was already dead, and had to be carried across No Man's Land by his colleagues. Evers noticed a small white paper note tucked in the dead officer's tunic, and withdrew it expecting to find a note to the man's young wife Edith. Instead, the note read ~

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Click to watch Part 1 of the 1977 Animation

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats--the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill--The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it--and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the lefthand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours' respect, but he gained--well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

Author says, in order to draw a parallel between Bag End and the Trenches, we have of course taken the assumption that Tolkien had started to write the Hobbit much earlier than is commonly understood..

Eric Oppen and Steve Payne

Respectively, Guest Historian and Editor of Today in Alternate History, a Daily Updating Blog of Important Events In History That Never Occurred Today.

Imagine what would be, if history had occurred a bit differently. Who says it didn't, somewhere? These fictional news items explore that possibility. Possibilities such as America becoming a Marxist superpower, aliens influencing human history in the 18th century and Teddy Roosevelt winning his 3rd term as president abound in this interesting fictional blog.

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