“Stories – frankly, human stories are always about one thing – death. The inevitability of death.”
He then read aloud from that article, which quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, her moving 1964 account of her mother’s desire to cling to life during her dying days. “There is no such thing as a natural death,” he read. “Nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
“Well, you may agree with the words or not,” he said. “But those are the key-spring of The Lord of the Rings.”
Tolkien’s battalion arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. The battle would prove to be one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. The brutal horror of the trench warfare he endured there, with its mud, chaos and death, left an indelible mark on him, and went on to permeate his later writing.