John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who passed away 50 years ago, was a university professor and extraordinary poet who was passionate about languages and trees. Tolkien was a writer who took a long time to mature, with the early years of his life being marked by a succession of losses: the departure from the idyllic countryside of Sarehole, and most notably, the loss of a loving mother with a vivid imagination. There is a tangible melancholy in Tolkien’s life, a desire to dream at all costs, despite the smoke from factories and an Edwardian society that suffocates its poets. In such a materialistic world, writing becomes an act of resistance, a form of courage that only makes sense within a fraternal community of young artists who dream ardently of changing the world.

His participation in World War I would change his life. When the former soldier J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the epic of The Lord of the Rings, he, like Frodo, was a soldier who had been wounded on the front lines. But there are invisible wounds from which one never recovers. Like his character, he survived the trenches while many of his loved ones did not (Boromir, Theoden/ childhood friend Rob Gilson, poet Geoffrey Bache Smith). Why is he still alive while his comrades, who were promised great literary careers, are dead? How can one return to the banality of everyday life after such an ordeal? The war was a cruel initiation that would lead the novelist, like any survivor of a great collective tragedy, to question the meaning of existence.