In particular, the Dead Marshes are reminiscent of Northern France’s landscape-bleak and muddy-after the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Though Tolkien detested allegory and denied that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for WWI, he admitted in a 1960 letter that his experiences in the war influenced his writing. Tolkien’s novels have remained both popular and culturally influential since their publication, inspiring numerous adaptations and popularizing the epic fantasy genre. Though he is best known for The Lord of the Rings series, Tolkien had a prolific academic career, publishing highly acclaimed translations and critical essays during his time as a professor at the University of Leeds and Oxford. While recovering from trench fever, he began recording the stories that would later be published by his son Christopher as The Book of Lost Tales. When WWI began, Tolkien delayed enlisting to complete his degree at the University of Oxford, then married Edith in 1916, two months before being sent to the Western Front. Father Francis ended Tolkien’s budding romance with Edith Bratt, an older Protestant girl, fearing that she was distracting him from school and forbidding him from contacting her until he turned 21. When he was 12, his mother died, leaving him and his brother in the care of her friend Father Francis, who raised them Catholic. Tolkien’s mother, Mabel, homeschooled him, and he grew up a voracious reader with an interest in languages. Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa and moved to the Birmingham countryside at the age of three after his father’s death.
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