A documentary on Tolkien’s experiences during the First World War has recently been published by King Edward’s School, Birmingham, where J.R.R. Tolkien went to school. Old Edwardians Zander and Elliot Weaver have produced an informative short film interviewing, among others, John Garth, author of “Tolkien and the Great War.”

The 1916 Battle of the Somme remains the most famous battle of World War I, remembered for its bloodshed and its limited territorial gains. What is often overlooked, however, is the literary importance of the Somme: more writers and poets fought in it than in any other battle in history. Narrated by Michael Sheen, War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme details the experiences of the poets and writers who served in the battle. The work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and JRR Tolkien (who arrived at the Western Front with ambitions to be a poet) was informed and transformed by the battle. Taken together, their experiences allow us to see this dreadful historical event through multiple points of view. The film uses animation, documentary accounts, surviving artefacts, battalion war diaries and the landscape itself to reconnect this literature to the events that inspired it.

An analysis of the sources of inspiration that fed the imagination of the British writer, poet and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), great master of epic fantasy.

A documentary film exploring the story of Robert Gilson's time on the frontline during the Somme campaign, for King Edward's School Birmingham.