While training as a signals officer for WWI, J.R.R. Tolkien married childhood sweetheart Edith, thou

While training as a signals officer for WWI, J.R.R. Tolkien married childhood sweetheart Edith, though he knew he would soon be sent abroad and confessed “parting from my wife then… it was like death”. He arrived in France on 4 June 1916, and was sent to Sommes. On the first day of that battle, he received news that one of his childhood friend, Rob Gibson, had been killed. Devastated, Tolkien wrote a letter to mutual friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, asking how it was possible to go on when it felt as though a part of him had died. Smith sent back a letter telling him their friendship would never die. Tolkien caught trench fever and was sent home to recuperate. While recovering in hospital, he learned that Smith had died in an accident behind the lines. It was at that point he began to write “The Fall of Gondolin.” In later years, after his books had been published, he criticized readers for attempting to find parallels between The Lord of the Rings and WWII, telling them, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”Edith Tolkien died in 1971. Upon her grave is the name “Lúthien.” After her death, Tolkien seemed to lose much of the vigor of life, writing hardly at all. He died two years later, and was buried in the same grave as Edith, and upon his tombstone is the “Beren”. -- source link

More pics about