"....Glimpses of the battlefield do occur within Tolkien's epic tapestry - Morgoth's monstrous iron dragons surely owe something to the tanks first used in combat in World War I, which terrified the horses of the cavalry. When he describes the desolation of the battlefield, strewn with the mangled corpses of friend and foe, at the end of combat, we sense that Tolkien has himself witnessed that bleak devastation.
Common cause
But in the main, Tolkien's imagination swerves away from Wilfred Owen's despair, mining the depths of his own sense of waste and loss, to salvage from it emotional, spiritual and moral meaning. This imaginative determination finds its way deep into the narrative fabric of his tales of Middle Earth.
In spite of the horror of total war, Tolkien chooses in his writing to focus his attention on the redemptive power of individual human action offered unconditionally as part of a common cause. Frodo Baggins is each of us aspiring to do good within modest limits...."
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If you scroll down to the comments, there is an anecdote on an incident that might have inspired the Black Riders...
Peter Kreeft has downloadable MP3's that include several lectures on Tolkien HERE...
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