Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness (2024)

In 1915, a young J.R.R. Tolkien arrives at the front in France with his closest friends. The Battle of the Somme unfolds around them, a landscape of mud and fire that will claim hundreds of thousands. The bonds of their brotherhood are tested and permanently altered by the relentless horror. This trauma imprints itself on Tolkien’s understanding of loyalty, loss, and the act of creation itself. The experience on those battlefields becomes a forge for the mythic sensibilities that would later define his literary world, transforming personal anguish into a foundational element of his imagination.