I sat down with Simon Tolkien to talk about his sweeping World War I novel, No Man’s Land—and what quickly became clear is that he didn’t write it to “hit beats.” He wrote it to raise the dead in the only way a novelist can: by making a vanished world feel three-dimensional again.
And yes—his grandfather was J.R.R. Tolkien. But this conversation wasn’t about trading on a name. It was about what war does to young men, what ideology does to families, and what it costs to spend years building a book that may never see daylight.
“Not a thriller”—and why that matters
Early on I asked how he classifies the novel. His answer was immediate: he used to write thrillers. This one is a deliberate departure.
“The idea is that the story is being carried forward by the characters…rather than the characters being the servants of the plot.”
That distinction matters. In a thriller, plot is king. In No Man’s Land, the plot is compelling—but it’s compelling the way history is compelling: because you know something dreadful is coming, and you can’t stop watching the ordinary people walk toward it.
He described the book as “historical fiction” and “literary fiction,” with a simple aim: transport the reader back 100 years and make it real.
Politics before family: Daniel’s tragedy, England’s fracture
One of the first things that grabbed me was Daniel—the father—written as a socialist, an atheist, and a man whose politics outrun his obligations. Tolkien explained why: pre-war England wasn’t a calm prelude. It was tense, divided, and increasingly unstable.
Industrial disputes were widespread. The country was strained. People expected the breaking point to come from domestic crisis—labor unrest, Ireland—anything but an assassination in the Balkans that would pull the entire map into a conflagration.
Daniel’s story becomes a doorway into that moment.
“A justified strike…drags his family into debt and disaster.”
There’s a key irony Tolkien builds into the narrative: Daniel is hired because he’s a union man—because others want his “class warfare” credentials—yet he’s personally burned out by the cost, and the mismatch creates tension that ripples through the mining town.
That theme hits close to home in any age: when ideology becomes identity, it eventually sends the bill—often to the people closest to you.
The draft, the shame, and the “white feather” world
Tolkien and I spent time on something modern Americans struggle to feel in their bones: the social and psychological pressure of a mass mobilization.
He talks about characters at home and one young man, Brice, desperate not to be sent. He tries to marry to avoid service. And then there’s the public ritual of shame:
Women handing men “white feathers” for refusing to go.
That detail isn’t just period color; it’s a visceral description of social coercion—community enforcement—honor weaponized into compliance. Despite one’s personal positions on the draft, Tolkien crafts a powerful confrontation between duty and deep seated instincts.
He also described a striking scene: a young man thinks he’s going to the cinema for comedy, and instead finds himself swept into a recruitment drive inside the theater—tables set up, pressure building, the whole room closing in.
Whether you agree with a given war or not, the machinery of social compulsion is real—and novels are one of the only ways to make readers feel what they’ve never lived.
“Pals battalions” and the catastrophic math of World War I
Here’s where Tolkien moves from history to horror.
In the early war years, Britain didn’t have conscription. So to drive volunteers, the government pushed the idea of “Pals battalions”—join up, and you’ll fight alongside your friends, your co-workers, the men from your town.
It sounded humane. In practice it created concentrated tragedy.
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme—July 1, 1916—units placed at the front were annihilated. Some towns were relatively untouched. Others lost a generation in hours.
This is not abstract history. It’s demographic devastation.
And it’s one of the centerpieces of No Man’s Land—a long novel (Tolkien notes it’s about 210,000 words) that “needed to breathe,” because the subject matter doesn’t fit into a neat, commercial-sized container.
Is The Lord of the Rings about World War I?
I raised a question you hear often: whether The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings were meant as allegory for World War I and industrialized warfare.
Tolkien’s answer was careful: no, not allegory—not a one-to-one moral lesson.
“I write stories…The point…is to create a world.”
But he also made an important distinction: a work doesn’t have to be allegory to be shaped by experience. He argues that trench warfare—the Somme “hellscape”—would have had a searing effect on the imaginative mind of his grandfather coming out of Oxford and rural England.
He even pointed to the “Dead Marshes” imagery as a place where readers can feel the Western Front echoing in the background—not as propaganda, but as memory transmuted into myth.
Craft: the “armature,” the brief, the research agony
For writers, Tolkien’s process is worth the price of admission.
He can’t “pants” these books. His legal training shaped him: he builds something like a full case file.
A synopsis of roughly 10–11 pages (about 5,000 words)
Publisher alignment—no “crazy surprises”
Then the deep work: research that can exceed the writing time
Then editing—each stage “an agony”
He borrowed a sculptor’s metaphor from his mother: the outline is an “armature”—bones without flesh. If the armature is too rigid, you can’t make the thing live.
That’s the tightrope: structure enough to guide you, loose enough to let characters breathe.
Imposter syndrome, identity, and the shadow of a famous name
This was one of the more human moments of the conversation.
He talked about wanting “an identity of my own,” especially after Peter Jackson’s films amplified the Tolkien name into the stratosphere. And when I asked directly about imposter syndrome, he didn’t hesitate:
“Yes. I think imposter syndrome is absolutely right.”
He described self-consciousness as a practical threat to good prose: you need an inner ear that can hear rhythm and truth—but not in a way that freezes you.
He also shared something that many authors won’t say out loud: the fear of writing a massive book for years and watching it die in a drawer.
That pressure is real. And it explains why publication isn’t just a sterile career objective —it feels like vindication that the sacrifice wasn’t wasted.
The hidden thread: why war books still matter
Tolkien called these “war books,” and made a comparison that startled me—in a good way: that they’re war books in the same strong sense that The Lord of the Rings is a war book.
Not because they’re manifestos. Because they’re about what war does to the interior life:
to young men drafted or pressured into service,
to families who live under casualty lists,
to villages marked by memorials,
to nations that think they’re marching into glory and wake up in mud.
As someone whose family still carries the aftershock of the Vietnam War, that theme landed. The era changes. The human cost doesn’t. Though time has shown that Vietnam was no mere folly, war can never be undertaken blind to it catastrophic impact on individual lives.
A note on length—and why editors matter
He told the story plainly: the book was long, hard to place, and then the right editor—Nan Talese—read it and “fell in love with it.”
That’s a reminder worth keeping: the difference between a book that lives and a book that dies is sometimes one reader with authority who gets it.
If you’re a reader (or a writer), here’s what to watch for
A few takeaways from my seat:
Character carries the weight. Tolkien isn’t racing you to a twist; he’s walking you into history with people you’ll care about.
War is not scenery. It’s the moral atmosphere—the pressure system that distorts everything underneath it.
Ideology has a body count. Sometimes literal. Sometimes domestic. Ideologues are impervious to reason or facts, and collectivist or fascist politics have plunged the world into bloody conflict — for some, the real costs are only truly understood when confronted with the destruction of those they love the most dearly.
Structure matters. The “armature” is real. So is the freedom required to make it breathe.
No Man’s Land is available in multiple editions (including the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday hardcover and later reprints).
If you listened to the episode (or read the novel), I’d like to hear what stood out to you most: the pre-war social fracture, the draft-and-shame culture, or the Somme itself.
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