BATTLE OF DAGORLAD
Among the most famous accounts of the life of King Arthur and the exploits of his knights was Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte d’Arthur. Malory’s descriptions of Arthurian battles were informed by the author’s real-life experience as a soldier-knight in that bloody and brutal national disaster known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–85). In Malory’s account of the Last Battle, the final duel that ended with the death of both Arthur and Mordred, spelled an end to the utopian kingdom centred on Camelot and the ideal chivalric alliance that was the Knights of the Round Table.
Curiously enough, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was posthumously published by William Caxton in 1485, just nine days after the final battle of the sporadic 30-year Wars of the Roses. This was the Battle of Bosworth Fields and the last battle ever to be fought by armoured knights in Britain. This historic “last battle” became known as “the swan song of English chivalry” and – like the mythical Last Battle of Arthur and the fictional Battle of Dagorlad – was truly the end of an era.
Like Malory’s Last Battle, Tolkien’s Battle of Dagorlad – as the single greatest battle in the War of the Last Alliance – was informed by the author’s own real-life experience in the First World War, and, specifically, of the disastrous and quasi-suicidal Battle of the Somme in 1916. In that terrible battle, Tolkien witnessed the total obliteration of the beautiful French landscape as it became a churned-up, treeless and blood-soaked wasteland filled with rotting corpses. It was a futile battle in which vast armies fought for months, resulting in over a million casualties.
This is comparable to his fictional Battle of Dagorlad (meaning “battle plain”) fought before the Black Gate of Mordor, in which “All living things were divided in that day, and some of every kind, even of beasts and birds.” The terrible slaughter lasts for months, and the open plain was turned into a mangled landscape littered with thousands of corpses. Over centuries, too, as we know from The Lord of the Rings, it becomes a nightmarish, noxious marshland where long-dead soldiers stare out from beneath the bog – a clear recollection by Tolkien of the blasted landscapes of the Western Front. Dagorlad sees the greatest assemblage of combatants since the War of Wrath in the First Age, and – like the Battle of the Somme – resulted in over a million casualties.
Ringwraith in Battle of Dagorlad
