Battle of the Somme 90th Anniversary July 1st

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by davem

I don't see that Tolkien couldn't have found himself in territory which had been occupied by German troops temporarily ('hence behind their lines').

Originally Posted by Child

Although the front as a whole was fairly stationary, there were very rare instances when one side fell back and the other went forward, leaving a short stretch of trenches in different hands.

But in such cases, the area in which Tolkien would have been stationed would no longer be behind exisitng enemy lines, and so the chances of him coming across any German soldiers in the manner described, let alone cavalry riders, would be negligible.

While I appreciate the romantic appeal of wanting to believe the tale true, and while the possibility that it did happen cannot entirely be dismissed, the weight of evidence points to it being extremely unlikely. Given the conditions in the trenches and the effect of such conditions on the men serving at the front, however, it is not at all unlikely that such a dream would come to seem real to Tolkien, perhaps even to the extent that he later genuinely believed it to have happened.