So, as I was saying, there doesn't seem to be much evidence about what was on Tolkien's mind when he was writing The Hobbit, in particular about the issue of aerial warfare. For example, I don't know what he made of the bombing of Guernica, which took place about 5 months before The Hobbit (and I stress again that this might just be because I have not done the requisite research!) However, we might be able to make an educated guess from his feelings as expressed just a few years later, during the Second World War. Of course, the aerial bombardments of that war itself, from Warsaw to Hiroshima and all points in between, would have given Tolkien ample food for thought. But so strong is his hatred of the bomber war in the 1940s that it seems unlikely that it wasn't there in some form in the 1930s.

The following is a quote from a manuscript Tolkien wrote during the war ('in the middle of this war'), apparently thoughts on the internal combustion engine, but in this section he talks about the aeroplane (he didn't like cars either). It's the most direct and sustained piece of writing I've found by him on the subject of aviation.

As for the aeroplane, that has been even more unfortunate. It was fledged just in time to be baptized in blood, to become a chief exemplar in our time of the dreadful potency of Original Sin. Clumsy, and, in spite of its growing complexity, inefficient machine, in comparison with its high object, it has taken the menacing shape not of birds but of fish-like or saurian monsters, and it defies and overrides all privacies, and scatters over all quietitudes the deadly roar of its parent den; at unawares it may fall in ruin on the frail houses of men, burning and crushing them at play, or by their hearths, or working in their gardens. This 'in peace'. War it has raised to a mass-production of slaughter. Yet a man -- yes, in the middle of this war -- trotted out this argument to me: 'You can talk,' he said, 'but if your child was dangerously ill, and the only specialist was in America, you would be only too glad to use a plane.' That dates it: a little earlier the specialist lived in Vienna. So to save the life of that hypothetical child by the supposed skill of an imaginary specialist (who might not succeed), hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, are to be blown to rags and burned, and half the remaining beautiful things of saner centuries with them. It would seem rather more economical to have a few more doctors more handily placed. I would be too brutally 'realistic' to suggest that the poor child must die, if it can only be saved by a machine with so terrible a potential of murder. It is all right if it is done by a machine. It might be regarded as odd if I sacrificed even one other man on an altar to gain the favour of the gods.

The question to be asked, of course, is not "Would you try to save your child's life by using an aeroplane now -- in a situation that you did not make or will?; but "Would you will such a situation to save your child's life?" The answer to the first question is: yes, let Moloch bring doctors for once, if he can. The answer to the second is just: no.¹

I've emphasised the most interesting bits. The aeroplane is 'a chief exemplar in our time of the dreadful potency of Original Sin' (Tolkien had a strong Catholic faith, so this phrasing is not casual). It has the 'menacing shape' of 'fish-like or saurian monsters' (hello, Smaug!) It has turned war into 'a mass-production of slaughter' (presumably contrasting it with a more noble warfare in the past). It destroys civilians and culture alike, on an enormous scale. The second part of the extract, recounting the argument he had with an (alas, unidentified) airminded man, is significant because it suggests he didn't confine his opinions to his manuscripts, but was prepared to speak out against this modern horror.

During the war Tolkien kept up a correspondence with his youngest son, Christopher, partly as a sounding board during the writing of The Lord of the Rings. As it happens, Christopher joined the RAF in 1943 and trained as a pilot in South Africa, though what type of aircraft he trained for I don't know. He was commissioned and stationed in Shropshire from March 1945; he might not have seen combat at that late date. (Another of Tolkien's sons, Michael, was also in the RAF, as an air gunner in Bomber Command who flew missions over Germany; he was invalided out in 1944.) As might be expected, aeroplanes cropped up in Tolkien's letters to Christopher; there are three references in the published collection, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (which Christopher had a hand in).

This is from a letter dated 9 July 1944; Tolkien first allows that machines are invented to make life better, but they only end up making life worse.

And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam Butler, sticks out so plainly and is so horrifyingly exhibited in our time, with its even worse menace for the future, that it seems almost a world wide mental disease that only a tiny minority perceive it. Even if people have ever heard the legends (which is getting rarer) they have no inkling of their portent [...] Well, I have got over 2 thousand words onto this little flimsy airletter; and I will forgive the Mordor-gadgets some of their sins, if they will bring it quickly to you.²

Note his reference at the end to aeroplanes as 'Mordor-gadgets'. That's not a compliment.

In a letter dated 19 December 1944, Tolkien speaks forthrightly of his dismay that Christopher was serving 'this modern Moloch' (the Carthaginians were said to have burned their children alive inside a statue in the likeness of their god Moloch; a reference he also made in the Bodleian manuscript quoted above):

But I fear an Air Force is a fundamentally irrational thing per se. I could wish dearly that you had nothing to do with anything so monstrous. It is in fact a sore trial to me that any son of mine should serve this modern Moloch. But such wishes are vain, and it is, I clearly understand, your duty to do as well in such service as you have the strength and aptitude to do. In any case, it is only a kind of squeamishness, perhaps, like a man who enjoys steak and kidney (or did), but would not be connected with the butchery business. As long as war is fought with such weapons, and one accepts any profits that may accrue (such as preservation of one's skin and even 'victory') it is merely shirking the issue to hold war-aircraft in special horror. I do so all the same.³

Even though he tries to be understanding, he still holds 'war-aircraft in special horror'.

Tolkien said much the same, though with less sympathy, in a letter to Christopher of 29 May 1945:

But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, 'for the liberation of the Shire'.⁴

This is the source of the title for my proposed chapter: Tolkien created some very memorable villains, ultimate evils, so for him to say 'it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain' is significant. So too is his likening Christopher's RAF service, though undoubtedly in a good cause, to 'Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, "for the liberation of the Shire".' Tolkien famously despised allegory. But such passages make it clear that he nevertheless saw deep and intimate connections between the world he created in his mind and the world he lived in; the one illuminated the other.

That's about all I have to say on Tolkien and the aeroplane (though I haven't talked about the fear of observation by the crebain and the winged Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings, maybe an echo of the nakedness felt by infantrymen when enemy aircraft were overhead). Perhaps there's nothing more to be said; perhaps some real research would turn up much more. But I think I've made a reasonably strong, if not particularly cogent, circumstantial case that airpower penetrated Tolkien's legendarium more deeply than one might have thought.

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1. Bodleian, Tolkien MS. 14 Folios 22-3, quoted in Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories (2008) -- but I found it here (I've corrected obvious typos; all emphases in this post are mine). I haven't been able to look at this book, as academic libraries here seem to turn their noses up at Tolkien studies; only public libraries carry this and similar works. [↩]
2. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London, Boston and Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), letter 75. [↩]
3. Ibid., letter 92. [↩]
4. Ibid., letter 100. [↩]