Tolkien’s First Words

We start in the trenches of the First World War and, throughout the film, move back and forth between the Western Front, conceived with due hellishness, and earlier episodes from Tolkien’s youth. In the film, Tolkien embarks on a self-imposed quest; in reality, he met Smith several times behind the lines as the battle raged. The clear suggestion of the film is that Tolkien wrote his fiction to rediscover the fellowship that the war destroyed.

Source: www.newstatesman.com