Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #441033 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 398 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618574810
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Millions of new captives of the Lord of the Rings saga have been roped into J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world as the result of Peter Jackson’s three-part cinematic interpretation of the great 20th century fantasy. John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War will certainly captivate an elite segment of those recent converts, but it is written more for those who have long been enthralled by Middle-earth and its fantastic denizens. While many early readers found parallels between World War II and the Lord of the Rings fairy-tale, Garth reaches back to World War I to find the deep roots in Middle-earth. Prior to the Great War, Tolkien was a scholar with a deep passion for language and fables. In fact, he formed a literary circle with a few friends dubbed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. Its members had the misfortune of coming of age just as the war was reaching a fevered pitch; Tolkien, a second lieutenant in the British army, survived the bloody Battle of the Somme, which took the lives of two of his closest friends. Garth adeptly chronicles how the devastation Tolkien witnessed helped shape the mythic tale that was already brewing in his mind. Written with a seriousness one associates with the time it chronicles, Tolkien and the Great War is a erudite but eminently readable exploration of how the harsh reality of the early 20th century colored one of the beloved fantasies of the modern era. --Steven Stolder

From Publishers Weekly
This dense but informative study addresses the long-standing controversy over how J.R.R. Tolkien's WWI experience influenced his literary creations. A London journalist, Garth is a student of both Tolkien and the Great War. He writes that when war broke out, Tolkien was active in an Oxford literary society known as the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), along with three of his closest friends. Finishing his degree before joining up, Tolkien served as a signal officer in the nightmarish Battle of the Somme in 1916, where two of those friends were killed. The ordeal on the Somme led to trench fever, which sent him home for the rest of the war and probably saved his life. It also influenced a body of Northern European-flavored mythology he had been inventing and exploring in both prose and verse before the war, toward its evolution into The Book of Lost Tales and in due course Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. This book could not pretend to be aimed at other than the serious student of Tolkien, and readers will benefit from a broad knowledge of his work (as well as a more than casual knowledge of WWI). But it also argues persuasively that Tolkien did not create his mythos to escape from or romanticize the war. Rather, the war gave dimensions to a mythos he was already industriously exploring. Garth's fine study should have a major audience among serious students of Tolkien, modern fantasy and the influence of war on literary creation.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Very much the best book about JRR Tolkien that has yet been written. Even if you are not a Lord of the Rings fan, I commend this book to you. It is all so interesting in itself, and I have rarely read a book which so intelligently graphed the relation between a writer's inner life and his outward circumstances." A.N.Wilson, Evening Standard

Customer Reviews

A Fresh Look at the Roots of Tolkien's Work
"Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth" by John Garth is not a full-scale biography of Tolkien, it is rather an examination of his experiences during World War One and the influence of those experiences upon the development of his writing and concepts behind Middle
Earth. Tolkien himself wrote little directly upon that war, so the reader should not expect a blow-by-blow account of life in the trenches and hospitals. But Garth has pieced together a reasonably comprehensive picture of the events witnessed by Tolkien and uses this platform for exploration of the writings and, in particular, Tolkien's relationships with a close-knit group of school-friends known as the "TCBS" -- The Tea Club and Barrovian Society, originating as a cluster of like-minded youths at King Edward's School in Birmingham, youths with lofty artistic ambitions and a belief that destiny would indeed carry them to artistic heights. Tolkien and three close friends were the heart of the TCBS, although there were other associates who shared their views. The alliances of the TCBS continued even after its members went off to Oxford and Cambridge and, after the war began, into the army and navy. By the end of the war, as Tolkien was to later comment, all of his close friends but one was dead, and he himself was a partially invalided veteran of the horrific Battle of the Somme. But the war did not kill the ideals of the TCBS and in many respects Tolkien was to carry them onwards.

It is easy today to view the First World War through the lens of unremitting disenchantment and disillusion that dominated the literary picture of that conflict in the late Twenties and Thirties, yet as Garth shows, such a perception is inadequate. Charles Carrington, an officer in a sister unit to Tolkien's own, was to later write of his assessment of such literature: "Book after book related a succession of disasters and discomforts with no intermission and no gleam of achievement. Every battle a defeat, every officer a nincompoop, every soldier a coward." As Garth writes: "The disenchanted view of the war stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives." It is clear that Tolkien did not belong to this school of utter disenchantment. Instead, he championed a world view that amid the great horror and wide despair, hope and courage and good could endure, always challenged but never wholly extinguished. And this, mind you, is not the wishful thinking of a schoolboy, but a considered worldview of a man who has seen the horror at first hand. Garth believes that it not coincidence that battle plays a central or climatic role in Tolkien's stories.

The main literary focus of "Tolkien and the Great War" is not "The Lord of the Rings", written decades later, but instead such earlier writings as "The Book of Lost Tales" that went into creating the world behind LOTR. Garth discusses the style of prose (and poem) chosen by Tolkien for his works, a style that deliberately rejected what was embraced by Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen and others, who themselves quite deliberately rejected the romantic, heroic,
"high diction" style of war writing that had gone before. In writing of "Beowulf", Tokien later noted: "the development of a form of language familiar in meaning and yet freed of trivial associations, and filled with the memory of good and evil, is an achievement, and its possessors are richer than those who have no such tradition."

Garth's book should be read by anyone wishing to understand the roots of Tolkien's great work, and the light it casts does certainly illuminate certain aspects of "The Lord of the Rings". Unlike many studies of the influence of various classic sources upon Tolkien's creation, Garth presents us with a fresh look at direct personal experience upon the author and the creative process.

An Essential Addition to the Tolkien Canon
John Garth has produced a fine work which will be enormously useful for many years to come. It appeals on two levels: first to Tolkien enthusiasts who are always eager to learn more about our favorite author's life and sources of inspiration, and secondly to anyone interested in World War I and the experiences of the ordinary soldiers who fought and died in it.

The book begins in pre war England with J.R.R. Tolkien and his small cluster of friends. Beginning with their schoolboy days at King Edward's School in Birmingham and continuing through the beginnings of their academic careers at Oxford and Cambridge, Tolkien (John Ronald in those days) had a close friendship with a group of highly intelligent kindred souls who formed the TCBS, or Tea Cake and Barrovian Society. Partly literary and partly just for fun, the TCBS must have been one of hundreds of similar societies founded in the semi-cloistered world of schoolboys. Unlike most such groups, the TCBS lived on in the hearts of its participants, four of whom, John Ronald Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson, were particularly close. They encouraged each other in their literary and artistic pursuits and by their early twenties were already producing work which boded well for their futures.

Then World War I broke out. Tolkien, Gilson, Wiseman, and Smith were sucked into the British armed forces along with thousands of other men, Wiseman into the navy, the others into the army. Gilson and Smith were killed in 1916 (Smith's letter to Tolkien about Gilson's death, ending with "My dear John Ronald whatever are we going to do?" is one of the saddest things I have ever read.) Tolkien and Wiseman survived and never forgot their dead friends. We also see the quiet, loving influence of friends and family, particularly that of Edith Bratt Tolkien, on the two survivors.

The heart of this book deals with the influence of the War on Tolkien's writings on Middle earth. I will never be able to read of the Fall of Gondolin again without thinking of the Somme, and never think of Eressea without remembering Tolkien returning home on a hospital ship to see the green hills of England once more. So much of Tolkien's heart and inspiration is revealed in this book that it should be shelved alongside his own masterpieces.

A scholarly study--- not for the casual fan.
This considered study of Tolkien's wartime experiences fills a void that Humphrey Carpenter's biography (an excellant book) only hinted existed. Garth writes with a scholarship and maturity that is lacking in the avalanche of Tolkien-related "literature" glutting the market (on the coat tails of Peter Jackson's reverential, if not wholly faithful, movie trilogy), most of which can be disregarded as inconsequential college senior thesis-work and redundant. This book increases our understanding of the man and his creation in a profound and original way. Tolkien and the Great War is an important work of literary scholarship that will endure.