Product Description

"Very much the best book about J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written." -- A.N. Wilson

"A highly intelligent book ... Garth displays impressive skills both as researcher and writer." -- Max Hastings

"It is a strange story that Garth tells, but he tells it clearly and compellingly." -- Tom Shippey

"Somewhere, I think, Tolkien is nodding in appreciation." -- Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

"Gripping from start to finish and offers important new insights." - Library Journal

"A labor of love in which journalist Garth combines a newsman's nose for a good story with a scholar's scrupulous attention to detail... Brilliantly argued." -- Daily Mail

"Insight into how a writer turned academia into art, how deeply friendship supports and wounds us, and how the death and disillusionment that characterized World War I inspired Tolkien's lush saga." - Detroit Free Press

"To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 . . . by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a
reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the
first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth
in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This
biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals
officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who
spurred his mythology into life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant
young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by
launching his epic of good and evil.
This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977,
meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a
multitude of other sources.
John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic experience in the First
World War is the key to Middle-earth's enduring power. Tolkien used his
mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform
the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to
disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary
tradition into a form that resonates to this day.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #293031 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 398 pages

Amazon.com
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.

About the Author
John Garth, winner of the 2004 Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award, studied English at Oxford University and has since worked as a newspaper journalist in London. A long-standing taste for the works of Tolkien, combined with an interest in the First World War, fueled the five years of research that have gone into Tolkien and the Great War and he has drawn extensively on previously unpublished personal papers as well as Tolkien's service record and other unique military documents.

Customer Reviews

Tolkien and the Great War
There are some gems in the book, but you must wade through most of it being tedious and boring.

Insights into Tolkien's Creation of the Myths Underlying his Masterworks
The close-knit intellectual fraternity of Tolkie's dearest friends, formed in prep school endured into college, and, for a select four, beyond the horrific experiences of the First World War's Western Front. Of the four, only Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman would survive the war. Rob Gilson, whose forte was art, and G.B. Smith, the only other of the group with a literary flair, were killed in the trenches.

During their separation and through the trauma of war and personal loss, they kept up a regular correspondence and critiqued each other's worldview of life, art and literature and their self-appointed role as guardians of all that was good and enduring.

But of the two surviving members of the clique, only Tolkien
would go on to fulfill their grandiose visions. The book is a wonderful examination of how the personal losses, as well as the
mind-numbing cacaphony of battle and slow recovery, impacted
the formation of the myths that precede and drive his later
more earthly worlds of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

At first I was put off by what appeared to me to be the intellectually effete snobbery of the clique, dubbed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. But as I read on, it became apparent that schooling in England, especially in the late Victorian epoch, was quite different from that in the US. And these fellows were all quite precocious. It was not class
distinctions that drove their sense of mission either. Several, like Tolkien, were from solid middle class backgrounds and hardly well off.

What amazed me is how this vision, born in the cloistered life
of the prep school, survived the horrors of the Somme, Ypres,
Passchendaele and Cambrai.

I had originally thought that this book would be a military critique of Lord of the Rings, showing how the battles in the book related to Tolkien's wartime experience. But it really went deeper than that, demonstrating how his literary world-view was affected, mostly subconsciously, by that trauma.

By "subsconsciously" I mean that the primeval epochs of gods and
demi-gods, faeries, elves and gnomes, reflected the loss of his
two friends in battle and the one other survivor's estrangement
after the war.

Some of the connections between the episodes and characters in
the Book of Lost Tales and the Silmarrion (the incomplete
and unpublished precursor works restored by son Christopher Tokien in the 1970s) may be a bit forced and the influences
are somewhat conjectural at times....though always well argued.

I found the philological parts a bit hard going. I think that a glossary of terms and cast of characters would help or even a chart showing the complicated evolution of the myths and terminology.

All in all, this was an eye-opening book and does enhance my appreciation of Tolkien's art and it's relationship to the real world, in riposte to those critics who find Tolkien's elves, dwarves, gnomes and monsters to be purely escapist fantasy.

Technically interesting, less than engaging writing
While Garth's book does a good job of discussing Tolkein's studies in philology (the study of language and its evolution) and his beginning work with Middle-Earth, I found it hard to keep reading despite being interested in the subject matter. Garth wallows in the details of Tolkein's schooling and childhood experiences, with a rather British over-attention to minutae. There are whole chapters at the beginning that lend little to the reader's understanding, although this improves as the book continues into his wartime experiences.

It does a good job covering Tolkein's interest in Nordic and Germanic languages, and how his experiences in WWI influenced his outlook and writing, but it seems like Garth could have spent a little more time working on making the material readable and enjoyable by a wider audience.

Fans of Tolkein and language study will still find a lot to recommend the book, but casual readers and those with only a moderate interest in the subject should look elsewhere.