Tolkien and the Great War
The Threshold of Middle-earth
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
How the First World War influenced the author of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy: "Very much the best book about J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written." —A. N. Wilson
As Europe plunged into World War I, J. R. R. Tolkien was a student at Oxford and part of a cohort of literary-minded friends who had wide-ranging conversations in their Tea Club and Barrovian Society. After finishing his degree, Tolkien experienced the horrors of the Great War as a signal officer in the Battle of the Somme, where two of those school friends died. All the while, he was hard at work on an original mythology that would become the basis of his literary masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
In this biographical study, drawn in part from Tolkien's personal wartime papers, John Garth traces the development of the author's work during this critical period. He shows how the deaths of two comrades compelled Tolkien to pursue the dream they had shared, and argues that the young man used his imagination not to escape from reality—but to transform the cataclysm of his generation. While Tolkien's contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.
"Garth's fine study should have a major audience among serious students of Tolkien." —Publishers Weekly
"A highly intelligent book . . . Garth displays impressive skills both as researcher and writer." —Max Hastings, author of The Secret War
"Somewhere, I think, Tolkien is nodding in appreciation." —San Jose Mercury News
"A labour 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 (UK)
"Gripping from start to finish and offers important new insights." —Library Journal
"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
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.
Customer Reviews
Amazing
This is an amazing book. Garth, if not the foremost Tolkien scholar living today, is at least in the top three.