Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth [Hardcover]

John Garth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2003

"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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 415 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (December 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618331298
• ISBN-13: 978-0618331291
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,196,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Garth was born in 1966 and grew up in the Home Counties of England before studying English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford University. He has since pursued a career in news journalism, both writing and editing in print and online, and he worked for many years for the London Evening Standard. He lives with his wife Jessica and their daughter Lorelei.

A long-standing passion for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, coupled with a growing curiosity about the individual's experience of war, led to the writing of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. The authoritative account of Tolkien's life in and around the 1914-18 conflict, it is the fruit of five years' research in public archives, among the family papers of Tolkien and his close friends, and on the site of the Battle of the Somme.

Tolkien and the Great War has been described by C.S. Lewis biographer A.N. Wilson as a 'masterpiece' and 'very much the best book on J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written'. It garnered the Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship in 2004 and has so far been published in Great Britain, the United States, Italy and China.

John Garth has also reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Observer, The Evening Standard and others. He is a regular contributor to the annual scholarly journal Tolkien Studies and has spoken at the National Army Museum in London, as a special guest of various societies, and at international conferences. He is interviewed on the extended DVD edition of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and on National Geographic's Beyond the Movie: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

His numerous other interests include history; northern mythologies; language and place-names; rock and pop, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s; photography; and the great outdoors. As well as Tolkien, he is also partial to (among others) Charles Dickens, Susan Cooper, Frank Herbert, William Blake, Tove Jansson, Alan Garner, John Irving, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, and the vintage television tour de force that is The Clangers.

For further information and to read more of John Garth's writings, visit his website at www.johngarth.co.uk

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fresh Look at the Roots of Tolkien's Work, December 23, 2003

By 

Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Hardcover)

"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.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Addition to the Tolkien Canon, February 16, 2004

By 

John D. Cofield - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Hardcover)

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A scholarly study--- not for the casual fan., December 13, 2003

By 

David Charlton (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Hardcover)

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.