‘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.
Drawing on Tolkien’s personal wartime papers, this major biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of close friends who spurred his mythology into life. John Garth argues that the experience of the First World War is key to Middle-earth’s enduring power, and that Tolkien used his mythic imagination to reflect the cataclysm of his generation, reshaping a literary tradition that resonates to this day.
John Garth 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, fuelled the five years of research which have gone into Tolkien and the Great War.
‘A highly intelligent book exploring Tolkien’s personal experience of the First World War…Garth displays impressive skills both as a researcher and writer’
MAX HASTINGS
‘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
‘Garth’s brilliantly argued study convincingly portrays Tolkien in an entirely different league from other, more familiar writers on war’
Daily Mail