n  "May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot."n

Vilket rent helvete det måste ha varit att leva genom det första världskriget, i dagens värld är svårt att tänka sig. Med skyttegravar, eldkastare och pansarvagnar som torterar den vanliga mannen som har blivit dit skickat mot sin vilja utan något hopp om överlevnad.

Boken demonstrerar Tolkiens upplevelse under första världskriget och hur han förlorade två av sina bästa vänner under sin tid i Frankrike. Även influenserna han har tagit med sina karaktärer angående kriget, där Samwise "Sam" Gamgee är den vanliga brittiska soldaten och Faramir är honom själv, fast utan modet som han själv påstod.

4/5 stjärnor.

This is one part history and two parts literary analysis. It requires some previous understanding of the battle of the Somme and early Tolkien poetry to really appreciate the analysis.

Often dry but richly rewarding, John Garth's biography tells the story of J. R. R. Tolkien's war years, and how the experiences of those years influenced and developed his famous mythology. I must admit that I expected more dedicated discussion of specific war events and circumstances which impacted The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but aside from a few examples given in Garth's Postscript – Tolkien's experience of the Battle of the Somme influencing the Dead Marshes being the most evocative – there was very little of this.

Instead, Garth traces Tolkien's development of his ideas, the world of Middle-earth he built on throughout his life and the stories and backstories he wrote before, and around, The Hobbit. The best of this backstory was later compiled into The Silmarillion, and the greatest strength of Garth's book is in analysing the true depth and literary ambition of Tolkien's ideas. When I read The Silmarillion a couple of years ago, I was struck by how Tolkien was creating a meta-myth in which his Middle-earth was our own world in an earlier cycle, with echoes that endured into our own world via language and legend. By knitting together our many disparate Western legends into a single origin, I remarked that Tolkien created arguably the most ambitious fictional contribution to Western mythology since Paradise Lost. Garth also makes the comparison to Milton's work (pg. 261), and to see him delve into this is very absorbing.

But where Garth really excels is in expanding the implications of Tolkien's ambition, Tolkien's achievement. Throughout most of the book, Garth is painstakingly delivering the narrative of how Tolkien developed his imagined world in response to the world at war around him, but towards the end he makes some rather bracing arguments that do the book great credit. Garth contrasts Tolkien's experiences of the war, and his literary creativity in response, to those of the more commonly-cited war artists: the disenchanted and demoralised poets who wrote of trenches and terror and held that the ideals that came before the war were a lie: "the old Lie", as Wilfred Owen put it. By writing his heroic myths, Garth argues that Tolkien expressed "aspects of the war experience neglected by his contemporaries", and his Middle-earth contradicts the orthodox view that "the Great War finished off the epic and heroic traditions [in literature] in any serious form" (pg. 287).

It's a compelling, refreshing, revisionist argument; recasting Tolkien from the fusty, aged, pipe-smoking Oxford don of popular memory into a genuine literary figure; a man who, when faced with the holocaust of the trenches, did not declare virtue and honour meaningless but instead sought to conserve – a true conservative – the values that came before and revitalise them in response. Nor is this sleight-of-hand; Garth makes his argument compellingly and lucidly, and his account of the first day of the Somme, when one of Tolkien's close friends was cut down (as were many thousands of others), is sickening in its brutal waste of life. Considering that there were surely many at the time who disagreed with the "disenchanted view of the war", which "stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives" (pg. 303), it is gratifying to see an argument made so completely that Tolkien was the literary figure par excellence for this perspective; one who sought not to discard or denounce as meaningless, but rebuild and revitalise – often in honour of the men who were lost. In one of the most affecting passages of the book, one of Tolkien's closest friends – who would soon die in the mud of the Somme – expresses his excitement at being sent one of Tolkien's poems, saying that the reason he fights and endures is so that people can still write and appreciate such fine art (pg. 117).

I picked up this book not because I am a big Lord of the Rings fan (though I am); instead, my interest was piqued by Tolkien's connection to my hometown of Salford. I bought the book at the Imperial War Museum North on Salford Quays, which also displays some of Tolkien's battlefield effects, including his service revolver. I had previously been ignorant of the connection; the battalion in which Tolkien served as a lieutenant was the Salford Pals, made up of hardy Northern men of "Eccles, Swinton and Salford" (pg. 68) and a few Oxford-bred officers like Tolkien. Garth makes the argument that Tolkien's experience of their courage and sacrifice not only inspired certain scenes from Middle-earth (such as how in 'The Fall of Gondolin', a battalion of "smiths and craftsmen" are "the first to meet the enemy onslaught" in a crucial battle and, in traumatic echoes of the Pals on the Somme, never "fared away from that field" (pg. 294)), but also steeled Tolkien's conviction, later expressed through the feats of the Hobbits, that it is the character of the smallfolk, not the great names, who decide the course of history in its most desperate moments. I would have been thrilled for such a crucial local connection to Tolkien's world when I was merely a fan of The Lord of the Rings as entertainment. To have such a connection when, as Garth demonstrates, Tolkien's achievement was an act of remarkable literary ambition done in preservation of the finest ideals, it proves to be a great honour.

There are three essential works for anyone interested in going deeper into Tolkien’s writing and thought: Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, Tom Shippey’s philological appreciation, JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century, and John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War. While Tolkien, famously and justly, abhorred the mining of an author’s life for the coal seam of his literary material, Garth’s study of Tolkien’s war, and that of the other three members of the youthful coterie that had gathered around him, the TCBS, is both an appreciation of the subtle weaving of thought, experience and action, and an examination of that generation, raised at the height of Empire, who bled out in the holocaust of the First World War. If anything, the two members of the TCBS who died in France, GB Smith and Robert Gilson, are portrayed even more vividly than Tolkien himself. It is clear that Tolkien was a writer who particularly required the frank and unvarnished feedback of men whom he admired and who resonated with him: most famously CS Lewis, who cajoled and encouraged the writing of The Lord of the Rings but, Garth’s book shows, Smith, Gilson and Wiseman similarly played midwife to the birthing of Middle-earth through their talks, discussions and shared ideals. For someone who has always been solitary in his creative endeavours, I find this aspect of Tolkien’s work fascinating and inscrutable. I’m also, I think, rather jealous. Would that I might say, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”

I read Tolkien and the Great War as part of a group read with the Tolkien group on Goodreads, and I'm so glad I did. I've read a lot of books about Tolkien, and this is one of the very best. Garth delves into the biographical details of Tolkien's youth and young adulthood, looking especially at Tolkien's friendship with three other schoolmates: G. B. Smith, Rob Gilson, and Christopher Wiseman. Together, these four formed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), a brotherhood dedicated to rekindling the enchantment of the world through their creative output (especially prose and poetry). The TCBS began as a group for conversation and clever pranks, but as these four men grew up together the TCBS became a refuge, a place of hope in the midst of a world at war. All four members eventually enlisted and served in the Great War, and as the grueling tedium and horror of trench warfare (and naval warfare, in Wiseman's case) took their toll, the men's letters to one another display a poignant yearning for even a brief time togehter, that the hope of the TCBS might enable them to endure through the war and dream of a better world after.

Gilson and Smith died in the war, which effectively ended the TCBS. Wiseman became a school headmaster, and Tolkien . . . well, of course we know what he did after the war. This story is significant because it was during these years that Tolkien began creating the Elvish languages and the history that goes with them. The encouragement of the other TCBS members helped give Tolkien the motivation to pursue his poetry and prose, and the dreams he shared with the TCBS--that beauty in writing might re-enchant the world, opening people's eyes to the "faerie" all around us--obviously resonated within him for the rest of his life.

John Garth's telling of this story is even and well reasoned. He presents the details as he has put them together, drawing from letters, wartime documents, other literature of the time, and other scholarship on Tolkien. There is surely a temptation for the biographer to make many presumptions, drawing connections between Tolkien's life experiences and his writings, and much of this would seem reasonable. However, Garth generally restricts himself to simply presenting the facts, and the book is stronger because of this. Throughout the book, he suggests that Tolkien's experiences may possibly be visible here and there in his fiction, only rarely in an obvious or direct way, but he respects Tolkien's own disdain for bringing the author's biography into his works.

For me the most fascinating parts of Tolkien and the Great War are Garth's Epilogue and Postscript, which are really distinct essays considering Tolkien's work as a whole, from a critical standpoint. Garth shares some wonderful insights into Middle-Earth: for example, the interesting parallel between Melkor's destruction of the Two Trees, using the shadowy cover of Ungoliant, and Beren's theft of the Silmaril, using the shadowy cover of Luthien's enchantment. How many times have I read The Silmarillion and yet not made that connection! Probably the greatest part of Garth's book is the Postscript, in which he defends Tolkien's writing against the attacks of critics, showing how Tolkien's archaic, seemingly backward-looking epic-creating is every bit as valid and appropriate a response to World War I as the trench memoir and poetry of disillusionment and disenchantment. Garth proposes that the literature of disillusionment in the decade following the war in many ways hijacked the actual feelings of the returning soldiers, giving the war in hindsight an emotional color that might not be entirely accurate. Tolkien, in contrast, created a literature that acknowledges the horrors and confusion, while still affirming that every act of heroism and bravery is valuable in itself, regardless whether the ultimate outcome seems to make any sense. The Beren/Luthien and Turin stories act as pictures of two ends of a spectrum of understanding war. In the story of Beren and Luthien, heroism and bravery result in victory, as well as the maturity of the heroic characters (though even in that story, the ending is tainted by the evils of war, greed, and selfishness). In Turin's story, the hero is ennobled through his dogged pursuit of justice and righteousness, even though he is also often rash and his decisions are fated to go awry to the very end; but the confusion and darkness that results from the hero's actions don't make his actions the less noble.

Garth's Postscript ought to be required reading for any Tolkien fan, and I highly recommend the whole book especially for readers who have spent some time with The Book of Lost Tales, the History of Middle-Earth series, or even just The Silmarillion. Tolkien and the Great War is simply a fantastic Tolkien book.

Writers cannot help but be influenced by a combination of their upbringing, the times in which they live, their friends, and the major events of their days, and John Garth does an excellent job giving us the details in each of these areas for J.R.R. Tolkien. While all wars change those who live through them, The Great War of the early twentieth century brought a dramatic shift in modern British society and closed the book on the Edwardian Era. It was into that former era that Tolkien had been born, and the trajectory of his life and writing was greatly impacted.

In examining Tolkien's intimate friendships during his school and university years, Garth reveals how writers of a variety of genres were thrown off balance by the devastation of war. Most of his closest friends never lived to see the other side of battle. Garth also shows us Tolkien's nature as a writer, including his stubborn perfectionism, tendency to rewrite and change completely many of his poems and narratives, all the while growing more mature in his craft that would ultimately bring the epics for which he is renown.

There are many aspects of Tolkien's writing career and style that intrigued me, but I especially loved two words he used in developing some of the storylines: discatastrophe and eucatastrophe. Great change can come suddenly, and it's not always bad. Sometimes a catastrophe can be for one's good.
To me, this is the lesson learned from Garth's account of Tolkien. When many others grew disenchanted and depressed as a result of the war and stopped pouring into their art, Tolkien found solace and strength in his. He didn't always like what he produced, but he never stopped writing. He pressed on, and as the years and his faith gave him the privilege of perspective on the war years, he was able to find hope, and ultimately reflected that in his greatest works.

I'm thankful for this deep dive into Tolkien's life. It's a lot of detail at times, but worth seeing the process of one of the greatest writers in history.

This isn't a complete biography of Tolkien but instead a detailed account of the careers of Tolkien and his three closest friends, collectively "the TCBSites" during WWI which goes on to discuss how the war affected Tolkien's creative output, making a convincing case that it is here, rather than in WWII we should look for the influence of real events on Lord of the Rings and other works by the most influential figure in 20th Century fantasy literature. Tolkien's childhood and school days are recounted in fair detail but his post-WWI life is treated in the most cursory fashion. This really is what the title suggests it is. The excruciatingly detailed account of WWI got me, dare I say it? - bogged down in the middle but over-all this is a good, readable book that acheives its aims. The "Postscript" looking at Tolkien's work as and in relation to other literary responses to WWI offered an interesting new perspective to me regarding Tolkien's motives, influences and aims and the descriptions of the basic principles of comparative philology added understanding of how and why language and legend were so intertwined in Tolkien's mind. Fans of Tolkien with an interest in the man, motives and influences behind the stories should read this.

Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Tolkien as an artist.

Being familiar with all of the books discussed herein, I found this a fascinating read. It hones in on Tolkein's time during "The Great War," WWI and how it interrupted his life, took the lives of all but one of his very best friends from his school years, and also how it perhaps changed the course of Tolkein's own potential history as he turned so much of what he experienced into the masterpieces that so many know and love.

This book's author also delves deeply into Tolkien's process and study of ancient languages and how with his philologist background created the languages that eventually drove the tales that he penned, instead of the tales making his languages a necessary adjunct to the said stories.

A couple of favourite quotes from the book, on the author's (John Garth) observations:

"That he saw the value in traditions that most others rejected is one of his gifts to posterity: truth should never be the property of one literary mode, any more than it should be the monopoly of one authoritarian voice."

"That downturn (the disaster or discovery that undermines all achievements and threatens to snuff out hope) however, is not the pivotal moment that matters most in Middle-earth. Tolkien proples his plost beyond it and soo reaches the emotional crux that truly interested him: 'eucatastrophe'*, the sudden turn for the better when hope rises unforeseeably from the ashes."

"Through his narrtives of had-won and partial victory, Tolkien suggests that we should go on, whether we can or not."

* From Wikipedia: A eucatastrophe is a sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible and probable doom.[1] The writer J. R. R. Tolkien coined the word by affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to catastrophe, the word traditionally used in classically inspired literary criticism to refer to the "unraveling" or conclusion of a drama's plot.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/325040.html[return][return]This book carries a recommendation by A.N. Wilson to the effect that it's "the best book about Tolkien that has yet been written". While I don't think it is actually better than Tom Shippey's work, it is none the less a very good book, moving well beyond the cliches of equating the Dead Marshes to the Somme. It basically concentrates on the story of the friendship between Tolkien and three of his schoolmates, G.B. Smith, Rob Gilson and Christopher Wiseman, who together formed an intimate group called the TCBS. It could have been the story of any group of naive and idealistic young men, pledged to change the world and to renew a sense of old values through their works of literature, except of course that one of them actually did.[return][return]Garth saves his analysis of the effect of the war per se on Tolkien's writing for an afterword, and concentrates for most of the book on the narrative of what actually happened to the four friends. This is very effective. The actual events of the Somme are dealt with surprisingly quickly, but Garth manages to balance a detailed account of where Smith, Gilson and Tolkien were (Wiseman was in the Navy) with a sense of the overall perspective of the agonising shifts in the 1916 front line. (This may be what A.N. Wilson was getting at - I haven't read much else about the first world war, but I find it difficult to believe that there are many other accounts of it that are as lucid as this.)[return][return]Of course, the effects of the Somme were devastating. Gilson and Smith were both killed, and Tolkien invalided home with trench fever; he never returned to the front line, fortunately. And it's fairly obvious that the deep friendship between Tolkien and Wiseman was fatally undermined by their war experiences. Garth makes a persuasive argument for the deep impact of the TCBS on Tolkien's writing. I would like to know more about the effect of Tolkien's relationship with his wife Edith, who he was courting and marrying at this time, on his writing. Perhaps there is little to say, or to be discovered.[return][return]There are two lengthy postscripts to the main narrative. The first looks at the relationship between what Tolkien was actually writing during the Great War and his eventually published work (two decades later for The Hobbit, four decades later for The Lord of the Rings). The second ranges freely across the whole spectrum of English literature in the twentieth century, pointing out that Tolkien describes both the heroism and the horror of war (where Owen and Sassoon concentrate on the horror, to the point of concealing what they themselves were up to), and concluding with a favourable review from C.S. Lewis about the realism of Tolkien's portrayal of the psychology of wartime.[return][return]There's lots more here. Recommended.

Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth is a broad-ranging biography of the creator of Middle-earth. Despite its title, the book covers J. R. R. Tolkien’s entire life. It starts with his time at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where he became steeped in languages and met the three friends with whom he formed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (or TCBS), a tight-knit club with world-changing literary ambitions. The four members of the TCBS are the focus throughout the account of the First World War. After the war, the book summarizes Tolkien’s life up until his death in 1973. It ends with an essay which argues that Tolkien’s work was influenced by the Great War. Prior to reading Tolkien and the Great War, I had dismissed this (as I thought) outlandish claim portrayed in, for example, the 2019 film Tolkien. Now, however, I am utterly convinced.


‘The Immortal Four’ members of the TCBS: G. B. Smith, J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman and Rob Gilson

In addition to these biographical details, the book charts Tolkien’s literary output up to around 1919 and the development of his mythology. The book also contains fascinating analyses of early Quenya and Sindarin (or Qenya and Goldogrin as Tolkien called them at the time). These examinations provide just enough detail to satisfy someone with an interest in languages but remain general enough not to put off a non-specialist.

Tolkien and the Great War is an excellent and very informative book about the life and influences of J. R. R. Tolkien. It is essential reading for any Tolkien fan, although it is perhaps not the best starting point for someone unfamiliar with the general details of Tolkien’s life (I would recommend Humphrey Carpenter’s book J. R. R. Tolkien: a biography as a good introduction to Tolkien’s life).

Really enjoyed. Could have used some tightening in parts. The audiobook was fantastic.