This is a stunning book of scholarship on Tolkien and WW1, along with an illuminating examination of his friends and his writing during the Great War. This is a "must read" for Tolkien fans. It is an accessible and well supported biography. Garth also provides reasonable judgments and substantiated opinions. He also regularly consults other recognized experts in Tolkien studies without mere blind acceptance. Loved this book. Learned a lot!

This is simply the best biographical work on Tolkien I've read yet. It sheds more light on his relationships with the members of the 'TCBS', details what he would have seen during his Great War service, and effectively puts all of his early writings into a evocative chronological context. John Garth makes convincing arguments for how Tolkien's Great War experiences and friendships shaped his writing, and for how his writing should be understood relative to his contemporaries. This book illuminates the development of Tolkien's writing as a whole, and really should be required reading before anyone begins the Book of Lost Tales material.

Let's start by saying that I'm not an avid reader of literary criticism, history, or whatever genre this work falls into. With that said: this is a painstakingly researched book about how his teenage years and service in WWI impacted Tolkien's writing. As someone who is not familiar with Tolkien's personal history, and as an only moderate fan of Lord of the Rings, I found it very fascinating, very details, but occasionally slow; and I also re-learned that LotR is definitely the culmination of Tolkien's lifelong study of myth and language.


If you've read The Lost Tales, you'll get more from this. If you know WWI history, you'll get more from this. The more into Tolkien you are, the more there is here for you.

If you're just a passing fan, or you liked the movies, I'd recommend giving it a pass for now. This is for the fanatics, and I mean that in a good way.

Even if you're not a fan of Tolkien, this is a facinating biography of Edwardian England. The biography follows Tolkien and his three best friends, all incredibly talented and literate in a way that only this generation really was, having met at public school at the height of Britain's classical public school system. The biography charts the origins of both his fiction and his scholarship (Tolkien held one of the most prestigious chairs at Oxford and his scholarship on medieval language is still read by graduate students) but it is also an incredibly touching portrait of four friends and the suffering that was inflicted on men of a certain historical moment by one of history's most senseless wars. This biography will give you a very good sense of both this man and this moment as well as giving you a new angle from which to see his fiction. I am not usually an avid reader of biography, but I couldn't put this down.

Not a bad read, composition was quite good. Character development was meh. Very tenuous connection however between WW1 and Tolkien’s writing. In fact Tolkien had formed most of his ‘Silmarillion’ background by the time he left university and stated he did no writing during WW1 as it was a hard thing to do as an officer in the trenches. There is no doubt that war has an impact on anyone’s world view but I don’t think this book shed much light in that regard.

I did appreciate the background on Tolkien’s prep and university days, which is most of the book, and his time with his circle of friends.

My wife tells me that they recently made a movie based on the book. I might check it out as I tend to like period pieces and am a Tolkien fan.

3 stars.

I was inspired to read this book after hearing John Garth speak at the National WWI Museum about how the Somme Battle affected Tolkien's writing. The discussion opened my eyes to how my own experiences of war have shaped my own writing, and I hoped for more insights. It took a while, but this book ultimately delivered.

The author takes us through Tolkien's life, exploring in great detail his relationship with his three friends of the "TCBS." I felt at times this discussion dragged on and chased a few tangents. Inexplicably there is little exploration of Tolkien's immediate reaction to the loss of two of his dearest friends in battle.

Fortunately I was patient. In the final section we see how The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings use the mythological epic format to explore the great evils of the Early Twentieth Century as Tolkien saw them: despair, dehumanizations, and the mechanization of death.

For myself, I found in Tolkien a kindred spirit: a soldier who has felt the exhilaration and horror, logic and insanity, hope and despair, courage and cowardice, and vitality and desolation of combat. I now see the Great War in the Desolation of Smaug or a fallen elf; in my own writing you may gaze upon Revolutionary America and catch a glimpse of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Thank you, John Garth, for opening my eyes to both Tolkien and my own reflection.

A very interesting and thorough look on the relationship between the First World War (then known as the Great War, or the War to end all Wars) and the creation of the mythology as well as languages of Middle-Earth. It does start out a bit slow, detailing Tolkien's friendships and schoolyears leasing up to the war, but it later shows why Garth starts there. It's not just the war experiences that spark Tolkien's creativity, rather it provided the final piece of the puzzle alongside his deep love of languages, Mideval myths, his friendships with the TCBS and the need to understand the new world that was left in the wake of the war. I don't think I'll be using this book for my thesis, but I'm not sure because it did provide some interesting and very valid points.

2018 review:

This book is amidst the uttermost challenging that I've read hitherto. Bursting with stark, high diction and sheer, austere workmanlike style, which required the highest engagement of my attention. The book is, evidently, an outcome of Garth's apparent immense research that completely vindicates facts' overwhelming, and I do delighted its lack of gaudy, luscious periphrases that made me quite zestful as the pages were lessening. I may declare that this book is keen legitimate sequel of Carpenter's J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, that was highly and quite often cited by Garth. Withal author's elaborated depicting of the TCBS' origin, and then following the weird of each of its member during the war, the hallmark of the book is Tolkien's involvement and engagement in the Great War, where Garth gave quite unbiased rave of Tolkien's both psychological and physical conditions out of trenches. Another marvellous matter is detailed and listed review of the Tolkien's mythology emerging that much elucidated some of my doubts I had on that account. And as a pinnacle - the last two chapters i.e. Epilogue and Postscript are, in fact, assays where Garth explains shifting and phases of the mythology and the matter that once would originate The Silmarillion.

2021 review:

I couldn't agree more. "Tolkien and the Great War" is a serious study and not quite suitable to those who expect such book to burst out of humorous anecdotes, apt to be read at the seaside or so.

After seeing the Tolkien movie and having read a biography some years ago, I decided to try this, as it was the basis for the movie and of course gives you the non Hollywood gloss over. Still a very reviting and at times sad story of Tolkien's school friends.
WWI was a true hell and is portrayed here.

John Garth’s
Tolkien and the Great War:
The Threshold of Middle-earth
Previously Published in Issue 10, Spring 2004, Journal of the Northeast Tolkien Society

Seeing John Garth’s new biography of J. R. R. Tolkien shelved next to many great books on the subject, a prospective reader wonders what Garth could add to the wealth of information. The question evaporates rapidly; reading Tolkien and the Great War is like slipping over a precipice of the Emyn Muil and free-falling into muddy march next to Battalion Signal Officer Tolkien with his closest friends, and then watching as their idealistic dreams and young lives vaporize, disappearing into the shadowy no-man’s land called the Battle of the Somme. J. R. R. Tolkien and his friends, Christopher Wiseman, Rob Gilson, and G. B. Smith, speak often and eloquently in poetry and letters throughout the narration which track their days as intellectual lights at King Edward’s School, and then details their plunge into the World War I abyss. First hand stories from other soldiers and a universe of facts large and small bring Tolkien, his friends, and the surrounding world at war vividly to life. Garth weaves into the account of inspirational fellowship, hope and loss, an absorbing study of J. R. R. Tolkien’s early work and creative development. Art and life fuse as Tolkien’s emerging vision of Middle-earth absorbs the nightmare landscape of the Battle of the Somme.

The interlacing biography of J. R. R. Tolkien and his three greatest young friends begins at King Edward’s School where they formed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS): a fellowship based on passionate idealism, creativity and youthful high-jinks. Through mutual inspiration, the society imagined they would reach their fullest artistic potential. They hoped to “kindle a new light” (Garth, 180) in the world, and “re-establish…the love of real and true beauty in everyone’s breast” (Garth, 105) through the influence of their creations. Meanwhile, at King Edward’s they led their classmates and triumphed over their enemies--cynicism, sarcastic irony and decadence. Typically, they indulged in sophisticated word-play, staged debates in Latin and performed Aristophanes in classical Greek.

Garth’s narrative never hurries through the awkward and searching passage of youth. He uses Tolkien’s 1911 poem, “The Battle of the Eastern Field” (a parody of heroic epic style in the form of a glorified soccer match), to illustrate the Edwardians’ impression that sports were a showcase for imaginary combat and war was a sport that could be civil. War, as Rob Gilson proposed, “was not…of the first importance, and…was a scientific contest of calculation rather than of personal prowess” (Garth, 146). From an accumulation of detail it is possible to recognize the enthusiasm and idealistic naïveté of youth and take these young men to heart, investing in their futures. The portrait of their innocence greatly magnifies one’s perception of the tragedy that follows their brief studies at Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

While World War I lurks in the shadowy future, Garth spins the memoir of four intersecting lives together with a highly focused account of J. R. R. Tolkien’s education and creative development. Tolkien’s enviable linguistic education (beginning with standard translation of Latin and Greek poetry into English, extending to include Welsh, Old English, Gothic, Old Norse and Finnish and ending with a profound grasp of comparative linguistic history or philology) explains in part why his work remains unique. Tolkien remarked, “If the main mass of education takes linguistic form, creation will take linguistic form” (Garth, 17). Unfortunately, a later-day writer lacking such a linguistic education may never match Tolkien’s virtuosity in using the English language.
Furthermore, one can hardly doubt Tolkien’s claim that he wrote his legends to support his invented languages after reading this biography. Garth cites repeated examples illustrating Tolkien’s philological method which involved working back from mysterious ancient words to infer meanings and then grounding them on reasonably imagined legends. He worked, for instance, from the name Eärendel, to “The Voyage of Eärendel the Evening Star”, to the legendary character in his mythology. On the other hand, Garth looks back frequently to Tolkien’s Quenya lexicon for clues to understanding his mythology. Looking for the meaning of Illùvatar’s “Secret Fire” that animates creation in “The Music of the Ainur”, for example, he finds that the Quenya word “Sā” means fire but is also the mystic name of the Holy Ghost. Finally, a sound shift Tolkien manufactured between Quenya and his later invented Goldogrin demanded an explanation, so he built philologically reasonable legends to support the language. In the end though, all of the legends lead back to war and “unnumbered tears” (Garth, 241).

Returning to John Garth’s interlacing chronicle of J. R. R. Tolkien and his three friends who were braving the ordeals of world war, one often finds echoes of The Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien did in his epic, Garth takes pains to indicate the relative positions of the TCBS and the time (sometimes down to the minute) of their struggles in the Battle of the Somme. He describes the approach to enemy strongholds and the landscape surrounding scenes of action as if he had been there. In addition, people who have poured intermittently over maps of Middle-earth while reading The Lord of the Rings may experience déjà vu studying Garth’s maps of the Battle of the Somme. They show the contours of the Western Front on the Somme along with the location of trenches and German strongholds, paths of marches, and important dates with the locations of the TCBS.

Adding first hand accounts from other soldiers, Garth puts a reader directly into the surreal landscape of battle. He quotes Edmund Blunden who describes the “ghastly gallows-trees” (Garth, 186) of Thiepval Wood where J. R. R. Tolkien spent time in a dugout between August 24 and August 26, 1916. Another soldier, Charles Douie adds, “The wood was never silent, for shell and rifle fire echoed endlessly through the trees…At night the flares, as they rose and fell, threw the wood into deeper shadow and made it yet more dark and menacing.” Such traumatized impressions of dark and light could certainly have fed Tolkien’s fascination with shadow and various manifestations of light in his mythology. The image of blinding light shining through a mesh of gallows-trees would not be alien to Middle-earth.

Moreover, Tolkien’s memory of “endless marching, always on foot” and the fact that he had gathered his belongings to move forty-five times between June 27 and October 24, 1916 reminds one of the heroes’ journey in The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien’s literary heroes, the marching TCBS were always mindful of mortality and their still unfulfilled mission to bring a new light into the world. In a passage reminiscent of Frodo handing the Red Book of Westmarch over to Sam, the aspiring poet G. B. Smith wrote to Tolkien: “may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.” As Garth’s biography reveals, J. R. R. Tolkien took to heart the mission his friends assigned him by building his visionary poetry into a mythology of light and then weaving the mythology into his heroic epic of good and evil.

Garth dares to give each of J. R. R. Tolkien’s early poems careful consideration and room to breathe as they emerge from the timeline of the biographical narrative. This gift of time and space allows one the rare pleasure of contemplating Tolkien’s nascent luminous mystic landscape in microcosmic form. Slipping across the border from the darker wartime narrative, a reader may stand momentarily transfixed in the transcendent setting of Kôr with its “sable hill, gigantic…gazing out across an azure sea / Under an azure sky…marble temples white…dazzling halls…tawny shadows [and] massy trees rock-rooted in the shade”. This sublime world in miniature would evolve into “white shores and…a far green country under a swift sunrise”: Frodo’s first perception of the Undying Lands at the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s visionary poetic landscape keeps reappearing suspended in Garth’s narrative at mantra-like intervals. These distillations of color and light remind the reader repeatedly of what is sacred and eternal in humanity, thereby illuminating the surrounding mournful account of crushed dreams and muddy dismembered bodies with unbearable poignancy. Vistas symbolic of a soul’s longing for eternal beauty, they hover distressingly near to scenes of “the lost of the Somme”: the remains of 20,000 British victims of machine gun and shell fire felled on July 1, 1916 and still “lying around” after three weeks in a “forest of barbed wire…thick with bodies, their faces purple-black.” The tension between these two landscapes of war and transcendence intensifies the impact of both on the reader.

As war approaches and for the duration of Tolkien’s active service on the murderous Somme, Garth portrays him as dwelling on the intersecting borders of these two landscapes. Tolkien’s poetic landscape seems to shimmer and tremble like a perfect tear on the verge while the distorted Somme landscape and a disillusioned world appear to press in on all sides. However, an entire legendarium lay encoded at the still center of Tolkien’s mystical landscape. With the ending of his active duty on the Somme, Tolkien wrote the pivotal prose narration of “The Fall of Gondolin.” Garth’s analysis of this work creates a powerful image of Tolkien’s poetically encoded seed “quickening” to send radiating green roots and shoots snaking through the colorless, chaotic landscape of the Somme and bringing a timeless perspective to the universal experience of conflict and suffering.


To annihilate Gondolin, the Elvish haven and monument to the memory of unstained paradise, Tolkien’s most powerful fallen angel, Melko, manufactures iron dragons. According to Garth, these creatures “violate the boundary between mythical monster and machine, between magic and technology.” Tolkien describes them as moving on “iron so cunningly linked that they might flow…around and above all obstacles before them”. Garth quotes a German account of a British tank on the Somme that likens it to a “monster,” an “iron caterpillar” driven by a “supernatural force,” and the “devil’s chariot.” The devastating battle in Gondolin between the Elves and Melko’s iron dragons certainly evokes some aspects of World War I: a lethal war of men against machines. Garth’s study of “The Fall of Gondolin” also includes a striking insight into the use of fantasy as it exaggerates the state of humanity and therefore may warn about radical forms of human behavior such as totalitarianism. This is just one of many interesting observations Garth makes about J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.

As with the poetry, the focus of this biography on a short span of years allows John Garth the luxury of reflecting at length on Tolkien’s prose inventions individually as they arrive in the narrative of time. Tolkien’s creation myth, “The Music of the Ainur” is, according to Garth, an effort to find an unexpected blessing attached to the fact that God’s creation is tragically flawed. Garth introduces the Valar (Tolkien’s unfallen angels), explains their mission as guardians of the created world, and notes that Melko arrives in that world before them. Continuing, Garth makes the incandescent statement that Melko’s “ensuing conflict with the Valar makes a whole history out of the biblical declaration, ‘Let there be light’.” He goes on to illustrate the point. There are also comparisons to Milton and The Bible in Garth’s discussion of the “fall” as it occurs in Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales, and the reader will find many other thought provoking ideas in Garth’s analysis of Tolkien’s cosmic myth.

Turning to Tolkien’s romantic fairy-stories, Garth gives his full and appreciative attention to “The Tale of Tinúviel” and “Turambar and the Foalókë” (treasure-hoarding serpent). There are many interesting facets to Garth’s analysis of these two tales, but his focus on Tolkien’s attitude toward prejudice, mockery and the destructive use of irony is most compelling. Beginning with Tinwelint’s mockery of Beren and Beren’s ultimate answering jest in “The Tale of Tinúviel” and then continuing with the dragon Glorund’s sadistic enjoyment of irony in “Turambar and the Foalókë”, Garth’s discussion pulls the reader into the stories and highlights one of the evils J. R. R. Tolkien wanted to undo in this world.

On a more general level, Garth’s compression of The Book of Lost Tales illuminates shifts in Tolkien’s mythology and the reasoning behind those shifts that may stretch out over two volumes of The History of Middle-earth. His clarifications would be helpful to readers of The Book of Lost Tales who become confused when Eriol living in the Dark Ages becomes Ælfwine possibly living in the eleventh century, and when Tol Eressëa shifts from symbolizing Britain to representing a separate island far west of the British Isles. Garth also makes it easy to follow the devolution of Tolkien’s legendarium from myth, to romantic fairy-stories, to their intersection with Germanic sea-legends at the outer limit of recorded history.

In his postscript, John Garth sets out to demonstrate a connection between Tolkien’s World War I experience and his art--an argument that seems like a forgone conclusion after reading the biographical narrative. What Garth really forges in the postscript is a layered, instructive and convincing case for J. R. R. Tolkien’s legitimate place beside other authors from the history of great literature. He names the writers and describes the two literary styles (modernism, and classic World War I literature of protest and dark unflinchingly focused realism) that dominated post World War I literature. Then he explains the reasons why those authors rejected heroic epic and high diction, and the reasons why Tolkien defied this trend.

Tolkien, like his wizard Gandalf, always had good reason for his choices. Frodo and Sam, on their sacrificial quest in The Lord of the Rings, found a “desolation that lay before Mordor” “more loathsome” than the Dead Marches with their “Many faces proud and fair…all foul, all rotting, all dead.” Called “Noman-lands,” this new hell was a “land defiled, diseased beyond all healing” where the heroes saw themselves as helpless “little squeaking ghosts”. Here Tolkien bears witness to the horrors and the heroic acts of ordinary soldiers he saw in “No Man’s Land,” the desolate expanse of mud where two of his dear friends died tragically with so many others during the Battle of the Somme. Garth points to John Milton and William Blake as Tolkien’s predecessors who, like him, sought to refine the chaotic and tormenting details of their existence into the long perspective of an organizing myth.

In Garth’s biography, Tolkien states that human misunderstanding arises from a “clash of backgrounds” and “It is the tragedy of modern life that no one knows upon what the universe is built to the mind of the man next to him”. Tolkien may have offered a type of bridge between backgrounds with his legendarium. As Joseph Campbell (a master of comparative mythology) explains in his book The Inner reaches of Outer Space, mythological communication conveys “through all its metaphorical imagery…a sense of identity…which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage.” This observation points to the relevance of Tolkien’s search for an organizing myth as activities in the theater of twenty-first century living take on global dimensions.

Tolkien’s use of high diction in the context of myth and legend was another choice made with good reason. As Garth’s biography reveals, Tolkien had a deep appreciation for the migration of meaning in language and he understood that language collects attributes such as ‘the memory of good and evil” that are irreplaceable and merit preservation. This was especially true for him in a time when many people denied the existence of absolute evil, seeing it only as a variable symptom of inadequate socialization. According to John Garth, the authors George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, and Tolkien all turned to fantasy as a means of redefining evil. Tolkien’s evils and Garth’s discussion of them are thought provoking. Those evils include: disenchantment, materialism, the dominance of machines over nature, tyranny and orthodoxy, passive acceptance of defeat, and nihilistic application of the ironic viewpoint to art and life.

In addition, according to Garth’s book, J. R. R. Tolkien perceived that World War I was just a symptom of the great evil, materialism. Joseph Campbell was another thinker who pinpointed “radical materialism [as the force in the nineteenth century that caused] anything like the functional grounding of a social order in a mythology [to disappear] into irrelevance.” In other words, materialism removed the possibility of “opposed actors on the world stage” finding anything in common through the unifying potential of myth. These insights regarding the destructive potential of materialism are important to consider now as the world searches for an antidote to terrorism and the Middle-Eastern War.

Looking back at Tolkien’s catalogue of scourges, one might venture to say that J. R. R. Tolkien and orthodoxy could stand as opposites, and it is interesting to think of a universally accepted ironic viewpoint and modernism as forms of orthodoxy. Tolkien’s statement in Garth’s biography regarding his “instinct…to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress” brings to mind authors such as Gabriel García Márquez who express their opinions of oppressive political regimes by cloaking their meanings in magical-realism. Tolkien’s cloak woven of heroic myth and fairy-story serves well his mission to re-spiritualize creation; it sneaks his message under the radar of almost universal modern-day skepticism. Probably, this is why readers still love his books without fully understanding their reasons and why they might find themselves searching through Beowulf, Elvish lexicons, and all of the literature about Tolkien to understand their fascination and to keep the spell intact.

Now those readers can add John Garth’s biography to the collection of great books about J. R. R. Tolkien and about the Great War. Anyone who has not yet read first hand accounts of the Battle of the Somme will have a poignant revelation reading this book. Readers interested in J. R. R. Tolkien’s work and the forces that influenced his artistic development will have a mind-expanding journey. Those who value J. R. R. Tolkien’s voice and spirit will get much closer to a beloved companion. Multiple readings of Tolkien and the Great War do not diminish its power to move the reader emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. After reading Garth’s book once, or many times, all will find the world taking on elegiac colors that linger and inform stories and news of the world for a long time. The universe of readers owes a debt of gratitude to J. R. R. Tolkien’s family and all the individuals who shared the letters, poems and first hand accounts that animate this story of war, friendship, and the evolution of a singular artistic vision. Along with the tales from J. R. R. Tolkien’s own incomparable pen, this book is a gift to treasure always.

This was recommended to me by Dave Llewellyn-Dodds, one of the small community of regular commenters on Brenton Dickieson’s blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia. It is an excellent and well written analysis of how Tolkien’s experiences just prior to, and during, the First World War, fed into his creative process. It does not try to claim that there is any direct allegory (as any serious fan of Tolkien knows, he hated allegory) but rather explores how his vision of Middle-Earth was deepened and expanded by his experiences of suffering and loss, and his encounters with new types of people. It definitely offers a new perspective on Tolkien’s legendarium, and will be an excellent complement to the film that is coming out soon, which also explores that period of his life.

This book will also make you realize what a senseless waste of lives the First World War was. Garth notes that A A Milne became a signaller because the chances of survival were higher. I can’t say I blame him. A similar (but less baldly stated) instinct underlay Tolkien’s choice of signalling as his contribution to the war effort. It’s chilling to think that Winnie-the-Pooh and The Lord of the Rings might not have existed if they had been killed. I also wonder what else Saki (H H Munro) and Wilfred Owen might have written, had they survived WW1. And what other geniuses were lost in that slaughter. Certainly Tolkien's friends Rob Q Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith.

Reject modernism, embrace Beowulf !