As far as Tolkien scholarship, two of the most well-regarded books to come out in recent years are Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth, and Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History, by Dimitra Fimi. The one is a biography, the other a survey of fairy-elements, and so while there is some overlap, they're really complementary, and well deserve their de facto status as required reading. Both highlight some of the lesser-known sources of Tolkien's inspiration: Chesterton, MacDonald, and Peter Pan, but also William Morris, whose romances were widely read at the front, and Francis Thomspon, about whom Tolkien said revealingly in an early essay:

'one must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being's harmony.'

Both approach the topic of racial overtones with much more circumspection than, say, Barfield. Fimi gives more attention to Tolkien's languages, though Garth does deal with them illustratively enough without digging in quite as much--in each, the integral role they play in Tolkien's thought comes through, and so it's clear how Barfield's musings would have been of significance to him. Still more with respect to Tolkien's own beliefs about what he was up to: recovering a lost truth through his stories. In Garth, copious research is brought forth to trace the role of WWI and his friendships with the members of the TCBS in developing Tolkien's philosophy, whereas Carpenter's earlier biographies understandably focused on the Inklings; in Fimi, a balanced background of myth, popular culture, linguistics, and sociology is fused in a compelling context for Tolkien's activity. Stirring stuff for the aspiring or amateur scholar, to be sure.

I absolutely loved this book, especially as I was lucky enough to see the recent film on this topic in the same week that I started it.
I am in awe of Tolkien’s imagination, creativity and his devotion to his task. It was so enlightening to learn about his history and how it affected him and influenced his work. I thoroughly enjoyed the detail given and I felt such gratitude that he had survived in order to create such epic work.

I got a lot more than I bargained for when I picked up this book. A lot of Tolkien books aren't much more than fan service. This was a straight up biography of JRRT's early years, with rock solid research, especially all the letters to and from Tolkien during the War. I agree with Shippey and others that Tolkien is underrated by the literary elites, so I was pleased and educated by the long discourses about "wartime writers" and the different ways they've influenced the 20th century. Thank you John Garth!

4,5/5

O J. R. R. Tolkienie słyszał chyba każdy, nieważne, czy lubi, czy nie fantastykę. Fascynujący świat Śródziemia to nie tylko Władca Pierścieni i Hobbit, dwa najważniejsze dzieła napisane ręką brytyjskiego autora. To także cała mitologia i wiele innych, drobniejszych utworów, które tworzą całe to uniwersum. Jaki jednak wpływ miała na Tolkiena I wojna światowa, w której brał udział? I czy stłamsiła jego twórczą wyobraźnię, a może wręcz przeciwnie?

Odpowiedzi na te pytania znajdziemy w książce Johna Gartha Tolkien i pierwsza wojna światowa. Całość jest podzielona na trzy części. Pierwsza to studenckie życie Tolkiena i powstanie TCBS (Tea Club – Barrovian Society), które JRRT założył wraz z trójką przyjaciół: Christopherem Wisemanem, Robertem Gilsonem oraz Geoffreyem Smithem. Stali się oni później najwierniejszymi fanami i krytykami Tolkiena. Druga część to wojenne koleje losu. Do brytyjskiej armii zaciągnęła się cała czwórka, ale każdy w innym czasie (najdłużej opierał się temu obowiązkowi właśnie Tolkien) i trafił do innego oddziału. Ostatnia część to tak naprawdę krótka historia demobilizacji autora Władcy Pierścieni i wyjaśnienie tego, jaki miała na niego wpływ Wielka Wojna i jak bardzo widać jej odbicie w historii Froda i Jedynego Pierścienia.

Ciąg dalszy: https://wiewiorkawokularach.blogspot....

This particular book will remind its readers about the focus of the recent movie on Tolkien [1] that focused its attention on the TCBS and Tolkien's school-age friends, a group of friends that was shattered by the death of half of its core members in World War I's trenches.  This particular book is about the time in Tolkien's life that is perhaps the most dramatic, given that he spent most of his life as an Oxford don whose rich imagination covered for a general lack of excitement in his life.  Yet having an exciting life is clearly overrated, as this book examines the horror that was faced by Tolkien and his friends and the damage that it did, even as it provided inspiration for some of the greatest literature of the 20th century.  And while this book has comparatively little to say about Tolkien's more famous work in Middle Earth, it does a good job at showing Tolkien's early writings that became part of the Lost Tales and other parts of his legendarium about Middle Earth, and also does a good job at uncovering some of the forgotten and obscure early poetry that Tolkien wrote.

This book is about 300 pages worth of reading material, and it begins with a list of illustrations, maps (mostly of the area of the Somme where Tolkien and his friends fought), and a preface.  After that the book is divided into three parts and thirteen chapters.  A prologue begins the first part of the book, which focuses on the "immortal four" of the TCBS group of Tolkien and his school chums, including a chapter about Tolkien's early childhood (1), his having too much imagination (2), the supposed council of London that tried to keep the group united before World War I (3), the interest of Tolkien in faerie literature (4), Tolkien's own writing about benighted wanderers (5), and the beginnings of the war (6).  After that the second part deals with the horrific experience of combat (II) for Tolkien and his friends, including chapters on the call to service (7), the early efforts of the British at the Somme (8), the death of half of the TCBS (9), and Tolkien's struggles as a soldier living in a hole in the ground where he got a nearly fatal case of trench fever (10).  Finally, the book ends with a look at Tolkien's experience recuperating in England (III), with chapters on Tolkien's writing while healing up (11), and the successful British defense in 1918 that ended before Tolkien was able to return to active duty (12), after which there is an epilogue about Tolkien's early writings on Middle Earth as well as a postscript about Tolkien's loss of lightness in his later writings as well as notes, a bibliography, and an index.

By and large this book is a worthy biography about a focused period of Tolkien's life, a part of his life that many people know little about.  It is by no means a complete biography of his life, though.  The author does a good job at showing how Tolkien viewed the Germans as having a sense of humanity and pointing out that his decision to go to war was by no means the result of a fierce hostility to England's enemies but a sense of duty, even if it was a costly one.  Indeed, Tolkien's identity was a tough one as he had a German name and was proud of his German heritage and had been born as an uitlander in South Africa and as a Catholic to boot, all of which made him somewhat of an outsider among English protestants.  Yet in exploring Tolkien's complex identity, the author does great service here in providing a picture of the complicated inspiration of literature and life in inspiring Tolkien's writings, and in pointing out how a group of friends was shattered by the effects of war, and how Tolkien himself struggled mightily to recover his health after his time in the trenches.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2019...

A far better biography of Tolkien than the previous one namely the Inklings. These four friends I feel were closer to each other since they stayed friends from their late teens until the end, in the midst of the First World War when two out of four died. And of course this marked Tolkien deeply as well as his fiction.

This book shows us the close relationship of Tolkien and his friends from School, their journey through the war and its trenches, Tolkien’s first tries with his Mythology and more.

It didn’t have the wacky cum eccentric menopausal neurosis of the Inlkings especially CS Lewis’s. If you want a different biography on Tolkien apart from the classic one by Carpenter choose this not the Inklings which is after all more on Lewis than on Tolkien.

One of the most important and thoroughly researched works on the early Tolkien. I highly recommend this and especially hearing John Garth read it. A must for any lover of Tolkien.

One key to understand The Lord of the Rings and all the other great works by Tolkien is his involvement in the First World War. Elements like a last minute rescue of the Rohirrim, or the role of Samwise Gamgee, or the mechanical beasts entering the battle of Gondolin clearly refer to his experience in the Battle of the Somme. 

Tolkien was there in the horrors of the trenches, as a Second Lieutenant of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, from June to October 1916. He survived because he caught trench fever, returned to England reporting sick and never returned to action.

Why doesn't the cover illustrate those trenches, then, why isn't there a tank, or soldiers in battle gear running through trenches? The photo is well-chosen, because it shows Tolkien as part of his beloved community at Exeter College. Consider, that Tolkien wasn't one of the first to be deployed as soldier, but decided to finish his degree in university first.  

The core of this biography focuses on Tolkien's ways through the war. John Garth gives a fascinating portray, disentangles the complicated movements of WWI campaigns, and fleshes out how his schoolfriends of the T.C.B.S. club fared during the war. It is a highly involved and intense research into not easily accessible sources, and the author mastered them in a way which is accessible to a broader public. 

One can literally watch the ideas leading to the Silmarillion coming to life. The author embeds and explains several poems from Tolkien and his friends through these early years. Tolkien started his mythology reluctantly before the Battle of the Somme. But only after he returned home, his ideas came to fruition in a kind of narrative explosion. His prose work started during his rehabilitation from trench fever back home in England, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin, continued with Beren and Luthien, and finished his Great Tales with The Children of Hurin. There was no idea of the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, and there was no Second or Third Age. 

John Garth brings all this to life in a thorough amount of details. He contextualizes Tolkien as a war author. Where other authors of his generation like Graves, Sassoon, or Owen created a far more pessimistic, modern poetry, Tolkien reflected the fighting differently, staying with the naturalistic romances, taking a stance against the disenchantment of his time.

The last part of the book concentrates on the effects on Tolkien's later Middle Earth writings, how formative they were, and how his experiences influenced the world he created. Although Tolkien himself hated such interpretation, Garth's analysis makes sense to me. 

A huge mass of literary references and notes are given at the end of the book. Garth's choice to not add footnote numbers in the text was a good one. The book finishes with twelve pages of bibliography and a handy index. More interesting to the casual reader will be the middle part with several photos of Tolkien, and his Exeter friends of the T.C.B.S, and the maps illustrating the movements of the Battle of the Somme.

You can see that this is not "yet another" Tolkien biography. It is a necessary one, adding much to the essential biography from Carpenter. The Mythopoeic Society honored the work with an Award for Inklings Study. 

For further reading of the author, consider his Tolkien at Exeter Colleg, and his newer Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-Earth (which I haven't read, yet).

This is the book (I think) the movie "Tolkien" mostly draws from. This focuses mostly on Tolkien's school years and developing the friendship of the TCBS (Tea Club and Barrovian Society), which at the core was him and three other boys. They all wanted to change the world through their art--poetry, music, writing, language. Even after they went to different universities they stayed in close contact, and then the war began. Two of them enlisted right away, but Tolkien resisted because he really wanted to finish his studies at Oxford. But once he finished, he enlisted as a junior officer as well.

The book has three main themes. First, the friendship of the four boys, which is described very well thanks to the author's access of the letters of three of them. Second, the war itself, mostly the Somme, which three of them were involved in (including Tolkien--the fourth was in the Navy so didn't have to be part of the Somme) and two died during the battles. Tolkien got trench fever and was sent back to England to recover. The author did a really good job of showing how bleak and basically pointless that battle was. Third, he covers Tolkien's developing mythology, how it started from his love of languages and "lost tales." These tales were fragments of northern legends, most of which hadn't been written down. Tolkien imagined what they could have been about, and how the evolution of language affected how they were told. His first poems and stories were really him filling in the gaps of these lost tales. As he was recuperating from his fever, he started writing the story of the Fall of Gondolin and the voyage of Earendil.

All in all, a very thorough look at this part of Tolkien's life. It was very sad, but also very interesting to see the germs of his legendarium get started, and how his friendships helped shape that.

This is a magnificent book. It's well-researched, well-written and does a fantastic job of contextualising Tolkien within the literary world of the late-19th century & early 20th century.

I might go so far as to say it is the best book I've read about Tolkien (alongside Tom Shippey's 'The Road to Middle Earth perhaps.)

It is actually a book that I think could be read by people interested in literature in general, not just Tolkien (although I fear that might not be what happens.) Indeed, I think it dovetails nicely alongside Paul Fussell's 'The Great War & Modern Memory' (which is another book I think everyone should read but there's a lot of them so perhaps I shouldn't keep banging on about them.)

Garth does a fine job of explaining why Tolkien's response to World War One wasn't to go down the route of either modernism or military memoir but to go back to the fairie and the epic.

Basically, it's a great book. Read it.

This was definitely worth reading. Garth doesn't spend a lot of time connecting the dots between Tolkien's WWI experience and his mythology, other than to discuss how the major themes of his mythology were influenced by the events of the war. He does get into a few of those discussions, but he mostly just describes the war experiences, outlines possible influence and lets you draw your own more specific conclusions. For this reason, it is probably better to read this book when you already have a pretty solid background in the legendarium.

DOES ANYONE REALIZE HOW CLOSE WE WERE TO LOSING TOLKIEN?!?!?? Can you imagine a world without his Hobbits, his elves, his orcs?
The man is a genius, not just a literary genius, but an absolute linguistic pedant. I finished this book simply fascinated and now I want to learn Norse, Welsh, Latin, and Greek. Not only have I gained a better understanding of the warfront during WWI, but I also appreciate the gifts Tolkien gave to us more than ever. I will cherish this book. A perfect audio read because all of the foreign and Tolkien vocabulary is pronounced correctly.