Tolkien and the Great War
OCLC 960643274 | |
Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth is a 2003 biography by
The book was warmly welcomed by Tolkien scholars as filling in an important gap in biographical coverage. Christian scholars too admired the book, though Ralph C. Wood thought that it underplayed the importance of Tolkien's Christianity. A reviewer for the Western Front Association thought the account of Tolkien's military service especially good. The book was called "plodding" by Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, but praised by other commentators.
The book won the 2004 Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies. It has prompted scholars to examine the influence of the war on Tolkien's writings.
Context
J. R. R. Tolkien was an English Roman Catholic writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.[1]
John Garth read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. He trained as a journalist and worked for 18 years on newspapers including the Evening Standard in London. He then became a freelance author while continuing to contribute newspaper articles. He combined his longstanding interests in Tolkien and in the First World War to research and write this biography; he states that he is especially "interested in how personal lives intersect with the big shocks and surges in history", one of the elements of the book.[G 1]
Book
Publication history
Tolkien and the Great War was published in 2003 by
Contents
Part 1
Tolkien and the Great War is written in three parts. The first, in six chapters, examines
Part 2
The second part describes in four chapters the military experiences of the TCBS in the trenches of the Western Front in 1916; Tolkien was attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers. Gilson was killed on the first day of the "Big Push" on the Somme. Tolkien's battalion, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, stayed in reserve for the first week. It went into action at Ovillers, Tolkien's company again staying in reserve to carry supplies, and Tolkien met Smith who had survived when the 3rd Salford Pals, part of the Lancashire Fusiliers, had been driven back to Authuille wood. Tolkien became battalion signals officer and often worked close to the front line. The battalion helped to win the Battle of Thiepval Ridge in late September, and took part in the capture of Regina Trench in late October. On 25 October, he went down with trench fever, and was sent home a fortnight later. Smith was wounded at the end of November and died of gas gangrene. Wiseman had joined the Royal Navy; he fought aboard HMS Superb in the Battle of Jutland in May 1916.[G 6]
Part 3
The third part, in two chapters, looks at Tolkien's wartime fantasy writings including "The Lonely Isle" of
Postscript
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Tuor_slays_Othrod_cropped.jpg/170px-Tuor_slays_Othrod_cropped.jpg)
The book ends with a postscript, a full chapter in length, in which Garth analyses the
The war imposed urgency and gravity, took [Tolkien] through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form. Without the war, it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on
language and mythology.[G 8]
Materials
The text is accompanied by monochrome photographs, showing Tolkien at school and two of
Reception
Scholarly
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Lancashire_Fusiliers_trench_Beaumont_Hamel_1916.jpg/220px-Lancashire_Fusiliers_trench_Beaumont_Hamel_1916.jpg)
Tolkien and the Great War was warmly welcomed by scholars. The Tolkien scholar
The scholar of humanities
The historian Bradley J. Birzer, reviewing the "excellen[t]" book for VII, writes that Garth wisely begins by noting how strange it was that Tolkien should have begun his "monumental mythology" in the war, the "crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern world". Birzer identifies three major themes in the book: that male friendship gave a "true and proper order" to the world; that the interlinked war and modernity "destroy almost all tradition and, possibly, all friendship"; and that myth revitalizes society. In his view, the book's account of the importance of friendship demonstrates "Garth's originality and genius", while the other two themes had been well covered in earlier works. He comments that the TCBS anticipated the Inklings, and argues that Tolkien, as much as his friend C. S. Lewis, was vital to the Inklings, as was Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction. Birzer criticises the style of invisible footnoting, combined with the abbreviations of the sources, which in his view made the book exceptionally "unfriendly". Further, he writes, Garth overlooks Clyde Kilby's memoir Tolkien and the Silmarillion. All the same, he calls the book essential for any scholar of Tolkien or the Inklings.[10]
Shaun Hughes, reviewing the work for
Christian
Tolkien's Roman Catholic faith,
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/12inchHowitzerShellForFritzThiepvalSeptember1916.jpg/220px-12inchHowitzerShellForFritzThiepvalSeptember1916.jpg)
The Christian scholar Ralph C. Wood, reviewing 6 books about Tolkien for Christianity and Literature, calls Garth's work "so well done that, along with Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien and Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth, it constitutes a third essential work for Tolkienian studies".[9] In Wood's view, Garth argues that the 20th century began with the "triumph of the murderous machine" in the First World War, with its "tanks and airplanes and howitzers", entering a nihilistic "classical age of war", in Nietzsche's phrase.[9] Wood writes that Garth brilliantly links these moral terrors to the moral and historical concerns behind Tolkien's philology, with his view of ancient Northern courage on a dangerous hostile Earth that was full of "faery—elven creatures ... ambassadors from the natural world".[9] Wood notes, too, that Garth incidentally shows Tolkien's implicit postmodernism, believing for instance that languages and cultures are rooted in time and place, and that geography determines much of how people think and act. Tolkien loved the Germanic in Northern mythology, but hated Nazism; to him, the spirit of that mythology was "not preening victory so much as somber defeat", remaining cheerful in the face of loss.[9]
Wood finds Garth "sometimes overly minute" in describing Tolkien's war experience, but thinks the book "so carefully and convincingly wrought" that he does not wish to find fault with it.[9] All the same, he feels that Garth "downplays the Christian character of Tolkien's mythic vision", not remarking how central Christianity was in his life and work. He thinks Garth mistaken in denying that the elves have freedom, as a Christian must believe (since elves have souls). And he finds especially problematic Garth's separation of Tolkien from the war poets like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon who hated and condemned the horrors they had seen: "Garth reads Tolkien as giving, instead, a more 'balanced' view of the war, as 'both terrible and stirring'". In Wood's view Garth is here missing "the overwhelming mood of sadness that permeates the whole of ... The Lord of the Rings".[9] Wood finds Shippey "far more incisive" in grouping Tolkien with critics of modern warfare like William Golding, Ursula LeGuin, and George Orwell.[9]
Military
David Filsell, reviewing the book for the
Popular
Elizabeth Hand, in The Washington Post, called the book "a seminal work that underscored how Tolkien’s fiction, far from being a bit of donnish fancy, was in many ways rooted in his experiences at the Battle of the Somme and his observations of an irrevocably damaged world in the aftermath of World War I."[13]
Tolkien's earlier biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, reviewing the book for The Sunday Times, states that Garth is "absolutely right that this was a crucial period for Tolkien, and it is also a moving story".[14] In his view, Garth quotes far too much of Tolkien's "abundant" early poetry for the TBCS, making the book "quite literally plodding, since he follows relentlessly in the steps of Tolkien and the TCBS as they converge on the Western Front".[14] He finds "a few fresh ideas" largely "swamped" by details of correspondence between the TCBS friends.[14] Replying to Carpenter, the Tolkien scholar and linguist Carl F. Hostetter described it as "a remarkably obtuse review ... of what is in fact an thoughtful, engaging, and above-all engaged study of what lies at the roots of Tolkien's power as an author, which power Mr. Carpenter himself rightly recognizes and defends."[14]
Prizes and impact
For the book, Garth won the 2004 Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies.[3]
Tolkien and the Great War influenced much Tolkien scholarship in the subsequent decades. By 2021, a review of Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger's 2019 edited book "Something Has Gone Crack": New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War was able to state that each of the 16 essays in the collection was responding to "Garth's seminal [work]".[15] The essays variously examined the course of the Great War as seen in the fictional wars of Middle-earth; how Tolkien transmuted his experience into art; the wartime origins of Tolkien's legendarium; and the issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in wartime. Garth contributed one essay, "Revenants and Angels: Tolkien, Machen, and Mons", to the collection.[a][15]
Notes
- ^ Garth told how Arthur Machen's short story, "Angels of Mons", about how the ghosts of English longbowmen from the Battle of Agincourt returned to save the British Army in the retreat from Mons, popularly came to be seen as true. He wrote that the story and Tolkien's mythology shared the archetypes of the eucatastrophic wartime intervention of angels and revenants.[15]
References
Primary
- ^ Garth, John. "About". John Garth. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
- ^ "John Garth on Tolkien: publications". John Garth. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
- ^ Garth 2003, Chapter 1
- ^ Garth 2003, Chapters 2–6
- ^ a b Garth 2003, Chapter 11
- ^ Garth 2003, Chapters 7–10
- ^ Garth 2003, Chapter 12
- ^ a b c d e f Garth 2003, Postscript. 'One who dreams alone'
- ^ Garth 2003, pp. 218–219
Secondary
- ISBN 978-0-04-928037-3.
- JSTOR 40158819.
- ^ a b Shelton, Luke (8 March 2019). "The Best (and Worst) Books for Tolkien Biography". Luke Shelton. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
- Journal of Tolkien Research. 8 (1). Article 5.
- S2CID 144368010.
- ISSN 2076-0787.
- S2CID 170550512.
- ^ S2CID 201766063.
- ^ JSTOR 44314223.
- JSTOR 45297094.
- JSTOR 40060041.
- ^ Filsell, David (April 2004). "Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth by John Garth Harper Collins, 398pp, 15 plates, 2 maps, £20. ISBN -00-711952-6". Stand To! (70 (April 2004)). Western Front Association. Retrieved 27 October 2021.
- ^ Hand, Elizabeth (9 June 2020). "Lose yourself in the places that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien". The Washington Post. Retrieved 28 October 2021.
- ^ a b c d Carpenter, Humphrey (December 2003). "Humphrey Carpenter reviews "Tolkien and the Great War"". The Sunday Times. Retrieved 28 October 2021.
- ^ OCLC 1121292764.
Bibliography
- ISBN 978-0-00711-953-0.