Tolkien and the Great War

How was Tolkien's life and work affected and influenced by the First World War? What was Tolkien's part in the War? How was Middle Earth made? John Garth has invested years of research into both Tolkien's early work and also into the detailed history of Tolkien and his circle of friends in academia and wartime. Here is the fruit of his long labour: a fascinating, focused examination of Tolkien's genesis as both writer and adult. Garth has had unprecedented access to Tolkien's papers while compiling this book, and there are extracts here from work that have never been published previously. The subtitle of this volume, 'The Threshold to Middle Earth', reveals much. This is not a wide-ranging biography; rather a heavyweight study of Tolkien's maturation as a writer and philologist, through his Oxford and War years. These are the years when his first created language, Qenya, was born, and when the first notions of Middle Earth were forming. This is the time that The Book of Last Tales was conceived, and written ... and rewritten, as was Tolkien's style. This is twenty years before The Hobbit, before The Silmarillion, long before The Lord of the Rings. This is also a time of horrific, wasteful war, which decimated Tolkien's generation, and changed the historic and literary landscapes forever. Serious Tolkien scholars and enthusiasts will find much to devour here. For those looking to discover or rediscover Tolkien's first work, there is more than enough to whet one's appetite for The Book of Lost Tales, and his early poetry. There is also frank and often very moving narrative of the Great War, and its human cost, revealed in its enormity through an all-too-familiar story of its impact on four friends, all men in their early twenties, all showing such great promise. As Tolkien wrote years later, "by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."(Kirkus UK)