Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
    Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
    Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
    Audiobook11 hours

    Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

    Written by John Garth

    Narrated by John Garth

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    A new biography exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Lord of The Rings.

    “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 … by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”

    So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by launching his epic of good and evil.

    John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic experience in the First World War is the key to Middle-earth’s enduring power. Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.

    This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 28, 2011
    ISBN9780007429219
    Author

    John Garth

    John Garth is a Tolkien expert who has become acknowledged as the authority on Tolkien’s wartime experiences, having appeared on The South Bank Show and other documentaries about Tolkien. He has spent four years researching and writing this book. He works as a sub-editor on the Evening Standard.

    Related to Tolkien and the Great War

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Tolkien’s Watercolors

      Mar 1, 2019

      Tolkien’s Watercolors
      1 min read

    • Article

      Swedish Gaming Giant Buys Lord Of The Rings And Hobbit Rights

      Aug 18, 2022

      The company that owns the rights to JRR Tolkien’s works, including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, has been bought by the Swedish gaming firm Embracer Group, which has hinted it could make spin-off films based on popular characters such as Gand

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Lord Of The Books

      Mar 8, 2023

      The Lord Of The Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Children Both Seen And Heard

      Feb 22, 2023

      Children Both Seen And Heard
      5 min read

    • Article

      Rascals And Rusticants

      Feb 28, 2024

      Rascals And Rusticants
      5 min read

    • Article

      They Were One-offs

      Apr 6, 2022

      HOW I wish I’d written this book! Matthew Kelly celebrates four women whose work created the organisations and attitudes to conservation we take for granted today. Two are well known, two are not; all their stories enrich us. The well-known two are O

      7 min read

    • Article

      Crazy For Cider

      Aug 25, 2021

      JAMES CROWDEN is a poet, shepherd and total cider nut. In this, at least his third book on the subject, there is no other drink but that it suffers from his passion for cider, apple brandy and cider’s delicate, sweet sister, perry—and almost no momen

      5 min read

    • Article

      Of British History, Britten And Puffins

      Jul 21, 2021

      AS a child, I was given a charming book called They Lived Like This in Chaucer’s England. Its drawings of minstrels, pilgrims, dogs and merry-making ignited a spark of fascination for the daily lives of people in the Middle Ages. Therefore, I devoure

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Place Worth Fighting For

      Mar 30, 2022

      Daisy Dunn (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, £20) ON one of his lighter poetry-writing mornings, Christmas 1944, T. S. Eliot wrote this: Mr Maurice Bowra Gets sourer and sourer,Having been in a hurryTo succeed Gilbert MurrayAnd is now (poor soul) at the bott

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Sep 21, 2022

      The Old Un’s Notes
      6 min read

    • Article

      On The Hobbit Trail

      Jun 28, 2023

      On The Hobbit Trail
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un's Notes

      Apr 5, 2023

      Is there anything more heart-warming than a church kneeler? And now this most British of things has found its biographer in the shape of Elizabeth Bingham, the leading authority on Anglican church kneelers and founder of the website parishkneelers.co

      6 min read

    • Article

      In The Book Club

      Jun 15, 2022

      In The Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      The King Of Westminster

      May 24, 2023

      The King Of Westminster
      5 min read

    • Article

      Kilvert’s Diary

      Feb 22, 2023

      Kilvert’s Diary
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un's Notes

      Feb 8, 2023

      The Old Un's Notes
      4 min read

    • Article

      Finding Facts In Fiction

      Mar 12, 2021

      Finding Facts In Fiction
      10 min read

    • Article

      Anything But Square

      Sep 6, 2023

      Anything But Square
      3 min read

    • Article

      If Trees Could Talk

      Jun 14, 2023

      If Trees Could Talk
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wit, Wisdom And Better Than Wordle: Why You Should Visit Dr Johnson’s Birthplace Museum

      Jun 25, 2022

      Civilisation comes in many sizes and, for Dr Samuel Johnson, compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), his home town of Lichfield was a microcosm of educated and ordered society. He once wrote of a visit to the Staffordshire city with

      2 min read

    • Article

      High Times With High Minds

      Jul 28, 2022

      SOME TIME IN THE SPRING OF 1966 the dean of University College, Oxford sidled up to me in the quadrangle and began to mutter. He was called Tony Firth and he had a very distinctive and widely imitated style: a slight figure, head on one side, given t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Late Summer Reads Guides, Biographies & Histories

      Aug 7, 2020

      By Chris Paton Did you know that the ‘first public lending library in the country [Scotland]’ was founded in 1680 at Innerpeff ray, near Crieff? Or have you heard the deliciously evocative Gaelic saying ‘cuimhnich air na daoine o’n d’ thàinig thu’ (‘

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Jan 12, 2022

      The Old Un’s Notes
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Tolkien and the Great War

    4/5

    125 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Tolkien was my hero as a child; Garth has shown me how Tolkien is my hero as an adult as well.
    • 5/5
      Amazing language. Excellent premise. Loved listening to the audio version because of the immersion in Tolkien thought and language.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant, absorbing, and detailed look at Tolkien's life with of course most emphasis on his life during World War One. A must read for anyone interested in the background of the man behind Middle-earth.
    • 5/5
      Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Tolkien as an artist.
    • 5/5
      This was an utterly excellent book, following Tolkien's own biography and the development of his mythology with excellent detail and attention to nuance. I expect it's all but incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with The Silmarillion, but I've only read the first part of the Book of Lost Tales andI managed quite well. Insightful, interesting, and illuminating. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      J. R. R. Tolkien created the most detailed mythology of the twentieth century. But no mythology can exist in isolation; people won't understand it. It must have roots in human experience.There are many books on Tolkien's sources, historical, folkloric, and philological. This book is rather different; it addresses a personal source: World War I. It also looks at his relationship with three other man of his age who called themselves the "TCBS." They were four bright literary men who set out to see the world in a new way (or, perhaps, revive an old way, but in any case, to shake things up).And all four ended up as officers in World War I. Three served in the army; two were killed and Tolkien ended up the victim of disease.This is the most detailed study of the TCBS and of Tolkien's war service now in print. It includes a careful attempt to show how Tolkien's early writings arose from the conditions of the time -- and looks at how these early influences led to his more mature writings. As such, it is perhaps of the greatest interest to the readers of The Silmarillion rather than The Lord of the Rings.That the war was a great influence on Tolkien can hardly be denied. And this book brings that out. It is, perhaps, less successful at bringing out the full panorama of the war. Although it discusses the fates of Tolkien and his friends Gilson and Smith, there isn't much general perspective on the war, or even on the way the British army was organized, with the upper and middle classes supplying the officers and the lower classes the cannon fodder. And this matters, because the upper classes were by no means guaranteed to contain the brightest minds....At the end, author Garth tries to sum it all up and show how the Great War influenced Tolkien's finished writings. Many will find this the most valuable part of the book. The rest, sadly, is neither fish nor fowl -- neither a "man in the trenches" view nor a full biography of Tolkien. Others have praised it highly, but I sometimes found myself lost. In the end, this is a piece of the puzzle of where Tolkien's writings came from. But the puzzle is much larger than this one piece.
    • 4/5
      I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings forty years ago or so. I have also watched the recent movie version of The Lord of the Rings. I am not really any kind of Tolkien fan. I liked those books well enough but just never chose to plunge in to any kind of serious study. My sweetheart recommended this book to me, and that mostly because of the focus on WW1. Actually even more than WW1, this book focuses on a small circle of friends, formed in their teenage years, that included Tolkien. The core was just four young men. They surely had high ideals and high hopes, which were all quite badly treated by the war.So the point of the book is to show how Tolkien expressed those ideals and their fate in the world through the legendary world he created. The focus is not on The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but on the early predecessors, even before the Silmarillion. Garth walks us though many of these stories in enough detail that one can follow along with no prior exposure to them, at least for the most part. From time to time I did start to feel a bit left out, as Garth shows how story elements foreshadowed later Tolkien works that I am not familiar with. But for the most part this book demand too much Tolkien-ology of its reader.I must say that I think Garth is quite successful with his argument here, that Tolkien was not running away from the harsh reality of his time but rather presented it in a medium that allowed him to get his points across effectively. Garth puts Tolkien in the company of Milton and Blake - they all created fabulous epics to portray the crises of their times.The crisis that Tolkien was confronting is one that we are still confronting, though probably we are now in a different phase of the progress of industrial domination. WW1 was probably the most dramatic rise of industrial might. E.g. the British fleet was converted to petroleum shortly before the war. WW2 must have been the triumph, with nuclear weapons etc. Now we are in the decline of industrial power, with the desperate struggle to maintain power that it entails. Maybe this makes Tolkien even more important today. Tolkien portrayed an alternative. Now that some alternative or other is becoming inevitable, not merely possible, our challenge is to choose, to steer our path toward some one of the better alternatives open to us. The noble virtues latent in the common man, this vision of Tolkien might show us a priceless vital way forward.
    • 5/5
      Fills a gap in the understanding of J. R. R. Tolkien's works.
    • 3/5
      The author says Tolkien wasn't inspired to write :Lord of the Rings" because of the war. He had returned to his lifelong interest, the creation of language and myth. But I think the loss of his friends in the war is the reason he didn't kill off Merry and Pippin, as I would have.
    • 5/5
      Awesome book, I couldn't put it down!