Tolkien And The Great War: The Threshold Of Middle-earth (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
John Garth’sTolkien and the Great War:The Threshold of Middle-earthPreviously Published in Issue 10, Spring 2004, Journal of the Northeast Tolkien SocietySeeing 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.
I read Tolkien and the Great War as part of a group read with the Tolkien group on Goodreads, and I'm so glad I did. I've read a lot of books about Tolkien, and this is one of the very best. Garth delves into the biographical details of Tolkien's youth and young adulthood, looking especially at Tolkien's friendship with three other schoolmates: G. B. Smith, Rob Gilson, and Christopher Wiseman. Together, these four formed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), a brotherhood dedicated to rekindling the enchantment of the world through their creative output (especially prose and poetry). The TCBS began as a group for conversation and clever pranks, but as these four men grew up together the TCBS became a refuge, a place of hope in the midst of a world at war. All four members eventually enlisted and served in the Great War, and as the grueling tedium and horror of trench warfare (and naval warfare, in Wiseman's case) took their toll, the men's letters to one another display a poignant yearning for even a brief time togehter, that the hope of the TCBS might enable them to endure through the war and dream of a better world after. Gilson and Smith died in the war, which effectively ended the TCBS. Wiseman became a school headmaster, and Tolkien . . . well, of course we know what he did after the war. This story is significant because it was during these years that Tolkien began creating the Elvish languages and the history that goes with them. The encouragement of the other TCBS members helped give Tolkien the motivation to pursue his poetry and prose, and the dreams he shared with the TCBS--that beauty in writing might re-enchant the world, opening people's eyes to the "faerie" all around us--obviously resonated within him for the rest of his life. John Garth's telling of this story is even and well reasoned. He presents the details as he has put them together, drawing from letters, wartime documents, other literature of the time, and other scholarship on Tolkien. There is surely a temptation for the biographer to make many presumptions, drawing connections between Tolkien's life experiences and his writings, and much of this would seem reasonable. However, Garth generally restricts himself to simply presenting the facts, and the book is stronger because of this. Throughout the book, he suggests that Tolkien's experiences may possibly be visible here and there in his fiction, only rarely in an obvious or direct way, but he respects Tolkien's own disdain for bringing the author's biography into his works. For me the most fascinating parts of Tolkien and the Great War are Garth's Epilogue and Postscript, which are really distinct essays considering Tolkien's work as a whole, from a critical standpoint. Garth shares some wonderful insights into Middle-Earth: for example, the interesting parallel between Melkor's destruction of the Two Trees, using the shadowy cover of Ungoliant, and Beren's theft of the Silmaril, using the shadowy cover of Luthien's enchantment. How many times have I read The Silmarillion and yet not made that connection! Probably the greatest part of Garth's book is the Postscript, in which he defends Tolkien's writing against the attacks of critics, showing how Tolkien's archaic, seemingly backward-looking epic-creating is every bit as valid and appropriate a response to World War I as the trench memoir and poetry of disillusionment and disenchantment. Garth proposes that the literature of disillusionment in the decade following the war in many ways hijacked the actual feelings of the returning soldiers, giving the war in hindsight an emotional color that might not be entirely accurate. Tolkien, in contrast, created a literature that acknowledges the horrors and confusion, while still affirming that every act of heroism and bravery is valuable in itself, regardless whether the ultimate outcome seems to make any sense. The Beren/Luthien and Turin stories act as pictures of two ends of a spectrum of understanding war. In the story of Beren and Luthien, heroism and bravery result in victory, as well as the maturity of the heroic characters (though even in that story, the ending is tainted by the evils of war, greed, and selfishness). In Turin's story, the hero is ennobled through his dogged pursuit of justice and righteousness, even though he is also often rash and his decisions are fated to go awry to the very end; but the confusion and darkness that results from the hero's actions don't make his actions the less noble.Garth's Postscript ought to be required reading for any Tolkien fan, and I highly recommend the whole book especially for readers who have spent some time with The Book of Lost Tales, the History of Middle-Earth series, or even just The Silmarillion. Tolkien and the Great War is simply a fantastic Tolkien book.
What do You think about Tolkien And The Great War: The Threshold Of Middle-earth (2005)?
Tolkien and the Great War is an obviously well-researched book that goes into explicit (at times I must admit tedious) detail on J.R.R. Tolkien’s involvement in World War I and its possible impact on his then-current and later writings. We begin by observing Tolkien’s earliest close friendships formed at St. Edward’s Grammar School under the auspices of the “TCBS” (an acronym for Tea Club, Barrovian Society) where the core group of Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson, and G.B. Smith became close artistic confidantes, encouragers and critics of each other’s work. Convinced that they were a group that would change the world with their work, their dreams were turned to harsh reality with the advent of “the war to end all wars”.We spend the majority of Tolkien and the Great War following ... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
—Fantasy Literature
Mr. Garth seeks to demonstrate how Tolkien's life experiences would one day inform the creation of Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth. For this forensic investigation, he traces the evolution of Tolkien's thoughts and influences, Mr. Garth excavates and examines every small detail of Tolkien's early writings and biographical information searching for clues. Periodically, he compares the non-fiction event to the fictional representations. As the book title suggests, Mr. Garth is most interested in how Tolkien's WWI experiences may or may not provide inspiration for his future mythical worlds. A connection Tolkien himself discouraged.The need to examine authors fiction as an extension of an authors real life is apparently a more recent compulsion among those who interpret literary works. In this case, Tolkien had a more obvious source for his inspirations. Most know Tolkien was a Professor of English Language and Literature and of Anglo-Saxon. A man who studied word origins and the connection of language to beliefs. For example, he wrote a definitive translation and interpretation of Beowulf. According to Tolkien(a Saxon name), he created his own mythology and languages based on those he studied and taught at University. He wished to create a mythology for England. He liked the Anglo-Saxon period from before the 1066 Norman invasion which bastardized the native languages with Latin words(think French.) A difficult study of Tolkien. Ultimately, a tedious and arguably boring exercise. For serious fans only. If you wish to appreciate Tolkien's writing, read Tom Shippey.
—Kerry
As with so many books on my shelf, I am unsure how exactly I came across this one. Clearly, it isn’t hard to determine WHY I would be interested in it. Tolkien is one of my favorite authors, and despite that, I know very little about the man’s life. This book promised to offer an interesting look at a reasonably significant portion of that life, and how it was influenced by one of the most significant events of the twentieth century.The book’s structure is a bit difficult to describe; part biography, part history, it focuses primarily on Tolkien’s life immediately before, during, and after the First World War (though there is a helpful (and fairly necessary) summary of his life prior to the war). In particular, it focuses in on the life of Tolkien and the Tea Club And Barrovian Society, a group which Tolkien formed with three of his friends, and which was tremendously influential on his life and experiences up until, and through, the First World War. Indeed, this book is arguably as much a biography of the TCBS (as they are primarily referred to in the book and of their own accord) as it is of Tolkien. Along the way, the book traces the development of Tolkien’s personal mythology through notes, stories, and poems that he composed during the war. Having finished chronicling the experience of Tolkien and the TCBS through the war, Garth ends the book with two chapters of reflection on the rest of Tolkien’s life, and how his experiences may have influenced the creation and development of the his mythology.This is an interesting book, if you are a Tolkien fan. If you are not a Tolkien fan, I suspect this is a poor place to start. While it isn’t required reading, familiarity with the Silmarillion will make reading this book a heck of a lot easier. The mythology that Tolkien was developing largely appears in that book, and Garth does not make a great effort to explain much about the mythology aside from analyzing Tolkien’s work as it stood during the Great War.While I got some good and interesting information and insights from this book, I have to confess that I found the writing a bit dense, particularly some of the battle narratives. I confess that I may not have been in the right frame of mind for some of the reading of this, but portions of the book felt like more of a struggle than I would have liked.For serious Tolkien fans, this book is unquestionably worth reading, if only for some of the ideas and insights. For casual fans, it might not be worth the bother.
—Jake
