Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth is being reprinted in paperback (15.01.11 by Pieter Collier) - Comments

It is always great news when a book on JRR Tolkien gets a reprint, especially if it is one of the better resources.

Just read on facebook, on the wall of John Garth, that his Tolkien and the Great War is being reprinted in paperback by HarperCollins - it's due out on 28 April.

The cover has been revamped using a new scan of the 1914 photo of Tolkien, allowing a much tighter crop than the old paperback. It was my pleasure to make this new scan for John Garth, as I happened to own the original photo and was glad to be able to make a good scan for the new reprint.

It’s not a new edition but John Garth has taken the opportunity to make a few corrections to the text. A list of these corrections can be found at John Garths' website.

Review of Tolkien and the Great War

I reviewed the book a long time ago, but you can still find it here: review of Tolkien and the Great War.

Interview with John Garth

In 2009 I had the pleasure to interview the author about the book, I'm certain this interview with John Garth is still very interesting today!

Tolkien and the Great War

This dense but informative study addresses the long-standing controversy over how J.R.R. tolkien's WWI experience influenced his literary creations. A London journalist, Garth is a student of both Tolkien and the Great War. He writes that when war broke out, Tolkien was active in an Oxford literary society known as the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), along with three of his closest friends. Finishing his degree before joining up, Tolkien served as a signal officer in the nightmarish Battle of the Somme in 1916, where two of those friends were killed. The ordeal on the Somme led to trench fever, which sent him home for the rest of the war and probably saved his life. It also influenced a body of Northern European-flavored mythology he had been inventing and exploring in both prose and verse before the war, toward its evolution into The Book of Lost Tales and in due course Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. This book could not pretend to be aimed at other than the serious student of Tolkien, and readers will benefit from a broad knowledge of his work (as well as a more than casual knowledge of WWI). But it also argues persuasively that Tolkien did not create his mythos to escape from or romanticize the war. Rather, the war gave dimensions to a mythos he was already industriously exploring. Garth's fine study should have a major audience among serious students of Tolkien, modern fantasy and the influence of war on literary creation.

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