by John Garth (1889)
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Imagine the first light of July 16, 1916, creeping over the blasted earth of the Somme, where nineteen thousand British lads lie dead from the day before, and a twenty-four-year-old Ronald Tolkien, fresh-faced signals officer of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, steps into the trenches for the first time. Mud sucks at his boots, shells whine overhead, and in his pack rattles a notebook where fragments of myth already stir—elves whispering through the wire and barrage. That’s the moment John Garth captures in Tolkien and the Great War, pulling you into the forge where Middle-earth was hammered out amid the greatest slaughter Britain ever knew.
You feel the dread first, visceral and choking, as Garth recounts Tolkien’s TCBS brotherhood: Rob Gilson vaporized by a shell at Ginchy, Geoffrey Bache Smith dying of shrapnel wounds with a poem unfinished in his pocket, their letters to Tolkien burning with dreams of a new mythology to heal a shattered world. It’s not dry history; it’s the raw pulse of youth betrayed by generals and gas. Then comes the wonder—Tolkien feverish with trench fever, shipped home just as his battalion shreds in the anvil of the Ancre, his mind alight with tales. Garth shows how those bonds echo in Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin: the unyielding camaraderie of the Lancashire Fusiliers reborn as hobbit loyalty, the Shire a green memory of Edwardian England worth every hellish yard gained.
What sets this book apart? Garth doesn’t just list dates; he traces the alchemy. The Dead Marshes, with their corpse-lights luring the lost? Straight from the saline swamps where Tolkien mapped enemy lines under fire. Sam’s gardenside eloquence? Forged in the TCBS vow to create beauty from barbarism. You read it like uncovering buried treasure, each page flipping the script on Tolkien as dreamy Oxford don—he’s a survivor, myth-maker in khaki, turning apocalypse into eucatastrophe. I’ve pored over it three times, underlining how his signals flares amid the muck prefigure the beacons of Gondor, and it hits harder each go.
This is the book for readers who devoured The Lord of the Rings and ached to know the man who made Samwise the truest hero, or anyone chasing the shadows behind the myth.
Crack it open tonight, and the Somme will whisper why the eagles still soar.
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