Tolkien and the Great War

Tolkien and the Great War: The Emergence of Middle Earth by John Garth, 313 pages

On November 8th of 1916, after almost 6 months of service at the front, Second Lieutenant John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, a signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, was invalided home to England with a severe case of trench fever.  It was during his long recovery, first in hospital and later in the Royal Defence Force, that Tolkien would begin to tie together his scattered fantasies into a coherent mythology, the foundation of the legendarium that served as the basis for his later masterpieces.

Tolkien and the Great War, beyond presenting the bare facts of Tolkien's service in the War and the fate of his closest friends, is concerned with the impact of the War on Tolkien's imagination.  For Garth, Tolkien developed his legendarium not to escape from the brutal material reality of the War, but as an attempt to place his ordeals in a moral and spiritual context.  This was not expressed, as one might expect, by simply aligning the warring nations on the sides of good and evil - to the contrary, Tolkien was only too aware of the orcishness present on all sides.  Rather, the War confirmed for Tolkien the need for a recovery of memory and renewal of language, while his explorations of the meaning of suffering led to a deeper understanding of the paradoxes of evil, eucatastrophe, and the value of the meek and lowly, themes which would become the hallmarks of his future work.