Scan barcode
A review by nonabgo
Tolkien și Marele Război: Originile Pământului de Mijloc by John Garth
4.0
I love Tolkien. He is by far my favourite author, regardless of genre. I have read his entire legendarium and I continue to be amazed at his capacity to imagine worlds, creatures, languages. The process he employed to finally arrive to the Lord of the Rings books is fascinating - he started by inventing a language, and not only words, but also an entire history of that language, with its evolution, root words that transformed over time. After which he invented another language. And these led to the elves, and then to Tol Eressea and Middle-earth, and then to the hobbits and the adventures we know and love.
And this book gives us the process of building that entire world, in light of WWI, a war Tolkien actively participated in and which robbed him of his friends.
This is not a full biography, but an account of Tolkien's life at Oxford before WWI and his participation in the war, as a young communications officer. It's well researched, based on letters and documents left behind by the author, his family and his friends and tackles not only his own life, but also the lives of his friends, who were his supporters and critics during the early days of his legendarium.
John Garth went into much detail - sometimes gruesome - about WWI, especially the Battle of the Somme, to which Tolkien participated and during which he lost friends. It's a historical document as well as a critical analysis of his work and how the war influenced and impacted both The Lord of the Rings and the extended mythology.
It's a great study that made me understand and see in a different light Tolkien's works. While a bit "professorial", the amount of research behind it is astonishing and I thank Garth for humanizing the god of fantasy and making me understand how close we were to lose him.
And this book gives us the process of building that entire world, in light of WWI, a war Tolkien actively participated in and which robbed him of his friends.
This is not a full biography, but an account of Tolkien's life at Oxford before WWI and his participation in the war, as a young communications officer. It's well researched, based on letters and documents left behind by the author, his family and his friends and tackles not only his own life, but also the lives of his friends, who were his supporters and critics during the early days of his legendarium.
John Garth went into much detail - sometimes gruesome - about WWI, especially the Battle of the Somme, to which Tolkien participated and during which he lost friends. It's a historical document as well as a critical analysis of his work and how the war influenced and impacted both The Lord of the Rings and the extended mythology.
It's a great study that made me understand and see in a different light Tolkien's works. While a bit "professorial", the amount of research behind it is astonishing and I thank Garth for humanizing the god of fantasy and making me understand how close we were to lose him.