John Garth (author)

John Garth is a British author, known especially for writings about J. R. R. Tolkien including his biography Tolkien and the Great War and a book on the places that inspired Middle-earth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Biography

John Garth read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. He trained as a journalist and worked for 18 years on newspapers including the Evening Standard in London. He then became a freelance author while continuing to contribute newspaper articles.[1]

Reception

Luke Shelton, editor of Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, called Tolkien and the Great War an excellent book on how the First World War might have shaped Tolkien's thought.[2] The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft, reviewing the same book for World Literature Today, wrote that Garth had ably portrayed Tolkien's early life with his close friends, using their own papers and their British Army company records. She found the first part of the book "somewhat leisurely", but the account of Tolkien's training and battlefield experience was "gripping".[3]

Mike Foster, reviewing Tolkien at Exeter College for Mythlore, described it as "a very good thing indeed", even if small (at 64 pages), with "rare photographs" that revealed "a time of innocence, a time of confidences", and serving as a kind of prequel to Tolkien and the Great War.[4]

Reviewing The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth for Mythlore, Foster described the book as a "masterful study ... encyclopedic in its scope", combining details of Tolkien's life with Middle-earth. He admired the photographs as well as its scholarship, and found "virtue" in the journalistic use of sidebars on background topics like Tolkien's debt to Anglo-Saxon cosmology or his mythology for England. He quotes Garth's account of the impact of Tolkien's "many trips to the trenches" in 1916, passing a crossroads where "a calvary had once stood .. at a tree-girt crossroads that the soldiers called Crucifix Corner. Similarly, en route to Mordor, Frodo and Sam see the old stone king at the Cross-roads in Ithilien—his head knocked off by orcs yet still whole." Foster comments that "Thus the Somme was reborn as the most horrific geography of Middle-earth. It inspired the Dead Marshes, the Barrow-downs, and Morgul Vale."[5]

Awards and distinctions
  • 2004 Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship[1]
  • 2015 Fellow in Humanistic Studies, Black Mountain Institute, University of Las Vegas[1]
  • 2014, 2016, 2017 The Tolkien Society Awards (2 best article, 1 outstanding contribution)[6]

Works

Garth has written many articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines including The Guardian.[7] Some of his major works are listed below.

Books
——— translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish[8]

Chapters

References
  1. Garth, John. "About". John Garth. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  2. Shelton, Luke (8 March 2019). "The Best (and Worst) Books for Tolkien Biography". Luke Shelton. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  3. Croft, Janet Brennan (2005). "[Review] Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth". World Literature Today. 79 (1 (January - April)): 93.
  4. Foster, Mike (2015). "[Review] Tolkien at Exeter College: How an Oxford undergraduate Created Middle-Earth. John Garth". Mythlore. 33 (2).
  5. Foster, Mike (2020). "[Review]: The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth". Mythlore. 39 (1 (Fall/Winter 2020)): 220–229.
  6. "Previous Winners". The Tolkien Society. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  7. "John Garth". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
  8. "John Garth on Tolkien: publications". John Garth. Retrieved 24 January 2021.

Official website

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