John Garth | |
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| Alma mater | St Anne's College, Oxford |
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| Years active | 1997–present |
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John Garth is a British journalist and author, known especially for writings aboutJ. R. R. Tolkien including his biographyTolkien and the Great War and a book on the places that inspiredMiddle-earth,The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. He won a 2004Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship for his work on Tolkien.[1] The biography influenced muchTolkien scholarship in the subsequent decades.
John Garth read English atSt Anne's College, Oxford. He trained as a journalist and worked for 18 years in newspapers including theEvening Standard in London. He then became a freelance author specialising inJ. R. R. Tolkien, while continuing to contribute newspaper articles.[1]
Among his works ofTolkien scholarship are twomonographs, namely the 2003Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth and the 2020The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth. His many articles and chapters on Tolkien include "A Brief Biography" inWiley-Blackwell's 2014A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, and ten historical essays inRoutledge's 2006J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. He has contributed articles and book reviews on Tolkien-related subjects in the specialist journalsTolkien Studies andMallorn, and in the national press includingThe Guardian,The Times,The Daily Telegraph,New Statesman, andThe Times Literary Supplement.[2]
Luke Shelton, editor ofMallorn, the journal of theTolkien Society, calledTolkien and the Great War an excellent book on how the First World War might have shaped Tolkien's thought.[3] The Tolkien scholarJanet Brennan Croft, reviewing the same book forWorld Literature Today, wrote that Garth had ably portrayed Tolkien's early life with his close friends, using their own papers and their British Armycompany records. She found the first part of the book "somewhat leisurely", but the account of Tolkien's training and battlefield experience was "gripping".[4]Garth's biography of Tolkien in his war years influenced much Tolkien scholarship in the subsequent decades. By 2021, a reviewer was able to state that each of the 16 essays in a scholarly collection was responding to "Garth's seminal [work]".[5]
The Tolkien scholarMichael Foster, reviewingTolkien at Exeter College forMythlore, 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 toTolkien and the Great War.[6]
ReviewingThe Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth forMythlore, 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 their scholarship and found "virtue" in the journalistic use of sidebars on background topics like Tolkien's debt toAnglo-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 "acalvary had once stood .. at a tree-girt crossroads that the soldiers called Crucifix Corner. Similarly, en route toMordor, Frodo and Sam see the old stone king at the Crossroads inIthilien—his head knocked off byorcs yet still whole." Foster comments that "Thus the Somme was reborn as the most horrific geography of Middle-earth. It inspired theDead Marshes, theBarrow-downs, andMorgul Vale."[8]
Garth has written many articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines includingThe Guardian.[10] Some of his major works are listed below.
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