I am now officially enrolled as a member of the University of Oxford and of St Antony’s College. As evidence, I offer a photo of the college’s welcome dinner for new graduate students. All complete strangers, we had a delightful evening.

I won’t deny that I played some part in getting myself to Oxford – and of course it’s been hard work. But I couldn’t have done it without all the kind, generous supporters who’ve helped me crowdfund my academic fees for the year ahead. So here’s a big thankyou! Though there’s much work ahead (crowdfunding as well as academic) it’s a life-changing step.

Going up to Oxford this week was a little like arriving at a Rivendell – a place of learning and wisdom that draws travellers from far-flung lands.

St Antony’s specialises in global area studies and must be the most international of Oxford’s colleges. More than 200 joined with me – all graduate students, coming (if memory serves) from 75 different countries. I spoke with people studying to be diplomats, learning Persian, researching US jurisprudence, reading Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson… and many more.

The previous day was my induction into the English Faculty, at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Here I hobnobbed with people researching Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene); the visionary poet William Blake and dance (such a rich intersection); the interrelations of two medieval English monasteries…

Everywhere, I encountered not only intelligence and motivation, but also spirit, curiosity and kindness. I feel honoured to be in such splendid company.

Also at the Schwarzman Centre, presiding in a corner of the English library, I encountered this venerable master – J.R.R. Tolkien, as sculpted by his daughter-in-law Faith Tolkien.

Tolkien is why I’m at Oxford in the first place. As my supporters at this blog know, I’m beginning a part-time DPhil, the doctoral degree otherwise known as a PhD, with the Faculty of English. My theme is ‘Myth-making and war from 1919 to the Atomic Era: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in its time’.

Supervising my work are Professor Simon Horobin, English philologist and chair of the English Faculty board, and Professor Giuseppe Pezzini, classical philologist and author of the recent landmark book Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation. Together they run the Oxford Tolkien Network, which actively promotes scholarly study of his works after long years of academic neglect by his own university.

My DPhil research will be part of that larger effort. And ultimately, I plan to turn my dissertation into a book, a worthy adjunct to my Tolkien and the Great War, with which I first began this literary, cultural and biographical exploration.

I still need to raise funds to support my work. Although paying the fees gets me through the door at Oxford, I’m still locked in the old dilemma: time spent on research and writing has to compete with freelance earning time. If I neglect one, I won’t get my DPhil. If I neglect the other, my family won’t eat.

I still hope some official funding solution will emerge (ideally in the coming year!) but in the meantime, only the generous sponsorship of supporters will help to square the circle and solve the dilemma.

Currently, 108 supporters bring in £1,160 per month, covering academic fees plus about three weeks’ focused work on my DPhil. We’re 58% of the way towards achieving £2,000 per month – which would free me to spend a quarter of a year on this research and writing.

Can you help me get there?

Greetings on Hobbit Day! I’m back from an unplanned and unavoidable hiatus with a talk on “The Undiscovered J.R.R. Tolkien” at the Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference, hosted by George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon, USA.

Check out the details at the URL below – it's an amazing programme with a stellar cast of Lewisians and one Tolkienist (me!). You can still get tickets to watch via remote streaming.

My talk is on Thursday at 7.30 Pacific Daylight Time. I'll be offering important new insights into Lewis's influence on Tolkien – the man he claimed it was impossible to influence!

https://www.georgefox.edu/cs-lewis-initiative/conference.html

On this day in 1936, Tolkien received a financial boost for his academic research that also, indirectly, seems to have helped him in his work on Middle-earth. We have long known about the Leverhulme Fellowship he was awarded that year, but not the announcement date. It gives me this opportunity to thank my marvellous crowdfunding supporters for the financial boost they’ve just given me – and to set the next stage.

On 7 June, I broke the news that I’m starting a pioneering Oxford DPhil on The Lord of the Rings. But there’s no bursary or grant. In just over three weeks (when I was busily blogging, emailing, and posting on social media), subscriptions to my crowdfunder more than doubled. By 1 July, 30 new supporters had joined and 7 existing supporters had switched to a higher plan. Thanks to this, and stalwart support from 35 others, I can now afford to begin the DPhil project.

This is the first step, not the last. I still need time to do the research, free from the need to earn as a freelance. So my new goal is to crowdfund three months of doctoral research – half what I’ve undertaken to do over the next year as a part-time DPhil candidate. After hitting the first target, and with 11 more supporters joining since then, I now believe we can achieve the new goal before I begin in October.

Tolkien’s case shows how valuable such help can be. But in his case, the chief beneficiary turned out to be literature rather than academic scholarship.

In June and July 1936, Tolkien was buried in marking exams. Besides Oxford, he did this for the universities of London, Manchester and Reading, and for the School Certificate. To meet the cost of a growing family, he’d been busy as an outside examiner in this way since 1922.

He wrote of this period:

‘I have spent nearly all the vacation-times of seventeen years examining, and doing things of that sort, driven by immediate financial necessity (mainly medical and educational). Writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged, and has been broken and ineffective.’

The work was also wretchedly dull – though that had at least one major payoff, when he doodled the random line ‘In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit’ in his tedium. If it hadn’t been for that, most of us would never have heard of him and the world would be poorer.

But relief was on its way.

Industrialist and philanthropist Lord Leverhulme had died in 1925 leaving part of his legacy to scholarships for research. In May 1933, his trustees announced they would annually be handing out £12,000 in research fellowships.

In July they announced 17, followed by 2 more in December. Among the 12 new fellowships for the sciences and humanities in 1934 were historiographer A.J. Toynbee, paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (the prehistory of East Africa), and Basil Liddell-Hart, military critic for the Telegraph (the viability, or otherwise, of an international peace-keeping force).

Among the 20 fellowships awarded in 1935 was Tolkien’s Oxford English Faculty colleague, Percy Simpson, for his longstanding edition of Ben Jonson’s works.[1]

The Oxford University Gazette relayed the next call for applications in its 29 January 1936 issue, warning that they must be sent to the Leverhulme Trust by 1 March.

Fellowships were earmarked ‘for the assistance of experienced workers’, because other financial help already existed for early-stage researchers. The trustees would give preferential consideration ‘to subjects in which the existing provision is inadequate’ and particularly to ‘men and women who are prevented either by pressure of routine duties any other cause from undertaking, or completing, an investigation of value.’

This was exactly Tolkien’s predicament. As it happened, he suddenly had plenty of time to think about applying and, indeed, to see how free time might help him.

At the end of January, he had torn a ligament in his leg while playing squash. He was now in bed under doctor’s orders for at least ten weeks. Though he offered classes at home to replace his lectures, he could not attend the many university and faculty meetings that usually filled so much of his day.

By June he was back on his feet – and back to marking exams. The renewed drudgery would not be over until about the end of July. But by then the good news of the Leverhulme Research Fellowship must have made the annual ordeal much more bearable. He was one of ten successful applicants announced on 10 July 1936 – putting him among the first 49 of all the fellowships to date.

As reported in The Times, the Times Educational Supplement and elsewhere, the award was for work on ‘Old and Middle English with special reference to western alliterative tradition’.[2]

The amount of each grant was meant to match the circumstances; they would not usually be given for more than two years.

Enquiries with the Leverhulme Trust reveal that Tolkien’s fellowship was worth £400, spread over two years. (I asked if relevant correspondence still existed, but was told, ‘There isn’t a great deal of information for our grants going that far back. Many of the earlier records were lost as a result of the bombing of London.’)

A substantial figure, £200 in 1936 had the same buying power as £19,000 today. Presumably this was how far his £1,000-a-year Oxford University salary fell short of his needs.

The salary – his stipend as Rawlinson & Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon – had stood still ever since he was appointed in 1925. But it looks as if Tolkien had made a two-pronged attack on the financial problem, appealing to the university authorities even while he applied for a Leverhulme Fellowship. The university increased his salary to £1,200 from 1 October 1936, alongside a few other select cases.[3]

The numbers, however impressive, look dry. And it’s often been asked what exactly Tolkien achieved with his Leverhulme Fellowship money.

On paper, the award would seem to have come too late to assist with preparation of his game-changing November 1936 lecture ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’. He still had to complete any exam marking commitments for that summer. The fellowship didn’t kick in until October and term-time. Even so Tolkien, surveying the time ahead, could now justifiably postpone some other summer or autumn tasks until the Christmas vacation. At any rate, he managed to transform his undergraduate Beowulf lecture series into one lecture fit for the British Academy.

Yet by the time the fellowship expired in summer 1938, he had published no further academic research of his own. And beyond that, he only published sporadic articles and an unadorned text of the Ancrene Wisse. Perfectionism was to blame, but so also were illness, split commitments and, I suspect, procrastination. But the large body of his academic papers at the Bodleian Library includes some intensely worked projects. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this material dates from the Leverhulme Fellowship period.

Tolkien himself was painfully conscious of his lack of Leverhulme output and what colleagues would think. On the other hand, he admitted privately that his creative projects might benefit from the absence of exam-marking. He told Charles Furth of George Allen & Unwin:

‘I am at present endeavouring to earn a grant for “research”, in addition to my ordinary duties, but I may find some odd moments in the near future, especially as I am freed from the burden of examining for two years.’[4]

Who can say how many ‘odd moments’ this freedom afforded him?

In summer 1936 Allen & Unwin were already ‘clamouring’ for The Hobbit, which had come to their attention recently. He had retyped it by the end of the Long Vacation and made further revisions later that year. Just after the British Academy lecture, he signed the Hobbit contract and then sent his publisher a publicity paragraph. I guess this is what he sent to his friend R.W. Chambers on 8 February 1927 with the comment, ‘The enclosed does not announce Leverhulme firstfruits – I wrote this ridiculous story some years ago.’[5] Preparing The Hobbit for publication involved not only checking proofs but also providing illustrations inside and on the cover – which also carried the publicity paragraph as the book’s ‘blurb’.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, one of Tolkien’s later letters states clearly that the Númenor stories ‘came out of the “blurb”’ for The Hobbit – which means they could have begun occupying him during the Christmas vacation. By autumn 1937, he had written and rewritten The Fall of Númenor as well as four chapters of his time-travel companion story The Lost Road. He was also at work on his Etymologies and Quenta Silmarillion, his Alphabet of Fëanor and perhaps more.

But this is not the place for detailed evidences for this kind of chronology. The most prominent landmarks of this Leverhulme Fellowship period are, of course, the publication of The Hobbit in September 1937 and the plunge into The Lord of the Rings that December. Would he ever have made that start if exam-marking had swallowed up the Christmas vacation of 1937–8 as usual? It seems doubtful.

I don’t have a private mythology bursting to escape into the wider world. Instead I have years of research, expertise and insight about Tolkien. That’s why I’m doing my DPhil on how the wars and crises of his times influenced The Lord of the Rings. And in the absence of official funding, that’s why I’m crowdfunding.

I’d like to welcome and thank all my new supporters here – in chronological order:

John Farrell, Carol Zaleski, D. Scott Fortner, Matthew Thompson-Handell, Oleh Feschowetz, Cindi Szymanski, Alistair Stewart, Paul Friend, Daniela Friedewald, David Charlton, DMae Binnkley, Charles Beckmann, Clive Shergold, Pekka Rautajoki, Alina Żochowska, Larry Street, Michael Nardini, Lucy Greenwood, Helaine Katz, Ian Hargrove, Ralph Sidway, Tammy Schlemmer, Bea Davies, Lukas and May Ritzel, Juan, Vincent Bryson, Adam Schwarz, Amy Pass, Mark Middendorf, Carole Keene, Katherine Ponganis, Luanne V, Emma Davies Day, and Malcolm Baalman.

I’d also like to thank existing members who’ve boosted their subscriptions to help with the DPhil:

Marilyn Pukkila, David Doughan, Bruce Leonard, Edmund Weiner, Jennifer Morris, Troels Forchhammer, Peter Rubinstein, and Alison Mable.

And I thank all the others giving me their stalwart support here:

Shaun Verrinder, Paul Taylor, James Moffett, Holly Ordway, Cathy Koenig, Todd Mayo, Giuseppe Pezzini, Christopher Sparrow, Lynn Schlesinger, Philip  Burton, Patrick Curry, Annika Röttinger and Tobias M. Eckrich, Shawn Marchese, Sean Lucas, Alison Mable, John Cofield, Nancy Raines, Juli Thompson, Peggy Layne, Alan Baxter, Rob Pinkerton, Alan Sisto, Kate Neville, Trevor Brierly, Anette Lauen Borg, Andrew Wells, Chiara Siasat, Christopher Gilson, Ed Pierce, Bonnie Marques, Lukas Bajgar, Mi Ann  Bennett , Ibid 11962, and Nirnaeth Galwe.

With more support like this, the new crowdfunding target is surely within reach. Every new or increased subscription will help. Please take a moment to look at the plans and rewards.

[1] Strictly as an in-joke, Tolkien would mock Percy Simpson in a parodic 1938 exam for C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield. Question 1 requires comment on the line, ‘It is no good setting them that. They would know it.’ Simpson had once said this to Lewis, who had written to his brother about it: ‘Percy Tweedlepippin is my colleague and his principles as an examiner are perhaps worth recording. In answer to a suggested question of mine he retorted “Its no good setting that. They’d know that!” (C.S. Lewis to W.H. Lewis, 14 June 1932, and endnote 74, Collected Letters, Vol. 2.)

[2] ‘The Leverhulme Fellowships: Awards for Research’, The Times, 10 July 1936, 8; Leverhulme Trust to John Garth, 11 February 2016; Leverhulme Trust, Leverhulme Research Awards: First Report (London: Office of the Advisory Committee, 1957), 25.

[3] Oxford University Gazette 21 October 1936, 29.

[4] Letters, no. 10, 17 January 1937.

[5] Caroline Chabot, ‘Raymond Wilson Chambers’, Moreana no. 94 (June 1987), 87–8.

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved.

One of Tolkien’s final touches to The Hobbit was also his hardest – to kill off the young dwarves Fili and Kili. Hard for his readers and, I suspect, for Tolkien himself. So why did he do it, when all along he had meant them to live?

In the complete manuscript version of the story, Fili and Kili survived the Battle of Five Armies.

Tolkien’s decision to change this in the final typescript is striking and in some ways puzzling.

The death of Thorin Oakenshild from wounds after the climactic battle is not only heroic but also the wages of folly. In both respects, it’s a death well earned. Thorin survives just long enough to make amends for his anger against Bilbo and to repudiate his own former gold-madness: ‘If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.’

By contrast, Thorin’s nephews are the least blameworthy and the youngest of all the story’s characters. They absolutely do not deserve to die. And they are the dwarves who young readers might identify with most closely.

The reader only learns of their deaths in the retrospective account of the day – like Bilbo, who has been knocked out mid-way through the battle:

Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.

As John D. Rateliff puts it in his superb History of The Hobbit, ‘The idea that the two most likeable of all Bilbo’s companions should also die in the battle [is] one of the saddest moments in the whole story, even though it occurs offstage while our narrator is hors de combat.’[1]

So why did Tolkien change the story so that they died?

Rateliff proposes two reasons for the change. On a purely pragmatic level, he points out, Tolkien may have introduced their deaths in order to remove any confusion about the dwarven succession after Thorin’s death. The kingship has to go instead to Thorin’s cousin Dain, to justify his actions as a deus ex machina in the Battle of Five Armies). On an artistic level, the deaths of the blameless Kili and Fili adds a touch of realism, writes Rateliff, to ‘ground the eucatastrophe and prevent the book from being “escapist” in a negative sense’.[2] He’s probably right on the pragmatic motive. He’s certainly right on the artistic one.

But if we look beyond internal narrative logic and philosophical values, we can find other, more urgent and personal reasons for the deaths of Fili and Kili…

Continue reading on Steady

It’s been hot and humid the past week as I write here in the UK. If you have air-conditioning, spare a thought for those of us who don’t.

But let’s withhold our sympathies from Tolkien and schoolfriends in the broiling summer term 115 years ago, when they brewed up their now-famous Tea Club and Barrovian Society. In the June 1911 issue of the King Edward’s School Chronicle, Tolkien proclaimed himself delighted.

Still, as he sat down to write the issue’s opening editorial, he claimed the steaming temperatures left him with a dilemma.

Continue reading on Steady

A newly revealed letter from Tolkien confirms longstanding speculation that ‘Crickhollow’ in Buckland is modelled on ‘Crickhowell’ in Wales. But I want to ask what Tolkien actually meant. Are the good folk of Crickhowell right to claim their town inspired a place in Middle-earth? That’s not at all clear.

Here’s what he wrote to Jenny Hall in the 2 February 1966 letter, up for auction at Christie’s:

I have been in most parts of Wales, but the place names I use are made up from English models or borrowed from books, though Crickhollow was actually meant to resemble Crickhowell.

One sentence, three clauses, two qualifiers, and a great deal of ambiguity.

Tolkien was a master of language, but here he was writing a casual letter – and although we may guess what question he was answering, we don’t know. The fuzzy syntax suggests he was dashing down his thoughts. At any rate, he was writing in 1966 for one person, not for a horde of ravening Tolkien fans in 2026. He had no reason to expect this statement would come under public scrutiny.

Let’s unpack what Tolkien says.

Continue reading on Steady

Like countless other writers, I owe a great debt to libraries in general. Like many, I owe a particular one to the British Library.

A great library is a book of lives. On its myriad pages, the minds of people across the ages have left their unique imprints. And I can attest to the way a great library can change lives, too.

Along with the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library is a copyright library. That means it receives, by law, a copy of every book published in Britain. The need to accommodate books – and their readers – meant that it outgrew its earlier site, the famous Round Reading Room at the British Museum.

That closed in October 1997, the British Library opened to readers at its new premises next to St Pancras Station on 24 November, and the Queen officially opened it on 25 June 1998.

At the time, I was living and working in central London. I had begun research for what became my book Tolkien and the Great War at the turn of 1997–98. So the new British Library quickly became something of a home from home.

Continue reading on Steady

A dive into Oxford’s wartime archives means I can now put to rest any question over when Tolkien enrolled as an air raid warden. As a bonus, it also suggests he did not join up alone.

I visited Oxford City Archive in the town hall to look at the Second World War enrolment register for air raid wardens there. The Air Raid Precautions Register, spanning 1937–1945, confirms that Tolkien joined the service on 29 September 1941.

That’s as I posted previously. But it was at least nine months later than his children came to remember it. The register entry illustrates the fragility of biography that rests on even the most sincerely held memories.

The date was first revealed in a register image published on the Oxford Museum website last year. I amplified it in this blog and on social media. It contradicts two items in the standard reference work, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond’s Chronology: that Tolkien became a warden ‘by January 1941, and probably during 1940’ and that he went to the scene of a 4 May 1941 bomber crash in that capacity.

Just after I wrote my original post about the register entry last year, Tolkien scholar Kristine Larsen revealed that Scull and Hammond’s information came from firmly held Tolkien family memories and some unidentified unpublished evidence.

Priscilla Tolkien had witnessed the bomber as it made its fatal plunge when she was 11. At 70, she wrote to the Oxford Times about it, saying: ‘My father J.R.R. Tolkien was an air raid warden and was soon on the scene with other wardens and fire-watchers in the neighbourhood.’ She later reaffirmed this belief to Scull and Hammond. Her brother Christopher had evidence their father was a warden at least as early as January 1941, she added.[1]

Scull and Hammond’s work is indispensable, and their access to family memories is the richest since Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 biography. But I have closer and more regular access to Oxford – where I’m about to begin a doctoral (DPhil) research project on how modern war shaped The Lord of the Rings. So I felt bound to go and check the official records.

What I found illustrates now even the most firmly held memory can be disproven by primary and contemporary evidence. We don’t know what evidence Christopher had, but an error has clearly arisen somewhere along the line.

For both the family and the September 1941 register entry to be correct, Tolkien would have had to enrol earlier and then leave the service before enlisting again that September. Any earlier entry would have been struck through, with a date when he left the service.

But I’ve now scrutinised every page from the beginning of the war up to the end of 1941. There is no earlier entry for Tolkien.

My photographs of the register (reference number OCA8/1/PL1/2 in the Archive), much clearer than the only earlier image available, also provide extra information. They are reproduced here by permission from Oxford City Council.

Among some interesting sidelights is the entry for Cecil Roth, the Jewish historian with whom Tolkien later shared air raid warden duties. He joined on 12 September 1941, just a couple of weeks before Tolkien. H.T. Wade-Gery, the Oxford classicist with whom Tolkien had once dined during the Battle of the Somme, volunteered on 29 May 1940.

Catholic professor Francis de Zulueta (Priscilla’s godfather) enrolled on 14 May 1940. Inklings member Colin Hardie, of Magdalen College, enrolled on 23 May 1940. Could either of their examples have inspired Tolkien to join? If so, the inspiration took nearly a year and a half to take effect.

But the register evidence suggests another plausible factor.

Entries on consecutive pages show that Tolkien enrolled between two men who lived round the corner from him in north Oxford – zoologist P.B. Medawar and osteopath H.E. Jackson, both of 110 Banbury Road. Medawar lived at 110a (one of three flats at the address).[2] Jackson’s address is simply 110.

It’s unlikely to be coincidence that Medawar and Jackson, who lived under the same roof, turned up to enrol on the same day as each other.

What about Tolkien? There are good reasons to think he knew the zoologist.

First, Peter Medawar was a fellow of Magdalen College like C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a friend to both men – and also (as the existence of the Inklings attests) a social magnet who loved to bring interesting people together.

Second, Tolkien and Medawar were both among the north Oxford locals who had rushed to the scene of the Linton Road bomber crash in May 1941.

For both Medawar and Tolkien, the end of September was almost the last chance to take on a fresh commitment before academic duties resumed the following week ahead of the autumn (Michaelmas) term.

Taken together, all this suggests that Tolkien, Jackson and Medawar went along to the city hall to enrol together, with Medawar acting as the link and linchpin.

It reminds me of how Tolkien had striven to join the same battalion as his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith in the First World War; and how Smith himself had joined that battalion, the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers, in company with Wade-Gery and other Oxford men.

As characters in The Lord of the Rings know, there’s courage in companionship.

Even before I read her paper, I was wondering whether Tolkien’s experience of the bomber crash spurred him to enrol as an air raid warden. In her memoir of her brother, Priscilla says it was seeing the crashing bomber that ultimately led Christopher to join the Royal Air Force. Actually attending the horrific scene of the crash can hardly have failed to affect Tolkien senior.

On my visit to the archives, I gathered more information to c0nsider from Oxford’s Air Raid Precautions bulletins and a scrapbook of relevant local newspaper cuttings.

But for now, the additional evidence from the enrolment register suggests that the May crash was the joint spur for him and Medawar at least. 

❖ I’m writing this blog to raise funds for my Oxford DPhil on modern war and The Lord of the Rings. If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to read more from me about Tolkien, please consider lending me your support by subscribing to one of my membership plans.

[1] Kristine Larsen, ‘A Plane, a Plaque, and a Prize: J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Medawar’ (Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 2, no. 2, 2025). I thank Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull for a helpful reply clarifying their rationale. Priscilla’s letter appeared in the Oxford Times, 20 October 1989.

[2] Medawar and his biologist wife Jean are also recorded at 110a Banbury Road in the 1939 Register of England and Wales, a population census carried out in preparation for the expected war. In her essay, Larsen points out that Medawar and Tolkien joined the same day, but does not go so far as to suggest that they may have enrolled together, nor note that Jackson lived at the same address as Medawar.

Read more…

The day Tolkien became a WW2 air raid warden

The bomber crash that sent Tolkien racing from his home

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved.

My Oxford doctoral project will transform the way we look at Tolkien’s epic. Here’s why … and how you can help

‘It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’ So says the Pope’s latest encyclical, quoting The Lord of the Rings.

This year I’m starting an Oxford University doctoral project tracing how ‘the tides of the world’ shaped The Lord of the Rings. But even as I look ahead to that, we’ve been collectively looking back across eight decades to D-Day, 6 June 1944.

The weekend after the Allied invasion of Normandy, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher, training for the RAF far away in South Africa:

A great deal is happening at this end of the world. But I won’t enlarge on that, as doubtless you get the same news as we do, and as quick; and if one knew anything outside that it would be ‘indiscreet’ to mention it. As a matter of fact I don’t. But thank God it really looks like clearing up a bit this evening. It is calmer, warmer, and there are glimpses of sun and blue sky. I fancy weather is of paramount importance …

Tolkien said he could remember little else about the week.

At this great turning-point in the Second World War, however, addressing Christopher stirred deeper memories of how he himself had responded to the First World War as a young man. He had channelled the stresses of experience into writing:

I took to ‘escapism’: or really transforming experience into another form and symbol with Morgoth and Orcs and the Eldalie (representing beauty and grace of life and artefact) and so on; and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since and I still draw on the conceptions then hammered out.[1]

It is this transformation of experience ‘into another form and symbol’ in his Silmarillion mythology that I traced in Tolkien and the Great War for his first mythological writings, in and around 1914–18.

I am ever mindful of Tolkien’s declaration much later:

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.[2]

So in my book I made every effort to exhume all the evidence and examine it objectively.

Take Éarendel, the earliest-invented hero of his mythology. It is well known that Tolkien transformed this figure from Old English poetry’s Éala Éarendel engla beorhtast, ‘hail Éarendel brightest of angels’. But I observe that when he did so in September 1914, he was resisting massive pressure to enlist in Britain’s New Army. In a literary parallel to that experience, the Éarendel of his poem sails off into the sky as the wayward Evening Star (the planet Venus) even while the fixed stars all move in rigid unison on ‘the gathering tide of darkness’. His Éarendel escapes the world while listening to its weeping.

One of the first reviews testifies to the success of my approach in Tolkien and the Great War:

Tolkien’s imaginative world ... surely grew out of his experiences as a young soldier on the western front. No writer before John Garth has been patient enough to explore not merely the obvious truth of this, but the more complicated matter of how the truth applies itself in each of the relevant texts, major and minor.

Even if you are not a Lord of the Rings fan, I commend this book to you. It is all so interesting in itself, and I have rarely read a book which so intelligently graphed the relation between a writer’s inner life and his outward circumstances.[3]

I find it deeply instructive to look at ‘outward circumstances’. Context helps on the most obvious levels. Tolkien’s June 1944 letter to Christopher refers the ‘paramount importance’ of weather for the Normandy invasion. You will read that comment with new appreciation if you watch Pressure, the admirably intelligent 2026 drama about the crucial and deeply fraught forecasting problems ahead of D-Day. You will appreciate the truth of it even more deeply if you read the history of the landings or the news and weather reports of the time. To paraphrase Gandalf (and the Pope), what weather the Allies would have for D-Day was not theirs to rule – but predicting it was a matter of utmost moment.

Any of us would have spent D-Day glued to the radio for any news of developments. But waiting for such vast events to unfold can make anyone feel powerless. When Tolkien ‘made special efforts with typing’ Book Four of The Lord of the Rings the next day, no doubt it was an escape into positive productivity.

He had written the story of Frodo’s journey from the Dead Marshes to the passes of Mordor with astonishing speed and fluency between April and May 1944. Those chapters saw a resurgence of his own memories of soldiering, most obviously in the haunted Dead Marshes. But his situation as the world plunged deep into war in September 1914 can also be discerned. It’s there in the echo of Old English poetry when Frodo takes out the Phial of Galadriel to pierce the utter darkness of Shelob and cries Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima, ‘Hail Eärendil brightest of stars’.

Empathy for Christopher in the Second World War, so palpable in Tolkien’s fatherly letters during these months in 1944, clearly contributed to that resurgence of his own First World War experience in Book Four.

My biographical explorations are an exercise in empathy too. I’ve never regarded Tolkien and the Great War as any kind of final word on Tolkien’s creative project. So my Oxford doctoral research will continue the same work by graphing the relation between Tolkien’s ‘outward circumstances’ and what he wrote from the 1920s to 1940s, particularly The Lord of the Rings.

I expect stresses, shocks and surprises proportionate to an ambitious academic endeavour.

And I hope for your support.

Changes in doctoral research funding mean I have no bursary.

So last week I launched a campaign to raise money to cover the fees. I set a new £900-a-month target for my ongoing crowdfunding here – more than double what my wonderful supporters were already contributing to help my writing and research.

Immediately some supporters increased their subscription levels, while others joined for the first time. In a matter of days, their combined generosity has reduced the shortfall by almost a quarter.

With my first-year fees to pay in October, the sooner I close the gap completely, the better.

Can you to help my DPhil journey through The Lord of the Rings? If so, look at my newly revamped subscription plans and rewards. Which one suits you best?

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved.

[1] Letters, no. 73.

[2] Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings.

[3] A.N. Wilson, ‘War and Middle-earth’, Evening Standard, 10 November 2003, 44.

I’m about to embark on a doctoral research degree about how world war and other modern conflicts shaped Tolkien’s masterpiece. Two newly published literary polls illustrate why I’m especially pleased that Oxford University has accepted my application – and why I’m asking for support here.

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, academicians and literary pundits made a note to avoid it.

It’s now 72 years since Bilbo and his creator issued their joint invitation with the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954. And it seems that this early divide – between experts and amateurs – still persists.

The Guardian recently published a list of ‘the 100 best novels of all time’. This is ‘the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide,’ the teaser says. ‘How many have you read?’

The winner, Middlemarch, is a great and wise novel of society and psychology. So is Beloved, in second place. So are Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, and In Search of Lost Time, in third, fourth and fifth places. And so it goes on down most of the list. The sole piece of resolutely genre fiction is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, scraping in at 91.

Who voted? Overwhelmingly, writers and critics who till the soil of primarily realistic social and psychological fiction.

In a commentary, Guardian writer Lisa Allardice ponders the absence of ‘the now unfashionable postwar writers’ C.S. Lewis, William Golding and Tolkien. Surely she doesn’t seriously think Tolkien has gone out of style. He’s only unfashionable in the sense that The Lord of the Rings has survived all the fads and trends of the past seven decades.

There’s nothing wrong with cultural polls and we shouldn’t take them as seriously as, say, elections. A poll of experts is a tried and tested way of getting the rest of us riled up. The Guardian has simply used the literati to get the chatterati talking. And that has generated a whole new Guardian poll: readers’ top 100 novels of all time.

The Lord of the Rings won. 

Tolkien excepted, the upper end is still solid canon fodder and so is most of the list. But readers also voted for Watership Down and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for Cloud Atlas and The Dispossessed. Piranesi, The Stand, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Dune – votes for books like these show that ordinary readers want to celebrate stories that transport them with wonder and fear, that compel them to turn of the next page.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for expertise and I admire experts. In my own field, I try to be one. Distrust and even hatred of experts is a plague of our times.

But the politics, news and social media of our times are also plagued by confirmation bias. Shared values harden into tumorous, metastasising growths. They dismiss other ways of being, doing and thinking – or they thrive on attacking them. Academic literary expertise has a weakness in that direction. In defining the cultural canon, it likes to show its teeth.

So, on one hand, we have a pan-national profession with overlapping literary outlooks and a shared agenda – to be able to define the canon they teach or write within. On the other hand, we have a lot of little people with no group affiliation, no unified code of readerly conduct, and no aim except to share their sense of excellence. They are amateurs in the proper sense: people who practice something for the sheer love of it.

At Oxford in the 1980s, I discovered there was actually a bust of Tolkien at the English Faculty Library, but it was sequestered at the one corner of the building where no one had cause to go. Among undergraduates, mention of Tolkien brought silence, sniggers or sneers: he was an escapist, and that was that. He was honoured in his own home town and university as a medievalist, but not as a literary creator in his own right.

I didn’t expect to study Tolkien at Oxford, but naturally I hoped the critical skills I developed there would help me understand what I admired in him. Reading The Wanderer, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight helped. So did the prophetic poems of William Blake, and Coleridge’s big trio (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. But little else. The Oxford English BA degree syllabus primarily taught the formal development of literature towards the social or psychological poetry, drama and fiction in today’s accepted canon.

It left me with a void to fill. Later, books by Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger showed me I was not wrong about Tolkien. But I sensed there was much more to learn. The claim that his works are mere escapism still rankled.

His portrayal of war, especially, seemed to demand attention. On the surface, the battles draw from medieval or classical sources and evoke a desperate glory. Beneath that surface there is always a sense of the horror of war and the damage it does to peoples, nature, the body and the mind.

Ultimately, to understand Tolkien, I wrote my own book about him. In Tolkien and the Great War, I gathered all the evidence then available about the wartime experiences of Tolkien and his friends in 1914–18. I charted with great care how Tolkien first conceived and constructed his mythology in that same period. This chronological mapping of secondary creation on the backdrop of primary experience makes the connection between them abundantly clear.

By grounding this fairy-story in the uncompromising reality of the Somme, Tolkien and the Great War (I’m proud to say) has helped people take Tolkien seriously. It’s on virtually all lists of essential books about Tolkien. Its influence has been far-reaching. ‘Nearly any article in the popular press will now allude to the facts of Tolkien’s service record and take as a given that his fantasy was inspired by these experiences,’ says Janet Brennan Croft in a recent essay anthology on the First World War and fantasy.

I’ve never ceased my deep research into how he reshaped his own lifetime experience into his stories. Tolkien and the Great War goes no further than about 1920, so there’s plenty to learn still about Tolkien’s famous works and how the crises of his era influenced them. But freelance work, life, bereavement, and even hurricanes can severely disrupt a long enterprise of this kind.

That’s why, early this year, I applied to begin a doctoral research project on The Lord of the Rings in its time. I’ll look at how he laid its foundations in the interwar years when the peace of Europe was crumbling, constructed most of it under the shadow of the Second World War, and completed it during the birth-throes of the Cold War.

I’m delighted to say that Oxford University has accepted my application – only the second time it has done so for a DPhil project on Tolkien. I hope that it will be a step in making the study of Tolkien a specialism within his own university and English faculty.

Rightly, it will challenge my brain and fortitude. But will also challenge me financially.

British funding for solo research projects has just been cut to the bone. A bursary to support doctoral study of Tolkien would be a great thing for the university that holds his academic and personal papers and half of his literary papers too. But such a bursary does not exist – at least not yet.

That means I’ll have to raise funds with as much energy as I can spare from everything else. The DPhil is part-time so I can spend half my year on freelance work, which will help. But at the very least, I need to make an additional stretch to pay the university fees.

So I’m setting a new target for this crowdfunding appeal – £900 a month. That’s more than double what my cherished supporters already bring in. But it’s surely within reach – with the help of anyone who admires my work or believes it would be a great thing to put the study of Tolkien squarely in place in his home ground at Oxford.

Would you like to help? If so, take a look at my newly revamped subscription plans to see what you get and what suits you best!

‘My imagination is rooted in Britain, and always will be,’ says Susan Cooper. ‘It’s like the fact that I’ve lived in the USA for 50 years and don’t have an American accent. But gradually it’s been crossing the Atlantic.’ With Ghost Hawk, her impassioned 2014 novel dealing with the fraught encounter between Puritan settlers and native peoples, her imagination definitively made landfall on the coast of America.

If Cooper’s name is new to some US readers, it’s only because her previous novels have been set in Britain – notably the Dark Is Rising sequence, a towering landmark on the road from J.R.R. Tolkien to J.K. Rowling.

Now 78, she has lived most of her life in New England, where she moved in 1963 to marry an M.I.T. professor.

But let’s go back in time – a compulsion of Cooper’s – to childhood in a house outside London during the Blitz of 1940–41, when her nightmares of German paratroopers bursting through the door seemed all too feasible. She began writing stories aged eight, but it wasn’t until after Oxford – where she attended lectures by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – that she found herself writing for children.

Initially it was part of her job as a Sunday Times journalist under James Bond author Ian Fleming; then it became an end in itself. Over Sea, Under Stone, about children searching for the Grail of Arthurian legend, long ago hidden in Cornwall by Celts fleeing the invading Anglo-Saxons, was published in 1965. By then she had moved to America, after falling in love during a four-month reporting trip Stateside.

Transplanted, she craved reconnection with her roots, and with Britain’s. The idea that her Cornish story was actually just the first of five books came in a flash while she was cross-country skiing. The snow-covered New England landscape carried her mind’s eye to ancient Britain, where she now set parts of 1973’s The Dark Is Rising.

In this second book, 20th-century Will Stanton learns on his 11th birthday that he is the last of the Old Ones, appointed defenders of the Light, and has to seek six signs – quartered circles of wood, bronze, iron, water, fire and stone. (Cooper has distanced herself from the widely panned 2007 movie adaptation, The Seeker.) In the other books, further tokens are gathered against the rising Dark. But the real interest lies in the brilliant interweaving of history and legend, in the shadings of morality that belie the simple dualism of Light and Dark, and in the increasingly well-drawn cast.

It was while she was writing the haunting fourth volume, The Grey King (winner of the Newbery Medal), that she and her husband met Hume Cronyn at dinner in a Caribbean hotel. When he told his actress wife Jessica Tandy – off in bed with sunburn – she responded, ‘Not Susan Cooper? She wrote that book I’ve been trying to get you to read for the last six months, The Dark Is Rising.’

So began a long collaboration, during which Cronyn and Cooper co-wrote the 1982 Broadway hit Foxfire, for which Tandy won a Tony Award. In 1996, two years after Tandy’s death and 13 after the end of Cooper’s first marriage, she married Cronyn, and they lived in Connecticut until his death in 2003, when she returned to Massachussetts to be near her children.

Ghost Hawk arose like a mist from the estuary salt-marsh on the South Shore where she built her island home. ‘The place is so extraordinary that it began to haunt me,’ she says. Characteristically, she began to explore its past.

‘For three years I read every 17th century source and umpteen histories, and became increasingly appalled by the bigotry of the Puritans, who came here to escape persecution and proceeded to persecute others – not just the Indians but also white Christians with beliefs other than their own. My imagination took over and gave me two boys, one English, one Pokanoket Indian, and their very dangerous friendship – and this story.’

The novel is structurally daring – managing to dovetail the perspectives of both boys – and culturally brave: ‘You have to pay great respect to the past, especially when one of your characters has an ethnicity different from your own,’ she says. But there are intriguing continuities with The Dark Is Rising and Dawn of Fear.

Like Will Stanton, Little Hawk is 11 when ancient ritual and sudden circumstance rob him of his innocence. Likewise the English immigrant John is 11 when he goes off to be apprenticed. When (by supernatural means) he learns the Pokanoket language, astonished Indians call John ‘the Speaker’, just as Will was ‘the Seeker’.

Cooper’s Britain has always been marked as a place in danger from invaders, whether they be Germans, Anglo-Saxons, or the agents of the Dark who exploit human hatred, greed and fear. In Ghost Hawk, the ‘invaders from over the sea’ are the English settlers on the Mayflower and later. Their first inadvertent gift is a disease so virulent to the native population that the hero’s entire Pokanoket village is wiped out while he is away enduring a solitary rite of manhood.

Further imports from 17th-century England are religious dogma, guns, and – perhaps most pernicious in Cooper’s view – a sense of ownership. The Pokanoket people honour the land as an mother; but the best hope their leaders can offer is to trade it away for short-term profit or peace: a perversion of the old ways, and a doomed one at that.

The Dark is Rising is a symphonic movement with brilliantly modulated suspense and terror, moving towards the point prophesied when ‘All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree’. Ghost Hawk, a powerful novel with the hobbled rhythms and stark outcomes of reality, offers no victory achievable by arms or by magic – only an impassioned plea for understanding.

It is in the lingering innocence of her young protagonists, and in the human capacity for open-heartedness, that Susan Cooper finds a limited hope. ‘I don’t think mankind is any darker than it’s always been, but because of mankind’s new capabilities the world is now clearly in greater peril year by year,’ she says from her house on the salt-marsh. ‘The future of this imperfect world is up to you. One person at a time. Try your best.  Small things are better than nothing.’

Susan and I later met when she gave the Pembroke College J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture in 2017; and again in 2023 at a discussion of the startling radio adaptation of The Dark Is Rising. Now, having just re-read the full five-part sequence with my book club, I can attest to its enduring power.

© John Garth, 2014 and 2026. All rights reserved.

Geoffrey Bache Smith was the friend who persuaded J.R.R. Tolkien to begin writing poetry in earnest – putting him on the path to Middle-earth. Smith’s own earlier transformation into a poet arose in tragic circumstances.

To set the scene, the Smith family were living in a house on the fringes of West Bromwich, not far from the home ground of the local football team. Geoffrey Bache Smith was 16.

On the cold afternoon of Saturday, 14 January 1911, Tom Smith watched as West Bromwich Albion beat Fulham four-nil in the English Cup league. He had suffered ill health for some time and fell seriously ill on his return from the Hawthorns foot­ball ground that night. He died three days later, aged 59.

Geoffrey’s fledgling literary emergence at school later in 1911 is all the more striking because it followed closely on the sudden death of his father. His youthful poetry is haunted by a sense of mortality. It would be natural if reflection on a sudden bereavement found expression in this way. Perhaps the loss of his father also loosened some reticence in Smith and encouraged him to seize the day.

A short verse later published in A Spring Harvest, the posthu­mous selection of Smith’s poetry edited by Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman, is deceptive in its apparent simplicity:

It was all in the Black Countree,
What time the sweet o’ the year should be,
I saw a tree, all gaunt and grey,
As mindful of a winter’s day:
And that a lonely bird did sit
Upon the topmost branch of it,
Who to my thought did sweeter sing
Than any minstrel of a king.

This is our only Smith poem to name the Black Country, the poet’s birthplace and homeland. With “the sweet o’ the year”, it quotes lines by another West Midland poet, Shakespeare, that celebrate spring “when daf­fodils begin to peer” and thrush, lark and jay sing “summer songs” (The Winter’s Tale, Act 4, Scene 3). But it also draws directly from the club badge of West Bromwich Albion: a throstle (song thrush) on a hawthorn branch. The team was known as the Throstles; their ground was the Hawthorns, named because hawthorn had previously grown there. The hawthorn’s fruits, haws, are an important part of the thrush’s diet.

Hawthorn blossom is one of the glories of the British spring, hence its bynames may-tree, mayflower and whitethorn. But Smith’s scene is spring­time and the tree is barren: here is neither true spring nor harvest. Rather, readers of Tolkien may think of the White Tree of Gondor, its branches “barren and broken” in the centuries-long absence of the King.¹

‘It was all in the Black Countree’ appears a mourning poem, “mindful of a win­ter’s day”—like the day his father fell fatally ill after the Hawthorns match, perhaps. But the poignancy lies in the lifeforce of the throstle’s song. Smith’s apparently slight and casual poem is a tribute to his hometown and home team and, as I think likely, an elegy for his father too.

This has been an excerpt from ‘“A Perfect Genius”: G.B. Smith Among Family and Friends’, my chapter in the pioneering new collection J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: With Wind in our Ears, edited by Professor Giuseppe Pezzini and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

You can read more about the book, and my portrait of the young G.B. Smith, in my accompanying blog post here.

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved. Excerpt reproduced courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan.

1. The Lord of the Rings, 50th anniversary edition (London: HarperCollins, 2004) 753.

This week we welcome a pioneering collection of essays on the friendship most responsible for laying the path to Middle-earth.

J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: With Wind in our Ears takes its subtitle from Tolkien’s 1915 poem ‘Courage Speaks to a Child of Earth’, dedicated to the T.C.B.S:

In boundless course
On a wingéd horse
We’ll dare the outer splendour
With the wind in our ears
Of the seven spheres
And the lost Earth faded slender.¹

In writing Tolkien and the Great War, I felt I got to know the almost irrepressible Smith, in all his comic thrusts and passionate candour. So I’m genuinely moved to see this book come to fruition. And I’m delighted to introduce Smith anew, in a chapter on his origins, background, and growth into the young man who inspired Tolkien.

Edited by Professor Giuseppe Pezzini of Smith’s Oxford college, Corpus Christi, this book contains the rich and various fruits of the conference he hosted there in 2023.

I provide the opening chapter, ‘“A Perfect Genius”: G.B. Smith among Family and Friends’. Grace Khuri uncovers Smith’s activities at the Oxford Union debating society and reproduces his final published words. Oronzo Cilli provides a publication history of Smith’s poetry, including previously unknown or forgotten items. That wraps up the section on ‘Life, Context, History’.

A section on ‘Genres, Resonances, Criticism’ examines Smith and Tolkien as war poets (Stuart Lee) and as vessels of classical tradition (Pezzini). Mark Atherton examines the influence of one Smith poem, Rime, on Tolkien. Kris Swank traces a single medieval motif through Longfellow to Smith and finally (with amazing effect) to Tolkien. Federica Calabrese looks at the friends’ response to the Glastonbury legends. And Allan Turner soberly assesses Smith as an ‘apprentice poet of his time’.

As an epilogue, Ivano Sassanelli reflects on the friends’ 1916 letters to each other about death and the T.C.B.S. His aim is to determine ‘if Tolkien remembered and (perceived himself to have) fulfilled the mission of the T.C.B.S. in the terms imparted to him by his friend G.B. Smith before his death’.

An appendix provides the full text of Smith’s posthumous volume of verse, A Spring Harvest, edited by Tolkien with Christopher Wiseman.

I’m still reading and absorbing the papers, but so far it’s a feast. Clearly, contributors have put in much valuable work beyond what they were able to prepare for the excellent 2023 conference. I certainly have.

Smith’s family roots – old agrarian on one side and new industrial on the other – reflect the dominant divisions in the area of West Bromwich, where he lived, and Birmingham, where he schooled. The tragic death of his father ushered in a creative awakening as a poet. His deceptively simple poem ‘It was all in the Black Countree’ can be revealed as an elegy for his father, drawing from the symbolism of the football club he had passionately supported.

If young Geoffrey Bache Smith came to the notice of the older Tolkien and friends in his first few years at King Edward’s School, it was probably only because his big brother, Roger, was in their ‘house’. Remarkably, he probably first made a real impression on them on the very day Tolkien left for good – Speech Day, July 1911, when he vied with them for English prizes.

Smith became an energetic contributor to the school’s cultural life and its quarterly Chronicle – including one serious poem omitted from A Spring Harvest. Despite lack of attribution by the Chronicle, several comic verses also seem to carry Smith’s fingerprints.

But when it came to literature, Smith was in earnest.

A school literary society talk on ‘Early English ballads’ in 1911 shows Smith engaging with contemporary critical thought on the topic – and foreshadows ideas that would only emerge for Tolkien in 1914–15.

Smith’s interest in Celtic myth and legend – also crucial to Tolkien – has roots in location and family. But it may well go back to the influence of an older boy at King Edward’s, Denis Macwiney, of Irish parentage. Smith acquired a small collection of books that passed ultimately to both Tolkien and Wiseman. While still at school, he had a poem, To the Ancient Heroees of the Cymry, published in Wales: A National Magazine. (Revised as ‘Dark is the world our fathers left us’, this one did appear in A Spring Harvest.)

When addressing the school literary society on the Arthurian legends, he argued that everything from the French romances to Malory to Tennyson was ersatz in comparison with the original glimpses since in the Welsh Mabinogion tale of Culhwch and Olwen. This talk, too, anticipated several of Tolkien’s founding creative principles.

Smith rounded off his school career with Speech Day, 1913. He won more literary prizes and gave two contrasting stage performances – one a ‘characteristically energetic’ role in French, the other in a non-speaking part as an ass.

And then it was off to Oxford – where Tolkien and the Great War takes up the story.

My thanks and congratulations to Giuseppe Pezzini for conducting this book into being, and to all the contributors for playing their parts.

Read an excerpt from my chapter here.

J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: With Wind in Our Ears is published by Palgrave Macmillan. You can view the contents here. Fortunate people with the right academic institutional subscriptions can read the book there too. Right now, it is available in hardback for a cool £120. But next year’s paperback edition will be a much more affordable £30.

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved.

1. Collected Poems, 149.

I like to watch a speaker speak, but sometimes I have to look elsewhere. That’s how it went at a talk I’ve just attended about Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. I arrived for the meeting of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society to find the room packed, but a seat saved for me – in the front row almost directly in front of the lectern.

It hardly seemed fair to gawp into the face of the excellent speaker, Peter Geddes, from so brutally close. Especially after he began talking extensively of evidence he’d drawn from Tolkien and the Great War. It was not really that I felt self-conscious; I was concerned he might be put off his stride. Perhaps that’s a form of vanity in me. Anyway, he was not. He wasn’t even ruffled by the sight of me fixedly scrutinising the wood of the desk beside the lectern for the better part of 40 minutes. And I was able to tell him how he’d gathered threads familiar to me but done so in a new way; he’d opened doors I’d left closed.

Of course, I’m delighted when Tolkien scholars draw on my work. Writing is a long solitary slog, and my first book felt like Everest. But once it’s done, a successful book acquires a life of its own. Its author can get on with other things while looking on with parental pride, spiced occasionally with astonishment. At the 2023 conference on Tolkien and his friend G.B. Smith at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, I found fellow presenters repeatedly citing Tolkien and the Great War, chapter and verse. I found I had even forgotten some of what’s in it. Towards the end, I was prompted to joke: ‘I’m starting to think I really ought to read this book you all keep mentioning.’

Continue reading on Steady

Think you know Tolkien’s 1,000-page epic? Pit your wits against this quiz. BBC Arts Digital originally commissioned it from me in 2020 but I’ve now added a few more questions for good measure.

This website lacks the equipment for a fully interactive quiz, so I link the answers at the end of the quiz.

1. In early drafts, who were the hobbits going to encounter at the Prancing Pony rather than a Man called Strider?

1. An elf called Wanderer

2. A hobbit called Trotter

3. A dwarf called Plodder

2. How are Ents said to walk?

1. Like elms uprooting themselves

2. Like stiff-legged giants

3. Like wading herons

3. Who says this of Éowyn? ‘Who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?’

1. Aragorn

2. Gandalf

3. Wormtongue

4. How does Lobelia Sackville-Baggins attempt to smuggle several small (but rather valuable) items out of Bag End?

1. In the brim of her hat

2. Inside her umbrella

3. In her pocketses

5. Which of these invocations in Sindarin Elvish is used against the Wargs?

1. Le nallon sí di’nguruthos

2. Edro hi ammen

3. Naur dan i ngaurhoth

6. Who calls himself ‘Eldest’?

1. Tom Bombadil

2. Gandalf

3. Treebeard

7. Which of these things is not made of the wood of ‘the fair tree lebethron, beloved of the woodwrights of Gondor’?

1. The casket carrying the crown at Aragorn’s coronation

2. The staves given by Faramir to Frodo and Sam

3. The chair of the steward Denethor

8. What seems ‘riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills’.

1. Orodruin

2. Imladris

3. Orthanc

9. Whose emblem is the Ship and the Silver Swan?

1. Imrahil of Dol Amroth

2. Círdan of the Grey Havens

3. Celeborn of Lothlórien

10. What book did Tolkien want published simultaneously with The Lord of the Rings?

1. The Silmarillion

2. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

3. The Hobbit

11. The guards of Minas Tirith laugh, and Pippin protests, when Gandalf calls him what?

1. Just a piece of luggage

2. Tom-fool of a Took

3. A very valiant Man

12. On the way to Helm’s Deep, Aragorn and Legolas travel with Éomer in the

1. train

2. van

3. car

13. Where on the map of Middle-earth is the Isenmouthe?

1. Between the Mountains of Shadow and the Ashen Mountains

2. Between the mouths of the rivers Lefnui and Greyflood

3. In the Wizard’s Vale, overlooked by Orthanc

14. Who says, ‘Things will go as they will; and there is no need to hurry to meet them.’

1. Bilbo Baggins

2. Gaffer Gamgee

3. Treebeard

15. Which composer(s) worked with Tolkien setting songs from The Lord of the Rings to music?

1. Howard Shore

2. Donald Swann

3. Lennon & McCartney

16. Who tarried in Arvernien?

1. Malbeth the seer

2. Scatha the worm

3. Eärendil the mariner

17. When does Sam first mention how he longs to see Rosie Cotton again?

1. Leaving the Shire

2. On Mount Doom

3. Going into Moria

18. Who ‘shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land’?

1. Goldberry

2. Nimrodel

3. Galadriel

19. What does Frodo say he wishes for at the Black Gate of Mordor?

1. A thousand oliphaunts with Gandalf on a white one at their head.

2. That the Ring had never, never, been found.

3. No killing.

20. Who talked about slipping off together and setting up somewhere on their own?

1. Merry and Pippin

2. Gorbag and Shagrat

3. Aragorn and Arwen

21. Where are seen ‘shapes of Men and of horses, and pale banners like shreds of clouds, and spears like winter-thickets on a misty night’?

1. On the way to the Stone of Erech

2. At the Muster in Dunharrow

3. From Amon Hen, moving endlessly out of the East

22. Which of these makes Gollum scream in pain?

1. miruvor

2. hithlain

3. athelas

23. What was hot as a glede?

1. The Balrog’s whip

2. The Silmaril that Beren and Lúthien took from the iron crown of Morgoth

3. The Ring that Isildur cut from Sauron’s finger

24. Who says ‘You’ll get bed and breakfast all right: more than you can stomach.’

1. Boromir

2. Merry

3. Uglúk

25. What, according to Treebeard, was the old name of Lothlórien?

1. Laurelindórenan

2. Dwimordene

3. The Golden Wood

26. Who is both Aragorn’s direct ancestor and his grandfather-in-law?

1. Elros Tar-Minyatur

2. Eärendil the Mariner

3. Elrond the Half-elven

27. Who says of whom that ‘Faithful heart may have froward tongue’?

1. Théoden of Éomer

2. Faramir of Sam

3. Aragorn of Pippin

28. Which member of the Inklings rudely vetoed readings of The Lord of the Rings?

1. C.S. Lewis

2. Hugo Dyson

3. Owen Barfield

29. Which is the odd one out?

1. ghâsh

2. gorgûn

3. yrch

30. What is the Gaffer’s delight?

1. His large paternal word-hoard

2. Po – ta – toes

3. Ointment for creaking joints

Click here for the answers…

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved.

Did the wartime birth of a new English phrase in 1914 help to shape the mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien was about to create?

Until the First World War, English speakers didn’t ‘go west’ when they died. The phrase was apparently introduced by British Army soldiers from Scotland and the west of Ireland, where it was part of the unregarded bedrock of ancient Celtic tradition.

All this I wrote in my last post (no pun intended). But I didn’t know about it when I traced how he developed his legendarium in my book Tolkien and the Great War.

Now I want to consider whether the new usage played any part in Tolkien’s 1915–16 invention of a mythology in which the souls of the dead go into the West. It means interrogating the facts and weighing up issues of influence, zeitgeist, and synchronicity.

So in this post I invite you to eavesdrop on a researcher’s internal dialogue. You’ll probably be relieved that I decided against writing it in a Sméagol-Gollum style.

Would Tolkien have really met the new soldiers’ phrase by the time he decided the souls of the dead in his mythology would pass into the West?

Surely. The Oxford English Dictionary declares that this 20th-century usage ‘became common during the Great War’. It first entered print in The Times at the end of 1914, when a reporter asked whether any readers knew the origin of ‘the soldiers’ curious phrase for death, “Going West”’. Peter Gilliver, our inside man at the OED,¹ has also found an earlier instance from the first weeks of the war:

One man was splashed with the blood of his comrade, who had been blown in half by a piece of shrapnel.... He was glad of his escape – ‘a very near call’ – but was sorry for the friend ‘who had gone West’, as he called it.²

Could Tolkien have actually read the lively discussion of ‘going West’ in The Times letters pages in the first weeks of 1915?

More likely than not. Later in life The Times was his national newspaper of choice. At this point he was president of Exeter College’s Junior Common Room, where the paper would have been delivered daily for Tolkien and the other undergraduates to read. If he saw or heard about the discussion, it would have interested him.

So when did Tolkien first come up with his idea of a place for the dead in the West?

The notion first appears in his poem Habbanan beneath the Stars. He conceived this during army training at Brocton Camp, Staffordshire, in December 1915. He actually wrote it in June 1916 at Étaples, the huge transit camp in northern France for soldiers arriving from Britain and heading to the trenches. The poem describes a vision of men encamped on a plain ‘where all roads end however long’. But while it’s striking that this is a camp of men, it’s clearly no ordinary camp. It’s certainly not Étaples – ‘a veritable prison, notorious for its vindictive regime’, as I put it in Tolkien and the Great War. The poem concludes with a moment of realisation:

These were His wandering happy sons

Encamped upon those aëry leas

Where God’s unsullied garment runs

In glory down His mighty knees.

Habbanan is implicitly in the West. Prefatory lines to the poem call it ‘that region where one draws nigh to the places that are not of men’ (Collected Poems 332–3). This is closely paraphrased in the broadly contemporary Qenya Lexicon, where Habbanan is the name in Teleatka (another Elvish language or dialect) for ‘a region on the borders of Valinor’ – and that is its literal meaning.

Tolkien was in military training more or less without break from enlistment in the Army in July 1915 until he conceived and wrote this poem. In other, more technical words, he was part of a speech-community that used ‘go west’ to mean ‘die’.

But was this poem his first expression of the idea of a place of enchantment in the West?

Of course not. Instead, Habbanan seems to have been one in a series of accretions or augmentations to his earlier idea of the land in the far West. In Tolkien’s September 1914 The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star, the star-mariner Éarendel sails off the western rim of the flat earth from a region which the poem calls Westerland but which it does not describe (Collected Poems 86). The Shores of Faery, a poem probably written in July 1915, first names and describes Valinor, a divine earthly paradise. By locating Éarendel’s harbour here, the poem clearly implies Valinor is in the West, whence he sails into the sky. Habbanan beneath the Stars came a little later.

But did Tolkien first meet the idea of a westward land of the dead through the soldier phrase ‘going west’?

Continue reading on Steady

English received an enormous jolt of electricity from the new technologies and experiences of the Great War. Old words received new meanings; new words were coined; foreign phrases were bastardized.

But I overlooked one striking example: the English use of “go west” to mean “die”. I’ve only just learned that this sense of the phrase was first recorded in the 1914–18 war.

From the outset, philologists have favoured a link with ancient Celtic traditions of a westward land of the dead. Theories about why the usage arose are interesting in themselves … and perhaps, too, for our understanding of Tolkien’s earliest cosmological concepts.

Noteworthy books on First World War culture and language mention the phrase but omit to mention that it was new. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1970) just says:

Of course there was a whole set of euphemisms for getting killed. ‘Going West’ was thought to be too la-di-da; more popular were ‘to be knocked out,’ ‘going out of it,’ ‘going under.’

Julian Walker’s Words and the First World War (2017), discussing a number of euphemisms for dying, some specific to particular nationalities, just says “gone west” was “used everywhere” (133).

But the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest illustrative quotation for this use is from New Year’s Eve 1914 – a question in The Times newspaper asking about its origin. (The etymologist’s earliest evidence for a phrase is a sentence asking where it came from. Now that’s meta.)

It appears in an article describing a small coastal village in northern France supporting a cluster of soldiers’ hospitals. The British troops are cheery (they were hardly ever otherwise, if you believed the war reports). But the imagery is melancholy. Incessant winter rain; incoming wounded; villagers missing or mourning their menfolk. Then:

The soldiers’ funerals go down the village street, the Union Jack covering the coffin, and a very small party following behind. Does anyone know the origin or meaning of the soldiers’ curious phrase for death, ‘Going West’?

The Times was publishing replies from readers, both expert and general, for the next two weeks. These letters pages throw a searchlight on the mental world of 1915 as it pertains to matters that would have greatly interested Tolkien.

Some readers looked to sources from relatively recent times. One letter connected a popular soldier song, Drake Goes West, in which Sir Francis Drake attacks Spain for Elizabeth I:

Some are going West, lad,
Who’ll ne’er return again –
Some will sleep their long, long sleep
’Neath the Spanish Main.

Another letter compared imagery from a Wordsworth poem. A woman who had lived in Colorado said she had occasionally heard people of the plains east of the Rockies saying ‘go west’ to mean ‘die’, alongside more common variants such as ‘He has passed the Great Divide’. An 11 January letter claimed it all went back to a Staff officer at Aldershot galloping past his battalion and shouting (in a voice his men found comical) that they must ‘Tell the general that I have gone west.’ The writer observed that this would ‘disappoint those who have sought to attribute it to ancient mythology’. Yet another letter connected the phrase with the opinion in the East End of London that the West End was a perilous place for a young woman to go.

Other readers, however, traced the phrase to ancient roots. A letter on 4 January said the westward journey of dead souls is ‘the belief of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians … still held by many pagan peoples all over the world – Brazilians, Australians, and Fijians, among others’. Another letter likened lines from classical Greek works, Homer’s Odyssey and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.

An especially interesting 6 January letter claimed the phrase was from south-west Ireland and reached far back into Celtic tradition:

Probably the soldiers who used this expression for death were Munstermen. … above all, the West stands, by a tradition which probably dates from many millennia before Columbus was born, for the mysterious and unknown. For death, the greatest of all mysteries:— ‘Is it Pat O’Sullivan? Poor fellow, he’s gone Wesht.’ … Why the shoreless ocean should suggest the mysterious to the Western Irish is easy to understand…

This caught the eye of Israel Gollancz, the distinguished philologist of King’s College, London. On 8 January, he made the fullest contribution to the debate:

It would be interesting to know how far the phrase ‘going West’ is common among English soldiers, and whether it seems to be peculiar to those coming from certain parts of the country – possibly from the West, Scotland, and Ireland.

(I don’t think Gollancz was setting up a contrast between Irish and English soldiers; rather, he was using ‘England’ to mean the whole of a Britain which then included the whole of Ireland.)

He also offered one earlier example:

The soldiers’ phrase ‘Going West’ … must be very old, though its occurrence in Early English literature is extremely rare. I can recall but one instance of its use, and this in some verses belonging to the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century on the theme and with the refrain ‘This World is Very Vanity’. The poem [is] possibly of West-Midland origin and certainly due to West-Midland influence … The illustrative lines are as follows:—

‘Women and mony wilsome wy
As wynd and wattir are gane west’
I.e., ‘Women and many a goodly whight
As wind and water are gone west’ – have passed away.

‘To go West’ was ‘to decline’; ‘westring’ was synonymous with ‘drawing to decline’; ‘going west’ meant ‘drawing towards death’.

Gollancz then examined the cultural beliefs behind the idea of the dead passing westward:

The natural course of all things mortal was the sun’s course – from East to West; and the expression ‘going West’ can no doubt be traced to far-off ideas, primitive beliefs, and superstitions; but, apart from this, Biblical phraseology and parable helped to deepen what is a natural and beautiful metaphor. Life’s Day in the Vineyard starts with sunrise and ends with the Dark of Night – ‘Sunset and evening-star!’

He was quoting Lord Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, a poem that depicts death metaphorically as a westward voyage. Gollancz went on to contrast two direction-words: ‘the auspicious “deasil”, sun-wise’ and ‘the sinister and ill-omened “widishins”’. He finished his long letter with this reflection:

There were, I think, in olden days no sinister or gloomy connotations in the phrase “going west”, applied to death; nor are there any for our brave soldiers to-day, who still use the expression when their life’s course is so nobly sinking westward.

The discussion on the Times letters page went on so long that the newspaper threw in its own own editorial commentary too. Canon E.A. Burroughs of Hertford College, Oxford, a stern moralist, found it reprehensible that ‘a public, eager … to discuss the origin of the phrase “Going West”, apparently thought the spiritual condition of the nation a subject less worthy of its attention’  (4 March, p.11). A philological discussion had become a weathervane for the state of Britain’s morals.

The current, online edition of the OED broadly follows Gollancz’s views. It likewise cites the quotation ‘Women and mony wilsome wy / As wynd and wattir are gane west’ (dating this to around 1532) but says the relationship ‘has not been firmly established’ between that earlier instance and the sense that ‘became widespread during the First World War’. The 1914–18 usage was originally Scottish, the OED says, giving an illustrative quote from Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1833):

The Irish, and the Scottish Highlanders, always describe persons lately dead as having gone west.

On this evidence, it would seem more accurate to call the sense originally Scottish and Irish. But at any rate the Dictionary judges that this usage is

Apparently ultimately with reference to the west as the place of the setting sun and perhaps also to its identification (esp. in Celtic traditions) as the abode of the dead.

So if the views of Israel Gollancz and the OED are correct, I guess what happened is this. The use of ‘going west’ for ‘dying’ was common enough in Scotland and Ireland, drawing on deep-rooted Celtic traditions. But it only really made a mark on the permanent record after ordinary Scottish and Irish soldiers were thrown into a war closely covered by journalists such as the Times correspondent in that northern French village. It was the most literate of wars, too, involving volunteer officers drawn from prestige schools and universities who were liable to write about their experiences.

My friend Peter Gilliver of the OED tells me he has found a 1925 claim that go west = ‘die’ was used even earlier, by soldiers from the British Isles fighting in the Boer War of 1899–1902. But he cautions: ‘It’s all too often the case that claims like this, presented as simple facts though they may be, often turn out to be entirely spurious.’

I’m going to look into the new usage (and the public discussion it provoked) as part of the context for Tolkien’s wartime development of a cosmology where dead souls go to halls in the West. Your thoughts are welcome below. And then we may ‘go west’ again in a later post here…

© John Garth, 2026. All rights reserved.

• Michael D.C. Drout, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation (W.W. Norton, 2025)

• Giuseppe Pezzini, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

As Gandalf tries to thread a route through the mines of Moria, Aragorn assures their jittery companions that the wizard can find his way better than the cats of Queen Berúthiel. Those cats have now strolled into two significant new literary studies on Tolkien, helping to steer remarkably diverse courses through his labyrinthine imagination.

The Tower and the Ruin explores the qualities that make Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings so much more credible than most fantasy works – and most modern literature, the book suggests. Such views may not be surprising in a medievalist like author Michael Drout, who teaches and writes on Beowulf. But he seeks to understand why The Lord of the Rings feels like so much more than a book – why reading Tolkien has such an ‘experiential quality’.

Drout invites us to think of how we engage personally with The Lord of the Rings and other writings, leading the way by describing how it became part of his own personal and family life. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is a cultural but also a social phenomenon: reading his books can be both an individual rite of passage and part of a family bond. A ribbon of memoir runs in and out of the literary argumentation in The Tower and the Ruin.

Continue reading on Steady

I’ll admit it’s a bit late to be reviewing the past year. But the month around the New Year was consumed by more important things – of which more later. Anyway, I had a busy time with Tolkien in 2025 – in scholarly and popular publications, in talks and lectures, on my crowdfunding blog, and in manuscript archives. So join me on a little excursion, starting with a couple that regular readers of this blog already know about.

Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories lecture rediscovered

Probably my most important new piece is a paper about Tolkien’s March 1939 lecture about fairy-stories. He reworked his lecture as the seminal essay ‘On Fairy-stories’, published in 1947. But the text of the 1939 lecture itself has been thought lost. Now I’ve been able to demonstrate that it survived. In fact it is already published, though no one realised it was the actual lecture text. Confirming my suspicions took me much sleuthing and close manuscript analysis. But spotting the clue depended on my experience in print journalism. My blog post about it also links through to my Journal of Inklings Studies paper.

New light on Tolkien’s return to Oxford in 1918

A further Bodleian manuscript discovery led to another of my 2025 papers. In Tolkien’s papers for his 1936 British Academy lecture, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, I noticed a handwritten calendar covering 20 November to 10 February – but with no years specified. By way of a few clues and a process of elimination, I managed to identify this as his tally of hours worked for the Oxford English Dictionary as a new freelancer. With Peter Gilliver of the OED, I’ve written a paper shedding much new light on this period just after Tolkien’s release from war service. It’s published in volume 21 of Tolkien Studies, and I blog about it here.

Geoffrey Bache Smith, the boy from the Black Country

I’ve contributed a biographical chapter on Tolkien’s T.C.B.S. friend Smith to a forthcoming book, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.B. Smith: With Wind in our Ears. Edited by Giuseppe Pezzini, it’s out from Palgrave Macmillan in April. The hefty hardback price makes it strictly for academic libraries, so I hope there will be an affordable paperback soon. This piece of writing originated in a brief talk I gave at the conference that was the springboard for the Palgrave book. I’ve now fulfilled a longstanding ambition to publish my ongoing research into his family and social background, his school life, and his early poetry. It hugely enriches my understanding of the young man who persuaded Tolkien to write poetry too. Around publication time, I may blog a bit more about what I’ve found.

Exploring Tolkien’s towers

At the invitation of illustrious Tolkien illustrator John Howe, I’ve contributed a chapter on the castles of Middle-earth to a book about the castle of Neuchâtel, his home town in Switzerland, and about other castles in history and fiction. Published to accompany an exhibition at the castle, La Tour du Fantastique is a gorgeous book and – if you read French – fascinating too. I show the central role of strongholds, castles and towers in the history of Middle-earth as well as their inspirations and their symbolism. I may blog a little from my original English version soon.

The death of Smaug revisited

I’ve previously noted how the peculiar circumstances of the death of Smaug point to the inspiration of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. Both feature bowmen battling gigantic monsters with protective jackets literally made of wealth. Both bowmen are at the end of their resources when a little bird suddenly appears and tells them the enemy’s secret weak spot. The point is more intriguing than I originally realised. Firstly, drafts show how Tolkien adopted the Hiawatha plotline (adapted from Native American myth) after rejecting a version of Smaug’s death inspired by the Germanic legend of Sigurd. Secondly, though, there are signs that Tolkien had Hiawatha at the back of his mind from much earlier in his story. Published in an issue of the journal ContactZone devoted to The Hobbit, my paper is in Italian, so it’s another one for the polyglots… for now.

Inspirations for the tengwar

The last 2025 paper to mention is in English, but is particularly aimed at readers interested in Tolkien’s invented languages and scripts. I examine various attempts to relate the Elvish tengwar to real-world scripts in terms of form and function, including phonetic notation systems such as Alexander Bell’s Visible Speech. The first spur to the article was a discovery in the British Library long ago. While researching Tolkien and the Great War, I stumbled on a 1910 booklet titled Shorthand Signalling that describes a military semaphore on phonetic principles. This, its anonymous creator argued, would be more efficient than the conventional spelling-based semaphore. On the battlefield, signalling C-A-U-G-H-T instead of its three phonemes /kɔːt/ might cost a life or two. Nonetheless, the idea evidently never took off. As I show, it’s quite possible that Tolkien read about the booklet and searched it out. At any rate, shorthand signalling has some noteworthy crossovers with the tengwar. My paper is in Arda Philology volume 8.

Other activities

My review of The Bovadium Fragments, the latest Tolkien publication and final edition prepared by Christopher Tolkien before his death, appeared in The Times. I’ve also reviewed two landmark books about Tolkien for the Times Literary Supplement. But I’ll say more about that when the piece appears.

In March, I travelled to Winona, Minnesota, at the invitation of Joseph Tadie of St Mary’s University, to speak about Tolkien’s unexpected but important Minnesota influences – that Hiawatha inspiration. Remotely, I discussed Tolkien’s creation myth with students from George Fox University at the invitation of Jason Lepojärvi. In April, I attended the University of Vermont’s annual Tolkien conference, hosted by Chris Vaccaro. This year the theme was Tolkien and war. I gave an illustrated lecture titled ‘Quisling and prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’, which I’ll certainly be writing up in due course.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, Ireland put on its spring green for me when I took my talk on ‘The Epic History of The Lord of the Rings’ to Cork, Dublin, Limerick and Kilkenny for Seed Talks. I also delivered this talk at Oxford University’s Saïd Institute and in Liverpool. For a change in July, I talked to a Brixton Seed Talks audience about Tolkien’s Elves – their history, their symbolism, their language and, yes, the shape of their ears. In August I travelled to Great Malvern and spoke at the Coach House Theatre about Tolkien’s inspirations from real places, sharing (among other things) some new ideas about the influence of the Malvern Hills.

Perhaps my favourite talk was about Tolkien and the First World War, arranged at extremely short notice and therefore delivered off the cuff to Brigham Young University students in London. I still vividly remember my nervousness when I began speaking in public 25 years ago. For many years I hardly spoke without a meticulously written script. Now I find talking from notes just as satisfying, because flexibility and on-the-spot ideas make up for whatever may be lost in finesse. And talking without notes is immensely liberating and great fun.

Summer found me teaching courses for Oxford Lifelong Learning (more formally the university’s Department for Continuing Education). As usual, at Christ Church for the Oxford Experience summer school, I led a course on ‘Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in Oxford’ and ‘An Introduction to Tolkien’s Mythology’. As usual, my students beat all my expectations for enthusiasm, engagement and insight. For the first time, I also taught a three-week course for the Berkeley-Merton summer school, this time on ‘Tolkien: Life, times, and The Lord of the Rings’. Here, at one of Tolkien’s own colleges, I had the extra good fortune to spend my nights up in a 17th-century turret. For the first time, I also led full-day guided tours outside Oxford, taking my class to Sarehole Mill and the Black Country Living Museum near Birmingham, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Berkshire Downs’ two most famous ancient earthworks – the White Horse of Uffington and Wayland’s Smithy.

The White Horse also featured in a day-long private driving tour I gave, also taking in the Rollright Stones, Faringdon Folly, and Broadway Tower, on an exquisitely beautiful September day.

Income from most of my activities necessarily goes to support the necessities of life. It doesn’t stretch far enough to support my ongoing research and writing on Tolkien – on which I’ve also been very busy, above and beyond all the things I’ve mentioned here.

That’s where this crowdfunding blog comes in. I began the blog, simply titled John Garth on Tolkien’s life and works, in April 2023. By the end of a very challenging 2024, I had published 17 posts – fewer than I’d hoped before disaster and bereavement took over the final months of that year.

In 2025, I’ve worked hard to make up for lost time. I added 18 posts, more than doubling the total number. The new posts total 23,000 words. Hey, I like to get my teeth into things!

Actually more than a quarter of that word count belongs to one piece – a meditation on the deaths and mortal thought of C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy which has previously only been available behind the Daily Beast paywall. I’ve also posted an alternative version of my review of The Bovadium Fragments (the Times version is also paywalled) and an excerpt from my preface to José Manuel Ferrández Bru’s biography of Father Francis Morgan, Uncle Curro.

Besides those, material freshly written for 2025 blog posts covers a wide range of topics, with emphasis on Tolkien and modernity. If you haven’t already, take a tour!

This blog began 2025 with 38 paying supporters. Naturally, some have left for whatever reason, but I’m delighted that more have joined. By the end of the year 44 kind and generous people were supporting the project. I can’t say how grateful I am to all of you who’ve contributed. But I can certainly say how vital this is for keeping my research and writing afloat. I hope to keep my supporters informed and entertained in 2026 – and I hope more people will decide to join!

My year wrapped up by closing the book on a literally disastrous period in my family life. Fifteen months ago, a hurricane sent a devastating flood through my mother-in-law’s house, as I blogged at the end of last year. But over this recent holiday season, I helped her and the rest of my family there move into a new home. I’m relieved to say that this house is well beyond the reach of storm surges, at 33 feet above sea level – virtually a mountaintop by Florida standards.

Words and pictures © John Garth, 2025. All rights reserved.

As I reported here in a recent post, Tolkien enrolled as a Second World War air raid warden on 29 September 1941. Thanks to further evidence that has since emerged, I can now suggest why.

Exploring the background to his decision to put himself forward, I’ve already written here about the Luftwaffe’s Blitz on British cities. In that same post, I show the stark photographic proof that German bombers had north Oxford in their sights.

But after posting that, I postponed writing about one truly explosive incident that may have influenced his decision to enrol.

This was a bomber crash in the next street, bringing the realities of war almost to the Tolkiens’ doorstep. From home at 20 Northmoor Road, 16-year-old Christopher Tolkien witnessed the plane’s descent and the resulting fireball. J.R.R. Tolkien himself rushed to the scene and helped in the aftermath.

In the event, Kristine Larsen has pipped me to this blog post with an excellent piece of research in the online Journal of Tolkien Research. Hers is just the kind of investigation I appreciate – a dive down rabbit holes that turns up some really unexpected findings.

The result of meticulous investigation spanning two years, her article says much more about the crash than I could find from online newspaper reports. And it goes well beyond the immediate incident, as I’ll note in a further blog post about the connection between Tolkien and Nobel-winning biologist Peter Medawar, who also dashed to help out after the accident.

Below, I’ll outline the plane crash much more briefly, then discuss what Larsen says about Tolkien’s air raid duties in the Second World War.

Continue reading on Steady

I have a new biographical article in the latest Tolkien Studies, written with Peter Gilliver of the Oxford English Dictionary, that fills in an important gap in what we know about Tolkien’s life between his First World War army service and his first civilian job.

There’s an old joke that Tolkien’s hardcore fans are so undiscriminating they would be happy to read his laundry lists. If such fans exist, they’ll be disappointed to hear that in all my years of research I’ve yet to encounter one of these fabled items.

Yet I’ve encountered quite a few other pieces of domestic or professional ephemera among the pages of Tolkien’s manuscripts. Granted, such moments can’t compete with first reading Gandalf’s battle with the Balrog – apparently the yardstick for Tolkienian excitement.¹ Yet I must confess that stumbling on a stray page from an appointments calendar, a shoe shop bill or a jotted to-do list has often given me a thrill. Truly. I’m always looking into the biographical shadows, and the items we generally chuck out can shine a light there – especially when it comes to dates.

Thanks to a discovery of this kind on one of my visits to the Bodleian Library, I have now been able to establish exactly when Tolkien began his first civilian job in the wake of his war service, at the Oxford English Dictionary. My good friend Peter Gilliver lent his in-depth expertise to help corroborate the finding. Our resulting article, ‘The Wanderer’s Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918–19’, has now been published in volume 21 of Tolkien Studies.

Here’s how it happened and what we learned…

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Do you remember what you were doing the day Aldous Huxley died? Or C.S. Lewis? You don’t think so? Well, the odds are that if you were old enough to be laying down memories at the time, you do. Because it was also the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

The indelible experience of hearing the news is captured well in the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File, as the announcement interrupts a song in mid-bar on our German hero’s car radio.

‘Jesus,’ he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal and swung into the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona towards the centre of Hamburg other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.

In this way the shots fired in Dallas echoed almost instantaneously around the world, and plunged uncountable numbers into shock, grief, fear for the future, and reflections on mortality. It was the day of St Cecelia, patron saint of music. Later American singer-songwriter Dion, and after him Marvin Gaye, hauntingly sang ‘Has anybody here seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he’s gone?’—because John F. Kennedy’s assassination did touch many millions as if they had lost a friend.

But virtually no one on 22 November 1963 realised—and relatively few realise even now—that that day also saw the departure of the two other major figures, who were also world-shapers in their very different ways. The deaths of Lewis and Huxley were mute, private events, only reported in The Times three days later.

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On a fine summer day in a former age, Robert Quilter Gilson of the T.C.B.S. made a watercolour of a Norfolk beach scene. I find it one of the most affecting of the pictures preserved in the little sketchbooks of this friend of Tolkien’s. And I’d like to write about it this Remembrance Sunday.

On the beach two figures, man and boy, gaze out over the North Sea. The skies are blue, the sea calm. All appears tranquil and contemplative, a summer-holiday study of innocence and fatherly care.

But it is evening, the clouds are purpling, and the shadows of man and boy fall westward in front of them. And look at the date.

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I sat down recently to read C.S. Lewis’s diary. Lewis tells a good story – as if that needs saying. And All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922–1927 offers the prospect of a deep dive into the period when he met Tolkien.

Five pages in, I had to put the book down.

Was I disgusted, disturbed, disappointed? Not at all.

I’d discovered that C.S. Lewis lived in my car park.

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Update, July 2026: My paper uncovering Tolkien’s 1939 lecture on fairy-stories – previously thought lost – is now the most read online article in the history of the Journal of Inklings Studies. My discovery is one of many vital points of chronology that will underpin my forthcoming Oxford DPhil on The Lord of the Rings in its time.

I've identified the manuscript Tolkien used for his landmark 1939 lecture On Fairy-stories – a manuscript previously thought lost.

It was a major piece of sleuthing, drawing not only on my expertise in Tolkien (and his handwriting!) but also my experience in newspaper journalism. I think it’s important because now we know the exact form of Tolkien’s definitive statement on fairy-stories in 1939 and in 1943. Between those points, he was writing The Lord of the Rings from Rivendell to Isengard – and reshaping the very idea of what fairy-story can be.

My paper is the featured article in the latest issue of the Journal of Inklings Studies (see links below).

This took a great deal of work and would hardly have been possible without the wonderful people who support me via this Steady crowdfunder. You know who you are. Here’s a big thanks to all of you!

In Tolkien On Fairy-stories, editors Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson say: “No copy of Tolkien’s lecture as delivered survives” (127). But they reproduce contemporary newspaper reports of the lecture, commenting: “While they were obviously written in some haste and from memory and on-the-spot notes, they are indices of the lecture’s emphasis and the major areas covered. Thus they are as close as we are likely to come to what Tolkien actually said at St Andrews on 8 March 1939.”

But when I was using the book in 2021, I noticed the striking congruence between the newspaper reports of Tolkien’s lecture and the manuscript published in Tolkien On Fairy-stories as MS B.

I knew that to investigate further I’d need to look closely at the MSS at the Bodleian, but I only had time at that point to spend a couple of days on this. Then I got involved in other things…

…Until 2024, when a Mythlore article by Matthew Thompson-Handell convinced me I should complete my study promptly. It struck me that he’d come close to noticing the same congruence I’d seen. And in any case I’ve reached the point in life when I know I must publish my work or it will be lost to oblivion.

So I returned to the Bodleian for quite a few days of intensive manuscript scrutiny. Then came the heavy analysis. And then I wrote a long essay and was sufficiently pleased with it that I offered it to the Journal of Inklings Studies. But when the editors expressed interest, I realised that as it stood, my essay was too flabby and structurally quite confusing. 

So this summer I massively rewrote it to streamline my presentation of the evidence and my argument. I also removed much material from the main essay and put it into an extensive series of notes (inspired by Tolkien’s extensive notes to his published version of On Fairy-stories itself). 

I’m very satisfied with what I produced in the end. And I’m very pleased to see it published in a St Andrews journal. I hope it will make a real difference to scholarship and hence to our overall understanding not only of On Fairy-stories but of Tolkien’s work as a whole.

Links

John Garth, ‘Revealed: Tolkien's 1939 Lecture on Fairy-stories’, Journal of Inklings Studies (originally an open-access article but now requires a subscription).

Matthew Thompson-Handell, ‘Some Observations on the Newspaper Reports on Tolkien’s Andrew Lang lecture in 1939’, Mythlore.

© John Garth, 2025. All rights reserved.

Though J.R.R. Tolkien never saw a motor-car in his Sarehole childhood, in 1911 he was driven to Oxford in one: his old schoolteacher’s, and quite possibly steam-powered. The car appears in his parodic account of his arrival at his new university home, Lemminkainen Goeth to the Ford of Oxen:

Lo! he spied a honking roadhop
Rooting up the road towards him.
Swiftly Lemminkainen mounted
On the monster; whereupon it
After prefatory snortings
Bounded forward like an arrow
— well, a rather rummy arrow;
quite impossible projectile —.
Never stopped it loudly tooting;
Creaking all its many jointings;
Rattling up its oily tumtum;
Droning down the dusty roadways;
Roaring through the scattered hamlets…¹

The noise, absurdity and monstrousness would leave their mark his imagination. I’m reminded of the ‘motor-cars oozing grease on the gravel’ in Howards End, E.M. Forster’s contemporary satire on old values under siege by the machine. Two years later, Tolkien was on a trip to Brittany as chaperone of two Roman Catholic Mexican boys when he saw their elderly aunt fatally struck by a car mounting the pavement.

These experiences established the twin poles of his experience of the motor vehicle, a new power that was both a temptation and a terror.

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Here’s my review of Tolkien’s Bovadium Fragments – a slight variant on the version published in The Times Saturday Review, 4 October 2025.

J.R.R. Tolkien arrived in Oxford as professor of Anglo-Saxon exactly a century ago. That year, Morris Motors, with factories in the medieval city’s Cowley suburb, became Britain’s biggest car maker. Given his view of machines, there is a certain inevitability that he would flourish a poison pen on the topic of Oxford and the car. 

[There’s also a certain inevitability that the Times sub-editor would come up with the headline. I’ve borrowed it here though undoubtedly Tolkien – not to mention Gandalf – would have stern words to say about how inappropriate it is. Anyway, my review continues below, or you can read it via The Times.]

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The day Tolkien enrolled as a Second World War air raid warden has been revealed in a previously unseen image from Oxford’s city archives.

It was on Monday 29 September 1941 – much later than has been suggested.

Humphrey Carpenter’s biography and the Tolkien Family Album alike says simply that he enrolled during the 1939–45 war. In their Chronology, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond say it was ‘by January 1941, and probably during 1940’. But I suspect this is an oversight.

The only previous published evidence is in Tolkien’s pocket diary entry for 15 January 1942:

‘Chief Warden’s Talk, St. Eds, 20.00’¹

So now we know from the Museum of Oxford website when Tolkien enrolled as an air raid warden, we can begin to ask why. 

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Tolkien hid all kinds of personal jokes and messages in his stories and – it turns out – in his pictures.

I often get asked to verify claims that such and such a place sparked his imagination. I suppose I have only myself to blame, since I’ve written a book called The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth!

My usual response is that either he not known to have visited the place in question, or he visited too late for it to have inspired The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

Such claims are ten a penny. Very few deserve serious consideration. Many are absurd. Tolkien is said to have written the whole of The Lord of the Rings in any number of places, from a table next to the walls of Merton College, Oxford, to the back rooms of various pubs around England. It stands to reason he can’t have done it all these places – and in fact, of course, he did it mostly at home in north Oxford.

Frankly, when the topic comes up I’m automatically wary. And so I was when a journalist, David Pittam from BBC Radio Nottingham, asked me to comment on the notion that a road in nearby Gedling appears in Tolkien’s picture The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water.

This claim had one thing in its favour. Tolkien spent meaningful time in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, before he wrote The Hobbit. He visited several times and stayed at the farm that his aunt, Jane Neave, jointly ran between 1912 and 1922. His brother Hilary worked on the farm for a while. And in September 1914, Tolkien composed his first Middle-earth-related piece of writing there – the poem The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star.

As the conversation unfolded by phone, and he sent me images via WhatsApp, I also saw there was a real case to answer.

The result was a radio interview and a BBC news article by David. In the blog post you’re reading now, however, I give further details and insights.

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Between his father’s death in 1973 and his own in 2020, Christopher Tolkien personally brought us 23 posthumous J.R.R. Tolkien books (including the volume of letters co-edited with Carpenter). So the road goes on, as Bilbo Baggins would say.

Most of that editorial journey passed through Middle-earth. But it began in England, with 1975’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo – translations of exquisite and anonymous 13th- or 14th-century verse.

And there – assuming this is the very last of Christopher’s editions – the road also ends. And in Bovadium, it is jammed with cars.

The story satirises the worship of the motores manufactured by the Dæmon of Vaccipratum. Non-latinists (like me) will immediately see that motores means motor vehicles but will be grateful to know that Vaccipratum means ‘cow-meadow’. In other words, this is Cowley, the seat of the motor-works established in the 1920s by William Morris, later Lord Nuffield. Cowley stands on the outskirts of Oxford, whose name Tolkien turns into Latin as Bovadium.

Cars jam the streets of Bovadium, asphyxiate its inhabitants, and explode. And that’s pretty much all we know about the story, though the American scholar Clyde S. Kilby, who read it and comments on it in his 1976 book Tolkien and the Silmarillion, reports liberal use of Latin.

Characters’ names cited by Kilby show it’s not all Latin, though…

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Capetown, 29 March. The Guelph, with mails from Delagoa Bay, has left for Southampton, via Teneriffe, Madeira, and Lisbon. —So said the shipping news, with perfect accuracy, of a seemingly inconsequential departure exactly 130 years ago today.

The passenger list, made on arrival in England 19 days later, is a bit less accurate. Among those on that steamer in 1895 was a four-year-old Miss Tolkin. In fact that passenger was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, aged 3.

The general story is well known. Born to English parents, young Ronald had suffered from the torrid, dry climate of the high African veldt. His mother Mabel determined to bring him and his younger brother Hilary on a long visit to England, both for health and to introduce the boys to their wider family. Their father Arthur stayed behind running a bank in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State (now part of South Africa). When Arthur Tolkien died in February 1896, the stay in England became permanent.

The details of the S.S. Guelph’s voyage from Cape Town are less well known. I have outlined the dates and stopping points in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien. In the current post I share my sources and a few further thoughts.

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Today also happens to be the day when I discover just how many of Tolkien’s works have allegedly been used by Meta, without permission, to train artificial intelligence. According to The Guardian, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg gave permission for its AI software to ‘scrape’ a vast database from Russia containing more than 7.5 million books in multiple languages. The Atlantic offers a list of what’s in the database. A lot of Tolkien and a great deal of work by other authors – even including me.

The word scraped, evoking a process both painful and mechanical, makes it sound as if these products of our countless individual minds were just some kind of mould.

This development would have horrified Tolkien and ought to horrify anyone who admires his work.

Though the Ruling Ring is portrayed as magical, it is also a ruthlessly simple machine – a lever that gives a small addition of power to the weak but a massive boost to the powerful. Tolkien wrote that The Lord of the Rings was about ‘the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, – and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.’

Not only would any action of such large-scale ‘scraping’ be a bulldozing breach of copyright on a scale to beggar belief. It would also be a declaration of war against what it means to be human.

The principle of copyright is so simple that even Mark Zuckerberg must understand it. His own company’s lawyers must spend vast amounts of time defending intellectual copyrights he has established. He certainly doesn’t want the software secrets or datasets behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to be made available to rivals.

And make no mistake, AI is a rival to human intelligence. I’m willing to accept that its vast data-crunching capacities may benefit science and medicine (though I’ll bet that for every miracle cure it produces there’ll also be a murderous new weapon). But AI is a cuckoo in the human nest, and like a cuckoo it will progressively outgrow and destroy everything that competes for its food.

This is particularly grim news for the creative arts. Very few authors make fortunes like Tolkien has (mostly posthumously). But AI will produce faster and more cheaply. It will hit marketing targets more effectively. It will cheapen the arts and steal audiences. Authors will be forced to give up – or starve. In the world that’s coming, Tolkien might have written some of his stories, but he would have been out-competed, unpublished.

The AI problem goes far deeper than copyright, anyway.

Making stories, poetry, drama – these are all vitally human activities. Each may express the imagination of a human mind engaged with the other humans, or with nature or (yes) technology.

The products of AI can never do that. However convincing they seem, they are mimics, chameleons, ciphers. They are as hollow and two-dimensional as the fake building facades on a film set.

And the damage will worsen exponentially. AI will not only recycle from original human sources it has ‘scraped’. Increasingly, it will recycle from the products of AI mimicry. Cliché will pile on cliché. If literature helps us see our world, AI will obscure our vision.

(That, maybe, is Zuckerberg’s dream, when we can all live happily in his metaverse.)

The Enemy in Tolkien’s world is sheer materialism, blind to all value except wealth and power. To Saruman, with his ‘mind of metal and wheels’, a tree is never a thing of beauty or unique individuality; it is mere timber or even just a obstacle to be removed. To Sauron, the Elven rings that give power to heal and sustain are objects to covet. To Morgoth, the Elves and Ents are creatures to conquer or destroy – or to corrupt into a mimickry of themselves, producing the miswrought monsters that are Orcs and Trolls.

No doubt Saruman – with his inability to distinguish timber from everything else that a tree is – would have seen no difference between human thought and artificial intelligence. They look the same, so they’re interchangeable, right? That seems to be the view of many scientists who think we’re on the brink of creating a mind-like Artificial General Intelligence.

But let’s be clear. We are far from understanding how the human mind works. So how can we know if AI can truly replicate it? We know what consciousness is – because we feel it. By extension and by empathy, we can recognise it in other living creatures. There is no evidence that machines, however clever, will ever gain consciousness, with its capacity for joy and pain, love and hate.

AI can scrape away at literature and steal its clothes, but it can never be part of the ages-old miracle that happens when one human tells a story to another. When we reach the point of believing that it does, we will be lost in a hall of mirrors.

© John Garth, 2025. All rights reserved.

On a railway journey home to Oxford from Manchester on 26 June 1935, Tolkien wrote about the landscape passing by through the train window: 

from Crewe to Wellington and Wrekin,

from Shropshire down into the black,

bleak, blasted country made of slack,

cinders, old iron, and poisoned water.

— ‘When Little Louis Came to Stay’ (Collected Poems, 1112)

It’s his only known description of England’s Black Country, which lies in southern Staffordshire and to the north-west of Birmingham, the city where Tolkien had spent his youth. It appears in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, which I reviewed last year for the Times Literary Supplement. It’s a verse addressed to his Manchester hosts, former Leeds University colleague E.V. Gordon and family.

In keeping with my Agatha Christiesque headline, I’ve sleuthed out what I think may be the train that Tolkien caught. The timetable appears in the closest edition of Bradshaw’s famous railway guide that I can find – early 1939 (before any wartime schedule changes). He’d have seen the Wrekin, a striking isolated height, on the right after Wellington. This train entered the Black Country at Wolverhampton and ran through it for half an hour before leaving it behind and entering Birmingham. For Tolkien, that was half an hour too much.

The poem at this point is self-reflexively about his inspiration to write it, personified in classical tradition as his ‘muse’. She starts ‘all stiff and hoarse’ until he reaches the Black Country.

And there a sudden frenzy caught her,
till by the time we came to Brum
she beat like a savage on a drum,
blaspheming the bright sun on high
proud and pitiless in clean sky
disdainful of the human blight
writhing in unaccustomed light.

‘Brum’ is Birmingham. His muse here is angry. You might say his muse is anger.

The lines describing the Black Country itself are a real nugget. It is often said that this very real Black Country was the inspiration for his fictional Mordor. Yet wherever anyone says this, you’ll probably find a Tolkien fan scoffing, spluttering or choking in disbelief. But I’ve argued that it’s a reasonable claim – and I think Tolkien’s 1935 poem adds a little to the picture.

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I feature among a sizeable group of talking heads discussing Tolkien and his inspirations in a new German–French TV documentary from ARTE, Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings. For the full roster, you can nip over to Tolkien Gateway. The narration is in German with English subtitles. Interviewees speak their own languages, of course. The 90-minute programme, directed by Jean-Christoph Caron and Matthias Schmidt, is available in Europe, including the UK, but not in the US (unless you use a VPN, of course). Well worth watching.

I get the chance to take a deeper dive into how WW1 Inspired The Lord of The Rings in a one-to-one interview with celeb historian Dan Snow for his History Hit podcast. First aired last April, the programme is being rolled out on his schedule again.

Another interview, given in Oxford back in November 2023, will go into a 2026 documentary by YLE, the Finnish national broadcaster. The whole programme is about Tolkien’s inspirations from Finland, so expect much on the catalytic role the Kalevala played in his formulation of a ‘mythology for England’, the Finnish language as inspiration for Quenya, and the primal hero Väinämöinen as model for Tom Bombadil. Here are a few shots from the shoot.

Over the years, I’ve given many interviews about Tolkien. There’s a fairly fully run-down on my website, but only up to 2021. I’ve neglected the website partly because I’ve been focusing more directly on writing and research, and partly because it needs a complete technical and design makeover. Funds for that are drastically lacking. If you know anyone who would be keen to help me with the tech and design aspect in return for a modest fee and free membership of this Steady project, do point them in my direction.

© John Garth, 2025. All rights reserved.

I don’t want to make light of a storm that comes with warnings of danger to life (especially since I now know personally the devastation a storm can cause even if no one is physically harmed). And anyway, I’m sure it’s already occurred to other Lord of the Rings fans that Éowyn is an excellent name for a storm – especially one riding from the west.

But a terrible storm, Ireland, and Tolkien – that’s a suggestive combination.

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Most readers are likely to meet mathom first in the description of gifts Bilbo gives away on his birthday at the start of The Lord of the Rings. We learn that on their birthdays, delightfully, hobbits give presents rather than receive them. ‘Not, of course, that the birthday-presents were always new; there were one or two old mathoms of forgotten uses that had circulated all around the district.’

The Prologue has more to say: ‘anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.’

Among the objects of no immediate use which hobbits wished to preserve were items of curiosity, of little use to them, and of obscure value. We would call them museum-pieces, and the Shire’s own museum at Michel Delving was called the Mathom-house. One of its holdings, lent by Bilbo, was his mail shirt, given to him from Smaug’s hoard by the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain. In a country where ‘heroes are scarce, … swords … mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers’ (The Hobbit, chapter 1), mail shirts too would seem useless. Yet the mail shirt turns out to be worth more than ‘the whole Shire and everything in it’, as Gandalf later reveals.

Mathoms have hidden value, and so does the word mathom.

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Hurricane Helene sent a mini-tsunami of seawater and sewage through my mother-in-law’s Florida house. It’s single-storey, so most of the contents and fittings were ruined. I immediately flew over from England. Dealing with the aftermath (including gutting the house completely) has taken up almost all of the remainder of the year.

That has meant a halt to almost all writing and research, including a planned trip to study the Lord of the Rings manuscripts at Marquette University, Milwaukee, in November.

The hurricane also forced me to cancel a string of talks. Some of these were paid gigs, so I lost virtually all income apart from what my wonderful crowdfunders provide via Steady (currently about £200 a month). Another was to have been at the Malvern Literary Festival; another, my contribution to the centenary conference on Christopher Tolkien held in Oxford in November. I’m especially grieved that I could not speak about the debt owed to Christopher by me and by scholarship in general.

But I could not contribute to that conference because the hurricane disaster had suddenly been compounded by a much deeper grief.

On 14 November, my mother died back home in England. So my only break from my post-hurricane efforts was for her funeral, on what would have been her 90th birthday. We gave her a good send-off – but we miss her terribly. ‘If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world,’ Thorin tells Bilbo in The Hobbit. If he’d also added dancing, and had specified the songs of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, he might have been thinking of Mum.

But I’m here to tell you what had I been working on before all this happened. If you’ve missed out on regular updates on this blog, I hope you’ll take comfort from the fact that any time not spent blogging went into the kind of work that this crowdfunding project is intended to support.

My most visible new work of 2024 was divided into three articles, a talk, and contributions to a television documentary.

The latter, Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings, was released online on 5 December. I’m one of several expert commentators popping up throughout the 90-minute documentary, made by Jean-Christoph Caron for ARTE. It’s in German with English subtitles, though of course I speak English in it anyway. (In May, I also spoke with Sarah Walker on BBC Radio Berkshire about Tolkien’s local inspirations.)

My first article of 2024 was published way back in January, in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen. I argue that Queen Margrethe’s well-known devotion to Tolkien’s works may have contributed to her decision to abdicate that month. You can read it in English on my Steady crowdfunding blog.

My second 2024 article, published exclusively on this same blog, asked ‘Where did Tolkien’s Silmarillion hero Beren get his name?’ I show that the young Tolkien had good reason to know Berinshill or Beren’s Hill in the Chilterns, a site hitherto overlooked as a possible inspiration.

My third article, in September, was an extensive Times Literary Supplement review of the Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. You may be able to read my review here if you can get past the paywall. The editors’ work is thorough and meticulous, even by their own impressive standards. The three-volume collection will be an essential and fruitful tool for scholarship, and I see many ways that it will shape my own work to come. As an expression of Tolkien’s musicality and mythopoeia, it is also a delight. I’m pleased that the TLS used the Macbeth-echoing headline I proposed: ‘Full of sound and Faërie’.

My major 2024 lecture was delivered back in February. I explored how the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon. This was for a seminar series showcasing the Tolkien research of Oxford University members. I was able to take part because I’m currently a member of Corpus Christi College’s senior common room.

The Rohan talk was a direct result of my efforts to provide material for my crowdfunding supporters at Steady. I realised the questions were worth investigating while rereading The Treason of Isengard for several Steady posts about Tolkien’s philological imagination and the invention of Rauros and environs. I thought Anglo-Saxon Rohan might make a further series of Steady blog posts. But the work was intensive, the telling took time, and what I discovered demanded a wider audience. So a talk it became.

In a nutshell, although Tolkien first conceived a land of horse-lords in 1939, when he had brought the Fellowship to Eregion, he only anglosaxonised them in 1942 at the very brink of introducing Éomer and his éored in ‘The Riders of Rohan’. The reason for the sudden change is tied up with why he had recently renamed Aragorn Elfstone – a decision I explain for the first time. It’s also tied up, I argue, with one of Britain’s darkest hours in the Second World War. You can watch me explain on the seminar YouTube page. Since the talk, I’ve corrected one key point (thanks to Tom Hillman). A journal editor is eager to publish my text.

That particular research project also counts as work towards Tolkien’s Mirror, my book-length study (long in progress) on the contemporary real-world inspirations for the legendarium. Here’s my underlying principle: to fully understand why Tolkien invented something, you need to establish when he did so.

The same need drove me this year to write a long paper, ‘Revealed: Tolkien’s 1939 lecture on fairy-stories’. This entailed intensive study of the MSS, housed among the Bodleian’s special collections in the Weston Library, Oxford. Tolkien lectured on the topic at St Andrews University, Scotland, in March 1939. He turned his lecture into an essay, first published in 1946 and now (in somewhat revised form) famous as his definitive statement on fairy-stories and why we tell them.

Verlyn Flieger, who co-edited the manuscripts for publication in 2008 as Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, has characterised his lecture/essay as a creative manifesto for The Lord of the Rings. However, no one has been able to definitively identify the actual text of the 1939 lecture among Tolkien’s MSS. The consensus (held by Verlyn’s co-editor Douglas A. Anderson, as well as by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond) is that this crucial text is wholly or substantially lost.

My own substantial essay on this marshals a large body of evidence from Tolkien’s MSS, his Bodleian Library borrowing records, and contemporary news reports. Together they show that, in fact, we do have the 1939 lecture text itself.

When the hurricane struck, I had to pause my plan for final revisions. Once I’ve made them, journal publication will follow.

New insights from re-reading On Fairy-Stories prompted me to propose a further talk, for an autumn series of Oxford Tolkien seminars, under the title ‘Quisling and prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard’. Before I had the chance to start work on this, the hurricane intervened. I hope I’ll have the chance to write and deliver the talk in the coming year.

I’m pleased to have written another paper which is already due to be published – though currently only in Italian, not English. ‘Tolkien’s aim and the death of Smaug’ shows how, at a fork in the road for The Hobbit, he had planned to model the dragon-slaying on the Germanic Saga of the Volsungs but abruptly adapted an incident from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha instead. Yet I also find signs that this incident – the death of Megissogwon – had shaped relevant aspects of The Hobbit almost from the beginning, and long before Tolkien’s sudden change of mind at the fork in the road. I offer insights into his statement, ‘I have long ceased to invent… I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.’

A separate 2024 project relates to Tolkien and the Great War. With Peter Gilliver, I’ve been investigating the period from autumn 1918, when the War Office released Tolkien for civilian work, and the start of his first actual job, at the Oxford English Dictionary. With new evidence from Tolkien’s academic papers and elsewhere, we fill in vital details pertaining both to my book and to The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, which Peter co-wrote with fellow OED editors Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner. We hope our essay, ‘The wanderer’s return: new findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918–19’, will appear in an upcoming Tolkien Studies.

Another paper, due to appear in the next volume of Arda Philology, also originated with research for Tolkien and the Great War. It’s a comparison between Tolkien’s tengwar and Shorthand Signalling, a phonetic semaphore system published by an anonymous army officer. When I stumbled on this rare publication years ago at the British Library, I was very struck by the visual and methodological similarities between the two systems. I’m glad to have finally put my thoughts into publishable form.

These papers (Rohan, On Fairy-stories, Smaug, ‘The wanderer’s return’ and Shorthand Signalling) currently run to a total of roughly 43,500 words. That’s half a book’s worth. Shorthand Signalling aside, all this is essential work towards my actual book, Tolkien’s Mirror – on which I also made even more crucial progress.

Back in May I shared a photo here showing my handwritten revisions on a page from my Tolkien’s Mirror proposal. Soon after, I submitted the book proposal to my agent. He was pleased with it, but he asked a question about structure that had been nagging at the back of my mind for a long time. The hurricane has forced me to postpone experimenting with a reorganised structure – but I’ll get back to it as soon as I can. The process should be less complex than it sounds, because my chapters are fairly modular.

Other work behind the scenes – mostly from the previous year – bore fruit in October with the publication of Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913–1959. I was the copy-editor appointed by Oxford University Press at the request of the principal author, Professor John Bowers. As he notes in his acknowledgements, I voluntarily took my work far beyond copy-editing, by going to the Bodleian Library, checking his transcriptions against Tolkien’s own MSS, and even identifying further passages that deserved a place in the book. These included material of characteristically Tolkienian philological insight.

This is far from the first time I’ve assisted other scholars with interpreting Tolkien’s handwriting, which can vary enormously in quality from calligraphic to electrocardiographic. Over the years I’ve come to be able to read much that I would once have thought impenetrable. This kind of work draws heavily on my wide and often intimate familiarity with the whole gamut of Tolkien’s work, both philological and creative. Without this kind of experience – a knowledge of his interests, opinions, and range of reference – you can look at a word or phrase forever without recognising what it actually says.

So that’s how 2024 went for me. It’s been a disorientating mixture of pleasure, trials and sorrow. As you can see, much of my recent research and writing should bear public fruit in 2025. And I hope to pursue more work on Tolkien – especially for Tolkien’s Mirror.

I thank my Steady supporters for giving me the opportunity to develop my ideas and for funding some of my research and writing time – although in truth for every hour the crowdfunding actually supports, I’ve probably worked 10 more hours without financial support of any kind.

Clearly I need to review what I offer you through Steady. I think you’ll probably agree that small, frequent posts would be better than long, infrequent ones. This one, for instance, has taken several hours’ intermittent work over several days. Far better, on the whole, that I spend such hours on the writing and research that my supporters are actually here to fund, no?

I also need to think about how much material I should make accessible only to members or to other visitors too. And in an ideal world, I would merge my Steady blog, my other blog, and my website. But that will take time, money and expertise that I don’t currently have.

This Steady crowdfunding project has been vital in what (despite appearances) has been one of my most productive years’ work on Tolkien so far. I thank all my supporters again!

So if you can continue your support, or you are contemplating joining us here, or if you know others who might wish to back my work, please do! You can consider this retrospective of 2024 as both a pledge of my side of the bargain and an appeal for further help! It will be more than welcome.

Happy New Year! Stay tuned in 2025.

© John Garth, 2024. All rights reserved.

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The mythology began as a home for Tolkien’s invented Elvish languages. So you might expect him to record a meaning for the name he gave to the hero of the central story of The Silmarillion. From a lifetime’s work, we have evidence of just one clear explanation.

Tolkien’s Etymologies, a 1937 lexicon of Elvish word-roots and their derivatives, glosses beren as ‘bold’, related to a verb bertho meaning ‘to dare’.[1] Very fitting for the hero who goes to the heart of the enemy’s realm and cuts a holy jewel from his iron crown.

However, Tolkien is unlikely to have had ‘bold’ in mind when he first coined the name in 1917. His Elvish lexicons from that earliest period of his invention have nothing similar to it. And anyway, one motivation of the Etymologies was to provide philologically cast-iron derivations for some his earliest names, which he had come to see as slapdash.

Appropriately, one example of this is the name Lúthien, which Tolkien gave in the 1920s to Beren’s elven lover (previously just called Tinúviel). Tolkien had earlier intended Lúthien to mean ‘friend’, and his plot notes show he tried it as a name to a succession of male characters. But the Etymologies derives Lúthien from a root meaning ‘magic, enchantment’ and translates it as ‘enchantress’. By the time he had it carved beneath his wife Edith’s name on her gravestone in 1972, he had decided it meant ‘daughter of flowers’.[2]

So beren ‘bold’ in 1937 may well tell us nothing about the meaning of (or motive for) Beren when Tolkien first used the name in 1917.

Now a chance encounter with a book in the Bodleian Library has led me to a plausible and intriguing possibility.

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Join me for my latest talk, as I follow the trail of the Riders of Rohan from the moment Tolkien invented them in 1939 to the moment in 1942 when Éomer and his éored finally galloped into The Lord of the Rings. Saddle up to hear discoveries about Tolkien’s creative methods and his inspirations, profoundly ancient as well as startlingly contemporary. You can expect the unexpected!

Without my Steady supporters, I would not have written this talk. I heartily thank you all!

In fact it began as a series of blog posts for my crowdfunding supporters (to follow on from my quartet on the name Wetwang). But it quickly outgrew its origins.

If I’ve been an inactive blogger so far this year, it’s because I’ve been working hard to find the facts, to ponder them, and to build my case as straight and true as I can. It sounds like an orderly process. Far from it! I continued to dig for data and ponder its implications right up to the very end.

That means the investigation led to vital findings I didn’t expect when I set out. Beyond the talk itself, some of these will make an important addition to my long-awaited book, Tolkien’s Mirror. That’s the ultimate purpose of this Steady crowdfunding project.

So if you’re not currently supporting me but you appreciate my writings and my talks, please consider join my wonderful fundingcrowd. (That’s got to be a word, right?!)

I gave the talk on Friday 23 February at Oxford’s Classics Faculty – which (as you will see) was a highly fitting location. Many had made their way through the squally weather to listen. Several dug into their supplies to offer me a lozenge for my ragged throat. All stayed to make comments or listen to them.

To face so many prominent Oxford Anglo-Saxonists and Tolkienists (not to mention a Lewisian) lined up in the front rows was an unexpected privilege. If only Tom Shippey could have been there to hear what I had to say about his own ideas on the ‘Anglosaxondom’ of Rohan … I’m sure he would have had a thing or two to say!

For drawing my attention to Professor Shippey’s lecture ‘Tolkien’s turning point’, I’m grateful to Bill Fliss, archivist of the Lord of the Rings MSS at Marquette University, Milwaukee. I also thank Edmund Weiner of the Oxford English Dictionary for reading the talk in draft and making many helpful suggestions.

The talk is part of Oxford University’s Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series, a showcase of Tolkien scholarship among members of the university. I am honoured to be a member of the Senior Common Room (SCR) of Corpus Christi College, which enabled me to take part in the series. For nominating me and for organising the seminar series with Grace Khuri, I’m deeply grateful to Professor Giuseppe Pezzini.

© John Garth, 2024. All rights reserved.

[I posted this article privately for my Steady supporters on 3 January (Tolkien’s birthday) when I was first pitching it for publication. It was published in Danish by Weekendavisen on 12 January, the day before Queen Margrethe’s abdication, so I now make it openly available to English readers, slightly updated to reflect the fact that King Frederik has now succeeded to the throne.]

Queen Margrethe of Denmark is the first Danish monarch to abdicate for 900 years. Then again, she is also the first to be a devoted reader of The Lord of the Rings, which has wise things to say about the relinquishment of power.

As Princess Margrethe, in 1970 she wrote to Tolkien telling him she had read the book with ‘much pleasure’ and had ‘been reading it ever since’. To show her appreciation, she sent him illustrations for each chapter. Tolkien must have been especially delighted because the chief part of his own chief literary inspiration, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, is set at the royal court of Denmark.

The princess and the author corresponded for two years and she sent him her drawing of Bilbo at work on his memoirs. The elderly Tolkien (who was then facing the fact that he might never finish his own lifework, The Silmarillion) praised the way she had ‘suggested the struggle of age with a task beyond its power to complete’.

Their correspondence might have continued, but she became queen in January 1972 and Tolkien died in September 1973, aged 81. But in 1977 Queen Margrethe allowed her illustrations to be used in the Folio Society edition under a pseudonym, Ingahild Grathmer, and adapted for publication by Eric Fraser.

In this book to which Margrethe is devoted, the highest virtue is to relinquish power. Those defending freedom and peace against the demoniac tyrant Sauron refuse to use his own Ring of Power to defeat him. Instead they destroy it, relinquishing the chance to be masters of Middle-earth themselves.

When Margrethe first read Lord of the Rings, she had a profound connection with Arwen, betrothed to the mortal hero Aragorn: both were queens in waiting.

For real-world inspiration she had looked to Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, realising ‘that I must somehow understand that I must dedicate my life to my nation like she has done’. She already knew how intimately monarchy is entwined with mortality. Elizabeth had become queen at 25 on the death of George VI. Princess Margrethe ‘hoped I wouldn't be as young as that when my father died’. In the event, she was not much older, at 31.

Despite much speculation over the years, Elizabeth never abdicated, perhaps deterred by the example of her uncle, Edward VIII, who quit the throne ignominiously for an unsuitable marriage. She remained remarkably active until her death at 96 in 2022, when Queen Margrethe attended her funeral.

But in her decision to abdicate the throne of Denmark to her son, the Crown Prince Frederik, Margrethe could look to The Lord of the Rings. All devotees know the almost unbearably poignant Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, tucked away in the appendices. It is precisely a reflection on mortality, wisdom, royal duty and relinquishment.

At the end of the main story, Aragorn is crowned king of Gondor and Arnor, restoring the ancient royal line of Númenor. The Tale revisits him in old age when, after long years of just rule, he tells Queen Arwen he will now relinquish both crown and life.

She asks, ‘Would you then, lord, before your time leave your people that live by your word?’

‘Not before my time,’ he replies. ‘For if I will not go now, then I must soon go perforce. And Eldarion our son is a man full-ripe for kingship.’

Aragorn looks to other royals not for inspiration, but as a dire warning. In the more ancient period dramatised in Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power, the kings of Númenor had clung to life and power until death took them unwillingly. Aragorn advises Arwen: ‘Take counsel with yourself, beloved, and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless.’

In this year’s New Year speech, Margrethe cited the toll of time on her own health and reasoned that now is the right time ‘to pass on the responsibility to the next generation’.

Tolkien’s tale is all the more poignant because of the existence of elvish immortality in Middle-earth. The kings of Númenor envied immortality and ultimately tried to seize it for themselves – triggering the destruction of their nation.

In contrast, elf-born Arwen has relinquished her own immortality to marry Aragorn. Now she sees the bitter end of that decision, ‘the loss and the silence’, and for the first time she empathises with the Númenórean kings. And Aragorn, graced with with the power to choose when to lay down life voluntarily, does so on his own birthday.

Queen Margrethe has relinquished the throne, not life itself. But the timing of her announcement is striking. At New Year we all necessarily think about the passing of time. She abdicated on 14 January, exactly 52 years to the day since she acceded to the throne.

I am not suggesting Queen Margrethe was ruled by Tolkien’s story. But The Lord of the Rings certainly has a deep and lasting impact on its closest readers, not merely as an extraordinarily compelling narrative but also as a moral and intellectual lodestone. And once read, it is never forgotten.

We have never been more aware of the dangers posed by rulers who try to cling to power. Age does not necessarily bring wisdom to them. No doubt some find it harder to contemplate the end of power the closer they get to the end of life.

Donald Trump sought to cling to power and has made clear he would use another presidency to avenge himself against those who thwarted him. Binyamin Netanyahu has ruled with intransigent hawkishness so long that many must find it hard to imagine a different Israel. Vladimir Putin has effectively ruled Russia since 1999, making himself a tyrant and violent imperialist. Ukrainians have called Russia Mordor and demonised its soldiers as orcs (a practice Tolkien would have viewed ambivalently).

Recently, news pundits have been examining the influence of Tolkien’s works on hard-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. As far as she seeks to invoke his own mythology to promote intolerance and undermine human rights, Tolkien would have loathed her.

But The Lord of the Rings is a book of wisdom that can change lives – and perhaps nations – for the better. A truer measure of his influence may now be seen in what Margrethe of Denmark has done after long reflection.

© John Garth, 2024. All rights reserved.

Writing these letters to his children gave Tolkien licence to be wildly counterfactual. This was an old desire that also gave his more serious legendarium a flat earth, an earthly paradise and trees that bore the sun and moon.

But in these gossipy, funny, episodic mini-tales he could freely indulge in absurd unrealities – and freely borrow too – without needing to worry about inner consistencies. If he wanted names for North Polar Bear’s nephews, he could make them Finnish (Paksu and Valkotukka, ‘Fat’ and ‘White-hair’). If he wanted a language for Father Christmas’s elf-secretary, he could just borrow it from Middle-earth Quenya (Mára mesta an ni véla tye ento, ‘Good-bye until I see you next’).

I’ve always been interested in Tolkien’s gift for invention, and it seems appropriate to talk about it now at the time of giving and in the context of the Father Christmas letters.

Several enduring aspects of his inventiveness have become clearer to me over the years. Among them is the urge simply to entertain: dressing up as a berserker, falling downstairs, and many other japes – besides writing, of course. Another is the opportunistic grabbing of ideas, to be used immediately or stored up for later. I was delighted when, researching The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, I realised that he used a 1947 Icelandic eruption as grist for the climactic Mount Doom scenes in The Lord of the Rings.

So here’s a possible trigger for one of the longest and most interesting letters from Father Christmas – the 1932 one, in which North Polar Bear (NPB) discovers secret goblin caves at the North Pole.

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Projects like this don’t turn into overnight success stories. It takes the generosity and imagination of supporters, but it also takes the persistence, stubbornness and imagination of the creator – me. So lately I’ve been spending some time developing John Garth on Tolkien’s Life and Works.

I’ve been talking to others who run Tolkien crowdfunding projects – thanks, Marcel Buelles and Alan Sisto!

One result of this is a small but much-needed expansion in my membership plans: the introduction of a middle tier between Strider and Wingfoot. I couldn’t rightly call it Trotter, which sounds slower than Strider. I thought Telcontar a bit obscure (and of course it essentially means the same as Strider). And Elessar or Elfstone would have broken with my metaphor of travel. So I’ve gone with Quickbeam, because he’s also a great and speedy traveller. And also because it gives me an excuse to publish the photo above, showing me with a curious-looking companion near where Tolkien trained on Cannock Chase in 1915–16. (It’s by Staffordshire librarian Scott Whitehouse, who organised the Staffordshire Tolkien Trail and accompanying exhibition with Great Haywood historian David Robbie.)

I’ve also been thinking about what this particular Steady project can deliver for you, besides the knowledge that you’re helping fund research towards a further book. And also for me, besides your help with funding. Some of this is reflected in the revised project description here.

These are the salient points…

As a supporter, you’ll receive regular treats in your inbox, also available to members as posts on this website. They’ll include:

● Insights into hugely varied aspects of Tolkien’s life, inspirations and creative genius

● News about my talks, research trips and publications

● Reports on my progress with research and writing

● Thoughts about my experiences of writing and research

I’ll gradually be making available older, previously published articles and papers too.

You can also help by making this a venue for conversation. If my posts spark your own thoughts, I invite you to jump in with your own comments. Soon I hope we can talk directly too, such as via online Q&As, a chat room, Zoom sessions.

Those who have helped me most, whether by dialogue or by funding, will be thanked in print. And simply by supporting this crowdfunding project, all of you will help me do what I’m uniquely good at – so that you can read more exceptional books about Tolkien.

Of course, I aim to do all this without stealing too much from my writing time. Setting up and refining this crowdfunding project has taken time, but looking ahead I hope to settle into a healthy rhythm.

Like any writer I need regular practice. Writing to a regular deadline is good for exercising the brain and good for overall productivity. It will also be a good way to ensure I keep dipping into Tolkien even when I have other priorities.

The fact is that researching and writing the way I do produces an alarming amount of unpublished material. My computer overfloweth with outtakes and tangential thoughts waiting to be shared, and my head sometimes feels fit to burst with further ideas that won't necessarily fit into any book I have in mind. I want to get them out in the open!

Thanks again for all your support so far.

Gift memberships

It’s a time of giving. It’s also a time of head-scratching for gift ideas and wasteful expense on gift wrap and shipping, presents that may just get put away unused, and so on.

Here’s another idea. Do you know someone who appreciates my work on Tolkien and would like to read more? Did you know you can give them membership of this project?

To see how easy it is, just go to the membership page and click on Gift a membership.* You can buy any of the plans, including the new, mid-tier Quickbeam.

As soon as you buy the gift membership, an email goes to the recipient telling them about it and how to access it (but not telling them the price). When the gift expires, it will not auto-renew.

There’s more information here.

*No, I don’t like gift as a verb either.

© John Garth, 2023. All rights reserved.

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I just spent a week with the Lord of the Rings manuscripts at Marquette University. Research is one of the activities that this Steady crowdfunding project supports – so if you contribute to that, it was partly with your help.

I’d give a lot to see a photograph of the Lord of the Rings papers when they first arrived in 1957 – all 9,200 pages or more. But archivist Bill Fliss tells me there’s no evidence that such photos were ever taken.

Marquette paid £1,500 for these manuscripts (some of them actually typescripts, of course) plus those for The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham and Mr. Bliss – a total of nearly 11,000 MS pages.

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Part four: visions of the battlefield

Everything that Tolkien said or knew about Wetwang, a place-name both in Yorkshire and in Middle-earth, fell into three different concepts. Philologists had once interpreted the Yorkshire name as Old English for ‘wet field’, but later as Old Norse for ‘place of summons’ or similar. The name also reminded Tolkien of the Middle English alliterative phrase to wete þe wonges, ‘to wet the cheeks, to weep’.

In this series of posts, I have suggested that when Tolkien was planning the Fellowship’s journey from Lórien, he used this last association in building up the Middle-earth map of Wetwang and its surrounding region. First he named the great marsh, spread on either side of the River Anduin like two wete wonges. Then, thinking of tears, he added the waterfall above it. On reaching the region, in the chapter ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’ he added the most striking facial features of all…

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Part three, from Rorschach to Rauros

A story like The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien said, ‘grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps’ (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography). As a philologist, Tolkien reckoned his own ‘leaf-mould’ was ‘made largely of linguistic matter’.

If any place in Middle-earth demonstrably grew out of a largely linguistic leaf-mould, it is Wetwang. I’ve already recorded philological debates over the Yorkshire place-name Wetwang, which established that it has probably nothing to do with wet but derives from Old Norse vétt-vangr ‘place of summons’. I’ve also discussed Tolkien’s own musings on Middle English wang or wong ‘cheek’, which he found ‘almost solely recorded in the alliterative formulae wete wonges or to wete þe wonges with reference to weeping’.

In a 1963 letter Tolkien describes the leaf-mould of the imagination as ‘beyond the reach of chemical analysis’. That may be so. Here I attempt only a probing of the ripe mould of Wetwang, offering an idea that can neither be proven nor disproven. I know that as a species we seem hardwired to find faces in clouds, Rorschach blots, or Martian landscapes; yet I am going to find a face in the topography of Middle-earth. To imagine how Tolkien imagined, I want to look at how the marshy Wetwang emerged in The Lord of the Rings in the light of his linguistic leaf-mould.

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Part two, in which we wet our wonges

Tolkien’s paper ‘Chaucer as a Philologist’ (1934) is an analysis of northern English dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales. Tolkien argues that Geoffrey Chaucer displays a philological interest in the dialect, as shown by the speech of two Northern clerks in the tale. I’ve never read this paper closely before copy-editing OUP’s forthcoming Tolkien on Chaucer, edited by John Bowers and Peter Steffenson.

So last week I enlarged on the comments about the name Wetwang that I’ve made in The World of J.R.R. Tolkien. Before we reach Wetwang in Middle-earth, this week I come to what Tolkien says about Wetwang in Middle English. It’s a fitting week to talk Chaucer, because the British Library (which I visited last night for its current exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination and for a talk by the wonderful Susan Cooper) has just made available online digitised images of all its Chaucer manuscripts.

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Part One, in which the vicar entertains

A place on the Middle-earth map, never visited, Wetwang is curiously memorable for it’s extraordinary name. Yet the name is no invention. It comes from a real place known to Tolkien. And as I have now found, it also had further resonances for the philologist who wrote The Lord of the Rings.

I’m in the middle of copy-editing an upcoming edition of Tolkien’s work on Chaucer, edited with commentary by John Bowers and Peter Steffenson, for Oxford University Press. Tolkien on Chaucer will include the complete text of ‘Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeves Tale’, first published in Transactions of the Philological Society in 1934.

Working on it has brought to my attention a reference by Tolkien to the Yorkshire place-name Wetwang which I didn’t take into account when writing about this name in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien. I sat down this morning to write a brief piece about this for you, but it has sprawled to beyond it’s borders (rather like the marshland itself) and filled the sluggish regions of my Saturday. So I’m going to divide it up over several weeks. Today I’ll expand on my brief account in Worlds.

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