Q&A With Tolkien and the Great War Author John Garth on Michael Martinez’ Middle-earth website
As a subscriber to the Mythsoc listserv, I was very grateful to find a link from Michael Martinez — proprietor of the fine Middle-earth.xenite.org website — to a recent interview conducted with J.R.R. Tolkien scholar, John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003). It’s a fascinating read and worth checking out; you can find it here.
Some reviewers have dubbed Tolkien and the Great War the best book on Tolkien that has yet been written. I wouldn’t go that far (for the record that book is Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth) but it is arguably the best book on Tolkien in the last decade. While Humphrey Carpenter’s biography is still the seminal work on the life and times of Tolkien, it brushes only lightly over his military service. Tolkien’s experiences with the Lancaster Fusiliers are stamped all over The Lord of the Rings, as Garth ably demonstrates in Tolkien and the Great War, and so any complete understanding of the influences of Tolkien’s works must account for his World War I experiences.
Bury Elminster Deep
The premise of this podcast series is that tourists came from as far as the Faerie Kingdom and Hell to visit the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and, once it was over, decided to stay. These sub-cultures continued to co-exist with every other immigrant community in Chicago, integrating just enough to go unnoticed by most people. The Burnham Society was established to intervene in those situations where the sub-cultures don’t peacefully co-exist. The organization is perpetually trying to maintain its lofty goals while dealing with petty day-to-day politics (much like its namesake, architect Daniel Burnham).
I have a week-long break between summer movie reviews, the gap between