Tolkien i Wielka Wojna

Abstract

Finally here comes a volume modestly entitled Tolkien and the First World War. On the threshold of Middle-earth. This is the result of many years of study by the author, John Garth, who writes in the introduction: This biographical study was born from one observation: how strange that J.R.R. T o l k i e n b e g a n t o c r e a t e h i s m o n u m e n t a l m y t h o l o g y i n t h e m i d s t o f t h e F i r s t W o r l d W a r, [emphasis added — J.Z.L] that disappointing crisis that shaped the present day. This sentence may surprise the Polish reader, whose consciousness has shaped a completely different image of the First World War, as an event that may have been a crisis, but gave Poland the independence it had been dreaming of for over a hundred years. Meanwhile, for the generation to which Tolkien belongs, it was just that — a crisis. As Hermann Broch, who was slightly older than him, wrote about this war: “Goodbye Europe, beautiful tradition is over”.
 Garth shows how Tolkien contrasted his work with this perception of the experience of the Great War, a work that is a great mythical story about destruction but also about hope. At the same time, it is a tribute to the memory of the generation that died in the trenches of Flanders.