John Garth
John Garth is well known for his ongoing work on Tolkien’s life and creativity. A member of Corpus Christi College SCR and an Oxford English graduate of St Anne’s College, he teaches for the Oxford Department for Continuing Education and was 2015 fellow in humanistic studies at the Black Mountain Institute, at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He worked in journalism for London newspapers including the Evening Standard before becoming a freelance writer, editor and speaker. His books have appeared in 18 languages and all have been shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship. His first, Tolkien and the Great War, won the award in 2004. Tolkien at Exeter College is published by the college, which commissioned him to catalogue its archival holding relating to Tolkien. The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien is published by Frances Lincoln and Princeton University Press. He contributed to the Blackwell Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, Routledge’s J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and Major Writers anthology J.R.R. Tolkien, the 2018 Bodleian exhibition book Maker of Middle-earth, and The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien. He has also written many articles and reviews for major newspapers and journals from the Guardian to Smithsonian Magazine; been widely interviewed across all media about Tolkien’s life and work; and been a keynote or solo speaker in Britain, the U.S. and Europe, including at the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Dresden’s Militär Historisches Museum, New York’s Morgan Library, the U.S. National World War I Museum, and Marquette University in Milwaukee. He was awarded the Tolkien Society’s Outstanding Contribution Award in 2017.
Selected publications:
2022 ‘The chronology of creation: How J.R.R. Tolkien misremembered the beginnings of his mythology’, in The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien, ed. Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine
2022 ‘Tolkien’s World: How J.R.R. Tolkien came to write the stories of The Rings of Power’, in Smithsonian Magazine
2020 The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth
2019 ‘Revenants and angels: Tolkien, Machen, and Mons’, in Something Has Gone Crack: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War, ed. Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger.
2019 ‘Ilu’s Music: The creation of Tolkien's creation myth’, in Sub-creating Arda, ed. Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger.
2018 ‘Tolkien and the Inklings’, in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine
2014 Tolkien at Exeter College: How an Oxford Undergraduate Created Middle-earth
2014 ‘Secrets of The Hydra: How my Tolkien research uncovered lost Wilfred Owen magazines’, in Oxfordshire Limited Edition
2014 ‘The road from adaptation to invention’: How Tolkien came to the brink of Middle-earth in 1914’, in Tolkien Studies, vol. 11
2014 ‘A brief biography’, in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee
2013 ‘The undergraduate Tolkien’, in Exeter College: The First 700 Years, ed. Frances Cairncross with Hannah Parham
2011 ‘Robert Quilter Gilson, T.C.B.S.: A brief life in letters’, in Tolkien Studies, vol. 8
2010 ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the boy who didn’t believe in fairies’, in Tolkien Studies, vol. 7 (best article, Tolkien Society Awards 2014)
2008 ‘“As under a green sea”: visions of war in the Dead Marshes’, in The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the 2005 Tolkien Conference, ed. Sarah Wells
2006 ‘Tolkien, Exeter College, and the Great War’, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger
2006 Various entries in J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D.C. Drout
2004 'Frodo and the Great War', in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull
2003 Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
