John Garth (author)

He trained as a journalist and worked for 18 years in newspapers including the Evening Standard in London.

[3] The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft, reviewing the same book for World Literature Today, wrote that Garth had ably portrayed Tolkien's early life with his close friends, using their own papers and their British Army company records.

She found the first part of the book "somewhat leisurely", but the account of Tolkien's training and battlefield experience was "gripping".

He admired the photographs as well as their scholarship and found "virtue" in the journalistic use of sidebars on background topics like Tolkien's debt to Anglo-Saxon cosmology or his mythology for England.

Similarly, en route to Mordor, Frodo and Sam see the old stone king at the Crossroads in Ithilien—his head knocked off by orcs yet still whole."

Tolkien fought with the Lancashire Fusiliers (pictured) on the Western Front in 1916.
In The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien , Garth is critical of the theory that the Ring of Silvianus inspired Tolkien's Ring . [ 7 ]