J. R. R. Tolkien was an English Roman Catholic writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

There, Tolkien began to study languages, learning French and Latin from his mother, finding Welsh and Greek attractive before the age of 10; soon he was reading Chaucer in Middle English.

At Oxford, the sub-rector of Exeter College considered Tolkien "very lazy"; he hardly worked on his Classics degree, instead becoming fascinated with the Finnish Kalevala, retelling part of it in his William Morris-style verse-and-prose The Story of Kullervo.

[G 4] The second part describes in four chapters the military experiences of the TCBS in the trenches of the Western Front in 1916; Tolkien was attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Middle-earth contradicts the prevalent view of literary history, that the Great War finished off the epic and heroic traditions in any serious form".

[G 8] He describes how Tolkien went against the tide of modernism followed by the war poets, preferring romances and epic adventures from writers like William Morris and Rider Haggard, and medieval poetry.

Garth writes that Tolkien chose to use a "high diction", something that he knew could be abused, and created an "even-handed depiction of war as both terrible and stirring".

[G 8] In Garth's view, The war imposed urgency and gravity, took [Tolkien] through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form.

The same may be said for his thoughts on death and immortality, dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe, enchantment and irony, the significance of fairy-story, the importance of ordinary people in events of historic magnitude, and, crucially, the relationship between language and mythology.

[G 8]The text is accompanied by monochrome photographs, showing Tolkien at school and two of his early artworks, with portraits of all four of the TCBS friends in uniform.

"[4] Chad Engbers, in The Lion and the Unicorn, writes that Garth, "like most excellent literary biographers", combines internal and external histories throughout, and comments that it is "strange" that nobody had thought of writing a biography of Tolkien's war years before, all the earlier biographies such as Humphrey Carpenter's, Joseph Pearce's, or Michael White's focusing on the "older Tolkien, a kindly, wrinkled Oxford don in a tweed coat".

In Rosebury's view, Garth's close examination of Tolkien's formative years supports the arguments defending his approach against the attacks made upon him.

[7] The historian Bradley J. Birzer, reviewing the "excellen[t]" book for VII, writes that Garth wisely begins by noting how strange it was that Tolkien should have begun his "monumental mythology" in the war, the "crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern world".

He comments that the ironic "disenchanted viewpoint" of other war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon "robs the narrator of agency", or in Garth's words "stripped meaning from what many soldiers saw as the defining experience of their lives".

In this way, he argues, "Tolkien restores balance to the narratives of World War I", enabling the discussion of contested subjects like courage, glory, honour, and majesty, in Garth's words again "under such stress that they often fracture, but are not utterly destroyed".

Terrence Neal Brown, in a review for Religion and Literature, writes that readers may recognise in the book "the sheer complexity of Tolkien's creative origins", noting the mutual affection concealed behind "the impersonal initials 'TCBS'".

In Brown's view, Garth locates Tolkien in the tradition of Great War literature, noting that far from being escapist or fantastical, his "disgust, anger, and condemnation" underpin his Middle-earth writings.

He cites Garth's conclusion that "Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs".

[9] Wood notes, too, that Garth incidentally shows Tolkien's implicit postmodernism, believing for instance that languages and cultures are rooted in time and place, and that geography determines much of how people think and act.

[9] Wood finds Shippey "far more incisive" in grouping Tolkien with critics of modern warfare like William Golding, Ursula LeGuin, and George Orwell.

[9] David Filsell, reviewing the book for the Western Front Association, writes that Garth "convincingly" claims that Tolkien "kept enchantment alive" through his experiences in the 1914-1918 war.

Filsell notes that the work grew from five years of research by Garth, who combined "his twin great interests" – in Tolkien and the war.