John Garth, the scholar behind Tolkien and the Great War, has been accepted for a DPhil at Oxford University. His research will examine how world war and modern conflict shaped The Lord of the Rings. It is only the second doctoral project on Tolkien that Oxford has ever accepted.
The news comes with a sharp backdrop. The Guardian recently published its critics’ list of the 100 best novels of all time, with Tolkien nowhere in sight. The readers’ version of the same poll? The Lord of the Rings won. Garth noticed. “He’s only unfashionable in the sense that The Lord of the Rings has survived all the fads and trends of the past seven decades,” he writes.
Anyone who has read Tolkien closely knows how deeply the wars of his lifetime run through his work. The Dead Marshes, where ancient faces float beneath dark water, echo the flooded craters of the Somme. The Siege of Gondor draws on the grinding, attritional warfare of the trenches. Tolkien lost close friends at the Somme in 1916, and his mythology didn’t emerge despite that horror. It emerged through it.
Garth’s earlier book mapped Tolkien’s wartime experiences against the first stirrings of his mythology, showing how the connection runs far deeper than surface-level inspiration. The new DPhil will extend that work into The Lord of the Rings itself, examining how Tolkien built the story’s foundations while European peace was crumbling in the 1930s, then carried the manuscript through the Second World War and into the Cold War years.
The project is part-time. British funding for solo research has been cut sharply, and no bursary for Tolkien studies exists at Oxford yet. Garth is crowdfunding to cover university fees, with a target of £900 per month.
