The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien

John Garth read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. He trained as a journalist and worked for 18 years on newspapers including the Evening Standard in London. He then became a freelance author while continuing to contribute newspaper articles. He became known as an authority on Tolkien with his 2003 book Tolkien and the Great War.[G 1]

Garth compares Cerin Amroth, a grassy mound in Lothlórien surrounded by two circles of trees, to the Motte of Warwick Castle, known as Ethelfleda's Mound (pictured), where a young Tolkien went with his future wife Edith Bratt.[G 14]

The Tolkien scholar Mike Foster writes in a long review in Mythlore, describing the contents of each chapter, that "Tolkien scholarship is much the richer" for the book. Its "prodigal detail" includes drawings never previously published, maps, and paintings that exploit the book's large (8"×10") format as well as Garth's well-researched text and informative sidebars.[2]

The scholar Matthew Fisher, writing in Tolkien Studies, comments that Tolkien scholarship has considered his concern for nature and the environment, and to some extent the geography of Middle-earth, with some "geographic source criticism" that made "an attempt to compile a list of equalities where A in the real world equals B in Middle-earth". In his view, Garth does not do this, but rather looks at the places that inspired Tolkien and shows how he made use of them in varied ways to construct Middle-earth. Fisher quotes Garth's introduction on what he considers a richer approach: "The book ... examines the influences that shaped his imagined cultures and cosmology. It counts place as a combination of location, geology, ecology, culture, nomenclature, and other factors."[3]

Laura Schmidt writes in VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center that Garth is following up on multiple studies of Tolkien's locations, not to mention the tourist industry around some of them in Oxford and elsewhere, but that he separates fact from fiction, listing both his reasoning and his sources. Schmidt states that the book gave her the "revelation" that Tolkien's use of places is like the way he weaves his languages from many materials until, with philological skill, they fit snugly together. Similarly, he mixed and matched places and geographic elements until he had what he wanted.[4]

John L. Murphy, reviewing the book for New York Journal of Books, writes that Garth adds "a careful eye and steady step" to the "ever-proliferating pile of Tolkien-related media". He notes Garth's description of Tolkien's literary approach as using "a paint-box, in which the author dipped, daubed, and mixed layers of color, depth, hue, form, and drama into his vast legacy of narratives." He quotes, too, Garth's "astute caution" to readers that Tolkien described "races and places as seen by medieval poets and chroniclers, not necessarily as they actually were". He notes Garth's correction of Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, who equated Birmingham to the dark land of Mordor, examining instead "that city's toy industry, and its buildings preserving the Gothic Revival and William Morris' Arts and Crafts Movement of Victorian times". In Murphy's view, both those new to Middle-earth and "veteran pilgrim[s]" will learn much from the book.[5]

Clea Simon, in her review for the arts fuse, called the book beautifully produced and "replete with illustrations" with "evocative landscapes", maps, architectural details, and Tolkien's own paintings, making it in her opinion "a lovely keepsake for fans". She found the works of "lesser artists" to be "less lovely", undercutting Tolkien's own imagination. She called it "a short book ... more an essay than a full manuscript", and repetitive. She noted that Garth was "a painstaking scholar", but that in the book he "ignores the poetry and creativity underpinning Tolkien's classic, dissecting it in an over-thought (and, at times, overwrought) search for connections to the author's real-life experiences". She notes that Garth quotes Gandalf's remark that "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom", and states that Garth is guilty of just that. In her view, the text might have worked well as "a series of speculative essays", but its packaging as a definitive work did a disservice both to Garth and to "the underlying scholarship".[6]

Darragh McManus, reviewing the book for the Irish Independent, considers it best for a general audience that is already familiar with Tolkien's books, since Garth expects detailed knowledge of Tolkien's placenames from his readers. He grants, however, that even specialists would, he writes, appreciate its visual appeal.[7]

Tom Chivers, reviewing the work for The Times, writes that The Lord of the Rings is not so much an escapist adventure as a tale of heartbreak and the loss of innocence as the world is threatened by overwhelming dark. In his view, Garth takes the book that way, bringing out Tolkien's "elegiac tone", ostensibly describing landscapes that inspired Middle-earth, but "unavoidably, a history of the man and his ideas". Chivers comments that the book is physically beautiful, richly bound and wonderfully illustrated, giving it the look of a coffee-table book. He adds that much of it is "surely speculative" as it expresses many of Garth's opinions and theories.[8]

• Garth, John (2020). The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth. Frances Lincoln Publishers. ISBN 978-0-71124-127-5.