#john garth

John Garth (1721-1810) - Concerto for Cello, Strings and Basso continuo in D-Major, Op. 1 No. 1, III. Giga. Performed by Richard Tunnicliffe, cello, and The Avison Ensemble on period instruments.

Rob Gilson, taken from John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

[alive on all channels]

John Garth, Ironworkers

Take care, guys ♡

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1973: “Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”

Regarding the fictional Sam Gamgee’s link to the First World War, Carpenter’s Biography quotes Tolkien as saying, “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” A batman, in military parlance, was a soldier who (as well as being required to fight) was tasked with looking after an officer’s kit, cooking, and cleaning. Tolkien’s phrasing in the letter sent to Minchin is different, and very interesting too: “My ‘Samwise’ is indeed (as you note) largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” It gives the extra dimension that in portraying Sam, Tolkien had also drawn on memories of lads from the rural outskirts of Birmingham, where he had lived between the ages of three and eight. This dovetails well with his statement elsewhere that the society of the Shire is “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee” (Letters p. 230)—that is, a village like Sarehole in 1897, Queen Victoria’s 60th year on the throne and Tolkien’s fifth on earth. Amid all Tolkien’s astonishing inventiveness, and alongside the vast knowledge of matters mythological and medieval that he poured into his legendarium, this is a point too easily overlooked: contemporary life, especially the life he knew in his formative years, was a powerful well-spring of creativity in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s comment to Minchin also provides support for a point I have made in various talks on how the Great War shaped The Lord of the Rings. By silently linking his hobbits with the boys of 1901, who had grown into the young men of 1914, Tolkien was able to draw directly upon the war into which he and those men were then hurled. He had seen, and felt, how war could change those who went through it. Many of the dangers he describes in The Lord of the Rings may be fantastical, though many are not and others are only symbolically so. But the fear, the resourcefulness, the demoralisation, the courage, the sorrow, the innocent laughter in the face of dreadful odds: all these things he had known, and he infused his fiction with them. This, and memories of those rural roots, bring the hobbits vividly to life.