TOLKIEN`S WAR tells for the first time the full story of a young man plunged into catastrophe as a soldier in the Battle of the Somme. This moving book also introduces the school friends who played a crucial part in shaping Tolkien`s writing, and shows how the author formed his vast mythology in order to give meaning to the deaths of two of these brilliant young men. Middle-earth was born as a response to the Great War, and it is this foundation that of tragic experience that underlies its power. Far from being an escapist, Tolkien used his mythic imagination to transform the cataclysm that engulfed his generation. While other artists surrendered to disillusion, he kept enchantment alive, hammering fairy story into a form relevant to modern times. Tolkien`s mythology is a fugue on despair and hope, death and consolation. It is a protest, too, against totalitarianism and the machine, the twin evils that came to obscene prominence in 1914. But TOLKIEN`S WAR shows how the invention of the hobbits in the 1930s finally gave Tolkien the means to write the War novel that he had been struggling to get out for 20 years: THE LORD OF THE RINGS.