John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, Part III, Epilogue, Postscript

For the February meeting, we'll be doing Part III (chapters 11 and 12) and the epilogue and postscript of Garth's Tolkien and the Great War, covering his return with trench fever and never making it back to France, instead spending the rest of the war serving on home soil and living on for all that had happened to him and to the world to sift through the landscape his imagination had long been forming to emerge as the Silmarillion we know, which eventually melded with the happy accident that is The Hobbit to give us the Lord of the Rings we love. It was greatly changed from its original shape, like Middle Earth after the destruction of the lamps and the killing of the trees and the upheaval of the land in the final war with Morgoth, but still the land of which we say to Tolkien---to borrow the title of the third and final novel from another of English descent but born in South Africa, slightly younger, Alan Paton---"Ah, but your land is beautiful."