MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth is a biography by the journalist and Tolkien scholar John Garth. It follows Tolkien from King Edward's School in Birmingham, where he formed the TCBS with his closest friends, to Oxford and then to the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where two of those friends, Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, were killed.
Garth shows how Tolkien's first poems and the earliest tales of his mythology took shape during these years. The book was published in 2003 by HarperCollins in the UK and Houghton Mifflin in the US, and won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2004.
How the young Tolkien, his school friends and the Battle of the Somme shaped the first stories of Middle-earth.