Legion of the Daggerstone

has as its hero a 21st-century J. R. R. Tolkien. Like the author of , J. R. Tolliver is an English professor specializing in ancient languages - only at UVA instead of Oxford. Like Tolkien, he was an officer thrown into combat - only with the Virginia National Guard in Iraq instead of the trenches of the First World War. And like Tolkien, he remedies his PTSD by writing a bestselling trilogy of fantasy novels - based on myths of ancient Mesopotamia instead of Northern Europe. This campus novel is a hybrid of literary fiction / fantasy novel / and Iraq War memoir.