"When Tolkien's Lord of the Rings appeared in 1954, it was eagerly sought by a rapidly widening community of readers while snootily dismissed by eminent critics as juvenile escapism. For many years most literary scholars refused to take Tolkien…
J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved novel The hobbit has deep roots in European folklore, mythology, and language. As a reader's introduction to Tolkien's Middle-earth, it contains references to the ancient history of this imaginary world which, though rarely…
Analyzes Tolkien's "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," "The Silmarillion," and his lesser works, and explains how his works tie into storytelling tradition dating back to Grimms' fairy tales and "Beowulf."
As a scholar of medieval literature and a lover of Germanic and Finnish mythologies in particular, J.R.R. Tolkien was "grieved by the poverty" of legend and myth in his own beloved culture. Inspired by works like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green…
A number-one New York Times bestseller when it was originally published, The Silmarillion is the core of J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginative writing, a work whose origins stretch back to a time long before The Hobbit. Tolkien considered The Silmarillion his…
This is the fourth volume of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien, the first two comprising The Book of Lost Tales Parts One and Two, and the third The Lays of Beleriand. It has been given the title The Shaping of Middle-earth…