Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I wrote
A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien's Literary Canvas
I love this book for its gloriously unfinished glimpses into three Ages of Tolkien’s sub-creation. It taught me just how important Túrin Turambar was to his author, took me to parts of Númenor I’d not dreamt of, and showed me Gandalf blowing smoke rings in Saruman’s face.
It also showed me Christopher Tolkien’s care as an editor and served as a first step towards the rich and unabashedly scholarly studies of The History of Middle-earth.
A New York Times bestseller for twenty-one weeks upon publication, J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales is a collection of short stories ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and further relates events as told in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
The book concentrates on the lands of Middle-earth and comprises Gandalf's lively account of how he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End, the story of the emergence of the sea-god Ulmo before the eyes of Tuor on the coast of Beleriand, and…
I loved this book because it illuminated Tolkien’s lifelong fascination with Beowulf, probably his greatest influence. The translation is good, but the commentary is better, and the inclusion of two short works, Sellic Spell and the Lay of Beowulf, showed me Tolkien’s delight in “re-tellings.”
His creative genius was seldom far removed from his scholarly work.
The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication.
This edition is twofold, for there exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection has been made, to form also a commentary on the translation in this book.
LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.
Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks…
I loved this book because it’s as close as we can get to a Tolkien “Guide to Fantasy.” It contains two of the best essays I’ve ever read: the cauldron of stories described in “On Fairy-stories” changed the way I understand art and tradition, and Tolkien’s defense of the Beowulf poet as a literary craftsman made me want to learn Old English and helped me understand what he was trying to build in Middle-earth.
I love it for taking me on a wild ride through Frodo’s dreams and along the lost road back to Númenor. Flieger’s study of Tolkien’s abandoned time travel stories is particularly effective; it made me want to explore every nook and cranny of The History of Middle-earth.
Much of her work on Tolkien is justly famous, but this one in particular showed me that Tolkien criticism could be a work of art in its own right.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion have long been recognized as among the most popular fiction of the twentieth century, and most critical analysis of Tolkien has centered on these novels. Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library in Oxford to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Verlyn Flieger uses them here to shed new light on his better known works, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision and giving added depth of meaning to his writing.
Tolkien's concern with time-past and present, real and "faerie"-captures the wonder and peril of travel into other…
LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.
Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks…
I love this one because it’s a fitting tribute to Christopher Tolkien’s monumental work of literary archeology. The essays in this collection feel as fresh today as they did 24 years ago. It’s hard to pick favorites from such a strong and wide-ranging collection, but I often return to the essays by the late scholars Charles E. Noad and Richard C. West on the making of the Silmarillion and on the concept of ofermod, respectively.
As a scholar of medieval languages and literature, J.R.R. Tolkien brought to his fiction an intense interest in myth and legend. When he died in 1973, he left behind a vast body of unpublished material related to his fictive mythology. Now edited and published as The History of Middle-earth by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, these 12 volumes provide a record of the growth of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology from its beginnings in 1917 to the time of his death more than 50 years later. The material in these volumes offers an unparalleled insight into Tolkien's process of myth-making…
Writing to his son while The Lord of the Rings was in progress, Tolkien noted a curious paradox that may ring true to many readers: “A story must be told, or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.” My book is all about those untold stories of other times and lands that give Tolkien’s work its inimitable sense of depth (and tantalize or frustrate us as curious readers).
It examines Tolkien’s theory of untold tales honed in his studies of medieval literature, and explores, to give just a few examples, the lasting impact that references or allusions to the Last Alliance or the legends of Túrin Turambar have on our experience of Tolkien’s fantasy worlds.
