Here are 100 books that Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss fans have personally recommended if you like
Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss.
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I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
I am fascinated by the contradictions of Tolkien’s women and by the tension between Christian and pagan in his writing.
This book is particularly valuable for its explication of Tolkien’s integration of Marian and Valkyrie imagery, resulting in female characters of transcendental beauty and heroism. And the writing is absorbing and informative.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
Verlyn Flieger is the doyenne of Tolkien criticism, and this collection sees her at her best.
I’ve often found that her brilliance lies in pointing out what’s been hiding in plain sight–and once you have seen it, your view is forever changed. “But What Did He Really Mean?” and “Politically Incorrect Tolkien” are my favorites, but there are many gems here worth excavating.
Devoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he called faerie, a world they both create and inhabit, and with the elements that make that world the special place it is. They cover a range of subjects, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and their place within the legendarium he called the Silmarillion to shorter works like "The Story of Kullervo" and "Smith of Wootton Major."
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
If you are anything like me, one of the reasons you keep coming back to Middle-earth is the landscape. This is the field guide I want to take on my next trip!
This is a very thoroughly researched compendium of information and folklore about real-world plants in Tolkien’s world—and about his invented plants as well. It's nicely illustrated, too!
The book considers the importance of plants in Tolkien's conception of Middle-earth. It develops the theme that Middle-earth is our own world - and will awaken the reader to the connection between the plants of Tolkien's legendarium and those growing in our gardens and local natural areas of the Northern Hemisphere. It also demonstrates the connection between the various plant communities of Middle-earth and the elven and human cultures that occupy them, including those environments degraded by warfare, industrialization or pollution.
The heart of the book is an alphabetical listing, arranged by common names, of all of the plants mentioned…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
I love a good, solid, chewy book of critical essays around a specific theme—I know, it’s a specialized taste. This is a good one.
Yes, I’d love to tramp peacefully around Middle-earth with the field guide I reviewed above, but there are horrors there as well, and this collection gives Tolkien’s dragons, wolves, spiders, and other monsters their due.
Fear and horror are an inextricable part of Tolkien's great mythology and his use of medieval sources for his evocations of fear and horror contribute to the distinctive tone of his work. This collection of essays shows how his masterly narrative techniques transform his sources, both familiar and unfamiliar, so that hitherto benign characters, objects and landscapes, as well as his famous monstrous creations, engage with deeply rooted human fears. The essays, by an international group of scholars, confirm Tolkien's worldwide reputation. They highlight the depiction of the fear associated with marginalised characters; explore the moral implications of light and…
I started out as an economics major in college but soon realized that the discipline was based on totally unrealistic assumptions, so I switched to philosophy and literature. I started reading Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche with some of my roommates and then chose UC San Diego for graduate work because of its focus on what became known as “theory”—which was taught there by luminaries including Jameson, Lyotard, and Marin.
I have been researching the psycho-dynamics of markets and capitalism ever since, and have become convinced that rescuing markets from capital is the only way to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.
Long before running into Norman O. Brown while on sabbatical leave at UC Santa Cruz, I was fascinated by this book’s attempt to re-assert the priority of psychology over the political economy and history by claiming that infants’ refusal to accept the limits of parental care creates separation-anxiety that causes the historical dynamic known as “progress.”
But it wasn’t until much later that Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that capitalism represses the death instinct provided an alternative explanation that rescued Brown’s insights for me by putting the explanation back in the realm of political economy and history–because dependence on the market produces separation anxiety, too.
Thanks to developing interests in both psychoanalysis and German idealism during my time as a student, I came across Slavoj Žižek’s writings in the mid-1990s. Žižek immediately became a significant source of inspiration for my own efforts at interfacing philosophies with psychoanalysis. By the time I began writing my dissertation – which became my first book, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive – I had the great fortune to meet Žižek. He soon agreed to serve as co-director of my dissertation and we have remained close ever since. I decided to write a book demonstrating that Žižek is not dismissible as a gadfly preoccupied with using popular culture and current events merely for cheap provocations.
One prominent feature of Žižek’s oeuvrethat initially brought him to fame is his impressive ability to make Lacan’s writings and ideas crystal-clear and tangibly concrete—and this by contrast with Lacan himself, who often is described as “notoriously difficult.” Écritsis Lacan’s magnum opus, containing his most important essays and articles from the 1930s through the mid-1960s. Although the volumes of Lacan’s Seminar are comparatively easier to read, Écritsprovides the single most comprehensive survey of Lacan’s thinking provided by Lacan himself. This 1966 book contains such Lacanian contributions to psychoanalytic theory as the mirror stage, the unconscious structured like a language, and the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad. Neither Lacan nor Žižek can be fully comprehended without a tour of the Écrits.
Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan's seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I am a professor of philosophy and editor or author of 12 books. I started out in ‘Freud Studies’ in the 1990s with no agenda, just a deep interest in Freud’s ideas. Since then I’ve written quite a lot on it. Unfortunately, the field is so contentious, so overrun with books by former patients and analysts, that casual readers couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of it. Readers are best served by reading complete works of Freud and making their own assessments. After that, they can look at Freud’s voluminous and eye-opening correspondence with colleagues. Then they can consult good books, and lists of recommended works, that put them in the right direction.
While some thinkers, such as Ernest Jones and Philip Rieff, had noted Freud’s lifelong reliance on 19th-century biology, it wasn’t until Sulloway’s tome of 1979 that a systematic investigation of Freud’s embarrassing biology was published. Hence the demystification Sulloway offers of a ‘psychoanalytic legend’ that routinely erases the foundational roles that Lamarckian inheritance and Haeckelian recapitulation play throughout Freud’s oeuvre. This dense, difficult, but well-argued and undeniable work is meant for experts but is key for all serious students of psychoanalysis.
In this monumental intellectual biography, Frank Sulloway demonstrates that Freud always remained, despite his denials, a biologist of the mind; and, indeed, that his most creative inspirations derived significantly from biology. Sulloway analyzes the political aspects of the complex myth of Freud as psychoanalytic hero as it served to consolidate the analytic movement. This is a revolutionary reassessment of Freud and psychoanalysis.
I completed a Masters in Theology where I studied early Church theology (Patristics) and Jungian analysis. Next, I wanted to pursue a PhD in Patristics to discover how and why the Catholic Church had banished true spirituality for stifling dogma and randy sexual abuse, but I was the mother of four children and had to go to work. I became an acquisitions editor for a Catholic publishing house, which enabled me to continue my research on the building deviation from real spirit in Catholicism. I wrote the Revelations Trilogy instead of doing a thesis in graduate school. This trilogy is very hot and controversial because nobody could control me.
Carl Jung’s discoveries in psychoanalysis and alchemy caused a revolution in 20TH Century psychotherapy, and the breakthroughs he made have had a huge influence on contemporary spirituality.
My book is deeply based on Jung’s research in general, and then this is his greatest book.
Ancient alchemists were supposedly trying to turn lead into gold, yet now we know they were activating many dimensions in their consciousness to attain the gold—personal transformation, even transfiguration of their souls—Jung’s fundamental discovery.
I have more than 20 years of experience in the field of leadership development and assessment. I am a trained theologian and English/German linguist, and I hold a passion for the more fundamental questions concerning the human condition. In my business consulting practice, I invite clients to become better versions of themselves and to transform their organizations as well as societies by consciously adhering to doing the right thing.
I consider this book to be THE book for delving deep into the realm of symbolism and unveiling the hidden meaning behind visions, dreams, memories, myths, and art.
In this classic, Jung explores the more profound—not just pragmatic—aspects of the human psyche. Through Jung’s thought-provoking concepts, I gained significant insights into the unconscious mind.
The landmark text about the inner workings of the unconscious mind—from the symbolism that unlocks the meaning of our dreams to their effect on our waking lives and artistic impulses—featuring more than a hundred images that break down Carl Jung’s revolutionary ideas
“What emerges with great clarity from the book is that Jung has done immense service both to psychology as a science and to our general understanding of man in society.”—The Guardian
“Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.”
Since our inception, humanity has looked to dreams for guidance. But what are they? How can…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
By chance, just over 50 years ago, I became an art therapist in a state hospital on the Northshore of Boston where I have always lived. With support from Rudolf Arnheim at Harvard University and others, I committed myself to furthering personal and community well-being through art. In my mid-twenties I established a graduate program at Lesley University which spawned an international community of expressive arts therapy. I have worked worldwide in advancing art healing and art-based research. Now University Professor Emeritus, and for the first time without a full-time position, I am trying to embrace the unpredictable ways of creation, and as I wrote, Trust the Process.
James Hillman called for the revisioning of psychology based on art, culture, and imagination. Of his many books, The Myth of Analysis, offering three essays on psychological creativity, language, and femininity, is the one that I reference most, especially his position that “the language of psychology insults the soul.” Social science and the therapy jargon of the “establishment” are not getting better, and as Hillman says, we become ill in sync with it. He said to me that art therapists can “be the carriers of imagination into the culture at the grassroots level. I really do want to encourage them with all my heart.”
In this work, acclaimed Jungian James Hillman examines the concepts of myth, insights, eros, body, and the mytheme of female inferiority, as well as the need for the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality. By examining these ideas, and the role they have played both in and outside of the therapeutic setting, Hillman mounts a compelling argument that, rather than locking them away in some inner asylum or subjecting them to daily self-treatment, man's "peculiarities" can become an integral part of a rich and fulfilling daily life.
Originally published by Northwestern University Press in 1972, this work had…
