Tolkien imagined The Lord of the Rings as a book very much like The Hobbit: aimed at a young audience, built around humor and pranks, and modeled on the structure of a folktale or fairy story. He even...
The excitement of creating is followed by desperate self-doubt. Courage and inspiration compete with discouragement and despair.
He captures something of C. S. Lewis in The Lord of the Rings. The character Treebeard makes an unusual Hrum, Hroom sound when he speaks. This was Tolkien’s attempt to capture the booming voice of Lew...
Mr Lewis says hobbits are only amusing when in unhobbitlike situations. It
Tolkien looked forward to sending new chapters to his son. In one letter, he expressed his appreciation to Christopher saying, This book has come to be more and more addressed to you, so that your opi...
You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
But it is far more important to see the difference between correction that is helpful and condemnation that is dismissive and, therefore, destroys.
Do not all the achievements of a poet’s predecessors and contemporaries rightfully belong to him? Why should he shrink from picking flowers where he finds them? Only by making the riches of the others...
However, one of the reasons for their dissolution is that Hugo Dyson crossed this line. When he persisted in dismissing The Lord of the Rings, it changed the group. Dyson didn’t critique the work: he...
No Oxford don was forgiven for writing books outside his field of study—except for detective stories which dons, like everyone else, read when they are down with the ’flu. But it was considered unforg...
Without Christopher Tolkien, not only would The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings look very different, but so would the face of Tolkien scholarship.
As Tolkien got older, he increasingly denied the participation of others in the creation of his work. Tolkien says this is one of the few places where Lewis’s detailed criticisms were useful and just....
In attacking these readings, Dyson was attacking the very reason for the group; in limiting the participation of one of its members, Dyson eroded its spirit. It is one thing to criticize an author. It...