The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All / Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, eds. -- Chicago: Open Court, 2003

 In the year 2000, Open Court Publishing launch a series titled, "Popular Culture and Philosophy" with the book Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing. Open Court has gone on to publish scores of books in this series.  As someone interested in both philosophy and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I was pleased to receive as a Christmas gift Volume 5 in the series, The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy.  Books in the series are anthologies by authors, largely philosophers, who seek to tease out the philosophical themes that appear in whatever pop culture subject is the subject of the book.  TLotR and Philosophy is the only work in the series that I've read.  This is perhaps a reflection of my distance from so much of pop culture -- nothing to be proud of, just a fact. Whether I'll read other works in the series is an open question, but I'm glad to have read this one.

As with most anthologies, the articles are uneven.  Perhaps my biggest complaint is that too many of the authors spend an inordinate amount of time describing major events in TLotR, as if someone reading this work would not be quite familiar with the fact that, say, Gandalf battled a balrog in Moria or Boromir was slain defending Merry and Pippin.  But setting this aside, many of the articles do a good job of exposing philosophical ideas in TLotR.  There are five parts to the work, titled, I. The Ring, II. The Quest for Happiness, III. Good and Evil in Middle-Earth, IV. Time and Mortality, and V. Ends and Endings.  Each part contains three articles, except for the last which contains four.  

Stand out articles include Eric Katz's article "The Rings of Tolkien and Plato: Lessons in Power, Choice, and Morality."  The comparison between Tolkien's One Ring and Plato's Ring of Gyges is an obvious topic for philosophical discussion.  In Plato's Republic, Glaucon argues that anyone with a ring that made them invisible would eventually use it for immoral ends, even an otherwise moral person.  Socrates responds that the moral person would prefer a life of peace and integrity to whatever would be gained by illicit uses of the ring.  Tolkien's characters better reflect this latter theory, though they present a more complicated response to the One Ring than Plato imagines for the Ring of Gyges.  Katz examines the reactions of numerous characters to the One Ring and shows how they respond according to their established character.  Each does experience a least a moment of temptation (except Tom Bombadil), but they each resist, except for Gollum and Frodo.  Gollum because he is murderous to start with, and Frodo because he simply can't overcome the force of the ring he has carried so long.  This suggests that the adage "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is not Tolkein's view.

In Scott A. Davison's article, "Tolkien and the Nature of Evil," persuasively argues that evil is not an independent force in opposition as thought by Manichaeans, but merely the absence of good.  In that sense, TLotR isn't really a story of "good versus evil," it is a story of an effort to keep corruption at bay.  Though Davison doesn't make much of this observation, Tolkien makes shadows a stand in for evil.  This is true not just in TLotR, but in The Silmarillion, Tolkien's realm of the god-like Valar, is originally illuminated (as is all of the world) by two trees.  How this might be isn't explained, but one can't imagine that these would be specific spatial sources of light.  Instead, their presence would bring light to all the world from every angle, leaving no place for shadows.  It is only when the two trees are destroyed by Ungliant and Melkor that the Sun and Moon are created, illuminating the world, but still casting shadows.  Evil has entered the world and shadows come into being.

Aeon J. Skoble's article, "Virtue and Vice in The Lord of the Rings" is rather unique in the anthology.  The other articles in the anthology largely start with features that appear in the novel and go on to observe their philosophical import.  Skoble turns this on its head.  His article reads more like an introductory essay on ethics, particularly virtue ethics, with illustrations of his points taken from TLotR.  That is, he centers the philosophical ideas as opposed to elements of the novel.  If all of the articles were like this, the anthology would make an interesting text for an introductory Philosophy course (of course with the pre-requisite that students read TLotR.  As it is, the anthology might be better described as literary criticism appropriate to an English literature class.  

The final article, by John J. Davenport, entitled "Happy Endings and Religious Hope: The Lord of the Rings as an Epic Fairy Tale," is a real stand out. Davenport makes use of Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-stories" and other works by Tolkien to support Tolkien's claim that TLotR is "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work."  This has always been something that has escaped me.  Certainly, some elements of the novel can be seen as religious and specifically Catholic, but to say it is "fundamentally" so, seemed a stretch.  

Davenport claims that the essentially religious message of the work is that "evil cannot stand forever, that its misappropriation of divine power and right destroys itself in the end.  But this does not come about without our participation, our willingness to sacrifice, and our faith (beyond all rational hope) that our mortal efforts will be met with the ultimate response, and day will finally come again."  The "ultimate response" that Davenport refers to is what Tolkien calls a "eucatastrophe" -- a sudden "turning" at the end of fairy-stories that provides an "unexpected deliverance...experienced not as an achievement..., but rather a divine gift."  The resurrection of Christ is seen as the great eucatastrophe of the Christian faith, and the sudden unexpected appearance of Gollum at the Cracks of Doom is the great eucatastrophe of Middle-Earth.  This makes Tolkien's claim that his work is "fundamentally religious" somewhat more plausible.  Of course, one might also argue that despite how seemingly hopeless things are, the future is always essentially uncertain.  There's nothing necessarily religious about that. 

Other articles in the anthology certainly deserve reviews here, but as they are each short, I'll instead recommend picking up a library copy and sampling them at your leisure.  As you should expect, some will be weaker than others, but anyone interested in Tolkien and philosophy will find them entertaining.  

  

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell / J.R.R. Tolkien, trans. -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014

Several years ago, I heard a rumor that a translation by Tolkien of Beowulf was found in his papers and that an eminent Tolkien scholar was working on editing it for publication.  Later, I heard that the scholar had abandoned the task.  So I was very pleasantly surprised to find Tolkien's translation of Beowulf on sale at my campus bookstore, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher.  Tolkien's relationship to Beowulf and Beowulf scholarship is legendary.  In 1936, he published an influential study of the entitled, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."  More than anything, that study elevated the reputation of Beowulf to the preeminent literary status that it has today.  Prior to that, Beowulf was seen mostly as a hotch-potch of story fragments which W.P. Ker described as putting peripheral matters at the center and central matters at the periphery.  According to Tolkien, the tangential narratives and allusions to other histories and legends lent depth and context to the story and that the centrality of the monsters (Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon) and how they were treated by the author offered an important insight into the poem and its telling.  For example, the reference to Grendel as being of the race of Cain and the connection between the dragon and Satan showed that Beowulf was neither fully a pagan epic nor a Christian homily.  Instead, it was a retelling of an earlier pagan legend by a Christian author.  The author's Christian world view could not help but make him (or her?) include a Christian slant on the drama.

It is clear that Tolkien's understanding of Beowulf is first rate if not second to none and so his edition of the poem can not be ignored.  Tolkien was also the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and so his mastery of Old English verse is also of the first order.  At one time in his life he wrote a poem entitled The Fall of Arthur in the alliterative verse form of Old English.  This form is composed of verses made up of two phrases each usually made up of two stressed and two unstressed units of the form:  x / x / | x / x /.   The alliteration occurs when the third stressed unit is the same sound as the sound of the fist stressed unit and sometimes also the second unit.  For example: "the Geat prince went / for Grendel's mother" or "funeral fires / fumes of wood smoke."  Of course, every line in Old English meter is not slavishly fitted to these forms, but any attempt to capture the sound of the Old English poetry would tend to follow these patterns.  Tolkien, however, chose not to write his edition of Beowulf in verse.  Instead, the narrative is presented in prose.  This permits him to more easily capture the meaning of the poem since he is able to choose Modern English expressions that do not alliterate, but what is lost in poetry is gained in semantic accuracy.  At the same time Tolkien's rendition of the story is colored by his sense of drama.  His diction and word order make the work suitably archaic and often quite stirring.  Anyone with an appreciation for his prose will thoroughly enjoy his rendition.

In addition to the rendition of the poem itself, Christopher Tolkien has included a commentary on the text that was taken from Tolkien's lecture notes.  The commentary is nearly twice the length of the poem and this more than anything will provide the reader with deep insight into the poem and to the pagan times about which the poem is written.  For example, Tolkien explains the passage, "Leave here our warlike shields" with the annotation: "Note the prohibition of weapons or accoutrements of battle in the hall.  to walk in with spear and shield was like walking in nowadays with your hat on.  The basis of these rules was of course fear and prudence amid the ever-present dangers of an heroic age, but they were made part of the ritual, of good manners."  The annotation goes on further to point out that this custom was appropriate to a king's hall and that "It was death in Scandinavia to cause a brawl in a king's hall."

The presence of the commentary in the same volume as the rendition gives a reader three extremely attractive options:  (1)  Read the narrative strait through without reference to the commentary.  This allows you to best appreciate Tolkien's own literary techniques.  (2) Read the the commentary along with the narrative.  This provides you with a deep understanding of the story with Tolkien as your guide.  (3) Read the commentary alone.  This provides you with a fascinating study of Old English and the customs of pagan Northern Europe.  It's hard to decide which of these approaches is best.  Perhaps three readings of the work would be ideal.

Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Interpretation of Nagarjuna / Andrew P. Tuck -- N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990

Understanding an alien tradition poses enormous obstacles. Many concepts that one takes for granted from one's own tradition turn out to be culturally specific, even ones that seem so fundamental to one's understanding of a subject that we think that they surely must be universal. Nonetheless, if we are to gain a cosmopolitan understanding, we must do what we can to understand what falls outside of our established world views. Success is always partial and it requires long and arduous study or total immersion in the alien culture.

In Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship Andrew Tuck illustrates the changing fashions among Western scholars in their attempts to understand Indian Buddhist philosophy, particularly the views of Nagarjuna and the Madyamaka school that Nagarjuna is said to have founded. Tuck distinguishes three phases in the Western interpretation of Nagarjuna and the Madyamaka school: German idealism, Anglo-American analysis, and post-Wittgensteinian linguistic functionalism. Previously understood as little more than nihilism, serious study of the Madyamaka school did not begin until the 20th century. A landmark in this development was Fyodor Stcherbatsky's book Buddhist Logic which agreed on the illusory nature of the empirical world, but did not reject the reality of a transcendent world of the thing-in-itself. By this, Stcherbatsky advanced a distinctly Kantian conception of Buddhism which recognized the apparent duality of the phenomenal and the noumenal. The approach is further developed by T.R.V. Murti's The Central Philosophy of Buddhism.

As the idealist view of Nagarjuna was coming to maturity, Western philosophers were beginning to abandon idealism and speculative philosophy in general. Instead, the techniques of logical analysis of Anglo-American philosophy were gaining prominence and a number of Nagarjuna's Western interpreters were employing these techniques to understanding his work. According to Tuck, Richard Robinson is foremost in this movement. Given Nagarjuna's criticism of competing philosophical views and the nearly syllogistic passages in his works, it is no wonder that the techniques of the logician would be applied. During this period of interpretation, Nagarjuna's tetralemma [neither A, ~A, A&~A, nor ~(A&~A)] became the focus of study. Nagarjuna's primary project was taken to be refuting all competing philosophical positions, thus rendering all conceptions of "own being" meaningless. According to Robinson, Nagarjuna failed in this project, but in any case, the approach to Nagarjuna's work was analytic, not speculative.

The final phase of interpretation came after the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers, Nagarjuna's task was pursued via a careful examination of the function of language, not its mere logical relations. Here a pragmatic, soteriological enterprise was afoot. Nagarjuna was showing his contemproaries how the fly might escape the fly bottle.

Tuck does not endorse any of these readings of (or approaches to reading) Nagarjuna. He merely seeks to show how the philosophical dispositions of Western philosophers have influenced the understanding of Nagarjuna. His work is in its detail interesting, but the larger point seems trivial. He does, however, seem to imply a more significant point.  Beyond merely observing that interpretations of alien traditions necessarily are shaped by the assumptions of the interpreting culture, Tuck seems to suggest that while no prior cultural assumptions are better or worse than another, each can generate a new and interesting mixture of ideas that will illuminate and advance human understanding.

The Fall of Arthur / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Christopher Tolkien, ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

When most of us think of Britain's mythopoeic tradition, the legends of King Arthur and his knights come quickly to mind.  According to J.R.R. Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien found them "too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive," but Tolkien did enjoy them as a child.  His appreciation for them as an adult was great enough to move him to edit (with E.V. Gordon) a Middle English version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and later to translate the poem into modern English, retaining its alliterative verse form.  It is not clear exactly when, but roughly around this stage of his career, Tolkien also began writing an alliterative poem "in the Beowulf meter" (according to his friend R.W. Chambers)  entitled The Fall of Arthur.

The poem was never completed by Tolkien, but numerous manuscripts survived.  Much to our benefit, Tolkien's son Christopher has assembled the best of these verses into a striking version of the story of the death of Arthur.  Tolkien is a master of Britain's traditional poetic meter and "Norther" alliterative verse, having composed numerous works in this style, so it is a pleasure to read Christopher's edition of his father's work, and to see how Tolkien chose to tell a story often told, but often told out of the context of the time.  Tolkien's knowledge of the literature and history of medieval England makes him especially equipped to give us what seems to be an authentic version of legend.

Along with the poem itself, Christopher Tolkien provides us with three essays of his own.  The first is the most interesting.  It recounts various tellings of the events that are included in Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur, including those by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Mallory.  Christopher Tolkien ably puts his father's imaginative treatment of the story into the context of this tradition, allowing us to see what Tolkien retained from that tradition and what is new in his narrative.  Perhaps the most interesting addition that Tolkien brings to the legend is his treatment of Guinevere (or "Guinever" as Tolkien chooses to spell her name.)  While modern treatments of her character make her out to be a beautiful, but star-crossed, heroine, Tolkien's Guinever seems more akin to Lady MacBeth.  Possibly less sympathetic, Guinever seems a good deal more autonomous and powerful than the more popular Guinevere.

Christopher Tolkien's second essay seeks to draw connections between The Fall of Arthur and Tolkien's larger legendarium, The Silmarillion.  While this essay includes a good deal of interesting paragraphs and valuable insights, it is largely disconnected and confused.  One is never sure if there are any broader points to be made by the essay.  The third essay amounts to little more than a record of various alternative drafts of the version that Christopher Tolkien chose to make "canonical" as The Fall of Arthur.  We are provided with page upon page of alternate passages that serve little purpose than to let the reader know that Christopher Tolkien needed to make numerous editorial decision in creating the canonical version.  Given these alternate passages, one could, in principle, re-do the work of the editor and create a number of very different versions of Tolkien's work, but it is hard to imagine who would want to bother.

In all, The Fall of Arthur is a welcome addition to the compiled work of J.R.R. Tolkien, it illustrates Tolkien's poetic genius, and tempts one to further explore both Tolkien's other alliterative poems and the treatments by other authors of the Arthurian legends.    

Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age / Sven Birkerts -- Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994

In 1994, the Internet was mainly a text-based medium.  "GUIs" or graphic user interfaces were relatively uncommon.  The first major web browser "Mosaic Netscape 0.9" was not released until October of that year.  Still, the prospect of the ubiquitous use of the Internet to browse linked documents was being discussed with great excitement, at least within academic circles.  Luddites were hard to find.  For that reason alone, Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies now appears to be a remarkably prescient warning of the downside of our new device-obsessed society.   At the same time, many of his observations seem quaint.  Birkerts got the main picture right, but he can hardly be faulted for mistaking the details or not seeing just how far down the road to digital hypnosis we would traveled.

The first half of the book tells the back story.  Birkerts, in an early chapter, recounts how he became attracted to books and writing, including his attempts to become a novelist and how he ultimately discovered his aptitude for writing essays.  In any case, we learn early on that Beikerts is devoted to print books, reading, and writing.  He goes on to describe the phenomenology of deep reading or reading in which we become thoroughly immersed in the text.  He provides an account of how reading can be instrumental in "self-formation," how reading and interpreting texts is related to our life activities apart from reading, and how the activities of reading and writing are not so very different.

In the second part of the book, Birkerts explores the coming new world of digital reading and as you might guess, he greets it with apprehension.  Birkerts fears that the beneficial habits and frame of mind created by deep reading will be undermined by the new electronic media.  He predicts the erosion of language.  He writes that "the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century" are becoming "flattened by the requirements of communication over distances.  That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken.  Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing....Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial.  The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse."  It's hard to deny that his prediction has come to pass.  The 140 character twitter message has joined the 30 second sound byte to dominate much of our communication.  Worse yet, the cell phone text has returned us to the age of brief telegraphic wire messages, except everyone is able to send these messages hundreds of time a day. 

Birkerts fears that with the loss of physical books will undermine our sense of the past.  No longer will the past be represented to us in surviving artifacts, but it will be stored in databases "flattening" our historical perspective.  The extent to which university students are turning their backs on physical books is, indeed, striking.  Their work relies very significantly on texts that can be viewed online.  This is, perhaps, a product of the ready availability of electronic journal literature.  Not long ago, libraries had access only to a limited number of journals and student research relied significantly on books.  Now, back issues of journals are sold to libraries in extremely cost effective packages.  Money is made mostly on expensive access to recent issues.  This is a boon to humanities research, but Birkerts's point that our historical perspective is flattened seems credible, particularly when one views a pdf of an 80 year old journal article in contrast to an original paper version of it. 

Perhaps Birkerts's most worrying prediction is of "the waning of the private self."  He detects "a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual."  He writes, "for some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise....One day we will conduct our public and private lives within networks so dense, among so many channels of instantaneous information, that it will make almost no sense to speak of the differentiations of subjective individualism."  I'm not entirely convinced that we are losing the notion of subjective individualism.  Much of our social networks are designed to create at least an image of ourselves as individuals, but at the same time we are becoming conduits for memes that waft through the electronic social space; and if Birkerts's concern about "the waining of the private self" was really a concern about the waning of privacy itself, he could not have been more prescient.

The more quaint aspects of Birkerts's work appear in this latter half, where he describes Perseus 1.0 as the "hot new thing in the classics world." Perseus 1.0 was an early an interactive multimedia database for the Classics.  The "Perseus Project" is still going, but it has been overtaken by so many new and more sophisticated databases.  Still, Birkerts's "curmudgeonly" remarks about the use of such tools in education, particularly humanities education remain worth considering and continue to be discussed among teachers and researchers.  Birkerts also has chapters on hyperlinks and audio books.  The observations about how hyperlinks change the character of writing and reading are worthwhile; however, his prediction that audio books would supplant print books is obviously mistaken.

The third part of The Gutenberg Elegies laments the demise of literature and the educated reader.  My knowledge of literature is far too shallow to comment on his points, though they seem a tad overstated.  Regarding the disappearance of the educated reader, I suspect he has a point.  In decades past, reading had far less competition.  Now, finding an avid reader is rather difficult.  This is surely a function of the time we spend looking at text messages, screen-shots, and Youtube video clips, not to mention downloadable movies, audio files, and much more.  The ubiquity of cell phones means that people seldom find themselves separated from people with whom they would like to converse and so carrying around a pocket sized paperback to fill the odd empty 20 minutes isn't something we do.

All in all, The Gutenberg Elegies is becoming (or has become) a classic, early work in the expanding debate over the social and personal consequences of our new digital culture.  Any one interested in this debate would do well to read it.

Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings / Matthew Dickerson -- Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2003

A common criticism of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is that it glorifies war and violence.  It is not hard to draw this conclusion in light of the numerous battle scenes depicted in the work and the military heroism of many of its main characters.  According to Matthew Dickerson, such a reading is superficial and a more discerning reader will see exactly the reverse.  War and violence are not glorified.  They are portrayed as the horrible acts of evil forces.  The wisest of the characters are repelled by war and violence and only resort to it out of desperate necessity.

Central to Dickerson's argument is an examination of the words, actions, and motivations of Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, Frodo, and Faramir.  Dickerson rightly observes that the most thoughtful and insightful commentary about war and violence come from these "wisest" characters.  Each exhibits a deep reluctance to engage in violence and in the case of Gandalf, Faramir, and Frodo, the characters overtly recognize the moral  value of their adversaries. Gandalf is noted as saying, "Many that live deserve death.  And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends."  Gandalf pities Sauron's slaves, Faramir regrets the death of a man deceived by Sauron to fight against Gondor, and Frodo shows mercy, time again, to Gollum.

One of the most telling passages in condemnation of war comes from Faramir:  "War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory.  I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Numenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.  Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise."  And against violence, Frodo is noted as saying, "Fight?" said Frodo.  "Well I suppose it may come to that.  But remember: there is to be no slaying of hobbits, not even if they have gone over to the other side.  Really gone over, I mean; not just obeying ruffians' orders because they are frightened....And nobody is to be killed at all, if it can be helped.  Keep your tempers and hold your hands to the last possible moment!"

One might wonder if these statements by characters that are certainly portrayed as wise by Tolkien are enough to contradict the general martial tone of much of the story, but Dickerson does an admirable job revealing nuances in the story and its telling that strengthen his conclusions.  After reading Following Gandalf one understands how The Lord of the Rings became so popular among the anti-war college students of the 1960s and 1970s.   War was upon us.  What was morally significant was how we dealt with it.

There is much more in Following Gandalf that deserves attention:  the importance of moral victory as opposed to military victory, mediation on freedom and creativity, power, hope and despair, and the Christian elements in the work.  There is, however, at least one current in Tolkien's work that is overlooked (or at least under-examined and that is what Tolkien thought of as the a great virtue of Northern European peoples: the willingness to remain true to one's duty in the face of certain defeat.  Certainly this virtue is most clearly revealed in times of war, but it is by no means inapplicable in other circumstances.  So too the nearly pacifist wisdom of many of Tolkien's characters hold lessons for us beyond the obvious circumstances of the novel.

The Lost Road and Other Writings / J.R.R. Tolkien -- New York: Ballantine Books, 1996

Following J.R.R. Tolkien's death, his son Christopher Tolkien began combing through Tolkien's papers to provide the world with posthumous works much in demand. Among the material the Christopher published is the twelve-volume series The History of Middle-earth. Volume Five The Lost Road and Other Writings is among the most important of the series. In it, we find versions of the stories that serve as the backdrop for The Hobbit and especially The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, the versions in Volume Five were written just before the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Consequently, they give us the clearest picture of Tolkien's legendarium as it bears on understanding The Lord of the Rings.

The first part of the work details the history of Numenor and its fall. Numenor was an island created for the race of men who fought with their half-kin the elves in the epic battle against Morgoth. Ultimately, the Numenoreans were seduced by Saron into waging war against the Valar, the gods who inhabited the forbidden Western land of Valinor. Upon the defeat of the Numenoreans, the island of Numenor was submerged into the ocean, with only a remnant of the race (loyal to the gods) escaping to Middle-earth. With the destruction of Numenor, the Valar reshaped the planet -- Arda -- such that it was now impossible for mortals to travel "the road" to the forbidden shores of Valinor, forever separating the men Middle-earth from alinor; hence, the story of "the lost road."

The Lost Road itself was an attempt by Tolkien to write a time travel story in which the travelers found their way back to Numenor through the vehicle of dreaming. The Lost Road was never completed, though Tolkien again attempted the story in a later work known as The Notion Club Papers. The Notion Club Papers can be found in Volume Nine of The History of Middle-earth -- Sauron Defeated.

Time travel as conceived in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers bears an interesting relationship to the work that Tolkien was engaged in as a philologist. Reconstructing dead, prehistoric languages from the remnants of descendant historical languages and thereby recreating the prehistoric culture is at least as much an art as a science. It inevitably involves creativity and imagination which are most at liberty in our dreams. How much Tolkien saw his work as a philologist as traveling through time is an open question, but The Lost Road is strong evidence that this is how he conceived of it.

Part two of Volume Five reaches even further back in the history of Arda, providing a description of its creation, annals of the world before the fall of Morgoth, and a version of the Quenta Silmarillion which tells the history of elves from their origins to the fall of their arch enemy, Morgoth. It also includes a version of The Llammas, a treatise on the history of the languages of the people of Arda.

Much of the material in Volume Five appears in earlier published work by Tolkien, particularly The Silmarillion. After each section by Tolkien, Christorpher makes an heroic effort to describe how the present version differs from other versions, but the level of detail is too great for the casual reader to appreciate the distinctions. Setting the texts side by side and using Christopher's notes as a guide might yield valuable insight into the transformation of Tolkien's creation, but in the end, it would probably only be of interest to the most dedicated Tolkien scholar. Nonetheless, Tolkien's narative, given to us in The Lost Road and Other Writings will reward anyone who appreciates Tolkien's work.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century / T.A. Shippey -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001

A couple weeks ago, I read The Hobbit, again. This was the first time I had done so after reading Tom Shippey's masterful work, The Road to Middle Earth. (See my review in this blog -- Aug. 22, 2009.) Shippey's analysis of Biblo Baggins rang true when I read The Road, but upon reading The Hobbit, I found it spot on. Shippey argues that Bilbo Baggins functions to connect the modern reader to the mythical, magical world of Middle Earth. Bilbo is in essence a respectable 19th century bourgeois man swept away on an adventure among a wizard, dwarves, elves, and a dragon, among other strange creatures. Without Bilbo, the modern reader would find the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and the Lonely Mountain too alien to appreciate. It would be much like dropping into Wonderland without Alice to serve as the reader's anchor.

My appreciation for Shippey's analysis in The Road prompted me to another of his works, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, at least the section on The Hobbit. Sadly, Tolkien: Author covers very little that is not in The Road, but it was enjoyable enough that I continued beyond the chapter on The Hobbit and ended up reading the whole of the book. In retrospect, I wish I had read Shippey's two works in reverse order. Tolkien: Author provides a clearer and perhaps fuller analysis of the themes in Tolkien's main works, while The Road delves deep into the mythopoeic and philological roots of Middle Earth.

The themes Shippey explores in Tolkien: Author include Tolkien's maps, evil, eucatastrophy, allegory, and of course the way in which hobbits function to connect the reader to Middle Earth. Perhaps the most interesting insight is Shippey's application of Northrop Frye's distinctions among literary modes. Frye distinguishes five literary modes: myth, romance, high mimesis, low mimesis, and irony. Shippey identifies each mode in the Tolkien's work. This goes a long way in explaining the richness of the text and illustrating Tolkien's remarkable skill in integrating them all in a single story.

Tolkien's skill however was not born full-fledged with his first works. There is a stronge, even jarring, contrast between the irony and low mimesis of Bilbo Baggins and the romance and myth of the wood elves, Smaug the dragon, and Beorn the shape shifter in The Hobbit, while the various modes appearing in The Lord of the Rings are smoothly integrated. Notably, the lower literary modes are completely absent in Tolkien's Silmarillian works.

Shippey's chapter on Tolkien's followers and critics is among the most enjoyable chapters. Here we read criticism from the literati that so strikingly misunderstand what is at work in Tolkien's stories that it leaves you wondering if they had read anything written before the 18th century. Regarding Tolkien's followers, Shippey's account makes them all seem like dismal amateurs in comparison Tolkien's masterful understanding of the genre. Both assessments are probably close to the mark.

Forced to choose, I would recommend The Road to Middle Earth over Tolkien: Author of the Century. The former is perhaps the best work on Tolkien written. The latter is merely excellent.

The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology / Tom Shippey -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

Much has been written about the roots of the mythology created by Tolkien in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Some of it is insightful -- some of it is superficial. Tom Shippey's work The Road to Middle-Earth lies on the far end of the insightful side of the spectrum. Shippey, was briefly a personal acquaintance of Tolkien. He is a medieval scholar in his own right, having held the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds University (formerly held by Tolkien himself) and the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University in Missouri. His Road to Middle-Earth was first published in 1982, with a second edition in 1992, and a revised and expanded edition in 2003. The subsequent editions are informed by Tolkien's posthumous publications, particularly, the twelve volume set The History of Middle-Earth.

The most important theme in Shippey's work is how philology informed Tolkien's work. Clearly, Tolkien gave enormous attention to the words he chose in all he wrote. His work was deeply informed by his understanding of Old English, Old Norse, and other Northern European medieval languages. Shippey traces a huge number of connections between these languages and Tolkien's writing, and he provides valuable explanations of the significance of specific word choices and invented names to Tolkien's themes and ideas. Shippey's expert analysis reveals layer upon layer of meaning.

Shippey locates Tolkien's legendarium within the myths and legends of Northern Europe in the same way that a philologist might postulate unrecorded words in long dead languages. For example, based on specific observable rules for word relations between languages, the words for dwarves -- "dweorh" (Old English), "dvergr" (Old Norse), and "twerg" (High German) -- allow philologists to postulate "*dvairgs" in Gothic. They may do this despite the absence of any record of the word for dwarves in Gothic. In writing these inferred words, philologists normally precede them with an asterisk, e.g., *dvairgs, to distinguish it from a recorded word.

According to Shippey, philologist, including Tolkien, came to accept this methodology, and to infer -- not just words -- but the realities to which they were attached. He writes, "The whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call '*-' or 'asterisk-reality', that which no longer existed but could with 100 percent certainty be inferred." Furthermore, this methodology encouraged philologists to blur the distinction between historical discovery and creative construction.

Shippey indicates that Tolkien was particular prone to this. Applied to literature, Tolkien called this technique "Sub-Creation." The resulting story lies somewhere between historical reality and mere fiction. Sub-Creation has a depth of meaning and authenticity that reaches beyond the creative product of a single author relying on his or her individual imagination. Shippey's account does much to explain the sense that many Tolkien fans have that Middle-Earth exists on the same plane as the Garden of Eden, Gilgamesh's Cedars of Lebanon, and Asgard of the Aesir. It also explains what Tolkien meant when he wrote that he wanted to create a mythology for England. Middle-Earth is essentially the *Mythology of England.

Despite the strength of Shippey's analysis, one is sometimes left with the feeling that Shippey imputes more than was intended by Tolkien. As a medieval scholar well-equipped with the tools of philology, it would be easy for Shippey to interpret accidental elements in Tolkien's work as part of Tolkien's conscious Sub-Creation; however, even if this is true, it only indicates the extent to which Tolkien was living and breathing the combined mythologies that form the building blocks of Middle-Earth.

The Road to Middle-Earth is loaded with many more insights than I have described here. It is a tour de force of Tolkien scholarship and deserves to be read by every Tolkien fan.

Beowulf and the Critics / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Michael D.C. Drout, ed. -- Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002.

In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien gave a lecture to the British Academy entitled, "Beowulf: Monsters and the Critics." It completely transformed scholarship related to Beowulf. The paper, published in the following year, was based on a longer work, "Beowulf and the Critics" that would not see publication for 66 years. The volume in which we receive it includes two versions of "Beowulf and the Critics," labeled "A" and "B" by the editor Michael Drout. According to Drout, comparing both versions to Tolkien's British Academy lecture allows us "a glimpse into the workings of a great mind engaged in a struggle with a complex problem." He also notes that the differences between the versions are too great "to redact some kind of 'best text.'" Be that as it may, I chose to read only the longer B version of the work and skip Drout's copious notes that make up half the volume. Much to my loss, I'm certain, but too many other books remain unread for me to spend the time that Drout's work deserves.

Tolkien's essay (or short book) takes to task the literary critics and historians who had to that time dominated Beowulf scholarship. Literary critics criticized the poem for its disorganization, disproportion, and adolescent focus on the monsters: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. It was deemed to be a hodge-podge of pre-Christian folklore, with the most interesting parts mentioned, not in the main story line, but in passing and in narrative tangents. Furthermore, the integrity of the poem was seen to be compromised by the additions of Christian passages tacked on by an embarrassed Christian compiler. Historians merely neglected the poetic features of the work to focus on the clues it gave to life in the early Middle Ages in Northern Europe.

Tolkien found all of these critiques without merit. For Tolkien, the author of Beowulf was a poet of the caliber of Homer or Virgil. Beowulf provides us with one of the best literary celebrations of the Northern European medieval ethic. It is a clear expression of the Northern European hero, seeking glory in this world by vanquishing evil, with a commitment to doing so no matter the cost to himself. Critics saw the main story to be Beowulf's fight with Grendel. The fights with Grendel's mother and the dragon were merely redundant. Against this, Tolkien claims that the final contest with the dragon is an vital component of the story. Without it, the work would fail to fulfill its poetic purpose. It also serves as a necessary counter-weight to earlier struggles.

On Tolkien's view, the story begins with a young man risking all for fame and glory in a noble effort to free a beleaguered people from an devastating scourge -- Grendel. Doing so, he unexpectedly finds himself faced with the even greater task of defending his wards against an even greater terror -- Grendel's mother. That he does not flinch from his duty is an expression both of his desire for glory and his commitment to duty. The final struggle comes to Beowulf fifty years later when he is no longer the indomitable young hero of Hrothgar's hall. Nonetheless, he takes up sword and shield to face the dragon. His doom is evident, but for the hero of Northern lore, failure always eventually comes. What is important is how we behave in the face of it.

Tolkien also makes a strong case against reading the Christian passages as an alien addition to the poem. Instead, Tolkien concludes that the poem was written by a Christian during a time in which paganism was still a going concern in England and that the syncretism of pagan and Christian elements is a natural expression of the Christian author who has not yet discarded his sympathies for the pagan ethic.

Tolkien's reading of Beowulf is compelling, but what is more interesting is what this reading reveals about Tolkien. In many ways, Tolkien is describing himself when he writes of the author of Beowulf. Despite Tolkien's staunch commitment to Catholicism, he had great sympathy for the pre-Christian pagan ethic, and in all of his work, he found ways to coherently integrate both sensibilities into his work. It also is interesting to note that he would have to defend his own writing against critics in the same way that he defended the Beowulf author. He, too, would be attacked for an adolescent fascination with fantasy and monsters.

Besides Tolkien's case for the Beowulf author, "Beowulf and the Critics" is a rich vein of Tolkien's biting wit. His criticism of the critics is chocked full of laugh-out-loud put downs. Some of them probably unfair, but no less entertaining for that. Beowulf and the Critics is a fine work. Someday, I'll return to read the A version and Drout's copious notes and I'm sure it'll be equally worthwhile.