Articles
Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War
When J.R.R. Tolkien arrived at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1911, there was scant sign he was anything more than a gifted young man chasing a degree amid a host of sociable distractions. When he left in 1915, the world had gone to war and he had begun the invention of Middle-earth. This is the story of Tolkien the Oxford undergraduate. Read more...
Michael Cox and The Meaning of Night
Michael Cox, whose neo-Victorian thriller The Meaning of Night I reviewed for the Evening Standard, had previously copy-edited my Tolkien and the Great War. Just as he started work on my typescript in June 2003, Michael (photo: Jerry Bauer) had to undergo a serious operation. All I knew was he had some kind of cancer. Read more...
Tolkien’s gift
First published in the Evening Standard to mark the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Return of the King and the final of the BBC's Big Read, in which The Lord of the Rings was named Britain's best-loved book.
The Lord of the Rings must be one of the most comprehensively dismissed books ever written. But Tolkien’s story has outlived one generation of critics and will outlive another. Like Homer’s Odyssey, it is for all time. Why? Because it bestrides the chasm between the ancient world and ourselves. His Middle-earth and the modern world are twins, born at the same time, in the First World War. Read more...
Tolkien fantasy was born in the trenches
In an article originally published in the Evening Standard just after the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, here I sketch some of the ideas underlying Tolkien and the Great War, was which I was then writing. Read more...
Review: The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
The first Tolkien epic not to be set in the world of The Lord of the Rings or some other version of Faërie, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún tells the story of Germanic epic’s greatest dragonslayer and his doomed kindred. It is a daunting, uncompromising affair, but reveals at last a vital missing link with the Northern myths and legends that famously helped inspire Middle-earth. Read more...
Review: The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner
As The Ring of Words demonstrates, J.R.R. Tolkien’s mode of creativity is the close artistic equivalent to the philosophy and technique behind the OED, and the range, detail, depth and scale of his imaginative enterprise follows inevitably.. Read more...
Review: J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (Drout) and J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (Scull and Hammond)
Tolkien encyclopedias have been around for years, detailing his imagined world but not treating his books as literature. As a sign of the coming of age of Tolkien studies, two substantial works of reference now abundantly make up for this lack. Read more...
Review: Smith of Wootton Major by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Verlyn Flieger
When Tolkien set about writing an introduction to one of George MacDonald's fairy-tales, he quickly realised he didn’t much like MacDonald’s moral allegory, and he would rather make his points about fairy-tales by creating one himself. He never finished the introduction. Instead, we have Smith of Wootton Major: a counter-story to cure us of the notion that fairy-tales are only for children. Read more...
See also my checklists and links to further journalism, book reviews and writings on Tolkien.
