Editors’ Introduction

This is the ninth issue of Tolkien Studies, the first refereed journal
solely devoted to the scholarly study of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As
editors, our goal is to publish excellent scholarship on Tolkien as well
as to gather useful research information, reviews, notes, documents,
and bibliographical material.
All articles have been subject to anonymous, external review in ad-
dition to receiving a positive judgment by the Editors. In the cases of
articles by individuals associated with the journal in any way, each ar-
ticle had to receive at least two positive evaluations from two different
outside reviewers. Reviewer comments were anonymously conveyed to
the authors of the articles. The Editors agreed to be bound by the
recommendations of the outside referees. Although they are solicited
and edited by the editors, book reviews represent the judgments of the
individual reviewers, not Tolkien Studies.
With this issue Tolkien Studies bids farewell to Douglas A. Anderson,
one of the founding editors of the journal. Since 2001 Doug has been
co-editor of Tolkien Studies, taking special responsibility for Book Re-
views and Book Notes, but keeping his keen eye on every aspect of the
journal, making innumerable corrections and additions from his vast
knowledge of Tolkien and his works, and employing his sound schol-
arly judgment on matters great and small. He will be missed, and we
wish him well with all his future endeavors, including his own publish-
ing imprint, Nodens Books.
Starting with our next issue (Tolkien Studies X), David Bratman
will be Book Review editor and co-editor of Tolkien Studies, and Merlin
­DeTardo will be taking over the annual Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies.
Michael D. C. Drout
Verlyn Flieger
Notes on Submissions

Tolkien Studies seeks works of scholarly quality and depth. Substan-

tial essays and shorter, “Notes and Documents” pieces are both wel-
come.
Submissions should be double-spaced throughout and use par-
enthetical citations in the (Author page) form. A Works Cited page
should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. All citations to
Tolkien’s works should follow the “Conventions and Abbreviations” of
Tolkien Studies.
Self-addressed, stamped envelopes should accompany all corre-
spondence unless the author wishes to communicate via email and

v
In Memoriam

Kathleen E. Dubs (1944 - 2011) was a member of the humani-

ties faculty at  Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and a member of
the Hungarian Tolkien Society. Her courses included medieval litera-
ture and Old and Middle English, and her lectures on Tolkien revived
interest in him in academic circles. She contributed the entry on For-
tune and Fate to the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, and with Janka Kas-
cáková edited the collection Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World
of J.R.R. Tolkien, reviewed in this volume of Tolkien Studies.

Conventions and Abbreviations

Because there are so many editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings, citations will be by book and chapter as well as by page-number
(referenced to the editions listed below). Thus a citation from The
Fellowship of the Ring, book two, chapter four, page 318 is written (FR,
II, iv, 318). References to the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings are
abbreviated by Appendix, Section and subsection. Thus subsection iii
of section I of Appendix A is written (RK, Appendix A, I, iii, 321).
The “Silmarillion” indicates the body of stories and poems developed
over many years by Tolkien; The Silmarillion indicates the volume first
published in 1977.

Abbreviations

B&C Beowulf and the Critics. Ed. Michael D. C. Drout. Tempe,

AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,
2002. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 248.
Bombadil The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.
CH The Children of Húrin [title as on title page:] Narn i Chîn
Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin. Ed. Christopher
Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2007; Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 2007.
FG Farmer Giles of Ham. Ed. Christina Scull and Wayne G.
Hammond. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

vii
FR The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Un-
win, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Second edi-
tion, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1987.
H The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937. Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Annotated Hobbit. Ed.
Douglas A. Anderson. Second edition, revised. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Jewels The War of the Jewels. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Lays The Lays of Beleriand. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Letters The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with
the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: George
Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Lost Road The Lost Road and Other Writings. Ed. Christopher Tolk-
ien. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1987.
Lost Tales I The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1984.
Lost Tales II The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin, 1984.
MC The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christo-
pher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983;
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Morgoth Morgoth’s Ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Harp-
erCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
OFS Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Extended Edition. Ed. Verlyn Flieg-
er and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins,
2008.
Peoples The Peoples of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Lon-
don: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
RK The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin
1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Second edition,

viii
 revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
S The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1977. Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin, 1977. Second edition. London:HarperCollins, 1999;
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Sauron Sauron Defeated. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Harp-
erCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
SG The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. Ed Christopher Tolkien.
London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Har-
court, 2009
Shadow The Return of the Shadow. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Lon-
don: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Shaping The Shaping of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1986.
SWM Smith of Wootton Major: Extended Edition. Ed. Verlyn Flieg-
er. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
TL Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books, 1964; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Expanded as Tree and Leaf, in-
cluding the Poem Mythpoeia [and] The Homecoming of Beorht-
noth Beorhthelm’s Son. London: HarperCollins, 2001.
TT The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954;
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Second edition, revised
impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Treason The Treason of Isengard. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
UT Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. Ed. Christo-
pher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
War The War of the Ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

ix
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma
Peter Grybauskas

“Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen

carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leop-
ard was seeking at that altitude.”
—Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (39)

I n January 1945, near the end of World War II and about midway
through the long gestation period of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.
Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher describing a literary quandary in
relation to two different emotions:
one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty in
evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past (best
expressed by Gandalf’s words about the Palantir); and the
other the more ‘ordinary’ emotion, triumph, pathos, trag-
edy of the characters. That I am learning to do, as I get to
know my people, but it is not really so near my heart, and
is forced on me by the fundamental literary dilemma. A
story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the un-
told stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by
Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless un-
told stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed,
distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached—or if
so only to become ‘near trees’ (unless in Paradise or N’s
Parish). (Letters 110)
The paradox of the untold story, and Tolkien’s efforts to resolve it,
play a pivotal role not just in The Lord of the Rings, but throughout
his entire legendarium. Vladimir Brljak has recently championed the
importance of this letter, asserting that “how to tell the untold … was
Tolkien’s fundamental literary dilemma,” and arguing that Tolkien’s so-
lution is found in the “metafictional ‘machinery’” of his stories—the
mediating conceit that the tales are derived from layered translations
and redactions of wholly vanished source texts—which allows for their
“telling and untelling…in the same breath” (19). In spite of the impor-
tance of this framework, the heart of Tolkien’s solution is found in the
stories themselves, in the narrative device which grants what Tolkien
called “unexplained vistas.”
With a nod to the letter, I would call this device the “untold tale,”
and count among its ranks the gaps, enigmas, allusions, ellipses, and

1
 Peter Grybauskas

loose ends that pepper Tolkien’s narratives. In his analysis of the

centrality of this correspondence, Brljak overlooks the two examples
given to help illustrate the “heart-racking sense” of untold stories—
”Gandalf’s words about the Palantir” and the name “Celebrimbor.”
These references offer a clue to Tolkien’s solution; indeed they are
themselves instances of it. In spite of his attention to minutiae, Tolkien
understood when to check his pen and create space for untold tales. In
this paper, I hope to clarify how he exploits his paradox of the untold
story by developing a system of narrative withholding into a core ele-
ment of his prose.
The study of Tolkien’s creation of narrative depth is not, of course,
new; other scholars have contributed substantially to our understand-
ing of both its roots and function. In his two book-length studies of
Tolkien’s work, Tom Shippey explores the author’s creation of Middle-
earth from a philological perspective, as the reconstruction of an “as-
terisk-reality” largely derived from the legends of Northern Europe.1
According to Shippey, Tolkien “took fragments of ancient literature,
expanded on their intensely suggestive hints of further meaning, and
made them into coherent and consistent narrative (all the things
which the old poems had failed, or never bothered, to do)” (Author
35). But, as the letter to his son suggests, of equal weight was a differ-
ent kind of impulse, one which above all sought to preserve the sense
of untold stories, for Tolkien understood that reconstructing coherent
and consistent narratives out of such fragments risked destroying the
very appeal of these nebulous legends in the first place.
Though he treats the romance of untold stories primarily as the in-
spirational spark to reconstruct lost narratives, Shippey acknowledges
the opposing force at work, at times touching on it to great effect:
as in his discussion of “peripheral suggestion” and the crucial obser-
vation that “more often stories are not told” in The Lord of the Rings
(Road 110).2 Tolkien’s ability to suggest narrative depth, Shippey dem-
onstrates, owes a debt to the inspirational sources as well: “the trick is
an old one, and Tolkien learned it like so much else from his ancient
sources, Beowulf and the poem of Sir Gawain, but it continues to work”
(Author 49). He also hits the mark in highlighting the importance of
Tolkien’s claim that “to go there is to destroy the magic, unless new un-
attainable vistas are again revealed,” though I argue that this is a more
far-reaching concern, an essential principle behind his work, not just
a localized challenge in presenting The Silmarillion (Letters 333; Road
230, 310). Thus I believe that Shippey underestimates the significant
presence of untold tales in texts outside of The Lord of the Rings, though
he is right not to concede to Christopher Tolkien so easily the notion

2
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

that depth was a major preoccupation of Tolkien’s in bringing The Sil-

marillion to light.3
Depth created by the intertextual relationship between The Lord of
the Rings and The Silmarillion (and other texts or pseudo-texts) is the
subject Gergely Nagy explores in “The great chain of reading: (inter-)
textual relations and the technique of mythopoesis in the Túrin story”
(Chance 239–258). In his analysis of the various Túrin stories and allu-
sions throughout the legendarium, Nagy examines the “mythopoeic”
effect of this depth and begins to untangle the many layers involved.
With reference to Beowulf and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, he draws dis-
tinctions between the invocation of stories and the invocation of texts,
and calls to attention the difference between “genuine” and “content-
less” allusions (Chance 242). However, Nagy’s focus remains chiefly on
the interaction between diverse texts—only one important aspect of
untold tales—over the more immediate element present in the indi-
vidual text that is the subject of this paper.
The recent news of Tolkien’s nomination and subsequent rejec-
tion for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 brings to the forefront
once more the arguments over Tolkien’s literary merits.4 For some,
Tolkien’s rejection by the Swedish committee validates the common
cry (here voiced by Salman Rushdie in a review of Peter Jackson’s The
Two Towers) that, however enjoyable the story, “nobody ever read Tolk-
ien for the writing.”5 Detractors of Tolkien’s prose cite various weak
points, several of which stem from the notion that his great strength in
detailing Middle-earth is by some literary standards a kind of Achilles’
heel; thus the admiration for the clarity of Tolkien’s vision and world-
building, mixed with complaints about the dullness, density—even tur-
gidity—of his prose.
In fact, the author himself was cognizant of the dangers of bloated
prose and on more than one occasion expressed doubts about his hab-
it of over-elaboration. In a letter written to Naomi Mitchison in April
1954, just prior to the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien
probes the curious tension in his work between a desire for exhaustive
detail and what he came to understand as an equally important need
to suppress it:
There is of course a clash between ‘literary’ technique, and
the fascination of elaborating in detail an imaginary mythi-
cal Age…. As a story, I think it is good that there should be
a lot of things unexplained (especially if an explanation
actually exists); and I have perhaps from this point of view
erred in trying to explain too much, and give too much
past history. Many readers have, for instance, rather stuck

3
 Peter Grybauskas

at the Council of Elrond. And even in a mythical Age there

must be some enigmas, as there always are (Letters 174).
Some months later, Tolkien again expressed an awareness of the
problem. Grumbling to Rayner Unwin over the appendices he had
promised to include with The Return of the King, the self-confessed “ped-
ant” (Letters 372) admitted that, though such indulgence in ancillary
detail was for him in fact “fatally attractive,” he was “not … at all sure
that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is re-
ally good” (Letters 210). In addition, Tolkien went on, echoing his ear-
lier statement to Ms. Mitchison on the virtues of the unexplained and
enigmatic, readers “who enjoy the book as an ‘heroic romance’ only,
and find ‘unexplained vistas’ part of the literary effect, will neglect
the appendices, very properly.” The self-critical tone of these remarks
highlights his sensitivity toward this issue. However, it should not be
taken as mere regret over lost opportunities in The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien was capable of reining in his tendency toward over-elaboration
to great effect, as the countless untold tales which lurk (but hide from
plain sight) on the borders of his narratives—both before and after
The Lord of the Rings—can attest. With the twofold aim of understand-
ing the untold tale as a core element of Tolkien’s legendarium and
proposing some categorical guidelines for its further study, let us first
take a closer look at the two examples Tolkien offers in his letter to
Christopher cited above.
“Gandalf’s words about the Palantir”
It is difficult to determine precisely which words Tolkien is refer-
ring to, as the subject of the palantíri—the seven Seeing Stones—is
broached quite often by the wizard once he has discovered Saruman’s
use of one of the Stones at Orthanc. There is also the added compli-
cation that Tolkien’s letter to Christopher refers to drafts of the text
sent via airmail—it does not necessarily reflect the published text. Still,
keeping in mind that the words are said at least to evoke an elegiac
“heart-racking sense of the vanished past,” it is Gandalf’s conversation
with Pippin in Book III: “The Palantír” that seems to me the best fit.
Unfortunately, Christopher Tolkien makes no mention of that particu-
lar letter from his father in his notes on the evolution of the chapter in
The War of the Ring. He does, however, include some alternate versions
of Gandalf’s words to Pippin that differ somewhat from the published
text and are worth examining as further demonstrations of the range
of effect Tolkien produces through untold tales.
While most of what carries an elegiac tone in the conversation be-
tween Gandalf and Pippin is preserved in the final form of the text,
Gandalf’s rumination in one draft about the lost location of two of the

4
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

Stones— “I do not know where, for no rhyme says. Maybe they were at
Fornost, and with Kirdan at Mithlond in the Gulf of Lune where the
grey ships lie” (War 77)—is excised from the final edition. The full
force of the remote fictive past is delivered in not-so-subtle terms; the
mystery of the stones’ locations is explicitly untold—”no rhyme says.”
Another wrinkle of interest is introduced by the use of dialogue over
plain narrative description, although from the perspective of a lore-
master such as Gandalf, the words bear added significance—a sort of
finality perhaps rivaling that of omniscient narration. If Gandalf says
that there are no rhymes to remember the whereabouts of the stones,
the reader has little difficulty accepting this as fact. The wizard’s wist-
ful, hypothetical “maybe” and the names of distant lands and charac-
ters that readers would have little knowledge of contribute also to the
sense of loss, wonder, and sadness.6
What Tolkien ultimately decides to include of Gandalf’s words in
published form maintains the elegiac tone of the drafts while evoking
the sublime7 as well. The scene weaves in references to his wider body
of myth while impressing on readers Gandalf’s extensive, yet ultimately
limited knowledge. The discussion of the palantír begins with Gandalf
muttering “Rhymes of Lore” to himself as he and Pippin ride toward
Minas Tirith. The rhyme Pippin overhears ends with “Seven stars and
seven stones / And one white tree” (TT, III, xi, 202). Songs and poems
are often used throughout Tolkien’s narrative to convey a sense of oral
history and of depth—verses like the Rhymes of Lore suggest layers of
prior history and legend, preserved fragments.8 The remote appeal of
the Rhyme catches Pippin’s attention, prompting his inquiries about
the origins of the Palantír. Gandalf’s reply exemplifies the emotion
Tolkien considered closest to his heart, and is the most reasonable
candidate for the vague reference to “Gandalf’s words” in the letter
to his son. The wizard tells Pippin, “The Noldor made [the palantíri].
Fëanor himself, maybe, wrought them, in days so long ago that the
time cannot be measured in years” (TT, III, xi, 203). Whether or not
we are familiar with the legendary craftsman, Gandalf’s words leave us
with a powerful sense of a measureless abyss of time.
This is again the impression when Gandalf later “sighed and fell si-
lent” after expressing his longing to gaze into the Stone, “to look across
the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the
unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the
White Tree and the Golden were in flower” (TT, III, xi, 204). It is a poi-
gnant image of longing and regret, though we might understand little
of what Gandalf says, and its beauty and sadness are only heightened
by the fact that the time is irretrievably lost—even Gandalf, sage and
scholar, finds the work of Fëanor almost “unimaginable.” It should be

5
 Peter Grybauskas

noted that much of the history of Fëanor, at least, is recounted in The

Silmarillion, thus setting this episode somewhat apart from the many
completely “ungrounded” untold tales. Yet even if we have had the
privilege of reading The Silmarillion (those reading prior to 1977 cer-
tainly had no such recourse), the element of confusion is only slightly
effaced; Gandalf is justified in expressing uncertainty about the origins
of the stones, as Fëanor is not explicitly linked to them in any other
writings. The wizard’s words, as Tolkien rightly indicates in the letter
to Christopher, grant the reader a brief glimpse of the vanished past,
at once revealing and baffling.
“Celebrimbor”
The untold story of another legendary Elvish smith is the subject
of Tolkien’s second example. If his reference to the palantír was some-
what vague, Celebrimbor proves even more troublesome. Although a
renowned craftsman and in fact the maker of the Three Elven Rings
of Power (a feat of obvious import to the events of the Third Age), Ce-
lebrimbor is mentioned only three times in all The Lord of the Rings. We
know he is the “maker of the Three” and that he wrote the “signs” on
the door to the entrance of Moria, but little else (FR, II, ii, 255; FR, II,
iv, 318). It seems an oversight that so little is said of the smith who had
such an important hand in the events leading up to what transpires in
The Lord of the Rings, but this is precisely Tolkien’s point in the letter;
the name alone imparts a sense of untold stories, as the deeds of Ce-
lebrimbor are almost entirely obscured in the fictional past. What little
that remains, however, is shaped for maximum literary effect.
During “The Council of Elrond,” a chapter so densely weighted
with historical revelation that Tolkien himself expressed some misgiv-
ings, the history concerning Celebrimbor at least is delivered in a man-
ner which showcases the importance of the paradox of the untold story
in Tolkien’s work. As the Council progresses, we are tantalized by the
thought of “Elrond in his clear voice” telling the full tale of the history
of the Rings, but such dialogue is withheld in favor of a kind of terse
summation by the narrator, dashing any hopes of a thorough account.
But Celebrimbor was aware of [Sauron], and hid the
Three which he had made; and there was war, and the land
was laid to waste, and the gate of Moria was shut.
Then through all the years that followed [Elrond]
traced the Ring; but since that history is elsewhere re-
counted, even as Elrond himself set it down in his books
of lore, it is not here recalled. For it is a long tale, full of
deeds great and terrible, and briefly though Elrond spoke,
the sun rode up the sky, and the morning was passing ere

6
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

he ceased. (FR, II, ii, 255)

Here are present many of the hallmarks of Tolkien’s untold tales,
which grant his prose narratives the ability to solve his “fundamental lit-
erary dilemma.” The condensed, polysyndetic summation, ­combining
stark and striking images with the passive voice, recalls Christopher
Tolkien’s description of The Silmarillion’s “epitomising form,” which,
“with its suggestion of ages of poetry and ‘lore’ behind it, strongly
evokes a sense of ‘untold tales’, even in the telling them; ‘distance’ is
never lost” (Lost Tales I, xii). In “The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of
Beleriand” (TS I 21–41) Nagy elaborates further on this point, dem-
onstrating how certain elements of style in The Silmarillion contribute
to a sense of depth by suggesting (and at times revealing) verse adap-
tation.9 In “the textual world,” Nagy argues, these stylistic elements
often “mark central scenes, climaxes, or privileged points in the nar-
rative” (25). As the Celebrimbor passage suggests, this phenomenon
is not limited to The Silmarillion. Crucial events in The Lord of the Rings,
whether “historical” or in the narrative present, are often treated indi-
rectly or elliptically, through mediating storytellers who withhold from
us the whole tale.
The following paragraph, beginning with “Then through all the
years,” provides another shift, and we are further removed from the ac-
tion, with all but the duration of Elrond’s speech, indirectly measured
by the sun’s path through the sky, omitted. The description of the pass-
ing day is reminiscent of the excuse used by Aeneas in Book I of Vir-
gil’s Aeneid: “Goddess, should I recount / From their first source, and
wert thou free to hear, / Our sorrow’s sad recital, eve would first / Put
day to sleep, and shut the gates of heaven” (Rhoades, I, 113, ll. 370).10
But Tolkien does not stop at simply robbing the reader of the full story.
He then offers the blunt, dead-end provocation that, because this text
can be accessed in Elrond’s library, the details of the tale will not—
need not—be “recalled.” The reader is left with a powerful and lasting
impression of this legend out of the fictive past, but any sense that our
curiosity has been satisfied quickly gives way to the realization that it is
merely being tickled into the realm of further inquiry.
Taxonomy: Two types of untold tales
Based on Tolkien’s initial examples, we can distinguish between
two broad categories of untold tales: the explicit and the implicit.
These two categories relate to Nagy’s distinction between two aspects
of depth: the invocation of stories versus the invocation of texts. The
explicitly untold tale is tied to the latter; it withholds information on
the grounds that the corresponding song or tale is either non-­existent/

7
 Peter Grybauskas

non-extant (as in Gandalf’s “no rhyme says”), unavailable (Celebrim-

bor’s “history” is “not here recalled”), or abridged (Treebeard “can-
not tell it properly, only in short”) (TT, III, iv, 78). Explicitly untold
tales are delivered either by the narrator or through characters within
the fiction unable or unwilling to divulge more information. They are
self-reflexive, drawing the reader’s attention away from the immediate
narrative.
The implicitly untold tale, on the other hand, evokes or suggests
a relation to outside stories without any clear reference to textuality.
This second category includes all other methods of narrative withhold-
ing: allusions (often to names of people or locations, as in “Kirdan
at Mithlond in the Gulf of Lune”), ellipses, digressive episodes, or
condensed summaries (“and there was war”), to name a few. Whether
explicit or implicit, all untold tales can be said to be “verifiable” or “un-
verifiable,” depending on the possibility of further investigation in the
same or another text.11 Although these two types of untold tales can
and do exist separately, they are often entwined, working in tandem, as
in the examples of the Palantír and Celebrimbor.
“To go there is to destroy the magic, unless…”
Both of the examples in the letter to Christopher are derived from
The Lord of the Rings, a work which has often been praised for such
qualities.12 But, as I suggested earlier, the untold tale is not a feature of
one work only, but an important part of the legendarium as a whole.
Some distinction must be drawn, of course, between core texts like The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on the one hand, and the many posthu-
mously released stories on the other. If, as I argue, we are to consider
the untold tale a highly refined element of Tolkien’s prose, there re-
mains always some doubt over the ultimate intentions of the author in
assessments of the posthumous material. In spite of the problematic
state of much of the legendarium, the appearance of untold tales in
narratives published after Tolkien’s death in 1973 remains worthy of
examination.13
The Silmarillion of 1977, perhaps the most important of the post-
humous Middle-earth publications, may bring into clear view some of
the “glimpses” which tantalize readers in The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings, but not without whetting the reader’s appetite with its own enig-
mas. The mate of Anglachel, Beleg’s (and later, Turin’s) sword, sounds
interesting indeed, but it “does not enter into this tale” (S 201). Like-
wise, Beren’s exploits in Gorgoroth might presumably merit their own
chapter, but instead we learn nothing of his journey, as Beren “spoke
of it to no one after, lest the horror return into his mind; and none
know how he found a way, and so came … to the borders of Doriath”

8
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

(S 164). Tolkien’s paradox of the untold story was one which engaged
all of his work, as the untold tales of The Silmarillion suggest.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the ubiquitous nature of untold
tales comes from a collection like Unfinished Tales, which, as advertised
on its dust jacket, would seem to reveal the “unexplained vistas” which
Tolkien had cautioned some readers, for the sake of “literary effect,”
to avoid. But just as in The Silmarillion, anything more than a cursory
look at the drafts and excerpts compiled within Unfinished Tales reveals
prose riddled with a sense of untold tales. I offer two brief examples:
one from “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields” and another from “The
Quest of Erebor.” The first tells of Isildur’s plight after the Last Alli-
ance, an event crucial to the history of the Ring but one only hinted at
in The Lord of the Rings. This “late narrative” concludes with a descrip-
tion of a treasure hoard containing some of Isildur’s effects, discov-
ered long after in Orthanc:
When men considered this secret hoard more closely, they
were dismayed. For it seemed to them that these things,
and certainly the Elendilmir, could not have been found,
unless they had been upon Isildur’s body when he sank;
but if that had been in deep water of strong flow they
would in time have been swept far away. Therefore Isildur
must have fallen not into the deep stream but into shallow
water, no more than shoulder-high. Why then, though an
Age had passed, were there no traces of his bones? Had
Saruman found them, and scorned them—burned them
with dishonour in one of his furnaces? If that were so, it
was a shameful deed; but not his worst. (UT 277)
Ending the account with such a discovery would seem to wrap
things up properly, but for the puzzling question of the king’s bones—
which, in spite of the suggested cremation scenario, is left intention-
ally ambiguous. Elsewhere, Tolkien uses the discovery of bones or
other fragmentary remains to initiate investigations into untold tales,
but here they are used otherwise; Isildur’s missing skeleton is symbolic
of some essential lacuna in the story, and indeed this final point of
intrigue is a fitting end to the nebulous tradition of Isildur.
Elsewhere in Unfinished Tales, an early draft of “The Quest of Ere-
bor” material yields an exchange between Gimli and Gandalf which
goes straight to the heart of Tolkien’s untold tales. Most of the text
is tailored toward tying up loose ends created by the beginning of
The Hobbit; Gandalf, in retrospect, provides his reasons (however far-
fetched) for facilitating the business venture between Thorin and

9
 Peter Grybauskas

­ ilbo, highlighting the earth-shattering importance that such seem-

B
ingly insignificant actions would have on the subsequent history of
Middle-earth. In the end, however, the tidy conclusion is overturned
with almost post-modern audacity, the dwarf musing: “Well, I am glad
to have heard the full tale. If it is full. I do not really suppose that even
now you are telling us all you know.” Gandalf, channeling Tolkien, can
only reply, “Of course not” (UT 336). In what way (if at all) Tolkien in-
tended to publish such material is unclear, but the fact that, as we have
them, both these unfinished narratives should end on the distinctive
note of an untold tale is indicative of Tolkien’s method.
Returning to The Lord of the Rings, we find similar tactics at work.
The tale proper, itself full of enigmas, is in some sense bracketed by
untold tales thanks to its Prologue and Appendices—sections which
the reader would normally expect to provide clarification rather than
further confusion. The Prologue ends on a note of speculation regard-
ing Celeborn’s departure, but concedes that “there is no record of the
day when at last he sought the Grey Havens, and with him went the last
living memory of the Elder Days in Middle-earth” (FR, Prologue, 25).14
On the far end of the narrative are the Appendices, containing the an-
cillary material which Tolkien had grumbled about but did eventually
complete. The first of the Appendices concludes with an explicitly un-
told tale: that, regarding rumors of Galadriel’s role in bringing Gimli
to Valinor, “more cannot be said of this matter” (RK, Appendix A, III,
362). By striking this emphatically cryptic note with the last line of Ap-
pendix A, Tolkien once more demonstrates his overarching concern
with enigmas.
Having differentiated between some major types of untold tales
and acknowledged their centrality, can we say more of their role? Like
“the gaps in the leaves and boughs” in “Leaf by Niggle” which grant
glimpses of the painter’s vast landscape and mountains beyond, the
suggestive power of untold tales creates space and depth, bringing
Tolkien’s prose to life (TL 76). They are the hyperlinks to Middle-
earth’s web of stories, and whether active or dead, they, like the di-
gressions in Beowulf, convey a whole range of artistic effects.15A full
categorization16 of the myriad roles played by untold tales is beyond
the scope of the present study, but here I should like to discuss their
relation to two important aspects of Tolkien’s prose: the elegiac mode
and the sublime.
Elegy and the Sublime
As has been noted, the depth created by untold tales is largely il-
lusory; the fleeting glimpse of a world of stories on the periphery is
often (though not always) a mirage. The provocations and subsequent

10
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

limitations imposed by untold tales contribute to what Tolkien called

in his letter on literary paradox, the “heart-racking sense of the van-
ished past,” a remote but poignant feeling of loss and nostalgia.17 John
D. Rateliff suggests that an elegiac “sense of loss is always pervasive in
all Tolkien’s work” (Blackwelder 80).18 Still more plainly, The Lord of the
Rings is, as Strider says of his campfire tale of Beren and Luthien, “sad,
as are all the tales of Middle-earth” (FR, I, xi, 203).19 Throughout the
legendarium, untold tales help to convey this elegiac tone—Gandalf’s
longing to see Fëanor at work and the reader’s desire to hear Elrond
recount the history of the Ring are but two among many examples of
this unrequited longing. Earlier in The Lord of the Rings, after rescu-
ing the hobbits from a barrow-wight, Tom Bombadil sifts through the
wight’s treasure hoard.
He chose for himself from the pile a brooch set with blue
stones, many-shaded like flax-flowers or the wings of blue
butterflies. He looked long at it, as if stirred by some mem-
ory, shaking his head, and saying at last:
‘Here is a pretty toy for Tom and for his lady! Fair was
she who long ago wore this on her shoulder. Goldberry
shall wear it now, and we will not forget her!’ (FR, I, viii,
156-57)
We never receive even a hint of who this fair “she” is, or what mem-
ory may have stirred Tom, but in spite of this (or perhaps precisely
because of it) the scene is tantalizingly effective. In his aforementioned
letter to Naomi Mitchison Tolkien places special emphasis on verifi-
able enigmas, like those which allude to events detailed in The Silmar-
illion. Bombadil’s memory, however, is a fine example of Tolkien’s
aptitude for exploiting completely illusory loose ends as well. Untold
tales are uniquely well-suited to conveying this emotion, for they are
themselves a lack, a felt absence and a faint reminder of other stories
fading beyond recall.
Of course, untold tales are capable of more than just making read-
ers sad; in their ability to suggest limitless, infinite depth, they evoke
the sublime, a quality of transcendent potency. Tolkien has had little
to say explicitly on the subject, but some of his reflections on literary
power bear mentioning, especially in their connection with our notion
of untold tales. In “On Fairy-stories,” for instance, Tolkien refers to the
sensation of an “abyss of time” in his discussion of the “ancient” quality
of the fairy-tale. He believed this quality lends a transcendent power
to fairy-tales, rivaling (and maybe even surpassing) that of other great
stories—“they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through,

11
 Peter Grybauskas

though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside
Time itself, maybe” (MC 129). It is no great stretch to connect this
door to Other Time to our previous discussions of narrative depth,
and to imagine it opening as Gandalf muses on the origins of the See-
ing Stones: “Fëanor himself, maybe, wrought them, in days so long ago
that the time cannot be measured in years” (TT, III, xi, 203).
Tolkien’s ruminations on the sublime are not confined only to his
academic essays, however. In his letter exploring the paradox of the
untold story, Tolkien makes pointed reference to “Leaf by Niggle,” and
it is thus unsurprising that the distant mountains in Niggle’s life’s work
provide another link between untold tales and the sublime. In Niggle’s
Parish, where the painter is blissfully free to explore the reaches of his
painting, the mountains “get nearer, very slowly,” but even so they do
“not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else,
a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage:
another picture” (TL 89). Their essence, it seems, is too great to be
contained in or fully captured by Niggle’s art. As the artist goes along
his journey, presumably toward Paradise, he progresses ever closer to
the mountains. But for the narrator they remain the ultimate untold
story, for “what they are really like, and what lies beyond them; only
those can say who have climbed them” (TL 93). A similar sense of un-
graspable immensity is evoked in the legendarium by passages like the
Celebrimbor summary, with its minimalist treatment of a legendary
historical event.20
At its best, Tolkien’s prose grants Middle-earth the multiplicative
depth of Niggle’s Parish. The reader can “approach it, even enter it,
without its losing that particular charm,” because there is always the
sensation of “new distances” unfolding, “doubly trebly, and quadruply
enchanting” (TL 89). This aptly describes the Grey Company’s (and
the reader’s) experience venturing under the mountains along the
Paths of the Dead. Continuing straight through would seem to satisfy
the immediate needs of the narrative, but Tolkien instead takes them
on a short detour to highlight something quite far removed from the
pressing concerns of the War of the Ring or the Oathbreakers:
Before [Aragorn] were the bones of a mighty man. He had
been clad in mail, and still his harness lay there whole; for
the cavern’s air was as dry as dust, and his hauberk was gild-
ed. His belt was of gold and garnets, and rich with gold was
the helm upon his bony head face downward on the floor.
He had fallen near the far wall of the cave, as now could
be seen, and before him stood a stony door closed fast: his
finger-bones were still clawing at the cracks. A notched and

12
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

broken sword lay by him, as if he had hewn at the rock in

his last despair. (RK, V, ii, 60)
The ranger sighs, taking a moment to reflect by the body, yet he
is resigned to his ignorance of the man’s purpose, knowing that the
Company must press on. He leaves the fallen warrior, saying, “Nine
mounds and seven there are now green with grass, and through all the
long years he has lain at the door that he could not unlock. Whither
does it lead? Why would he pass? None shall ever know” (RK, V, ii,
61). Aragorn is right, of course, though bits and pieces (his name at
least, Baldor son of Brego) can be gleaned from the appendices (RK,
Appendix A, II, 349) or from Theoden’s recollection of “ancient leg-
end, now seldom spoken” (RK, V, iii, 70). But this is precisely Tolkien’s
point, and the episode brings Middle-earth to life—ironically, para-
doxically—as only an untold tale could.
There is a striking similarity between the skeleton on the Paths
of the Dead and Ernest Hemingway’s leopard in the epigraph to this
paper. Like Tolkien, Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1954, seven years before Tolkien’s nomination, developed a theo-
ry of omission and narrative withholding which became a core tenet
of his prose style.21 According to his theory, “the omitted part would
strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they
understood” (A Moveable Feast 75). There remains, of course, a world
of difference between the two writers, but the fact that they share this
fundamental principle is nonetheless significant. Though Tolkien
modeled much of his technique on the ancient sources he professed,
it was also a fundamentally modern one. In spite of this sort of surpris-
ing overlap in prose strategy between Tolkien and more “canonical”
writers, it remains difficult for many critics to judge Tolkien’s literary
merits. In the end, it may come down to the issue of taste and familiar-
ity. Tolkien once said of Beowulf that it was “more like masonry than
music,” and perhaps the contrast is somewhat true of Tolkien’s work
as well (MC 30). But with an open mind and a critical eye we can ac-
knowledge the artistry in Tolkien’s use of untold tales and join C. S.
Lewis, the man who nominated Tolkien for the Nobel, in quoting Gim-
li: “there is good rock here.”

13
 Peter Grybauskas

Explicitly Untold Tales

Types Examples Notes

Explicitly untold “How Shelob came there, flying Elegy, textual aware-
from ruin, no tale tells” (TT, IV, ness/reflexivity22
ix, 332)
Qualified and “But [goblins] had a special Intrigue, textual
verifiable grudge against Thorin’s people, awareness/reflexivity
because of the war which you
have heard mentioned, but
which does not come into this
tale” (H, IV, 60)
Qualified and “Shelob was gone; and whether Intrigue (perhaps fol-
unverifiable she…this tale does not tell” (TT, lowed by frustration),
IV, x, 339 my emphasis) textual awareness.
We have here a
strong sense of the
maddeningly coy,
and perhaps playful,
narrator.23
Incomplete and Strider’s campfire tale: “I will tell Layered, intertextual
verifiable you the tale of Tinuviel…in brief depth, elegy
– for it is a long tale of which the
end is not known” (FR, I, xi, 203)

Incomplete and On the Entwives: ‘yes, I will The characters

unverifiable indeed,’ said Treebeard, seeming themselves get in on
pleased with the request. ‘But I the coy act, as we see
cannot tell it properly, only in from Treebeard’s
short; and then we must end our tantalizing remarks
talk…’ (TT, III, iv, 78) here.24

Implicitly Untold Tales

Undeveloped allu- Tom Bombadil’s “fair” lady Confusion, comedy,

sion (loose end) (FR, I, viii, 157) wrath
(see above discussion)
Episode, developed Gandalf and the lights seen on Small, suspenseful
within the primary Weathertop (FR, I, xi, 195, 200; cliffhangers, leading
text FR, II, ii, 277) to epitomizing sum-
mation by Gandalf,
but not, perhaps,
wholly satisfactory
revelation

14
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

Implicitly Untold Tales (continued)

Types Examples Notes

Allusion, devel- “The blade scored it with Heightened sense of

oped in another a dreadful gash, but those history, typological
text hideous folds could not be events, intertextual
pierced by any strength of depth25
men, not though Elf or Dwarf
should forge the steel or the
hand of Beren or of Túrin
wield it.” (TT, IV, x, 337-38)
Digressive episode Brego and the Paths of the A literal, but memo-
Dead (RK, V, ii, 60 ; RK, V, iii, rable digression off
70-71) the beaten path
beyond Dunharrow,
leading to a moving
glimpse of the heroic
cultural background
of Rohan
Ellipsis, developed Gandalf describes his duel with Indirection adds
(partially) the Balrog: “if there were a to the sense that
year to spend, I would not tell some encounters are
you all” (TT, III, v, 104). ultimately beyond the
reach of words
Ellipsis, largely As battle is joined before the Cliffhangers or char-
undeveloped Gates of Mordor, Pippin’s acter development,
“thought fled far away and his indirection (common
eyes saw no more”… (RK, V, mediating technique
x, 169). in Tolkien’s narration
of battles)

Enigma Mysterious old man seen by the See Tolkien’s letter to

three hunters (TT, III, ii, 45) Mitchison (discussed
above)
Artifacts, Frag- The Book of Mazarbul; Sword- The lasting remnants
ments, Ruins that-was-Broken; The Dead of untold tales, stand-
Marshes, the “great battle long ing in for (or in the
ago” (FR, II, v, 335-36; FR, I, x, case of the Book, tell-
182, 184; TT, IV, ii, 235) ing) them, sparking
curiosity26

“Epitomising sum- Celebrimbor is mentioned at The sublime (see

mation” the Council (FR, II, ii, 255). above discussion)

15
 Peter Grybauskas

Notes

1 See Tom Shippey’s discussion of the philological aspects of the as-

terisk reconstruction in The Road to Middle-earth (19-23).
2 The discussion of the vague and unsettling increase in tension
at work in the Mines of Moria should also be mentioned: “What
Tolkien does in such passages is to satisfy the urge to know more
(the urge he himself felt as an editor of texts so often infuriatingly
incomplete), while retaining and even intensifying the counterbal-
ancing pleasure of seeming always on the edge of further discovery,
looking into a world that seems far fuller than the little at present
known” (Author of the Century 86-87). The presence of this counter-
balance, I would argue, is ubiquitous to Tolkien’s legendarium.
Likewise Shippey’s online discussion of “lost tales” in “Tolk-
ien’s Two Views of Beowulf ”: “But there are two more Tolkienian
reasons for not forgetting what the poem has to say about history.
One is that the poem is absolutely full (and quite apart from the
monsters) of something we know Tolkien liked very much indeed,
which is, ‘lost tales.’ Again and again the poet hints at, alludes to,
tells a bit of a story which we sometimes get hints of elsewhere, and
sometimes know nothing about. I count about twenty of them.”
3 Christopher Tolkien argues that putting pen to paper was never
a question, and this viewpoint is perhaps strengthened by the im-
perative used by Tolkien in the letter—the story must be told. See
the Foreword to The Book of Lost Tales I for more (Lost Tales I, ix-xi).
4 See the BBC article online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/enter-
tainment-arts-16440150.
5 Rushdie’s extended comments can be found in his review of the
film at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jan/04/film.
salmanrushdie.
6 They would of course have no knowledge at all of such matters,
prior to the many posthumous publications of much of the mate-
rial concerning the Elder Days.
7 A proper definition of the sublime would be the subject of one or
more books, but, for the purposes of brevity, we may consider it a
sense of unquantifiable power or the infinite, often characterized
by contradictory sensations (such as terror and awe). I would argue
that the sea in Tolkien’s allegory for Beowulf criticism is an image of
the sublime.

16
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

8 For an exploration of the suggestion of oral history and its impor-

tance to Middle-earth, see Prozesky.
9 See Nagy’s “The Adapted Text” (21 and passim).
10 In “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien praises Vir-
gil’s ability to project the “effect of antiquity (and melancholy)” so
deftly that readers are prompted to say with longing: “Alas for the
lost lore, the annals and poets that Virgil knew” (MC 27). Faramir
says much the same of Gandalf in his talks with Frodo: “it is hard
indeed to believe that one of so great wisdom … could perish, and
so much lore be taken from the world” (TT, IV, v, 279).
11 More often than not they are partially verifiable. Thus I prefer
this distinction over Nagy’s similar “genuine” and “contentless,” as
untold tales are by nature somewhat “ingenuine.” Furthermore,
“verifiable” is a more cautious label than “contentless,” given the
inevitable questions of lost drafts or content that may well have
existed on some level, if only in Tolkien’s head.
12 Shippey has said that The Lord of the Rings “has in abundance…the
Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’” (Road 229).
13 Had many of these posthumous publications never come to light
at all, it would in a sense only strengthen the argument that what
remains unsaid is of great importance to our understanding of
Tolkien’s work.
14 Brljak singles this out as a keynote for all of Tolkien’s mature fic-
tion (5-6).
15 For the classic study on the importance of Beowulf’s digressions
(itself indebted to Tolkien’s influential essay on the poem’s literary
qualities), see Bonjour.
16 They can be used as a method of character development, to
evoke suspense, to confuse and frustrate, as an integral part of the
metafictional aspects so compelling to Brljak, and more. For a few
examples, see the chart included at the end of this text.
17 Here again the influence of Beowulf should be noted; Tolkien clas-
sified the Old English work not as epic, but heroic-elegiac. Fur-
thermore, its “dark antiquity of sorrow” as Tolkien argued in his
famous essay, could be seen as an “effect and a justification of the
use of episodes and allusions to old tales” (MC 27).
18 While Rateliff touches on the importance of understanding

17
 Peter Grybauskas

­ olkien’s work as the “lost tales, the fragmentary sole surviving re-
T
cord of a forgotten history,” he believes the mournful mood is due
primarily to Tolkien’s decision to place “Middle-earth on our own
planet” (69, 67).
19 He says this, fittingly, in reference to a fragmentary poem with no
extant conclusion.
20 Mountains themselves indicate untold tales in the legendarium as
well as in Niggle’s Parish. See for example the allusion to Aragorn’s
wandering in Appendix A, that “when he was last seen his face was
towards the Mountains of Shadow” (RK, Appendix A, I, 336).
21 Incidentally, 1954 was also the year The Fellowship of the Ring was
published. Hemingway’s theory of omission is not mentioned in
the Nobel Presentation Speech. For more see the Nobel archive
website: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/lau-
reates/1954/press.html.
22 For a discussion of the significance of this specific reference to
Shelob, see Prozesky (30).
23 As Shippey says of the writers of Beowulf, the Aeneid, and other
works influential to Tolkien, “there was a sense that the author
knew more than he was telling, that behind his immediate story
there was a coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world of which
he had no time (then) to speak” (Road 228-29).
24 Consider Nagy’s remark on the relevance of illusory depth: “the
fact that illusory depth also appears should not detract from the
feeling of completeness: the ultimate base-text, as we have seen, is
always a pseudo-text” (“The Great Chain” 252).
25 Nagy (“The Great Chain” 241).
26 For further discussions of Mazarbul, see Flieger (Interrupted Music
74) or Hammond and Scull (163).
Works Cited
Bonjour, Adrien. The Digressions in Beowulf. London: Blackwell and
Mott, 1950.
Brljak, Vladimir. “The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist.”
Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 1-34.
Flieger, Verlyn. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World,
revised edition. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002.

18
 Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

——. Interrupted Music. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005.
Hammond, Wayne and Christina Scull. J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustra-
tor. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New
York: Scribners, 1998.
——. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 2003.
Nagy, Gergely. “The Great Chain of Reading: (inter-)textual relations
and the technique of mythopoesis in the Túrin story.” In Tolk-
ien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance. New York: Routledge,
2003: 239-58.
——. “The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of Beleriand.” Tolkien Stud-
ies 1 (2004): 21-41.
Prozesky, Maria. “The Text Tale of Frodo the Nine-fingered: Residu-
al Oral Patterning in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien Studies 3
(2006): 21-43.
Rateliff, John D. “‘And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten’: The
Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory.” In The Lord of the Rings:
Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelde, ed. Wayne Ham-
mond and Christina Scull. Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 2006.
Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. Ed. New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2003.
——. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
——. “Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf: One Hailed, One Ignored. But
Did We Get This Right?” Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza. http://
www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=238598
Published July 2010.Accessed November 2011.
Virgil. The Aeneid. The Poems of Virgil. Trans. James Rhoades. Encyclope-
dia Brittanica, 1952.

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20
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”: Tolkien and
Geology
Gerard Hynes

“O Valar, ye know not all wonders, and many secret things are
there beneath the Earth’s dark keel” (Lost Tales I 214). So
Ulmo explained the Earth’s structure to the Valar. It is curious that
they, having materially participated in the making of the world, should
be uncertain of its form, but Tolkien was himself uncertain how to de-
pict Arda, at this stage (c.1919) and for decades afterwards.1
Henry Gee has rightly observed that it is unsurprising Tolkien was
interested in the earth sciences given his own view of his profession:
“I am primarily a scientific philologist. My interests were, and remain,
largely scientific” (Gee 34; Letters 345). Tolkien, like any educated per-
son of his generation, was exposed to and to a degree internalized
both the scientific method and the scientific worldview. For example,
in “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien chose to use a geologic metaphor when
discussing the preservation of ancient elements in fairy-stories: “Fairy-
stories are by no means rocky matrices out of which the fossils cannot
be prised except by an expert geologist” (OFS 49). As Verlyn Flieger
and Douglas A. Anderson note in their commentary, “The geologic
comparison here is both timely and intentional: geology and mythol-
ogy being coeval disciplines arising in roughly the same period and out
of the same human impulse to dig into origins” (OFS 106). The same
could, of course, be said of philology. Further, Tolkien was a reader
of science fiction and well aware of the expectations it engendered in
readers in terms of coherent world building (see Gee 23-41). Given
Tolkien’s insistence that Middle-earth is our Earth (Letters 220, 239,
283, 376) the inclusion of geological references is part of the “hard
recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun”
(OFS 65) which is, according to Tolkien, fantasy’s essential foundation.
But scientific understanding and the theories and discoveries on
which it is based develop and change. The importance of scientific
developments, and geology in particular, to Tolkien’s account of the
shaping of Middle-earth has been emphasized by Karen Wynn Fons-
tad, Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie, Henry Gee and Kristine Larsen
(Larsen, A Little Earth of His Own, Shadow and Flame).2 The geology
Tolkien knew was not static in any way; new discoveries apparently in-
fluenced him as he revised his legendarium. The most far-reaching de-
velopment in geological theory in the twentieth century, though it took
most of Tolkien’s scholarly lifetime to establish itself, was c­ ontinental

21
 Gerard Hynes

drift and Tolkien’s writing displays an awareness of and receptivity to

it.3 Both Robert C. Reynolds and William Sarjeant have offered expla-
nations of the topography of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age
in terms of plate tectonics, but both articles are primarily descriptive
and do not address the question of Tolkien’s knowledge of geology,
particularly the evidence for continental drift developing across the
drafts of his legendarium.4
Indications of a growing concern with geological accuracy and a
familiarity with continental drift emerge side by side in Tolkien’s writ-
ings as they developed. Though Tolkien’s geology would always have
a strong catastrophist element, in the 1930s Tolkien began to incor-
porate into it a uniformitarian underpinning of geologic time as well
as a dynamic theory of geological change. 5 The general uniformitar-
ian consensus in geology in the second half of the nineteenth and
opening decades of the twentieth century understandably formed the
basis of Tolkien’s treatment of geologic time. But the particular form
geological change took in his developing presentation of Middle-earth
in deep time may be in part the result of Alfred Wegener’s then revo-
lutionary theory of continental drift. Briefly put, “continental drift”
proposes a lateral movement of land masses across the Earth’s surface
over geologic time. The notion of continental drift was suggested as
early as 1596 in the third edition of Abraham Ortelius’ Thesaurus Geo-
graphicus where he noticed the symmetry of the African and American
coasts and reinterpreted Plato’s Critias as referring not to Atlantis sink-
ing but to it being dragged westwards, a cataclysmic event marking
the rupture of the Old and New Worlds (Romm 408). While Ortelius’
account has some points of contact with Tolkien’s description of the
downfall of Númenor and the removal of Valinor from terrestrial ge-
ography, there is no particular evidence Tolkien knew it.6 Instead, we
must turn to the main works of continental drift theory which certainly
were known and debated in Tolkien’s lifetime.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the domi-
nant explanation for large scale geological features such as mountain
ranges was that the Earth was gradually cooling from an original mol-
ten state causing its surface to wrinkle like the skin of an apple (Hal-
lam 110ff.). The first modern theory of continental drift (which would
automatically provide an alternative explanation of such features) was
published by the American geologist F.B. Taylor in “Bearing of the
Tertiary Mountain Belt on the Origin of the Earth’s Plan” in the Geo-
logical Society of America Bulletin in 1910. The German meteorologist Al-
fred Wegener independently developed his own theory of continental
drift, first published in 1915 in Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeone
(translated into English as The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1924).

22
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

Of the two, Wegener became better known. The Times, one of Tolkien’s
regular papers (Scull and Hammond II 822), published an unfavour-
able article on Wegener’s theory in 1923.7 The paper later covered
Wegener’s final, and fatal, Arctic expedition throughout 1930 with an
obituary for Wegener, containing a paragraph on continental drift, in
1931.8 For these reasons, it is Wegener’s version of the theory that will
be addressed here.
Wegener was profoundly dissatisfied with the prevalent explana-
tion for the existence of identical species of flora and fauna on sepa-
rate continents: intercontinental land-bridges which subsequently
sank (Wegener 5-6). Had such bridges existed, he argued, the water
they displaced would have raised the ocean level and flooded entire
continents, preventing the very land-bridges the theory depended
upon (Wegener 13). Like Ortelius, Wegener observed the symmetry
of the South American and African coasts and suggested that the two
continents, “formed a unified block which was split in two in the Cre-
taceous; the two parts must then have become increasingly separated
over a period of millions of years like pieces of a cracked ice floe on
water” (Wegener 17).9 Apart from dispensing with unnecessary land-
bridges, Wegener’s theory also had the advantage of offering a viable
alternate explanation for the formation of mountain ranges. The lead-
ing edges of drifting continents would become compressed and folded
by the frontal resistance of the plates into which they were pressing;
for example, the Andean range extending from Alaska to Antarctica
would have been formed by the westward drift of the two Americas
(Wegener 20). The great weakness of Wegener’s theory was the lack
of an explanation for the forces behind the motion. In the fourth edi-
tion of his work he surveyed the proposals of other theorists who sug-
gested the friction of tidal waves or the precession of the Earth’s axis
under the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon, or perhaps
convection currents in the sima (the lower layer of the Earth’s crust),
although Wegener felt that assumed a very great fluidity in the Earth’s
substructure (Wegener 175-78). Ultimately Wegener had to admit that
theory had not caught up with observation:
The formation of the laws of falling bodies and of the
planetary orbits was first determined purely inductively, by
observation; only then did Newton appear and show how
to derive these laws deductively from the one formula of
universal gravitation. [...] The Newton of drift theory has
not yet appeared. (Wegener 167)
Wegener’s theory also faced the difficulty that accepting it would
require geologists to reject almost completely the existing scientific

23
 Gerard Hynes

consensus which was based on a static Earth model (Kearey and Vine
3-7). Though the reception of Wegener’s hypothesis was at best mixed
(Hallam 147), his work incited debate, not to say controversy, with an
international conference addressing continental drift in 1922 (Dine-
ley 826).10
The earliest example (c.1919) of what might be called tectonic
movement in Tolkien’s legendarium occurs when Ossë and his followers
drag the island upon which the Valar are standing westward towards
Eruman following the flooding caused by the destruction of the two
lamps (Lost Tales I 70). This passage probably owes more to the giantess
Gefjon dragging Zealand out to sea in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda11
(Snorri 29), than it does to any modern geophysics.12 This geological
change represents the power of the Ainur rather than Arda’s natural
processes. Tolkien wrote in “The Coming of the Valar,” “Now this was
the manner of the Earth in those days, nor has it since changed save
by the labours of the Valar of old” (Lost Tales I 68). Arda was originally
conceived of then as essentially static according to its own natural laws,
though capable of transformation by external, catastrophic interven-
tion.
Tolkien’s cosmology in these early drafts leans more heavily to-
wards the metaphoric, analogical approach of myth. While writing The
Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien produced both a map of Arda and a highly
stylised diagram, I Vene Kemen. The earliest “Silmarillion” map seems
to be purely geographical in intent, a “quick scribble” with “The Theft
of Melko and the Darkening of Valinor” written around it (Lost Tales I
82). Context may explain its purpose. Tolkien was likely visualizing the
relative positions of Valmar, the Two Trees and Melko’s escape route
while working out his narrative. I Vene Kemen, possibly to be translated
as “The Earth-Ship,”13 also provides geographical information but ad-
ditionally positions Arda within a larger creation by including the Sun,
the Moon and the three layers of air which surround the world. Over
the course of a four page discussion of the difficulties and questions
the diagram raises, Christopher Tolkien suggests the mast and sails
may be a later addition to the drawing and the metaphor of a ship
may post-date the diagram itself, merely being inspired by the coin-
cidental shape of the world (Lost Tales I 87). While I Vene Kemen may
be a mythologized depiction of a cosmology, its form, the Earth “in
section,” is relatively modern. The diagram is reminiscent of the geo-
logical cross-section, a form which only emerged in the nineteenth
century.14 Geological diagrams were pioneered by the German natu-
ralist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (Fara 208-209); a figure
Tolkien may have been familiar with (Lewis and Currie 19-32). Even
in this early, “mythological” stage in Tolkien’s cosmology, science, at

24
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

least the ­tradition of scientific illustration, may have had an influence.

Whether or not it was an impulsive decision on Tolkien’s part, the
image of the world as a ship upon the waters is not without precedent
or possible sources. Thales of Miletus (c.620-c.546 BC), offered just
such an analogy. Thales, one of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers,
identified water as the primary substance of the physical universe. Ar-
istotle wrote, “Thales, the founder of this school of philosophy, says
that the principle is water, and for this reason declared that the earth
rests on water” (Metaphysics 983 b20-b21). In his De Caelo, Aristotle gives
Thales’s theory but finds fault with it:
Others say that the earth rests upon water. This, indeed, is
the oldest theory that has been preserved and is attributed
to Thales of Miletus. It was supposed to stay still because it
floated like wood and other similar substances, which are
so constituted as to rest upon water, but not upon air. As if
the same account had not to be given of the water which
carries the earth as of the earth itself! (On the Heavens 294
a29)
It is possible Aristotle misinterpreted Thales (O’Grady 88-94) who may
have meant that individual islands and land masses floated on water
rather than the Earth itself. Either interpretation could fit Tolkien’s
drawing in which both the land mass and the world itself are shaped
like a ship. It was only later in antiquity that the Roman philosopher
Seneca the Younger (c.4BC-AD65) introduced the image of the world
as a ship:
The following theory of Thales is silly. For he says that this
round of lands is sustained by water and is carried along
like a boat, and on the occasions when the earth is said
to quake it is fluctuating because of the movement of the
water. (Questiones Naturales III.14)15
Nevertheless, one pre-Socratic does not a cosmology make, and
there is no evidence to argue for an explicit connection between I
Vene Kemen and Thales. The idea of the Earth floating upon water is
still present in the Ambarkanta of the mid 1930s but it is no longer
mythologized to the degree of I Vene Kemen: “Within these walls the
Earth is globed: above, below and upon all sides is Vaiya, the Enfold-
ing Ocean. But this is more like to sea below the Earth and more like
to air above the Earth” (Shaping 236). The diagrams of the 1930s are,
however, less pictorial metaphors than I Vene Kemen and begin to show
the strong influence of modern geography and geology, particularly
in presentation.

25
 Gerard Hynes

Dimitra Fimi has argued that there is a discernible shift in Tolkien’s

legendarium during the 1930s from a “mythological” to a “novelistic” or
“historical” mode (Fimi 5-6). Fimi attributes this change to Tolkien’s
adoption of a novelistic style for The Hobbit and The Fall of Númenor
(Fimi 117-121, 161) but claims that the cosmology of this period (such
as the Ambarkanta) is still “clearly “mythological” and has no aspiration
to be realistic in any way” (Fimi 124). This claim requires some qualifi-
cation. The Ambarkanta, subtitled “Of the Fashion of the World,” does
mark a shift in Tolkien’s cosmology away from the mythic to one more
(tentatively) historical and scientific. Tolkien arguably adapted his cos-
mology to be more acceptable to a contemporary readership bring-
ing to the text assumptions based on a more dynamic, geologically
active world. Just as Tolkien became concerned with the reaction of
his readers to a mythologized astronomy, he was evidently equally con-
cerned that the geology of Arda should be acceptable to readers with
a scientific worldview.16 Each of the two maps which accompany this
text depict the Earth at a specific point in its history, with the differ-
ences between Maps IV and V representing the changes caused by the
first Battle of the Gods when the Valar destroyed Utumno and chained
Melko (Shaping 239, 248-51). The Valar, however, are no longer the
only force capable of changing the Earth’s fabric. Tolkien wrote, “And
the Earth was again broken in the second battle, when Melko was again
overthrown, and it has changed ever in the wearing and passing of many
ages” (Shaping 239-40, my emphasis). This sentence marks a subtle but
significant change in Tolkien’s cosmology. The Ambarkanta dates from
approximately the same time as Tolkien began writing The Fall of Nú-
menor,17 and he added material to the Ambarkanta referencing the ef-
fect of that cataclysm upon the shape of the world (Shaping 240, 261).
This particular passage indicates Tolkien, even while thinking about
cataclysmic change by divine fiat, was also beginning to write of that
geological change in terms conditioned by the slow regular change of
early twentieth century geological uniformitarianism.
In the Council of Elrond there is another reference to slow change
over geologic time. Saruman had claimed the Ring had been rolled
down the river Anduin into the sea where it would lie forever. Glorfin-
del seizes upon this suggestion as a means to be rid of the Ring.
“Then,” said Glorfindel, “let us cast it into the deeps, and
so make the lies of Saruman come true. […] Yet oft in lies
truth is hidden: in the Sea it would be safe.”
“Not safe forever,” said Gandalf. “There are many things
in the deep waters; and seas and lands may change. And it

26
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or

for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We
should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not
hope to make one.” (FR, II, ii, 349)
Although they are both essentially immortal beings, Gandalf takes
a longer view than Glorfindel and thinks in geologic time.18 Sauron’s
threat is to all of Middle-earth through all its time and Gandalf’s re-
sponse is relevant to that threat across time. Having a statement of
long-term geological change come from a figure of such authority and
be accepted by the equally wise indicates Tolkien considered geologic
time an established feature of Arda’s nature by the time this scene was
composed; that is probably late 1940 or early 1941.19
As well as a general sense of long-term geological change, Tolkien’s
writings from the 1930s also begin to indicate a knowledge of the spe-
cifics of continental drift. As can be seen from the title of F.B. Taylor’s
1910 work—“Bearing of the Tertiary Mountain Belt on the Origin of
the Earth’s Plan”—one of the attractions of continental drift was that
it could explain the source of mountains and relate them to the struc-
ture of the Earth. The Canadian geologist Reginald A. Daly (one of
Wegener’s early advocates) eagerly applied the theory to this task in his
1926 defence of continental drift, Our Mobile Earth (Daly 260-63). The
relevance of all this to Tolkien will become apparent when this passage
from Our Mobile Earth is considered:
At the close of the Palaeozoic Era, almost 200,000,000
years ago, the east-west geosyncline of the northern hemi-
sphere was intensely crumpled by the sliding together of
the North Polar dome and the Equatorial dome.20 The re-
sult was the Appalachian-Hyrcanian system of mountains,
extending from west of Arkansas, through Alabama, New
England, Newfoundland, Britain and France, Germany,
Russia and all across Asia to China. It was a colossal, prob-
ably uninterrupted, chain of mountains all the way. (Daly
315-316)
Maps IV and V of the Ambarkanta depict the Iron Mountains, which
Melkor had raised to fortify the north, as just such a chain running un-
broken across the north of Middle-earth (Shaping 235, 239, 248-251).21
In The Silmarillion they are described as standing “upon the borders of
the region of everlasting cold, in a great curve from east to west” (S
134).22 There is an intriguing similarity between Melkor ensconced in
the far north raising the Iron Mountains and the North Polar dome
forcing up the Appalachian-Hyrcanian mountains between itself and

27
 Gerard Hynes

the equator, indicating a familiarity with theories of mountain forma-

tion in general if not Daly’s work in particular.23
This is not the only time the North Pole and the theory of conti-
nental drift appear together in Tolkien’s writings. While Henry Gee
is correct to point out that Tolkien’s use of the word Gondwanaland
proves he was aware of the theory of continental drift (Gee 59; Letters
409-410), this letter dates from 1971 when the controversy over drift
theory had been largely settled and the theory of plate tectonics was
gaining general acceptance. What is more interesting is a much earlier
mention of continental drift in a letter Tolkien wrote to his children in
1932 under the guise of Father Christmas. Referring to cave paintings
beneath the North Pole “Father Christmas” writes:
Cave bear says these caves belong to him, and have
belonged to him or his family since the days of his
great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great (multiplied
by ten) grandfather; and the bears first had the idea of
decorating the walls, and used to scratch pictures in soft
parts—it was useful for sharpening the claws. Then MEN
came along—imagine it! Cave bear says there were lots
about at one time, long ago, when the North Pole was some-
where else. (That was long before my time, and I have never
heard old Grandfather Yule mention it, even, so I don’t
know if he’s talking nonsense or not). (Tolkien 2009, 78,
my emphasis).24
It is understandable Tolkien should be non-committal about the valid-
ity of the theory. Wegener’s work had only appeared in English eight
years earlier and the reaction from the geological community had not
been entirely favourable (Hallam 143-147).
Despite references to slow geological change, Tolkien’s fictional
geography owes as much to catastrophism, sudden and violent distur-
bances, as opposed to the slow and regular change of uniformitarian-
ism (see Hallam 30-64; Lewis and Currie 18-32). The destruction of
Beleriand, and later of Númenor, though geological events, are not ex-
plained in plausible geological terms. In part this can be accounted for
by interpreting Tolkien’s geology as geomythological rather than just
geological. Geomythology, a term coined by Dorothy Vitaliano, is “the
geologic application of euhemerism” and interprets certain myths and
legends in terms of geological events that may have been witnessed by
the human cultures who recorded the myths. It also includes etiologi-
cal myths i.e. those invented to explain various environmental features
(Vitaliano 1). The myths and legends of the First and Second Ages
are understandably mythological, rather than historical, sources. Just

28
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

as Tolkien would come to see the astromythology of the First Age as

a garbled Mannish tradition (Morgoth 370), his geomythology can be
seen as mythologized, and catastrophized, accounts of real geological
events or etiological explanations for the current environment of the
Mannish world. Wegener’s theory, while intrinsically uniformitarian,
allows for geological upheavals which bridge the gap between such
mythologized cataclysms and the almost imperceptible change of geo-
logical processes. Plate tectonics are responsible, after all, for such cat-
astrophic results as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and more recently the
Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.25 While many geological events in
the legendarium can only be interpreted literally in catastrophist terms,
certain geological events are most easily understood as metaphoric
reflexes of Wegener’s theory. In the Ambarkanta the Valar attempt to
strengthen Valinor’s defences by widening the Western Sea separating
it from Middle-earth:
For their further protection the Valar thrust away Middle-
earth at the centre and crowded it eastwards, so that it was
bended, and the great sea of the West is very wide in the
middle, the widest of all waters of the Earth. [...] And the
thrusting aside of the land caused also mountains to ap-
pear in four ranges, two in the Northland and two in the
Southland. (Shaping 239)26
This is catastrophic (although its timescale is undefined) but its ef-
fects upon the continents of Middle-earth are the same as those of the
relatively gradual processes of continental drift. Even in The Silmaril-
lion as published there is this interesting sentence: “But the mountains
were the Hithaeglir, the Towers of Mist upon the borders of Eriador;
yet they were taller and more terrible in those days, and were reared by
Melkor to hinder the riding of Oromë” (S 52).27 Here Tolkien displays
his knowledge that taller mountains are younger, an important geo-
logical principle and basic to continental drift, though not a concept
limited to that particular theory.
In a letter to H. Cotton Minchin Tolkien wrote: “Having geologi-
cal interests, and a very little knowledge, I have not wholly neglected
this aspect, but its indication is rather more difficult – and perilous!”
(Letters 248). The peril Tolkien referred to could be interpreted in
two ways. Scientific theories can become obsolete all too easily, leav-
ing their references in Tolkien’s works hanging in thin air with no
referent, thus robbing the texts of the grounding in reality they would
have originally possessed. The other peril might be the temptation
to subject the texts to constant revision in the hope of making them
scientifically coherent at the expense of the mythological qualities of

29
 Gerard Hynes

the original conception. The first type of peril, understandable given

the precarious status of Wegener’s theory for so long, could be (along
with generic considerations) what kept references to geological move-
ment in the texts to a minimum, always leaning towards metaphor and
analogy. The second peril caused Tolkien immense trouble when at-
tempting to reconcile the creation of the Sun and Moon with mod-
ern astronomy. Perhaps for this reason he did not attempt to make
the geology of Middle-earth conform entirely to uniformitarian prin-
ciples. Tolkien wrote geomythology (and geomythology tends towards
the catastrophic) because he was writing mythology. Instead of trying
to force fantasy into the mould of science fiction, he managed to in-
corporate into his work, to the enrichment of his sub-creation, several
basic geological assumptions as well as one theory that would later be
vindicated. During the 1930s Middle-earth’s cosmology may have wa-
vered between mythological and historical terms but it was bolstered
by sound geological foundations.
Notes

1 Admittedly the knowledge of the Valar is dependent on their own

part in, and hence knowledge of, the Music of the Ainur. For a
thorough outline of Tolkien’s struggles with the shape of the Earth
see (Noad). For the most likely date of Ulmo’s comment see (Scull
and Hammond II, 120-32).
2 Kristine Larsen has also argued convincingly that Tolkien was con-
versant with modern astronomy, especially with theories of lunar
formation as demonstrated in Ainulindalë C* (See Larsen, A Little
Earth of His Own, also Myth, Milky Way).
3 “Continental drift” has become a largely discarded term due to its
association with discredited mechanisms of tectonic motion. Geol-
ogists and geophysicists, should any read this article, will hopefully
tolerate the use of the outdated term due to its currency during
Tolkien’s literary career.
4 Sarjeant disregards the “Silmarillion” material entirely. “In con-
trast, the supplementary material in the successive volumes of The
History of Middle-earth must be viewed as the equivalent of a geolo-
gist’s field notes – unrevised and not to be trusted; so this must be
discounted. (In any case, the additional geological information to
be found therein is quite remarkably meagre)” (Sarjeant 334).
5 Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been shaped by

30
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

s­ udden, violent cataclysms while uniformitarianism is the assump-

tion in natural science that currently occurring natural processes
have always operated in the same manner and at the same rate (see
Hallam 30-64).
6 In the first half of the twentieth century Ortelius was primarily re-
membered for his contribution to cartography with his Theatrum
Orbis Terrarum. The eleventh edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica
states that Ortelius “laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient
geography” but does not mention his Atlantis theory (Encyclopaedia
Britannica Vol. XX 331-32). Numerous geological explanations for
the destruction of Minoan Crete (the main contender for a histori-
cal source for Atlantis) emerged in the second half of the twentieth
century (See Vitaliano 179ff.). It will require further research to
determine whether Tolkien could have known of any while writing
about Númenor.
7 The Times Feb 6, 1923, p.8B.
8 The Times May 16, 1931. p.14F.
9 Wegener may have developed his theory while observing ice floes
during one of his numerous Arctic expeditions.
10 The theory was only confirmed and generally accepted in the
1960s with the discovery of sea floor spreading and the develop-
ment of palaeomagnetism (see Kearey and Vines 6). After the late
1960s the term “continental drift” came to be replaced by “plate
tectonics” (see Searle 158).
11 A text which similarly mythologizes geographical features.
12 Captain Shard’s floating island in Lord Dunsany’s 1912 “The Loot
of Bombasharna” (364-368) provides a contemporary analogue.
13 An isolated note in a notebook refers to a “Map of the Ship of the
World” (Lost Tales I 87).
14 I have been unable to find any medieval depiction of the world “in
section.” Michael Freeman traces the development of the geologi-
cal cross-section from the work of William Smith in the 1790s and
notes the emergence of three dimensional geological models from
the 1840s onwards (Freeman 122-29).
15 See also VI.6: “The cause of earthquakes is said to be water by more
than one authority but not in the same way. Thales of Miletus judg-
es that the whole earth is buoyed up and floats on liquid that lies

31
 Gerard Hynes

underneath, whether you call it the ocean, the great sea, [...]. The
disc is supported by this water, he says, just as some big heavy ship
is supported by the water which it presses down upon.” None of
Tolkien’s published texts connects the earth’s watery support with
earthquakes but the image of the world as a ship cannot help but
imply a certain sense of movement.
16 Consider Tolkien’s problems with “The Flat Earth and the astro-
nomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and Moon.”
“But you can make up stories of that kind when you live among
people who have the same general background of imagination,
when the Sun ‘really’ rises in the East and goes down in the West,
etc. When however (no matter how little most people know or
think about astronomy) it is the general belief that we live upon a
‘spherical’ island in ‘Space’ you cannot do this anymore” (Morgoth
370).
17 Christopher Tolkien dates the Ambarkanta to the mid 1930s, after
the “later Annals” but before The Fall of Númenor (Lost Road 9, 108)
which would date it to 1936-1937 at the latest (See Scull and Ham-
mond II, 42-43, 283-84).
18 Glorfindel may be thinking of the Silmaril lost in the sea (S 305).
His claim could also be unintentionally ironic given the propensity
for rings cast into the sea to turn up inside fish (one of Gandalf’s
“many things in the deep waters”?). Going back as far as the Ring
of Polycrates the motif is sufficiently common to be classified as
tale type 736A (Aarne 253). Tolkien could have read it in “The Fish
and the Ring” in Joseph Jacobs’ 1890 collection English Fairy Tales
(Jacobs 137-40). Also, though this exchange immediately follows
Galdor’s comment that “Sauron can torture and destroy the very
hills,” Gandalf links the change of seas and lands to the passage of
time more than to Sauron’s actions. Even if Tolkien was consider-
ing a scenario based on folklore or mythology, he implied a geo-
logical explanation—perhaps tellingly.
19 Cf. Frodo’s experience in Lothlórien, “hearing far off great seas
upon beaches that had long ago been washed away, and sea-birds
crying whose race had perished from the earth” (FR, II, vi, 460).
Tolkien attempted to set down the full story of Gandalf’s encoun-
ter with Saruman and failure to return to Hobbiton between the
fourth and fifth versions of “The Council of Elrond” (Treason 130-
136). Gandalf’s comments most likely date from the fifth version
(see Scull and Hammond I, 241-43).

32
 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

20 By “domes” Daly means what would later be called tectonic plates.

21 The Iron Mountains had existed since The Book of Lost Tales but
at that early stage they were not clearly distinguished from what
would become the Ered Wethrin (Lost Tales I 81, 112).
22 Interestingly, the Appalachian-Hyrcanian mountain system was sev-
ered by the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. In Middle-earth the
battles between the Valar and Melkor breached several mountain
chains, most notably the Blue Mountains in the War of Wrath, but
also the Iron Mountains (S 341-42).
23 This is not to claim that every mountain range in Middle-earth
must correspond to a counterpart in our primary world; the Misty
Mountains are not the Alps for example. Tolkien stated, “[...]
though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains
and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the
nearer past, imaginatively this “history” is supposed to take place
in a period of the actual Old World of this planet” (Letters 220). His
concern was that Middle-earth’s geology be scientifically possible
rather than historically accurate.
24 There is a physical North Pole in The Father Christmas Letters—see
the 1926 letter—so Tolkien must be referring to continental drift
rather than shifting magnetic poles (Tolkien 2009, 20). Also the
North Pole would have been more habitable at a different latitude.
25 As catastrophic in terms of geological upheaval as in loss of life.
26 Kristine Larsen has argued that G.H. Darwin’s explanation for the
moon’s formation, which Tolkien likely knew, provided an alter-
native and catastrophic explanation for some geological features
which would otherwise be explained by Wegener’s theory (Larsen,
A Little Earth of His Own 400). Darwin argued the moon had been
ejected from the Earth’s surface during the build up of a tide in the
young molten Earth and his interpreters attributed features such
as mountain ranges and ocean basins to this cataclysm (Loc. cit.).
Prior to Ainulindalë C*, however, Tolkien does not use a geological
explanation for the moon’s formation. The Ambarkanta, the most
important text for a Wegenerian reading of Tolkien, describes geo-
logical formations without recourse to the moon.
27 This sentence is taken from The Annals of Aman dating from 1958
(Morgoth 47, 83). The Hithaeglir did not yet exist at the time of the
Ambarkanta (Shaping 256-57) and the sentence does not appear in
the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion.

33
 Gerard Hynes

Works Cited
Aarne, Antti. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography.
2nd rev. Trans. and enl. Stith Thompson. FF Communications,
no.184. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987.
Anonymous. “The Progress of Science. Are the Continents Drfiting
Apart?, Wegener’s Theory.” The Times (Feb 6 1923): 8B.
Anonymous. “Professor Wegener: Leader of German Arctic Expedi-
tion.” The Times (May 16 1931): 14F.
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Revised Oxford Translation.
2 Vols. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991.
Daly, Reginald Aldworth. Our Mobile Earth. New York and London:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.
Dineley, D.L. “Plate tectonics: the history of a paradigm.” In Hancock
and Skinner. The Oxford Companion to the Earth: 826-27.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1911.
Lord Dunsany. “The Loot of Bombasharna.” In Lord Dunsany, Time
and the Gods. London: Millennium, 2000.
Fimi, Dimitra. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Fonstad, Karen Wynn. The Atlas of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Rev. Ed. Lon-
don: HarperCollins, 1994.
Freeman, Michael. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
Gee, Henry. The Science of Middle-earth. London: Souvenir, 2005.
Hallam, A. Great Geological Controversies. Second edition. Oxford: OUP,
1989.
Hancock, Paul L. and Brian J. Skinner. The Oxford Companion to the
Earth. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
Jacobs, Joseph. English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales. Ed.
­Donald Haase. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002.
Kearey, Philip and Frederick J. Vine. Global Tectonics. Second edition.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

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 “Beneath the Earth’s dark keel”

Larsen, Kristine. “‘A Little Earth of His Own’: Tolkien’s Lunar Cre-
ation Myths.” In The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien
2005 Conference, Vol.2, ed. Sarah Wells. Coventry: The Tolkien
Society, 2008: 394-403. (2008a)
Larsen, Kristine. “Shadow and Flame: Myth, Monsters, and Mother Na-
ture in Middle-earth.” In The Mirror Crack’d: Fear and Horror
in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and its Sources, ed. Lynn
Forest-Hill. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008:
169-196. (2008b)
Larsen, Kristine. “Myth, Milky Way, and the Mysteries of Tolkien’s Mor-
winyon, Telumendil, and Anarimma.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010):
197-210.
Lewis, Alex and Elizabeth Currie. The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien. West
Rhyn: Medea, 2002.
Noad, Charles E. “On the Construction of ‘The Silmarillion.’” In Tolk-
ien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Ver-
lyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport CT and London:
Greenwood Press, 2000: 31-68.
O’Grady, Patricia F. Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science
and Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Reynolds, Robert C. “The Geomorphology of Middle-earth.” Swansea
Geographer 12 (1974): 67-71.
Romm, James. “A New Forerunner for Continental Drift.” Nature 367,
no. 3 (February 1994): 407-08.
Sarjeant, William Antony Swithin. “The Geology of Middle-earth.” In
Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed.
Patricia Reynolds and Glen Goodknight. Milton Keynes: Tolk-
ien Society; Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 1995: 334-39.
Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Compan-
ion and Guide. Vol.1 Chronology. Vol.2 Reader’s Guide. London:
HarperCollins, 2006.
Searle, Roger. “Continental drift.” In Hancock and Skinner. The Oxford
Companion to the Earth: 158-59.
Seneca. Naturales Questiones. 2 Vols., trans. Thomas H. Corcoran. Lon-
don: Heinemann, 1971-72.
Snorri Sturluson. The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse Mythology. Ed. Jean.

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 Gerard Hynes

I. Young. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964.

Taylor, F.B. “Bearing of the Tertiary Mountain Belt on the Origin of the
Earth’s Plan.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 21 (1910):
179-226.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Letters from Father Christmas. Ed. Baillie Tolkien. Lon-
don: HarperCollins, 2009.
Wegener, Alfred. The Origins of Continents and Oceans, Translated from
the fourth revised German edition by John Biram. London:
Dover, 1966.

36
 Law and Arda
Douglas C. Kane

J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote in his classic essay “On Fairy-stories”

that to create a Secondary world in which a “green sun” was “cred-
ible, commanding Secondary Belief” was “story-making in its primary
and most potent mode” (OFS 61). To create a truly successful Fairy-
story, or work of Fantasy, the sub-creator must be able to seamlessly
blend elements that firmly exist in the real world with elements that
vary from the real world and exist solely in the secondary world, and
do that in a way that is believable to the reader, who obviously brings
with her a real world perspective. The term “green sun” has no mean-
ing except in the context of the reader’s knowledge of the yellow sun
in the real world of her experience.
There have been a number of attempts to document different ways
in which Tolkien has achieved this difficult goal. Kristine Larsen’s ex-
tensive efforts to demonstrate the ways in which the astronomical di-
mensions of Tolkien’s secondary world parallel that of the real world
immediately come to mind.1 There have been numerous other simi-
lar efforts to describe the physical elements of Middle-earth, whether
botanical, or geologic, or geographic. 2 There have also been a num-
ber of attempts to document the “philosophy of Middle-earth,” and
of course, unending discourses on the religious aspects of Tolkien’s
legendarium, as well as his borrowing from other myths and traditions,
and the ways in which his various invented cultures and languages bor-
row from real world cultures and languages. Another example is John
Garth’s compelling descriptions of Tolkien’s blending of his own ex-
periences of war at the Somme in his fiction, particularly in the Dead
Marshes chapter of The Two Towers, as well as the Hill of the Slain in The
Silmarillion, which Garth describes as “a grand myth-maker’s flourish
with an alloy of realism” (Garth 18).
However, one area that has not been extensively discussed is the ways
in which Tolkien gives his invented world an aura of realism through
incorporating real world legal concepts into his fiction, blending and
adapting them in order to fit into his secondary world, thus making
his “green sun” that much more credible, and making secondary belief
that much more possible. Any reasonably complex imagined society is
going to have issues arise in which that society addresses how disputes
and other interactions between individuals are resolved and regulated.
These types of legal issues are of particular significance because of the
relationship that law has with moral, philosophical and psychological
concepts that are important in Tolkien’s writings. As such, the way that

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 Douglas C. Kane

he incorporates these legal concepts into his secondary world—and

the way that this evolved over the course of the creation of his legend-
arium—is especially instructive.
Tolkien, of course, was not an attorney or a legal scholar, and there
is no indication that he was any more familiar with the law than one
would expect of an educated British man in the early to mid twentieth
century. However, this does not render a study of his use of real world
legal concepts less valuable (any more than the fact that he was not
an astronomer renders Larsen’s work uninstructive). In The Hobbit in
particular he demonstrates a remarkably intuitive knowledge of legal
concepts. However, it was when he transcended that understanding
that his fiction really blossomed.
In their Introduction to Tolkien On Fairy-stories (their expanded
edition of Tolkien’s famous essay) Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. An-
derson describe how Tolkien applied the lessons that he learned in
writing the essay to improve his craft, particularly as seen in the ad-
vances from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. They state, “All of these
improvements can be subsumed under the heading of the most potent
phrase in Tolkien’s essay, “the inner consistency of reality.” The Lord of
the Rings has it; The Hobbit has it intermittently, but not consistently”
(OFS 18). This evolution can be seen in the presentation of legal issues
in the two works (and also the movement within The Lord of the Rings it-
self from the earlier portions which are much more akin to The Hobbit,
to the more gritty later portions). In The Hobbit the legal issues closely
parallel the real world, whereas in The Lord of the Rings they are more
firmly rooted to the secondary world, thus better serving the ‘inner
consistency of reality.’
This development can be seen even more clearly in Tolkien’s ex-
pansion of the tales of the Elder Days in the years following the com-
pletion of The Lord of the Rings, in which his use of what his fellow
Inkling, Owen Barfield, called “legal fictions” to express concepts of
morality, philosophy and psychology, reached its highest level. In “Po-
etic Diction and Legal Fiction,” an essay which was initially written as
part of the book dedicated to another fellow Inkling, Essays Presented
to Charles Williams, Barfield discusses “legal fictions” (such as the cre-
ation of a corporation that can be sued as a person) as a way of creat-
ing meaning, comparing these devices to the way that metaphors work
in language. Barfield argues that this type of figurative expression is
ubiquitous not just in poetry, but throughout language. He notes that
Aristotle in his Poetics called the element of metaphor “far the most
important” (Barfield 45), and metaphor goes to the heart of Barfield’s
own theory of poetic diction, in which he utilizes the study of the use
of language as evidence of the evolution of human consciousness. In

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 Law and Arda

the course of discussing how these legal fictions relate to the use of
figurative expression in language, Barfield makes a number of obser-
vations that reflect how Tolkien’s incorporation of legal issues in his
fiction advanced.
Barfield noted: “Properly understood, are [legal fictions] not a tell-
ing illustration of the fact that knowledge—the fullest possible aware-
ness—of the nature of law is the true way of escape from its shackles?”
(Barfield 64). We see this idea increasingly demonstrated in Tolkien’s
work over time, with a clear emphasis on a higher morality that super-
sedes the letter of the law.
Barfield also wrote: “Here we begin to tread on metaphysical
ground and here I think the analogy of legal fictions can really help
us by placing our feet on one or two firmer tufts in the quaking bog. It
can help us to realize in firmer outlines certain concepts which, like all
those relating to the nature of thought itself, are tenuous, elusive, and
difficult of expression” (Barfield 59). This idea is strongly reflected
in Tolkien’s later work, particularly in the essay “Laws and Customs
among the Eldar” in which Tolkien specifically uses a “legal fiction”
(the so-called “Statute of Finwë and Míriel”) in order to facilitate the
expression of some of his most “tenuous, elusive, and difficult” con-
ceptions.
Finally, we also see a depth of understanding of psychology reflect-
ed in his treatment of legal issues that would be surprising to liter-
ary critics who dismiss Tolkien as a superficial fantasy writer. Quoting
again from “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction”: “There is not much that
is more important for human beings than their relations with each
other, and it is these which laws are designed to express” (Barfield
63). Another characteristic of Tolkien’s later work is the way in which
he shows individuals relating to each other, both in engaging in (or
suffering the consequences of) criminal conduct, and in the “legal fic-
tion” of the marital relationship.
The Hobbit
Tom Shippey, with typical alliterative insight, describes Bilbo Bag-
gins as “the Bourgeois Burglar” (55-93). This description captures very
nicely the two main legal motifs in The Hobbit—one contractual and
the other criminal—and the way that they intersect. Shippey notes that
the early development of the story of The Hobbit depends on the “ten-
sion between ancient and modern reactions” (73). Bilbo’s attempt to
retreat into a modern, business-like air is defeated by the Dwarf song
“Far over the misty mountains cold,” which evokes the ancient world
and awakens in Bilbo’s heart “the love of beautiful things made by
hands and by cunning and by magic” (H i 22). He is then met with

39
 Douglas C. Kane

a contract “more practical than Bilbo at his most business-like had

thought” (Shippey 73). This contract is a good example of how Tolk-
ien used a very real world legal meme in The Hobbit. It reads in full:
Thorin and Company to Burglar Bilbo greeting! For
your hospitality our sincerest thanks, and for your offer
of professional assistance our grateful acceptance. Terms:
cash on delivery, up to and not exceeding one fourteenth
of total profits (if any); all travelling expenses guaranteed
in any event; funeral expenses to be defrayed by us or our
representatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not oth-
erwise arranged for.
Thinking it unnecessary to disturb your esteemed re-
pose, we have proceeded in advance to make requisite
preparations, and shall await your respected person at the
Green Dragon Inn, Bywater, at 11 a.m. sharp. Trusting that
you will be punctual.
We have the honour to remain
Yours deeply
Thorin & Co. (H, ii, 28.)
In modern legal terms,3 in order to form a valid and enforceable
contract there must be a manifestation of mutual assent to an ex-
change with valid consideration. That manifestation of mutual assent
usually requires an open offer with clear terms, which is accepted by
the other party before being revoked.4 Looking at the wording of the
contract here, it would appear at first that Thorin and company are
accepting an offer made by Bilbo; after all, they specifically state that
they are. However, as so often is the case, the language of this written
contract is deceiving. Even if the hobbit’s actions the evening before,
in which he agreed to accompany the dwarves on their quest, could be
construed as an offer, the terms of the contract are certainly not clear
until Thorin presents them in this letter: Bilbo would agree to provide
his “professional services” in exchange for a one-fourteenth share of
the profits of the endeavor, plus traveling expenses and funeral ex-
penses, if necessary. By adding material terms to the agreement that
had not previously been agreed to, this letter becomes a counter-offer,
not an acceptance. It even provides a mechanism for Bilbo to dem-
onstrate his own acceptance of the counter-offer, by appearing at the
Green Dragon Inn in Bywater, at 11 a.m. sharp, ready to begin the
adventure. Not until Bilbo does so—without making any additional
changes to the terms of the contract—is there a valid acceptance to
an offer. As for consideration, this is a contract to provide services in

40
 Law and Arda

exchange for payment, a classic form of consideration. The written

contract is quite vague, of course, as to what “professional services”
Bilbo was to provide. However, it is not an “integrated contract”5—it
does not specify that it provides a final and complete expression of all
of the terms. Thus “parol evidence,” which is evidence of prior verbal
statements, would be admissible to help define the terms. Whether the
conversation the night before was sufficiently specific to define what
Bilbo’s “professional services” would be is another debatable point.
The rest of the terms are fairly clear, even if Bilbo had little idea what
a fourteenth share of the profits could possibly be.
So it appears likely that a valid contract was formed, but upon clos-
er examination, there are some additional potential problems. One
defense against the enforceability of a contract is that one of the par-
ties to the contract is not competent to agree to the terms, or that he
was subjected to undue influence.6 It certainly could be argued that
Bilbo was tricked into agreeing by a third party, Gandalf. Between
his surreptitiously placing the mark on Bilbo’s door to mark him as
a “burglar” (and thus having the requisite “professional expertise”),
and then inducing Bilbo to leave Bag End to go meet the dwarves at
the Green Dragon before he knew what he was doing, a strong argu-
ment could be made that Bilbo never really knowingly consented to
the contract. That is without even getting into the manipulation of
Thorin and the dwarves that Gandalf engaged in, as detailed in the
various versions of “The Quest of Erebor” published in Unfinished Tales
(321-36) and in Douglas A. Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (367-77).
Another defense is that a contract for illegal conduct (or conduct
that is otherwise contrary to public policy) is not just voidable, but
void, and therefore unenforceable.7 That is where the two motifs cross:
if the conduct that Bilbo is being paid to do is actually criminal (which
will be discussed further below), then the contract is in fact void for
illegality.
The final defense available is one that is actually pointed out by
Smaug himself, who cleverly plants a seed of doubt in Bilbo’s mind by
pointing out that there is no way that the hobbit is going to be able to
transport a one-fourteenth share of the vast treasure across Wilderland
and back to the Shire. Smaug is not only a wily serpent, but he also ap-
parently has a keen legal mind, because he is quite right on this point.
A contract is not enforceable if any of the material terms of the con-
tract are impossible (or impracticable, as legal authorities have tended
in recent years to say), to fulfil.8 The fact that Thorin claims to have
not considered this salient point is irrelevant (and perhaps question-
able), since Bilbo certainly would have been within his legal rights to
refuse to perform any more “professional services” once he realized

41
 Douglas C. Kane

that the consideration that he had been promised would have been
completely impossible to deliver.
Turning back to the question of whether the services that Bilbo
was contracting to provide were illegal, arguably from the Dwarves’
point of view they were not. After all, they were simply seeking his help
in regaining property that lawfully belonged to them, or at least their
families, since it had been stolen from them by Smaug himself. Howev-
er, Bilbo seems to have taken the role beyond where they anticipated.
Consider the first adventure, with the Trolls. True, the Dwarves
seemed to be asking for services that went beyond those of the “expert
treasure-hunter” who was described in the meeting in Bag End: they
demanded that Bilbo investigate the light they had seen that turned
out to be the Trolls’ fire and find out what was there. However, Bilbo
himself—perhaps out of his mind with fear, or perhaps just motivated
by a kind of misguided pride—took the matter further, taking the title
of “Burglar” to heart and attempting to pinch a purse from one of the
Trolls’ pockets. This gambit was defeated by the Troll’s surprisingly ef-
fective anti-theft system: a talking purse that squeaked “’oo are you?” as
Bilbo carefully lifted it from the pocket (H, ii, 31-34). This was clearly
criminal behavior; even if the Trolls themselves were thieves and mur-
derers, there is no evidence that they stole the purse, and even if they
did (since Trolls are not known to make their own accoutrements),
there certainly was no indication that Bilbo was trying to return the
purse to its rightful owner. To be technical, this was not a burglary,
since burglary requires the breaking and entering into some kind of
a structure, whether through forcible entry or not,9 and there was no
structure that Bilbo entered, and thus no burglary, even if he had suc-
ceeded in stealing the purse. Nor was this a “robbery,” since that crime
requires the use of force or intimidation,10 and one certainly cannot
imagine little Bilbo intimidating three large Trolls. Instead, this was a
simple case of larceny, or rather, attempted larceny, since Bilbo never
successfully made off with the property. But he did in fact both form
the intention of stealing the purse, thus having the requisite mens rea
or “guilty mind” for an attempted crime, and he took a concrete ac-
tion that went beyond mere preparation, thus committing the requi-
site actus reus, or “guilty act.”11 The trolls, however, were never likely to
pursue the matter through legal channels, being more concerned with
their next meal, and they were to soon lose the ability to do so forever
due to Gandalf’s intervention (see H, ii, 34-40).
The next action that Bilbo took in which he appropriated someone
else’s property has a much greater significance, not just in his story but
in the wider history of Middle-earth: his finding of the Ring. As most
Tolkien fans are aware, there are two different published versions of

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 Law and Arda

this incident: the version published in the first edition of The Hobbit
in which Gollum promised to give Bilbo a “present” if Bilbo won the
Riddle contest, and the “real” story in which Gollum never intended
to give Bilbo the Ring (see Anderson 128-131, n. 25, and Rateliff 153-
163). Bilbo seems to have been motivated by a guilty conscience in
devising the sanitized tale, and at first look it seems apparent why. The
old adage “possession is nine-tenth of the law” is not really an accu-
rate statement. Although Bilbo found the Ring as opposed to taking
it from Gollum by force or stealth, once he learned for certain that it
was property belonging to Gollum he would be duty-bound by law to
return it to him; failing to do so was as much a theft as if he had taken
it by force. On the other hand, one defense that a person accused of
a crime can assert is the defense of necessity,12 and it seems likely that
Bilbo could have successfully claimed that it was necessary that he keep
the Ring in order to avoid getting throttled and eaten. Moreover, he
did not use more force than was necessary, since he used the Ring to
escape Gollum by leaping over him instead of his original inclination
of “stabbing the foul thing, putting its eyes out, killing it” (H, v, 81). As
Gandalf would later tell Frodo, the forbearance that Bilbo showed Gol-
lum here out of pity would go on to rule the fate of many (FR, I, ii, 69).
This element, however, was entirely missing from the original version
of the chapter, in which it is made clear that Bilbo was not actually in
danger because Gollum is unwilling to break his agreement with Bilbo,
and is therefore forced to agree to show the hobbit the way out as a
substitute for giving him “his only present” after Bilbo “wins” the rid-
dle contest. This is a good example of how Tolkien’s writing advanced
beyond a strict adherence to the “letter of the law” from the time of the
writing of The Hobbit to the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings
(since the revision of this chapter was associated with the latter).
It is when Bilbo arrives at the Lonely Mountain with the Dwarves
that he fully accepts the burglar role. As discussed above, burglary re-
quires that a perpetrator enter a “structure” in order to carry out a
theft, whether through forcible entry or some other means. Here, he
and the dwarves did enter a structure, though they utilized a key and
a secret entrance (not to mention some convenient moonlight to help
in map-reading), rather than force in order do so. Bilbo went on to
steal a valuable cup virtually out from under Smaug’s nose, although
arguably he was doing nothing more than returning property to its
rightful owners (though this is a point that Smaug might have disput-
ed) (H, xi, 193; xii, 199). Smaug then proceeded to take his ire out on
the mostly innocent people of Lake-town, to both their and his own
regret (H, xiv, 225-229).
All of this activity culminates with Bilbo’s taking of the Arkenstone,

43
 Douglas C. Kane

at which time he tells himself that “now I am a burglar indeed!” rec-

ognizing immediately that his claim to the stone as representing his
one-fourteenth share of the treasure is nothing more than a weak jus-
tification. However, he is clearly enthralled by the Silmaril-like stone
(H, xiii, 216-217). He knew from Thorin’s earlier comments (see H,
xii, 212) how much the Dwarf-lord valued the stone, and this point
is borne out all the more after they learned that the dragon has been
killed and they settled in for the siege, when Thorin stated that the
stone “is worth more than a river of gold in itself, and to me it is be-
yond price. That stone of all the treasure I name unto myself, and I will
be avenged on anyone who finds it and withholds it”13 (H, xvi, 233).
Bilbo’s later giving up the stone to Bard and the Elvenking even at the
expense of sacrificing his claim to his share of the treasure in a vain
attempt to avoid war, although admirable (and presaging his later abil-
ity to give up the Ring voluntarily), probably is not sufficient to negate
his criminal action, though of course that also becomes a moot point
in the end. We see here a reflection of a major theme in Tolkien’s
work: the collision between fate or destiny and free will. Bilbo tries to
turn his own criminal act to good in order to avoid the pending clash
of arms. For all of his good intentions, he can not prevent a battle
from occurring since it was “meant to be,” just as he, and subsequently,
Frodo, were “meant” to have the Ring, as Gandalf says (FR, I, ii, 65).14
After the Battle of Five Armies was won, the Arkenstone was buried
with Thorin, and Dain honored the agreement that had been made
with Bard, passing on to him one-fourteenth of all the silver and gold.
An interesting sidelight is that the Emeralds of Girion and the other
gems in the hoard were excluded in the calculation of the fourteenth
share. Thorin had originally specified that he would give “one four-
teenth share of the hoard in silver and gold, setting aside the gems” in
return for the Arkenstone, as Bilbo’s contractual share (H, xvii, 252).
There is no logical reason why the gems should have been excluded,
nor why Bard would have agreed to exclude them with no further ne-
gotiation; certainly there was no such stipulation in the original con-
tract. It is one of those puzzling points that appear in various places in
Tolkien’s writings that seem to be too specific to be merely a random
point with no deeper meaning and yet have no obvious significance.
Perhaps Thorin specifically excluded them because the emeralds were
so beloved by the Elves, and he was still so angry over his recent im-
prisonment in the halls of the Elvenking. That would not explain why,
however, Bard agreed so readily to exclude them with no negotiation.
One can only suppose that he concluded that it was the best deal they
were going to get, and that it was not worth arguing over. The con-
trast here between Bard and Thorin is stark, particularly since Thorin

44
 Law and Arda

a­ lmost immediately begins pondering whether he can enlist Dain’s

help to regain the stone without having to give up any of the treasure.
Instead, in the end, Dain not only honored the agreement to provide
the fourteenth share of the gold and silver but also restored the gems
to Bard, who passed the Emeralds of Girion on to the Elvenking (H,
xviii, 265). This is yet another demonstration of how, for Tolkien, hon-
or supersedes legal obligation. As for Bilbo, he refused Bard’s offer to
take a large share of the treasure himself, limiting himself to two small
chests of silver and gold (which still made him immensely wealthy in
the Shire). Despite the obvious changes to Bilbo’s character that re-
sult from his adventure, his basic hobbit-sense remained untouched
by greed and temptation. 15
The Hobbit then ends with a bit of legal folderol, when Bilbo re-
turns from his adventures to find that all of his possessions are be-
ing auctioned off by the lawyerly sounding gentlemen, Messrs. Grubb,
Grubb & Burrows, as he was “presumed dead” (H, xix, 274). In most
common law jurisdictions, a missing person generally is not declared
to be presumed dead until five to seven years has passed, unless he or
she is known to have been exposed to “imminent peril”—like a plane
crash—and fails to return.16 Of course to the Hobbits of the Shire,
going off with Gandalf on an adventure probably was sufficient to be
considered “exposed to imminent peril.”
This is a rather detailed look at legal issues in The Hobbit in order
to show that the presentation of legal themes in that book largely par-
allels the real world without always being smoothly incorporated into
the secondary world. It does not so much constitute a credible “green
sun” commanding secondary belief, as much as it does a mostly yellow
sun with some green highlights.
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings starts out in much the same place that The
Hobbit ends in its presentation of legal issues, with another bit of legal
folderol. After Bilbo disappears again, Frodo’s inheritance of Bag End
is confirmed by a ludicrously “clear and correct” will, complete with
among other things seven signatures of witnesses in red ink, according
to the legal customs of hobbits (FR, I, i, 47). Even as the story quickly
darkens, with the revelations made by Gandalf in the “Shadows of the
Past” chapter leading to Frodo’s having to flee the Shire, the same
lighthearted attitude dominates the legal themes, with the revelation
of the “conspiracy” to invade Frodo’s privacy by Merry, Pippin, Sam
and Fatty Bolger (see FR, I, v, 113-116). Similarly, in the “Shortcut to
Mushrooms” chapter Frodo’s irrational fear of punishment for his tres-
passing on and stealing mushrooms from Farmer Maggot‘s land as a

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child is also quite lighthearted (FR, I, iv, 100-102). However, this scene
was presented in a much more absurdly comical manner in the ear-
lier drafts of the story, in which Frodo’s predecessor—Bingo Bolger-
Baggins—uses the Ring to play a silly trick on the Farmer, picking up
Maggot’s mug of beer and drinking it while invisible, so that “the mug
left the table, rose, tilted in the air, and then returned empty to its
place” (Shadow 96-97).
The change in tone in The Lord of the Rings is very well illustrated
by Boromir’s assault on Frodo at Amon Hen in an attempt to take the
Ring by force (FR, II, x, 413-416). Here a conflicted but essentially
good character commits a criminal act—a violent assault and battery—
that powerfully demonstrates one of the key themes of the tale, vividly
illustrating the negative influence of the Ring. Similarly, we learn that
Gollum/Sméagol, a conflicted but essentially evil character, first ob-
tained the ring by murdering his friend Déagol, though it is unclear
how much that was due to the evil influence of the Ring, and how
much was due to his basic nature (FR, I, ii, 62-63). More significantly,
later when Frodo encounters Gollum, he binds the creature to him by
getting him to agree to lead him to Mordor, sealing the agreement by
getting Gollum to swear an oath “by the Precious,” which of course is
what Gollum called the Ring (TT, IV, i, 224-25). This was not a con-
tractual agreement; it is not an exchange of valid considerations. It is
true that Frodo agreed not to kill or hurt Gollum, but even if such an
agreement could be considered a valid form of consideration (which
is highly doubtful), Frodo had already unilaterally decided, out of pity,
not to harm Gollum, before Gollum had agreed to provide a service to
him (see TT, IV, i, 221-22). Thus, this agreement did not have the force
of law behind it. Instead, it relied on a higher moral force, such that
even an essentially evil character like Gollum (but one that still has a
small corner of light hiding in the midst of his dark soul) felt bound
by it—although it did not stop him from betraying Frodo to Shelob,
or from transferring his oath to himself as the “Master of the Precious”
in the end.
Another good example of Tolkien using a legal scenario to show
how moral compass transcends the law is Gríma Wormtongue‘s con-
spiring with Saruman to undermine Théoden. Gríma, a supposed
counselor to the king, conspired with the king’s enemy, Saruman,
spied on the king, discredited his loyal vassals like Éomer, and possibly
even used poison to reduce the king to a barren shell of himself—a
much darker conspiracy than the one discussed earlier. The response
to this darker conspiracy is particularly illuminating. Gandalf diffused
the conspiracy by unveiling some of his hidden power, after first sub-
verting the law of the land as set forth by Gríma by convincing the

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doorward Háma to allow him to keep his staff. This helps make Gan-
dalf’s existence as a mysterious yet angelic or even divine being more
credible. Even more significant, after Gríma’s treachery was laid bare,
Théoden showed him mercy, and rather than punishing him by death
or imprisonment (as might be expected for such treason), he gave
him the choice of either showing his loyalty in battle, or exile (see TT,
III, vi, 125; see also UT 355). This is consistent neither with a modern
implementation of the law,17 nor with the Anglo-Saxon culture upon
which Rohan is based.18 This deviation helps to cement one of the
main themes in Tolkien’s long tale: the importance of mercy.
Perhaps the best example of mercy comes towards the end of The
Return of the King. Beregond, a member of the Guard of the Tower of
Gondor who befriended Pippin, was faced with the difficult choice of
either subverting the will of his sovereign, the Steward Denethor, or
seeing his Captain, Faramir, be wrongfully killed because of Denthor’s
madness. He ended up committing a number of crimes in his haste
to save Faramir, the worst of which was killing the door warden and
spilling blood in the Hallows, which was forbidden (RK, V, vii, 127-
128). After the War of the Ring was done and over with, and Aragorn
assumed the throne of Gondor as King Elessar, he sat in judgment of
Beregond. Aragorn acts as judge, jury, prosecutor and defense attor-
ney, all wrapped up in one (RK, VI, v, 247). To modern sensibilities,
this is completely unacceptable. Yet in the context of Tolkien’s sec-
ondary universe, it is not only believable, but admirable, once again
emphasizing the theme of mercy, as well as highlighting the type of
“unconstitutional monarchy” that Tolkien describes in a 1943 letter to
his son Christopher as being one of his ideal types of governance (Let-
ters 63). This scene is a fine example of Tolkien successfully creating
a credible green sun commanding secondary belief, and by doing so
delineating the parameters of his moral universe.
Elder Days
Tolkien’s treatment of legal issues in the tales of the Elder Days are
particularly instructive in showing how his writing evolved from before
the completion of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to after those
works were finished. That development can be tracked by following
the progression of several legal proceedings. As time went on, Tolkien
became more and more interested in the philosophical and metaphys-
ical implications of his sub-creation, and his discussion of legal issues
becomes correspondingly more abstract.
There were two “trials” that took place during the days before the
rising of the Sun and the Moon: the trial of Melkor after he was cap-
tured by the rest of the Valar and brought in chains back to Valinor,

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and the trial of Fëanor after he drew his sword and threatened his half-
brother Fingolfin. In both cases, Manwë, like Aragorn, had absolute
power to impose judgment. He imposed on Melkor a term of impris-
onment of three ages, a very long period of time (S 51-52). Nonethe-
less, several of his brethren—particularly Ulmo and Tulkas—disagreed
with his decision to release Melkor at the end of the term, and of
course we the readers, with the benefit of hindsight, can see that it was
a foolish mistake (S 65-66). In the case of Fëanor, he was banished for
seven years along with his seven sons, and his father Finwë chose to
share his exile, thus essentially yielding the kingship to his second son
Fingolfin, and making the lies of Melkor come true (S 70-71).
It is instructive to look at the development of these stories over the
course of the writing of the legendarium. The Chaining of Melko is one
of the original Lost Tales. In that first version, the Valar used deceit in
order to capture Melko, pretending to do homage to him and even
seeming to bring Tulkas bound in chains to get him to lower his guard
(Lost Tales I 102-104). As the legendarium developed and took shape,
Tolkien realized that the Valar would never use this type of deception;
it is quite contrary to the morality so well expressed in The Lord of the
Rings by Faramir, when he said to Frodo that he would not snare even
an Orc with a falsehood (see TT, IV, v, 272). One element of this sto-
ry that was developed further in the post–Lord of the Rings versions of
the story is the nature of Manwë’s blindness to evil that allows him to
make the seemingly foolish decision to release Melkor from bondage.
As I discuss in Arda Reconstructed, the older version is retained in the
published Silmarillion. In the longer, newer version, it is acknowledged
that Melkor’s evil was beyond full healing, but noted that since he was
originally the greatest of the powers of Arda, his aid would, if he will-
ingly gave it, do more than anything to heal the hurts that he caused;
and that Manwë judged (wrongly as it turns out) that Melkor was on
this path, and that he would be more likely to stay on that path if he
was treated fairly. This longer passage specifies that Manwë was slow to
perceive jealousy and rancor since he himself did not experience these
things (Morgoth 273; see also Kane 83). This passage is noteworthy in
that it demonstrates Tolkien coming more to emphasize the value of
goodness in and of itself, even when that quality leads to what in hind-
sight is clearly a miscarriage of justice.
The story of Fëanor and the Silmarils also goes back to the begin-
ning, though the holy jewels did not have the significance in the Lost
Tales that they were to later obtain (see Lost Tales I 128). The element
of Melkor spreading lies among the Noldor and inciting their rebel-
lion was present from the beginning, and Fëanor’s feud with his half-
brother Fingolfin, and his resulting banishment, is already present in

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the Quenta Noldorinwa, which as mentioned earlier was written around

1930 (Shaping 90-91). The confrontation between Fëanor and Fingol-
fin was significantly expanded in later writings not incorporated into
the published Silmarillion (compare S 70 with Morgoth 277-278; see also
Kane 90). However, the part of the story that receives the most fur-
ther development in the post–Lord of the Rings writings is the descrip-
tion of the subsequent theft of the Silmarils and murder of Finwë by
Melkor, when Fëanor is summoned back to Manwë’s halls to attend a
festival that the Elder King hopes will help heal the divisiveness that
has marred Valinor. In the older version contained in the published
Silmarillion, these crimes are briefly reported with little detail by an un-
named “messenger.” In the latest version of the Quenta, the description
of this theft and murder is made by Fëanor’s son Maedhros, and it is
one of the most vivid and moving descriptions of a criminal act in all
of Tolkien‘s writings (compare S 79 with Morgoth 293-294). As I write in
Arda Reconstructed, “The descriptive detail and the fact that the story is
told by a close member of Finwë’s family both make it far more com-
pelling” than the older version (Kane 107). The added detail in the
later version also makes Fëanor’s subsequent reaction to the report of
his father’s death much more sympathetic, with his sons chasing after
him in haste, fearing that he will slay himself in his grief. It is noted in
this more detailed version that those who saw his grief “forgave all his
bitterness” and (most significantly) that later events might have been
different if he had “cleansed his heart ere the dreadful tidings came”
(see Morgoth 295 and Kane 108).
In addition, the “criminal” relationship between Melkor and Ungo-
liant is much more developed in the later writings. Considerably more
detail is added to show how Melkor used a combination of threats and
bribes to entice her into aiding him (see Morgoth 284-85 and Kane 93).
A completely different version of the darkening of Valinor is told, in
which Melkor much more explicitly used Ungoliant to accomplish his
evil designs, with her destroying the Two Trees with no help from him
at all, and his craven nature more clearly demonstrated (see Morgoth
285-88 and Kane 96-99). Finally, the subsequent “falling out of thieves”
is also significantly expanded (see Morgoth 296 and Kane 108-109).
Another “trial” in the Elder Days is the hearing that Thingol con-
ducted regarding the death of his counselor Saeros as a result of his
confrontation with Túrin. This is another element that goes back to
the original Lost Tales (see Lost Tales II 75-76, where the counselor’s
name is Orlog, not Saeros), but which received significant develop-
ment in the later, post–Lord of the Rings, writing. In the most developed
version of the story, the Narn i Chîn Húrin (versions of which are pub-
lished both in Unfinished Tales and in The Children of Húrin), Thingol’s

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initial decision condemning Túrin is overturned when Beleg Strong-

bow is able to present a surprise witness, the elf-maiden Nellas who
witnessed Saeros’s waylaying Túrin and precipitating the events that
led to his death (see UT 79-84 and CH 87-96). There is no suggestion
at all—as there would be in a modern trial—that Nellas was not telling
the truth because she clearly was smitten with Túrin, and therefore bi-
ased in his favor. For Tolkien the important point is that truth prevails
over injustice, but even more that Túrin’s arrogant pride refuses to
allow that justice to be done, thus allowing Morgoth’s curse to prevail.
Another legal proceeding is the trial of Túrin’s father, Húrin, which
is part of the post–Lord of the Rings work The Wanderings of Húrin, which
was published in The War of the Jewels and only small parts of which
appear in the published Silmarillion. To set the stage briefly, Morgo-
th released Húrin after thirty years of bondage following the deaths
of Húrin’s children, but only because Morgoth realized that Húrin
could further his own cause. In the portion included in The Silmarillion
Húrin revealed the location of Gondolin to Morgoth, and then found
his wife Morwen just before she died at the foot of the “stone of the
hapless,” where Túrin is buried.19 (See S 227-30 and Jewels 271-74 and
295-96; see also Kane 209 and 212-13.) The Wanderings of Húrin further
describes how he then fell into a swoon and was found by the men of
Brethil, and threatened with death by Avranc, the son of Dorlas (the
warrior of Brethil who failed Túrin and then was slain by Brandir).
However, he is befriended by Manthor, one of the chief warriors of
Brethil and one of the kin of the Haladin. He is nonetheless taken
prisoner, and he proceeds to assault Hardang, the current Chieftain of
Brethil, with a stool. He is put on trial, after being drugged, with Man-
thor acting as his counselor. Húrin falsely charges the men of Brethil
with failing to provide help to Morwen, and he eventually provokes an
uprising against Hardang in favor of Manthor. Hardang is slain, but
then Manthor is also killed, by Avranc, and Húrin goes on to Nargo-
thrond, to eventually unwittingly wreak havoc on Doriath (see Jewels
274-295). This story contains some of Tolkien’s most incisive political
commentary, including Húrin’s cold comfort to Manthor on his death-
bed, in which he pointed out that Manthor’s friendship to Húrin was
rooted in Manthor’s own self-interest in seeking to use his defense of
Húrin to further his own ambition to become the Chieftain.
The downfall of Doriath in the published Silmarillion is largely
an editorial construction (see “A note on Chapter 22 Of the Ruin
of Doriath in the published Silmarillion” in Jewels 354-56 and Kane
207-18). However, one element that is present in all versions is that
Thingol agreed with the Dwarves to compensate them for either cre-
ating or recreating the Nauglamîr, the Necklace of the Dwarves that

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 Law and Arda

i­ncorporated the Silmaril that Beren and Lúthien recovered from

Morgoth (see, e.g., S 232-233 and Shaping 132-133). This is one of the
only “contractual” relationships described in the tales of the Elder
days, and we can see how well that worked out for the parties involved
(all of them are eventually killed). Much more prevalent are binding
oaths, such as the “oath of abiding friendship and aid in every need”
made by Finrod to Barahir when the latter saved him during the Dagor
Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame, which eventually rebounds to
lead to his death in the course of helping Barahir’s son, Beren20 (see S
152 and 169-176). Like the agreement that Gollum made with Frodo
discussed above, this agreement was not backed by the force of law, but
instead reflects a higher morality. Not only does this reflect the high
importance that Tolkien placed on abiding by one’s word at all costs,
it is also another reflection of the ever-present theme of destiny in
Tolkien’s legendarium, as Finrod had long before predicted to his sister
Galadriel that he would eventually swear an oath that would lead to his
death (see S 130).
However, perhaps the most meaningful discussion of a “legal fic-
tion” in the Elder Days is the essay “The Laws and Customs among
the Eldar” mentioned earlier, the full name of which is “The Laws and
Customs Among the Eldar Pertaining to Marriage and other Matters
Related Thereto: Together with the Statute of Finwë and Míriel and
the Debate of the Valar at its Making” (Morgoth 209). This work, and
the associated writings about Finwë and Míriel—only a small amount
of which can be found in the published Silmarillion—contain some
of Tolkien’s most profound ruminations, “tenuous, elusive, and dif-
ficult of expression” (to use Barfield’s phrase) though they may be.
It is perhaps not surprising that as a devout Catholic, Tolkien would
be particularly interested in the sanctity of marriage. Finwë is the only
character of in all of Tolkien’s work who marries a second time, and
explaining how that was allowed to come about gives Tolkien an out-
let to express much profound thought not only about marriage, but
about death, justice and healing. Because marriage is meant to be per-
manent, in order to allow Finwë to remarry, Míriel was required to
renounce any chance of returning to her body—because otherwise
there was a chance that Finwë would have two spouses, and that could
not be. The Valar engaged in a great debate about what to do with this
situation, since it had never come up before. In opening the debate,
Manwë made it clear that the death of Míriel was a sign of the Marring
of Arda by Melkor, and discussed the differences between Justice and
Healing. He noted that
in Arda Marred Justice is not Healing. Healing cometh

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 Douglas C. Kane

only by suffering and patience, and maketh no demand,

not even for Justice. Justice worketh only within the bonds
of things as they are, accepting the marring of Arda, and
therefore though Justice is itself good and desireth no fur-
ther evil, it can but perpetuate the evil that was, and doth
not prevent it from the bearing of fruit in sorrow.
(Morgoth 239-240)
This sorrow was nothing less than the acceptance of Death that led to
a lower road leading away from Arda Unmarred. The Valar conclude
at the end of the debate that they can only offer Justice, not Healing,
even though Justice leads to that lower road that Manwë describes.
Nonetheless, Manwë concludes that the lower road resulting from the
Marring of Arda still would lead in the end to a positive result, because
“Arda Healed” will be greater and more fair than the original Arda Un-
marred. At the end of the debate, Mandos makes is clear in declaring
his Doom that a ruler cannot compel his subjects to walk the higher
road that leads to healing, because that would simply lead to tyranny,
and that “a ruler who discerning justice refuseth to it the sanction of
law, demanding abnegation of rights and self-sacrifice, will not drive
his subjects to the virtues, virtuous only if free, but by unnaturally mak-
ing justice unlawful, will drive them rather to rebellion against all law.
Not by such means will Arda be healed” (Morgoth 246).Thus, the Heal-
ing of Arda will come only through allowing the full Tale of Arda to
play out to the end, and the Valar can only act as just rulers of Arda as it
exists, without trying to compel others to walk the higher path. More-
over, each of the events that occurred—Míriel’s death, Finwë’s com-
ing together with Indis and bringing her children into the world, the
marring of Fëanor’s birth and his subsequent rebellion, and even the
unchaining of Melkor—were all necessary components of the eventual
healing of Arda.
This is truly an example of using a legal fiction (the “statute of
Finwë and Míriel”) to express concepts that are “tenuous, elusive, and
difficult of expression.” It provides a reaffirmation and explanation of
the ever-present theme of fate in Tolkien’s work. More importantly, it
establishes a firm division between Justice, which is all that can be ex-
pected from authority within the circles of the world (even up to and
including the Valar themselves) and Healing, which must come from
the Authority that is beyond the circles of the world. This is among
the clearest expressions of Tolkien’s metaphysical views in all of his
writings, particularly the belief in a higher morality that transcends
earthly authority. The essay also addresses the relationship between
individuals within Arda. There is no provision made for Elvish divorce,
but Tolkien notes in “The Laws and Customs of the Eldar” that no

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ceremony was necessary for marriage; a couple was automatically mar-

ried when they consummated their relationship (Morgoth 211-212).
He also makes clear that marriage is a relationship of both body and
spirit (Morgoth 225). The antithesis therefore can be presumed: that if
a couple is separate both physically and spiritually, they can no longer
be considered married.
Ironically, one of the only characters in the First Age whose mar-
riage collapses while both parties still lived is Finwë and Míriel’s son
Fëanor, who becomes estranged from his wife Nerdanel over his rebel-
lion against the Valar. Particularly interesting is the fact that Nerdanel
elected to remain with Indis when Fëanor returns to Middle-earth (see
Morgoth 279 and Kane 91). In one version of the tale, reported in the
“Shibboleth of Fëanor” section of The Peoples of Middle-earth, she de-
manded custody of at least one of their twin sons but was rebuffed by
Fëanor, to which she replied, “You will not keep all of them. One at
least will never set foot on Middle-earth.” Their son Angrod then died
when Fëanor had the ships of the Teleri put to flames (Peoples 353-55
and Kane 113-14). What a telling comment on the danger of marital
strife, not to mention the power of destiny in Tolkien’s legendarium.
But the best study of the breakup of a marriage comes in the sec-
ond age tale of Aldarion and Erendis, published in Unfinished Tales
(see 173-217). This is perhaps Tolkien’s most emotionally nuanced sto-
ry, a tale of true love initially overcoming tremendous obstacles, only
to eventually collapse under the weight of two prideful people with
truly irreconcilable differences. Although this is a tale about humans,
not Elves, there is again no provision for divorce, despite Aldarion and
Erendis’ eventual total estrangement—again perhaps not surprising
coming from a devout Catholic. One of the most interesting elements
of their separation is the issue of the custody of their daughter, An-
calimë, who would become the first ruling queen of Numenor. An-
calimë herself is described as having disastrous relationships with men,
showing that Tolkien was well aware of how dysfunctional relationships
tend to propagate themselves.
These examples show that in his later years, Tolkien was using legal
fiction in a much more subtle manner than could be seen in his earlier
work, both with the early versions of the tales of what would become
the Elder Days, and The Hobbit. His ability to tailor these legal issues to
his secondary world enabled him to more successfully express sophisti-
cated concepts of morality, philosophy and psychology.
Conclusion
This is only a brief overview of a complicated subject, highlighting
some of the ways that Tolkien has incorporated legal themes and issues

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in a way that makes his secondary world more compellingly credible, as

well as how his efforts to do so changed and matured over the course
of the creation of his legendarium. The Hobbit has by far the most ex-
plicit references to real world legal processes. In The Lord of the Rings,
particularly the latter parts, and even more in his later writings as he
expanded the scope and breadth of his legendarium, Tolkien is much
more successful at using the presentation of legal issues in order to
“escape from their shackles,” promoting and enhancing a moral vision
that transcends the law of man, as well as using a legal fiction to help
express ideas that are “tenuous, elusive, and difficult of expression,”
and using legal themes to illuminate the relations between individu-
als, be they criminal conspirators, victims of crime, or the partners
in a failing relationship. It is in this later work that we see him most
successfully using legal themes to generate a credible – not to mention
compelling – secondary world.
Notes
1 For a listing of Professor Larsen’s work in this area, see http://
www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/tolkien.html.
2 See, e.g., Hazell, Hilton and Fonstad.
3 By “modern legal terms” I refer to the Anglo-American system
of common law which has its roots in medieval Britain. In the
common-law system (which is used in the United Kingdom and all
of the U.S. states and Canadian provinces except Louisiana and
Quebec, both of which utilize the French-based civil law system),
law is generated largely through the decisions made by appellate
courts. Because of the doctrine of stare decisis, in which courts are
bound by prior decisions in most cases, the law changes slowly in
this system. Specifics can often vary widely between jurisdictions;
however over time a body of basic legal principles has been devel-
oped. In many cases common law has become codified into statu-
tory schemes that complement (and sometimes replace) the body
of case law. In 1923, the American Law Institute first began issuing
“Restatements” of various areas of law in order to codify trends
in common law. The second Restatement of Contracts was com-
pleted in 1979, and issued in 1981, and is probably the most cited
non-binding legal authority in American jurisprudence. Similarly,
The Model Penal Code was also created by the American Law Insti-
tute and while like the Restatements it is nonbinding, it has been
adopted in part or whole as the basis for the criminal statutory
scheme for more than two-thirds of the states. It was developed in

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1962 and last updated in 1981. For ease of reference, I cite these
generalized codifications of basic common law principles. Unless
otherwise noted, the basic principles would have been applicable
in Britain during the time that Tolkien was writing The Hobbit and
the other works discussed herein. As discussed above, while there
is no indication that Tolkien had specific knowledge of these legal
matters, he demonstrates a remarkably intuitive understanding of
the law.
4 See Restatement (Second) of Contracts §§ 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 30, 35,
36, 38-40, 42, 50, 60 and 71.
5 See Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 209.
6 See Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 177.
7 See Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 178.
8 See Restatement (Second) of Contracts §§ 261-72.
9 Model Penal Code § 221.1.
10 Model Penal Code § 222.1.
11 Model Penal Code § 5.01(1).
12 Model Penal Code § 3.02(1)(a).
13 It is worth noting how closely these words echo the oath of Fëanor
and his sons regarding the Silmarils, which makes it first appear-
ance in the circa 1930 (essentially contemporary with the writing
of The Hobbit) Quenta Noldorinwa with language almost identical to
that contained in the published Silmarillion: “They swore the un-
breakable oath, by the name of Manwë and Varda and the holy
mountain, to pursue with hate and vengeance to the ends of the
world Vala, Demon, Elf, or Man, or Orc who hold or take or keep
a Silmaril against their will” (Shaping 94).
14 Perhaps the most developed and explicit expression of Tolkien’s
views on interaction of fate and free will can be found in Ulmo’s
words to Tuor in “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin” written
in the early 1950s, when The Lord of the Rings was completed but
not yet published. Note that although Ulmo’s words appear at first
blush to support the idea that there is room for free will within
the divine plan—“in the armour of Fate (as the Children of Earth
name it) there is a ever a rift, and in the walls of Doom a breach,
until the full-making, which ye call the End”—a closer look at what
he says reveals that even his own seeming rebellion against the will

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of the rest of the Valar is in fact his appointed role to play in the
greater scheme of things (“that is my part among them, to which
I was appointed ere the making of the World”). Moreover, he
makes it clear that the acts of Tuor (and by extension his son-to-be,
Eärendil) are themselves a product of playing that appointed role:
“And that hope lieth in thee; for so I have chosen” (UT 29).
15 Compare Bilbo’s relative frugality to the fate of the Master of Lake-
town, who we later learn “took most of the gold and fled with it,
and died of starvation in the Waste, deserted by his companions”
(H, xix, 276).
16 See, e.g., California Probate Code section 12401.
17 See 18 U.S.C. § 2381.
18 See http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/encyclopedia/
anglo-saxon-law.pdf
19 The last portion of the Wanderings of Húrin text included in the
published Silmarillion is the burial of Morwen, which in the original
text takes place at the end of Húrin’s experiences in Brethil.
20 Finrod gives Barahir his ring in token of this vow, and this ring be-
came an heirloom passed all the way down to the House of Isildur,
playing a small but important role in The Lord of the Rings.

Works Cited
Anderson, Douglas A. The Annotated Hobbit: Revised and Expanded edi-
tion. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
Barfield, Owen. The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. Middle-
town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977.
Flieger, Verlyn. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World.
2nd edition. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002.
Fonstad, Karen Wynn. The Atlas of Middle-earth. Revised edition. Bos-
ton: Mariner Books, 2001.
Garth, John. “‘As under a green sea’: visions of war in the Dead Marsh-
es.” In The Ring Goes Ever On—Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005
Conference: 50 Years of the “Lord of the Rings,” vol. 1, ed. Sarah
Wells. London: Tolkien Society, 2008.
Hazell, Dinah. The Plants of Middle-Earth: Botany and Sub-Creation. Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007.

56
 Law and Arda

Hilton, Benjamin D. “The Geologic History of Middle Earth.” Brigham

Young University, Department of Geology, Provo, UT, 2009.
Kane, Douglas C. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmar-
illion. Bethlehem PA: Lehigh University Press, 2009.
Rateliff, John D. The History of the Hobbit, vol. I: Mr. Baggins. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.
Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth, revised and expanded edition.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.

57
e

58
 “Justice is not Healing”: J. R. R. Tolkien’s
Pauline Constructs in “Finwë and Míriel”
Amelia A. Rutledge

...none of the Dead will be permitted to be re-born until

and unless they desire to take up their former life and con-
tinue it. Indeed they cannot escape it, for the re-born soon
recover full memory of all their past. (Morgoth 227)

Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because

ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take
wrong? Why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be de-
frauded?” (I Corinthians 6:7)

T he second marriage of Fëanor’s father, Finwë, is presented in The

Silmarillion as the occasion for Fëanor’s animus toward his half-
brothers (S 65), but the philosophical ramifications of the death of
Míriel, Finwë’s first wife, are not discussed at that time.1 In the scheme
of the Quenta Silmarillion, the story of Finwë and Míriel is significant
primarily as the source of the tension between Fëanor and his half-
brothers. The Judgment of Manwë, the conclusion of a quasi-legal
debate in the absence of precedents, permitted Finwë’s second mar-
riage, the rivalry among his sons, and the disastrous oath sworn by
Fëanor that embroiled all of the Eldar in the fatal dissension resound-
ingly foretold in the Doom of Mandos (“Tears unnumbered shall ye
shed...”).2
The full significance of the story of Finwë and Míriel emerges in
Morgoth’s Ring. As Christopher Tolkien notes regarding his father’s
work:
Among the chief ‘structural’ conceptions of the mythology
that he pondered in those years were the myth of Light;
the nature of Aman; the immortality (and death) of the
Elves; the mode of their rebirth; the Fall of Men and the
length of their early history; the origin of the Orcs; and
above all, the power and significance of Melkor-Morgoth,
which was enlarged to become the ground and source of
the corruption of Arda. (Morgoth ix)
He further states, “in these writings is seen my father’s preoccupa-
tion in the years following the publication of The Lord of the Rings with
the philosophical aspects of the mythology and its systematisation”

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 Amelia Rutledge

(­Morgoth 271). In Tolkien’s multiple versions of the tale, Finwë requests

permission to remarry when his spouse, Míriel, withdraws to Aman
in exhaustion after the birth of Fëanor; she prefers this equivalent to
death to continuing her life as an Eldalié. After lengthy deliberations,
the Valar grant Finwë’s request once they determine that Míriel has no
intention of resuming bodily existence.
The present study will focus on “Finwë and Míriel” as Tolkien’s
specific case within the larger concept of theodicy, the study of justice
and of the nature of evil, and the central concern of Morgoth’s Ring, in
the same way that cosmogony was central in the Ainulindalë. The Valar
rule in favor of Finwë’s petition, but the most telling statement of the
Valar’s dilemma is Manwë’s own: “Justice is not Healing” (Morgoth 239,
Tolkien’s emphasis). Manwë does not question the Judgment itself,
but his ambivalence attests to his awareness that the law’s inadequa-
cies have been laid bare. Manwë states further that justice meted out
in granting the wishes of both spouses is a product of Arda Marred,
since Míriel’s hopeless exhaustion and Finwë’s disordered desire for
remarriage3 demonstrate the imbalance between order and disorder
that has persisted despite the efforts of the Valar to stabilize Arda in
the face of Melkor’s disruptions. Although the Judgment of Manwë
addresses the plight of the bereaved Finwë, the larger question of the
meaning of death for de facto immortal beings is inescapably present in
the deliberations of the Valar when they must face the consequences
of yielding to Míriel’s petition never to be reborn.
Both Elizabeth Whittingham and Douglas Charles Kane discuss
the Finwë and Míriel story, but with special emphasis on eschatology:
Whittingham in her chapter on “Death and Immortality,”4 and Kane in
his discussion of the scant textual presence of Mándos’ eschatological
“Second Prophecy” (236). In contradistinction to these two studies,
I want to focus more precisely on the legalism that both frames de-
bates in “Finwë and Míriel” and is criticized by Manwë as inadequate
to the complexities of the relationships of Valar and Eldar in Arda,
reading it through the lens of St. Paul’s analyses of the inadequacy
of the law. I do not suggest direct Pauline influence or a theological
affirmation of Pauline arguments in Tolkien’s fiction;5 rather, I assert
that Pauline teachings about the law’s insufficiency in the economy of
grace can serve as an heuristic that makes possible some clarification
both of the Valar’s debate and the judgments of Manwë and of Námo/
Mandos, Manwë’s voice in the judgments of Arda. Manwë’s summa-
tion, especially his uneasiness with the inadequacy of a just decision
to effect true renewal, “healing,” of the parties involved, is consonant
with Pauline assertions, discussed below, regarding the limitations of
the law both in Christians’ everyday lives and in the context of divine

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 “Justice is not Healing”

grace. Tolkien’s verbal constructs in “Finwë and Míriel” are analogous

to texts such as Galatians 3:19 and 21 or Hebrews 7: 9,6 which signal
the law as needful but lacking. Manwë sees the Judgment as a faute de
mieux for negotiating imperfect resolutions to moral dilemmas hereto-
fore not encountered by the Valar. Beyond verbal analogies, however,
Manwë is concerned that resolving the immediate problem, the results
of bereavement in Finwë’s case, falls short of healing the disorder, the
“marring,” of Arda occasioned by Melkor’s revolt. There is also, within
Tolkien’s presentation of the Judgment, structural congruence with
Pauline assertions that grace has succeeded where the law has failed.
In the absence of such assurance, Manwë can only state that what the
Judgment fails to accomplish must be left to hope: “But healing must
retain ever the thought of Arda Unmarred ... This is Hope which, I
deem, before all else the virtue most fair in the Children of Éru, ...”
(Morgoth 239–40). The Valar have been forced to realize the limits of
their power over the operations of Arda.
The terms “law” or “quasi-legal” are potentially misleading, as is
Christopher Tolkien’s term, “systematisation,” which implies that the
story of Finwë and Míriel provides a resolution of the quandary cre-
ated by conflict between “permanent marriage” and the liberum arbi-
trium inherent in all rational beings of Arda. Since Tolkien’s construct
requires that neither concept be discarded, he presents quasi-juridical
debates that pit choice and desire against the “laws” on which the ex-
istence of the Eldar is based. There is no final resolution and Finwë’s
summation is an acknowledgment of the limitations of what the Valar
have achieved. What constitutes the “law” in the construction of the
central dilemma is, in the absence of a system such as canon law, the
concept of essentialist monogamy or “permanent marriage” as inher-
ent in the nature of the Eldar. The “Finwë and Míriel” debates demon-
strate the authorial work required to sustain such a construct simulta-
neously with Tolkien’s construction of liberum arbitrium, “free choice”
(generally translated “free will”).
Whittingham, using The Music of the Ainur as it is found in The Book
of Lost Tales, describes the “strange gift” given to men by Ilúvatar—free-
dom from the dictates of the Great Music—as:
confusing since in the various stories Elves and all other
creatures also seem to have the freedom to do as they wish,
though that might be the difference between appearance
and reality. Another possibility is that Ilúvatar is refer-
ring to some other potential beyond individual choice, a
freedom perhaps of the race as a whole to shape its ends.
(129–30)

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 Amelia Rutledge

There is no suggestion elsewhere that Elves lack the freedom to choose.

The Valar refuse to compel the Eldar—those resisting the summons to
Eldamar are allowed to remain in Middle Earth, and Fëanor is not
forced to yield the Silmarils when the Two Trees are poisoned, even
if the light from the jewels might restore the Trees. The confusion to
which Whittingham alludes arises when one considers that what is dic-
tated in the Great Music is what we would call “nature”; the Elves, one
of the themes propounded by Ilúvatar alone, have an essence that con-
forms (or should) with the Music; permanent marriage is part of that
“nature”—essentialism in its purest form—yet they have “freedom” as
well. The Elves are permitted choice, but, for marriage at least, the as-
sumption, prior to the occasion of the Judgment, is that their choice
would not deviate from their nature as defined by the Great Music.
Contra Whittingham, this “freedom,” whether for Eldar or Edain,
cannot be simply a matter of “appearance and reality,” since constraint
obliterates the very freedom implied by liberum arbitrium. This neces-
sary freedom can be misused, like all good, although not every misuse
of liberum arbitrium goes so far as to be called “evil,” unless one consid-
ers “willfulness,” “sin,” and “evil” to be synonyms.7 To the extent that it
is a good, then, liberum arbitrium must exist in tension with the (appar-
ently) inherent monogamy that distinguishes the Eldar from humans.
The Valar are slow to realize that nature does not and cannot trump
free choice (in this, unfortunately, they fail to consider their most po-
tent example, Melkor). Finwë cannot be described as evil in compari-
son with Melkor, but he has consulted his desires in a way that does
not accord with the essential monogamy that has been constructed in
Tolkien’s depiction of the Eldar.
Tolkien and Theology
Absent the few references he provides to his own reading, sources
and analogues for Tolkien’s mythopoeic work are difficult to specify,
so that claims regarding analogies to philosophical or religious sources
must be advanced cautiously. On the other hand, the similarities be-
tween the legendarium and Neoplatonic philosophy or Augustinian the-
ology have already been discussed,8 and Whittingham notes similari-
ties to classical, Norse, and Finnish mythologies in her chapter about
death and immortality (123–27). In letter 200 (to Major R. Bowen),
Tolkien describes the difficulties of literary sub-creation, while sound-
ing rather pleased at the results of his efforts: “I am sorry if this all
seems dreary and ‘pompose’ [sic]. But so do all attempts to ‘explain’
the images and events of a mythology...it is, I suppose, some test of
the consistency of a mythology as such, if it is capable of some sort of
rational or rationalized explanation” (Letters 260). The colloquy of the

62
 “Justice is not Healing”

Valar is a fictive reenactment of another such “rationalized explana-

tion” in which the Valar define their positions on the subject of Elvish
remarriage prior to Manwë’s judgment.
Tolkien was not by training a systematic theologian, nor was the
primary focus of his writing exegetical or polemical; as “sub-creator,”
he nevertheless brought to the texts collected in Morgoth’s Ring some
of the strategies of the speculative theologian. As a practicing Roman
Catholic, he was familiar with scripture as embodied in the liturgy and
in the Office, and he notes, in a passage about his schooldays to his son
Michael (letter 306): “I was even allowed to attend the Headmaster’s
classes on the NT (in Greek)”; the theological content of these classes
is not revealed, but one can assume that his mentors did not consider
the experience detrimental to Tolkien’s Catholicism.9 In letter 131 to
Milton Waldman, Tolkien explains the principle that prevents him
from incorporating explicit Christian content (Letters 144)10.
Manwë’s awareness of legalism’s failure to resolve remarriage
among longaevi, a situation with implications for the very ground of
Elvish existence, signals the Finwë/Míriel dilemma as an important
nexus of theodicy, ontology (here, the inveterate essentialism of the
Eldar’s moral nature), and ethics. Ethical obligations are too complex
for the very absolutes (e.g., the fantasy of inherent rectitude) that
seem to elevate the Eldar above the human condition. Tolkien’s com-
mitment to two basic absolutes means that there can be no easy resolu-
tion of the conflict created in the narrative.
Even if neither Tolkien nor his speaker Manwë was satisfied with
the legalisms of the debate, no easy appeal can be made—nor will I
make one—to a “Pauline” negative view of the “law.” A detailed discus-
sion of current Pauline exegesis is outside the scope of this study, but
it useful to note that contemporary scholarship views the extreme bi-
narism of “law” versus “faith” as historically conditioned and even post-
Pauline. Current scholarship has led to a more historically nuanced
consideration of Paul’s dicta about the supercession of law by the new
dispensation: J. Louis Martyn notes that Paul’s early proclamations re-
garding the inadequacy of the law necessitated careful qualifications in
his later letters, Romans, I Corinthians, or Ephesians (42–43). Robert
K. Rapa argues that readings of Paul’s theology that rely on post-Ref-
ormation law/grace dichotomies require careful historical positioning
in order to move beyond simplistic binary oppositions of “law” and
“grace” (Rapa 5); it is necessary to recognize that Pauline texts are ap-
propriated in contextually different polemical situations across time.
Further, Panayotis Coutsoumpos cites Martin Luther’s deep pessimism
about human capacity to do good (40) as an example of the much
later Protestant dichotomy, noting also that Paul himself did not take

63
 Amelia Rutledge

an antinomian view of “grace” in opposition to “law” (49). There is no

single Pauline text that can serve as a model for all of the questions
raised in the Valar’s debate; rather, there are key Pauline passages, to
be discussed below, that are verbal parallels to Tolkien’s formulations
of the dilemma into which his efforts to achieve a coherent theology
for his Secondary World had led him. Moreover, these same passages
share perceptions both of the law’s legitimacy and its inadequacies.
Marriage Among the Eldar
It is useful to define the contexts for the monogamy that is the
source of Finwë’s, and thus Tolkien’s, dilemmas: Elvish lifespan, the
possibility of rebirth, and the conditions upon which this rebirth is
contingent. Under ideal circumstances, the lifespans of the Eldar are
coterminous with Arda (Morgoth 270). Elvish existence offers the op-
portunity of once-only rebirth; in the event that it takes place at all,
rebirth has as its purpose the “redress” of “the unnatural breach in the
continuity of life” (Morgoth 227). The discussion continues: “...none of
the Dead will be permitted to be re-born until and unless they desire
to take up their former life and continue it. Indeed they cannot escape
it, for the re-born soon recover full memory of all their past” (Morgoth
227).11 The reborn always return to their own families, which leads,
inevitably, to attachment to the same appropriate spouse when the re-
born individual matures to marriageable age (Morgoth 234). For any of
the married Eldar who die, then, Tolkien makes rebirth contingent on
the will to continue their marriages.
When the question is raised whether a marriage can be ended after
rebirth, Tolkien’s speaker evades the matter, indicating that death is “a
thing unnatural”: “But perceiving their nature, as we now do, we hold
that the love of the...” (Morgoth 227). The passage breaks off here, but
one might infer that if the Eldar persist long enough, the wish to end a
marriage would be seen for the “unnatural” thing that it is and would
not be taken further.12 What has not yet been encountered by Eldar
and Valar, except theoretically, is death (the absolute refusal of rebirth
instead of waiting in Mándos), which is Míriel’s request.13 In perpetuat-
ing the “unnatural breach” in her life’s continuity, Míriel unilaterally
removes herself from the possibility of realizing that her desire is, ac-
cording to the “inference” just cited, unnatural. Faced with coercion
by her essence, as it were, she opts to exist in stasis—her body uncor-
rupted and her marriage in hiatus—for the duration of Arda. Finwë
is perforce co-opted into the same marital hiatus; as long as Míriel’s
rebirth is a possibility, he cannot marry another. Against the expected
resignation to his state he sets his desire for a spouse and additional
offspring.

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 “Justice is not Healing”

Tolkien’s discussion of marriage among the Eldar conflates ontol-

ogy with ethics: as noted above, a convenient essentialism would have
it that by nature the Eldar are desirous of marriage, exogamous, and
chaste: all qualities toward which humans must strive. 14 To make of
monogamy an essential component of Elvish being may, at first glance,
make their condition of existence ethically ideal. On the other hand,
to make the continuance of marriage the sole ground for return to
bodily existence—that is, no one could return with the intention, or
even desire, to take any other spouse, which is exactly what Finwë is
requesting, involves both Finwë and Míriel in a situation that can only
be resolved by special dispensation for Finwë, an annulment not just
of a marriage but, if the ground rules are to remain consistent, of fun-
damental essence. If not the latter, then there would need to be an
admission that Eldarin “nature” has been gravely misconstrued.
The truncated “B” text of “The Laws and Customs among the El-
dar” asserts that marriage is grounded in the soul, or fëa (in essentia
either male or female), and that marriage, contracted early, was en-
tered only once in the existence of any of the Eldar (Morgoth 210). One
“desire” (a concept central in Tolkien’s definition of fantasy) enacted
in this construct is for an essence not at war with itself.15 This fantasy
of wills in perfect harmony with right action is an arbitrary move in
Tolkien’s mythopoeic game; however, in the context of the legendari-
um, while the Eldar may indeed be created to be wedded beings, what
they cannot be is static.16 What seems, philosophically, to be the perfect
situation for marriage—that is, to construct it as an ineluctable part of
Elvish nature—is also susceptible to the Elvish willfulness that the Va-
lar are never able fully to comprehend, as witnessed by their disastrous
effort at transporting the Eldar to a haven safer than Middle-earth.17
Truly free choice must be able to override an essentialist conception
of “natures,” and both spouses do just that: Míriel is obdurate in her
refusal to return to life and marriage, and Finwë cannot be persuaded
to accept a solitary existence. “Permanent marriage was in accordance
with Elvish nature, and they never had need of any law to teach them
this or enforce it...” and faced with a “permanent” marriage that was
broken, “they did not know what should be done about it,” hence the
Finwë and Míriel episode (Morgoth 225). Such a statement of the Va-
lar’s perplexity suggests that Tolkien is not making a naïve blunder
into an impasse, but, rather, recognizing it as an inevitable result of a
sub-creative act within his Secondary World, he proceeds to “save the
appearances,” using the Valar’s deliberations to shore up his ethical
paradigm.

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 Amelia Rutledge

The Debate of the Valar

The Valar’s extended debate has been praised by David Bratman
in “The Literary Value of the History of Middle-Earth” for the honesty
with which Tolkien presents the various positions of the speakers. He
notes that Tolkien, dealing with a question of divorce and remarriage
about which a devout Roman Catholic could not remain neutral, does
not use the “trick so often found in bad novels in which the ‘wrong’
character offers only easily dismissed straw-man arguments” (76).
Instead, the “Judgment” presents the opinions of each of the Valar,
beginning and ending with Manwë,18 who never yields his point that
“Justice is not Healing”: “The Statute was just, but it accepted Death...a
thing unnatural in Arda Unmarred” (Morgoth 239). Yavanna agrees,
against her spouse, Aulë, who attempts an alternate view: he questions
whether Míriel’s death is a result of Arda Marred or simply the result of
Fëanor’s exceptional birth and hence a dispensation of Eru (Morgoth
240). Aulë’s argument in favor of a special dispensation is quashed
by Ulmo, who asserts that death is an effect of the Shadow—it brings
sorrow into Aman just as it brings sorrow to Middle-earth (Morgoth
240–41).
Ulmo is equally severe against Níenna, who defends the weakness
of the Eldar despite the strength of their spirits: Finwë did not under-
stand the purpose of death (Morgoth 241–42). Ulmo counters, blaming
Finwë, who importuned his wife and hardened her Eldaic will; his fault
is the greater (Morgoth 242–43). Injecting a lighter note, Vairë speaks
for Míriel, her protégé, yet she tells the male Valar to judge Finwë when
they are in his condition of abandonment (Morgoth 244). Manwë, at
the end of the debate, comes full circle: The Eldar came into a marred
world and are ordained to know death. Eru would not need an evil tool
such as death (a conclusion that would follow for Aulë’s attempted ex-
tenuations), but he will use what instruments are to hand. Still, Finwë,
and by extension all the Eldar, should not be cast down by grief, since
two aspects of Arda Unmarred remain: the vestiges of Arda Unmarred
that can be discerned, and trust in the Promise (Morgoth 244–46). The
relatively concise narrative of the debate behind Manwë’s judgment19
raised so many questions about the ontology of the Eldar, the relation-
ship of marriage to embodiment, and the Valar’s slow realization that
the Eldar were not exempt from the “Marring” of Arda by Melkor,
that Tolkien also wrote an extended, much-edited essay “The Laws and
Customs among the Eldar” as an explication of the reasoning behind
the Judgment of Manwë.
In Manwë’s judgment, no permanent exception to the ground
rules of Elvish existence has been made; nor does granting the wish-
es of Finwë and Míriel void the good of the marriage now dissolved.

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 “Justice is not Healing”

­ ratman, in his discussion of the same passage, likens the Valar to

B
Supreme Court justices, “...the debate demonstrates the legal maxim
that ‘Hard cases make bad law’” (76). This may be so, but what I find
notable is the consistently Pauline approach Manwë takes not only to
the case under consideration but also the larger context, that of “Arda
Marred” that underlies the cosmology and the theodicy of Tolkien’s
legendarium. The law is not bad law—there is no doubt that the ruling
is just—however, what Manwë underlines is the inadequacy of a legal
judgment in a case of bereavement and conflicting desires, so I want
to focus attention on Manwë’s full statement:
In this matter ye must not forget that you deal with Arda
Marred—out of which ye brought the Eldar. Neither must
ye forget that in Arda Marred Justice is not Healing. Heal-
ing cometh only by suffering and patience, and maketh no
demand, not even for Justice. Justice worketh only within
the bonds of things as they are, accepting the marring of
Arda, and therefore though Justice is itself good and de-
sireth no further evil, it can but perpetuate the evil that
was, and doth not prevent it from the bearing of fruit in
sorrow. Thus the Statute was just, but it accepted Death
and the severance of Finwë and Míriel, a thing unnatural
in Arda Unmarred, and therefore with reference to Arda
Unmarred it was unnatural and fraught with Death. The
liberty that it gave was a lower road that, if it led not still
downwards, could not again ascend. But healing must re-
tain ever the thought of Arda Unmarred...This is Hope
which, I deem, before all else the virtue most fair in the
Children of Éru, ....(Morgoth 239–40)
It is not the case that Manwë’s arguments simply quote Pauline
maxims, but the core arguments are strikingly similar. Verbal corre-
spondences to well-known verses are not, in themselves, compelling,
as, for example, “Healing cometh only by suffering and patience, and
maketh no demand, not even for Justice” (Morgoth 239), compared
with “ Charity suffereth long, and is kind... beareth all things, believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” (I Corinthians 13:4-
7). Consider, however, “Now therefore there is utterly a fault among
you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take
wrong? Why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?” (I
Corinthians 6:7). A court’s decision may forestall contention, but it
does not amend the underlying animus between opponents. Here,
both of the quoted statements could serve as epigraphs to Manwë’s pro-
nouncement regarding the opposition between Justice and ­Healing,

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 Amelia Rutledge

and to Ulmo’s criticism of Finwë’s ill-considered importunacy in the

face of Míriel’s resistance. Moreover, Manwë’s words imply a critique of
Finwë’s appeal to a “lesser” means, the mechanics of “court justice,” as
Paul criticized Christians’ use of lawsuits instead of negotiations ruled
by charity.
Regarding the insufficiency of the law, Manwë provides further ex-
position when he asserts that “Justice worketh only within the bonds
of things as they are, accepting the marring of Arda...” (Morgoth 239),
and further: “The liberty that it gave was a lower road that, if it led
not still downwards, could not again ascend” (Morgoth 240). Compare
“Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgres-
sions,....” (Galatians 3:19 ) or “Is the law then against the promises of
God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could have
given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” (Galatians
3:21). Taking the analogies one step further, one might also compare
Manwë’s assertion “But healing must retain ever the thought of Arda
Unmarred...This is Hope which, I deem, before all else the virtue most
fair in the Children of Éru,” (Morgoth 240) with “For the law made
nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by which we
draw nigh unto God” (Hebrews 7:19). Juxtaposing Manwë’s summa-
tion with Pauline verses also illustrates Tolkien’s use of rhetorical style
as a technique for appropriation; his sub-creative act is less allegoresis
than mimesis. Making a shift from polemic—Paul’s rhetorical questions
and rebuttals—to authoritative summation preserves an ethos akin to
the Pauline epistles while remaining within the specific narrative con-
text of sub-creation.
In his essay on Galatians, Bruce Longenecker favors translating the
word for law as “pedagogue,” one whose duties end when the subject
comes of age (69). The Judgment is provisional, a measure that the
“Unmarring” will supersede. The analogy (and only this) to the Pau-
line “better hope” is the “Arda Unmarred” about which the Valar can
only speculate, especially since it is unclear what part, if any, the Eldar
will have in this transformed cosmos. In words similar to Paul’s asser-
tions, Manwë’s rueful arguments ironically must limit the ultimate effi-
cacy of law even as the Valar constitute a court of judgment. Justice can
restore balance or equity, perhaps, but not heal; for Paul, the law may
punish or exact compensation, but it does not conduce to salvation.
Manwë’s judgment grants a special dispensation to two individuals
while retaining a conviction of the rightness of the larger principle.
The Valar have tended to operate in terms of large generalities, e.g.,
the greater good of the Eldar motivated their removal from Middle-
earth, to Eldamar, but the seeds of later disasters were sown by that
act. Here, as in the case of their reasonable but unperceptive demand

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 “Justice is not Healing”

that Fëanor break one of the Silmarils to release the primal light that
will restore the Two Trees after they are poisoned by Ungoliant, the
Valar are forced to consider particularity. Fëanor was overly proud and
possessive of his work, but only one of the Valar, Aulë, realized the
specific burden in what was being asked, even if the others perforce
accept Fëanor’s refusal (S 78). The Judgment does not mention either
case, but the result of the deliberations shows a willingness to debate
the terms of the specific dilemma, remarriage, held in tension with the
larger question of the Marring. Of necessity, the case at hand domi-
nates the discussion; for the Eldar and the Valar, there is no precedent
for such a remarriage as Finwë requests.
It is possible to dismiss “Finwë and Míriel” as a wish-fulfillment at-
tempt to create a case for divorce by mutual consent. The resolution
of the case, in fact, invites such a conclusion: that the text also per-
mits the fëa of Finwë a limited connection to Míriel (even if he can
only contemplate her at a distance), once Morgoth has destroyed his
body is an instance of special pleading that mars an otherwise rigor-
ous exploration of weighty concerns.20 This “solution,” granting Finwë
a mitigated return to the wife from whom he had asked severance, is
awkward, a lapse in intellectual rigor from what has gone before. Nev-
ertheless, as Bratman notes, Tolkien takes the question of remarriage
among the Eldar seriously (76), even if he ends the revision (B-text)
just as the discussion focuses on how a marriage can be ended with
the possibility of rebirth, by stating “But herein there is indeed a dif-
ficulty, that reveals to us that death is a thing unnatural. It cannot be
amended, but it cannot, while Arda lasts, be wholly undone or made as
if it had not been” (Morgoth 226).
Tolkien has been honest enough to see the problems created by his
premises and to work within his established system rather than simply
to expunge the difficult elements. While not completely avoiding a
loaded argument, he follows a good speculative practice to the point
of impasse. As Bratman notes: “The difficulty of achieving simple an-
swers is part of what makes Tolkien’s sub-creation so intriguing” (77).
To relinquish Elvish “nature” would require a radical reconstruction
of the ontology of the race central to the early history of Arda as well
as an excursion into eschatology made untenable by its inevitable simi-
larities to Tolkien’s living belief. Tolkien had already completed the
narrative trajectory of the Finwë and Míriel story in the exile sequence
of Quenta Silmarillion. Further theological realization was limited, here
as in the similar case of the “Fall” of humans in the Athrabeth Finrod ah
Andreth by the restrictions Tolkien invoked in the letter to Milton Wal-
dron; the greater force of established doctrine always determined, for
this author, the “event horizon” of speculation.

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 Amelia Rutledge

Notes
1 Elizabeth Whittingham presents, in the events’ chronological or-
der, the complex textual evolution of the Finwë/Míriel arguments.
Her discussion (145 ff.) complements Christopher Tolkien’s recon-
struction of the textual evolution of the Judgment of Manwë. In,
Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion, Douglas
Kane discusses the editorial decisions made by Christopher Tolk-
ien in compiling the texts for The Silmarillion. He notes with regret
the decision not to include in that volume the deliberations of the
Valar that permitted Finwë to marry again when Míriel refused re-
birth (82). Chapter 16 is a detailed discussion of the evolution of
the relevant texts.
2 For the most accessible version of this text see The Silmarillion (88).
3 That Finwë would even consider remarriage is a sign of aberration
in his essence, for reasons that will be discussed below.
4 Whittingham’s valuable and broadly-based discussion of “immor-
tality” includes a consideration of the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth
debate between Finrod and Andreth (153 ff.), a work outside the
scope of this study because of its focus on eschatology.
5 For a discussion of a range of approaches to the Christian and
Catholic content of Tolkien’s work, see Paul E. Kerry (234-45).
6 Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgres-
sions,....” (Galatians 3:19 ); “Is the law then against the promises
of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could
have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law”
(Galatians 3:21); and “For the law made nothing perfect, but the
bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto
God” (Hebrews 7:19).
7 In De libero arbitrio I, xvi, 35, Augustine of Hippo states that “All
sins are contained in this one category, that one turns away from
things divine and truly enduring, and turns towards those which
are mutable and uncertain.” This same passage continues: “evil is
the turning away of the will from the immutable good, and the
turning towards mutable goods. And this turning away and this
turning to are not forced but voluntary” (35). By a strictly Augus-
tinian reading, then, “willfulness/sin/evil” are synonyms.
The “Melkor” passage in “Valaquenta,” is especially signifi-
cant: “From splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for
all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless. Understanding

70
 “Justice is not Healing”

he turned to subtlety in perverting to his own will all that he would

use, until he became a liar without shame. He began with the de-
sire of Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he
descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into
Darkness...” (S 31).
8 See, for example, essays by Gergely Nagy and John William Hough-
ton.
9 Whittingham refers to Christian analogies in Tolkien’s description
of rebirth among the Elves, and in his considerations of an after-
life (126–27), noting several letters, including the letter to Milton
Waldman but in particular letter 355 in which he states that he
wanted a world “consonant with Christian belief ” (168).
10 “For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal.
Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution
elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit,
not the in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world. (I am speak-
ing, of course, of our own present situation, not of ancient pagan,
pre-Christian days...)” (Letters 144). Although Tolkien did drop dis-
cussions to avoid similarities that were too obvious (his hints about
the Fall of Man are one such instance), it is a small step from “con-
sonance” to similarity.
11 For some, the stay in Mándos’ realm is long enough to equate to
permanent exile from life: “... the wrong-doers,...were held long in
‘waiting’, and some were not permitted to take up their lives again”
(Morgoth 222). Fëanor, whose body “fell to ash” when he died, is
apparently one such person: “and his likeness has never again ap-
peared in Arda, neither has his spirit left the halls of Mandos” (S
107).
12 The “A” text that continues the passage notes that desiring the con-
tinuation of marriage is not the point; it is the essence of uncor-
rupted Eldar to resume a union that has been interrupted (Morgoth
233). Remarriage to a different partner is not simply impermis-
sible, it is impossible as long as rebirth can occur.
13 Míriel’s refusal, then, is the only possible grounds for even consid-
ering Finwë’s request, since earlier, the text had noted that the dis-
solution of any marriage, which would require the departed never
to seek return, must be grounded in the will of the departed, since
the living cannot compel the decision (Morgoth 226).
14 MS A of “The Laws and Customs among the Eldar” uses “essential”

71
 Amelia Rutledge

chastity in another, much more problematical, instance of a wish-

fulfillment solution in the case of rape. The act is declared (1)
completely unknown, since it is foreign to Elvish nature so to force
another, and (2) were it to occur, “one so forced would have re-
jected bodily life and passed to Mandos” (Morgoth 228), a solution
that erases the victim rather too conveniently, as in the example of
sun-maiden who is raped by Melkor and who disembodies herself
(Morgoth 380-81).
15 Cf. Romans 23:7: “But I see another law in my members, warring
against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the
law of sin which is in my members.”
16 Tolkien’s using “mutability” explicitly would have aided the clarity
of his exposition. He does allude the concept in one of his discus-
sions in the later chapters of Morgoth’s Ring (270), when he notes
that unlike the Biblical concept of the “Fall” as rebellion, the rebel-
lion of Morgoth occurred before Arda was brought into physical
being by Ilúvatar’s fiat and resulted in an instability, or “sub-cre-
atively introduced evil,” within the new creation. However, since
the events of the early struggles against Morgoth are presented as a
narrative, there is little philosophical exposition in the texts them-
selves.
17 The Valar’s decision results in the sundering of the Eldarin kin-
dred between those who go to Eldamar and those who remain be-
hind—divisions that contribute to the mutual distrust that fuels, in
part, the conflicts surrounding the Silmarils.
18 Whittingham also provides a synopsis of the deliberations (149–
50), but the current discussion emphasizes different aspects of the
debate.
19 Mándos’ defining statement of Manwë’s Judgment focuses on jus-
tice, not on metaphysics (Whittingham 150).
20 Finwë and Indis, his second wife, had already separated once their
children matured—a permissible act according to the custom of
the Eldar (Morgoth 248–50).

Works Cited
Augustine. An Augustine Synthesis. Ed. Erich Przywara. New York: Harp-
er, 1958.
Bratman, David. “The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth.”

72
 “Justice is not Healing”

InTolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth,

ed. Verlyn Flieger & Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, CT; London:
Greenwood Press, 2000: 69-91.
Coutsoumpos, Panayotis. “Paul’s Attitude Towards the Law.” In Paul:
Jew, Greek, and Roman, ed. Stanley E Porter. Leiden, The Neth-
erlands: Brill, 2008: 39-50.
Houghton, John William. “Augustine in the Cottage of Lost Play: The
‘Ainulindalë’ as Asterisk Cosmogony.” In Tolkien the Medieval-
ist, ed. Jane Chance. London: Routledge, 2003.
Kane, Douglas C. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmar-
illion. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2009.
Kerry, Paul E. “Tracking Catholic Influence in The Lord of the Rings.”
In The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Writings of J.R.R.
Tolkien. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011:
234-45.
Longenecker, Bruce. “Galatians.” The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul.
Ed. James D. G. Dunn. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003: 64-73.
Martyn, J. Louis. Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul. Nashville, TN:
Abingdon Press, 1997.
Nagy, Gergely. “Saving the Myths: the Re-creation of Mythology in Plato
and Tolkien.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed.
Jane Chance. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Rapa, Robert Keith. The Meaning of “Works of the Law” in Galatians and
Romans. New York: P. Lang, 2001.
Whittingham, Elizabeth A. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study
of The History of Middle-earth. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co,
2008.

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Amelia Rutledge

74
 Book Reviews
Carl Phelpstead, Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. 224 pages hardcover $148.00,
trade paper $25.00. ISBN 978-0708323915.

During the early days of Tolkien scholarship, little recognition was

paid to influence from the Celts. A few writers noted similarities be-
tween Merlin and Gandalf, as Ruth S. Noel did in her 1977 Mythology
of Middle-earth and Verlyn Flieger did in her 1978 dissertation, but the
emphasis was on Arthurian connections rather than Celtic influence
behind Arthurian tales. Ten more years passed before J. S. Ryan (in an
essay on perceptions of the ancient Celts) wrote that “serious atten-
tion” should be paid to Celtic elements, particularly Welsh elements,
in Tolkien’s writing. Even then, well over a decade passed before the
serious attention Ryan called for began to make a difference in Tolk-
ien scholarship.
Knowing what we know now, this reluctance to give the Celts their
due seems odd, to say the least; but as Dimitra Fimi points out in a
2007 article on Tolkien’s “Celtic type of legends,” the dislike Tolkien
expressed for “Celtic things” in a 1937 letter seems to have turned
most researchers away (Letters 26). Readers took Tolkien at his word,
focusing on this one derogatory comment without taking note of far
more favorable statements expressed in other letters and without pay-
ing attention to the full range of Tolkien’s scholarship, lectures, and
writings.
Today it is no longer possible to claim familiarity with Tolkien and
not believe the Celts—their language, literature, and mythology—had
a major influence on him. And since we now know that the Welsh
meant more to Tolkien than any other branch of Celtic people, a Tolk-
ien book focused specifically on Wales is a welcome book indeed.
Carl Phelpstead’s Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity
(2011) is an important book for scholars as well as for serious followers
of Tolkien. It is not a long book (116 pages of text), but within those
pages Phelpstead brings together all essential information about Tolk-
ien and his relationship with Wales.
Before and after the text are two persuasive additions. The first,
a chronology, is not a full accounting of Tolkien’s life but sets out
“the main events and publications discussed in this book.” What the
chronology makes obvious is how early in Tolkien’s life a Celtic in-
terest—especially a Welsh interest—began and how persistent this in-
terest remained. As Phelpstead points out, Tolkien’s “last significant

75
 Book Reviews

c­ ontribution to scholarship” (of those pieces Tolkien saw through to

publication) was “English and Welsh,” a 1955 lecture published in
1963. After Phelpstead’s final chapter comes an appendix, a list of
Welsh-related books once owned by Tolkien and now found predomi-
nantly in the English Faculty Library in Oxford. Like Phelpstead’s
Chronology, this three-page appendix offers quick, convincing proof
of Tolkien’s attachment to Wales.
The text is divided into three parts. Part I (Language) includes
“Encountering Welsh,” “Linguistic taste” (primarily on Tolkien’s pref-
erence for Welsh), and “Inventing language” (with much to say about
Welsh influence on the Elves’ Sindarin language). Part II (Literature)
covers “Mythological sources,” “Arthurian literature” (focusing largely
on the Welsh roots of Arthurian tales), and “Breton connections” (a
chapter on Tolkien and the Breton Celts and how they connect to the
Welsh). Part III has only one chapter “Insular identities.” This final
chapter circles back to earlier material, summarizing and expanding
on Tolkien’s allegiance to that area of England bordering on Wales,
the area he identified with home.
Much of what Phelpstead writes about has been dealt with by ear-
lier scholars or by writers focusing on Tolkien’s life, but in order to
give a full accounting of Tolkien and the Welsh, Phelpstead needed
to cover what was already known before moving on to new discoveries
and new information (including material from unpublished Tolkien
drafts). It is also true that Phelpstead is more an investigator than an
interpreter, more a gatherer of information than a literary critic. This
does not lessen the value of Phelpstead’s book. Both skills are needed.
Few writers (Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger being two exceptions)
are masters of both, presenting us with new material—textual, linguis-
tic, mythological—and at the same time giving that information a liter-
ary context and a literary perspective.
But new or familiar, Phelpstead says it well. His history of chang-
ing attitudes toward Celtic cultures (in “Linguistic taste”) is particu-
larly informative, as is “Inventing language,” an accessible chapter in
spite of Phelpstead’s warning that some “may find parts of this chapter
too technical.” His accountings of Tolkien’s time at Oxford, first as
a student and later as a professor, are well worth reading. (Among
other achievements, Tolkien was instrumental in bringing medieval
Welsh into the curriculum, where it remains today.) A short section
on dragons, found in “Mythological sources,” is nicely done. (Welsh
dragons, unlike the more familiar Germanic ones, are associated with
mountains, giving an appropriately Welsh hint to Smaug on his Lonely
Mountain.) And I especially appreciate the close attention Phelpstead
pays to Tolkien’s 1955 lecture “English and Welsh” in Chapter 2. This

76
 Book Reviews

extremely important lecture—one of the most telling pieces Tolkien

ever wrote—is not nearly as well known as it ought to be and says more
about Tolkien and Wales than any other work.
Now and then Phelpstead misses an opportunity or stops short,
omitting material that might well have supported his argument or bet-
ter informed the reader. When he writes, for example, about Frank
Riga’s “detailed” comparison of Merlin and Gandalf, saying that Riga
recognizes both similarities and differences and finds “different as-
pects of medieval traditions about Merlin” scattered among Tolkien’s
wizards, the reader (or this reader, at least) would like to have learned
more. What exactly were the similarities (or differences) Riga found,
and what are the various traits (according to Riga) Tolkien shared
among his wizards?
There are other small deficiencies. In his chapter on Arthurian lit-
erature, Phelpstead connects Aragorn’s “Sword that was Broken” with
Arthur’s sword pulled from the stone. Both swords are an indication
of their owner’s kingship, he argues. Fair enough, but it would have
made sense to mention as well the broken and reforged sword found
in Volsunga saga (a work that greatly influenced Tolkien). Phelpstead’s
decision to ignore Sigurd’s sword in Volsunga saga may have boosted
his argument for Celtic/Welsh influence, but the reality is more com-
plex.
In one place (a footnote to page 92), Phelpstead claims Marjorie
Burns (myself, in fact) “includes both Shelob and the Corrigan in a
discussion of webs in Tolkien’s work but does not mention the phials.”
But on page 116 of her book, Perilous Realms, the book Phelpstead is
referring to, she makes precisely this connection, writing that the Cor-
rigan’s phial is “much like the phial of Galadriel.”
In Chapter 4, Phelpstead introduces the Welsh concept of the Wild
Hunt (a variation of the more familiar Northern European Wild Hunt,
where supernatural huntsmen race on horseback across the sky). He
then indicates from where Tolkien drew from the Welsh motif but cites
only the hunt for the white hart in The Hobbit and the peril of Loth-
lórien. He does not mention the hunt from The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun
(Tolkien’s original poem in the Breton tradition). Later, in his chapter
“Breton connections,” he covers The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun and covers
it well, even commenting that a hunt for a white doe leads to the witch.
He does not, however, link that hunt with the Wild Hunt tradition.
There are other hunts that Phelpstead might have mentioned as
well, hunts that could help to strengthen connections between Welsh
and Elvish hunts. “Of Beren and Lúthien” ends with a hunt that takes
both Beren and Huan’s life. In Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien uses the
perilous hunt for comic effect, first through Giles’ reluctance to hunt

77
 Book Reviews

for the dragon and later through inept and ill-prepared knights who
accompany him over “the Wild Hills and the borders of the dubious
lands.”
Though it is not a major point, Phelpstead’s index could use some
improvement. An entry for hunts or the Wild Hunt would have been
helpful. Corrigan (or korrigan or Gorrigan) does not appear in the in-
dex, though much is made of that figure. And certain works, such as
Hrólfs saga kraka and Parzival, and certain names, such as Hengest and
Horsa, Lludd, Uther Pendragon, or Myrddin could well have been in-
cluded.
Here and there Phelpstead’s criticism of other scholars who have
written on Tolkien and the Celts takes on a note that might almost be
called chiding. What troubles him is a perceived failure to distinguish
clearly enough between various branches of those people we call the
Celts. But the matter is not that simple; Tolkien himself uses Celtic in-
clusively (though he elsewhere makes distinctions); and even today,
with our greater awareness of cultural differences, the question of
Celtic unity or Celtic diversity is not a settled matter. There are some
who emphasize distinctions among branches of the Celts and others
who focus more on similarities.
But whatever the case—whether Celts are to be carefully separat-
ed into various Celtic types or seen as essentially a single race—those
who first published on Tolkien and Celtic influence helped the cause
along. By opening up a subject previously much ignored, they paved
the way for Phelpstead’s more specialized book (a well-written, helpful
book) on Tolkien’s favorite Celts.
Marjorie Burns
Trout Lake, Washington

Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J. R. R. Tolkien. ed. Kath-

leen Dubs and Janka Kascáková. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2010. xii, 245 pp. $52.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978-
1-4438-2558-0.

This book follows on the heels of The Mirror Crack’d (ed. Lynn For-
est-Hill, 2008) and Truths Breathed Through Silver (ed. Jonathan Himes,
2008) as one of what has now become a series of similar volumes from
Cambridge Scholars Publishing: slim, expensive collections of essays
from a wide array of scholars—including, in this case, several from
eastern Europe. The Introduction promises this current collection
“takes new directions, employs new approaches, focuses on different
texts, or reviews and then challenges received wisdom” ([ix]), while

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 Book Reviews

“consider[ing] the vast range of Tolkien’s works” rather than focusing

on just what may be called the Big Three: The Lord of the Rings, The
Hobbit, and The Silmarillion (ibid.).1 Of the eight essays gathered here,
half survey broad topics (food and drink, laughter, staying and going,
the grotesque) while the rest focus more narrowly (source-study of one
of Tolkien’s cosmological concepts, a linguistic interpretation of the
Turin lay, identifying Tom Bombadil).
Among the broad surveys, the best (and best essay in the volume)
is co-editor Kascáková’s “‘It Snowed Food and Rained Drink’ in The
Lord of the Rings,” which both documents just how many references
to food are in the book and shows how Tolkien uses such references
to establish character—e.g., her observation that it’s difficult to catch
Strider eating, and when he does, he’s always in a hurry. It’s not just
that Aragorn carries the sword-that-was-broken while Sam carries cook-
ing gear; the hobbit obsession with food is such that the very first word
in Treebeard’s lines adding them to his Long List of free peoples is
“hungry.” Kascáková has mastered her subject, and found more in it
that might have been expected—for example, showing that hobbits
think in terms of food even on a metaphoric level, then demonstrating
how true this is by giving the very telling example of Bilbo’s comparing
his state to “butter . . . scraped over too much bread” (92). Kascáková
also includes a passage about how The Lord of the Rings mediates be-
tween The Hobbit and The Silmarillion: a truism often stated but rarely
so succinctly put (97).
Similarly, in “‘No Laughing Matter’” the volume’s other editor,
Dubs, compiles an extensive listing of places in The Lord of the Rings
that mention characters laughing. She certainly shows how ubiquitous
this motif is and demonstrates that there are far more comic moments
than previous critics had realized, but she is generally content just to
list; more commentary on the significance of this element would be
welcome. Her most interesting contribution comes towards the end of
her essay when she points out how Tolkien’s evil characters also laugh,
albeit gloatingly or mockingly, from Old Man Willow and the Nazgûl
to Saruman and Gollum to Sauron himself. Unfortunately, her tally is
somewhat compromised by the inexplicable inclusion of Ghân-buri-
Ghân among the “evil foes” who laugh and her mistaken assertion that
“the Balrog produces ‘hoarse laughter’ before the attack in Moria”
(121).2 Her piece is also unusual for its slim bibliography, consisting
solely of an entry from The Tolkien Encyclopedia in addition to The Lord
of the Rings itself.3
By all rights, Sue Bridgwater’s “Staying Home and Travelling: Stasis
Versus Movement in Tolkien’s Mythos” should be a mess, but in fact it
is one of the highlights of the whole collection. Bridgwater starts out

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 Book Reviews

by choosing an impossibly large topic: characters in Tolkien who stay at

home (e.g., Rosie, Smith’s Nell) versus characters who leave (e.g., Bil-
bo)—two categories that include every single character in all Tolkien’s
books! She then complicates this by dividing the travellers into those
who plan for their journeys (Frodo) versus those who abruptly go off
(e.g., Niggle); those who are destined for their travels (Smith) versus
“the wrong person taking the wrong journey for the wrong reasons”
(Boromir, who usurps his brother’s quest). If this were not enough,
she expands her two motifs into a figurative sense as well—e.g., in
her claim that for all his journeying Sam never really leaves home,
since he remains a stay-at-home hobbit in his heart (23). That may be,
but can it really be said that a rabble-rouser like Fëanor is similarly a
figure of “stasis,” since he never changes inwardly wherever he goes
(24–25)? Here Bridgwater seems to muddy her own waters, expand-
ing her terminology’s inclusiveness beyond useful limits. Yet while her
piece would have benefited from a tighter focus and more structured
presentation, she is exploring what is undeniably a major theme in
Tolkien’s work, and does offer occasional insights along the way, such
as her observation that Eowyn “[fulfills] a geas of which she has never
heard” (36). And there’s a certain fascination in seeing Ar-Pharazôn
the Golden linked to “The Sea-Bell” on the one hand and Ofermod on
the other (32).
With “Grotesque Characters in Tolkien’s Novels The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings” by Silvia Pokrivcáková & Anton Pokrivcák, we reach
the last of the surveys and the first of the two essays in this collec-
tion to rely heavily on literary theory. This particular piece devotes
a third of its length to summarizing the history of critical theory on
the grotesque; this is a case where less would have been more. Taking
Men to represent the real and Elves the ideal (80), they quickly survey
various departures from those norms: trolls, orcs, Gollum, dwarves,
hobbits, ents.4 They conclude that sometimes an ugly exterior reflects
inner evil, while at other times outer ugliness is at odds with inner wis-
dom; something every reader of the book already knew. Their point
of view—that hobbits display “physical deformities” in being freak-
ishly short, pointy-eared, and large-footed, or that “[their] physical
appearance . . . suggests that there is something wrong with them”
(83)—seems to me to clash with Tolkien’s, given how careful he was to
construct a world in which what might seem abnormal in the average
human is quite natural in another race.
The second essay weighted with literary theory, Roberto Di Scala’s
“‘Lit.’, ‘Lang.’, Ling.’, and the Company They Keep: The Case of The
Lay of the Children of Húrin seen from a Gricean Perspective,” centers on
Tolkien’s early alliterative Túrin poem. Di Scala (the Italian translator

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 Book Reviews

of this lay) first discusses the ‘Lit and Lang’ opposition and suggests
it can be transcended by adding a third element, ‘Ling’ (linguistics),
which he finds closer to philology as Tolkien practiced it. He then
segues into a discussion of the ideas of the late Paul Grice regard-
ing the potential gap between “speaker’s meaning” (what the author
intended) and “utterance meaning” (what the words literally say);
surprisingly, he makes no reference to the book Speaker’s Meaning by
Tolkien’s fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, whose ideas we know Tolkien
treated with respect. If I understand him rightly, Di Scala concludes
the alliterative lay is more successful as a work of art than has hitherto
been generally granted. I think he is wrong, however, in his assertion
that the Túrin lay “was originally not intended for publication . . . the
Lay was meant . . . exclusively [for] its author’s ears and no one else’s”
(136; cf. also 126 & 137). Certainly Tolkien never finished the work,
but Di Scala’s claim here exceeds the evidence.
The best of the essays focusing on specific points, Jason Fisher’s
“Sourcing Tolkien’s ‘Circles of the World’: Speculations on the Heim-
skringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi”
seeks specific sources for Tolkien’s phrase and concept “The Circles
of the World,” suggesting possible influence from Snorri Sturluson’s
Heimskringla, from an apocryphal book in the Latin Vulgate, and from
a thirteenth century map from the West Midlands. Here we have an in-
teresting topic that would have benefitted from either a broadening or
narrowing of focus. Surveying these three possibilities doesn’t fully do
justice to the topic: this essay would have been more compelling had
it focused entirely on the strongest of the three parallels, the medieval
worldmap,5 with perhaps support from the others. Even better would
be to delve deeper to include Tolkien’s whole concept of the Flat
World, its debt to classical and medieval thought, and ways in which
Tolkien’s creation departed from those models. Over all this essay is
best taken as preliminary findings (as perhaps hinted at in the use of
the word “Speculations” in its title); it is to be hoped Fisher will return
to this topic one day to give it the more extensive treatment it deserves.
Finally, the two essays by Liam Campbell and Kinga Jenike are
both devoted to the apparently perennial problem of Tom Bombadil’s
identity and function. Campbell’s approach in “The Enigmatic Mr.
Bombadil: Tom Bombadil’s Role as a Representative of Nature in The
Lord of the Rings” is the more traditional; he surveys previous attempts
to identify Bombadil’s nature before offering up his own solution:
Bombadil represents beleaguered nature (61) and derives primarily
from the medieval ‘Green Man’ legend (62). Ironically, perhaps, in
a piece devoted to someone who turns away from mastery and domi-
nation, Campbell’s piece suffers from a tendency to review leisurely

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what ­others have written, content to pass lightly over previous material
rather than coming to grips with it. For example, he mentions Shippey
identification of Bombadil as a genius loci (43) and then passes on with-
out seeming to realize the implications of that identification (the most
perceptive to date), as if checking items off a list rather than deeply
engaging the subject. The latter part of Campbell’s piece relies heav-
ily on the controversial work of new-age writer John Matthews, whose
speculations and assertions Campbell takes uncritically, at face value.6
The second Bombadil piece, “Tom Bombadil—Man of Mystery,”
will probably generate more discussion than any other essay in this
collection. Jenike takes the novel approach of choosing to proceed by
a process of elimination. Is Bombadil a goblin? No, because goblins
are evil. Is he a troll or dragon? No, because trolls are stupid and drag-
ons greedy, and Tom is neither. He is not a Man or one of the Dwarfs
(sic), because he’s immortal, nor one of the elves because they’re af-
fected by the Ring. After similarly rejecting ent and hobbit and Maia,
she makes an imaginative leaps and concludes that he must be J. R.
R. Tolkien himself (72), written into the book (just as Chaucer wrote
himself into The Canterbury Tales as one of the pilgrims) but kept iso-
lated from the main narrative.7 If this were not enough, Jenike offers
a second bold theory that, having created the character of Bombadil
in the early 1930s, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings specifically to
provide a setting into which that character could be inserted, an inter-
esting variant of the oft-repeated claim that he wrote the tale in order
to have a setting in which a character could offer a line of dialogue in
Elvish. I doubt that Jenike’s solution will gain many (any?) adherents,
but it does have the virtue of being original, taking even a confirmed
Bombadologist like myself by surprise.8
Errata
Perfection being unachievable in this world, there are inevitably
some errors. Studies in Words is by C. S. Lewis, not Jared Lobdell (16).
Michael N. Stanton, not Michael Drout, is the author of The Tolkien
Encyclopedia’s entry on “Humor” (105). Snorri Sturluson did not write
the Völuspá (7), although he based part of his Prose Edda on this work in
the Elder Edda. What Tolkien published in 1925 was not his translation
of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (as stated on page 58) but his edition
of the original Middle English text; the translation was posthumously
published in 1975. One author expresses doubts about Goldberry’s
being Tom’s wife, saying “it is not clear that Goldberry is, technically,
a wife” (69). Actually, the poem “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,”
which the same author cites just two pages later, ends with an account
of Tom’s “merry wedding” and describes “his bride” in her wedding

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 Book Reviews

finery (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 16). These are minor flaws that
do not detract much from the main work, but it’s good for anyone
who might want to cite from these essays to be aware of them; any
more serious problems are discussed above in the evaluations of the
individual essays.
Conclusion
This book’s main virtue is that it provides an outlet for rising new
scholars—this is one contributor’s first publication in English—and
thus is valuable for offering new points of view. In the end, this is a
worthwhile but non-essential volume. Considering its slim size and
hefty price, if you’re on a limited budget you might want to give this
one a pass. But if you have the budget and the shelf-space, or have ac-
cess to a good-sized university library, you should consider checking
this one out and reading through the essays that interest you; it’s well
worth your while.
John D. Rateliff
Kent, Washington
Notes
1 Despite this claim, the bulk of these essays focus exclusively on ex-
actly those three works, with only occasional references to other
works like Smith of Wootton Major and “Leaf by Niggle” (Bridgwa-
ter,22, 29–30) or the poem “Once Upon a Time” (Jenike 73).The
chief exception is Di Scala’s essay, which centers on Tolkien’s early
alliterative poem The Lay of the Children of Húrin.
2 In fact, as Tolkien himself observed in his comments on the Zim-
merman script, “The Balrog never speaks or makes any vocal sound
at all. Above all he does not laugh …” (Letters 274; emphasis Tolk-
ien’s). Dubs garbles another example when on the same page she
writes “… the Haradrim, driven to the brink, fierce in despair,
laughed at the dwarves attempting to escape down the river” (121);
here she seems to have conflated a genuine reference from “The
Last Debate” with memories of Beren’s ambush in The Book of Lost
Tales.
3 Dubs seems to have missed entirely Derek Robinson’s “The Hasty
Stroke Goes Oft Astray: Tolkien and Humour,” which appeared
in Robert Giddings’ J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land (1983). While
admittedly poor (indeed, downright bad), Robinson’s piece is the
most notable previously published essay on the subject, and refut-
ing his claims (his thesis runs directly counter to her own), could

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 Book Reviews

have provided her with a good starting point from which to argue
her thesis.
4 Oddly enough, they include no mention of Ghân-buri-Ghân, one
of Tolkien’s best examples of his ‘look foul, feel fair’ dichotomy.
5 A reproduction of the Herefordshire mappa mundi would also have
helped.
6 Campbell’s essay has since been incorporated into his recent book
The Ecological in the Works of JRR Tolkien (Walking Tree Press, 2011),
where it forms the first half of chapter two (pages 73–96).
7 She offers as additional evidence the fact that Tom is called “Fa-
therless,” while Tolkien was an orphan.
8 For those seeking another startlingly untraditional (but not alto-
gether serious) interpretation of Bombadil, see http://km-515.
livejournal.com/1042.html.

Liam Campbell, The Ecological Augury in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (Zu-
rich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 2011). 324 pp. $24.30 (trade
paper). ISBN-13 978-3905703184.

At this late date there can be no serious Tolkien scholar who denies
the environmental themes in Tolkien’s legendarium. After countless
essays and conference presentations on the topic, and an entire con-
ference devoted to it at the University of Vermont in 2011, saying that
Tolkien was concerned about the environment is like saying that The
Lord of the Rings contained rings. But to date there have been only a
handful of book-length treatments of the topic, the most well-known
being Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle-earth (1997) and Matthew Dick-
erson and Jonathan Evans’s Ents, Elves, and Eriador (2006). Both works
are written in accessible language, and represent different sides of the
argument whether Tolkien’s writings reflect a standard interpretation
of Catholic teachings as to the balance between stewardship and domi-
nation in terms of the environment. A third book-length treatment of
the topic is certainly welcome, especially if it treads new ground. One
way that such a work could accomplish this is by examining works of
Tolkien not covered by Curry and Dickerson and Evans. Campbell’s
volume does that, by examining all of the legendarium (admittedly the
History of Middle-earth volumes to a much lesser extent) as well as
non Middle-earth writings such as his letters and Leaf by Niggle. The

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 Book Reviews

volume also boasts a lengthy bibliography of secondary sources in the

fields of ecology, psychology, religion, and Tolkien criticism: a valuable
resource for both students and scholars alike.
The work is divided into an introduction, five chapters, a conclu-
sion, and an afterword. The introduction summarizes critical and
public responses to Tolkien’s works, while Chapter 1 focuses on his
childhood and love for trees. Neither discussion breaks new ground,
but they provide good summaries of both aspects of Tolkien’s life, es-
pecially for those who are new to either topic. The chapter continues
by setting up Tolkien’s belief that evil “lay not in the machine but in
the machine-wielder” (57). The chapter concludes by discussing some
aspects of religion in Tolkien’s legendarium (including references to
the Valar) and acknowledges the importance of Tolkien’s religion in
his worldview and writings. Again, these topics are not viewed in any
fresh light, but they do form an important foundation to any argument
concerning environmental/ecological themes in Tolkien’s works.
The second chapter is an examination of the role of Tom Bom-
badil that sets him in opposition to the characterization and motiva-
tions of Saruman. Campbell argues that the two characters represent
“the struggle between the ecologically sustained landscapes of Middle-
earth and the mechanized powers which threaten them” and “repre-
sent positive and negative environmental models” as well as “inverted
mirror reflections of each other” (73). Campbell’s examination of the
enigma that is Tom Bombadil brings together Tolkien’s original words
and the interpretations of other Tolkien scholars, and offers his own
thoughts as to the central meaning and relative importance of the
character to the story. The most original of Campbell’s ideas seems to
be the suggestion that Bombadil owes much to the ancient archetype
of the Green Man. This hypothesis is worthy of further consideration
and exploration. Where Campbell’s argument falls flat is at the end, in
a table that attempts to contrast Bombadil and Saruman as embodying
various aspects of his “Ecologically Positive Presentation/Ecologically
Negative Presentation.” My argument is not with the table itself, but
rather that it has an equally defensible explanation as contrasting Bom-
badil as the embodiment of pure science and Saruman as the misuse
of science in destructive (subjugating) technologies. Campbell even
cites the quote from Tolkien’s 1954 letter to Hastings that supports
this interpretation, but does not acknowledge the alternative read-
ing. In it Tolkien explains that Bombadil is “a particular embodying of
pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other
things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other ‘ and wholly inde-
pendent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind,
and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the ­knowledge”

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(Letters 192). Campbell leaves out the continuation of the quotation

in which Tolkien explains that the difference is between “Zoology and
Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture” (Letters 192), i.e. between
scientific knowledge and the application of science. Campbell is cer-
tainly free to focus on his own interpretation, but he should not ignore
alternatives in the process.
Chapter Three also focuses on a comparison between two charac-
ters, Gandalf and Sauron. Campbell notes that this comparison does
have a natural basis in Tolkien’s writings, as “The Istari” in Unfinished
Tales notes that they are both Maiar and that Gandalf is “coeval and
equal” to Sauron (UT 395). As in the case of the previous chapter,
the argument concludes with a summary table that contrasts the two
characters as depictions of “Ecologically Positive Presentation/Eco-
logically Negative Presentation.” Again, the table does not add to the
strength of the argument, in this case because the contrasting points
seem forced at times. For example, how is being “obsessed with regain-
ing the One Ring” in and of itself an ecologically negative presentation
(151)? Rather, it is the potential of what Sauron will do once he has
the Ring that presages a probable ecological disaster. Perhaps such al-
ternate phrasing would have made the contrast between the two char-
acters stronger.
In chapter three Campbell also begins to set forth his interpreta-
tion of the previous arguments presented by Curry and Dickerson and
Evans as to what extent Tolkien’s ecological vision is a purely Christian
one. In my reading of all three works, it appears that Campbell takes a
middle-road between the two previous books. In the third chapter he
argues that Gandalf is a steward of Middle-earth’s environment, and
in the following chapter posits that this stewardship is not a classical
Catholic interpretation; by exploring the relationship of the elves to
nature, and Gandalf to other characters in the texts, he offers that
Tolkien “incorporated his green philosophy into his Catholic faith and
promoted, through the culture of his elves and others, an environ-
mental ethos which can legitimately consider the natural world to be a
valued creation of God in its own right” (173). Campbell’s discussions
of connections between Gandalf, Radagast, and Saint Francis of Assisi
are worthy of further consideration, and his reflections on the connec-
tions between Tolkien’s “races of elves” (156) (both in the legendarium
and in others of his works) are perhaps among the best in the book. To
this scientist one of the most thought-provoking connections Camp-
bell draws in his final chapter is between The Lord of the Rings and Ra-
chel Carson’s seminal environmental work Silent Spring, especially his
ecological cautionary tale entitled “A Fable for Tom.” My sole criticism
is that Campbell buries in a footnote the fact that he is not arguing that

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 Book Reviews

Carson’s work was influenced by Tolkien. This is an important point

and deserves to be made clearer to the reader.
The work’s “conclusion” summarizes his argument, but it is not
the end of the story. Instead, the author continues with an afterword
that devotes most of its space to Verlyn Flieger’s essay “Taking the Part
of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth.” Campbell attempts to address
Flieger’s criticism that Tolkien is not seemingly consistent in his eco-
logical message, specifically as it relates to tree-felling. Flieger makes
a compelling (and troubling) case in her essay; Campbell synthesizes
the rebuttals of several authors as well as his own thoughts to make
an equally coherent argument. For example, in discussing the tension
between the hobbits and the Old Forest, Campbell reminds the reader
of one of Tolkien’s letters, in which he explains that hobbits “are not a
Utopian vision; or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age”
(Letters 197). While Campbell’s argument is solid and worth consider-
ing, it would have been better served if it had been integrated into the
main body of the work. In its current location it appears to have been
an afterthought rather than an afterword, written in response to com-
ments from an editor or pre-publication reviewer.
Unfortunately, the afterword does not end with his thoughts on
this matter, but rather continues on with a rationalization of Gandalf’s
actions in The Hobbit chapter “A Journey in the Dark” in which he sets
fire to trees in order to save Bilbo and the dwarves. Again, this argu-
ment would have been much better served if it had appeared within
the main body of the work, and as a less well-developed section than
the one on Flieger’s essay, it ends the work on a weak and apologist
tone. This brings me to one of the most distracting aspects of the work,
namely the exorbitant number of explanatory footnotes. Many are di-
gressions that could have been omitted, some of which take up a half
a page of text. The work itself even ends on an explanatory footnote.
Another complaint I have about this work is what I consider to be
a significant “road not taken,” or rather a false promise, starting with
the title of the work itself. An “augury” is generally an omen or por-
tent; if we read Tolkien’s works as a cautionary tale of how the Age of
Machines has adversely affected nature and our connection to it, then
the title is well–deserved. But Campbell further explains that Tolkien’s
“ecological augury, which I argue is the most representative way of
characterizing the nature of the green dimension of Tolkien’s fiction,
calls for a recovery of environmental values and a reconnection with
nature” (21). The idea that these two “key aspects of Tolkien’s envi-
ronmentalism: recovery and augury” are, as he calls it “two sides of the
same coin” (21) certainly can be argued from the point of view of Tolk-
ien’s essay “On Fairy-stories,” which places an emphasis on recovery as

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part of the central importance of fairy-stories. But this emphasis on re-

covery and augury also owes much to the author whose famous poem
“Auguries of Innocence” was brought to mind upon reading the title
of the book—William Blake. Campbell does reference Blake a number
of times in his book, for example noting that “Tolkien’s work should
be placed alongside Blake’s, Thoreau’s and Wordsworth’s as among
the most significant green texts ever committed to print” (204) and
that “Like William Blake before him, however, he distrusted machine-
wielders and builders, and trailblazing engineers who seemed indiffer-
ent to the ecological cost of their endeavors” (28). However, he never
makes deeper connections to Blake’s emphasis on recovery as well as
augury. This is an avenue for exploration that Tolkien scholars should
consider more deeply.
I have no doubt that Campbell’s book will spark renewed in-
terest in Tolkien’s environmental themes. In retrospect, I did not con-
cur with all of the author’s connections and conclusions; for example,
a lengthy (half page) footnote on page 40 attempting to connect the
ents’ attack on Isengard with James Lovelock’s Gaia theory is an ex-
ample of serious overreach. But in such cases I was forced to consider
why I did not agree, and in the process thought more deeply about
Tolkien’s works. This in itself is one reason to recommend the work.
Like the hobbits themselves, this book is not a “Utopian vision;
or recommended as an ideal.” It is not, as it claims, a “complete study
of the environment themes in Tolkien” (21), but neither have its two
predecessors been.1 It is, however, thoughtful and thought-provoking,
well-documented, and eminently readable. As such it deserves to have
a place in any Tolkien criticism library, as do the previous two works
by Curry and Dickerson and Evans. The reader can read all three and
take away something unique from each volume; having noted this, I
fully expect there to be a fourth volume in the next few years that
will attempt to synthesize the arguments of all three and put forth yet
another new take on the environmental themes in Tolkien’s work, for
there is still much to consider in this area of Tolkien criticism.
Kristine Larsen
New Britain, Connecticut
Notes
1 Curiously, in his introduction Campbell calls Dickerson and Ev-
ans’s work the only other “complete study” (21) in this area, de-
spite the fact that Dickerson and Evans clearly state in their own
work that they feel they did not take their argument “far enough”
(266).

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 Book Reviews

Works Cited
Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-earth. Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. Lon-
don: HarperCollins, 1998.
Dickerson, Matthew T., and Jonathan Evans. Ents, Elves, and Eriador:
The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. Lexington, KY: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 2006.

Tolkien and the Study of His Sources, edited by Jason Fisher. Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. 2011. 240 pages. $40.00
(trade paperback). ISBN 978-0786464821.

J.R.R. Tolkien is that rare sort of writer who makes us intensely

curious about the texts that he liked most. Therefore it seems oddly
contradictory that the man who did so much to point his readers to
the sources of his own inspiration for The Lord of the Rings had a hearty
dislike of literary source criticism. In 1966 Tolkien compared a source
critic to “a man who having eaten anything, from a salad to a well-
planned dinner, uses an emetic, and sends the results for chemical
analysis.”1 A long-held opinion, Tolkien had expressed it in another
culinary metaphor more than three decades earlier. Quoting in his
essay “On Fairy Stories” a metaphor coined by George Webbe Dasent
from Popular Tales from the Norse Tolkien says “we must be satisfied with
the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox
out of which it has been boiled,” and then changes Dasent’s meaning
(Dasent was discussing philological analysis) when he glosses the meta-
phor: “By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by the author,
and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material.” (OFS 47). Tolkien preferred
attention focused on the new work, not on its sources: “To my mind it
is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive,2 whether
invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered that is
the most interesting thing to consider” (Letters 418).
Given the evidence of Tolkien’s censorious view of source criticism,
a collection such as this volume might seem to start out at a moral dis-
advantage; and, indeed, Jason Fisher and his co-contributors in Tolkien
and the Study of His Sources appear, at first blush, to be overly apologetic
and deferential to Tolkien’s pronounced opinions. “If Tolkien wished
to proscribe our rooting around among ‘the bones of the ox’ out of
which his works were made,” Fisher cautions, “what right do we have
to gainsay him?” But this impression quickly dissipates when Fisher
follows his hesitant query with a refreshing declaration of his own: “I

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 Book Reviews

believe scholars have every right . . . with all due respect to the author,
we can, and should proceed” (1). Then Fisher and his colleagues turn
a potential vulnerability into a strength by tackling the issue head on.
“This collection of essays is concerned with both the theory and prac-
tice of source criticism,” says Fisher, and, accordingly, the first forty-five
pages are devoted almost purely to theory, with an Introduction by
Tom Shippey and essays by E.L. Risden, and Fisher.
Shippey’s Introduction, “Why Source Criticism?” serves to intro-
duce the whole work. He surveys the contributions on a high level and
finds three veins of source criticism in the collection: essays on the cul-
tural background for Tolkien’s work, essays on Tolkien’s professional
interests as scholar and philologist, and essays on the global traditions
of narrative and story. It might be tempting to characterize Shippey’s
introduction simply as bestowing on this book an avuncular blessing
of legitimacy from the world’s foremost Tolkien scholar, but Shippey
always rewards close reading, and even his asides provoke thought,
such as, for example, when he describes Tolkien, professionally, as “a
controversialist all his life” (7). Here Shippey addresses, with valuable
insight, the reasons why Tolkien disliked source criticism, and yet in
concluding he supports Fisher’s prefatory declaration for the validity
of the pursuit, and tells us, in a gentle riposte to Tolkien’s culinary
metaphors that “you can learn a lot from seeing what a great cook has
in his kitchen” (15).
Risden’s essay, “Source Criticism: Background and Applications,”
focuses on the scope of source criticism as a method and points out
examples of its applicability, ranging from Biblical studies to Shake-
speare, and he distinguishes source criticism from biographical and
historical criticism. To the extent that Risden discusses Tolkien, he
generally reiterates information provided by Shippey in Appendix A
of The Road to Middle-Earth. Fisher’s essay, “Tolkien and Source Criti-
cism: Remarking and Remaking,” is one of the most spirited in the vol-
ume, focusing on how source criticism should be practiced in regard
to Tolkien, and the benefits that can be obtained from it. Even more
so than Shippey’s introduction, Fisher’s essay epitomizes the essential
spirit of this book.
The three theoretical essays that open the book provide a founda-
tion for the eight practical essays that follow, and so one of the best
aspects of this volume is the critical self-awareness of the contribut-
ing scholars. This reviewer does not possess the breadth of historical
and literary knowledge that would be required to evaluate in detail
the accuracy of the source scholarship of this eclectic group of con-
tributions, for the examined sources in this volume have a diversity
ranging from Gilgamesh to the history of the Byzantine Empire to John

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­ uchan’s novel Midwinter. Nevertheless, these eight diverse essays can

B
be evaluated by other objective standards. One such objective mea-
sure is the extent to which the essays demonstrate Tolkien’s use of the
sources they examine, which should be a helpful analysis in a review
like this because, presumably, a general reader who picks up this book
will be motivated more by an interest in Tolkien than by a direct inter-
est in a particular source (which, if that were the dominant motiva-
tion, would likely lead to choosing a different book). Direct influence
stands implicit in this test: the argument and evidence that Tolkien not
only knew the source but that it also affected his thought and writing
in some manner must be strong. Measured by this analysis, the most in-
formative essays about Tolkien in this volume are Thomas Honegger’s
contribution on “The Rohirrim: Anglo-Saxons on Horseback”; John
D. Rateliff’s essay “She and Tolkien, Revisited,” documenting Tolkien’s
use of motifs from H. Rider Haggard’s novels She and Ayesha; Nicholas
Birns’ “The Stones and the Book: Tolkien, Mesopotamia, and Biblical
Mythopoeia,” analyzing Tolkien’s use of Biblical myth and Mesopota-
mian history; and Diana Pavlac Glyer and Josh B. Long’s chapter on
“Biography as Source: Niggles and Notions,” looking at Tolkien’s use
of his own life experiences in his writings.
Another such objective measure is the extent to which the es-
says provide a detailed and informative description of the source or
sources they examine. By this standard, the most useful essays in this
book are Miryam Librán-Moreno’s “Byzantium, New Rome!: Goths,
Langobards, and Byzantium in The Lord of the Rings,” a summary of
and commentary on certain aspects of the history of Constantinople
from the 4th to the 11th century, and Judy Ann Ford’s discussion of
“William Caxton’s The Golden Legend as a Source for Tolkien’s The Lord
of the Rings.”
A third objective measure is the persuasiveness of an essay in regard
to Tolkien’s use of a particular source, especially when the evidence
of the source’s influence on Tolkien is more tenuous and conjectural
than it is in the context of sources which we know Tolkien studied
closely. The prominent essays in the volume under this standard are
Kristine Larsen’s “Sea Birds and Morning Stars: Ceyx, Alcyone, and
the Many Metamorphoses of Eärendil and Elwing,” a fascinating and
imaginative exploration of Ovid and astronomy, and Mark T. Hooker’s
“Reading John Buchan in Search of Tolkien,” an exhaustive analysis of
motifs and ideas from three novels by John Buchan that Tolkien may
have adopted and adapted for use in his own novels.
While each of these diverse essays has its strengths, it must be
conceded that not every part of these essays will be helpful to read-
ers who do not know the examined sources well before starting in.

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­ evertheless, in their best parts, and there are many, all of these well
N
written, well researched essays not only show us the breadth and depth
of Tolkien’s thought and reading, but also they remind us many times
over of the extraordinary imaginative uses Tolkien made of the sources
that influenced his thought.
Paul Edmund Thomas
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Notes
1 I had never before encountered this jocular quip until reading it
on page 30 of the collection under review here, which alone makes
the book worth the price of admission: Fisher quotes from Daphne
Castell, “The Realms of Tolkien,” New Worlds Vol. 50, No. 168 (No-
vember, 1966) 146.
2 Tolkien means “motif” but prefers the English version of the word
to the French.

Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Film Tril-
ogy, edited by Janice M. Bogstad and Philip E. Kaveny. Jefferson, North
Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, August 2011. 302
pp. $35.00 (trade paperback). ISBN 978-0786446360.

Picturing Tolkien is a collection of sixteen essays tackling Peter Jack-

son’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy from a ten-year perspective not possi-
ble for earlier attempts at assessing its merits and misfires. The Jackson
versus Tolkien debate may not be as heated now as it was in those early
days after the films rolled like a deep ocean tsunami over the con-
sciousness of Tolkien scholars and fans worldwide, but it has certainly
not abated. It is, instead, more measured and thoughtful.
A quick scan of the Table of Contents of Picturing Tolkien will reveal
a number of familiar names from the academic community, heavy-
weights all. You might be tempted to think, “Oh boy, here we go.”
You’d be wrong.
Instead of the long-expected evisceration of Jackson’s film trilogy,
what you’ll discover in these pages is a fascinating cross-section of opin-
ion—and expert knowledge—on this monumental visual retelling of
Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga. You may learn things you didn’t know.
You may also find that ten-year-old hindsight counts for a lot. You will
definitely find compelling arguments on both sides of the Great Peter
Jackson Divide. There are many voices in Picturing Tolkien, and it is well
worth the reader’s time to listen to them all.

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When evaluating a book of this nature, given the crowded field of

books about Tolkien, it’s helpful to apply certain benchmarks. Does
the structure of the book work—is the collection even in content and
not weighted more toward one topic to the exclusion of others? Are the
articles equally strong, with no filler or weak arguments sandwiched
among the stronger ones? Are new perspectives offered, and do old
arguments carry new weight? Within each essay, is the intent clearly
stated and satisfactorily reasoned. Does the conclusion effectively pull
all the threads of the discussion together? Although your mileage may
vary depending on which side of the Divide you find yourself on, it’s
safe to say this collection wins a solid “Yes” to all these questions.
The collection is conveniently structured into the two main points
of argument surrounding Jackson’s version of Tolkien’s sprawling
novel: story/structure and character/culture, with eight essays in
each section. The book begins with the strongest film defense (Kristin
Thompson), followed by the strongest book defense (Verlyn Flieger),
essentially establishing the two opposing points of view up front. This
is a valuable way to begin, because it helps put all the other essays in
perspective, setting a point of reference for how well Jackson’s adapta-
tion has succeeded or not.
Thompson’s contention that “it’s better to have a film with energy
and entertainment value that takes liberties than one that sticks to
the original with bland respect” immediately invites the counter-argu-
ment that once you begin to unravel the carefully woven tapestry of
Tolkien’s fiction by taking those liberties, you end up with a tangle of
unhooked plot points that keep requiring new material to repair the
rip in the fabric of story. Thompson cleverly relies heavily on Shippey,
the gold standard for Tolkien scholarship, to set her point that Jack-
son’s screenplays are a satisfying alternate road to Middle-earth. As evi-
dence, she gives a detailed analysis of Jackson’s successful and creative
solutions to some of the adaptation’s most difficult challenges, in par-
ticular the “Gollum talks to himself” scene. Flieger’s succinctly argued
essay (it’s one of the shortest in the collection) clearly sets the oppos-
ing viewpoint that the “constraining literality” of computer-generated
fantasy filmmaking makes it unsuitable for adaptation of a work such
as Tolkien’s, which is so heavily dependent on language and its role
in creating the world of the mind. Her evidence is the Tom Bombadil
sequence, which treads “close to whimsy” in prose, but would unavoid-
ably fall into the worst of parody on the screen. The ineffable quality of
Bombadil, whose presence “resides in theme rather than plot,” simply
could not be adequately translated to the screen, yet his impervious-
ness to the Ring is at the very core of what the written story is all about.
Tom Bombadil is essence, not actor. The psychological attraction of

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the One Ring is accomplished through layered impressions, not fiery

letters on the screen, and therein lies the problem with any cinematic
rendering of The Lord of the Rings.
Following this setup of the opposing camps, John D. Rateliff fur-
ther examines how Jackson’s choices of elision and exclusion affect
the films overall. Rateliff’s conclusion that “Tolkien’s story is too tight-
ly woven and interlinked for whole episodes to be removed without
consequences down the line” points directly to what this reviewer has
called Tolkien’s “fearful symmetry.” And it is this intricately construct-
ed nonlinear symmetry that E.L. Risden’s essay examines through a
discussion of film linearity vs. book complexity, to “uncover essential
differences in media” and expose the “exigencies of adaptation.”
Dimitra Fimi addresses the ways in which folklore in film and folk-
lore about film affected the Jackson films, bringing into play the huge
body of myth, fairy-tale, and legend outside Tolkien’s legendarium (ex-
ternal folklore) as well as Jackson’s personal take on Tolkien’s use of
the deep well of folklore (internal folklore). Her detailed examina-
tion of Jackson’s Elves as neo-Celtic beings, in addition to an explica-
tion of how Tolkien’s oathbreakers in the Paths of the Dead end up as
pop-culture “cinematic zombies,” demonstrate graphically the ways in
which Jackson’s films have “imposed a definitive, solidified version of
Tolkien folklore.”
Yvette Kisor tackles the problem of interlacement, the non-linear
story structure that makes Tolkien’s novel such a complex and satis-
fying read. Kisor explains how interlacement works, demonstrating
Tolkien’s use of “chronological leapfrogging,” and suggests that Jack-
son’s use of intercutting serves a similar purpose for the films, so that
abandoning Tolkien’s non-linear narrative technique achieves “a fidel-
ity to Tolkien’s message, or theme.”
Sharin Schroeder takes both Tolkien and Jackson to task in their
portrayal of monsters, pointing out that both are inclined to bring
these illicitly made creatures into the foreground—Jackson through
his background as horror filmmaker and Tolkien through his eloquent
defense of the monsters in Beowulf. She demonstrates how Franken-
steinian monster creation and its moral implications haunt the work of
both men, as demonstrated in a comparison of Tolkien’s Gollum and
Jackson’s invented super-orc Lurtz.
From Lurtz, the all-purpose killing machine, we move to Robert
C. Woosnam-Savage’s chapter on arms and armor, which closes the
first section of the book. This essay touches on a nagging criticism
concerning Jackson’s films— that they are so astonishingly real and
viscerally gritty that those images are burned forever into the mental
landscape of anyone who has seen the films, supplanting the ­evocative

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qualities of Tolkien’s language and becoming canonical for both im-

agery and story. For film-firsters, this is a non-issue; for book-firsters,
not so much. Woosnam-Savage’s point is well taken, however, that this
sense of reality achieved by “treating the matériel of the War of the Ring
as part of a real, grounded, history” is what helped Jackon’s trilogy as-
cend to classic cinema status, especially when compared to past “war”
movies and their treatment of armaments and battle sequences.
Section two of Picturing Tolkien opens with an essay co-written by
Judy Ann Ford and Robin Anne Reid that looks at “Frodo’s journey
into the West” and how that scene was recast for cinema. The differ-
ence in approach to the concept of “afterlife” and religious redemp-
tion in book versus film is significant, having specifically to do with
Tolkien’s Scandinavian-tinged “spiritual pessimism” and Jackson’s
optimistic presentation of the new age of men coming into play as
the melancholy Elves depart. Both paths, the authors assert, can put
viewers and readers “in the same emotional location when the stories
ended.”
Philip E. Kaveny returns to the problem of Gollum. Kaveny com-
pares Gollum’s role and character development as handled by Tolkien
and Jackson, pointing out that both were constrained by issues of time
and money, preventing them from presenting the complete history of
Middle-earth that might have been. Gollum serves as both backstory
conduit and bridger in both book and film, “integrating the big pic-
ture of what is at stake on a moral, ethical, and spiritual level.”
Character studies of Gandalf and Aragorn are presented by Brian
D. Walter and Janet Brennan Croft, respectively. Walter demonstrates
how the films dilute the authority of Gandalf as a sort of “wizard angel”
in both his Grey Pilgrim and White personas to allow a “fuller, richer
depiction of numerous other characters”—Gandalf’s loss is their gain,
especially Aragorn’s, who must become the films’ human authority fig-
ure. This brings us to Croft’s study of Jackson’s Aragorn, which consid-
ers the reasons for significant character changes made in the films.
Contrasting Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero to that of the modern
superhero monomyth expounded by Lawrence and Jewett, it becomes
clear that the latter is much more cinematic and acceptable to today’s
movie audiences (and thus more profitable) than the former. As Croft
argues, Jackson recast Aragorn to appeal to an audience that would
respond to “the irresistible power of the American [Hollywood] ver-
sion of the monomyth.”
And speaking of Aragorn, what about his love life? He certainly
had one onscreen. Richard C. West examines Jackson’s use of the scant
source material (mostly Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings) to craft
a love story between the films’ human hero and his betrothed, the

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daughter of Elrond. Having to invent mostly a character for Arwen,

Jackson’s initial impulse to turn her into “Arwen, Warrior Princess” was
luckily deflected by online fan outrage, allowing her to be more Arago-
rn’s “helpmate and inspiration” from a distance, making the wedding
scene all the more satisfying when they are reunited. This version of
the Aragorn/Arwen love story, asserts West, “resulted in a distinct work
of art that is worthwhile in its own right.”
Establishing cultural settings in the films is addressed by both Jan-
ice M. Bogstad and Michael D.C. Drout. Bogstad demonstrates that
horses serve a greater narrative function than “the establishment of
preindustrial but post-Iron Age culture.” From the mundane (Bill the
Pony) to the mythic (the Mearas, Shadowfax, Brego), the characters’
relationships with horses not only establish the culture of Rohan, but
more broadly enforce the liminality of both Gandalf and Aragorn. In
Drout’s discussion of Tolkien’s disavowal of Anglo-Saxon influence in
crafting the Rohirrim, six pages of setup may seem daunting to those
not linguistically inclined, but keep reading—the connection to Jack-
son’s films is worth it. The point Drout makes is that “a great many
readers (critics and others) are influenced in their understanding of
the Anglo-Saxons by the Rohirrim,” a fact that colors interpretation.
Enter Jackson. Once again, we are back to “reducing or eliminating
the ambiguity inherent in prose that is used to describe sensory data.”
In other words, once an image becomes as a visual icon, such as use of
the Sutton Hoo headgear to model Théoden’s helmet, it essentially be-
comes the only image (and cultural correspondence) accepted. Drout
encourages a rereading of the books (and particularly Appendix F) to
offset this disambiguation that is the natural parlance of film.
The collection is brought to a close by Joseph Ricke and Cath-
erine Barnett, whose co-authored essay confronts the ultimate criti-
cism of Jackson’s film epic—whether the numinous can satisfactorily
be filmed. Through extensive discussion of the difference between
“magical” and “numinous” and film techniques for establishing the
intangible, their conclusion is that “some things are untranslatable,”
but overall Jackson has created his own beautiful and iconic scenes
that give viewers a satisfying sense of the numinous.
It is unlikely that this collection of essays will radically change the
minds of those who believe Jackson played too fast and loose with Tolk-
ien’s story and characters (this reviewer is still in that category), and
that ultimately numinous, interlaced fantasy narrative cannot be suc-
cessfully transitioned to the flattening, visual medium of film. On the
other hand, there is much to be appreciated here and there are new
perspectives to add to the growing discussion of Jackson’s take on Tolk-
ien’s ageless tale of loss and redemption.

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Does this book belong on the shelf alongside your other trusted
Tolkien reference materials? Absolutely.
Anne C. Petty
Crawfordville, Florida

The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of The Rings, ed. Paul
E. Kerry (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011),
pp. 310; Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien’s Work,
ed. Paul E. Kerry & Sandra Miesel (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2011), pp. xii + 220.

Is The Lord of the Rings a Christian work? Patrick Curry’s answer—

”yes, but not only that”1—is probably the best and most succinct re-
sponse; but the issues implied by the question and Curry’s answer are
by no means uncomplicated. The 29 essays gathered in these two vol-
umes demonstrate the validity of both sides of Curry’s summary: the
contributors to The Ring and the Cross explore various dimensions of
“the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity, even his Roman Catholi-
cism, on his writing” (17), while the essays in Light Beyond All Shadow
expand the inquiry to investigate more broadly “how Tolkien’s writing
opens up the nature of religious experience and the spiritual” beyond
the strictly Catholic or Christian to include transcendental values at
the most general level (vii). Regarding the first volume, The Ring and
the Cross, the fact that Tolkien was a Christian “and indeed a Roman
Catholic” (Letters, 255) is undeniable—primary evidence is abundant
in his essays and letters; this evidence has been much discussed in re-
cent decades, and much of it is rehearsed over again in this volume.
What is deniable, and what some scholars have attempted—without
much success—is the degree to which this fact constrained what
Tolkien wrote or determined how his works should be read. The vast
secondary literature that has grown up around Tolkien’s imaginative
writing explores virtually every doctrinal, ontological, theological, and
soteriological topic extending from this fact, and in light of the tangle
through which one now must make one’s way, it can be stated in truth
that The Ring and The Cross assists substantially in cutting a swath. A
similar metaphor, that of mapping spiritual territory, governs Light Be-
yond All Shadow.
The question that hovers over both volumes is just how to mea-
sure the influence of Tolkien’s religious views and commitments on
the products of his creativity and his readers’ response to them. Must
we regard The Lord of the Rings, the Middle-earth legendarium, or the
Tolkienian oeuvre as a whole as exclusively Christian? To that question

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one may join Curry and many contributors to these two books in say-
ing, “no,” perhaps adding “not necessarily.” This question might have
been posed just as easily as, “is The Lord of The Rings a pagan work,” to
which Curry’s answer mentioned above would apply just as well. There
are essays in these two collections by noted Christian theologians, both
Catholic and Protestant, by writers claiming positions sympathetic to
atheism, paganism, and by writers trying valiantly to preserve neutral-
ity by positioning themselves (with or without the label) as “agnostic”
on the foundational issues. With only a slight modifications either
question—“Is it Christian?” and “Is it pagan?”—might be answered jus-
tifiably: “Yes—but it is more than that.” The power and the brilliance
of Tolkien’s judicious combination of constituent elements in con-
structing his work are evident in the breadth of positions exemplified
in these two books and in scores of publications preceding them. Both
of these questions are posed honestly by the contributors to these two
essay collections; they are answered with satisfactory evidence backing
up either approach. But, for some, therein lies the problem.
In a word, the decisive, underlying issue is that of specificity. In his es-
say in The Ring and The Cross, Stephen Morillo asks, “why should Chris-
tianity have a special claim on ideas common to so many religions,” and
“where . . . are the specifically Christian features” (emphases mine) in
The Lord of the Rings, beyond what he calls “the commons of spiritu-
ality”? Are the broader spiritual—arguably, “pagan”—implications of
the book necessarily incompatible with the more explicitly Christian
doctrinal and theological implications often claimed for it? People of
many kinds of Christian faith, both orthodox and heterodox, people
committed to other religious or quasi-religious systems—e.g., pagan-
ism—and those with no specific faith tradition have found much to
appreciate in Tolkien’s works. While disagreements about particulars
seem to animate the (sometimes) rancorous debate, a sequential read-
ing of these two volumes hints at a wide zone of either unrecognized
or unacknowledged common ground shared by the “Tolkien-as-Chris-
tian-apologist” and the “Tolkien-as-Pagan-sympathizer” positions.
The Ring and the Cross is divided into two sections, “Part I: The Ring”
and “Part II: The Cross,” and contains 15 essays, several by respected
writers of already well-known books on the subject of Tolkien’s Chris-
tianity and its influence on The Lord of the Rings: Joseph Pearce, Ralph
C. Wood, and Bradley Birzer, whose essay–as contrasted with several
others—appears to have been written de novo for this volume. While
several of the key essays here cover ground already covered in earlier
books, some topics that have seen relatively little coverage hitherto in
discussions of Tolkien’s religion. In the 36-page “Introduction” that
opens The Ring and The Cross, Kerry surveys some 114 scholars, some

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with ­multiple citations, who have written on Christian approaches to

Tolkien’s works from the beginnings of Tolkien scholarship in the
1960s down to 2008. At once both thorough and extremely well-orga-
nized, the survey alone is almost worth the whole volume. Thereafter,
“Part I: The Ring” opens the volume with a three-essay exchange be-
tween Ronald Hutton and Nils Ivar Agøy on paganism and The Lord of
the Rings. In “The Pagan Tolkien,” Ronald Hutton analyzes Tolkien’s
diverse positions on his identity as a Christian writer and his mutu-
ally contradictory assertions about his work as Christian or not. The
cosmological roots of the legendarium and its underlying mythology
derived from various sources ranging from pagan neo-Platonism to a
form of Christianized neo-Platonism, ending up with a work in which
the ingredients contributing to its mythic structure were about one-
third Christian and two-thirds not, with a theology which was “so un-
orthodox . . . as to merit the term heretical.” Nils Ivar Agøy’s response
ably answers many of Hutton’s critiques, including the connection
Hutton draws between the period in Tolkien’s life in which the prin-
cipal mythic components undergirding the narratives were developed
and the period of time in which, Tolkien says, he all but ceased to prac-
tice his faith. Agøy concludes that Tolkien’s comments reflect fatherly
sympathy for Michael’s own wrestling with flagging faith and indicate
merely that Tolkien became less regular in his attendance at Mass—
something far less ominous than a temptation to give greater credence
to competing mythologies or to cease believing altogether.
The essays by Stephen Morillo, John R. Holmes, and Ralph C.
Wood in “Part II” are all new essays, while Chris Mooney’s is reprint-
ed from a 2002 Boston Globe column. Catherine Madsen’s essay is an
expanded, thoroughly recast revision of a 1987 Mythopoeic Society
paper and thus represents a lively dialogue not only with her original
interlocutor Charles Huttar but also with her own 2004 article. This
part of the book, then, introduces new material to the debate concern-
ing the ratio of pagan and Christian elements in Tolkien’s work; here,
the balance of the argument favors an appreciation of how Tolkien the
Catholic Christian fruitfully used “pagan” material in The Lord of the
Rings without either betraying his deepest Catholic commitments on
the one hand or, on the other, denouncing pagan beliefs as hopelessly
benighted and therefore useless to an orthodox Christian perspective.
Noteworthy in this section, Stephen Morillo develops the idea—with
expressed indebtedness to a 2003 talk by Martha Bayless—that in Mid-
dle-earth, Tolkien invented not an imaginary medieval world per se but
rather an invented world as it might be imagined by a twentieth-century
academic medievalist. John R. Holmes’s essay on “Religion as Palimp-
sest” draws an analogy connecting the relationship between Tolkien’s

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Christianity and the mythopoeic elements of The Lord of the Rings with
the philological problem of religious language in the history of Eng-
lish. Jason Boffetti”s essay in Part II, “Catholic Scholar, Catholic Sub-
Creator” and Carson L. Holloway’s “Redeeming Sub-Creation” present
familiar data and repeat well-worn arguments involving sub-creation,
eucatastrophe, and the redemptive implications of Tolkien’s theories
of language, myth, and literature drawn from the implications of his
foundational essay “On Fairy Stories.” (Incidentally, given this essay’s
importance for both sides of the discussion, it is surprising to find no
reference to Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson’s 2008 expanded
edition—which offers significant and nuanced insights—anywhere in
the volume). Boffetti’s essay might have worked better to introduce
the volume’s second half. Most interesting, however, are the essays by
Michael Tomko and Joseph Pearce, which present new material situat-
ing Tolkien in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history
of Roman Catholicism in England. Tomko elucidates the impact on
Tolkien’s sense of the variable fortunes of Catholicism in English his-
tory—in particular, Cardinal John Henry Newman and the Oratory
in England (and specifically, the Birmingham congregation)—on his
own scheme of four “ages” in Middle-earth (or, properly, Arda). Pearce
charts the influence of Catholic writers and apologists G.K. Chesterton
and Hilaire Belloc, whose “distributism” (a set of positions set against
industrialism, mechanism, urbanism, and their dehumanizing effects)
no doubt played a role in the development of the young Tolkien’s ro-
manticism, nostalgia for community, and insistence on the integrity of
“the individual and the family at the very heart and center of political
life.” Kerry’s article on “Tracking Catholic Influence” is thought-pro-
voking but perhaps less useful overall than his encyclopedic editorial
introduction; Marjorie Burns’s “Saintly and Distant Mothers” traces
mother-figures–chiefly as stand-ins for Mary the Mother of God—to
whom Tolkien was fervently devoted and who thus looms large in The
Lord of the Rings—through female figures in George MacDonald, who,
despite his own sometimes contradictory accounts, influenced Tolk-
ien’s significantly.
Light Beyond All Shadow paraphrases in its title a passage in The Re-
turn of the King from one of the darkest stretches of narrative in the
whole epic narrative. In it, Sam sees a star shining high above the dark
land of Mordor: “like a shaft, clear and cold,” reminding him that the
Shadow hanging over that benighted land and threatening all of Mid-
dle-earth is only “a small and passing thing: there was light and high
beauty beyond its reach.” Sandra Miesel’s “Introduction” does not
match Kerry’s introductory essay in The Ring and The Cross in the sense
that it does not offer as exhaustive a review of previous ­scholarship; its

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value lies instead in its balanced, well-crafted panorama of Tolkien’s

sub-created world, in which The Lord of the Rings is called “but one peak
in a mighty range of mist-wreathed mountains.” Her chronological
survey of what she calls aptly “the Terrain” of Middle-earth’s cosmog-
ony, cosmography, and geography is useful even to veteran explorers
for its large-scale map of that imagined world. One is reminded how
vast is the landscape through which many of us have been tramping
most of our lives. Roger A. Ladd’s “Divine Contagion” analyzes the
nature of Power in the Middle-earth legendarium in terms of Michel
Foucault’s theories of power as a function of “force relations” between
social unequals and “pastoral power,” which Foucault identifies as an
“old power technique” originating in Christian institutions. Power can
be passed, though diluted, through contact between greater and lesser
agents and can be used either for Domination or for Art; Tolkien fa-
vored the latter, and in his works Ladd identifies a transmission model
in the attenuating (or, via Verlyn Flieger, “splintering”) of light from
its origins in Eru through systematic diminution into the light of the
Two Trees, the Silmarils, and the phial of Galadriel. This transmission
model is observable also in the transference of the primary creative
power of Eru to the ever lesser and lesser sub-creative acts of the Ainur,
the Valar, the Maiar, and ultimately the Elves and Men.
Matthew Dickerson’s essay on “Water, Ecology, and Spirituality”
wades through every significant reference to water as an index of the
“salvific mystery” in the depths of spirituality plumbed in Tolkien’s
works; given its specific discussion of that spirituality as an outworking
of Tolkien’s Christianity, the essay might have been more at home in
The Ring and The Cross, than in this one, whose more general focus is
indicated in the subtitle on “religious experience.” This same observa-
tion also might be applied to several other essays in this collection,
raising a question concerning the editors’ conceptual methodology
allocating essays between the two companion volumes. Given its more
general approach to the broadly mythico-religious issues raised there,
the opening exchange between Hutton and Agøy in The Ring and the
Cross, to take another example, might have worked as well or even
better in Light Beyond All Shadow. Other essays in “Part I” of the previ-
ous volume including Morillo’s on “the spiritual core” of The Lord of
the Rings, John R. Holmes’s “Religion as Palilmpsest” and Catherine
Madsen’s “Eru Erased” on “the minimalist cosmology” of The Lord of
the Rings also reach beyond the scope of the specifically Christian in
Tolkien’s work as a whole and again might have been more at home
in Light Beyond All Shadow. But this is a trivial quibble: for prospective
users of these two essay collections, the larger point is this: regard-
less of where they appear, all the essays in both volumes—even those

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­ resenting ­already well-established arguments over again—are of sig-

p
nificant value to anyone tracking through the terrain. Whether our
explorations are characteristic of meandering across the immense ex-
panse or of conducting a pilgrimage towards some specific objective,
Kerry and Miesel’s surveys in these two books provide good guidance.
The essays in Miesel’s volume adumbrate or illuminate various fea-
tures of the territory mapped out in her opening remarks: Anne C.
Petty’s on the “Mythopoeic Iconography of Middle-earth” and Glenn
R. Gill’s essay on “Biblical Archetypes” make useful connections be-
tween types and images within the legendarium and in Tolkien’s con-
scious and unconscious sources. Jared Lobdell’s Ymagynatyf and J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism,” said by the editor to be “sure to arouse
controversy,” suggests that in his concept of Original Sin, Tolkien—in-
fluenced by Cardinal Newman, St. Philip Neri, Fr. Francis Morgan, and
the Catholic Oratorians to which he belonged—may not have been as
Augustinian as is sometimes assumed. Julian Eilmann’s “Music, Poetry
and the Transcendent” keys from Sam Gamgee’s metaphorical remark
in Lothlórien that he felt himself to be “inside the song.” Eilmann
admits the essay does not examine Tolkien’s lyrical work “in its total-
ity and variety”–”[t]he book Tolkien: The Lyricist has not been written
yet.” But numerous narrative scenes illustrate the power of music and
songs, the mythic source of this power originating ultimately in the
significance of music in the creation myth in the Ainulindalë. Inter-
estingly, Eilmann echoes some of Matthew Dickerson’s assessment of
water imagery in a section titled”Music that Turns into Running Water:
Music, Water, and the Transcendent.” The romantic association of wa-
ter and the sea appear to be central expressions of this transcendent
quality, and “sensitive individuals are able to sense the echo of the
cosmic tune in the roar of the sea.”
John Warwick Montgomery’s somewhat brief “Tolkien: Lord of
the Occult?” confronts the minor but persistent strain of resistance
to “the pagan Tolkien.” When, “in the face of all the evidence,” some
regard Tolkien as having compromised his religious commitments by
accommodating modern, broadly pagan ideas in too friendly a fash-
ion, Montgomery says Tolkien brought this on himself. The essay ap-
peals, as expected, to “On Fairy Stories” and (dis)credits misreadings
of Tolkien’s works to those who are “compelled to make [Tolkien] tell
their own story instead of his own.” In “Life-Giving Ladies: Women in
the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien,” Sandra Miesel deals with another argu-
ably spurious objection to Tolkien, his failure to include many impor-
tant female characters in his narratives. Expanding an earlier version
published in the St. Austin Review, Miesel begins “J.R.R. Tolkien ideal-
ized women,” attributing the paucity of female characters partly to the

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times in which he lived and the institutions to which he belonged and

partly to a corresponding elevation of the female principle to the level
of idealization. Though “[n]o female says a word in The Hobbit,” Miesel
directs attention to significant characters in the other works–predict-
ably, Arwen, Galadriel, Goldberry, Rosie Cotton, Nienna/Niënor, and
others–interpreting them in mythic terms suggested by Mircea Eliade,
Georges Dumézil, and Robert Graves. The mythic importance of the
seven female demiurges–the Valier–appears as a counter-balance to
the relatively smaller narrative roles of female elves, dwarves, and hob-
bits; in many positive examples, “Tolkien exalts feminine gifts” in the
shield-maidens, wise queens, lore-mistresses, artists, and fruitful wives
that populate his works, equaling or even surpassing male characters
in their courage, loyalty, patience, and tenacity.”
Robert Lazu’s essay on “Literature and Jesuit Spiritual Exercises”
demonstrates Tolkien’s affinity, if not indebtedness, to ideas of visual
imagination in Plato, Aquinas, and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exer-
cises. Colin Duriez’s “Tolkien and the Inklings” suggests the Christian
character of this group has been overemphasized by some commenta-
tors and highlights the centrality of the group’s literary discussions.
The essay not only provides specific details concerning the rather fluid
“membership” of this group, it also shifts some attention away from ar-
guably the most influential friendship with C.S. Lewis to highlight the
“subtle but not negligible” interdependence between Tolkien “lesser
Inklings” Owen Barfield, David Cecil, Warren Lewis, Hugo Dyson, Co-
lin Hardie, Charles Williams, R.E. Havard, and many others known to
have participated.
Happily, implications of the film versions of the trilogy are not ig-
nored in this volume, which concludes with Russell W. Dalton’s, “Peter
Jackson, Evil, and the Temptations of Film” and Christopher Garbows-
ki’s “What Remains of Tolkien’s ‘Catholic’ Tale in Peter Jackson’s The
Lord of the Rings.” These two essays echo the opposed assessments of
Jackson’s adaptations found in Janet Brennan Croft’s edited anthol-
ogy Tolkien on Film; Dalton explores the Manichaean and Boethian
concepts of evil developed in Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of
the Century and elsewhere, arguing that Jackson successfully resisted
reducing the story to a dualistic conflict climaxing with the defeat of
power by greater power. Garbowski appropriates central ideas from
“On Fairy Stories,” demonstrating how Jackson captured Tolkien’s em-
phasis on ideas of community, place, self-transcendence through self-
sacrifice, and ultimate eucatastrophe.
Tolkien’s religious views, his views of paganism “versus” or “in rela-
tion to” Christianity, and their literary implications, as is well known,
were developed in the context of discussions over many years with

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 Book Reviews

his fellow Inklings. Tolkien shared a perspective whereby a simplistic

distinction between elements in his created mythology influenced
by pagan mythic patterns and those found also in Christianity would
have been regarded by Tolkien either as nonsensical or irrelevant.
Commenting on the question of specificity or exclusivity, C.S. Lewis
famously said “Christian literature” might exist as a separate category
only in the same sense that Christian cookbooks might: boiling an egg
is the same for Christians as for pagans; analogously, we might add,
eating the egg would be a similar experience for both. This must be
seen as equally true whether one is cooking, sculpting, painting, writ-
ing a work of literature, inventing a fictional mythology, or enjoying
the results of these and other such creative occupations. Specificity
and exclusivity may be useful for the purposes of some kinds of discus-
sion, just as generalization and inclusion may be for others; both ap-
proaches have purposes and effects consistent with and appropriate to
their underlying objectives in discussing Tolkien’s works; both may be
valid for different reasons.
Following this line of argumentation, we may find a way out of the
simple dichotomy of “Tolkien as Christian apologist” versus “Tolkien
as pagan sympathizer.” The archetypal mythic patterns exhibited in
Tolkien’s works—e.g., death and rebirth, vicarious interdependency,
exaltation of the small or humble, and the heroism of self-sacrifice—
are also observable in nature: not analogously, not in terms that dictate
allegory, but preternaturally, and illustrated both in Christianity spe-
cifically and more generally in most other religions, including various
forms of paganism. Tolkien believed mythic consciousness provides
the only direct access to the truth of abstract principles we attempt
to verify through the exercise of rational intellect, discursive thought,
or reason. Every myth is, or may become, the father of innumerable
truths on the abstract level. For Tolkien as well as for other Inklings,
verifying the efficacy of Christian faith did not require falsification of
all other faiths. In fact, such verification necessarily includes abstract
truths exemplified in other mythic and religious traditions outside
Christianity per se–including, but not limited to, the other mythic tra-
ditions, including those–like Tolkien’s—invented for the purposes of
fiction.
For this reason, the dichotomy distinguishing J.R.R. Tolkien’s per-
sonal religion from either his invented mythology or from “heathen”
mythologies–a dichotomy which scholarly proponents of one view or
the other generally take great pains either to emphasize or to explain
away–can be seen as simplistic. According to Tolkien’s views of myth
analyzed and explained in these essays, any similarities, echoes, res-
onances, or parallels between the mythic elements of Tolkien’s own

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 Book Reviews

personal religion and the fictional myths he invented can be attrib-

uted not to an effort—conscious or not—to ground the latter in the
former but to the inevitability that both would express the same ab-
stract truths, originating perhaps (as Tolkien believed) in the same
ultimate source. For Tolkien, Christianity was the religious tradition
that expressed these truths most clearly, completely, and specifically.
But this kind of specificity does not necessitate the rejection of these
same truths reflected elsewhere in other myths. Christians must assent
to the Christian myth with imaginative sympathy similar to that which
we grant to all myths of whatever origin. Conversely, non-Christian
readers must accept—without prejudice—patterns at the deepest lev-
els of Tolkien’s mythopoeia as they appear in parallels and affinities
with other mythic traditions and in echoes from the biblical beliefs to
which Tolkien subscribed. Many of Tolkien’s readers, Christian or not,
derive at least as much—if not more—spiritual sustenance from Tolk-
ien’s legendarium as from whatever religion—if any—they may profess
to believe or disbelieve.
Pagan? Christian? Considered this way, the distinction hardly
seems to matter. Though some of the 29 essays collected by Miesel and
Kerry in these two books draw energy rather too much from a false
dichotomy, on balance they all in one way or another fulfill the injunc-
tion implied by Lewis’s 1944 rhetorical question “If God chooses to be
mythopoeic . . . shall we refuse to be mythopathic?”
Jonathan Evans
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia

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 The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2009
David Bratman and Merlin DeTardo

T olkien studies in English of 2009 included an unusually large

number of articles on The Hobbit and on war and violence, thanks
to the appearance of theme anthologies on these subjects in the form
of issues of Hither Shore: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Tolkien Gesellschaft, partly
in German but each including many articles in English. Volume 5, ti-
tled Der Hobbit (no English translation of this title seemed necessary),
is dated 2008, but appeared in 2009. Volume 6, titled Violence, Conflict,
and War in Tolkien, is dated 2009. Both are conference proceedings
edited by a team headed by Thomas Fornet-Ponse.
Other continental European publications in English of the year
included Arda Philology 2, edited by “Beregond” Anders Stenström,
second in a series of conference proceedings on Tolkien’s invented
languages, and the 2009 issue of Lembas-extra, from the Dutch Tolkien
Society, Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor, edited by Cécile van Zon.
The latter has the theme of Tolkien in Poetry and Song, foreshadowing
the musical topic of theme anthologies in later years.
Rather unusually, no other theme anthologies not in semi-period-
ical form appeared in 2009, not even from Walking Tree Publishers,
an industrious Swiss organization with some personnel overlap with
the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft. Walking Tree’s only book of the
year was a retrospective collection of articles by the Australian Tolkien
scholar J.S. Ryan. This was their second collection of this kind, the first
having been Tom Shippey’s Roots and Branches in 2007.
On the Anglo-American side, the Tolkien Society in the U.K. pro-
duced issues 47 (dated Spring) and 48 (dated Autumn) of its journal
Mallorn, edited by Henry Gee, and the Mythopoeic Society in the U.S.
produced Vol. 27, no. 3/4 (issues 105/106, dated Spring/Summer)
and Vol. 28, no. 1/2 (issues 107/108, dated Fall/Winter), of its journal,
Mythlore, edited by Janet Brennan Croft. Mallorn is generally entirely
focused on Tolkien, though including fiction and poetry, not covered
here, while Mythlore also covers C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other
mythopoeic literature; each of this year’s issues included three articles
on Tolkien. Also appearing this year was Vol. 6 of the journal in hand,
Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. Lastly, and returning to Tolk-
ien’s invented languages, came Parma Eldalamberon 18, from a team of
editors headed by Christopher Gilson, eighth in a series of annotated
primary texts of Tolkien’s own philological writings.
Of book-length monographs of the year, the most attention has
gone to Christopher Tolkien’s edition of the previously unpublished,

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 David Bratman and Merlin DeTardo

and indeed previously almost unknown, Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.

Among secondary scholarly studies, there has been much interest in
and some contention over the portrait of Christopher Tolkien as an
editor in Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion by
Douglas Charles Kane, an attempt to put in narrative form a lengthy
and thorough table tracing the sources in The History of Middle-earth
texts of the work published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Other noted
books of the year include The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-earth’s Magi-
cal Style by Steve Walker, part of a movement seen also in this year’s
shorter papers to extend Tolkienian language studies to include his
English, and Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Lin-
guistic and Literary Background of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction by Elizabeth So-
lopova, which gestures in the direction of Tolkien source studies, this
year as always a rich topic. Source studies merge imperceptibly into
comparative studies, and the other author most compared to Tolkien
this year, not always to her advantage, is J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Pot-
ter series, completed in 2007, is passing more rapidly into grist for the
critical mill than The Lord of the Rings did when it was new in the 1950s.

Authorship of the individual sections of the “Year’s Work” that fol-

low are designated by their author’s initials: David Bratman [DSB] and
Merlin DeTardo [MTD].

Works by Tolkien [DSB]

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, edited by Christopher Tolkien

(London: HarperCollins, 2009), is a notable addition to J.R.R. Tolk-
ien’s published oeuvre. This is only his fourth full book of poetry,
and only his second (counting his translations of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo as the first) to consist of his versions
of previously existing stories. Very little information was available on
or attention drawn to the contents of this work prior to the announce-
ment of this volume’s publication. The book primarily consists of two
long poems forming a narrative sequence. Völsungakviða en nýja eða Sig-
urðarkviða en mesta (“The New Lay of the Völsungs, or The Longest Lay
of Sigurd,” 57-180) and Guðrúnarkviða en nýja eða dráp Niflunga (“The
Lay of Gudrún, or The Slaying of the Niflungs,” 251-308), both appar-
ently dating from the 1930s, are Tolkien’s attempt to retell, in a uni-
fied and consistent manner, the legendary story known from the Norse
Völsunga saga and Eddaic poetry and the German Nibelungenlied, all of
them sources Tolkien drew on in forming his version. Though the ti-
tles are in Old Norse, the poems are in Modern English, using the Old
Norse eight-line alliterative stanza and attempting the style and impact

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 The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2009

of the Icelandic poems of the Codex Regius. Völsungakviða en nýja begins

with Ódin’s plan to create the clan of the Völsungs and takes the fa-
mous tale through the deaths of Sigurd and Brynhild. Guðrúnarkviða
en nýja carries on with the later adventures of Gudrún and the Niflungs
and their strife with the Huns. Appendices present two shorter poems
by Tolkien: The Prophecy of the Sibyl, a rhymed Modern English version
of part of the Eddaic poem Völuspá (364-67), and what Christopher
Tolkien has titled Fragments of a Heroic Poem of Attila in Old English, with
his editorial translation into Modern English (368-77). The Prophecy is
probably also from the 1930s, the Fragments apparently from the late
1920s. Extensive forewords and commentaries by Christopher Tolkien
as editor on the main poems incorporate numerous quotations from
his father’s lecture notes and other writings, most prominently an en-
tire lecture titled “Introduction to the ‘Elder Edda’” (16-32).
Contemporary critical attention to this book, apart from book re-
views, begins with an interview with Christopher Tolkien, by journalist
Alison Flood, concerning also other works of his father’s that he has
edited, published as “Christopher Tolkien answers questions about
Sigurd and Gudrún,” along with a short article by Flood based on the
interview, “Tolkien breaks silence over JRR’s ‘fierce, passionate’ poem”
(both in Guardian, May 5, 2009). “Tolkien’s Sigurd & Gudrun: Sum-
mary, Sources, & Analogs” by Pierre H. Berube (Mythlore 28 no. 1/2:
45-76) is a useful table, rather akin to the ones for The Silmarillion in
Kane’s Arda Reconstructed (discussed below) identifying which source
texts Tolkien used for individual sections of his two lays, including cita-
tions of elements he rejected; plotting and thematic analogs in his own
fiction; and most prominently a detailed and fairly sardonic plot sum-
mary, divided into chunks covering a few stanzas each. Mention should
also be made here, although the item was not published until the next
year, of Tom Shippey’s thorough discussion of Tolkien’s adaptation of
his sources in a review (which, as Shippey notes, “considerably exceeds
the boundaries of a review”) in Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 291-324.
Tengwesta Qenderinwa and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part 2 (Mountain
View, CA, 2009) is Parma Eldalamberon 18, an entry in a roughly chrono-
logical survey of Tolkien’s linguistic texts with editorial commentary.
The “Part 2” in the title applies just to “Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets,” ed-
ited by Arden R. Smith, of which Part 1 appeared in Parma 16 in 2006.
This part (109-48) presents a variety of alphabets, similar to the later
Tengwar, apparently dating between 1924 and 1931, all of them adapt-
ed for writing English, and thus, as Smith notes, not strictly part of
the Elvish mythology. A few appear as tables of sound values, but most
are short texts, appearing in facsimile, and presented by Smith with
both phonetic transcription and modern-spelling transcription. These

109
 David Bratman and Merlin DeTardo

include some fragments of known Tolkien poems and a small allusion

to the story Roverandom, plus several copies of the Lord’s Prayer. “Ten-
gwesta Qenderinwa” (“Quendian Grammar”), edited by Christopher
Gilson and Patrick H. Wynne, is a treatise on the “base structure” or
morphology of the Elvish languages. Like the lays, it is itself in English,
despite its title. It comes in three texts, “Tengwesta Qenderinwa 1” (23-
58) from the late 1930s, “Tengwesta Qenderinwa 2” (69-107) from the
early 1950s, and a briefer intermediate text titled “Elements of Quen-
dian Structure” (59-68). An editorial foreword (6-21) gives details on
the complex, multi-layered texts, significantly altered in revision and
differing from each other considerably in contents and theoretical
bases.
“Fate and Free Will” (Tolkien Studies 6: 183-88), edited by Carl F.
Hostetter, is a previously unpublished note written 1968 or later, out-
lining the Eldarin view of the relationship between these concepts.
The philosophy expressed is one in which certain actions or outcomes
may be fated, without restricting the free will of conscious actors to
make deliberate choices. As usual with Tolkien’s late philosophical
essays, this arose out of linguistic discussion, and Hostetter places as
preface an additional linguistic definition and note that allude to the
main text.
“The Clerkes Compleinte,” an anonymous 60-line poem (signed
“N.N.”), a Chaucer pastiche in Middle English, was published in The
Gryphon, a Leeds University student magazine, in 1922. It was uncov-
ered, identified as Tolkien’s, and reprinted in the hard-to-find journal
Arda in 1984. A slightly revised text, dated 1924 or later, was printed
in facsimile in Arda in 1986, and is now for the first time printed in a
more generally-available source in Jill Fitzgerald’s article (see below)
in Tolkien Studies 6: 49-51. It depicts the woes of a philology student try-
ing to register for classes in a crowded university.

General Works and Biography [DSB]

Like Roots and Branches by Tom Shippey (from the same publisher,
2007), Tolkien’s View: Windows into His World by J.S. Ryan (Zurich: Walk-
ing Tree Publishers, 2009) is a collection of articles on Tolkien by a
notable scholar, albeit one less well-known than Shippey. Ryan is a pro-
fessor of English in Australia who attended Oxford in Tolkien’s time
and knew him there. His primary research topics in Tolkien studies, as
reflected in the contents of this book, are Tolkien’s scholarly interests,
which Ryan often approaches biographically, and their application as
influences and themes in his fiction. This book contains twenty es-
says on Tolkien, most of them reprints modified from their original

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 The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2009

publication. Seventeen of the essays originally appeared in Tolkien

or Inklings journals between 1981 and 1992; one, a pioneering study
in Tolkien’s use of Germanic mythic names and their accompanying
ethos, appeared in the journal Folklore in 1966; another, a study of the
application of the principles of “On Fairy-stories” to “Leaf by Niggle,”
was a chapter in Ryan’s 1969 book, Tolkien: Cult or Culture?; and the
final essay, “Trolls and Other Themes: William Craigie’s Significant
Folkloric Influence on the Style of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit” (33-
46), is newly published. This last item is a rather loose argument that
Tolkien derived many of the folkloric themes in The Hobbit, including
the behavior of trolls and dragons, from Craigie’s 1896 book, Scandi-
navian Folk-Lore. The remaining papers in the book include studies of
Oxford figures such as Elizabeth Wright, George Gordon, and Christo-
pher Dawson, and their possible influences on Tolkien; essays on myth
and folklore and their application to such features in Tolkien’s fiction
as the Barrow-wights and the Púkel-men; and biographically-focused
analyses of Tolkien’s undergraduate English examination topics, his
early romantic poems, and the topic listings for his Oxford lectures
on Old Norse.
At 24 pages and about 2,000 words, J.R.R. Tolkien by Jill C. Wheeler
(Edina, MN: ABDO Publishing, 2009), part of the “Children’s Au-
thors” series of the “Checkerboard Biography Library,” is the shortest
and most elementary children’s biography of Tolkien yet. It is diffi-
cult to imagine a child who can grasp The Hobbit needing this book’s
level of discourse. In her brief space, Wheeler concentrates on the life
rather than the works, saying of the latter only that The Book of Lost Tales
was later renamed The Silmarillion and that Tolkien set it and other
works in “a magical world he called Middle-earth” (12). The only story
described is that of Lúthien, who, we are told, “gave up her magic to be
with” Beren (20). The account of writing The Lord of the Rings (18-19)
also has some distinctly mangled facts, but the biographical portion of
the text otherwise generally avoids inventions.
The Inklings of Oxford: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Their Friends,
text by Harry Lee Poe, photography by James Ray Veneman (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), is a slick-paper coffee-table book. Poe’s
text begins as a tourist’s love letter to Oxford, and then runs through
a history of the Inklings’ friendship, focusing primarily on Lewis and
secondarily on Tolkien, and frequently bringing in some, but not all,
of the other Inklings. The biography is conventional, drawing mostly
on Humphrey Carpenter’s portrait in The Inklings, though some more
recent books are cited, and it is consequently mostly reliable. One odd
statement is a suggestion that Allen & Unwin outwitted itself financial-
ly with its offer of a profit-sharing agreement to Tolkien when The Lord

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 David Bratman and Merlin DeTardo

of the Rings later turned out to be successful (136-37); in fact, Rayner

Unwin always declared himself thoroughly satisfied with this outcome.
There is a little literary commentary; an attempt to find similar themes
in The Hobbit and Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress on the grounds that they
were roughly coeval poses Poe an interesting challenge (64-71). There
is nothing specifically geographical in this history, though each page is
decorated in Veneman’s sumptuous color photographs, informatively
captioned, of Inklings sites and other buildings in Oxford, with a very
few historical photographs. Spotty walking tours through Oxford and
environs are relegated to an appendix. At least once the tourist is di-
rected to turn left where it should have been right.
Tolkien’s Bag End by Andrew H. Morton (Studley, Warwickshire:
Brewin Books, 2009) is a short volume serving as a sequel to Tolkien’s
Gedling, 1914, by Morton and John Hayes (from the same publisher,
2008). It is a local history nugget carrying the previous book’s bio­
graphy of Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave into 1923–1931, the period when
she was the owner-operator of a Worcestershire farm called Bag End,
a name which Tolkien borrowed directly for his fiction. Available in-
formation on Tolkien’s connection with the farm is essentially nil, so
Morton does what he can with local history and description, intending
an illustration of the character of the English countryside fictionalized
in the Shire. He builds Chapter 1 out of Tolkien’s declared love for
and connection with the county of Worcestershire, and at the end, in
Chapter 5, he at last gets to the only real point of Tolkienian interest
in his topic, the origin of the name. This, disappointingly, appears not
to be, as often reported, because the farm “was at the end of a lane
that led no further” (Carpenter, Biography 106; Morton sources this in
an uncollected Tolkien letter of 1968 [17]), a condition Morton states
was temporary anyway. But, to the frustration of the reader, Morton
cannot securely provide any other etymology either, though this does
not prevent him from speculating.
The most hermetically biographical Tolkien book of the year is
Black & White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien, edited by
Angela Gardner (Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire: ADC Publica-
tions, 2009), a very small volume with large print and many imagi-
native illustrations by Jef Murray, offering a transcription of a brief
autobiographical notebook written by Tolkien’s younger brother. The
opening sections, recalling the author’s early childhood, are mostly
written in the first-person plural, presumably meaning the two broth-
ers. The stories bear a fairy-tale air and describe the children playing
in the countryside, encountering and often avoiding resident adults
who are seen as ogres and witches. The editor’s introduction suggests
that J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood inspirations may be reflected here, but

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she does not go so far as to offer specific parallels. Later parts of the
notebook discuss the author’s World War I service and his work as a
farmer. An unsigned “Brief Biography of Hilary Tolkien,” with several
family photographs, concludes the volume, including an excerpt from
a 1971 letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Hilary recalling family harvest-sea-
son celebrations in the 1920s (71).
Amy H. Sturgis contributes the Tolkien entry (vol. 2: 301-03) to
Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin A. Reid (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 2009). Sturgis summarizes the views of “some” critics
and “others” (unidentified in the entry, though a few of the relevant
articles are listed as a bibliography) that either Tolkien puts female
characters on a pedestal and omits them altogether when possible, or
that he is following mythic traditions to create women who lead and
are capable of growth. Sturgis notes the gender balance among the Va-
lar, and (unlike some writers on this topic) lists Erendis and Ancalimë
as well as Éowyn as important female characters. Lúthien is only men-
tioned in passing. The magnified female roles in Jackson’s movies raise
the question of why these changes were considered necessary.
“Tolkiens of My Affection” by Lance Strate (ETC. 66 no. 3: 278-94)
is a rambling general appreciative article focused on The Lord of the
Rings and The Silmarillion. The tone may be conveyed by noting Strate’s
use of words like “uplifting.” Strate admires the History of Middle-earth
series but finds it difficult to read. He praises the variety of individual
spiritual journeys of the various heroes of The Lord of the Rings. Then
he forces in a biographical comparison to Marshall McLuhan to intro-
duce the idea that Tolkien, in his use of language, was aware of it as a
medium that controls the message in a McLuhanesque sense. Strate
claims Tolkien as an advocate of spoken over written communication,
citing as evidence the Music of the Ainur, Treebeard’s oral lore, and
Frodo’s encounter on Amon Hen with the Eye (apparently here rep-
resenting the evil of reading) and the Voice (representing the good of
speaking).

General Criticism: The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Work as a

Whole [MTD]
Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Linguistic and Lit-
erary Background of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction by Elizabeth Solopova ([New
York]: North Landing Books, 2009) is a slender book (107 pages) de-
scribing four cultural traditions that have influenced Tolkien’s work.
Much of this is familiar but capably presented. A section on Old Norse
literature and language emphasizes Tolkien’s use of descriptive names,
which give his stories the feel of historical texts. (However, Solopova

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 David Bratman and Merlin DeTardo

errs in claiming that Tolkien borrowed the name “Balin” from Völuspá
[20] and that “Aragorn” means “Royal Tree” [21].) Solopova’s com-
ments on Old English include summaries of Tolkien’s views on Beowulf,
particularly his creative responses to literary and linguistic problems
that “defeated a scholarly approach” (39), and on The Battle of Mal-
don, concerning which she likens Túrin’s bridge, built so Nargothrond
can war more openly against its enemies (but which ultimately gives
Glaurung easy access to the city), to the tidal spit that Beorhtnoth al-
lows his Viking opponents to cross uncontested. From Finnish also
comes a more widely-acknowledged influence on Túrin, in the person
of Kullervo from the Kalevala; like Verlyn Flieger (considered later in
this survey), Solopova is particularly interested in Tolkien’s interweav-
ing of fate and free will. Solopova’s discussion of Gothic mainly con-
cerns similarities between Tolkien’s Battle of the Pelennor Fields and
the historical Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (with a long, helpful
quotation from a translation of Jordanes’s Getica) including the usual
overemphasized comparison of the deaths of Theoderic the Visigoth
and Théoden the Eorling, which are only broadly alike. Her remarks
on the Gothic language would be improved by reference to Arden
R. Smith’s “Tolkienian Gothic” in the collection The Lord of the Rings
1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder (2006). In So-
lopova’s opening section, she summarizes Tolkien’s philological work
and his thoughts on heroism and myth; her general remarks on arche-
typal imagery are superior to those in the Jungian studies by Robin
Robertson and Pia Skogemann (see below). A concluding chapter in-
troduces Tolkien’s invented languages, with particular attention to the
nature of Quenya.
Pia Skogemann’s Where the Shadows Lie: A Jungian Interpretation of
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications, 2009)
is the author’s own translation of her Danish work, En Jungiansk For-
tolkning af Tolkiens Ringenes Herre (2004); this is only occasionally no-
ticeable in the text (as when she has “Torben” for “Ted” [36] or refers
to a “flock” of orcs [44]). More problematically, Skogemann claims
that Tolkien’s “so-called” trench fever (a well-known bacterial disease)
was probably post-traumatic stress disorder (68), and she believes that
Tolkien adapted the word “hobbit” from “hobby” (9), because hobbits
provided him a way to tell stories involving the invented languages
he described in his lecture, “A Hobby for the Home” (better known
as “A Secret Vice”). The most significant trouble with Skogemann’s
work is that she forces The Lord of the Rings into her Jungian plan, in
which Tolkien’s four hobbit protagonists represent the ego (Frodo,
Sam, Merry, and Pippin are thinking, feeling, sensation, and intu-
ition, respectively), with the Shire as the consciousness, unaware of

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and yet menaced by the collective unconsciousness which is Middle-

earth (x-xii, 14). For example, because groups of four have Jungian
significance, Skogemann determines the Fellowship to consist of eight
genuine members (deliberately omitting Boromir) and describes the
heroes as crossing four rivers (missing the Greyflood among others)
and passing through four forests (which requires designating the area
where the hobbits meet Glorfindel as the “troll forest” [60]). An un-
duly large part of Skogemann’s text is devoted to plot summary. As she
proceeds through the story, she identifies Bombadil as a trickster fig-
ure free of conscious control; Aragorn as inner resources drawn from
the unconscious; Goldberry, Arwen and Galadriel as representations
of the anima; Elrond, Théoden, and Denethor as worn-down arche-
typal images in need of refreshment; and the Rings of Power collec-
tively as the self. Bombadil and Goldberry also provide a glimpse of
the transcendent, Gollum represents a “loss of meaning” (26), Merry
and Pippin grow through traditional rites of passage, and Sam’s de-
feat of Shelob shows him overcoming his fear of women and thus able
to accept Rosie’s love. Overall, Skogemann feels Tolkien’s work, like
Jung’s, is a response to modern horrors; she identifies R.B. Cunning-
hame Graham, H.G. Wells, Franz Werfel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael
Ende, and Hanne Marie Svendsen as authors with similar concerns.
Skogemann says nothing about why The Lord of the Rings is particularly
valuable for Jungian interpretation as compared to other texts, except
for a remark that The Silmarillion lacks a “conscious perspective” (154).
She also compares The Silmarillion stylistically to the illustrated note-
book that Jung kept early in life, which coincidentally is known as The
Red Book. Despite some swipes at Timothy R. O’Neill’s The Individuated
Hobbit (1979), Skogemann’s book represents no advance on his work.
Nor does a sequence of eight articles published over three years
in the journal Psychological Perspectives, in which Robin Robertson ap-
plies a more narrowly-focused Jungian model to Tolkien. Each article
has the main title “Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings” and
is differentiated by subtitle. In the “Introduction” (50 no. 1 [2007]:
79-94), Robertson also calls the entire series Frodo’s Quest. Citing Ur-
sula K. Le Guin on fantasy’s interior journeys, Robertson describes
each of Tolkien’s characters as “a possible individual human solution
to a more than human situation” (87). His remaining articles are les-
sons in self-actualization structured as plot synopses interspersed with
Jungian interpretation. As in Skogemann’s book, the symbolism is
inconsistent: characters sometimes represent parts of the psyche and
sometimes have psyches of their own. Merry and Pippin travel “The
Path of Curiosity” (50 no. 1 [2007]: 95-112) with a sense of wonder
that enables their growth, meet a kindred spirit in Treebeard, and

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separate as a ­necessary step toward maturation. Robertson claims that

Théoden dies “thinking he has killed” the Witch-king (109). “The Path
of Opposites” (50 no. 2 [2007]: 276-90) chronicles the reconciliation
of Legolas and Gimli as symbolic of the need for emotional balance.
Their shared journeys underground are encounters with inner dark-
ness necessary for advancement. “The Path of the Wizard” (51 no. 1
[2008]: 119-40), discussed in this survey last year, contrasts Gandalf
with Saruman (whose multi-colored robes show an inability to make
choices). Robertson’s comments on “The Path of the King” (51 no.
2 [2008]: 316-39) trod by Aragorn (whose triumph over the Dead is
contrasted with Boromir’s fate) are marred by the movie idea that he
“turned aside from his destiny” as king (319). Gollum’s story is “The
Path of Tragic Failure” (52 no. 1 [2009]: 93-110). In this installment,
Robertson announces without explanation that “Tolkien was not an
introspective man” (95) and asserts that Gollum is “totally grey” in
appearance (96) and is the shadow glimpsed at the Buckland Ferry
(100). “The Path of Love” (52 no. 2 [2009]: 225-42) is Sam’s journey in
support of Frodo; Robertson contrasts Sam’s naturally-achieved deep
insights with his occasional narrow-mindedness, and emphasizes the
value in taking risks, as when he looks into the Mirror of Galadriel.
Finally, Frodo experiences “The Path of Transcendence” (52 no. 3
[2009]: 351-71). Bombadil demonstrates to Frodo that the world was
originally good and that “words are where the human meets the di-
vine” (360). Frodo will forget these lessons at times, as he is educated
through harsh experience until self-sacrifice elevates him to the sta-
tus of Buddha or Jesus. Both Robertson and Skogemann should be
pleased to learn that a brief note (129) in Tolkien on Fairy-stories (2008)
shows that Tolkien was at least aware of Jung’s theories.
In “The Destiny of a King: Multiple Masculinities in J.R.R. Tolk-
ien’s The Lord of the Rings” (Handbook on Gender Roles: Conflicts, Attitudes
and Behaviors, edited by Janet H. Urlich and Bernice T. Cosell [New
York: Nova Science, 2009]: 221-33), Chris Blazina applies a version of
Georges Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis about the structure of pro-
to-Indo-European societies to Aragorn, who Blazina sees as incorporat-
ing the roles of ruler, warrior, and farmer/hunter; Blazina compares
Aragorn’s healing powers and the restoration of the White Tree to the
Fisher King myth.
In “The Unique Representation of Trees in The Lord of the Rings”
(Tolkien Studies 6: 91-125), Cynthia M. Cohen proposes that Ents are
creatures unlike all earlier authors’ sentient or ambulatory trees; her
literary comparisons range from Ovid to T.H. White. Bringing an ar-
borist’s expertise to her subject, Cohen also argues against the usual
reading of the Old Forest trees as intelligent and hostile—except for

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Old Man Willow, whose textual history she traces carefully (as she does
also for the Ents). She offers some further botanical and symbolic
commentary on many of Tolkien’s other trees, particularly in Hollin
and at the Cross-roads in Ithilien.
Emma Hawkins discusses “Tolkien and Dogs, Just Dogs: In Meta-
phor and Simile” (Mythlore 27 no. 3/4: 143-57), noting Tolkien’s ca-
nines in Roverandom, Mr. Bliss, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Silmarillion, The
Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. In the last work, Hawkins finds few
actual dogs but many dog metaphors, which she sees as subtle tugs on
the reader’s sympathy.
Andúril, Gurthang, and Sting demonstrate “The Legacy of Swords:
Animate Weapons and the Ambivalence of Heroic Violence” for Judith
Klinger (Hither Shore 6: 132-52). Studying Tolkien’s personification of
weapons, Klinger shows a keen eye for details (such as Tolkien having
the Witch-king stabbed not by Merry but by “Merry’s sword” [RK, V, vi,
117]), imaginatively interprets connections between his works (Ara-
gorn and Túrin are contrasted to show heroes as agents of both order
and destruction), and references a veritable armory of earlier research
(with 62 footnotes and 34 works cited) but leaves too many of her fas-
cinating strands incomplete.
Annie Birks seeks “Perspectives on Just War in Tolkien’s Legend-
arium” (Hither Shore 6: 28-41) but often misapplies the standard crite-
ria for evaluating the justice of initiating conflict to Tolkien’s stories.
Fëanor’s war against Melkor, for instance, fails the test not because he
lacks a just cause, as Birks argues (she thinks the Elvish flaw of resist-
ing change outweighs Melkor’s crimes of theft and murder), but on
the grounds that he has no chance of success. Birks does recognize
that this criterion is irrelevant to the War of the Ring, where the only
alternative for the forces of the West is annihilation.
Before it tails off into the jargon of literary theory, Martin G.E.
Sternberg’s “Language and Violence: The Orcs, the Ents, and Tom
Bombadil” (Hither Shore 6: 154-68) intelligently speculates on the Black
Speech and Entish, both of which may restrict the action of their speak-
ers: the former emphasizes doing over thinking and reduces memory
and individuality, while the latter is so overly descriptive that acting is
perpetually delayed. Similarly, Bombadil’s refusal of generalities ex-
plains why Gandalf thinks him an unsuitable keeper for the Ring.
Two other essays in Hither Shore 6 take somewhat opposing views
on Tolkien’s presentation of war. Anna Slack’s “Clean Earth to Till:
A Tolkienian Vision of War” (118-30) argues that The Lord of the Rings
shows the justice of war, so long as it is waged with moral clarity and
deals fairly with unintended consequences, to a world that questions
the value of heroism. In “The Problem of Closure: War and Narrative

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in The Lord of the Rings” (170-81), Margaret Hiley can’t decide if Tolk-
ien intentionally uses the very structure of the story, which she sees as
overwhelmed by the violence it purports to examine and condemn,
to convey war’s uncontrollable nature, or if this shows the text as itself
dependent on conflict.
Frank Weinreich tries to quantify the “Violence in The Lord of the
Rings” (Hither Shore 6: 10-26) by electronically counting the words that
describe present or incipient violence (using World Health Organiza-
tion definitions); he finds that these account for roughly one-third of
the text, some of it, however, minimized in effect by being described
after the fact. Weinreich would like to compare these figures to those
for other works.
Bringing experience as a military chaplain to his examination of
“Éowyn’s Grief” (Mythlore 27 no. 3/4: 117-27), Brent D. Johnson thinks
that Tolkien describes her case in psychologically realistic terms. With
symptoms that manifest too quickly to be post-traumatic stress disor-
der, Éowyn suffers rather from “traumatic grief,” a condition that de-
velops through the years of Wormtongue’s manipulation of Théoden
and intensifies when he is killed. Faramir helps her to heal with pa-
tient commiseration. Johnson thinks Éowyn’s portrayal is influenced
by Tolkien’s knowledge of the many Great War widows.
“Your Own, Someone Else’s, and No One’s (On the Problem of
Memory in J.R.R. Tolkien and J.L. Borges)” by Sergey Zenkin (Social
Sciences 40 no. 3: 31-41) is translated from Russian by Natalya Perova,
having first appeared in 2008 in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. Zen­
kin differentiates between the “profane” personal memories of the
hobbits and the “sacral” cultural memories of Middle-earth revealed to
them in The Lord of the Rings; he contrasts both with the machine-like,
paralyzing hyperthymesia of the title character of Borges’s 1942 story
“Funes the Memorious.”

General Criticism: Other Works [MTD]

Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion by Doug-
las Charles Kane (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2009) is a
valuable work of reference. Kane closely compares The Silmarillion, as
edited for publication in 1977 by Christopher Tolkien (with assistance
from Guy Gavriel Kay) to the inconsistent “Silmarillion” manuscripts
published in (mainly) The History of Middle-earth series. With the ca-
veat (which might be expressed more strongly) that even those appar-
ent sources are themselves edited and incomplete, Kane discusses in
turn each of the 28 chapters in The Silmarillion. He includes tables that
identify every paragraph’s principal and supplementary sources for all

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but five chapters (where Christopher Tolkien had already performed

a similar analysis, or for which no sources can be traced). With Kane’s
work as a guide, no researcher examining The Silmarillion with refer-
ence to Tolkien’s motives or his other works should again be daunted
from the necessary task of checking against the relevant history. Dog-
gedly, skillfully, Kane shows that most of the words in The Silmarillion
are those of J.R.R. Tolkien, while much of their arrangement, at all
levels, is editorial. Working mainly from 1950s historical annals associ-
ated with the “Quenta Silmarillion,” but reaching back to the 1910s
“Lost Tales,” Christopher Tolkien spliced chapters, paragraphs, and
even sentences; Kane explicates one paragraph that has been com-
bined from six different sources (76). In all, he finds The Silmarillion is
assembled from more than 20 texts. The only chapter whose words are
not primarily J.R.R. Tolkien’s is “Of the Ruin of Doriath,” where the
last version completed dates from 1930 and disagrees with later “Sil-
marillion” developments. This has been known since the 1994 publica-
tion of The War of the Jewels, where Christopher Tolkien says (356) he
was “overstepping the bounds of the editorial function” (Kane tends
to repeat himself and cites this phrase three times). However, as Kane
acknowledges, this pastiche is quite skillful, and the description of
Thingol’s death in particular has been widely praised—but usually as
the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (see Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light and Bri-
an Rosebury’s Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, in addition to, as Kane
notes [216], Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth). Kane’s evaluation
of the constructed Silmarillion is less rigorous than his source-tracing.
By seldom questioning the work’s large structure, he implicitly endors-
es the text; his chief complaints, summarized in a concluding chapter,
are that it is edited too much for the sake of consistency, condensation,
and literary convention, thus omitting philosophic passages (particu-
larly the Second Prophecy of Mandos and the “Athrabeth Finrod ah
Andreth”), lively details, and a needed framing structure; he also be-
moans the reduction in the already limited role of female characters.
Apart from the last point (which is unsystematically considered) these
are reasonable conclusions to which Kane responds mainly with aston-
ishment, expressing too little consideration for Christopher Tolkien’s
uncertainty (mentioned repeatedly in The History of Middle-earth) as to
the scope and purpose of the posthumous editing of his father’s texts
and for the sheer difficulty of interpreting them.
Michaël Devaux cites Kane’s work in “Dagor Dagorath and Rag-
narök: Tolkien and the Apocalypse” (translated from French by David
Ledanois in Hither Shore 6: 102-17), an attempt to make sense of Tolk-
ien’s comment (Letters 149) that the “Silmarillion” mythology would
conclude in a final battle that was indebted to and yet not particularly

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like the old Norse tradition of Ragnarök. Examining Tolkien’s chang-

ing eschatological conceptions as presented in The History of Middle-
earth volumes (like Elizabeth Whittingham’s book, The Evolution of Tolk-
ien’s Mythology), Devaux finds Tolkien reducing the role of the Valar
as the story becomes less like Ragnarök and more like the Christian
Apocalypse. He also identifies apocalyptic imagery used earlier in The
Silmarillion narrative.
“Subcreation as Synthesis of Language and Myth: The Power and
Purpose of Names and Naming in Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin” by
Stephanie Ricker (Explorations: The Journal of Undergraduate Research
and Creative Activities for the State of North Carolina 4: 35-61) is a study
of the many names given to or assumed by Túrin and several other
characters in different versions of his story. Ricker offers Biblical ono-
mastic principles as a guide, tracing particularly names that show the
role of Túrin’s pride and despair in his unhappy fate. For all Ricker’s
attention to detail (including interesting comments on Túrin’s father,
Húrin Thalion, and friend, Beleg Cuthalion), she repeatedly confuses
Doriath and Gondolin.
Allan Turner, with “The Hobbit and Desire” (Hither Shore 5: 83-92),
seeks understanding of “the desire of the hearts of dwarves” (H, I, 45),
a phrase present in the first drafts, long predating the complications
surrounding the possession of the Arkenstone, and so probably not
meant in condemnation of Bilbo’s traveling companions. Instead,
Turner identities this desire as Sehnsucht, and offers a passage from
Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen that evokes both this phrase and the
description of Gollum searching out mountains’ roots in The Lord of
the Rings.
The subject of “Talk to the Dragon: Tolkien as Translator” (Tolk-
ien Studies 6: 27-39) by Ármann Jakobsson is the way that Smaug’s
speech shows the dragon’s human qualities and makes him a double
for Bilbo, which implies the dragonish nature that lurks within and
suggests Fáfnir, a transformed person. Jakobsson forgets at least Ken-
neth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon” when he suggests that The
Hobbit’s early readers would have been surprised by Smaug’s speaking.
In explaining how Tolkien developed Smaug, Jakobsson notes Chryso-
phylax only in passing and never mentions Glorund (later Glaurung),
who as much as Smaug is modeled on Fáfnir.
“Changing Perspectives: Secret Doors and Narrative Thresholds in
The Hobbit” (Hither Shore 5: 30-45) is another provocative, sophisticated,
lucid and unfinished study by Judith Klinger, in this case of how Bilbo’s
experiences on Smaug’s back door function as a turning point in the
story’s point of view, intruding Bilbo into Smaug’s legendary world
in a reversal of Bilbo’s dragon-fears at Bag-End. Klinger doesn’t read

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Thror’s map closely enough and also mistakes Tolkien’s comments on

his Hobbit dust jacket design as applying to the text.
In “‘Sing We Now Softly, and Dreams Let Us Weave Him!’: Dreams
and Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit” (Hither Shore 5: 67-
81), Doreen Triebel takes up the medieval dream theories that Amy
Amendt-Raduege applied to The Lord of the Rings (in “Dream Visions in
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” in Tolkien Studies 3) and contem-
plates the dreams of Bilbo, Bombur, and even Smaug. Triebel sensibly
observes that Bilbo’s uneasy dream on the Eagle’s Eyrie (which she
guesses to be a search for his “true self” [74]), cannot be attributed
to the ring he had lately acquired, because it had no such importance
when the passage was written.
With “The Treasure of My House: The Arkenstone as Symbol of
Kingship and Seat of Royal Luck in The Hobbit” (Hither Shore 5: 121-33),
Martin G.E. Sternberg shows himself to be a Thorinist, determined
that Gandalf is wrong to endorse Bilbo’s gift of the Arkenstone to
Bard. Having argued that, per medieval conventions, it would be bad
luck for Thorin to buy back a family heirloom, Sternberg sees Thorin’s
death as the only way for the dwarf to save face after it is stolen. Stern-
berg’s argument is undermined by his claims that the jewel’s heirloom
status is partly shown by its having brought “luck” and “good fortune
to its owner” (122, 128), without reference to Smaug’s sack of Ere-
bor, and his statement that the stone’s wrongful possessors are cursed
(128), even though nothing untoward happens to Bilbo and Bard.
Sternberg also believes that Indian royal diamonds inspired Tolkien.
“‘Some Courage and Some Wisdom, Blended in Measure’: On
Moral Imagination in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit” by Blanca Grzegor­
czyk (Hither Shore 5: 93-105) is a study of situations in Tolkien’s book
that serve as ethical guides for readers. Aristotle’s arguments on virtue
are applied to Tolkien’s presentation of courage, temperance, justice,
and prudence. Grzegorczyk doesn’t think anyone in The Hobbit is “in-
sufficiently sensitive to pleasure” (100), but that is basically how Tho-
rin describes himself to Bilbo before he dies.
“Seeing Fire and Sword, or Refining Hobbits” by Anna E. Slack
(Hither Shore 5: 174-85) struggles over the proper terminology to de-
scribe Bilbo’s heroism while noting how he slowly grows accustomed to
legendary circumstances, as when he identifies his sword by its lineage
when confronting Gollum. Slack feels that Thrain’s “exploits in the
Necromancer’s dungeons” sound “grand” (and she calls him “Thror”
[179]), but Tolkien has Gandalf describe the imprisoned dwarf as “wit-
less and wandering” (H, I, 58).
Guglielmo Spirito discusses “Wolves, Ravens, and Eagles: A Myth-
ic Presence in The Hobbit” (Hither Shore 5: 47-66), particularly the

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r­ esonance those animals add to Tolkien’s writing, mainly in response

to earlier work by John D. Rateliff. Eagles spark a long digression on
the legend of Ganymede.
“Bombadil in Poetry” by Sjoerd van der Weide (Lembas-extra 2009:
48-55) briefly examines sixteen of the seventeen poems in The Adven-
tures of Tom Bombadil, with analysis that falls short of that in earlier sur-
veys of the 1962 collection by the likes of Paul H. Kocher, Stephen M.
Deyo, and Tom Shippey.
“J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)” by Eugenio M. Olivares Merino (Re-
writing the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century: Vol. II: National Traditions,
edited by Jaume Aurell and Julie Pavon [Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
2009]: 327-70) investigates Tolkien’s ideas about eighth-century Eng-
land as gleaned from “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” explains
earlier scholarship that prepared Beowulf studies for Tolkien’s work,
and sees Tolkien creating the Rohirrim to exemplify the best of Anglo-
Saxon traditions.
“When Harry Met Faërie: Rowling’s Hogwarts, Tolkien’s Fairy Sto-
ries, and the Question of Readership” by Amy H. Sturgis (Hog’s Head
Conversations: Essays on Harry Potter, edited by Travis Prinzi [Allentown,
PA: Zossima Press, 2009]: 81-101) is a revision of Sturgis’s 2004 article
“Harry Potter Is a Hobbit: Rowling, Tolkien, and the Question of Read-
ership” (in CSL 35 no. 3), with less than ten percent changed to in-
clude references to the final volume in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter se-
ries. Citing “On Fairy-stories,” Sturgis tries to defend Rowling’s books
from charges that they are too intense for children and too childish
for adults.
Alex Lewis does not identify “The Ogre in the Dungeon” (Mal-
lorn 47: 15-18), but presumably his title refers to Andrew Lang: Lewis’s
main point is that Tolkien is less enthusiastic about Lang in the ver-
sions of “On Fairy-stories” published in Essays Presented to Charles Wil-
liams and Tree and Leaf than he had been in his Andrew Lang lecture.
In this change of heart, Lewis suspects the influence of the Inklings.
He also cites two works that don’t exist.

Tolkien’s Literary Theory and Practice [MTD]

Building on ideas initially developed in her book Splintered Light,
Verlyn Flieger contemplates “The Music and the Task: Fate and Free
Will in Middle-earth” (Tolkien Studies 6: 151-81). This is a close examina-
tion, including careful attention to the etymology of the verbs “must”
and “will,” of the ramifications of the apparent statement in the “Ai-
nulindalë” that Men possess free will but Elves do not. Flieger analyzes
several situations in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings where self-

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determination and circumstances interact. This includes the meeting

of Beren and Lúthien, but not the “choice(s) of Lúthien” to renounce
her immortality (Lost Road 304; RK, VI, vi, 252). Also missing is Gal-
adriel’s statement when rejecting the Ring, “I pass the test” (FR, II, vii,
381), which makes little sense if Eru took the test in her place, and no
sense if Galadriel interprets the Elvish philosophical commentary in
Tolkien’s “Fate and Free Will” notes (discussed earlier in this survey)
in the same way that Flieger does.
Franco Manni also considers questions of Elvish free will in “Real
and Imaginary History in The Lord of the Rings” (Mallorn 47: 28-37).
Noting how the three-age chronology of Middle-earth shows little of
the technological or social changes found in genuine history, Manni
proposes that Tolkien meant for it to be “a metaphor for the life of the
individual,” in which the longeval elves mature morally (36). Manni’s
insightful article is underdeveloped and misses the point of The Hobbit
by describing Bilbo as “essentially unchanged” (36) at the book’s end.
In “Clinamen, Tessera, and the Anxiety of Influence: Swerving
from and Completing George MacDonald” (Tolkien Studies 6: 127-50),
Josh Long finds that Smith of Wootton Major shows Tolkien responding
to MacDonald’s “The Golden Key” as what Harold Bloom would call a
“strong poet,” misconstruing his predecessor’s work so as to deny influ-
ence and emphasize his own originality. The situation is more complex
than Long indicates: the tall, awe-inspiring Queen of Faery may be
Tolkien’s correction of MacDonald’s tiny, amusing fairies, but she is
also a successor to Galadriel.
Matthew R. Bardowell explores “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creative Ethic and
Its Finnish Analogues” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20 no. 1: 91-
108), deliberately ignoring similarities in plot or character to focus on
philosophies Tolkien’s work shares with the Kalevala. The song contest
between Väinämöinen and Joukahainen extols harmony, ancientness,
and remembrance, values that Tolkien honors in the “Ainulindalë,” in
Tom Bombadil and Treebeard, in his concept of subcreation, and in
his ideas about influence.
In “The Eucharistic Poetics of The Hobbit” (Hither Shore 5: 9-29),
Fanfan Chen opaquely applies the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s
concept of religious “saturated phenomena” (objects or events that
overwhelm the senses and intellect) to Tolkien’s use of symbols and
language, particularly earth and labyrinth imagery. Somehow she finds
that his trolls and goblins “speak for Nature” (20).
Observing “Certain Regressive Tendencies in Rowling and Tolkien:
Fantasy and Realism” (Marvellous Fantasy, edited by Jørgen Riber Chris-
tensen [Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg University Press, 2009]: 45-59),
Jørgen Riber Christensen claims that the arguably backward-­looking

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criticism of industrialism and modernity in The Lord of the Rings, with

roots in Thomas Carlyle’s Signs of the Times (1829) and earlier, none-
theless serves the aesthetics of realism because Frodo “faces situations
that are the consequences of modernity” (56).
The chapter on Tolkien (61-103; notes at 195-98) in William Gray’s
Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien,
MacDonald and Hoffmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) dis-
cusses many of Tolkien’s works including The Hobbit, whose narrative
technique is compared unfavorably to that in George MacDonald’s
works; The Notion Club Papers, which Gray finds “arguably more promis-
ing” than C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (79); and Smith of Wootton
Major (like Josh Long, Gray discusses Tolkien’s later dislike of Mac-
Donald). Gray is also interested in the ways by which Tolkien suggests
depth in The Lord of the Rings and in the legendarium’s uncertain con-
nection to real landscape and history. The central place in Tolkien’s
stories of imagination and of love, broadly defined to include love of
the natural world, helps to explain his appeal to environmentalists.
David Henige regularly refers to Tolkien in “Authorship Re-
nounced: The ‘Found’ Source in the Historical Record” (Journal of
Scholarly Publishing 41 no. 1: 31-55), a study of books whose authors
pass themselves off as discoverers, editors, or translators. Over time it
may become impossible to tell fact from caprice or fraud, as happened
with the Trojan histories once attributed to Dictys Cretensis and Dares
Phrygius and the lost or non-existent British book which Geoffrey of
Monmouth claimed as a source for Historia Regum Britanniae. Henige
suggests The Lord of the Rings might someday be taken as genuine.
Worse things could happen.

Source and Comparative Studies [mtd]

The central claim of Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie in The Epic
Realm of Tolkien, Part One: Beren and Lúthien (Moreton-in-Marsh, U.K.:
ADC Publications, 2009) is that Tolkien intended The Book of Lost Tales
to be understood as Geoffrey’s mysterious source-book on King Ar-
thur (even though Eriol’s or Ælfwine’s compendium would have been
an Anglo-Saxon work). They believe that as Tolkien’s mythology de-
veloped its own character, he split the Arthurian material off into his
poem, “The Fall of Arthur,” still unpublished, although he continued
to incorporate motifs from the Matter of Britain into later “Silmaril-
lion” iterations. Here Lewis and Currie trace seeming Arthurian con-
nections only in the story of Beren and Lúthien, as it developed in
“The Tale of Tinúviel,” The Lay of Leithian, and the “Quenta Silmaril-
lion” traditions. Studies of Tolkien’s other stories are promised. Lewis

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and Currie justify this investigation in part by citing the “Scull/Ham-

mond Reader’s Guide, s.v. The Fall of Arthur” in support of the asser-
tion that Tolkien’s Arthurian poem is 9,000 lines long, more than twice
as large as “The Lay of Leithian,” otherwise Tolkien’s longest poem,
and therefore more important to him than the “Silmarillion” (3, 122).
On the contrary, Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond, in their entry
on “Arthur and the Matter of Britain” in the Reader’s Guide volume of
The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, report that the Arthur poem
has 954 lines (56). The Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen and Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s German poem Parzival are Lewis and Currie’s most
frequently cited texts among more than two dozen Arthurian works.
Having emphasized Tolkien’s fondness for crossword puzzles (100),
Lewis and Currie take Tolkien to have adapted his supposed sources in
exceedingly complicated ways, with apparent discrepancies explained
away as Tolkien either deliberately subverting his model or switching
between different Arthurian inspirations. For instance, having deter-
mined to their satisfaction that Beren’s name links him to the one-
handed knight Bedwyr (Bedivere) in Culhwch and Olwen, the authors
argue that Beren’s maiming by the wolf Karkaras derives not from the
Fenris-wolf biting Tyr’s hand in Norse legend, as Tom Shippey has sug-
gested, but from Arthur’s method (in a late romance) of dazzling wild-
cats with his shield, which technique they feel Beren is misapplying
when he thrusts the silmaril toward the wolf (78-80). At other times,
Lewis and Currie find Beren’s characteristics to derive from Culhwch,
Percival, the Fisher King, or the Irish hero Cú Chulainn. That Lewis
and Currie offer so many analogues make their conclusions seem less
not more likely: Arthuriana is so vast and varied that similarities can
be found to almost any other text. Most of Lewis and Currie’s more
convincing suggestions have previously been discussed by others in-
cluding Verlyn Flieger and Dimitra Fimi. Two non-Arthurian sources
are also considered: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for the story
of Ælfwine (and “Leaf by Niggle”)—curiously, Tolkien is quoted but
Coleridge only paraphrased—and the modern dance pioneer Loie
Fuller (1862–1928) for Lúthien’s terpsichorean accomplishments.
Inspired in part by Lewis and Currie’s 2005 book, The Forsaken
Realm of Tolkien, Guglielmo Spirito seeks “The Legends of the Trojan
War in J.R.R. Tolkien” (Hither Shore 6: 182-200). Spirito finds Faramir
somewhat like Hector and thinks Tolkien took Idril’s epithet “silver-
footed” from Thetis (195). If so, what connection did Tolkien intend
between the mother of the besieging Achilles and the daughter of the
besieged Turgon?
Maggie Burns explains that “The Desire of a Tale-teller” (Mallorn
48: 19-25) to write of “history, true or feigned” (FR, Foreword, 6-7)

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might have been quickened by two boys’ adventure books that Tolk-
ien donated to King Edward’s School Library in 1911: Herbert Hay-
ens’s Scouting for Buller, set in the Boer War (Burns also describes some
other Boer War narratives Tolkien might have known), and Alexander
Macdonald’s The Lost Explorers, about an Australian mining expedition.
Both works have some elements prefiguring Tolkien’s stories (particu-
larly The Hobbit). Tolkien had earlier given the library a pair of works
by G.K. Chesterton.
Dale Nelson claims that “Tolkien’s Further Indebtedness to Hag-
gard” (Mallorn 47: 38-40) extends to the influence of Montezuma’s
Daughter and Heart of the World. The first work’s hero escapes in a bar-
rel, and the story climaxes on a volcano’s rim where the villain fights
an invisible foe. The second work includes a wandering royal heir, a
green stone, a dream prophecy, a broken heirloom, a gleaming white
but dilapidated capital city, and assassins at an inn.
Ian Nichols offers “A Comparison of the Ideology of Robert E.
Howard’s Conan Tales and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (The
Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies 4 no. 1: 35-78) but
stumbles too often with Tolkien. Tolkien’s views on race are faulted
because his virtuous Elves “are usually portrayed as blond and fair”
and his evil Nazgûl “are black” (48). Here Nichols sees the influence
of Tolkien’s early years in southern Africa but doesn’t cite Tolkien’s
comments on the subject of apartheid (Letters 73, MC 238). Tolkien’s
attitude toward women supposedly is shown in Galadriel’s failure to
“venture out to fight the evil of Sauron” (41), but in fact Galadriel
“threw down” and “laid bare” the battlements and dungeons of Sau-
ron’s fortress Dol Guldur (RK, Appendix B, 375). Nichols concludes
that Tolkien values stable civilization while Howard prefers dynamic
individualism; both are Romantic, but in different ways.
Flora Liénard pits “Charles Williams’ City Against J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Green World” (Charles Williams and His Contemporaries, edited by Su-
zanne Bray and Richard Sturch [Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cam-
bridge Scholars, 2009]: 69-83) and forgets Gondolin and Minas Tirith
in her argument that cities suggest only corruption for Tolkien while
they mean sacred history, ritual, and order for Williams. She also feels
that Frodo and Sam’s relationship demonstrates Williams’s concept of
substituted love.
As George Watson’s title suggests, “The High Road to Narnia” (The
American Scholar 78 no. 1: 89-95) is only tangentially about Tolkien,
whose opinions Watson sometimes lumps together with those of C.S.
Lewis. Watson suggests but does not pursue a comparison of Tolkien
and Lewis to other English writers born overseas like George Bernard
Shaw and Joseph Conrad. Was it from Lewis, whom Watson knew, that

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he heard of Tolkien supposedly exclaiming, “They love me in Hous-

ton, Texas” (89), a quotation, otherwise unattested, for which Watson
gives no source?
In “The Realm of Faërie, and the Shadow of Homer in Narnia and
Middle-earth” (Mallorn 47: 25-28), Louis Markos finds The Lord of the
Rings is like the Iliad in its suggestions of a world and history outside
the story and in its emphasis on genealogy. By contrast, C.S. Lewis’s
Narnia stories, less realistic and with the supernatural more immedi-
ately present, are more akin to the Odyssey.
Stefan Ekman sees “Echoes of Pearl in Arda’s Landscape” (Tolkien
Studies 6: 59-70), particularly in the descriptions and dream-visions of
Murmuran (later called Lórien) in Aman and the forest of Lothlórien
in Middle-earth. Like Judith Klinger in “Hidden Paths of Time: March
13th and the Riddle of Shelob’s Lair” (in the 2006 collection, Tolkien
and Modernity), Ekman proposes that an apparent error in the chronol-
ogy of The Lord of the Rings, in this case the date of the Fellowship’s de-
parture from Lothlórien, actually shows Tolkien deliberately stretch-
ing time. Ekman also discusses Tolkien’s poem “The Nameless Land.”
“‘There and Back Again’: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Literature of the Me-
dieval Quest” by Phil Purser (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teach-
ing 16 no. 2: 31-42) attempts to show that The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings exemplify quest themes of physical and metaphorical journey-
ing, the importance of the supernatural, and the transformation of the
hero, and thus are useful tools for teaching medieval studies. Aragorn
is compared to William the Conqueror and Beowulf, while Legolas
and Gimli are likened to Beorhtnoth’s retainers. Purser is prone to
geographic mistakes, and repeatedly confuses the Lonely Mountain
with the Misty Mountains.
Annie Kinniburgh examines “The Noldor and the Tuatha Dé Dan-
aan: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Irish Influences” (Mythlore 28 no. 1/2: 27-44), not-
ing Tolkien’s reference to that mythical Irish people in The Lost Road.
She relates their time in Ireland to that of the Noldor in Beleriand,
finds their king Nuada to be like Tolkien’s Maedhros in relinquishing
his rule after losing his hand, suggests that Balor of the Evil Eye influ-
enced Sauron, and identifies shared motifs like oath-breaking, mortals
succeeding immortals, and an overseas paradise. Oddly, Kinniburgh
dates the Christianizing of Ireland to 600 years after St. Patrick (31).
“Imram: Tolkien and Saint Brendan” by Marion Kippers (Lembas-
extra 2009: 32-47) summarizes the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
and related texts about the sea-voyaging saint in relation to Tolkien’s
poems “The Nameless Land” and “Imram” and his unfinished novel
The Lost Road. Comments on Tolkien’s “Fastitocalon” may seem out
of place, since, as Kippers knows, Tolkien took the name from an Old

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English text (Letters 343), but she sees Tolkien’s Brendan as a kind of
successor to Ælfwine and Eriol.
Kristine Larsen, in Mallorn 48 (29-32), asks of “The Stone of Erech
and the Black Stone of the Ka’aba: Meteorite or ‘Meteor-Wrong’?”
Both Tolkien’s great rock in Gondor and the relic in Mecca have con-
flicting origin stories, being said either to have fallen from the sky or
to have been relocated from a lost earthly paradise.
Zak Cramer notes that Tolkien could have found the idea of “Drag-
on Meat for Dinner” (Mallorn 47: 50), described as traditional in Farmer
Giles of Ham, in the Talmudic Bava Batra, where it is said that the right­
eous will eat the flesh of the distaff Leviathan in the World to Come.
Paul H. Vigor presents a plan and apologia for geographical source
study in “Questing for ‘Tygers’: A Historical Archaeological Landscape
Investigation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Real Middle-earth” (Mallorn 48: 33-37)
but only hints at the results of his early research. Like Lewis and Cur-
rie, Vigor sees Tolkien’s work as a great puzzle, one which he believes
will be solved by investigating walking trips that Tolkien might have
taken in the English countryside. Tolkien’s Two Towers, Vigor suggests,
derive from an unidentified Catholic church converted to Anglican
use by Henry VIII, who therefore inspired the Witch-king (36).
Lynn Whitaker analyzes “Frodo as the Scapegoat Child of Middle-
earth” (Mallorn 48: 25-29) with a comparison to Ursula K. Le Guin’s
story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973). She wonders
if Frodo’s increasingly infantilized status and terrible suffering are
meant to counter any hint of self-aggrandizement in his volunteering
for the Ring quest.

Religious and Devotional [DSB]

In “‘A Far Green Country’: Tolkien, Paradise, and the End of All
Things in Medieval Literature” (Mythlore 27 no. 3/4: 83-102), A. Keith
Kelly and Michael Livingston consider the role of the titular land, of
which Frodo first dreams and then to which he travels at the end of The
Lord of the Rings, in Tolkien’s cosmology. Its popular image in readers’
minds (of whom the authors take Peter Jackson as an exemplar) is as
an immortal Heaven, but that is the mistake Ar-Pharazôn made when
he tried to invade it. Instead, it is an Earthly Paradise, in Dante’s terms,
or an “asterisk-Eden,” in Tolkien’s (96), a kind of Purgatory where the
aim is more healing and recovery than the purgation of sin. Frodo will
die there, but by laying down his life with his own consent, a process
Kelly and Livingston distinguish from suicide by comparing it with the
heavenly taking up of Enoch and Elijah in the Bible. (They could as
well have mentioned the voluntary deaths of Aragorn and the earlier

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kings of Númenor.) The authors also discuss the Earthly Paradise in

medieval works: besides Dante’s Purgatorio, it appears in Pearl and Sir
Orfeo, two English poems to which Tolkien devoted much attention;
and it also appears in “Leaf by Niggle,” where Niggle’s Parish is a de-
lightful land but a second stage of purgation and not the final destina-
tion of men. That destination is the true Paradise of whose nature both
Christian theology and Tolkien’s mythology tend to be silent. Kelly and
Livingston also contrast the Earthly Paradise with the Refrigerium as
presented in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.
In “Personal and Communal Hope in Flannery O’Connor and
J.R.R. Tolkien,” by Ralph C. Wood (Cynicism and Hope: Reclaiming Dis-
cipleship in a Postdemocratic Society, edited by Meg E. Cox [Eugene, OR:
Cascade Books, 2009]: 87-99), Tolkien is the author who demonstrates
communal hope. The mutual friendship and selfless sacrifice for oth-
ers shown by the characters in The Lord of the Rings demonstrate Chris-
tian values and will somehow save the world from the collapse of de-
mocracy.
For Michael C. Morris, in “Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts and
Animals: A Review of the Treatment of Nonhuman Animals and Oth-
er Sentient Beings in Christian-Based Fantasy Fiction” (Society and
Animals 17 no. 4: 343-56), Tolkien is a foil for the disesteemed J.K.
Rowling. Tolkien’s favored characters treat animals well (though the
only example Morris gives of a well-treated animal is Bill the pony);
the Elves, the Ents, Tom Bombadil, and Beorn are vegetarians and
even sometimes vegans (though Hobbits and Men are not); and plant
rather than animal products are exploited for human use. Rowling, in
Morris’s telling, gives pretty much the exact opposite, and Lewis’s Nar-
nia is placed in between them. Tolkien’s hierarchy of being, though it
may be objectionable to secularists, is in keeping with the concept of
responsible stewardship held by Christian animal liberationists.
Jason Lief, in “Challenging the Objectivist Paradigm: Teaching
Biblical Theology with J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Guillermo del
Toro” (Teaching Theology and Religion 12 no. 4: 321-32), employs “On
Fairy-stories,” along with Joseph Campbell, to present the thesis that
myth is important and not antithetical to history, in the service of his
proposal to “re-mythologize” the Bible for students. He also compares
the “Ainulindalë” with Aslan singing Narnia into existence in Lewis’s
The Magician’s Nephew.
“Middle-earth Language Training, or, Middle-earth as a Body of
Language” by Frits Burger (Lembas-extra 2009: 21-29) is a devotional
text treating language as an icon for worship. It presents the plot of
The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for freeing one’s mind from an aca-
demic model of language as a dead subject of study and moving into

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some vaguely-defined living emotional feeling form of understanding.

This is a strange argument to make in the name of Tolkien, who more
than other scholars demonstrated that rigorous scholarly analysis and
warm literary appreciation need not be antithetical. Burger muddies
his thesis by further allegorizing the novel’s plot as a human body,
starting with the Shire as a head (like a head, everything in the Shire
is round), and becoming increasingly ludicrous as he descends to the
nether regions.

Language, Philology, and Tolkien’s Sub-Creation [DSB]

In The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-earth’s Magical Style (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Steve Walker is not out to provide a techni-
cal analysis of the qualities or even the virtues of the language of The
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (the only Tolkien books he covers),
though he does allude to several critics, including Brian Rosebury,
Michael D.C. Drout, and Ursula K. Le Guin, who have. Instead, this
volume is a kind of paean to the enchantment of reading these books.
Walker’s principal argument is that the hidden depths in Tolkien’s
naïve “unobtrusive” prose, his realism of presentation, and his use of
stale metaphors as if they were concrete and living, delight readers
who have surrendered to his compelling narrative, but merely alienate
those who have not. By thus deferring to variable personal reaction,
Walker sidesteps the question of whether the prose displays actual lit-
erary quality. He relies on the testimony of personal enthusiasm and
of personal revulsion alike to demonstrate this thesis, and quotes reac-
tions of many readers professional and amateur, sometimes repeating
himself (e.g. 14, 111). His own tone is one of relentless enthusiasm:
gushery over “Tolkien’s wizardry with words” (47) is typical. A state-
ment in the first line of the first chapter that Middle-earth is “incredi-
bly credible” (7) brings the quality of Walker’s own prose, and perhaps
his awareness of what words he is using, into question. Walker notes
the criticism that “Tolkien asserts rather than demonstrates” (9), and
follows this precept himself: statements like “in the writings of Middle-
earth, simple repetition seems paradoxically to establish distinction”
(80) raise without actually addressing the question, how does it do
this? Walker’s arguments do not attempt to rebut the cynical, and he
avoids discussion of the moral or aesthetic implications of stylistic is-
sues. Discussions of literary allusions and syllabic stress are lightly han-
dled, assuming a prior knowledge of the text referents, in contrast to
the detailed studies by Drout and Le Guin. Treatments of other stylistic
topics more original to Walker, such as “emblems” (physical manifesta-
tions of narrative situations) (134) or unversed poetry (140-42) could

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have been longer and more detailed. Walker conflates the romantic
with the sexual, and treats Tolkien’s intended puns and etymological
references interchangeably with those existing only in the mind of the
reader.
The Hobbitonian Anthology: of Articles about J.R.R. Tolkien and his Leg-
endarium by Mark T. Hooker ([U.S.]: Llyfrawr, 2009), a print-on-de-
mand book that appears to have been revised several times since first
publication, is of the same kind as Hooker’s previous book of 2006
from the same publisher, A Tolkienian Mathomium. It is a collection of
brief articles, some of them previously published (mostly in the fanzine
Beyond Bree), mostly on Tolkienian onomastics, both in the original and
in translation. More than the previous book, this one is focused pri-
marily on The Hobbit. The section on names, mostly hobbit personal
and place names, is filled with close and tenuous primary-world and
literary references, mostly ones which could have been known by Tolk-
ien, though whether they actually were or not, and if so whether they
bear any significance to his choice of the name, is left an open ques-
tion. Hooker’s report of a well-known Oxford bakery of Tolkien’s ear-
lier years called Boffin’s is a typically ambiguous discovery: there is no
way to tell whether the hobbit surname came from here or not. A sec-
tion of miscellany treats other words in the same manner, including an
article on translators’ treatment of formal and informal second person
address, without discussing whether thee or thou occur in the original of
The Hobbit (in fact, they do not). A section on translations of The Hobbit
and “Leaf by Niggle,” mostly Eastern European, is largely an exercise
in seeing what connotations the target languages’ names conjure up in
readers’ minds, or at least in Hooker’s mind.
The kind of detailed consideration of prose suggested by Walker is
demonstrated by Robin Anne Reid in “Mythology and History: A Stylis-
tic Analysis of The Lord of the Rings” (Style 43 no. 4: 517-38). Reid takes
three evocative passages from the book and analyzes them at the level
of individual clauses, toting up what are called in functional grammar
their themes and processes, which basically means their significant
nouns and verbs. The lack of any control samples makes it difficult to
determine from this article what Reid’s findings prove about Tolkien’s
prose style. But it is clear that his writing is complex and subtle, that he
characteristically links together clauses with grammatical parallelism,
and that he inverts word order from customary phrasing to open up
narrative perspective and to evoke spiritual understanding.
“Intertextual Patterns in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of
the Rings” by Thomas Kullmann (Nordic Journal of English Studies 8 no. 2:
37-56) operates on a more general level. Kullmann’s thesis is that the
stylistic registers of the two novels are highly distinct from each other.

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The Hobbit, Kullmann says, is full of references to pre-texts, by which is

meant that passages frequently remind the reader—or at least they re-
mind Kullmann—of various other works. The ones he itemizes form a
variety, but they’re mostly Victorian children’s books. By contrast, The
Lord of the Rings does not do that. Instead of referencing specific works,
it mirrors a variety of literary styles, especially in dialogue. These range
from the colloquial regionalist (Sam) to the rhetorical epic (Elrond
and Aragorn). The realism of presentation of the narrative descrip-
tion serves to invite readers to identify their real experiences with a
non-realistic story. Kullmann concludes by urging fans of The Lord of the
Rings not to undervalue The Hobbit for its more ironic, parodic mode.
John D. Rateliff in “‘A Kind of Elvish Craft’: Tolkien as Literary
Craftsman” (Tolkien Studies 6: 1-21) describes Tolkien’s creativity in
terms of the smallest level of prose, individual words. His thesis is that
“God is in the details” and that, while part of what makes Tolkien’s
fiction compelling is the loose description that leaves much up to the
reader’s imagination, the choice of telling detail is also part of his cre-
ative genius. Rateliff has a mixed opinion on whether to follow Ralph
Waldo Emerson in holding that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds,” as he maintains that it ultimately doesn’t matter that
Tolkien failed to keep the Moon phase (in the shooting of Smaug in
The Hobbit) consistent with the calendar, yet he also admires Tolkien’s
strenuous efforts to attempt to do it. The sight of Tolkien thus muck-
ing up his own vivid initial description in a failed effort at consistency
does not add force to Rateliff’s criticism of the editors of the 50th an-
niversary edition of The Lord of the Rings for textual changes made, as
Rateliff notes but not with sufficient force, by both the original initia-
tive and the specific authority of Christopher Tolkien. Others involved
were only trying to codify Christopher Tolkien’s research in The History
of The Lord of the Rings, and their error, if any, was in accepting his
judgment. Whatever the validity of Rateliff’s critique of this particular
point, his conclusion that we should never alter Tolkien’s words or
presume to second-guess his intent does not hold up against the com-
plexity of the textual history and the frequent ambiguity of determin-
ing what Tolkien’s intent was in the first place. Despite this problem,
Rateliff’s article is a sensitive and clearly-argued consideration of the
artistic quality of Tolkien’s prose.
Tom Shippey declares that his survey of “Tolkien’s Development as
a Writer of Alliterative Poetry in Modern English” (Lembas-extra 2009:
64-73), though actually rather detailed, is but a preliminary foray into
the neglected topic of the technique—the rhythm and meter—of Tolk-
ien’s works in this form. Shippey observes that grammatical changes in
word structure over the centuries have made adhering to the complex

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rules of Old English alliterative stress and meter more difficult in Mod-
ern English, and that, over his career, Tolkien “got markedly better at
it” (67). The Lay of the Children of Húrin is strained, The Homecoming of
Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son is more successful to the point that the in-
dividual styles of the two speakers are distinctive, and the laments and
battle-cries of the Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings are subtle and ap-
propriate in diction as well as metrically apt. Shippey is not prepared
to say whether the project to revive alliterative verse in Modern English
is capable of success or even if it is ultimately worthwhile, but he notes
that Tolkien certainly thought it so.
Jill Fitzgerald in “A ‘Clerkes Compleinte’: Tolkien and the Divi-
sion of Lit. and Lang.” (Tolkien Studies 6: 41-57) examines Tolkien’s
ambivalent attitude to this division in English studies. Although firmly
a practitioner of the linguistic and philological side of the field, he
believed or hoped that it could be reconciled with literary study. This
did not prevent him from acting as an advocate for philology, claim-
ing “Chaucer as a Philologist” in his essay of that title on dialectical
variation in The Reeve’s Tale, which Fitzgerald summarizes, and express-
ing his frustrations with English department infighting and university
bureaucracy in various writings, including his own poem “The Clerkes
Compleinte,” here reprinted but not extensively discussed.
“J.R.R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application”
by Stuart D. Lee (Tolkien Studies 6: 189-211) itemizes Tolkien’s unpub-
lished writings on this Old English poem. These basically consist of
several versions of 1920s lecture notes and translations of the poem,
scripts of various versions of a 1930s-40s radio talk, and a response, dat-
ed 1964-65, to Burton Raffel’s translation of this and other Old English
poems. During the 1930s Tolkien worked on an unpublished school
edition of The Wanderer. Using the ubi sunt lines at the end (notably
also quoted by Tolkien in his 1959 valedictory lecture), Lee demon-
strates that a kind of variorum edition by Tolkien could be assembled,
but he cautions that this would not be a scholarly text but an assem-
blage of Tolkien’s working notes. Tolkien’s scholarly concerns with The
Wanderer included the literary qualities of the narrative persona. (He
considered the title, invented by a 19th century scholar, to be mislead-
ing.) Lee concludes by noting echoes of The Wanderer in elegiac im-
agery in Tolkien’s own writing, tying this into Tolkien’s response to
Raffel. Tolkien took considerable offense at Raffel’s description of him
(Tolkien) as a “re-creator” of Anglo-Saxon culture, denying (as he cus-
tomarily did) any firm connection between the Anglo-Saxons and the
Rohirrim. To Raffel’s view of translation as free re-creation, Tolkien’s
vehement reply that this practice is “at best a foolish misuse of a talent
for personal poetic expression; at worst the unwarranted imprudence

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of a parasite” (quoted at 204 as part of a long, partially previously un-

published, paragraph) offers, though Lee does not specify this, some
hints of Tolkien’s view of “re-creative” dramatizations of his own work.
Ross Smith in “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Art of Translating English
into English” (English Today 25 no. 3: 3-11, 64) considers Tolkien’s
technique in translating Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
from earlier forms of English into Modern English (hence the title
of the article). As Tolkien’s Beowulf has not been published, except
for a few fragments, Smith’s primary source on it is Tolkien’s article
“On Translating Beowulf,” which lays out his criteria. Tolkien advocates
verse translations that balance adherence to the original meter with
phonetic and stylistic evocativeness. He advocates a certain degree of
archaism in translating Beowulf to reflect the fact that it was already a
historical story at the time of its composition, and he practices “a Malo-
reyesque register” in Sir Gawain to convey the chivalric style (8). Smith
compares and contrasts Tolkien’s translation practice with the more
“modern” approaches of Seamus Heaney in Beowulf and Simon Armit-
age in Sir Gawain. Lastly, Smith discusses Tolkien’s pose as a translator
of The Lord of the Rings, a conceit borrowed from medieval romances.
The expression of this in Appendix F is unnecessary for the story, and
was probably adopted to satisfy Tolkien’s own sense of historical apt-
ness. Smith notes that the pose is entirely artificial; that is, Tolkien
wrote the Modern English first and invented the “source” text after-
wards. It reaches its limit in the lack of etymology for the “original”
Westron; Smith does not note the similarity of this to its presumptive
ancestor within the sub-creation, Adûnaic.
After a lucid introduction to the external history of Quenya and an
explanation of the degree to which it exists as a real language, Chris-
topher Gilson in “Essence of Elvish: The Basic Vocabulary of Quenya”
(Tolkien Studies 6: 213-39) plunges into a description of the lexical cor-
pus from the perspective of its external history, of Tolkien creating it.
Using lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, together with English gloss-
es, Gilson ties together the early and later stages of Tolkien’s devel-
opment of Quenya, showing definitions being elaborated and words
shifting meaning over time, as nuances are clarified and other words
move into the same lexical space. He points out that Quenya words
often lack clear one-to-one matching with their English definitions, as
is equally true of word comparisons between primary world languages,
and he raises the question of to what degree vocabulary and syntacti-
cal patterns in one stage of Quenya may be carried over to another
where not specifically contradicted by Tolkien. Gilson’s own position
is clear: despite changes in its evolution, Quenya is the same language
throughout Tolkien’s career.

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The proceedings of the Second International Conference on

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Invented Languages, held at Antwerp in 2007, forms
issue 2 of Arda Philology, edited by Anders Stenström (Beregond) and
published by the Arda Society of Sweden. It includes five papers view-
ing Tolkien’s invented languages from a variety of perspectives. “Re-
construction and ‘Retro-construction’ in Tolkien’s Eldarin Languages”
by Benct Philip Jonsson (1-15) forms a pendant to Gilson’s article on
Quen­ya, by observing that while Quenya, which Gilson and Jonsson
agree was central in importance to Tolkien, remained relatively un-
changed over time, the proto-Eldarin language which, within the sub-
creation, is ancestral to Quenya was totally reconstructed between two
stages of work on it in the 1910s and 1930s, particularly in its phonol-
ogy. The proto-Eldarin was subsidiary to Quenya in Tolkien’s mind,
constructed backwards from it in accordance with philological princi-
ples. Jonsson attributes the changes to Tolkien’s reconstruction of the
Elvish language family tree and his increasing mastery of comparative
philology. Stenström’s “Phonotactic Preferences in the Root Reperto-
ries of Qenya Lexicon and The Etymologies” (98-113) takes an aesthetic
approach to the study of the proto-Eldarin language. Stenström argues
that, as the other Elvish tongues do, it has its own style in sounds and
in construction of words from phonemes. He conducts a combined
survey of the known vocabulary of both forms of the language to pres-
ent statistical charts of the prevailing patterns. “Practical Neo-Quenya:
Report on the Johannine Bible Translation Project” (16-55) is a de-
tailed account by Helge K. Fauskanger of a project to translate the
Book of Revelation and the Epistles of John into Quenya, consisting of
scrambling around the published Quenya vocabulary lists in search of
appropriate words and for solutions to grammatical problems. Some
gaps must be filled by neologisms; Fauskanger holds that, as Quenya
has no exterior existence outside of Tolkien’s head, anybody else’s
additions to it are as legitimate as Tolkien’s (16-17). “The Feanorian
Mode of The Etymologies and Its Relation to Other Systems for Writ-
ing Quenya” by Måns Björkman (80-97) is another technical article,
this one on the Tengwar alphabet. Björkman compares the letters and
mode presented in “Addenda and Corrigenda to The Etymologies,” pub-
lished in 2003-4, with Tolkien’s other tables of Tengwar usage, noting
differences in terminology, letters presented, and the representation
of vowels. A fifth paper, by Karolina Agata Kazimierczak, is considered
under Reception Studies, below.
“Tolkien of the Many Names” is John Garth’s guest editorial for
Mallorn 48 (4-7). Garth discusses the profusion of comic allusive
names, often in Latin, that Tolkien gave to himself and friends in writ-
ings of his King Edward’s School years, and briefly considers similar

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habits of pseudonymy of Tolkien’s characters and even Tolkien fans.

Garth notes that one of Tolkien’s early codenames was Lutro, Espe-
ranto for “otter,” speculates that Tolkien had Otr (Otter) of the Norse
sagas in mind, speculates further that the phonemic similarity of Otter
to Ohthere in Old English literature would have appealed to Tolkien,
and finally draws a connection to Ottor, an earlier name for Eriol in
The Book of Lost Tales, concluding that Eriol is therefore in part an au-
tobiographical figure, a form of creative inspiration not entirely un-
known to Tolkien.
Janet Brennan Croft discusses “Naming the Evil One: Onomastic
Strategies in Tolkien and Rowling” (Mythlore 28 no. 1/2: 149-63). She
notes a reluctance by other characters in The Lord of the Rings to call
Sauron by that name, apparently out of a semi-tangible fear that he
might overhear them if they did. This reluctance is displayed even by
some of his own servants. Croft is systematic enough to catalog the
varying preferences of different characters in this respect (as she like-
wise does for Rowling’s Voldemort, whose name is also shunned by
some). Whether Sauron actually is “his right name,” as Aragorn says,
or merely an Elvish epithet—as is Morgoth, who, once Fëanor gives him
that name, is never called anything else by an Elf—is not addressed.
Croft does recognize that The Eye for Sauron is a metonym and not a
physical description (154). Lastly among Tolkien’s megalomaniac vil-
lains, Saruman is too minor an Evil One to receive either an epithet or
name avoidance, and his self-applied titles don’t take.
“The Curious Case of Denethor and the Palantír” by Jessica Yates
(Mallorn 47: 18, 21-25), the only major non-linguistic sub-creational
study of the year, addresses the question of Sauron’s control over what
Denethor saw in his palantír and its role in feeding Denethor’s de-
spair. Yates argues that Sauron did not at first know that Frodo had
been captured, or he would have moved to secure the prisoner more
quickly. This, in turn, means that, if Denethor saw Frodo’s capture
in his palantír—a (probably mistaken) supposition first proposed by
Tom Shippey in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century as an explanation
for Denethor’s complete despair—therefore Denethor’s use of the
palantír would not have been entirely under Sauron’s control. But
Gandalf ran an enormous risk if he let Denethor know that Frodo was
the Ring-bearer, because Sauron then could have learned it via Dene-
thor’s palantír while monitoring Denethor’s use of it. Yates proposes
that a better solution would have been for Gandalf to lock Denethor’s
palantír up, and claims he shows “negligence” in failing to do so (23).
She also notes that the script to the Peter Jackson movie tries to avoid
this dilemma. Yates’s use of phrases like “logging in” to describe using
a palantír suggest that the entire discussion may be too mechanistic.

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There are two papers about Dwarves and music this year. “The
Song of Durin” by Ben Koolen (Lembas-extra 2009: 74-85) describes
the historical contexts of the song of that title in The Lord of the Rings
and, more briefly, of the Dwarven songs in The Hobbit. Little is said of
the songs’ literary character and even less of their verse-forms. More
robust in its consideration of detail, “The Dwarven Philharmonic Or-
chestra” by Heidi Steimel (Hither Shore 5: 135-41) is a light speculation
on the instruments said to be played by the Dwarves in chapter 1 of
The Hobbit. Steimel notes that related Dwarves play the same or related
instruments. She considers the instruments’ possible origin in Middle-
earth, how easily they could have been carried around, and what might
have become of them in the course of the story. She also speculates on
how the different instruments might have fit together musically.

Reception Studies [DSB]

“The Name of the Tree: Mythopoeia and The Garden of Proserpina”
by Renée Vink (Lembas-extra 2009: 6-20) is a straightforward source-
comparison study, noting commonalities between two works and spec-
ulating whether the later-written is a response to the earlier. The dif-
ference from the usual run of Tolkien source studies is that the work
being compared to Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia postdates it, though it
claims to predate it. The Garden of Proserpina appears in A.S. Byatt’s nov-
el Possession (1990), where it is attributed to a fictional character who
is a Victorian-era poet. Both works extol the sub-creative human imagi-
nation, and, strikingly, both address this abstract concept in verse. Spe-
cific points and imagery (notably that of a tree) are also common to
both authors. Vink traces the common references to Platonic ideas
from Plato forward through Vico and Barfield, and discusses Byatt’s
complex love-hate relationship with Tolkien as expressed, both explic-
itly and implicitly, in many of her works. She concludes that Byatt’s
knowledge of Tolkien is sufficiently extensive, and the matching of
imagery sufficiently close, that the homage in The Garden of Proserpina
is deliberate.
“Unfolding Tolkien’s Linguistic Symphony: Relations Between Mu-
sic and Language in the Narratives of J.R.R. Tolkien, and in Composi-
tions Inspired by Them” by Karolina Agata Kazimierczak (Arda Phi-
lology 2: 56-79) compares the artistic creativity expressed in Tolkien’s
invented languages to that of music, trying various ways to account
for or to cancel out the difference that languages have linguistic se-
mantic content and (non-vocal) music does not. Kazimierczak then
describes three Tolkien-inspired composers, Bertrand Guillerm, Adam
Klein, and David J. Finnamore, and their various projects for creating

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romantic, operatic, and pseudo-authentic musical works inspired by

Tolkien’s stories.
“The Not-Quite-Moving Pictures: The Comic Book Adaptation
of Tolkien’s The Hobbit” (Hither Shore 5: 186-96) is David Wenzel and
Charles Dixon’s The Hobbit (1989-90). Dirk Vanderbeke, author of this
article about it, compares the work with other comic book adaptations
of literary novels. He argues that Wenzel and Dixon rely too heavily
on long verbatim quotes from the book which are redundant to the
pictures they provide, instead of integrating words and pictures to
complement each other imaginatively. The imagery in the art draws
more from animated movies and other comic books than from the vi-
sual aspects of Tolkien’s own sources. This casually demotic treatment
of the visual clashes with the respectful literary treatment of the text.
In “Thrusts in the Dark: Slashers’ Queer Practices” (Extrapolation
50 no. 3: 463-83), Robin Anne Reid is primarily concerned with coun-
tering preconceived stereotypes of categories of fan fiction and of its
writers and readers. The Tolkien relevance of her article consists of the
citation and description of two Lord of the Rings-based fan fiction stories
which Reid considers literarily valuable on their own merits, and not
deserving of being pigeonholed as of interest only to the “abnormal
and perverse.” The stories depict bondage-domination sexual relation-
ships between Merry and Frodo, and Boromir and Faramir; both sto-
ries also explicitly depart from, rather than claiming to supplement or
complement, the events of Tolkien’s novel, becoming the equivalent
within Tolkien’s universe of “alternate history” stories.

Film Studies [DSB]

Despite its subtitle, The Lord of the Films: The Unofficial Guide to Tolk-
ien’s Middle-earth on the Big Screen by J.W. Braun (Toronto: ECW Press,
2009) is not about Tolkien. It’s a collection of entertaining trivia points
about the Jackson movies. A few items, some of dubious accuracy, do
relate to Tolkien writing the book or to backstory excluded from the
script; several more on adaptation issues convey a belief that the mov-
ies improved on Tolkien. The title of a section labeled “The Burden
Is Heavy: Tolkien wrote for one audience; the scriptwriters wrote for
four” (67-69) summarizes this perspective. The four audiences may be
summed as two, those who had read the book before (who are, in this
account, to be mollified with “little moments” and “inside jokes”) and
those who hadn’t (for whom the story must be made clear). But is not
Tolkien’s book also read both by those who have read it before and
those who have not?
Jane Chance writes “‘In the Company of Orcs’: Peter Jackson’s

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Queer Tolkien” (Queer Movie Medievalisms, edited by Kathleen Coyne

Kelly and Tison Pugh [Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009]: 79-96). The
title is a chapter title on the DVD of Jackson’s Return of the King, and
“queer” here, as for Robin Anne Reid above, means odd or unusual
rather than specifically homosexual, though in Chance the homo-
sexual implication is strongly taken as read. Chance’s subject is Jack-
son’s presentation of the masculinity of hobbits and orcs; Tolkien only
comes in to provide a desexualized heteronormative context, undercut
by a hidden sexuality which Chance cites Catharine Stimpson, Brenda
Partridge, and Esther Saxey to support. Chance implicitly criticizes
Jackson for infantilizing the hobbits by having them appear “barely
post-adolescent” instead of “middle-aged” as in Tolkien (83), although
Tolkien’s hobbits obviously age more slowly than humans: Pippin at 29
(not even “middle-aged” by human standards) has not yet come of age
at 33, for instance.
“Councils and Kings: Aragorn’s Journey Towards Kingship in J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings”
by Judy Ann Ford and Robin Anne Reid (Tolkien Studies 6: 71-90) is
three papers in one. The first is an analysis of Tolkien’s Aragorn as
expressing a Germanic sacral model of kingship. Aragorn becomes
king of Gondor not solely because of his ancestry, but also because his
leadership passes the test to show him worthy to embody the sacred
and semi-divine role of leader of the people. His ancestry is merely
what gives him the opportunity to show his quality. The second part
compares and contrasts Tolkien’s Aragorn, whose confidence in his
responsibility is tempered only by his need to demonstrate his capacity,
with Jackson’s reluctant aspirant, who fears that he is unworthy, and
who must address an anti-monarchial tendency in Gondor that does
not exist in the book. This section of the paper is particularly valuable.
As Tolkien had no need nor occasion to explain how his character
differs from Jackson’s, many casual commentators have inadvertently
read the Jackson character’s reluctance into the Tolkien character’s
challenge. Ford and Reid provide an inoculation against that error.
The final two pages of the article leave Aragorn to cite an elaborate
theoretical paradigm making the obvious point that movies don’t al-
ways adapt source books accurately, and that they may be judged in
other capacities. This argument is unnecessary to justify Ford and
Reid’s own reasonable decision to discuss differences between the two
without criticizing Jackson. So what is it doing there? Any implication
that success on some other level may excuse a movie—one which heav-
ily promotes itself as an adaptation, and is enthusiastically taken as
such by its fans—from negative evaluation in that capacity should be
deprecated.

139
140
 Bibliography (in English) for 2010
Compiled by Rebecca Epstein, with Michael D.C. Drout,
David Bratman, and Merlin DeTardo

Primary Sources
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Story of Kullervo” and Essays on Kalevala. Ed. Ver-
lyn Flieger, with introduction. Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 211-78.
Includes:
“The Story of Kullervo: (Kalervonpoika).” Tolkien Studies 7
(2010): 214-45.
“On The Kalevala or Land of Heroes.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010):
246-61.
“The Kalevala.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 262-78.
———. Quenya Phonology: Comparative Tables, Outline of Phonetic Develop-
ment, Outline of Phonology. Ed. Christopher Gilson. Mountain View,
CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 2010. Parma Eldalamberon 19.

Books
Dubs, Kathleen and Janka Kascáková, eds. Middle-earth and Beyond: Es-
says on the World of J.R.R. Tolkien. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2010.
Eden, Bradford Lee, ed. Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.
Giancola, Donato. Middle-earth: Visions of a Modern Myth. Nevada City,
CA: Underwood Books, 2010.
Karlson, Henry C. Anthony III. Thinking with the Inklings: A Contempla-
tive Engagement with the Oxford Fellowship. Silver Spring, MD: Cre-
ateSpace, 2010.
Kerry, Paul E., ed. The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Writings of
J.R.R. Tolkien. Lanham, MD: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group, Inc., 2011. [Published 2010.]
Pearce, Joseph and Robert Asch, eds. Tolkien and Lewis: Masters of Myth,
Tellers of Truth. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010. [Spe-
cial issue of St. Austin Review, January/February 2010.]
Robinson, Jeremy Mark. J.R.R. Tolkien: Pocket Guide. Maidstone, Kent:

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 Bibliography for 2010

Crescent Moon Publishing, 2010.

Sammons, Martha C. War of the Fantasy Worlds: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.
Tolkien on Art and Imagination. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010.
Steimel, Heidi and Friedhelm Schneidewind, eds. Music in Middle-
earth. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2010.

Articles and Book Chapters

Agøy, Nils Ivar. “The Christian Tolkien: A Response to Ronald Hut-
ton.” In Kerry, ed., 71-89.
Akers, Matthew P. “Distributism in the Shire.” In Pearce and Asch, eds.,
11-16.
Amendt-Raduege, Amy M. “Better Off Dead: The Lesson of the Ring-
wraiths.” Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 1 no.
1 (2010): 69-82.
———. “‘Worthy of a Song’: Memory, Mortality and Music.” In Eden,
ed., 114-25.
Artamonova, Maria. “Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the
Twentieth Century: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles.” In
David Clark and Nicholas Perkins, eds. Anglo-Saxon Culture and the
Modern Imagination. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 71-88.
Bainbridge, William Sims. “Lord of the Rings Online.” In William Sims
Bainbridge. Online Multiplayer Games. San Rafael, CA: Morgan &
Claypool Publishers, 2010. 18-20.
Biemer, Marie-Noëlle. “Disenchanted with Their Age: Keats’s, Mor-
ris’s, and Tolkien’s Great Escape.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 60-75.
Birks, Annie. “Romanticism, Symbolism and Onomastics in Tolkien’s
Legendarium.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 18-30.
Birzer, Bradley J. “The ‘Last Battle’ as a Johannine Ragnarök: Tolkien
and the Universal.” In Kerry, ed., 259-82.
Boffetti, Jason. “Catholic Scholar, Catholic Sub-Creator.” In Kerry, ed.,
193-204.
Bowman, Mary R. “Refining the Gold: Tolkien, The Battle of Maldon,
and the Northern Theory of Courage.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010):
91-115.
Brackmann, Rebecca. “‘Dwarves Are Not Heroes’: Antisemitism and
the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Writing.” Mythlore 28 nos. 3-4
(Spring-Summer 2010): 85-106.

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 Bibliography for 2010

Branchaw, Sherrylyn. “Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of

the Rings.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 137-46.
Bratman, David. “Liquid Tolkien: Music, Tolkien, Middle-earth, and
More Music.” In Eden, ed., 140-70.
———. “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2007.” Tolkien Studies 7
(2010): 347-78.
Bridgwater, Sue. “Staying Home and Travelling: Stasis Versus Move-
ment in Tolkien’s Mythos.” In Dubs and Kascáková, eds., 19-40.
Brljak, Vladimir. “The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist.” Tolk-
ien Studies 7 (2010): 1-34.
Bülles, Marcel. “Envisaging the Future.” Mallorn 50 (Autumn 2010):
4-6.
Burns, Maggie. “‘…A Local Habitation and a Name….’” Mallorn 50
(Autumn 2010): 26-31.
———. “‘An Unlettered Peasant Boy’ of ‘Sordid Character’: Shake-
speare, Suffield and Tolkien.” Mallorn 49 (Spring 2010): 17-23.
Burns, Marjorie. “Saintly and Distant Mothers.” In Kerry, ed., 246-58.
Campbell, Liam. “The Enigmatic Mr. Bombadil: Tom Bombadil’s Role
as Representation of Nature in The Lord of the Rings.” In Dubs and
Kascáková, eds., 41-66.
Campbell, Lori M. “One World to Rule Them All: The Un-Making and
Re-Making of the Symbolic Portal in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of
the Rings.” In Lori Campbell. Portals of Power: Magical Agency and
Transformation in Literary Fantasy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.
143-62.
Chisholm, Chad. “The Wizard and the Rhetor: Rhetoric and the Ethos
of Middle-earth in The Hobbit.” Mallorn 50 (Autumn 2010): 34-36.
Croft, Janet Brennan. “The Thread on Which Doom Hangs: Free
Will, Disobedience, and Eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.”
Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010): 131-50.
Cunningham, Michael. “An Impenetrable Darkness: An Examina-
tion of the Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on Black Metal Music.” In
Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 215-40.
De Rosario-Martínez, Helios. “Fairy and Elves in Tolkien and Tradi-
tional Literature.” Mythlore 28 nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2010): 65-
84.

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 Bibliography for 2010

Di Scala, Roberto. “‘Lit.’, ‘Lang.’, ‘Ling.’, and the Company They Keep:
The Case of The Lay of the Children of Húrin Seen from a Gricean
Perspective.” In Dubs and Kascáková, eds., 125-42.
Dubs, Kathleen. “‘No Laughing Matter.’” In Dubs and Kascáková, eds.,
105-24.
Eden, Bradford Lee. “Strains of Elvish Song and Voices: Victorian
Medievalism, Music, and Tolkien.” In Eden, ed., 85-101. [Also in
Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 149-65.]
Eilmann, Julian. “Sleeps a Song in Things Abounding: J.R.R. Tolkien
and the German Romantic Tradition.” In Steimel and Schneide-
wind, eds., 167-84. [Translated from German by Heidi Steimel.]
Evans, Deanna Delmar. “Tolkien’s Unfinished ‘Lay of Lúthien’ and the
Middle English Sir Orfeo.” In Eden, ed., 75-84.
Fisher, Jason. “Dwarves, Spiders, and Murky Woods: J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Wonderful Web of Words.” Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010):
5-15.
———. “Horns of Dawn: The Tradition of Alliterative Verse in Rohan.”
In Eden, ed., 7-25.
———. “Sourcing Tolkien’s ‘Circles of the World’: Speculations on the
Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa
Mundi.” In Dubs and Kascáková, eds., 1-18.
Fornet-Ponse, Thomas. “‘Strange and Free’—On Some Aspects of the
Nature of Elves and Men.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 67-89.
Fowkes, Katherine A. “The Lord of the Rings (2001-3): Tolkien’s Trilogy
or Jackson’s Thrillogy?” In Katherine A. Fowkes. The Fantasy Film:
Wizards, Wishes, and Wonders. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 134-
44.
Garth, John. “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Fair-
ies.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 279-90.
Geier, Fabian. “Making Texts Audible: A Workshop Report on Setting
Tolkien to Music.” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 283-300.
[Translated from German by Heidi Steimel.]
Gray, Lauren. “From Innocent to Magician: The Heroic Journey of
Aragorn.” In Will Wright and Steven Kaplan, eds. The Image of the
Hero II. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of So-
cial Imagery, 2010. 134-38.

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 Bibliography for 2010

Hemmi, Yoko. “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of
­Native Language: Sindarin and British-Welsh.” Tolkien Studies 7
(2010): 147-74.
Holloway, Carson L. “Redeeming Sub-Creation.” In Kerry, ed., 177-92.
Holmes, John R. “‘Inside a Song’: Tolkien’s Phonaesthetics.” In Eden,
ed., 26-46.
———. “‘Like Heathen Kings’: Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien’s Fic-
tion.” In Kerry, ed., 119-44.
Honegger, Thomas. “Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and Consolidation in
Sir Orfeo: The Medieval Foundations of Tolkienian Fantasy.” Tolkien
Studies 7 (2010): 117-36.
———. “‘The Past Is Another Country’: Romanticism, Tolkien, and
the Middle Ages.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 48-58.
———. “Publishing about Tolkien: Polemic Musings about New De-
velopments by an Old Hand in the Business.” Hither Shore 7 (2010):
254-56.
Hutton, Ronald. “Can We Still Have a Pagan Tolkien?: A Reply to Nils
Ivar Agøy.” In Kerry, ed., 90-105.
———. “The Pagan Tolkien.” In Kerry, ed., 57-70. [Originally pub-
lished in Sarah Wells, ed. The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the
Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings (Coventry:
The Tolkien Society, 2008), vol. 2: 32-39.]
Jackson, Aaron Isaac. “Authoring the Century: J.R.R. Tolkien, the
Great War and Modernism.” English 59 no. 224 (2010): 44-69.
Jenike, Kinga. “Tom Bombadil—Man of Mystery.” In Dubs and Kas-
cáková, eds., 67-74.
Jensen, Keith W. “Dissonance in the Divine Theme: The Issue of Free
Will in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.” In Eden, ed., 102-13.
Joe, Jeongwon. “Introduction: Why Wagner and Cinema? Tolkien was
Wrong.” In Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman, eds. Wagner &
Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 1-26.
Jorgensen, Estelle R. “Music, Myth and Education: The Case of The
Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 44 no. 1
(Spring 2010): 44-57.
Kascáková, Janka. “‘It Snowed Food and Rained Drink’ in The Lord of
the Rings.” In Dubs and Kascáková, eds., 91-104.

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 Bibliography for 2010

Kerry, Paul E. “Introduction: A Historiography of Christian ­Approaches

to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In Kerry, ed., 17-56.
———. “Tracking Catholic Influence in The Lord of the Rings.” In Kerry,
ed., 234-45.
Kilby, Clyde S. “Woodland Prisoner.” Seven 27 (2010): 48-60. Ed. John
D. Rateliff, with introduction, 45-47.
Kisor, Yvette. “Totemic Reflexes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” Mythlore 28
nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2010): 129-40.
Larsen, Kristine. “‘Behold Your Music!’: The Themes of Ilúvatar, the
Song of Aslan, and the Real Music of the Spheres.” In Steimel and
Schneidewind, eds., 11-27.
———. “Myth, Milky Way, and the Mysteries of Tolkien’s Morwinyon,
Telumendil, and Anarríma.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 197-210.
———. “Silmaril or Simulacrum?: Simulations of the Heavens in Mid-
dle-earth.” Silver Leaves 3 (2009-2010): 18-23.
———. “The Words of Húrin and Morgoth: Microcosm, Macrocosm
and the Later Legendarium.” Mallorn 49 (Spring 2010): 27-30.
Lewis, C.S. “Language and Human Nature (Manuscript Fragment).”
Seven 27 (2010): 25-29.
Linden, Steven. “A Speculative History of the Music of Arda.” In
Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 75-90.
Madsen, Catherine. “Eru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The
Lord of the Rings.” In Kerry, ed., 152-69.
Maier, Norbert. “The Harp in Middle-earth.” In Steimel and Schneide-
wind, eds., 107-24. [Translated from German by Heidi Steimel.]
Makai, Péter Kristóf. “Faërian Cyberdrama: When Fantasy becomes
Virtual Reality.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 35-53.
Martin, Gregory. “Music, Myth and Literary Depth in the ‘Land ohne
Musik.’” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 127-48.
Mason, Sophia. “Inheriting the Legacy of Tolkien and Lewis: Paolini’s
Inheritance Cycle.” In Pearce and Asch, eds., 26-30.
McIntosh, Jonathan. “Ainulindalë: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Meta-
physics of the Music.” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 53-72.
Milburn, Michael. “Coleridge’s Definition of Imagination and Tolk-
ien’s Definition(s) of Faery.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 55-66.

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Mitchell, Jesse. “Master of Doom by Doom Mastered: Heroism, Fate

and Death in The Children of Húrin.” Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Win-
ter 2010): 87-114.
Mooney, Chris. “The Ring and the Cross: How J.R.R. Tolkien Became
a Christian Writer.” In Kerry, ed., 170-76.
Morgan, Alun. “The Lord of the Rings—A ‘Mythos’ Applicable in Unsus-
tainable Times?” Environmental Education Research 6 nos. 3-4 (2010):
383-99.
Morillo, Stephen. “The Entwives: Investigating the Spiritual Core of
The Lord of the Rings.” In Kerry, ed., 106-18.
Mouton, Marguerite. “Reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work in the Light of
Victor Hugo’s Notions of the Sublime and the Grotesque.” Hither
Shore 7 (2010): 162-71.
Naveh, Reuven. “Tonality, Atonality and the Ainulindalë.” In Steimel
and Schneidewind, eds., 29-51.
Nelson, Marie. “J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Leaf by Niggle’: An Allegory in Trans-
formation.” Mythlore 28 nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2010): 5-19.
Noad, Charles E. “The Tolkien Society: The Early Days.” Mallorn 50
(Autumn 2010): 15-24.
Owens, Gareth. “Two Cheers for Applicability.” Mallorn 49 (Spring
2010): 50.
Padley, Jonathan and Kenneth Padley. “‘From Mirrored Truth the
Likeness of the True’: J.R.R. Tolkien and Reflections of Jesus Christ
in Middle-earth.” English 59 no. 224 (2010): 70-92.
Parish, Catherine. “Refracted Light: The Possible Genesis of Bilbo
Baggins.” Quadrant 54 no. 12 (Dec. 2010): 59-62.
Pearce, Joseph. “The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding
of Community.” In Kerry, ed., 224-33.
Phillips-Zur-Linden, Vanessa. “Arwen and Edward: Redemption and
the Fairy Bride/Groom in the Literary Fairytale.” Mallorn 50 (Au-
tumn 2010): 37-41.
Pokrivcáková, Silvia and Anton Pokrivcák. “Grotesque Characters in
Tolkien’s Novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” In Dubs and
Kascáková, eds., 75-90.
Pueppke, Mike. “Lewis and Tolkien: Bridges Between Worlds.” Mallorn
49 (Spring 2010): 24-27.

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 Bibliography for 2010

Rateliff, John D. “How Do We Know What We Know?” Mallorn 49

(Spring 2010): 4-8.
Richards, Darielle. “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Fortunate Rhythm.” In Eden, ed.,
61-74.
Rimoli, Emanuele and Guglielmo Spirito. “Outer and Inner Land-
scapes in Tolkien: Between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dos-
toevskij.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 120-36.
Ruud, Jay. “The Voice of Saruman: Wizards and Rhetoric in The Two
Towers.” Mythlore 28 nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2010): 141-52.
Schneidewind, Friedhelm. “Embodying the Voices: Documentation of
a Failure.” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 303-08. [Translated
from German by Heidi Steimel.]
Schult, Stefanie. “Beauty, Perfection, Sublime Terror: Some Thoughts
on the Influence of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Sublime and Beautiful on Tolkien’s Creation of Middle-earth.” Hither
Shore 7 (2010): 152-61.
Segura, Eduardo. “‘Secondary Belief’: Tolkien and the Revision of Ro-
mantic Notion of Poetic Faith.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 138-50.
Sinex, Margaret. “‘Monsterized Saracens,’ Tolkien’s Haradrim, and
Other Medieval ‘Fantasy Products.’” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 175-
96.
Slack, Anna E. “Stars Above a Dark Tor: Tolkien and Romanticism.”
Hither Shore 7 (2010): 8-17.
Smith, Murray. “‘They Began to Hum Softly’: Some Soldiers’ Songs
of World Wars I and II and of Middle-earth Compared and Con-
trasted.” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 185-212.
Smith, Paul. “Microphones in Middle-earth: Music in the BBC Radio
Play.” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 241-54.
Sommer, Mira. “Elven Music in Our Times.” In Steimel and Schneide-
wind, eds., 255-82. [Translated from German by Marie-Noëlle
Biemer.]
Steimel, Heidi. “‘Bring Out the Instruments!’: Instrumental Music in
Middle-earth.” In Steimel and Schneidewind, eds., 91-105.
Sternberg, Martin G.E. “Tolkien, the Philistine, and the Politics of Cre-
ativity.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 188-203.
Stoddard, William H. “Simbelmynë: Mortality and Memory in Middle-

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earth.” Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010): 151-60.

Sturgis, Amy H. “‘Tolkien Is the Wind and the Way’: The Educational
Value of Tolkien-Inspired World Music.” In Eden, ed., 126-39.
Tally, Robert T. Jr. “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs: Simple Humanity
in Tolkien’s Inhuman Creatures.” Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter
2010): 17-28.
Tierney, Alan. “Balrogs: Being and Becoming.” Mallorn 49 (Spring
2010): 31-37.
Timmons, Daniel. “Heroes and Heroism in the Fiction of Tolkien and
the Old Norse World: An Interview with George Clark.” In Robin
Waugh, James Weldon, and George Clark, eds. The Hero Recovered:
Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark. Kalamazoo, MI:
Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. 233-41.
Tomko, Michael. “‘An Age Comes On’: J.R.R. Tolkien and the English
Catholic Sense of History.” In Kerry, ed., 205-23.
Treacy, Susan. “Musica Donum Dei: Sibelius, Tolkien, and the Kaleva-
la.” In Pearce and Asch, eds., 31-32.
Triebel, Doreen. “Celtic Influences and the Quest of National Iden-
tity.” Hither Shore 7 (2010): 76-92.
Vigor, Paul H. “Thror’s Map: Decoration or Examination?” Mallorn 50
(Autumn 2010): 50.
Waggaman, A. Craig. “On Hobbits and Hoplites: Dilemmas of Leader-
ship in Aeschylus’ The Suppliants and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings.” In Margaret S. Hrezo and John M. Parrish, eds. Damned If
You Do: Dilemmas of Action in Literature and Popular Culture. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 63-86.
Waito, David M. “The Shire Quest: The ‘Scouring of the Shire’ as the
Narrative and Thematic Focus of The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 28
nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2010): 155-76.
Waldstein, Michael. “Tolkien and St. Thomas on Beauty.” In Pearce
and Asch, eds., 4-10.
Whitaker, Lynn. “Corrupting Beauty: Rape Narrative in The Silmaril-
lion.” Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010): 51-68.
Whitt, Richard J. “Germanic Fate and Doom in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The
Silmarillion.” Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010): 115-29.
Wiker, Benjamin. “The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien.” In Benjamin

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Wiker, 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss
and One Imposter. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2010. 245-
66.
Wilkin, Peter. “Æfre me strongode longath: Songs of Exile in the Mor-
tal Realms.” In Eden, ed., 47-60.
Wood, Ralph C. “Confronting the World’s Weirdness: J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Children of Húrin.” In Kerry, ed., 145-51.
Young, Helen. “Diversity and Difference: Cosmopolitanism and The
Lord of the Rings.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21 no. 3 (2010):
351-65.

Selected Reviews
Bonagura, David C., Jr. Rev. of The Return of Christian Humanism: Ches-
terton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History, by Lee Oser. Modern
Age 52 no. 3 (Summer 2010): 233-36.
Brazier, Paul. Rev. of The Lord of the Rings: Scholarship in Honor of
Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull;
Shadows and Chivalry: Pain, Suffering, Evil and Goodness in the Works of
George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis, by Jeff McInnis; Inklings of Heaven:
C.S. Lewis and Eschatology, by Sean Connolly. The Heythrop Journal 51
no. 1 (January 2010): 161-64.
Brunner, Larry. Rev. of The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton,
Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History, by Lee Oser. Christianity and
Literature 59 no. 2 (Winter 2010): 365-68.
Crowe, Edith L. Rev. of Where the Shadows Lie: A Jungian Interpretation of
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, by Pia Skogemann. Mythlore 28 nos.
3-4 (Spring-Summer 2010): 179-83.
DeTardo, Merlin. Rev. of Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes
and Language, ed. Janet Brennan Croft. Mythprint 47 no. 4 (2010):
8-9.
Emerson, David. Rev. of Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien,
ed. Bradford Lee Eden. Mythprint 47 no. 8 (2010): 8.
Foster, Mike. Rev. of Letters from Father Christmas, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed.
Baillie Tolkien. Mallorn 49 (Spring 2010): 13-14.
Garth, John. Rev. of Tengwesta Qenderinwa and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets
Part 2, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Gilson. Tolkien Studies 7
(2010): 324-30.

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Hiley, Margaret. Rev. of Music in Middle-earth, ed. Heidi Steimel and

Friedhelm Schneidewind. Hither Shore 7 (2010): 246-51.
Honegger, Thomas. Rev. of Languages, Myths and History: An Introduc-
tion to the Linguistic and Literary Background of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction,
by Elizabeth Solopova. Hither Shore 7 (2010): 241-42.
Hooker, Mark T. Rev. of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to
Hobbits, by Dimitra Fimi. Mythprint 47 no. 9 (2010): 10-11.
Johannesson, Nils-Lennart. Rev. of Tolkien, Race and Cultural Histo-
ry: From Fairies to Hobbits, by Dimitra Fimi. English Today 26 no. 1
(2010): 60-61.
Kane, Douglas C. Rev. of Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s My-
thology, by Verlyn Flieger. Mythprint 47 no. 6 (2010): 10.
———. Rev. of Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, by
Verlyn Flieger. Mythprint 47 no. 9 (2010): 5-6.
———. Rev. of The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of The His-
tory of Middle-earth, by Elizabeth A. Whittingham. Mythprint 47 no.
3 (2010): 8-9.
Mitchell, Philip Irving. Rev. of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From
Fairies to Hobbits, by Dimitra Fimi. Christianity & Literature 59 no. 3
(2010): 563-65.
Moniz, Emily A. Rev. of Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien,
ed. Bradford Lee Eden. Mythlore 29 nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2010):
183-86.
Mouton, Marguerite. Rev. of Tolkien et ses légendes: Une expérience en fic-
tion, by Isabelle Pantin. Hither Shore 7 (2010): 239-41.
Pesch, Helmut W. Rev. of War of the Fantasy Worlds: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.
Tolkien on Art and Imagination, by Martha Sammons. Hither Shore 7
(2010): 251-53.
Rateliff, John D. Rev. of The Hobbitonian Anthology of Articles on J.R.R.
Tolkien and His Legendarium, by Mark T. Hooker. Tolkien Studies 7
(2010): 330-35.
———. Rev. of Tolkien’s View: Windows Into His World, by John S. Ryan.
Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 340-45.
Riggs, Don. Rev. of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, Vol. VI,
ed. Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D.C. Drout, and Verlyn Flieger.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21 no. 3 (2010): 472-75.

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 Bibliography for 2010

Sarrocco, Clara. Rev. of A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie,

by Verlyn Flieger. CSL 41 no. 5 (2010): 10-11.
———. Rev. of Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology, by
Verlyn Flieger. CSL 41 no. 5 (2010): 10-11.
———. Rev. of Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, by
Verlyn Flieger. CSL 41 no. 5 (2010): 10-11.
Senior, W.A. Rev. of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and The Oxford English
Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21 no. 3 (2010): 476-79.
Shippey, Tom. Rev. of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolk-
ien, ed. Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 291-324.
———. Rev. of The Epic Realm of Tolkien: Part One, Beren and Lúthien, by
Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie. Mallorn 49 (Spring 2010): 10-12.
Simpson, Jacqueline. Rev. of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From
Fairies to Hobbits, by Dimitra Fimi. Folklore 121 no. 1 (2010): 106-07.
Slocum, Robert B. Rev. of Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fan-
tasy of the Real, by Alison Milbank. Anglican Theological Review 92 no.
1 (Winter 2010): 230-32.
Söffner, Claudia. Rev. of Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of
Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffman, by William Gray.
Bookbird 48 no. 1 (2010): 70-71.
Smith, Arden R. Rev. of Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction
to the Linguistic and Literary Background of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction, by
Elizabeth Solopova. Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 335-39.
Turner, Allan. Rev. of Lembas Extra 2009: Tolkien in Poetry and Song, ed.
Cécile van Zon. Hither Shore 7 (2010): 238-39.
———. Rev. of The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-earth’s Magical Style, by
Steve Walker. Hither Shore 7 (2010): 242-44.
Wood, Naomi. Rev. of Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of
Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffman, by William Gray;
Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, George Mac-
Donald and R.L. Stevenson, by William Gray. Children’s Literature 38
(2010): 241-48.

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 Notes on Contributors
David Bratman reviews books on Tolkien for Mythprint, the monthly
bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, for which he served as editor from
1980-1995. He has edited The Masques of Amen House by Charles Wil-
liams, compiled the authorized bibliography of Ursula K. Le Guin,
and contributed articles on Tolkien to the journals Mallorn and Myth-
lore and the book Tolkien’s Legendarium (ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F.
Hostetter). His bio-bibliography of the Inklings is an appendix to Di-
ana Pavlac Glyer’s book The Company They Keep. He holds an MLS from
the University of Washington and has worked as a librarian at Stanford
University and elsewhere.

Merlin DeTardo is the general manager at Cleveland Play House.

He has contributed articles to the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship
and Critical Assessment and reviews to Mythprint, and is a regular partici-
pant in the Reading Room forum at TheOneRing.net.

Rebecca Epstein has worked on the Tolkien Studies annual bibliogra-

phies since 2004, with the scope of her efforts increasing each year.
She is a recent graduate of Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts.

Peter Grybauskas teaches English in Rome, where he also collabo-

rates with the Roman Association of Tolkien Studies (jrrtolkien.it). He
has contributed articles to Mythlore and a forthcoming Italian collec-
tion, C’era una volta...Lo Hobbit - Alle origini del Signore degli Anelli. He
has presented at the ICMS in Kalamazoo and the 7th Annual Tolkien
Conference at the University of Vermont. He holds an MA in Litera-
ture from the University of Maryland.

Gerard Hynes is a doctoral candidate in Trinity College, University

of Dublin. He is writing a dissertation on Tolkien’s treatment of the
physical world, with a focus on the intersection of Tolkien’s theolo-
gy and ecology. He has taught on the Tolkien course offered as part
of the Trinity College’s M Phil in Popular Literature and Children’s
Literature. He is coordinating an international Tolkien conference,
“Tolkien: The Forest and the City,” with Dr. Helen Conrad-O’Briain in
Trinity College in September 2012.

Douglas C. Kane is an attorney specializing in employment discrimi-

nation and harassment cases and other civil rights matters. He is also
a Middle-earth enthusiast who has loved the works of J.R.R. Tolkien for

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 Contributors

more than thirty years. He co-founded and runs the Tolkien Internet
discussion site thehalloffire.net. His first book, Arda Reconstructed: The
Creation of the Published Silmarillion, was published by Lehigh Univer-
sity Press in 2009, with a paperback edition released in 2011; it was
a Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies finalist
in 2010 and 2011. Doug Kane lives in Santa Cruz, California with his
partner, Beth Dyer, and two cats.

Amelia A. Rutledge is an associate professor of English at George

Mason University. Trained as a medievalist, her teaching interests in-
clude medieval literature (especially Arthurian legend), children’s
literature, science fiction, fantasy, and intellectual history. She has
published articles on Robin McKinley’s Deerskin, on the construction
of masculinities in the Arthurian novels of Jack Whyte and Bernard
Cornwell, and on configurations of nurture in Philip Pullman’s trilogy
His Dark Materials.

154