Tolkien and the modernists

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J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasy The Lord of the Rings , was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since been accepted into the literary canon, if not as a modernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in the First World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over and industrialised. His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.

Contents

Scholars have compared Tolkien to authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, writing that he fits into the romantic tradition of William Morris and W. B. Yeats; has some connection with the Celtic Revival and the Symbolist movement; can be likened to the romantic Little Englandism and anti-statism of George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton between the wars; and the disillusionment of Orwell, William Golding, and Kurt Vonnegut after the Second World War.

Tolkien's writing has some clearly modern features, especially the strong emphasis on intertextuality, like the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; but he differs from them in using the diverse materials not so as to present a fragmented collage, but to create a world of his own, providing a mythic prehistory, a mythology for England.

Context


J. R. R. Tolkien

The author of the bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings , [1] J. R. R. Tolkien, born in 1892, was orphaned as a boy, his father dying in South Africa and his mother in England a few years later. He was brought up by his guardian, the Catholic priest Father Francis Morgan, and educated at boys' grammar schools and then Exeter College, Oxford. He joined the British Army's Lancashire Fusiliers and saw the horror of trench warfare in the First World War. After the war he became a professor of English language at the University of Leeds, and then at the University of Oxford. He specialised in philology, especially Old English works such as Beowulf , taking little interest in English literature written after the Medieval period. He died in 1973. [2]

Literary rejection

Tolkien encountered sharp criticism for The Lord of the Rings from literary figures such as Edmund Wilson [3] and Edwin Muir. [4] The hostility continued for some years after his death with attacks from writers such as Michael Moorcock in his essay "Epic Pooh". [5] [6] In 2001, The New York Times reviewer Judith Shulevitz criticized his "pedantry", [7] while in the London Review of Books , Jenny Turner attacked it as a "cosy little universe" for "vulnerable people". [8] In 2002, the critic Richard Jenkyns in The New Republic criticized it for lacking psychological depth. [9]

Rehabilitation

A large part of Tolkien's output, worked on throughout his career, was his Legendarium, the complex and dark body of writings (navigable links in diagram) that underlies The Silmarillion. His work reflects the changing nature of the world in the 20th century. Tolkien's Legendarium.svg
A large part of Tolkien's output, worked on throughout his career, was his Legendarium, the complex and dark body of writings (navigable links in diagram) that underlies The Silmarillion . His work reflects the changing nature of the world in the 20th century.

21st century scholars, largely accepting Tolkien as modern, have offered a variety of estimations of his position in the literary canon, from recognising his realism in the face of the collective traumas of his time, [11] to noting his romanticism, [12] and describing the long-established elegiac tone of his writings, aligning Middle-earth with the modern world. [13]

Realism and hope

Theresa Nicolay showed in her 2014 book Tolkien and the Modernists [11] that Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy, like Modernism, was created as a reaction to two collective traumas of the 20th century, namely industrialisation and the mechanised mass killing of the First World War. These traumas left people with feelings of hopelessness and alienation, and a sense that good tradition was broken and that religion had failed. Tolkien differed from many modernists in having a strong Catholic faith, giving him hope. Nicolay described how this combination of realism and hope guided Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. [14]

The scholar of theology Ralph C. Wood, in his 2015 book Tolkien among the Moderns , [15] argued that Tolkien was neither escapist nor antiquarian, and had engaged with modern literary figures such as James Joyce and Iris Murdoch. His book was criticised for overlooking scholarship on Tolkien's engagement with modernism, such as the work of Verlyn Flieger, Dimitra Fimi, who examined his attitudes to race, [16] and the 2-volume collection Tolkien and Modernity edited by Thomas Honegger and Frank Weinreich in 2006. [17] [18] [19]

Romantic Little Englandism

In 2005, the Tolkien scholar Patchen Mortimer commented on the "contentious debate" about Tolkien, noting that his many readers found his books and "the attendant languages, histories, maps, artwork, and apocrypha" [20] a huge accomplishment, while his critics "dismiss[ed] his work as childish, irrelevant, and worse". [20] Mortimer observed in 2005 that admirers and critics had treated his work as "escapist and romantic", [20] nothing to do with the 20th century. Mortimer called this "an appalling oversight", writing that "Tolkien's project was as grand and avant-garde as those of Wagner or the Futurists, and his works are as suffused with the spirit of the age as any by Eliot, Joyce, or Hemingway". [20]

Tolkien's treatments of nature and of evil, and his vision of an empire in decline, have all been likened to the writing of George Orwell by different scholars. George Orwell press photo.jpg
Tolkien's treatments of nature and of evil, and his vision of an empire in decline, have all been likened to the writing of George Orwell by different scholars.

Anna Vaninskaya, in Blackwell's 2014 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien , looks at Tolkien's modernity in comparison to the literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. She notes that while Tolkien is popularly known as the author of two successful works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, most of his output, worked on throughout his writing career but unpublished in his lifetime, was his legendarium that lay behind The Silmarillion . She argues that the form and themes of Tolkien's early writings fit into the romantic tradition of writers like William Morris and W. B. Yeats, and have a looser connection with the Celtic Revival and with the Symbolist movement in art. In terms of politics, she compares Tolkien's mature writings with the romantic Little Englandism and anti-statism of 20th century writers like George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton. [12]

Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar and like him a philologist, writes that the Shire is certainly where Middle-earth comes nearest to the 20th century, and that the people who had commented that the chapter "The Scouring of the Shire" in The Lord of the Rings was about Tolkien's contemporary England were not wholly wrong. Shippey suggests however that rather than seeing the chapter as an allegory of postwar England, it could be taken as an account of "a society suffering not only from political misrule, but from a strange and generalized crisis of confidence." [22] Shippey draws a parallel with a contemporary work, George Orwell's 1938 novel Coming Up for Air , where England is subjected to a "similar diagnosis" of leaderless inertia. [22]

A mythology for an England in decline

Verlyn Flieger notes how dark Tolkien's Silmarillion legendarium is, and that "though it never wavered in intent" it inevitably changed with the changing world of the 20th century, taking on its "color, flavor, and mood". [10] She comments that his "great mythological song" began at the end of the Edwardian era, which it recalled nostalgically; took its shape in the very different era between the wars, which it viewed with "weary disillusionment"; and finally found an audience during yet another era, the Cold War, which it regarded with apprehension. [10] Shippey compares the treatment of evil in The Lord of the Rings with that of disillusioned contemporary authors after the Second World War such as Orwell, William Golding, and Kurt Vonnegut. [21] Flieger too compared him with Orwell, writing that:

If Tolkien's legendarium as we have it now is a mythology for England, it is a song about great power and promise in the throes of decline, racked by dissensions, split by factions, perpetually threatened by war, and perpetually at war with itself. It seems closer to Orwell's 1984 than the furry-footed escapist fantasy that detractors of The Lord of the Rings have characterized that work as being. [10]

John Rateliffe quotes the early Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher's 1972 description of Tolkien's plan, to create a mythic prehistory by inserting into The Lord of the Rings: [13]

some forebodings of [Middle-earth's] future which will make Earth what it is today ... he shows the initial steps in a long process of retreat or disappearance by all other intelligent species, which will leave man effectually alone on earth. ... Ents may still be there in our forests, but what forests have we left? The process of extermination is already well under way in the Third Age, and ... Tolkien bitterly deplores its climax today." [23]

Rateliffe writes that Tolkien's "close identification" of Middle-earth and the modern world was present throughout his writing from the start of his career to its end, as was the "elegiac tone"; Tolkien began in 1917 with "lost tales", "the fragmentary sole surviving record of a forgotten history, ... the tragic story of a ruined people". [13]

Modern but not a modernist

Vaninskaya writes that Tolkien was certainly "a modern writer", [12] but questions whether he was a modernist. She notes that whereas his friend C. S. Lewis publicly engaged with modernism, Tolkien did not. On the other hand, his work was "supremely intertextual", [12] like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, full of allusions, interweaving and juxtaposing styles, modes, and genres, most visibly in The Lord of the Rings. The effect, though, was not, as those authors chose, to present modern life as "fragments in a jagged-edged collage", but "to mold an independent myth of his own", in fact to subcreate a world. [12]

Brian Rosebury, writing in 1992, quotes Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter's remark that "Though Tolkien lived in the 20th century, he could hardly be called a modern writer". [24] Rosebury notes that Tolkien belonged to the "lost" generation that contained the killed war poets such as Wilfred Owen; but by 1954–5 when The Lord of the Rings appeared, the fashion was for anti-modernist social realism with writers like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, whose "styles of calculated plainness" Tolkien did not follow. [25] In short, Rosebury writes, Tolkien had a more complex relationship to modernism, which he calls the dominant literary tendency of the 20th century. In his view, The Lord of the Rings is "antagonistic" to the practices and values of modernism, but like many modernist works it uses myth creatively and adaptively. He gives as an example Rainer Maria Rilke's Angels in the Duino Elegies , reworking the archetype of beings like humans but separate from them; the work is quite unlike Tolkien's, but like it throws mortality into sharp relief, and shows death as "a necessary and fitting, as well as a tragic, completion of our destiny". [25] He notes, too, Shippey's analysis of Tolkien's "transformations of motifs" [25] from Shakespeare's Macbeth : the march of the Ents to destroy Isengard, recalling the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane; and the killing of the Witch-king of Angmar, fulfilling the prophecy that "not by the hand of man shall he fall" by bringing about his end with a Hobbit, Merry Brandybuck, and a woman, Éowyn. [26] [25] Rosebury observes, too, that like Rilke and Eliot, Tolkien builds from his "religious intuitions", creating a work that may be suffused with Christianity, but keeps it thoroughly hidden with no trace of allegory; Rosebury likens this to the way that the particularist Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh gave their attention to human dramas, allowing the reader to notice some power in religious faith. [25]

Sharing qualities with modernism

Rosebury states that Tolkien's writing shares several qualities with modernism, as well as having a modern novelistic "realism"; but the thing that keeps it from being called modernist is that it lacks irony. In particular, he writes, Tolkien is never ironic about value, nor about the literary text itself, both hallmarks of modernism; [25] Patrick Curry, writing in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, concurs with this. [27] Shippey notes that Tolkien can all the same make use of irony, as when Denethor despairs "on the brink of victory", having been misled by looking in the Palantír. Shippey goes on to describe The Lord of the Rings as "a profoundly ironic work, so much so that I do not think we have even yet got to the bottom of its many ironies." [28]

The Lord of the Rings is sharply aware of people's moral imperfection, and all the characters, "even the wisest", understand only a fraction of their world, but the work is not radically pessimistic about the possibility of knowing anything. Rosebury notes that one can see that modernism remains influential in the fact that saying a work is not ironic or self-referential [lower-alpha 1] can be taken as disparagement, whereas in the Romantic period, works such as Byron's or Goethe's were basically always earnest. Rosebury concludes by suggesting that the "elements of neo-romantic earnestness in Tolkien may ... come to seem a welcome variant" of modernism, rather than a failure to adjust to it. [25]

See also

Notes

  1. There is a definite self-referential moment in The Lord of the Rings: on the stairs of the dangerous pass of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam talk about what a story is. Sam says "We're in one, of course, but I mean put into words, you know ... read out of a great big book with red and black letters". Frodo answers "Why Sam ... to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story were already written". Verlyn Flieger writes that this is "the most self-referential and post-modern moment in the entire book", since it constitutes the book itself looking both back at its own creation, and forward to the printed book that the reader is holding. [29]

Related Research Articles

The "Ainulindalë" is the creation account in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, published posthumously as the first part of The Silmarillion in 1977. The "Ainulindalë" sets out a central part of the cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium, telling how the Ainur, a class of angelic beings, perform a great music prefiguring the creation of the material universe, , including Middle-Earth. The creator Eru Ilúvatar introduces the theme of the sentient races of Elves and Men, not anticipated by the Ainur, and gives physical being to the prefigured universe. Some of the Ainur decide to enter the physical world to prepare for their arrival, becoming the Valar and Maiar.

The Notion Club Papers is an abandoned novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in 1945 and published posthumously in Sauron Defeated, the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth. It is a time travel story, written while The Lord of the Rings was being developed. The Notion Club is a fictionalization of Tolkien's own such club, the Inklings. Tolkien's mechanism for the exploration of time is through lucid dreams. These allow club members to experience events as far back as the destruction of the Atlantis-like island of Númenor, as narrated in The Silmarillion.

Ælfwine the mariner is a fictional character found in various early versions of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium. Tolkien envisaged Ælfwine as an Anglo-Saxon who visited and befriended the Elves and acted as the source of later mythology. Thus, in the frame story, Ælfwine is the stated author of the various translations in Old English that appear in the twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth edited by Christopher Tolkien.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mythopoeic Awards</span> Literary award

The Mythopoeic Awards for literature and literary studies are given annually for outstanding works in the fields of myth, fantasy, and the scholarly study of these areas. Established by the Mythopoeic Society in 1971, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award is given for "fiction in the spirit of the Inklings", and the Scholarship Award for non-fiction work. The award is a statuette of a seated lion, with a plaque on the base. It has drawn resemblance to, and is often called, the "Aslan".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Arda</span> History of J. R. R. Tolkiens Middle-earth

In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the history of Arda, also called the history of Middle-earth, began when the Ainur entered Arda, following the creation events in the Ainulindalë and long ages of labour throughout Eä, the fictional universe. Time from that point was measured using Valian Years, though the subsequent history of Arda was divided into three time periods using different years, known as the Years of the Lamps, the Years of the Trees, and the Years of the Sun. A separate, overlapping chronology divides the history into 'Ages of the Children of Ilúvatar'. The first such Age began with the Awakening of the Elves during the Years of the Trees and continued for the first six centuries of the Years of the Sun. All the subsequent Ages took place during the Years of the Sun. Most Middle-earth stories take place in the first three Ages of the Children of Ilúvatar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tolkien's legendarium</span> J. R. R. Tolkiens mythological writings

Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a unique English mythology. The earliest story drafts are from 1916; he revised and rewrote these for most of his adult life.

J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings had an initial mixed literary reception. Despite some enthusiastic early reviews from supporters such as W. H. Auden, Iris Murdoch, and C. S. Lewis, literary hostility to Tolkien quickly became acute and continued until the start of the 21st century. From 1982, Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger began to roll back the hostility, defending Tolkien, rebutting the critics' attacks and analysing what they saw as good qualities in Tolkien's writing.

Morgoth Bauglir is a character, one of the godlike Valar, from Tolkien's legendarium. He is the primary antagonist of Tolkien's legendarium, the mythic epic published in parts as The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin.

<i>Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon</i> Book of literary criticism of Tolkien

Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon is a 2003 book of literary criticism by Brian Rosebury about the English author and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien and his writings on his fictional world of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings. A shorter version of the book, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, appeared in 1992. Rosebury examines how Tolkien imagined Middle-earth, how he achieved the aesthetic effect he was seeking, his place among twentieth century writers, and how his work has been retold and imitated by other authors and in other media, most notably for film by Peter Jackson.

England and Englishness are represented in multiple forms within J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings; it appears, more or less thinly disguised, in the form of the Shire and the lands close to it; in kindly characters such as Treebeard, Faramir, and Théoden; in its industrialised state as Isengard and Mordor; and as Anglo-Saxon England in Rohan. Lastly, and most pervasively, Englishness appears in the words and behaviour of the hobbits, both in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard C. West</span> American librarian and Tolkien scholar (1944–2020)

Richard Carroll West was an American librarian and one of the first Tolkien scholars. He is best known for his 1975 essay on the interlace structure of The Lord of the Rings, for which he won the 1976 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies.

Tolkien's monsters are the evil beings, such as Orcs, Trolls, and giant spiders, who oppose and sometimes fight the protagonists in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. Tolkien was an expert on Old English, especially Beowulf, and several of his monsters share aspects of the Beowulf monsters; his Trolls have been likened to Grendel, the Orcs' name harks back to the poem's orcneas, and the dragon Smaug has multiple attributes of the Beowulf dragon. The European medieval tradition of monsters makes them either humanoid but distorted, or like wild beasts, but very large and malevolent; Tolkien follows both traditions, with monsters like Orcs of the first kind and Wargs of the second. Some scholars add Tolkien's immensely powerful Dark Lords Morgoth and Sauron to the list, as monstrous enemies in spirit as well as in body. Scholars have noted that the monsters' evil nature reflects Tolkien's Roman Catholicism, a religion which has a clear conception of good and evil.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music of Middle-earth</span> Music in J. R. R. Tolkiens Middle-earth fiction

The music of Middle-earth consists of the music mentioned by J. R. R. Tolkien in his Middle-earth books, the music written by other artists to accompany performances of his work, whether individual songs or adaptations of his books for theatre, film, radio, and games, and music more generally inspired by his books.

The prose style of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, especially The Lord of the Rings, is remarkably varied. Commentators have noted that Tolkien selected linguistic registers to suit different peoples, such as simple and modern for Hobbits and more archaic for Dwarves, Elves, and the Rohirrim. This allowed him to use the Hobbits to mediate between the modern reader and the heroic and archaic realm of fantasy. The Orcs, too, are depicted in different voices: the Orc-leader Grishnákh speaks in bullying tones, while the minor functionary Gorbag uses grumbling modern speech.

The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien set out to explore time travel and distortions in the passage of time in his fiction in a variety of ways. The passage of time in The Lord of the Rings is uneven, seeming to run at differing speeds in the realms of Men and of Elves. In this, Tolkien was following medieval tradition in which time proceeds differently in Elfland. The whole work, too, following the theory he spelt out in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", is meant to transport the reader into another time. He built a process of decline and fall in Middle-earth into the story, echoing the sense of impending destruction of Norse mythology. The Elves attempt to delay this decline as far as possible in their realms of Rivendell and Lothlórien, using their Rings of Power to slow the passage of time. Elvish time, in The Lord of the Rings as in the medieval Thomas the Rhymer and the Danish Elvehøj, presents apparent contradictions. Both the story itself and scholarly interpretations offer varying attempts to resolve these; time may be flowing faster or more slowly, or perceptions may differ.

J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium, to make the works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Great War and Middle-earth</span> Effect of the First World War on Tolkiens fantasy writings

J. R. R. Tolkien took part in the First World War, known then as the Great War, and began his fantasy Middle-earth writings at that time. The Fall of Gondolin was the first prose work that he created, and it contains detailed descriptions of battle and streetfighting. He continued the dark tone in much of his legendarium, as seen in The Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings, too, has been described as a war book.

<i>Tolkiens Art: A Mythology for England</i> 1979 book by Jane Chance

Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' is a 1979 book of Tolkien scholarship by Jane Chance, writing then as Jane Chance Nitzsche. The book looks in turn at Tolkien's essays "On Fairy-Stories" and "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"; The Hobbit; the fairy-stories "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major"; the minor works "Lay of Autrou and Itroun", "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth", "Imram", and Farmer Giles of Ham; The Lord of the Rings; and very briefly in the concluding section, The Silmarillion. In 2001, a second edition extended all the chapters but still treated The Silmarillion, that Tolkien worked on throughout his life, as a sort of coda.

J. R. R. Tolkien derived the characters, stories, places, and languages of Middle-earth from many sources. Among these are several modern works of fiction. These include adventure stories from Tolkien's childhood, such as books by John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, especially the 1887 She: A History of Adventure. Tolkien stated that he used the fight with werewolves in Samuel Rutherford Crockett's 1899 historical fantasy The Black Douglas for his battle with wargs.

Literary devices in <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> Literary techniques in Tolkiens work

The philologist and fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien made use of multiple literary devices in The Lord of the Rings, from its narrative structure and its use of pseudotranslation, to character pairing and the deliberate cultivation of an impression of depth. The narrative structure in particular has been seen as a pair of quests, a sequence of tableaux, a complex edifice, multiple spirals, and a medieval-style interlacing. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, on the other hand, has a single narrative thread, and repeated episodes of danger and recuperation in five "Homely Houses". His prose style, too, has been both criticised and defended.

References

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  3. Wilson, Edmund (14 April 1956). "Oo, Those Awful Orcs! A review of The Fellowship of the Ring". The Nation . JRRVF. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
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  9. Jenkyns, Richard (28 January 2002). "Bored of the Rings". The New Republic. Retrieved 1 February 2011.
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  11. 1 2 Nicolay 2014.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lee 2020 , Anna Vaninskaya, "Modernity: Tolkien and His Contemporaries", pages 350–366
  13. 1 2 3 Rateliff 2006, pp. 67–100.
  14. Riggs, Don (2015). "[Review] Tolkien and the Modernists: Literary Responses to the Dark New Days of the 20th Century by Theresa Freda Nicolay". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts . 26 (3): 610–613.
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  17. Honegger & Weinreich 2006.
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  21. 1 2 Shippey 2001, pp. 115–116, 120–121.
  22. 1 2 Shippey 2001, pp. 219–220.
  23. Kocher 1972, p. 10.
  24. Carpenter 1981, p. 157.
  25. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rosebury 2003, pp. 145–157.
  26. Shippey 1982, p. 137.
  27. Curry 2020, pp. 369–388.
  28. Shippey, Tom (2016). "The Curious Case of Denethor and the Palantír, Once More". Mallorn (57): 6–9.
  29. Flieger 2005, pp. 67–73 "A great big book with red and black letters"

Sources