A Tolkien Compass, a 1975 collection of essays edited by Jared Lobdell, was one of the first books of Tolkien scholarship to be published; it was written without sight of The Silmarillion, published in 1977. Some of the essays have remained at the centre of such scholarship. Most were written by academics for fan-organised conferences. The collection was also the first place where Tolkien's own "Guide to the names in The Lord of the Rings" became widely available.
The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey described the essays as written in an innocent time before Tolkien studies became professionalised, and as such they offer "freshness, candor, and a sense of historical depth"[1] that cannot be repeated. Other scholars have stated that two of the essays about The Hobbit have become frequently-cited classics in their field.
The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954–55; it was awarded the International Fantasy Award in 1957. The publication of the Ace Books and Ballantine paperbacks in the United States helped it to become immensely popular with a new generation in the 1960s. It has remained so ever since, judged by both sales and reader surveys.[3] The literary establishment was initially largely hostile to the book, attacking it in numerous reviews.[4][5]
Synopsis
The first and second editions contain the following essays:
I. Jared Lobdell. "Introduction". Aside from introducing the essays, he notes that none of them attempt Quellenforschung, the search for Tolkien's sources, but suggests that the matter is worthy of study.
II. Bonniejean Christensen. "Gollum's character transformation in The Hobbit". She finds the "fallen hobbit" Gollum immediately interesting, even apart from Tolkien's changes to the second edition of the novel to make the story fit better with The Lord of the Rings, which make Gollum "fascinating". The key changes are to chapter 5, "Riddles in the Dark": Gollum becomes a far darker character, and the riddle competition becomes deadly serious, as Bilbo will be eaten if he loses.
III. Dorothy Matthews. "The Psychological Journey of Bilbo Baggins", provides an early Jungian approach to Tolkien, suggesting that Gandalf fits the Wise Old Man archetype, and Gollum the Devouring Mother, while Bilbo sets out on his quest "out of balance and far from integrated".
V. Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill. "The Corruption of Power" examines what power, especially that of the One Ring, does to those who have it. "And the answer is unequivocal: The desire for power corrupts." Of the three wise and ancient characters in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf and Galadriel see the temptation, and reject it. Saruman succumbs to it. Of the men of Gondor, Boromir tries to seize the Ring; Faramir "understands the danger".
VI. Deborah Rogers. "Everyclod and Everyhero: the image of man in Tolkien" argues that both the Hobbits and Aragorn represent Man. Rogers notes that she knows Hobbits are important, as Tolkien wrote her a letter in 1958 confessing "I am in fact a hobbit."[6] The Hobbits are in her view "small, provincial, and comfort-loving" but not John Bull English: in short, they are cloddish antiheroes. Aragorn, however, is definitely a hero; together, he and the Hobbits form a composite picture of man, a clod with a hero trying to get out.
VII. Richard C. West "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings" shows that the novel has a complex medieval organisation, in which story threads are interwoven to create a subtly cohesive narrative. It mirrors "the perception of the flux of events in the world around us, where everything is happening at once". The technique allows events to be seen, too, from different points of view. West notes that this is also modern, as writers like James Joyce and Marcel Proust "once again began experimenting" with the medieval technique.
VIII. David Miller. "Narrative pattern in The Fellowship of the Ring" looks at other story structures, noting that with the road as a setting, the "there and back again" novel (he includes The Hobbit) is picaresque. Miller analyses the journey in the first volume as a sequence of "conference[s] in tranquillity", "blundering journey[s]", dangers, and "unexpected aid", as for example the party venturing into the Old Forest, becoming entrapped by Old Man Willow, only to be rescued by Tom Bombadil. He identifies nine such cycles.
IX. Robert Plank. "'The Scouring of the Shire': Tolkien's view of fascism" looks at a single chapter – Book 6, Chapter 8 of The Lord of the Rings, in which the Hobbits return home victorious from their adventures like the hero Odysseus to Ithaca, only to have to "scour" their home of enemies. Plank comments that "the outstanding characteristic of [the chapter] is that miracles do not happen, the laws of nature are in full and undisputed force, [and] the actors in the drama are all human [mortals, whether men or Hobbits]." Thus the chapter is "not fantasy", unlike the rest of the novel. Plank is surprised that Tolkien thinks of the "overthrow of a tyrannical government as a quick and easy job."
Charles A. Huttar writes that Isengard is an "industrial hell", quoting Tolkien's words "tunneled .. dark .. deep .. graveyard of unquiet dead .. furnaces". Medieval fresco of hell, St Nicholas in Raduil, Bulgaria
X. Charles A. Huttar. "Hell and the city: Tolkien and the traditions of Western literature" looks at the novel's debt to literary tradition. The Fellowship's journey through Moria is likened to a descent into Hell, part of a hero's monomyth, while Gandalf's struggle with the Balrog echoes the hero "overcoming a monster of 'the deep'". Frodo's journey to Mordor, too, is such a descent. Huttar considers, too, the various cities with their towers: Minas Tirith of Gondor; Barad-Dûr, the Dark Lord Sauron's fortress; Orthanc, the fallen wizard Saruman's fastness within the industrial Isengard; and either Minas Morgul, home to the nine Nazgûl, or the nearby Cirith Ungol, the watchtower that becomes Frodo's prison. All have become hellish, except for Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard, which stands against them: "a great city" with its seven walls and seven levels, "but it is dying." This would seem desperate: but "Tolkien sees hope."
XI. U. Milo Kaufmann. "Aspects of the paradisiacal in Tolkien's work" picks out two features of Tolkien's writing: "his uncanny capacity for making us see ordinary objects and actions bursting with the value of wholeness and finality", and "his talent for creating intransigently mysterious landscape." He finds these in "Leaf by Niggle" and in The Lord of the Rings.
The first edition also contains:
XII. J. R. R. Tolkien. "Guide to the names in The Lord of the Rings". Tolkien explains how to translate both personal names like "Treebeard" (by sense) and placenames like "Bag End" (again, by sense), individually listed and explained, and asks that all other names be left untranslated.
A Tolkien Compass was published in paperback by Open Court in 1975. They brought out a second edition in 2003, adding a scholarly foreword by Tom Shippey.[1] The essays consisted mainly of Lobdell's selections from the first and second Conferences on Middle-earth.[8] The book has been translated into French, Swedish, and Turkish.[9] There are no illustrations.
Tom Shippey commented that A Tolkien Compass appeared "at a time when, in the United Kingdom at least, professing an interest in Tolkien was almost certain death for any hopeful candidate seeking entrance to a department of English".[1] The first edition included Tolkien's "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings"; Shippey called this "immensely valuable" and "deplored" the fact that the Tolkien Estate had demanded it be omitted from later editions. Shippey described the essays as written in the "Age of Innocence" before Tolkien studies became professionalised, and as such offer "freshness, candor, and a sense of historical depth" that cannot be repeated.[1] He noted that some of the early predictions, made before The Silmarillion appeared in 1977 or The History of The Lord of the Rings in 1988–1992, were wrong. For instance, Tolkien had not written much of The Lord of the Rings before the Second World War; but many other predictions have been substantiated, such as Richard C. West's account of Tolkien's use of medieval-style interlacing as a narrative structure.[1]
The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft has written that West's essay "has proven to have particularly long-lasting impact",[10] while the medievalist Gergely Nagy called the book "a significant early collection".[11]
The librarian and Tolkien scholar David Bratman described the book as "the first commercially published collection of scholarship from the Tolkien fan community."[12] He commented that the essays were originally papers for conferences organised by fans, but were for the most part written by scholars, and that two of the chapters were seen by scholars as "classics in the field": Richard C. West's essay on "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings, and Bonniejean Christensen's on "Gollum's Character Transformations in The Hobbit".[12]
The librarian Jean MacIntyre, regretting that scholars have paid relatively little attention to The Hobbit compared to Tolkien's other novels, has noted that A Tolkien Compass takes the children's book seriously with two frequently-consulted essays, namely Matthews's psychological interpretation of The Hobbit (MacIntyre notes that Randel Helms had "mocked" this), and Christensen's account of Tolkien's revisions of The Hobbit as he updated Gollum's character.[13]
The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel by the English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's book The Hobbit, but eventually developed into a much larger work. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book is recognized as a classic in children's literature and is one of the best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million copies sold.
In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the Lonely Mountain is a mountain northeast of Mirkwood. It is the location of the Dwarves' Kingdom under the Mountain and the town of Dale lies in a vale on its southern slopes. In The Lord of the Rings, the mountain is called by the Sindarin name Erebor. The Lonely Mountain is the destination of the protagonists, including the titular Hobbit Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, and is the scene of the novel's climax.
Bilbo Baggins is the title character and protagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, a supporting character in The Lord of the Rings, and the fictional narrator of many of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. The Hobbit is selected by the wizard Gandalf to help Thorin and his party of Dwarves to reclaim their ancestral home and treasure, which has been seized by the dragon Smaug. Bilbo sets out in The Hobbit timid and comfort-loving, and through his adventures grows to become a useful and resourceful member of the quest.
The Two Towers is the second volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. It is preceded by The Fellowship of the Ring and followed by The Return of the King. The volume's title is ambiguous, as five towers are named in the narrative, and Tolkien himself gave conflicting identifications of the two towers. The narrative is interlaced, allowing Tolkien to build in suspense and surprise. The volume was largely welcomed by critics, who found it exciting and compelling, combining epic narrative with heroic romance.
The Red Book of Westmarch is a fictional manuscript written by hobbits, related to the author J. R. R. Tolkien's frame stories. It is an instance of the found manuscript conceit, a literary device to explain the source of his legendarium. In the fiction, it is a collection of writings in which the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were recounted by their characters, and from which Tolkien supposedly derived these and other works. The name of the book comes from its red leather binding and casing, and from its having been housed in the Westmarch, a region of Middle-earth next to the Shire.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the real-world history and notable fictional elements of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy universe. It covers materials created by Tolkien; the works on his unpublished manuscripts, by his son Christopher Tolkien; and films, games and other media created by other people.
Scholars and critics have identified many themes of The Lord of the Rings, a major fantasy novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, including a reversed quest, the struggle of good and evil, death and immortality, fate and free will, the danger of power, and various aspects of Christianity such as the presence of three Christ figures, for prophet, priest, and king, as well as elements like hope and redemptive suffering. There is also a strong thread throughout the work of language, its sound, and its relationship to peoples and places, along with moralisation from descriptions of landscape. Out of these, Tolkien stated that the central theme is death and immortality.
"The Council of Elrond" is the second chapter of Book 2 of J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy work, The Lord of the Rings, which was published in 1954–1955. It is the longest chapter in that book at some 15,000 words, and critical for explaining the power and threat of the One Ring, for introducing the final members of the Fellowship of the Ring, and for defining the planned quest to destroy it. Contrary to the maxim "Show, don't tell", the chapter consists mainly of people talking; the action is, as in an earlier chapter "The Shadow of the Past", narrated, largely by the Wizard Gandalf, in flashback. The chapter parallels the far simpler Beorn chapter in The Hobbit, which similarly presents a culture-clash of modern with ancient. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls the chapter "a largely unappreciated tour de force". The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge writes that the chapter brings the hidden narrative of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings close to the surface.
Saruman, also called Saruman the White, later Saruman of Many Colours, is a fictional character of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. He is leader of the Istari, wizards sent to Middle-earth in human form by the godlike Valar to challenge Sauron, the main antagonist of the novel, but eventually he desires Sauron's power for himself and tries to take over Middle-earth by force from his base at Isengard. His schemes feature prominently in the second volume, The Two Towers; he appears briefly at the end of the third volume, The Return of the King. His earlier history is summarised in the posthumously published The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
The One Ring, also called the Ruling Ring and Isildur's Bane, is a central plot element in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). It first appeared in the earlier story The Hobbit (1937) as a magic ring that grants the wearer invisibility. Tolkien changed it into a malevolent Ring of Power and re-wrote parts of The Hobbit to fit in with the expanded narrative. The Lord of the Rings describes the hobbit Frodo Baggins's quest to destroy the Ring.
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel The Lord of the Rings by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It is followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The action takes place in the fictional universe of Middle-earth. The book was first published on 29 July 1954 in the United Kingdom. The volume consists of a foreword, in which the author discusses his writing of The Lord of the Rings, a prologue titled "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters", and the main narrative in Book I and Book II.
"The Shadow of the Past" is the second chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy work, The Lord of the Rings, which was published in 1954–1955. Tolkien called it "the crucial chapter"; the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey labelled it "the vital chapter". This is because it represents both the moment that Tolkien devised the central plot of the book, and the point in the story where the protagonist, Frodo Baggins, and the reader realise that there will be a quest to destroy the Ring. A sketch of it was among the first parts of the book to be written, early in 1938; later that year, it was one of three chapters of the book that he drafted. In 1944, he returned to the chapter, adding descriptions of Gollum, the Ring, and the hunt for Gollum.
The theme of addiction to power in The Lord of the Rings is central, as the Ring, made by the Dark Lord Sauron to enable him to take over the whole of Middle-earth, progressively corrupts the mind of its owner to use the Ring for evil.
J. R. R. Tolkien was attracted to medieval literature, and made use of it in his writings, both in his poetry, which contained numerous pastiches of medieval verse, and in his Middle-earth novels where he embodied a wide range of medieval concepts.
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.
Scholars, including psychoanalysts, have commented that J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories about both Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit, and Frodo Baggins, protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, constitute psychological journeys. Bilbo returns from his journey to help recover the Dwarves' treasure from Smaug the dragon's lair in the Lonely Mountain changed, but wiser and more experienced. Frodo returns from his journey to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom scarred by multiple weapons, and is unable to settle back into the normal life of his home, the Shire.
Scholars have described the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings, a high fantasy work by J. R. R. Tolkien published in 1954–55, in a variety of ways, including as a balanced pair of outer and inner quests; a linear sequence of scenes or tableaux; a fractal arrangement of separate episodes; a Gothic cathedral-like edifice of many different elements; multiple cycles or spirals; or an elaborate medieval-style interlacing of intersecting threads of story. Also present is an elaborate symmetry between pairs of characters.
The lives of the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth appear variously to be driven by luck or by fate. This is arranged in such a way that the characters' free will is never compromised; they must rely on their own courage, just like Old English heroes like Beowulf and figures from Norse mythology. The text of The Lord of the Rings, while never Christian on the surface, hints at the working of higher powers, which the cosmology in The Silmarillion presents as the angelic or godlike Valar, who in turn carry out the will of the creator, the one God Eru Ilúvatar.
J. R. R. Tolkien's best-known novels, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both have the structure of quests, with a hero setting out, facing dangers, achieving a goal, and returning home. Where The Hobbit is a children's story with the simple goal of treasure, The Lord of the Rings is a more complex narrative with multiple quests. Its main quest, to destroy the One Ring, has been described as a reversed quest – starting with a much-desired treasure, and getting rid of it. That quest, too, is balanced against a moral quest, to scour the Shire and return it to its original state.
↑ MacIntyre, Jean (1988). ""Time shall run back": Tolkien's The Hobbit". Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 13 (1). Project Muse: 12–17. doi:10.1353/chq.0.0500.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
