Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism

When first published, The Lord of the Rings stood far from the mainstream: no one had seen anything like it for decades. Tolkien's almost stridently antimodern tale needed valiant defenders, vocal admirers who understood its sources and relished its monumental scale. While such champions of modernism as Edmund Wilson mocked Tolkien's archaic structure and language, W. H. Auden -- a great modernist poet in his own right -- rose to his defense with a spirited essay on the true nature of the Hero Quest. Edmund Fuller's essay collected here discusses the nature of the fairy tale, returning to the roots of the term to remove the treacle of Disney and restore the value of realistic enchantment. Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis takes up the question of why, if you have a serious comment to make about real life, you would drape it in a never-never land of your own. He shrewdly argues that it is because real life does have mythic and heroic qualities -- in abundance.

This collection also includes, among others, essays by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Verlyn Flieger, Paul Kocher, Jane Chance, and each of the editors, as well as a brand-new essay by Tom Shippey that shows us how to process all this vast learning, adding to it the many delights of the film versions of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, so we can relish his achievement all the more.

The essays span fifty years of critical reaction, from the first publication of The Fellowship of the Ring through the release of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, which inspired a new generation of readers to discover the classic work and prior generations to rediscover its power and beauty. Fans and scholars alike will appreciate these important, insightful, and timely pieces. Fourteen of the fifteen have been previously published but are gathered here for the first time. The final essay in the volume, The Road Back to Middle-earth by Tom Shippey, was commissioned especially for this collection. Shippey examines how Peter Jackson translated the text into film drama, shaping the story to fit the understanding of a modern audience without compromising its deep philosophical core.
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Neil D. Isaacs, Professor Emeritus of English language and literature at the University of Maryland, lives in Colesville, Maryland.

Rose A. Zimbardo, Distringuished Teaching Professor Emeritus of English at Stony Brook University, has been a noted Restoration scholar for more than forty years. She lives in San Francisco.

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