Customer Reviews

Tolkien the Medievalist (Routledge Research in Medieval Religion and Culture)

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This impressive collection gathers sixteen scholarly articles on various medieval influences on and echoes in Tolkien's works. As with any collection of this nature, there are essays which will appeal to some readers and not to others, but the level of scholarship in this collection is uniformly excellent.

For me, Leslie Donovan's "The valkyrie reflex in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Eowyn, and Arwen" was the most outstanding essay in the collection, shedding new light of the roots of Tolkien's depiction of female characters, their motivations, and implications for the reader seeking viable female role models in this (on the surface) male-dominated work.

Verlyn Fleiger's valuable essay on the folklore controversy behind Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories" explains the scholarly disputes to which Tolkien responds in his well-known lecture. Flieger also wrote a very interesting article on the Wild Man motif in medieval literature and Tolkien's works. Christine Chism contributes a fascinating piece on the Nazi "misappropriation" of Germanic folklore, myth, and history, and Tolkien's indignant response. Michael W. Maher's exploration of medieval images of Mary in the character of Galadriel, especially in the application of the appellations of Mary given in the Litany of Loreto to the Lady of Lorien, is also quite intriquing for its concrete evidence of the influence of Tolkien's Catholicism on this character. Other essays deal with CS Lewis' influence on Tolkien, Augustinian echoes in Tolkien's cosmogony, the Seafarer poem, mythological aspects of tales from The Silmarillion, and so on. Overall, this is an outstanding anthology recommended for any serious Tolkien or medieval literature collection.

The book is a serious and carefully assembled collection of papers, as usual in the works in charge of Jane Chance. For a Tolkien fan and a intended medievalist philologue, what I would like to be, it is a real party. The articles in general are of very good level. I enjoyed specially V.Flieger's "Tolien's wild men", a true archetype of academic exposition, orginal and reliable. I would propose it as a model of style and way of work. My other favourite was John Houghton "Augustine in the cottage of lost play", a wonderful study, deep and illuminator.
I am, in few words, grateful for the book, and strongly reccomend it, in my horrible written English!