Customer Reviews

Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England

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This is a 23 year old book, reprinted with updates, and, apart from Verlyn Flieger's =A Question of Time= (a much superior, but specialized, work), this and Chance's =Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power= are currently the most easily available academic studies of Tolkien. This is unfortunate: Chance's work has some merit, but she is a dull, foggy writer, with a bent towards political and Freudian analysis alien to Tolkien's thought. Both books are analyses, not introductions. This one is a general survey of Tolkien's fiction published through =The Silmarillion=. It's been updated with many new references to later scholarship (not always summarized correctly), but there's very little on "The History of Middle-earth" or any other of Tolkien's more recently published fiction. =Tolkien's Art= remains a book from 1979, with none of the change of context its subject demands: to discuss "Imram" today without tucking in a single reference to =The Notion Club Papers=, from which it's excerpted, is inexcusable. I cannot recommend either of these very highly.

Tolkien was an outsider. Chance mischaracterizes him as a soap box, Land of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia jingoist. His basic artistic credo is found in Leaf by Niggle which expresses an artists disaffection with his society, England. Chance's agenda is reductive and banal, and in fact Tolkien explicitly repudiated this simplistic interpretation. Tolkien wrote fantasy literature not propaganda. He was an artist not a politician.