A Tolkien Compass

by Jared Lobdell

Paperback, 2003

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Collection

Publication

Open Court (2003), Edition: 2nd, Paperback, 208 pages

Description

A Tolkien Compass offers surprising insights into the mind of the creator of Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's political, religious, cosmological, and psychological principles are explored by ten writers with different backgrounds and divergent approaches. As leading Tolkien authority Tom Shippey observes in his foreword, A Tolkien Compass lives up to its name by providing vital guidance to both new and seasoned travelers in Middle-earth. Book jacket.

User reviews

LibraryThing member waltzmn
Is that a faint whiff of desperation in the air?

This isn't the earliest work of J. R. R. Tolkien criticism -- not by many years. Had the editors desired, there was a rich wealth of articles available. But the essays come from a specialized source: the first two "Conferences on Middle-Earth." This
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rather restricted the available materials. Like most scholarly conferences, the number of presentations was relatively restricted and the quality of the results highly variable.

Some of the pieces here are of great value. Bonniejean Christensen's "Gollum's Character Transformation in The Hobbit," which compares Gollum's behavior in Tolkien's first and final editions of the book, is a great resource for any Tolkien scholar; it shows how Tolkien adapted Gollum from a minor character to one of the key elements of the Lord of the Rings mythology. Richard West's "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings" makes a crucial point about the way Tolkien organizes his plots.

But there are some weak essays, too. I won't pick on them in particular; it's not really fair to expect a paper that was probably designed for a particular specialized audience to stand up in print forty years-odd years later. (The conferences were in 1969 and 1971; the collection itself is copyrighted 1975.) Especially since the papers were obviously presented before the publication of The Silmarillion and all the other posthumous Tolkien works. There is much that we now know that the authors of the time could not have known. But it's best to be forewarned: This book breaks very little new ground, and it is dated. There is much that is useful here. But don't expect every essay to be equally valuable.
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Language

Original language

English

Physical description

208 p.; 5.94 x 0.43 inches

ISBN

0875483038 / 9780875483030
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