THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH

by T. A. Shippey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 1983

Like Humphrey Carpenter's very good Tolkien biography, this erratically enlightening study begins with the recognition that philology was not only Tolkien's profession but the core of his intellectual (and even spiritual) life. Here Shippey, a student of Old and Middle English, can meet him on some of his own ground. To that strange and mazy mind, Shippey suggests, the morphology and even the orthography of the primitive Germanic languages as preserved in early medieval texts were clues to the greatness of some hidden pre-literate Northern past--clues ignored by adepts of more accessible languages. In a sense, Tolkien invented the world that should have existed for legend to take place in, and constructed the epic that should have lain behind the ""asterisk-world"" of philogical conjecture. Yet, in a stroke of great artistic common sense, he made the heroes of this many-peopled and many-tongued Urwelt the anachronistically bourgeois hobbits, who correspond to nothing at all in the world of Beowulf and Wiglaf. The force of this argument is often blunted, however, when Shippey gets down to a more everyday sort of literary criticism: searching for image-patterns, grandly discussing thematic correspondences with sources on the evidence of isolated phrases, rehashing long sequences of events in overinflated detail. Where he is first-rate is in the realm of etymology--the trains of thought that the very names of the Norse Eddas or the rivers of England would set off in the mind of any philologist, or did set off in the mind of one extremely peculiar one. A valuable appendix gives the original texts (together with modern translations) of three poems Tolkien wrote in Old English and one in Gothic (this last the only extant poem in that lost language). A second gives a splendid brief listing of works that must have belonged to his mental furniture. In sum: the most useful book on Tolkien since the Carpenter biography.

Pub Date: April 11, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION