THE TOWER AND THE RUIN

My precious…

“J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are qualitatively different from most other works of twentieth-century literature.” So writes Drout, a professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of the Medieval at Wheaton College. His book seeks to tell us how and why. Tolkien created a world so real-seeming, so larded with lore and language, that the reader enters, stays, and leaves only unwillingly. Tolkien was a scholar of Old English and Old Norse. He contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary. He shaped the runes and rigamarole of Hobbits, elves, and monsters out of the clay of epic. He grounded his imagination in not only medieval but Victorian fantasy: the adventures of H. Rider Haggard and the Nordic mistiness of William Morris. But the author locates Tolkien’s true distinctiveness not in literary sources but in a moral vision and its powerful emotional content. Friendship and loss emerge as the axes of the drama. “The pain of the lost home has been transmuted into a sadness that we can accept….Transforming…sorrow into something more, into tears that are not bitter, is the great achievement of Tolkien’s art.” This is a book of feelings, then: about Drout’s half-century experience of reading, of his own family life, of his research into early languages and early drafts of Tolkien’s tales, and, finally, of a redemptive relationship to literary art. Some readers may miss the history here: There’s very little on World War I, or the Oxford Inklings, or the realia of what it meant to be a scholar at the time. What we get instead is close reading and praise. Tolkien becomes a “consolation” for the author and for all readers seeking salvation in adventure.

An ardent plea for Tolkien as a writer with a moral vision about friendship in the face of love and loss.