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The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology Paperback – June 24, 2003
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The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey’s classic work, now revised in paperback, explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien’s professional background led him to write The Hobbit and how he created a timeless charm for millions of readers. Examining the foundation of Tolkien’s most popular work, The Lord of the Rings, Shippey also discusses the contribution of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales to Tolkien’s great myth cycle, showing how Tolkien’s more “difficult” books can be fully appreciated. He goes on to examine the remarkable twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, written by Tolkien’s son and literary heir Christopher Tolkien, which traces the creative and technical processes by which Middle-earth evolved.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJune 24, 2003
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100618257608
- ISBN-13978-0618257607
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Professor Shippey's commentary is the best so far in elucidating Tolkien's lovely myth." Harper's Magazine "Shippey is a rarity, a scholar well schooled in critical analysis whose writing is beautifully clear." Minneapolis Star-Tribune "[Tolkien] deserves his full do, and Shippey's appreciative assessment of his unique achievement provides it in full and satisfying measure." Philadelphia Inquirer —
About the Author
Tom Shippey taught at Oxford University at the same time as J.R.R. Tolkien and with the same syllabus, which gives him an intimate familiarity with the works that fueled Tolkien's imagination. He subsequently held the chair of English language and medieval literature at Leeds University that Tolkien had previously held.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
My involvement with Tolkien's fiction now goes back almost fifty years, to a first reading of The Hobbit some time in the mid-1950s. My first attempt to comment publicly on Tolkien did not come, however, till late 1969 or early 1970, when I was recruited, as a very junior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, to speak on 'tolkien as philologist' at a Tolkien day organised by some now-forgotten association. It was my good fortune that Tolkien's secretary, Joy Hill, was in the audience, and asked me for a copy of my script to show the Professor. It was my further good fortune that he read it, perhaps out of good will to Birmingham and to King Edward's School, Birmingham, which we both attended, he (with a gap) from 1900 to 1911, and I from 1954 to 1960. Tolkien furthermore replied to it, with his habitual courtesy, in a letter dated 13 April 1970, though it took me a very long time to understand what he meant, as I discuss below.
It was not till 1972 that I met Tolkien in person, by which time I had been promoted from Birmingham to a Fellowship at St. John's College, Oxford, to teach Old and Middle English along the lines which Tolkien had laid down many years before. Just after I arrived in Oxford, Tolkien's successor in the Merton Chair of English Language, Norman Davis, invited me to dine at Merton and meet Tolkien, who was then living in college lodgings following the death of his wife. The meeting left me with a strong sense of obligation and even professional piety, in the old sense of that word, i.e. "affectionate loyalty and respect, esp. to parents', or in this case predecessors. After Tolkien's death I felt increasingly that he would not have been happy with many of the things people said about his writings, and that someone with a similar background to his own ought to try to provide'as Tolkien and E. V. Gordon wrote in the 'Preface' to their 1925 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight''a sufficient apparatus for reading [these remarkable works] with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired'.
In 1975, accordingly, I contributed an article on 'Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings' to the volume of Essays in Memoriam edited by Mary Salu and R. T. Farrell, essentially an expansion of my 1970 script. In 1979, however, I followed Tolkien's track yet again, this time going to the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at the University of Leeds, which Tolkien had held more than fifty years before. This only increased the sense of professional piety mentioned above, and the result was the first edition of the present work, which appeared in 1982. I assumed at the time that that would be my last word on the subject. But since then, of course, the whole 'History of Middle-earth' has appeared, twelve volumes of Tolkien's unpublished drafts and stories edited by his son Christopher, as well as a volume of academic essays including some new material, and the 'reconstructed' editions of the Old English Exodus and Finnsburg poems: each separate publication a valuable source of information, but also of some trepidation to the writer who has committed himself to explaining 'how Tolkien worked' or 'what Tolkien must have been thinking'. A second edition of The Road to Middleearth, in 1992, accordingly tried to take some of this material into account.
A further thought, however, had slowly been growing upon me, first expressed in the article on 'tolkien as a Post-War Writer', delivered as a lecture at the 'tolkien Phenomenon' conference at the University of Turku, Finland, in 1992, and printed in the proceedings of that conference, Scholarship and Fantasy, edited by Keith J. Battarbee. This thought was that I had from 1970 always thought of Tolkien as a philologist, a professional ancestor, one of a line of historical linguists descended essentially from Jacob Grimm, of 'Grimm's Law' and 'Grimms' Fairy Tales'. I had in other words habitually seen him, to use the linguists' term, 'diachronically'. But language can and should also be viewed 'synchronically', and so could Tolkien. What happened if one considered him in the literary context of his time, the early to mid-twentieth century? My unconsidered assumption had been that he had no literary context, that he was a 'one-off ''certainly the impression one would get from reading any literary histories of the period which happened to mention him. But if one reflected on Orwell and William Golding, Vonnegut and T. H. White, CC. S.
Lewis and even Ursula Le Guin, several of them close to him in age or experience or date of publication, a different picture emerged: one of a group of (as I have called them) 'traumatised authors', writing fantasy, but voicing in that fantasy the most pressing and most immediately relevant issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century'questions of industrialised warfare, the origin of evil, the nature of humanity. This 'synchronic' view of Tolkien took shape in my book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). (Grammarians will note the absence of an article before the first word of the sub-title.) I hope that my two books now complement each other through their different approaches, though they present essentially the same explanations of the central works.
The present, third edition of The Road to Middle-earth naturally allows and obliges some reconsiderations, especially as a result of the new information contained in 'the History of Middle-earth'. On the whole I feel my first edition got off relatively lightly, confirmed as often as disproved. The rolling years and volumes have allowed me some clear hits: 'angel' as Tolkien- speech for messenger (see note 11 to chapter 5 below, and c.p. Treason of Isengard, p. 422), or the importance of Old Mercian (see below p. 123 and c.p. Sauron Defeated, p. 257). Of course when it comes to philology, a real discipline, one ought to get things right. I was pleased when Anders Stenström, staying with me in Leeds in 1984, found in a Leeds journal for 1922 an anonymous poem in Middle English which we concluded was by Tolkien; but almost as pleased when the emendations I proposed to the text as (mis)printed were confirmed by Christopher Tolkien from his father's manuscript (see the journal of the Swedish Tolkien Society, Arda, vols. 4 [for 1984] and 6 [for 1986], for the poem and Stenström's account of his search).
Meanwhile, some unmistakable wides have also been called: in my allegorisation of 'Leaf by Niggle', on p. 44 below, I should not have written 'his 'tree' = The Lord of the Rings', but have put down something much more extensive; despite p. 76, Sauron was not part of Tolkien's 'subsequent inspiration' but there already; while on p. 271, writing 'there is, in a way, no more of 'middle-earth' to consider' was just tempting Providence. Even more significantly, my 1982 discussion of 'depth' in Tolkien, pp. 308'17 below, was extensively answered by Christopher Tolkien a year later in his 'Foreword' to The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1, pp. 1' 5, with a further note in Part 2, p. 57.
It is clear that all my discussions of Tolkien were affected by reading his works (as almost everyone does) in order of publication, not order of composition. It is a temptation to try to remedy this retrospectively, but I have not done so. Studying Tolkien's fiction as it developed in his own mind, possible now as it was not in 1982, would be a different book. In general, then, I am happy to stand by what I published in 1982, and again in 1992, remembering the data I had, and expanding or updating wherever necessary.
Yet I do turn back to the letter Professor Tolkien wrote to me on 13 April 1970, charmingly courteous and even flattering as it was from one at the top of his profession to one then at the bottom ('I don't like to fob people off with a formal thanks . . . one of the nearest to my heart, or the nearest, of the many I have received . . . I am honoured to have received your attention'). And yet, and yet . . . What I should have realised'perhaps did half-realise, for I speak the dialect myself'was that this letter was written in the specialised politeness-language of Old Western Man, in which doubt and correction are in direct proportion to the obliquity of expression. The Professor's letter had invisible italics in it, which I now supply. "I amin agreement with nearly all that you say, and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper: especially about design as it appears or may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of actual composition'. It has taken me thirty years (and the perusal of fifteen volumes unpublished in 1970) to see the point of the italics.
Tolkien, however, closed his letter to me with the proverb: 'Need brooks no delay, yet late is better than never?' I can only repeat his saying, question-mark and all.
Copyright © 2003 by Tom Shippey.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Revised & enlarged edition (June 24, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618257608
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618257607
- Item Weight : 13.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #317,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
TOM SHIPPEY received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. In an academic teaching career lasting 43 years (1965-2008), he taught at six universities, including Oxford and Harvard. His first published article, more than fifty years ago, was “The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf” (1969), while his first published book was Old English Verse (1972). Since then, he has published well over a hundred academic articles, and more than twenty monographs and edited collections, notably (with Andreas Haarder) The Critical Heritage: Beowulf (1998). His most recent books are Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (2022)., and (with Leonard Neidorf) Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary (2023). He has also written more than 200 reviews on fantasy and science fiction for The Wall Street Journal, as well as many contributions, often on archaeology, to The London Review of Books. He is well known for books that have reached a wider community of readers outside academia, such as Laughing Shall I Die (2018) and his much-reprinted and often-translated books on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1981) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000).
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The Road to Middle Earth and Prof. Shippey’s other book, JRR Tolkien, Author of the Century, both cover the same material, but in slightly different ways. Each makes unique points, but overall, there is a lot of repetition. If you are only going to buy one of these books, I’d recommend “Road to Middle Earth” for its fuller exploration of philology, underlying themes and concepts in Tolkien’s works, defense against selected criticisms, and Tolkien’s early drafts and later revisions.
Both books start off with detailed explanation of philology. Dictionary definitions of the word fail to capture the scope and depth of the field that was Tolkien’s passion and which influenced his books so enormously. Through Prof. Shippey’s analysis, one glimpses a complexity to the novels that would otherwise go unnoticed. Tolkien was keenly intrigued by the origins and meanings of words. He saw in ancient texts, whether Old English, Old Norse, or Anglo-Saxon, hints of stories now forgotten, words that teased him with their obscure meanings. What were these lost legends? What did the unusual words mean and what did they imply about the world that gave rise to them? Tolkien wanted to create a mythology that could account for the concepts behind the words, a mythology that explained dwarves and elves, dragons and ents. Tolkien’s stories were often patterned after existing texts and records of actual cultures, but also reflected modern experiences.
A combat veteran of the first World War, Tolkien also witnessed the horrors brought by the second—extermination camps, genocide, bombing of civilian populations, weapons of mass destruction—things Prof. Shippey tells us were unthinkable to the Victorian culture Tolkien had grown up in. A sense that “something had gone horribly wrong” with the world could not fail to seep into the writings of those who lived through those times. Thus, one theme of “Lord of the Rings” was the nature of evil, and another that of sorrow. Even if the quest is achieved and Sauron defeated, the world cannot go back to what it was. Beautiful things of old will fade, some wounds will never heal.
Prof. Shippey focuses mostly on the Lord of the Rings, but also discusses Tolkien’s other works. The Hobbit is presented as primarily the clash between two cultures, the modern world represented by Bilbo and the hobbits, undeniably English of Victorian or Edwardian times, and the archaic world of the dwarves, colored by heroic sagas like Beowulf. The Silmarillien, the work of Tolkien’s heart and his lifelong project, is patterned after Genesis and the Fall; in this case, the Fall is that of the elves, whose sin is the desire to make things that reflect themselves. Tolkien’s short stories are not forgotten, but examined for the insights they give to Tolkien’s moods and perspectives.
Prof. Shippey’s ideas make for engaging reading. His responses to assorted Tolkien critics are icing on the cake. He makes a convincing case that many critical remarks are hypocritical, imperceptive, and elitist. He also suggests that Tolkien’s “elementary sensibilities—over patriotism, over euphemism, and especially over sex and marriage” were held against him and prevented a fair reading of his books. That Tolkien has appealed to a broad demographic range for decades shows clearly that people find his stories relevant even if they are fantasy and don’t conform to critics’ ideas of what constitutes “good literature.”
I came away from both “Author of the Century” and “Road to Middle Earth” with a greater appreciation for Tolkien’s books and a better understanding of how they came to be written. Do give one or both a try.
---Tolkien as Philologist: I had a casual understanding of Tolkien's love of language(s), but I had no idea that he was so capable in this field and incorporated so heavily insights from the entire history of Anglo-Saxon speech and writing (as well as other language-groups/families). Little words here and there will have entirely new depths and meaning for me :)
---Tolkien's relationship with modernity: I did not understand the magnitude with which Tolkien was interacting with (and bucking against!) the guild as a whole. I now appreciate Tolkien's accomplishment even more after learning how the guild (and foolish critics!) pigeon-holed him as "escapist" and unrealistic.
---Tolkien in light of the World Wars: Shippey highlights a bit of Tolkien's participation in WWI, the war that was supposed to "end all wars," as well as the ironic fact that his own sons would participate in the next great, global conflict, WWII. I had never considered Tolkien in relation to Vonnegut, Orwell, and other writers affected by the great wars, but that is certainly an integral part of his historical context.
---Anticipation of Christianity: Shippey convincingly demonstrates that LOTR is not exactly "Christian," but examines heroism and triumph in a pre-Christian world that shows some anticipation (perhaps expectation?) of the Christ event.
---Intertextuality: I was previously aware of Tolkien's use of older themes and material, but I had no idea that LOTR is so full of textual and thematic recapitulations and reincarnations. If you want to understand the literary roots of Tolkien's program in LOTR and related material, Shippey's book really shines in this area from cover to cover.
I could go on all day, but that doesn't seem the best course of action. Let me simply say that Shippey's masterpiece has both enhanced my reading of LOTR and informed me about the author of that great work. After reading Shippey's book, I love Tolkien and LOTR more than ever. I am so impressed with this volume that I now intend to read all Shippey's books on Tolkien. I'd like to thank him for such a vital contribution. This "fanboy" appreciates it dearly.
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The Road to Middle Earth, originally published in 1982, predates this trend. Although there were some earlier pioneers in Tolkien scholarship, such as Paul Kocher and Randel Helms, Shippey's book was the most thorough and detailed analysis when it appeared. Professor Shippey is a philologist and scholar of Anglo Saxon. He comes from the same intellectual discipline as Tolkien and is uniquely placed to understand him. His book has not been bettered as the most comprehensive, intelligent and thoughtful analysis of Tolkien.
Tolkien was a serious literary artist, not just another epic fantasy writer of dungeons and dragons. His work is full of beauty and profundity and was deeply influenced by northern mythologies and his Catholic faith. You have to know how to read Tolkien to get the most from him. Shippey's book still serves as the best guide for a deeper understanding of the legendarium.
Wer sich primär für die Geschichten von Mittelerde begeistert, nicht aber für die Bedeutung einzelner Ortsnamen oder lange Erläuterungen zum Streit zwischen den Fachgebieten an den Universitäten, wird einen zu großen Teil des Buches langweilig oder nicht relevant finden.