I haven’t read (or even heard of) Shippey, but now I’m going to have to look him up. When I was castigating “scholarly” authors, I was thing of folks like William Ready, whose The Tolkien Relation is, as far as I can tell, useless. Its alternate titleis even worse: Understanding Tolkien.
Despite the rest of Maeglin’s post, I have to take issue with this. Just because it was written before the Silmarillion is no reason to ignore a work that gleans what it can from the available material.
I didn’t really mean that one should ignore it altogether. I think that time and money are better spent on Shippey. Carter is forced to spend a rather considerable portion of the book simply speculating. While it’s interesting and some of it is quality work, I think a newer reader might as well go straight to the most relevant and useful books.
The Road to Middle Earth, probably the best work of Tolkien criticism, was recently republished after many years of being out of print. Shippey wrote essentially a revised and updated version, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, with an eye to Tolkien’s massive popularity, unexplainable to so many critics. I don’t want to spoil his arguments, as they are both subtle and persuasive. It is less technical than Road, but both are manifestly readable.
Shippey’s credentials are impressive. He was a student of Old English who taught the same syllabus as Tolkien at Oxford, and even held his very chair.
Tolkien’s LOTR reminds me of Wagner’s ROTN.
And I do know Wagner’s version was not an original.
All I am saying is that in the ninteenth century Wagner paved the way for a fantasy story of a magical ring that could enable it’s wearer to rule the world.
Had this (popular) story not been part of the collective consciousness, it’s possible that the reading public would have greeted JRRT’s book with puzzlement.
Just my opinion though, we’ll never know.
I liked both BTW.
