Summary

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.

Author Biography

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. He currently holds the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University in Missouri.

Acknowledgements and Abbreviations	ix
Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition	xv
1 'Lit. and Lang.'	1	(27)
2 Philological Inquiries	28	(27)
3 The Bourgeois Burglar	55	(39)
4 A Cartographic Plot	94	(41)
5 Interlacements and the Ring	135	(42)
6 'When All Our Fathers Worshipped Stocks and Stones'	177	(46)
7 Visions and Revisions	223	(48)
8 'On the Cold Hill's Side'	271	(18)
9 'The Course of Actual Composition'	289	(43)
Afterword	332	(11)
Appendix A: Tolkien's Sources: The True Tradition	343	(10)
Appendix B: Four 'Asterisk' Poems	353	(9)
Notes	362	(18)
Index	380

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Excerpts

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