Tolkien's Lost Chaucer

by John M. Bowers

• ISBN13: 9780192580290
• ISBN10: 0192580299
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780192580306
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2019-09-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press Academic UK
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Summary

Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination.

Author Biography

John M. Bowers, Professor of English, University of Nevada Las Vegas

John M. Bowers is an internationally known scholar of medieval English literature with books on Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet. Educated at Duke, Virginia, and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he taught at Caltech and Princeton before settling at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Great Courses released his lecture series The Western Literary Canon in Context.

Table of Contents

1. Prologue: Concerning Chaucer
2. Unexpected Journeys
3. Four Chaucerians: Walter W. Skeat, Kenneth Sisam, George Gordon, and C.S. Lewis
4. Tolkien as Editor: Text and Glossary
5. The Chaucerian Incubus: The Notes
6. Tolkien as Chaucerian: The Reeve's Tale
7. Chaucer in Middle-Earth
Appendices
Works Cited