Very sad news. I've not, thus far, gotten on terribly well with The Silmarillion, though I do plan to get further than a dozen pages into it one of these days. But I always felt that Christopher Tolkien was a wonderful custodian of Middle-earth and his father's legacy, as well as an incredibly important person in the annals of Tolkien scholarship. In fact, I'm not sure Tolkien scholarship would be a thing without his sorting and editing of his father's unfinished writings.

It was also Christopher Tolkien who drew those wonderful maps in The Lord of the Rings (following his father's instructions, of course), which have so fired my imagination since I first read the books as a teenager. So, for that alone I owe him thanks.

For the Tolkien fans in Michigan...Bilbo's a LOTR themed pizza place...



It's been operating since 1976.

Their website is here

-M

Can't answer any of those directly, but this article is a pretty good wrap up of what was known about the series through January of this year. It's set in the Second Age and set in and around Numenor, with both a young Galadriel and Sauron playing key roles in the narrative (but not leads).

My guess, the lead will be one of the men of Numenor, perhaps one we have seen in Tolkien's works, perhaps a new character introduced specifically for the show.

-M

I picked up this 1981 book about J.R.R. Tolkien's works by Katheryn F. Crabbe for the cheap, cheap price of £2.99...




It was placed in the biography section of the secondhand book shop where I found it, but actually it only features a brief biographical section. The majority of the book is literary criticism consisting of a series of essays, each one discussing Tolkien's major works (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion) and a final one focusing on secondary works, such as Farmer Giles of Ham and Tree and Leaf. I've only read about a quarter of the book so far, and while I don't agree with everything Crabbe has to say, she writes well and does make some rather interesting points. All in all, this is a nice little book and well worth the price I paid for it.

W.H.Auden did a lot of literary criticism of Tolkien over the years, most of it in periodicals like the NY Times supplements, not sure if it was ever collected. I remember finding a lot of stuff when I did my high school honors term paper on Tolkien in the spring of '84, but had to get a lot of it on microfilm and such at the time, and Auden's stuff sticks out in my memory, but it wasn't the only serious literary criticism out there at the time. Nearly 40 years later, I am sure there is more out there now, but a lot of it then was focused on the theory of the Ring as an allegory for "the bomb" and other Cold War tinged approaches.

-M

I'd say that Crabbe's book is a serious and scholarly attempt at criticism, yes. I don't always agree with her conclusions, mind you, but she suggests a number of thought provoking interpretations of events in The Hobbit (which is as far as I've gotten in the book so far). I was thinking of sharing some of her conclusions in this thread, just to open up a bit of discussion.




Randel Helms' Tolkien's World (1974), Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth (1982), Mark Eddy Smith's Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues : Exploring the Spiritual Themes of the Lord of the Rings (2001), and Brian Rosebury's Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (2003) are the ones that I know of, though I've never read any of them. Also, I'm pretty sure that the York Notes series of English literature study guides published books on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit back in the 1980s.





I agree with the bolded. Tolkien's works -- LOTRs especially! -- absolutely have allegorical elements in them. I don't care how much Tolkien insisted that they didn't.

Mind you, I don't subscribe to the "ring=the atom bomb" theory; that's much too neat and tidy to be true, I think. Clearly though, the devastating events of the War of the Ring were heavily influenced by Tolkien's own experiences on the First World War battlefields and, to a slightly lesser extent, World War II, which was raging as he wrote the LOTRs. For example, there's that moving passage in The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo says to Gandalf, "I wish it need not have happened in my time" in relation to the rise of Sauron and the war that is threatening to engulf Middle-earth, and the wizard replies, "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times." That's Tolkien's experiences of war and his own anxieties about the safety of his son Christopher, who was serving in North Africa with the RAF in WW2, coming through on the page right there.

Also, the main takeaway from the ending of The Return of the King, where Frodo is unable to find solace from all he had witnessed, even though the war was won, is absolutely an allegory for Tolkien's own feelings after World War I. A conflict in which he had lost all but one of his close friends.

Likewise, the destruction of the southern edge of Fangorn Forest by Saruman's forces is absolutely an allegory for the destruction of parts of rural Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire by the enncroachment of roads, houses and modern industry in the post-war era. The moral of the Ents' march to overthrow the evil wizard, being that if you f**k with the environment, there will be consequences!

Such allegorical readings of these parts of the story are absolutely justified in my view, even if they were unconcious on the part of the author.