J. R. R. Tolkien's most familiar creation, the hobbits of Middle-earth, belonged only to his private world until September 1937. Before then they were known only to his children, his great friend C. S. Lewis, and a few other people. The print run of what...

The place in fantasy literature earned by J. R. R. Tolkien is indisputable. Tolkien is directly responsible for the rising popularity of fantasy literature in the late twentieth century. While authors such as Anne McCaffrey may dominate the scene of mode...

The driving passion of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's literary life was to make his "fairystories" so complete in description and detail, so varied in character and action, so expansive in philosophy and religion, as to be "real." He was in every way the pe...

"The Children of Hurin" (Houghton Mifflin, 313 pages, $26, or $75 for a deluxe slipcased edition) _ J.R.R. Tolkien: Six thousand years before the Fellowship of the Ring, long before anyone had even seen a Hobbit, the elves and men of Middle-earth quaked at the...

If "The Hobbit" is a lesser work than the Ring trilogy because it lacks the trilogy's high seriousness, the collection that makes up "The Silmarillion" stands below the trilogy because much of it contains only high seriousness; that is, here Tolkien cares more about the meaning and coherence of his myth than he does about these glories of the trilogy: rich characterization, imagistic brillance, powerfully imagined and detailed sense of place, and thrilling adventure. Not t...

The Silmarillion, despite the cuts that have evidently been made in the original materials, the selection and arrangement that have been imposed on them, remains an empty and pompous bore. There are epic elements in it, but they have been smothered by an overgrowth of genealogy. The narrative is not in itself very sturdy. Oaths, feuds, sword fights, lost cities, doomed lovers, and ill-starred friendships abound; but there is a dearth of characters and an oversupply of stereotypes. The familiar Tolkien divis...

I feel that Tolkien did not revise and add to [The Silmarillion] over the years as an escape, though it does seem in one way to belong to a deep, almost childlike need to fix and possess for ever a part of the English countryside (and in this sense it could be said to bear the same relation to his practical life as "The Wind in the Willows" bore to Kenneth Grahame's.) The clue to reading it can be found, perhaps, in Leaf by Niggle. The Silmarillion is the creation of what Tolkien called...