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A review by jsjammersmith
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey
5.0
When Harold Bloom is forced to address the title of your book when writing a literary critique of The Lord of the Rings, regardless of the entire content of your book, you have truly accomplished something.
I've recently started digging into the discourse which surrounds J.R.R. Tolkien as I slowly plow through The Lord of the Rings for the second time in my life. I picked this book up along with a small mountain of books at my local library and began reading this one. It was a bit of a slog at first, but after a while I found I could read long passages without pausing or needing a break. Tom Shipley's work is important for Tolkien studies, because it contextualizes the entire body of Tolkien's work, while also understanding how the book operate and where they come from.
Shippey explores Tolkien's fascination with languages and ancient texts, showing how the man constantly derived inspiration from such works. Looking into the man's approach to writing, the names of his characters, the origins of the various monsters and creatures he borrowed or crafted on his own, and of course tackling the epic monster that is The Silmarillion Shippey finds not only the relevance of Tolkien's book, he manages to find the art. The final chapter in facts places The Lord of the Rings alongside works such as Ulysses and The Waste Land in order to assess the first claim of the book, namely, that Tolkien is the Author of the 20th century.
This is obviously a difficult argument especially when one remembers the great body of writers that existed during that century, who contributed their voices and prose. That list includes authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway just to name a few. I can't say for myself whether I would argue that Tolkien is the "Author of the century," however I do feel comfortable enough arguing for the fact that Tolkien established a universe that has been borrowed from, stolen from, parodied, and marveled at since it's publication in the 1950s.
Middle Earth has persisted in the face of critics, in spite of them, and the makers of the new technologies and innovations that have made this new age all owe a debt to Tolkien in some form or capacity. The "Old Professor" impacted the zeitgeist and we're still feeling it. So in the end Shippey does at least prove to his reader this.
I've recently started digging into the discourse which surrounds J.R.R. Tolkien as I slowly plow through The Lord of the Rings for the second time in my life. I picked this book up along with a small mountain of books at my local library and began reading this one. It was a bit of a slog at first, but after a while I found I could read long passages without pausing or needing a break. Tom Shipley's work is important for Tolkien studies, because it contextualizes the entire body of Tolkien's work, while also understanding how the book operate and where they come from.
Shippey explores Tolkien's fascination with languages and ancient texts, showing how the man constantly derived inspiration from such works. Looking into the man's approach to writing, the names of his characters, the origins of the various monsters and creatures he borrowed or crafted on his own, and of course tackling the epic monster that is The Silmarillion Shippey finds not only the relevance of Tolkien's book, he manages to find the art. The final chapter in facts places The Lord of the Rings alongside works such as Ulysses and The Waste Land in order to assess the first claim of the book, namely, that Tolkien is the Author of the 20th century.
This is obviously a difficult argument especially when one remembers the great body of writers that existed during that century, who contributed their voices and prose. That list includes authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway just to name a few. I can't say for myself whether I would argue that Tolkien is the "Author of the century," however I do feel comfortable enough arguing for the fact that Tolkien established a universe that has been borrowed from, stolen from, parodied, and marveled at since it's publication in the 1950s.
Middle Earth has persisted in the face of critics, in spite of them, and the makers of the new technologies and innovations that have made this new age all owe a debt to Tolkien in some form or capacity. The "Old Professor" impacted the zeitgeist and we're still feeling it. So in the end Shippey does at least prove to his reader this.