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Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien
A major contribution to the growing body of Tolkien scholarship
With the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and forthcoming film version of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s popularity has never been higher. In Green Suns and Faërie, author Verlyn Flieger, one of world’s foremost Tolkien scholars, presents a selection of her best articles―some never before published―on a range of Tolkien topics.
The essays are divided into three distinct sections. The first explores Tolkien’s ideas of sub-creation–the making of a Secondary World and its relation to the real world, the second looks at Tolkien’s reconfiguration of the medieval story tradition, and the third places his work firmly within the context of the twentieth century and “modernist” literature. With discussions ranging from Tolkien’s concepts of the hero to the much-misunderstood nature of Bilbo’s last riddle in The Hobbit, Flieger reveals Tolkien as a man of both medieval learning and modern sensibility―one who is deeply engaged with the past and future, the regrets and hopes, the triumphs and tragedies, and above all the profound difficulties and dilemmas of his troubled century.
Taken in their entirety, these essays track a major scholar’s deepening understanding of the work of the master of fantasy. Green Suns and Faërie is sure to become a cornerstone of Tolkien scholarship.
With the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and forthcoming film version of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s popularity has never been higher. In Green Suns and Faërie, author Verlyn Flieger, one of world’s foremost Tolkien scholars, presents a selection of her best articles―some never before published―on a range of Tolkien topics.
The essays are divided into three distinct sections. The first explores Tolkien’s ideas of sub-creation–the making of a Secondary World and its relation to the real world, the second looks at Tolkien’s reconfiguration of the medieval story tradition, and the third places his work firmly within the context of the twentieth century and “modernist” literature. With discussions ranging from Tolkien’s concepts of the hero to the much-misunderstood nature of Bilbo’s last riddle in The Hobbit, Flieger reveals Tolkien as a man of both medieval learning and modern sensibility―one who is deeply engaged with the past and future, the regrets and hopes, the triumphs and tragedies, and above all the profound difficulties and dilemmas of his troubled century.
Taken in their entirety, these essays track a major scholar’s deepening understanding of the work of the master of fantasy. Green Suns and Faërie is sure to become a cornerstone of Tolkien scholarship.
340 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2011
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262 people want to read
About the author
Verlyn Flieger
51 books63 followersVerlyn Flieger is an author, editor, and professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She teaches courses in comparative mythology, medieval literature and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Flieger holds an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1977) from The Catholic University of America, and has been associated with the University of Maryland since 1976. In 2012, Flieger began teaching Arthurian studies at Signum University.
Flieger holds an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1977) from The Catholic University of America, and has been associated with the University of Maryland since 1976. In 2012, Flieger began teaching Arthurian studies at Signum University.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 17, 2015
An eclectic collection of essays on Tolkien - and, as such, of varying degrees of interest. However, there was enough here of interest to really pique my curiosity.
There was much to appreciate: the quote on pg. 188 about language and mythology. Mythology is language and language is mythology... the two are not opposite poles but opposite sides of the same coin... 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language equally depends on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition.
I'm sure that most people would find difficulty in agreeing with this, but the more I research words and names, the more I am convinced he's right.
Apparently, however, Flieger does not agree. On pg. 174, she says: The question of names is especially relevant to allegory because, in normal life, names do not mean anything: surnames especially, as we all know, are not chosen by come by an accident of birth; most people do not in fact know what their names "mean" (i.e. what they used to mean long ago, before they became just names.)
Perhaps it's badly expressed - but this comment comes across as suggesting names are not significant in everyday life, but the choices in story are. Since I hold that the names of characters in a story (particularly mythic novels of whatever genre) actually reflect those of the author, I find the statement almost naive. In the case of Tolkien, it's possible to trace a line from his inspiration to his name without much difficulty at all. And, although it's impossible to know if he realised the mythic/ linguistic link between Earendil and his own name, perhaps in the mystery of names which Flieger discusses in an extended way after pg. 245, he had some sense of it.
Cognates for names, pseudonyms, alternatives are always of interest: thus I'm grateful to know Kullervo (of the Kalevala) was known as Turo or Tuirikken (in Ingria) and as Tuiretuinen (in Archangel and Karelia). On the point in the paragraph above, note how Tuirikken sounds said very fast with an R -> L shift.
Other points of real interest were neck riddles (a nifty notion that begs to be used more explicitly in a fantasy novel) and the Corrigan. The latter, I think, explains the title of CS Lewis' The Silver Chair as I've suggested in my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
This is a goldmine of ideas for an aspiring fantasy writer. I just happened to have noted the ones that appealed to me! Tuck in and enjoy!
There was much to appreciate: the quote on pg. 188 about language and mythology. Mythology is language and language is mythology... the two are not opposite poles but opposite sides of the same coin... 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language equally depends on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition.
I'm sure that most people would find difficulty in agreeing with this, but the more I research words and names, the more I am convinced he's right.
Apparently, however, Flieger does not agree. On pg. 174, she says: The question of names is especially relevant to allegory because, in normal life, names do not mean anything: surnames especially, as we all know, are not chosen by come by an accident of birth; most people do not in fact know what their names "mean" (i.e. what they used to mean long ago, before they became just names.)
Perhaps it's badly expressed - but this comment comes across as suggesting names are not significant in everyday life, but the choices in story are. Since I hold that the names of characters in a story (particularly mythic novels of whatever genre) actually reflect those of the author, I find the statement almost naive. In the case of Tolkien, it's possible to trace a line from his inspiration to his name without much difficulty at all. And, although it's impossible to know if he realised the mythic/ linguistic link between Earendil and his own name, perhaps in the mystery of names which Flieger discusses in an extended way after pg. 245, he had some sense of it.
Cognates for names, pseudonyms, alternatives are always of interest: thus I'm grateful to know Kullervo (of the Kalevala) was known as Turo or Tuirikken (in Ingria) and as Tuiretuinen (in Archangel and Karelia). On the point in the paragraph above, note how Tuirikken sounds said very fast with an R -> L shift.
Other points of real interest were neck riddles (a nifty notion that begs to be used more explicitly in a fantasy novel) and the Corrigan. The latter, I think, explains the title of CS Lewis' The Silver Chair as I've suggested in my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
This is a goldmine of ideas for an aspiring fantasy writer. I just happened to have noted the ones that appealed to me! Tuck in and enjoy!
April 3, 2012
A must have for any Tolkien lover. While I had read some of these articles in different publications - having the complete breath of Dr Flieger's work on Tolkien is an incredible resource to have. Her new chapter on Tolkien, Kalevala, and The Story of Kullervo is one of the best treatments I have read of Tolkien's passion for the Finnish myth cycle of the Kalevala and how it "set the rocket" of in the story of the Silmarillion. One of my favorite chapters is Gilson, Smith and Baggins. Dr Flieger is one of my Tolkien academic role models and this volume will have pride of place next to another on of my Tolkien academic role models, Professor Tom Shippey's volume of essays Roots and Branches.
Each chapter of this book is a pure mathom of Tolkien exploration and adventure!
Read
January 13, 2026Fantasy and Reality: Tolkien’s World and the Fairy-story Essay
In introducing students to the fiction of JRRT I often use to begin by quoting what I always felt was an especially relevant statement from his essay “On Fairy-Stories” that ‘ fantasy depends on reality as nonsense depends upon sense.’ Not long ago, I looked through the essay to verify the quote…. It wasn’t there. What I did find to the considerable embarrassment of my memory was that my often quoted victim wasn’t what JRRT wrote at all what he actually said was much richer and much more complex than my snappy little one liner gave him credit for:
‘ for creative Fantasy is found upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of a fact, but not a slave slavery to it. So upon logic was found at the nonsense that display itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll.’
The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth
“[The Silmarillion] it’s nothing less than an attempt to justify God‘s creation of an imperfect world filled with suffering, loss, and grief.
- John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War
[This essay is a really in-depth examination of Tolkien’s incorporation of fate - Wyrd - versus free will across his works, particularly The Silmarillion (Fëanor and the Silmarils), The Hobbit (Bilbo and the Ring) and LotR (Aragorn and the Falls of Rauros)]
“In the process of creating his mythology, Tolkien did more than color in a blank space; he invented a cosmology whose operation depends on a paradox, a challenging teleological contradiction.
“The contradiction resides in the simultaneous presence in his invented world of two opposing principles, Fate and Free Will, imagined as operating side-by-side, sometimes in conflict sometimes interdependent…
“The difficulty lies not with free will, but with fate. Readers who assume (and most do) the characters in Tolkien’s invented world are free to choose, find the opposing notion that they are predestined hard to accept. And the idea that both principles are concurrently at work (and apparently at odds) is a concept, even harder to encompass….
“He specifically objected to “ the Arthurian world” as a candidate for England’s myth since it “explicitly contained the Christian religion.”
“‘Myth and fairy-story,’ he wrote, ‘ must as all art reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error) but not explicit not in the known form of the primary ‘ real’ world. (Letters 144). The operative word in this statement is art. Tolkien was writing fiction not the theology.
“‘There cannot be any’ story’ without a fall— all stories are ultimately about the fall… yet he was also aware that in western Judeo Christian tradition, a fall inevitably implies the Fall— the Eden story, the disobedience in the garden, God‘s punishment and humanities explosion from Paradise into a world of pain and suffering
Both the truth, and the human experience from which it derived— that the world is flawed full of surprises and seldom works the way we want it to— are dependent on and generative of the words used to express them. The names for things, as Tolkien well knew, operate to create the very world they described. in the present context such catch words as luck, accident chance, happenstance, coincidence, fate, destiny all seek to name and thus to capture an aspect of human experience, the ways in which we categorize the way things happen
Bosworth-Tollers Anglo-Saxon dictionary glosses wryd related to the old English verb weorôan “to happen or become”… linguistically related is old Icelandic Urô described in Snorri’s Edda as one of the three Norns or Fates, the others named as Verǒandi and Skuld. Urǒ and Verǒandi are respectively, the past and present participle of old Icelandic verb veroa…”to become, happen, come to pass”…with the more specific meaning one must, needs, as forced, is obliged to do so….further defines Verǒandi (capitalized) as the Being, the Weird, the name of one of the Norns…while Skuld…implies “that which will have happened”… related to modern English ”shall” or “should,“ it is closer in meaning to “ must”…
Fate the word is frequently used to translate both “Wyrd” and “Urǒ”… is defined as…” disposed, force, principle or power that predetermined…And finally “doom”, which in modern English has negative connotations, is derived from Anglo-Saxon dómit means simply “judgment, judicial sentence, decree”
As noted earlier, doom is to ride from Anglo-Saxon dòm. Wow its primary meaning is ‘I. judgment, decree ordinance, law,’ it also has a rare usage listed as ‘IV. Will, free will, choice, option.’ Thus Fëanor’s impractical choice to deny Yavanna the Silmarils, and his consequent oath to pursue Morgoth bring on the choice of the Noldor to follow him, which leads to their Doom. Though that doom is spoken in the voice of Mandos, it is the Noldor who in effect doom themselves.
I mentioned earlier that the words God, Heaven, Grace, Paradise, Providence, Salvation, Damnation, make no appearance in the mythology. Nor does the word Redemption.”
Tolkien and the Idea of the Book
[well, yes, of course: Bilbo as author transmitting these histories and stories to us].
Tolkien on Tolkien: On Fairy-stories,, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings
Examples from The Hobbit where Tolkien didn’t follow what became his own guidelines for sub-creating his secondary world
When is a Fairy Story a Faërie Story: Smith of Wootton Major
Faërie… his precedent was medieval. The word appeared in Gowers Confessio Amantis (c. 1450), Chaucer’s “Wyfe of Bath’s Tale (late 14th century), Sir Orfeo (c.1350), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
For as Tolkien said of Beowulf, ‘ myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.’ (MC 15)
The Footsteps of Ælfwine
The presence of elves in the world are tested here by numerous mentioned in Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry…Norse alf, Anglo-Saxon ælf…Ælfwine… combining for ‘elf’ with the word for ‘friend’… must… have had a literal meaning, describing or alluding to one who was in actuality an elf-friend.
Responding to Frodo’s Elvish greeting…Gildor replies ‘Hail, Elf-friend.’…Goldberry says to Frodo, ‘I see you are an elf-friend… however it is not until the Council of Elrond that we discover that the phrase has a history beyond the present moment….Elrond tells Frodo, ‘though all the mighty elf-friends of old, Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin and Beren himself, your seat should be among them.’ What seemed at first a polite form of address later a complimentary epithet can now be seen as the sign of election to a special company. Nonetheless, for the first 20 years of the stories publication, there was a little evidence…. to indicate to readers that the phrase carry any extra meaning beyond the context of the immediate narrative. Not until The Silmarillion was published in 1977 did the figures of Beren and Túrin and Húrin come truly to life and take their proper place in the legendarium
The Curious Incident of the Dream at the Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth
The principle of reincarnation can be linked to a larger thing running through Tolkien’s major works that the past is not just at tributary to the present but formative of it and immediate in it
Tolkien repeatedly underscores the immediacy of time past in time present and time future by introducing prophecies old songs and legends into his narrative as well as personal recollections of events in history, both near and distant
The memory that overtakes Merry is neither that of a Barrow wight nor a man of Carn Dûm, but rather someone who was ‘worsted’ indeed slain by a man of Carn Dûm, stabbed through his heart with a spear.
Finally, however, the question remains why is the episode included in the story? what is its purpose?… the immediate influences I suggest, were the two science fiction stories that bracket this portion of the book, the first written in 1936 [“The Lost Road”] the year before he began work on Lord of the rings and the second composed in 1945-46 [“The Notions Club Papers”] after Tolkien’s writing of the Barrow-downs chapters. time-travel in dream-memory were still in his mind as he was.
The episode of Merry’s dream at the barrow remains then the most irregular, least explicable, and least historically prepared for event in the entire book, singular in its mystery and significant in its power to bridge, passed and press
Part Two: Tolkien in Tradition
Tolkien’s Wild Men From Medieval to Modern
Tolkien’s more complex versions of the figure exceed the convention by their lengthier treatment and fuller development as character characters. I will offer 3 1/2 examples. My first example is an unlikely one: Strider, the guide and rescuer of The Hobbits , who becomes Aragorn the uncrowned king… he has the requisite characteristics to fit him into the outlaw Titan… sitting alone in the corner of the common room at Bree… he has made to seem just one among many strangers men on the move, squint-eyed, ill-favored types…
The next example is Túrin Turambar, the hapless protagonist of one of the most poignant episodes in Tolkien’s mythology… based on Kullervo, an equally hapless character from the Finnish Kalevala,… what gives Túrin a special poignance as a wild man is that his tragedy need not have happened. What he becomes makes us constantly aware of how different he might have been…Tolkien has made him a paradigm of modern alienation a self exiled outsider, driven by emotions He does not understand ,willful and conflicted, coming into painful self-awareness only at the end of his life… a telling clue to Túrin’s psychological wild man status comes with his most exasperating and revealing quirk. He keeps changing his name as if he had no real sense of self, taking on a succession of abstract identities, each of which is a marker of his alien nation from himself in the world around him.
My next example is the most complex in both the most and the least typical..Gollum, Tolkien’s Mr. brilliant creation, a medieval wild hobbit with distinctly modern overtones. Gollum is also psychotic, driven mad by his obsession with the ring. It is just here, however, that Tolkien’s maternity takes over Gollum’s madness is distinctly of the 20th century rather than the Middle Ages…
My half example part of Gollum and yet separate from him, is Tolkien’s most modern most moving depiction of the wild man it is, of course, the least likely wild man in the book—Frodo. . We see also the potential Gollum in Frodo as well as his struggle against being holy taken over by the madness that has wasted and destroyed that lost creature
The Concept of the Hero - Frodo and Aragorn
“ clearly for Tolkien, the monster figure is at the heart of the matter… Aragorn fights orcs but not in single combat
, and only as part of a larger battle; Sam fights Shelob; Gandalf fights the Balrog; the greatest evil is Sauron… but he has never seen…
I suggest that Tolkien’s central monster-figure is so natural a part of the material world that he goes, largely unrecognized as such. He is Gollum, the twisted broken, outcast, hobbit, whose man-like shape and dragon-like greed, combined both the Beowulf kinds of monster in one figure.
To see Gollum as a manlike monster, we must first accept his relationship to humanity… there we have him, of hobbit kind, murderer, outcast, maddened by Reminders of Joy he cannot share. He is even cannibalistic. … the parallel with Grendel the man-eating monster of Beowulf is unmistakable. Grendel it is OutKast, a wanderer in the waste, of the race of Cain, the first murderer, and he cannot hear the sound of the harp and the song of creation
Bilbo’s Neck Riddle
Is ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ a proper Riddle or isn’t it?…
Despite the fact that it is contrary to custom, and that the stories narrator disallows it, despite the fact that the Oscar himself is unaware of it, Bilbo’s last question is a legitimate. They’re very special kind of Riddle. Is a neck riddle.
What is a neck riddle?…
… questions that are unanswerable except by the asker, who thus ‘ saves his neck by the Riddle for the judge or executioner has promised release and exchange for a riddle that cannot be guessed.’
Allegory Versus Bounce: Smith of Wootton Major
“ The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends. [MC15]; for “ myth is alive at once and in all parts and dies before it can be dissected.”
“Roger Lancelyn Green’s review…warned against looking too hard for a message in what was essentially a fairy tale, writing that, ‘to seek for meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.’”
…I really like that T.A. Shippey’s rebuttal to Flieger’s dismantling of his prior position is included.]
Tolkien and Lönnrot as Mythmakers
“He was familiar with the Icelandic Eddas and sagas;
with the Germanic history-cum myth of the Huns and Burgunians;
with the Irish hero tales;
the Welsh Mabinogion
and the complex and comprehensive Autherian ‘Matter of Britain’
Brittany and Wales in Middle-Earth
My second area of Celtic influence this from Wales concerns language. Two major invented languages are spoken in Middle-earth—Quenya and Sandarin. Book these languages were based on real world languages, Quenya on Finnish and Sindarin in Welsh.
In introducing students to the fiction of JRRT I often use to begin by quoting what I always felt was an especially relevant statement from his essay “On Fairy-Stories” that ‘ fantasy depends on reality as nonsense depends upon sense.’ Not long ago, I looked through the essay to verify the quote…. It wasn’t there. What I did find to the considerable embarrassment of my memory was that my often quoted victim wasn’t what JRRT wrote at all what he actually said was much richer and much more complex than my snappy little one liner gave him credit for:
‘ for creative Fantasy is found upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of a fact, but not a slave slavery to it. So upon logic was found at the nonsense that display itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll.’
The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth
“[The Silmarillion] it’s nothing less than an attempt to justify God‘s creation of an imperfect world filled with suffering, loss, and grief.
- John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War
[This essay is a really in-depth examination of Tolkien’s incorporation of fate - Wyrd - versus free will across his works, particularly The Silmarillion (Fëanor and the Silmarils), The Hobbit (Bilbo and the Ring) and LotR (Aragorn and the Falls of Rauros)]
“In the process of creating his mythology, Tolkien did more than color in a blank space; he invented a cosmology whose operation depends on a paradox, a challenging teleological contradiction.
“The contradiction resides in the simultaneous presence in his invented world of two opposing principles, Fate and Free Will, imagined as operating side-by-side, sometimes in conflict sometimes interdependent…
“The difficulty lies not with free will, but with fate. Readers who assume (and most do) the characters in Tolkien’s invented world are free to choose, find the opposing notion that they are predestined hard to accept. And the idea that both principles are concurrently at work (and apparently at odds) is a concept, even harder to encompass….
“He specifically objected to “ the Arthurian world” as a candidate for England’s myth since it “explicitly contained the Christian religion.”
“‘Myth and fairy-story,’ he wrote, ‘ must as all art reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error) but not explicit not in the known form of the primary ‘ real’ world. (Letters 144). The operative word in this statement is art. Tolkien was writing fiction not the theology.
“‘There cannot be any’ story’ without a fall— all stories are ultimately about the fall… yet he was also aware that in western Judeo Christian tradition, a fall inevitably implies the Fall— the Eden story, the disobedience in the garden, God‘s punishment and humanities explosion from Paradise into a world of pain and suffering
Both the truth, and the human experience from which it derived— that the world is flawed full of surprises and seldom works the way we want it to— are dependent on and generative of the words used to express them. The names for things, as Tolkien well knew, operate to create the very world they described. in the present context such catch words as luck, accident chance, happenstance, coincidence, fate, destiny all seek to name and thus to capture an aspect of human experience, the ways in which we categorize the way things happen
Bosworth-Tollers Anglo-Saxon dictionary glosses wryd related to the old English verb weorôan “to happen or become”… linguistically related is old Icelandic Urô described in Snorri’s Edda as one of the three Norns or Fates, the others named as Verǒandi and Skuld. Urǒ and Verǒandi are respectively, the past and present participle of old Icelandic verb veroa…”to become, happen, come to pass”…with the more specific meaning one must, needs, as forced, is obliged to do so….further defines Verǒandi (capitalized) as the Being, the Weird, the name of one of the Norns…while Skuld…implies “that which will have happened”… related to modern English ”shall” or “should,“ it is closer in meaning to “ must”…
Fate the word is frequently used to translate both “Wyrd” and “Urǒ”… is defined as…” disposed, force, principle or power that predetermined…And finally “doom”, which in modern English has negative connotations, is derived from Anglo-Saxon dómit means simply “judgment, judicial sentence, decree”
As noted earlier, doom is to ride from Anglo-Saxon dòm. Wow its primary meaning is ‘I. judgment, decree ordinance, law,’ it also has a rare usage listed as ‘IV. Will, free will, choice, option.’ Thus Fëanor’s impractical choice to deny Yavanna the Silmarils, and his consequent oath to pursue Morgoth bring on the choice of the Noldor to follow him, which leads to their Doom. Though that doom is spoken in the voice of Mandos, it is the Noldor who in effect doom themselves.
I mentioned earlier that the words God, Heaven, Grace, Paradise, Providence, Salvation, Damnation, make no appearance in the mythology. Nor does the word Redemption.”
Tolkien and the Idea of the Book
[well, yes, of course: Bilbo as author transmitting these histories and stories to us].
Tolkien on Tolkien: On Fairy-stories,, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings
Examples from The Hobbit where Tolkien didn’t follow what became his own guidelines for sub-creating his secondary world
When is a Fairy Story a Faërie Story: Smith of Wootton Major
Faërie… his precedent was medieval. The word appeared in Gowers Confessio Amantis (c. 1450), Chaucer’s “Wyfe of Bath’s Tale (late 14th century), Sir Orfeo (c.1350), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
For as Tolkien said of Beowulf, ‘ myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.’ (MC 15)
The Footsteps of Ælfwine
The presence of elves in the world are tested here by numerous mentioned in Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry…Norse alf, Anglo-Saxon ælf…Ælfwine… combining for ‘elf’ with the word for ‘friend’… must… have had a literal meaning, describing or alluding to one who was in actuality an elf-friend.
Responding to Frodo’s Elvish greeting…Gildor replies ‘Hail, Elf-friend.’…Goldberry says to Frodo, ‘I see you are an elf-friend… however it is not until the Council of Elrond that we discover that the phrase has a history beyond the present moment….Elrond tells Frodo, ‘though all the mighty elf-friends of old, Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin and Beren himself, your seat should be among them.’ What seemed at first a polite form of address later a complimentary epithet can now be seen as the sign of election to a special company. Nonetheless, for the first 20 years of the stories publication, there was a little evidence…. to indicate to readers that the phrase carry any extra meaning beyond the context of the immediate narrative. Not until The Silmarillion was published in 1977 did the figures of Beren and Túrin and Húrin come truly to life and take their proper place in the legendarium
The Curious Incident of the Dream at the Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth
The principle of reincarnation can be linked to a larger thing running through Tolkien’s major works that the past is not just at tributary to the present but formative of it and immediate in it
Tolkien repeatedly underscores the immediacy of time past in time present and time future by introducing prophecies old songs and legends into his narrative as well as personal recollections of events in history, both near and distant
The memory that overtakes Merry is neither that of a Barrow wight nor a man of Carn Dûm, but rather someone who was ‘worsted’ indeed slain by a man of Carn Dûm, stabbed through his heart with a spear.
Finally, however, the question remains why is the episode included in the story? what is its purpose?… the immediate influences I suggest, were the two science fiction stories that bracket this portion of the book, the first written in 1936 [“The Lost Road”] the year before he began work on Lord of the rings and the second composed in 1945-46 [“The Notions Club Papers”] after Tolkien’s writing of the Barrow-downs chapters. time-travel in dream-memory were still in his mind as he was.
The episode of Merry’s dream at the barrow remains then the most irregular, least explicable, and least historically prepared for event in the entire book, singular in its mystery and significant in its power to bridge, passed and press
Part Two: Tolkien in Tradition
Tolkien’s Wild Men From Medieval to Modern
Tolkien’s more complex versions of the figure exceed the convention by their lengthier treatment and fuller development as character characters. I will offer 3 1/2 examples. My first example is an unlikely one: Strider, the guide and rescuer of The Hobbits , who becomes Aragorn the uncrowned king… he has the requisite characteristics to fit him into the outlaw Titan… sitting alone in the corner of the common room at Bree… he has made to seem just one among many strangers men on the move, squint-eyed, ill-favored types…
The next example is Túrin Turambar, the hapless protagonist of one of the most poignant episodes in Tolkien’s mythology… based on Kullervo, an equally hapless character from the Finnish Kalevala,… what gives Túrin a special poignance as a wild man is that his tragedy need not have happened. What he becomes makes us constantly aware of how different he might have been…Tolkien has made him a paradigm of modern alienation a self exiled outsider, driven by emotions He does not understand ,willful and conflicted, coming into painful self-awareness only at the end of his life… a telling clue to Túrin’s psychological wild man status comes with his most exasperating and revealing quirk. He keeps changing his name as if he had no real sense of self, taking on a succession of abstract identities, each of which is a marker of his alien nation from himself in the world around him.
My next example is the most complex in both the most and the least typical..Gollum, Tolkien’s Mr. brilliant creation, a medieval wild hobbit with distinctly modern overtones. Gollum is also psychotic, driven mad by his obsession with the ring. It is just here, however, that Tolkien’s maternity takes over Gollum’s madness is distinctly of the 20th century rather than the Middle Ages…
My half example part of Gollum and yet separate from him, is Tolkien’s most modern most moving depiction of the wild man it is, of course, the least likely wild man in the book—Frodo. . We see also the potential Gollum in Frodo as well as his struggle against being holy taken over by the madness that has wasted and destroyed that lost creature
The Concept of the Hero - Frodo and Aragorn
“ clearly for Tolkien, the monster figure is at the heart of the matter… Aragorn fights orcs but not in single combat
, and only as part of a larger battle; Sam fights Shelob; Gandalf fights the Balrog; the greatest evil is Sauron… but he has never seen…
I suggest that Tolkien’s central monster-figure is so natural a part of the material world that he goes, largely unrecognized as such. He is Gollum, the twisted broken, outcast, hobbit, whose man-like shape and dragon-like greed, combined both the Beowulf kinds of monster in one figure.
To see Gollum as a manlike monster, we must first accept his relationship to humanity… there we have him, of hobbit kind, murderer, outcast, maddened by Reminders of Joy he cannot share. He is even cannibalistic. … the parallel with Grendel the man-eating monster of Beowulf is unmistakable. Grendel it is OutKast, a wanderer in the waste, of the race of Cain, the first murderer, and he cannot hear the sound of the harp and the song of creation
Bilbo’s Neck Riddle
Is ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ a proper Riddle or isn’t it?…
Despite the fact that it is contrary to custom, and that the stories narrator disallows it, despite the fact that the Oscar himself is unaware of it, Bilbo’s last question is a legitimate. They’re very special kind of Riddle. Is a neck riddle.
What is a neck riddle?…
… questions that are unanswerable except by the asker, who thus ‘ saves his neck by the Riddle for the judge or executioner has promised release and exchange for a riddle that cannot be guessed.’
Allegory Versus Bounce: Smith of Wootton Major
“ The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends. [MC15]; for “ myth is alive at once and in all parts and dies before it can be dissected.”
“Roger Lancelyn Green’s review…warned against looking too hard for a message in what was essentially a fairy tale, writing that, ‘to seek for meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.’”
…I really like that T.A. Shippey’s rebuttal to Flieger’s dismantling of his prior position is included.]
Tolkien and Lönnrot as Mythmakers
“He was familiar with the Icelandic Eddas and sagas;
with the Germanic history-cum myth of the Huns and Burgunians;
with the Irish hero tales;
the Welsh Mabinogion
and the complex and comprehensive Autherian ‘Matter of Britain’
Brittany and Wales in Middle-Earth
My second area of Celtic influence this from Wales concerns language. Two major invented languages are spoken in Middle-earth—Quenya and Sandarin. Book these languages were based on real world languages, Quenya on Finnish and Sindarin in Welsh.
May 20, 2019
Best essays:
Frodo and Aragorn
The Unhealed Wounds of Frodo Baggins
Bilbo’s Neck Riddle
Eco-conflict in Middle Earth
Some of the essays I thought duds but I’m a fake tolkien fan who only really cares about frodo tbh.
Frodo and Aragorn
The Unhealed Wounds of Frodo Baggins
Bilbo’s Neck Riddle
Eco-conflict in Middle Earth
Some of the essays I thought duds but I’m a fake tolkien fan who only really cares about frodo tbh.
December 21, 2014
Read parts - insightful, critical literary analysis of Tolkien that is fresh and accessible.
January 4, 2021
4.5/5.
August 29, 2023
Read selected essays
May 1, 2024
Tom Shippey is father and Verlyn Flieger is mother!!
September 16, 2024
In particular I loved the essays in Part 2: Tolkien in Tradition. Excellent read.
January 2, 2016
I didn't like this quite as much as Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, because as it's a collection of essays, there's a certain amount of repetition of theme and detail. However, it's still very much worth reading if you're interested in Tolkien scholarship at all.
February 9, 2014
This book of Dr. Flieger's essays contains excellent ideas and new connections within the Tolkien canon, and many essays compare Tolkien's themes to earlier literature. Flieger clear and engaging writing is a pleasure to read for us Tolkien fans.
April 15, 2012
I had the pleasure of meeting the author and the book is just as accessible and interesting as Flieger herself. :)
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