A Tolkien Compass

by Jared Lobdell (Editor), Tom Shippey (Foreword)

This guide to travels in Middle-Earth includes an original chapter by Tolkien himself, explaining the meaning and origin of the names in Lord of the Rings. Can hobbits be psychoanalyzed? Does Tolkien’s Christianity shine through his imitations of pagan legends? Do his books offer a useful guide to everyday life? These and many more questions are addressed in the eleven chapters of this book. Contributors analyze Gollum’s character transformation, the psychological journey of Bilbo, the regime set up by Saruman at the end of Lord of the Rings and its parallels to fascism, the books’ narrative technique, and Tolkien’s rich use of myth and symbol. This is an insightful book that will appeal to both old and new Tolkien fans.

Genres: Fantasy, Essays, Literature, Speculative Fiction, Fiction

164 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1977

Reviews

[Jon]

4 stars

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting little essay book from the 1970s! Didn't agree with everything, but neither did the collection's compiler (in a hilariously opinionated introduction). I did, however, disagree more with him than I did with the authors in their analyses.

[Angelica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Tolkien Compass is simultaneously interesting and very dull. But really, what did I expect from a bunch of literary analysis written in the 1970s? That’s not to say that the essays included in this book don’t make solid arguments—it’s that the arguments feel like old news. These may have been compelling points in the 70s, but current literary analysis has moved past simply examining the narrative structure of a story and onto issues that are at the front of the social consciousness, such as how Tolkien portrays issues of race, class, and imperialism, or even his work’s queer themes.

Although the subjects weren’t of huge interest to me, most of the essays in this collection are well-written and argue their points in a compelling way. I also commend the editor for both showcasing fan scholarship and being unbiased in his essay selection. However, there were several essays that really took their time getting to the point, and one that I just completely detest. Nobody else will have read this essay, but I’m going to rant about it because I’m mad.

“The Psychological Journey of Bilbo Baggins” is truly a time capsule of 20th century sexism. The author argues that The Hobbit is fundamentally a “coming-of-age” story in which Bilbo starts out immature and naive and ends up more mature and well-rounded. I agree with that. However, the author presents pre-adventure Bilbo as an overly-feminine homebody who would rather stay inside and cook than go on manly adventures. She poses Bilbo’s femininity as the cause of his “out of balance” nature, which of course must be corrected by proving his manhood through dangerous quests and battles. But why were femininity and masculinity even brought into this when they have no real bearing on the story? In my view, Bilbo starts out content, although pampered and naive due to his sheltered lifestyle. Through his quest, he learns about new cultures and problems in the wider world; he experiences hardship and death. His naivety is gone, replaced by a more mature, educated, and world-weary version of himself. In Hobbit culture, pre-adventure Bilbo is not portrayed as feminine, and post-adventure Bilbo is not portrayed as masculine. It’s the societal gender norms in our own world that made the essay’s author project fem./masc. characterization onto Bilbo. There was no need! And seriously, can we finally move past devaluing and delegitimizing femininity already? Okay, rant over.

Don't let this one essay sour the whole book for you, though. It's not all that bad.

[K.J. Cartmell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a series of academic lectures on the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. The essays are focused mostly on the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. My edition is from 1975, and the essays contained are older than that. I had the advantage over the writers in that I had read The Silmarillion, which was not published until 1977. I understood terms like 'Balrog of Morgoth' better than they did. The editor, Jared Lobdell, writes in the introduction that he included a few essays that he disagreed with, simply because he found them to be well-argued. That's not something we do here in the age of hyper-partisanship. I found his spirit refreshing.

The most interesting essay in the batch is the first one, Bonniejean Christensen's "Gollum's Character Transformation in The Hobbit." Christensen traces the changes in the manuscript regarding Gollum from the comic, friendly villain from the original 1938 version to the more sinister version Tolkien developed as he wrote The Lord of the Rings. I've never cared much for psychoanalysis, so Dorothy Matthews' Jungian study "The Psychological Journey of Bilbo Baggins" did little for me. I liked Richard West's and David Miller's studies of the structure of The Lord of the Rings much better.

One writer, Milo Kaufmann, seemed to have studied Tolkien's story "Leaf by Niggle" far more carefully than he did The Lord of the Rings. He puzzled over Gollum assisting Frodo and not betraying him. He mistook Gollum's vow as a simple promise (easily made, easily broken), overlooking that Gollum had sword allegiance to the Ringbearer "on the Precious." The evil ring itself was binding Gollum to his promise.

This book sat on my shelf for many years before I got around to it. (The receipt, preserved inside and which I used as a bookmark, notes the purchase date of May 11, 1999.) I enjoyed reading each thought-provoking essay, even those that I, like the editor himself, disagreed with.

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is occasionally good and interesting, but overall it's mostly pretty banal. However, Tom Shippey's foreword does a good job contextualizing all of this. This book is a compilation of essays (dating from the late-60s to the early-70s) representing some of the first published literary criticism of Tolkien's writings ever done. The fact that these essays all date well before the publication of the Silmarillion makes them even more interesting to me. However, because of this, these essays often feel less scholarly and more informal, with many of the observations being fairly obvious and boring.

Best essay: "The Interlace Structure of LotR" by Richard C. West. Tolkien's use of interlacing (the medieval literary technique often utilized in chivalric romances) is now well-documented, but it was very cool to see the (very first!) essay ever done on the topic! Also, to see just *how* well-documented this subject is, check out this Wikipedia page about "interlacing in LotR": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interla....

Runner-up: "Hell and the City: Tolkien and the Traditions of Western Literature" by Charles A. Huttar. Convincing analysis on Tolkien's use of the ol' "hero passing through the underworld" motif used throughout LotR.

[Michael Joosten · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of scholarly essays joined with the text of the "Guide to Names in The Lord of the Rings," A Tolkien Compass is a project that would not have been likely to exist in a later era. Post-dating Tolkien's death, but predating even the 1977 release of The Silmarillion, A Tolkien Compass sheds an interesting light on the scholarly work being written about Tolkien's work at a time when the full background mythology was not yet available. Much of it is still worth reading today and the parts that I found more doubtful could just as easily have been written now despite that.

[victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some very interesting ideas put forth in this collection of essays. Is the title not slightly misleading? I was hoping from the title there would be more focus on the moral compass. I also don't understand why The Hobbit receives such little attention; the size of the book shouldn't dictate the amount of research. Perhaps its existence as a children's book puts general literature scholars off, but are the academics in this book not also fighting against the same prejudices that class LOTR as "juvenile trash" and the fantasy genre as fairy stories for adults? It would be interesting to see more research in this area.

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing first-gen literary criticism! The quality of this work is top-notch and completely text-based, even when we take a secondary discipline like psychology and make connections. Obviously not everyone—not even every Tolkien fan—would enjoy a bunch of nerdy observations about a fantasy world, but if digging deep into Middle Earth sounds like a worthy quest, then this is for you. Click below for takeaways from each essay.

https://thatladywhoreadsalot.wordpres...

[Natalie Schloss · Rating 3 out of 5]

could do without the one essay of freudian nonsense lmao

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of essays about Tolkien's works. Not likely something I would read again, but nice to have it in the collection.

[Volsung]

A collection of essays on "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," first published in the 1970s -- as such, the essays are some of the earliest written on Tolkien, at a time before Tolkien's other writings, "The Silmarillion," "Unfinished Tales" and "History of Middle-Earth," were posthumously published, and for this reason they can at times be dated and incorrect. On the other hand, some of this is fundamental, bedrock scholarship on Tolkien, and still useful.

This new edition contains a foreword by T.A. Shippey, which does a good, thoughtfully-considered job of putting these essays in their context, and noting their merits and demerits.

On the other hand, it should ALSO be noted that a piece written by Professor Tolkien himself, and published in the original edition of the "Tolkien Compass," is NOT to be found in this new edition: the extremely valuable, highly enlightening "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings," published in the original 1975 edition of the "Tolkien Compass" but withdrawn from this present edition by the Tolkien Estate. (Shippey, in his foreword, speaks of "deploring the required omission" of it.) This work of Tolkien's is not only linguistically interesting, but also sheds a great deal of light on the etymologies and creative inspirations and processes behind Tolkien's varied nomenclature: and since Tolkien himself said that, for him, stories and concepts began with words and names, the absence of his "Guide to Names" in this volume is to be sorely missed.

[Soraia Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

No geral o livro é bastante interessante.

Faz-nos pensar em muitos aspectos sobre a escrita rica de Tolkien.
São feitas muitas metáforas e paralelismos em relação ao "inferno", "fascismo", "cristianismo", entre outros.

Mostra-se assim que a escrita Tolkiana é complexa e inteligente,conseguindo abordar uma série de temáticas e relacioná-las entre si num equilíbrio dinâmico.