The Road to Middle-earth

by Tom Shippey

The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey’s classic work, now revised in paperback, explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien’s professional background led him to write The Hobbit and how he created a timeless charm for millions of readers. Examining the foundation of Tolkien’s most popular work, The Lord of the Rings, Shippey also discusses the contribution of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales to Tolkien’s great myth cycle, showing how Tolkien’s more “difficult” books can be fully appreciated. He goes on to examine the remarkable twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, written by Tolkien’s son and literary heir Christopher Tolkien, which traces the creative and technical processes by which Middle-earth evolved.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Literary Criticism, Mythology, History, Literature, Books About Books

532 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".

Shippey's education and academic career have in several ways retraced those of Tolkien: he attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, became a professional philologist, occupied Tolkien's professorial chair at the University of Leeds, and taught Old English at the University of Oxford to the syllabus that Tolkien had devised.

He has received three Mythopoeic Awards and a World Fantasy Award. He participated in the creation of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, assisting the dialect coaches. He featured as an expert medievalist in all three of the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of the trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy.

Also publishes as T.A. Shippey.

Reviews

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

J. R. R. Tolkien was better at transporting readers into a living, breathing, fully-realized fictional reality than almost any other author who has ever lived. While for most readers the pleasure of the stories themselves is sufficient alone, more hardcore aficionados like myself want to see the deep roots of such a remarkable creation. How did he do it? Shippey's work delves deeply into Tolkien's inspirations, artistic obsessions, and creative process. It will greatly satisfy the sort of person who finds the LOTR appendices as interesting as the plot they've just finished. There's an infamous dropoff in readership from The Hobbit, to The Lord of the Rings, to The Silmarillion, and then to the likes of Unfinished Tales, but for the small group of fans who not only sympathize with but valorize Tolkien's decades of effort with his legendarium simply to create plausible settings for his artificial languages, this book provides an incredibly interesting account of how Tolkien's attitudes toward the power of words shaped his characters, stories, settings, and indeed his entire thematic repertoire. I thought I was a dedicated fan (although to my shame I have not read any of the 12 posthumous volumes of The History of Middle-Earth), but Shippey has read every one of Tolkien's works so many times that he enhanced my appreciation for the under-the-hood craftsmanship in the Tolkienverse more than I thought possible.

The short answer to "why is Tolkien so great?" is that he had a clear vision (or rather a series of visions), he made sure his plots and his themes lined up, and he put a ton of work into what for most authors would seem like irrelevant background details. Tolkien really loved a lot of old epic poetry that his fellow linguists were lukewarm about, but that turned out to provide excellent templates for modern stories even across the vast cultural gap between modern England and its millennium-old antecedents. Shippey doesn't use any film analogies, but as he was discussing how Tolkien studied Beowulf carefully in order to produce similar effects with his own works, I was reminded how a lot of the better genre films put modern material atop older structures in order to take advantage of people's love of both the familiar and the new. So, for example, successful science fiction films mix the genre with noir as in Blade Runner, with Westerns as in Star Trek, with samurai/swashbuckers as in Star Wars, etc. Tolkien used the format of the children's adventure story in the The Hobbit as a comforting framework for his "modern mythology", upgrading to a more adult literary style in The Lord of the Rings, and then dispensing entirely with contemporary narrative formats in his drafts for The Silmarillion, which would have been nearly impenetrable to lightweights and casuals even if he'd been able to finish it.

While Shippey does use Tolkien's own writings as primary sources, and his acknowledged inspirations as secondary material, the book is mainly concerned with tracing Tolkien's own attitudes towards his work; not merely wondering why Tolkien dedicated so much of his life to this fantasy world, but how he made it so convincing to others. The storytelling urge is nearly universal in young children, but most people's fantasies are not very interesting to other people, and nearly all of us eventually turn our mental narrative generation machinery over to more prosaic concerns due to the pressures of adulthood. One of the things that made Tolkien unique was his determination to maintain his creative processes for his whole life; there have of course been countless novelists in history, but Tolkien's novels stand apart from most other writers by his decision to ground them in linguistics, to most people perhaps the dullest soil possible to sprout a fantasy world from. Even his colleagues, who may have been fellow linguists but not true philologists ("philology" = "love of learning"), certainly did not appreciate languages aesthetically to the same degree, and were often skeptical or dismissive of the power of words, leaving Tolkien as one of the very few linguists who appreciated the ancient epic poetry as poetry. Shippey quotes a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher:

"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what (The Lord of the Rings) was all about, and whether it was an 'allegory.' And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn' omentielmo, and that the phrase long antedated the book. I never heard any more."

Even today, Tolkien's works seem to stand above the obligatory constellations of fanfiction that always surround seemingly similar media franchises like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. This is because fanfiction authors, even the most talented ones, naturally tend to focus on the appeal of the characters, and in Tolkien's works the interactions of the characters are only one of the things going on. The chapter "The Bourgeois Burglar" in particular is a fascinating exploration of just how hard Tolkien worked to ensure that the language and vocabulary of the hobbits, men, dwarves, and so on was congruent with their nature, which complemented the alternately comic and dramatic tone of their interactions with each other, and how the broader thematic concerns then are revealed by the plot in turn. In the chapter "Interlacements and the Ring" Shippey extends this deep alignment to Tolkien's religious explorations, handled far more subtly here than in C. S. Lewis' otherwise comparable Narnia series. Is evil active or passive, Manichean or Boethian, a force unto itself or a mere turning away from the good? Is the Ring a pagan symbol, and the cosmology of Middle-Earth therefore heretical? Tolkien spent a huge amount of time ensuring that his creation worked consistently within itself and with the pre-Christian heroic motifs underneath it without openly contradicting Christian doctrine, to the extent possible. He was not immune to the problems of internal contradiction, which partially explains his immense difficulties finishing his later works, but perhaps any truly great work inevitably expands beyond the point where all its pieces can fully harmonize together. Just look at any of the more modern "epic" properties with teams of writers and all the money in the world, and Tolkien's accomplishments seem all the greater.

On the subject of consistency, one of the more unexpectedly moving chapters is "Visions and Revisions", when Shippey discusses the meaning that the story of Beren and Lúthien had to Tolkien. It's only one part of the Silmarillion, but Tolkien rewrote it so many times that even though it's hardly known, its story of a grand quest undertaken for a powerful yet ultimately doomed love was clearly more dear to him than any other part of his whole creation (Tolkien and his wife's gravestones read 'Beren' and 'Lúthien', respectively). This obsessive dedication made me think of other works that get compared to his, for example Wagner's operas, which Shippey doesn't discuss until the first appendix (as always with Tolkien, read the appendices!), and how idiosyncratic Tolkien's vision often was. Tolkien evidently did not think highly of Wagner as a dramatist, which somewhat surprised me, but it makes more sense when you realize that, as with all great artists, he hated basically everything, particularly artistic works seemingly very similar to his own:

"Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. 'Both rings were round', he snarled, 'and there the resemblance ceases' (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of 'the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring', des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities."

Now, I personally love Wagner, and rank the Ring Cycle as an incredible artistic achievement, but Tolkien of course has a point about how he and all those other authors are not really playing the same game (though read George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool" essay on Shakespeare to see how differently even great writers can rank artistic merit). This is another reason why I think comparisons of Tolkien to people like George Lucas, or (especially) George R. R. Martin can only go so far; Martin might have excellent points about flaws in Tolkien's models of political economy (the infamous "What was Aragorn's tax policy?") and so forth, but it's like comparing a Balzac novel to the Epic of Gilgamesh solely because they both have prostitutes in them. Shippey extends this point further in another book called Author of the Century, which I haven't read, but even if you don't agree with Shippey that Tolkien will eventually represent the entirety of 20th century literature the way that Shakespeare epitomizes the 16th, it's enough to note that Tolkien invented an entire literary genre just to give his mock-Welsh and faux-Finnish artificial languages a playground, and no one else has done anything even close since. Tanner Greer's essay "On the Tolkienic Hero" notes that Tolkien seems untouched by irony, and even though it seems strange that it took a fussy and incredibly opinionated academic, one who wrote entire poems about how misguided oak trees (his critics) couldn't understand the pure love of learning natural to birch trees (philologists like himself), to create one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, perhaps the only conclusion is that the genius and genesis of literature might remain as forever mysterious to us as the Undying Lands, or as the power of words themselves.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century a few years ago, but The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created A New Mythology is his earlier book on Tolkien, and now that I have read it, I think I should have started with this one. This a great book and I am sure I’ll read it again someday.

The first two chapters are about philology, the comparative study of languages to understand their evolution. These chapters are informed by Shippey's tenure at Oxford which overlapped chronologically with Tolkien's and teaching the same syllabus. The third chapter looks at Tolkien's portrayal of heroism in The Hobbit, or There and Back Again and how he uses different linguistic registers. One of my favorite quotes comes from this chapter:
"There is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher ready to cook’. Yet he has a place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us) all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.

Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English until 1604, and then only in Aberdeen; ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later; ‘total’, not used as here till 1557; ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo.

Chapters Four, Five and Six are about LotR. In chapter four of the highlights is Shippey’s discussion of the Council of Elrond, where he looks at the way Tolkien makes each character’s speech distinct. But he also has interesting things to say about the contrasts between the cultures of Gondor and Rohan; it’s great but I’m not going to try to summarize it. And in Chapter Five; Shippey looks at the tension in Tolkien’s work between Boethian and Manichean views of evil. (This section of the later book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century apparently were a revised or abridged version of what’s in the older book. I don’t remember for sure which other parts are like this.)

"A good way to understand The Lord of the Rings in its full complexity is to see it as an attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, both living, each seemingly contradicted by the other. One of these is in essence the orthodox Christian one, expounded by St. Augustine and then by Catholic and Protestant teaching alike, but finding its clearest expression in a book which does not mention Christ at all: Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophe… this says that there is no such thing as evil; ‘evil is nothing,’ is the absence of good, is possibly even an unappreciated good, Omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam, wrote Boethius, ‘all fortune is certainly good.’ …Views like these are strongly prominent in The Lord of the Rings.

Still, there is an alternative tradition in Western thought, one which has never become ‘official’ but which nevertheless arises spontaneously from experience. This says that while it may be all very well to make philosophical statements about evil, evil nevertheless is real, and not merely an absence; and what’s more it can be resisted, and what’s more still, not resisting it (in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills) is a dereliction of duty. The danger of this opinion is that it tends toward Manicheanism, the heresy which says that good and evil are equal and opposite…"

Chapter Six has more discussion of Tolkien’s style, including interesting readings of the poems in LotR. He also examines how Tolkien viewed his non-Christian characters and how he was influenced by the Beowulf poet’s view of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons.

In Chapter 7 Shippey describes Tolkien’s writing process and his literary influences for the tales that eventually became The Silmarillion. It is probably fine to read this chapter if you haven't read the book; in fact one of the objectives of this chapter is to make The Silmarillion more accessible to people who haven't read it. (As someone who has read it I think the overview he gives goes a little bit too far in its emphasis on fatalism, but the issue is too complicated to get into here.) An important part of Tolkien’s work on these stories was his attempt to reconcile his stories about Elves with traditional theology, and Shippey suggests that a passage in the Middle English text Early South English Legendary (c. 1250) may have provided a source for Tolkien's core ideas about Elves, which Shippey summarizes as the following"that elves were like angels; that they had however been involved in a Fall; that their fate at Doomsday is not clear (for men ‘shall join in the Second Music of the Ainur,’ elves perhaps not), that they are associated with the Earthly Paradise, and cannot die till the end of the world."

Chapter 8 is mostly about one of Tolkien’s short stories, Smith of Wootton Major, which is not set in Middle-earth but does involve fairies. Shippey’s analysis will probably make more sense if you have read it before. I have read it, but not recently, and I will probably want to read this chapter again sometime when I reread that story.

Chapter 9 focuses on the earlier drafts of Tolkien’s writing and how his ideas changed in later versions. (Some of these issues are discussed throughout the book at different points as well). Shippey describes the early drafts of LotR and notes that they lack some of the darker elements of the final version. If Tolkien had stuck to his earlier approach LotR would be "a story of much narrower emotional range, with far less sense of irrevocable loss." (The earlier drafts have been published in the History of The Lord of the Rings, which I haven’t read, but usually Shippey provides enough context that I could follow the discussion anyway.)

I'm so glad I finally got around to reading this. It can a bit technical and dense sometimes but it was very rewarding.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Appreciated not just the etymologies but how Tolkien fit them into his writing. Made me want to re-read LOTR and Beowulf. I suspect Tolkien owes more to Ariosto than either he or this book acknowledge.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purloined a few passages from one of the chapters for my undergraduate thesis, and am only now getting around to read the whole book.

This book is the hardest thing I have read in quite some time, and I say that as a literature person who's read a decent amount on the subject. It's real analysis; a great place to start is chapter 5, on intrelacements.

The first 100 pages or so are almost entirely on philology - a necessary context, and referred to throughout the book - but, if I may be honest, reading that part was purgatorial. Sheer stubbornness and spite made me despairingly read page after page of linguistic developments, as I laughed in scorn at younger me who thought she could be a dictionary editor. The hubris!

The book is extremely meaty, sometimes dense, but everything he says is essential, and instructive for analyzing other works as well. At various times, he made me cry, and a few times he even made me laugh out loud. If nothing else, Shippey is a sheer pleasure to read because of his mastery as a writer. His sentences and arguments are structured so flawlessly that I can forgive the philology.

Definitely would recommend, and would reread.

[Jonathan Langford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Analysis of Tolkien's sources and the uses he put to them is a stape of Tolkien criticism. However, it is seldom done terribly well. What Shippey has done that no one else has done anywhere near as well (so far as I'm aware) is look at Tolkien's use of those sources and use it to illuminate Tolkien's creative process. In so doing, Shippey brings together Tolkien's scholarly identity as a philologist and his authorial identity as a writer of fantasy, and shows that those two identities are one and the same.

Put simply, this is the best single book of Tolkien criticism that I have read. While much of the ground here is also covered in Shippey's later book, Tolkien: Author of the Century, this one (in my view) has more of the "meat" of his argument.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're going to study Tolkien, you probably can't avoid Shippey. Fortunately, his work is reasonably readable -- although long-winded: for the size of the book it took me surprisingly long to get through it -- and he has a good grasp of Tolkien's 'sources'. Not that Tolkien would have liked that term, as Shippey quite rightly points out in the appropriate places: better say, then, that Shippey knew what influenced Tolkien, through being a medievalist as well, and through teaching Tolkien's own curriculum at Leeds.

I realise now, though, that not much of this sunk in. I'll have to reread any relevant sections to effectively write my essay, I think. It's not a precisely relaxing read, going into the depth of detail it does, and referring to works of Tolkien's which I haven't read or which were themselves difficult to digest.

Still, it's a good place to start, and it's probably more enjoyable if you don't have an essay deadline looming up behind you, tapping pointedly on your shoulder.

[JD Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all know (or wrongly deny) that J.R.R. Tolkien was a genius. But Shippey, who took over Tolkien's chair at Oxford, looks at Tolkien's teaching curriculum and comes up with a definitive vote that Tolien was the greatest writer of the English-speaking world. By studying the place names in the Lord of the Rings (and the other works), Shippey shows how Tolkien recaptured English history from long before the 1006 Conquest, and conencted with the myths and tales that had been transmitted into England long before the arrival of Christanity. It's not easy creating one myth. Tolkien did that, while also saving the essence of many more.

[Chad D · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book to start with if you want to read books about Tolkien.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A study of Tolkien's methods in creating the narratives of Middle-Earth, including words, names, maps, poetry, and mythology.

For most of us who have read (and re-read) J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and other stories, we marvel at the world Tolkien creates, complete with fascinating names, a variety of languages with poetry and mythologies of beginnings, and the entry of evil into their world. Creatures who previously only inhabited the fairy tales of childhood come alive: dwarves, elves, trolls, wights, and orcs, as well as Tolkien's unique creation, those lovable hobbits. One wonders, how did he do all that? We might wonder where Christopher Tolkien, his son, has gotten all the material for twelve volumes of Middle-Earth history and more.

Tom Shippey's book helps answer that question, and is a boon to those who wish to delve (an appropriate word) into the depths underneath the stories we love. Shippey begins with what it meant for Tolkien to be a philologist. It was a time when the field of English studies was riven between "lit versus lang." Tolkien was a philologist. He loved languages, particularly the languages from which modern English came. Shippey observes that for Tolkien, the story arose from the language and the world he created provided a place for the languages. The book traces all of this, the people and place names, the poetry and song, the map of Middle-Earth and a mythology to make sense of it all.

He analyzes the stories and what he calls "interlacement" as a series of different stories intersect in this grand story. He also unfolds Tolkien's lifetime work of establishing the history behind The Lord of the Rings, including the account that made up The Silmarillion, finished by Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien worked for decades on various pieces of the history, developing languages, drawing on Old English and other languages to come up with words, and then going back and forth, harmonizing his account. He would devise stories and characters like Tom Bombadil and then try to fit them into his growing narrative. Names changed over times as Trotter became Strider and Aragorn. It appears that Tolkien often could be drawn down rabbit trails as he sought to elaborate the bones of the history of Middle-Earth. The story "Leaf by Niggle" is a parable of Tolkien's creative process. It is a story of an artist so meticulous that he only paints one leaf. Oh, what a leaf Tolkien painted, even if he left much unfinished work to Christopher!

The book includes several afterwords, the most interesting of which is a comparison of the text of Lord of the Rings with Peter Jackson's version, underscoring what can be done with text versus film, and the plot choices Jackson made, sometimes illuminating, sometimes questionable.

If all the poems and strange names in Lord of the Rings are off-putting to you, this probably isn't the book for you. Shippey plunges deeply into all of this and Tolkien's creative process that resulted in the story. It can be heavy wading, and is probably done best after reading Lord of the Rings several times and having the text at your side. If you love all this stuff, you will love this book and won't mind some of the sections which get fairly technical with lots of unfamiliar words.

Tolkien probably started developing the ideas that led to The Lord of the Rings around 1914. The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954 and 1955. His other major work, The Silmarillion, was published posthumously in 1977. In an era where some fan fiction writers crank out a work every year or two, Shippey helps us understand why it took so long to produce these works and why these works are considered so great by so many. Shippey makes the case that in creating this mythology in the English language, Tolkien was "The Author of the Century." Tolkien did not merely create a story. He created a world.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It can be a little dry at time, but definitely worth the read if you're a Tolkien fan. The worst part about it is it makes you want to read all of Tolkien's work.... again.

[Maria Tag · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This was a great and thorough analysis of Tolkien and his works, influences, and attitudes. As a hardcore Lord of the Rings fan, it was very interesting seeing what led to the creation of my favorite story on Earth, and how his approach toward language and literature shaped the legendarium. Although the book definitely got pedantic and overly academic at times (and made a few unbacked claims...how can you say Boromir deserved to die and then not explain why?) it was overall an excellent and intriguing breakdown of Tolkien and his works.

[Kyriakos Sorokkou]

χρόνος ανάγνωσης κριτικής: 36 δευτερόλεπτα

Ο φετινός Σεπτέμβρης ήταν ο μήνας που έκλεισαν 50 χρόνια
από τον θάνατο του Τόλκιν. Ήταν επίσης και ένας μεταβατικός
ας το πούμε μήνας για το πρότζεκτ Τόλκιν.
Αυτό διότι το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο είναι το τελευταίο που ασχολείται
άμεσα και εκτενώς με τη Μέση-γη και τους μύθους της και το 
τελευταίο που εκτείνεται πέρα των 400 σελίδων.
Οπότε ο υπόλοιπος Τόλκιν θα είναι κάτι διαφορετικό
και κάπως πιο ξεκούραστο.

Είναι γραμμένο από τον ακαδημαϊκό Τομ Σίπι και είναι μια
ακαδημαϊκού στυλ μελέτη στο πώς το στοιχείο της δουλειάς του Τόλκιν τον βοήθησε
να φτιάξει και να αναπτύξει την δική του μυθολογία πάνω σε όσα δίδασκε
στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Οξφόρδης (αγγλοσαξωνική γλώσσα, σκανδιναβική λογοτεχνία).

Ενδιαφέρον ανάγνωσμα ειδικά για τους λάτρεις του Τόλκιν αλλά
σε αρκετά σημεία πλατειάζει και επαναλαμβάνεται
και είναι αρκετά ακαδημαϊκό για τα γούστα μου και κάπως με ψιλοκούρασε.
Ίσως φταίει κι ο δίχρονος κορεσμός μου πάνω σε ό,τι 
έχει σχέση (κυρίως) με την Πρώτη Εποχή της Μέσης-γης. 
Αλλά σε γενικές γραμμές μου άρεσε.

[Anders Winther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never before had alitterary analysis made me cry, Shippey set out to engender a better understanding and a more qualified reading of Tolkien's, a goal well achieved.

[Gijs Grob · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Road to Middle-Earth' is a literary study of Tolkien's work, especially that of The Lord of The Rings. In this book Shippey shows the importance of philology on Tolkien's writings, and he argues quite convincingly that for Tolkien words and maps became before plot in The Lord of the Rings. Shippey shows how Tolkien's world started as a mythology of England, a country which lacked the rich mythology of Wales, Ireland and Scandinavia. He also examines Tolkien's literary influences from the middle ages, in particular Beowulf, and shows how Tolkien struggled to reconcile the pagan world of his influences with his own catholic belief into a convincing new tale. According to Shippey this rather hopeless goal is one of the reasons The Silmarillion was never completed. Another was Tolkien's love for words, which was greater than the discipline to complete stories. Interestingly, Shippey regards the hobbits as modern elements invading the ancient world of mythology, thus guiding us readers into a world that otherwise is alien, and it's the hobbits that make The Lord of the Rings much more readable than The Silmarillion, which completely lacks these modern elements.

Futhermore, Shippey refutes literary criticism of Tolkien's work, showing that Tolkien's esthetics and goals were different than of his contemporaries, and have a literary worth that is totally unique, with depth as one of its main attractions. Nevertheless, Shippy reckons The Lord of the Rings as a work reflecting World War II, and at the same time he discards all searches for allegories or metaphors.

My only criticism is that he spends little time on Tolkien's struggle to reconcile the rather childish world from 'The Hobbit' with the more profound one from 'The Silmarillion'. To me, it's clear that the undertaking of 'The Hobbit' was initially unrelated to his private writings for what later would become 'The Silmarillion', and one of the literary problems of 'The Lord of the Rings' is the rather artificial fusion of the two. Nevertheless, this is a very insightful and interesting study of Tolkien's world and recommended for Tolkien lovers who want to dive deeper into the work of their favorite writer.

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best thing I did was choosing Tolkien and the Lord of the rings for my essay. Period

Tolkien's world building habilities are mesmerising

There are so many layers into Middle Earth

Tolkien was able to create a whole new level of complexity into historical fantasy that shaped the fantasy genre as we know it today

💚

[Dan Lawler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was the Way to Middle Earth Shut?

Author Tom Shippey demonstrates how the Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion legendarium grew from Tolkien’s deep dive into the search for original meaning associated with Old English words, fragments and stories touching on the subject of Faerie. As a fellow philologist, Shippey is uniquely qualified for the task; he has held the same chair in language at Oxford that Tolkien once had, and the two are certainly rare birds of a feather. Shippey examines Tolkien’s personal motivations in storytelling and the value he placed on fairy tales, including LOTR.

What is fascinating, and worthy of a book itself, is Shippey’s theory in chapters 8 and 9 that, as Tolkien aged, he became increasingly despondent over whether his stories bore the “inner consistency of reality” which, by Tolkien’s reckoning, was the singular quality that justified the immense time and effort he had devoted to writing fantasies at the expense of his professional career.

Tolkien’s metaphysics of storytelling are set out in the essay On Fairy Stories (1939) and the follow-up tale Leaf by Niggle (1943) which illustrated the principles in story form. The two papers presented as optimistic a view of storytelling in particular, and art in general, as any author or artist could ever hope for. Literature and art had the capacity to convey other-worldly truth because man, though fallen in nature, still possessed a capacity to discern and communicate at least some splintered fragments of that truth. Because God is Creator, humans made in His image are sub-creators whose works, if properly done, can possess eternal value. Indeed, the author/artist may hope to find a representation of their earthly work that was only seen in part and partially enjoyed here but in the world to come seen in full and fully enjoyed throughout eternity.

Shippey says of Tolkien that “by the 1960s he was not so sure” of his theory of sub-creation. (Location 5247.) That is no loss to Shippey as he believes Tolkien's works “keep their own purely literary justification; the theory of ‘sub-creation’ is not needed.” Id. But it was otherwise for Tolkien himself as the ideas underlying sub-creation were the only basis by which fantasy was worthwhile and meaningful, and distinguished from mere escapism. Two of those ideas were the inner consistency of reality and eucatastrophe.

In On Fairy Stories, Tolkien created the term eucatastrophe to describe the universally desired joy of the happy ending “or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ … which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well…. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and insofar as evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” It is this peculiar quality of joy that infuses good fantasy with the inner consistency of reality, providing “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”

For Tolkien, without this hope, joy and truth, there was no escape from the nihilism of universal final defeat. Yet Shippey finds it absent in Tolkien’s later writings: “For Tolkien there was no eucatastrophe” and “the sense of age and exclusion seems to have grown on him more and more strongly.” Loc. 5553. Tolkien came to doubt his theory of sub-creation and “the legitimacy of his own mental wanderings.” Loc. 5239. According to Shippey, Tolkien “asked more than he had a right to” and all hopes for a supernatural guarantee “are bound to be disappointed.” Loc. 5247.

Shippey’s conclusions are certainly shaped in part by his own skepticism. Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce, who is acquainted with Shippey, said he is not a Christian and “conceded readily that he did not fully understand the religious and theological aspects of [Tolkien’s] work but most certainly did not dismiss it or deride it.” Still, it is true, as Shippey elaborates, that Tolkien’s later poems and short stories lack the joyful turn of the eucatastrophe, and end with the protagonists being denied access to the Perilous Realm of Faerie, returning with melancholy to the ordinariness of their everyday lives. Shippey concludes from this that Tolkien “no longer imagined himself rejoining his own creations after death, like Niggle” and “he felt they were lost….” Loc. 5247.

Shippey does not address the cause of Tolkien’s apparent disillusionment. Perhaps, given his own predispositions, Shippey simply attributed it to the man growing older and wiser. But without the theory of sub-creation, or an equivalent, there really is nothing beyond the circles of this world except a universal final defeat that awaits all. Tolkien could not have fallen that far, but there must have been something underlying the ominous change in tone of his later works. Its worth pursuing.

The book presents much to think about. Also, the word-craft on the philological side is superb and provides many surprises and delights. In addition, Shippey’s droll and deadly rebuttals to Tolkien’s snobbish literary critics are especially satisfying. Definitely a good read.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my Weekly Standard review (link here [http://tinyurl.com/3x7pha]):

IN THE NEWLY REVISED and expanded version of The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey, a colleague of Tolkien at Oxford, has delved deep into Middle-earth's Northern roots. What Tolkien set out to do in "The Hobbit," Shippey suggests, was recreate the forgotten literatures of ancient northern Europe. The dwarves to which Bilbo is introduced in the first chapter--Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Fili, Kili, Bombur, Bifur, Bofur, Dwalin, Balin, and Thorin--have names taken directly from "a section of the Eddic poem "Völuspá," often known as the "Dvergatal" or 'Dwarves' Roster,'" which scholars have typically regarded as a meaningless list. Tolkien, however, saw in the "Dvergatal" and other such scraps not a rigmarole, but "the last faded memento of something once great and important, an Odyssey of the dwarves."

But, particularly in "The Hobbit," Tolkien found it impossible simply to tell a story from the heroic world of the North. The narrative itself required the irony of Bilbo Baggins, a bourgeois hobbit, if only to connect the modern reader to the lost world. With prodding from the wizard Gandalf, Thorin Oakenshield and the dwarves agree to employ Bilbo as a "burglar" to accompany them in a journey to reclaim their far-off, ancestral home, the Lonely Mountain, from the depredations of the dragon Smaug.

For Bilbo, discretion in battle is often the only part of valor, and his ineptitude at "burglarious proceedings" more than once threatens to throw the whole company into ruin. The strong comic vein of "The Hobbit" owes much to the clash between Bilbo's modern anachronisms--the jacket he wears, his handkerchiefs, his talk of "profit" and "contracts"--and the archaic world in which Thorin Oakenshield and the others live. The dwarves are on a high and noble quest, straight out of the age of ancient epic. Bilbo is on an adventure, straight out of the age of the Victorian novel. All the comedy in the book comes from this contrast--but in the end, the comic vein gives way, as Thorin, on his deathbed, exchanges with Bilbo parting words indicating a newfound mutual understanding and tolerance of their respective worlds:

"I am glad that I have shared in your perils--that has been more than any Baggins deserves."

"No!" said Thorin. "There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."

Perhaps what Tolkien hoped is that through the comic and ironic contrast of a modern hobbit let loose in a heroic world, present-day readers would come to some appreciation of the past. Or perhaps he simply caught hold of the tail of a fantastic children's story, that day when he scribbled in an exam book, and all he did was hold on while it bucked and galloped its way to the end of the book. Maybe he meant it, in other words, or maybe he didn't, but either way he was clearly on to something, for Middle-earth proved a thicker, richer place than was necessary for the story.

[Michael Joosten · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a fair amount of repetition between Shippey's two main books about Tolkien, but inasmuch as the two books are different approaches to the same topic (or presentations of the same material to different audiences) that's not necessarily a defect. I think, both when I read them originally and rereading them this year, that I read Author of the Century first, and this is somewhat appropriate, though it is chronologically inaccurate: The Road to Middle-earth is far the older text and been updated twice to take into account material that Author of the Century always had access to.

I say that this is a somewhat appropriate reading order, because Author is not in any way a more generalised or simplied account of things, it's approach IS more easily accessible to the modern reader because the focus is on things we are more familiar with, looking at what makes Tolkien successful from a more general perspective--looking at Tolkien from the perspective of a Stanley Unwin or a C.S. Lewis or a Humphrey Carpenter, one might say--whereas The Road is almost a case of Shippey explaining Tolkien's method from the perspective of Tolkien himself.

If this indeed the case, it makes sense both that I think The Road to be the superior work and the more difficult one. Looking at everything Tolkien does in literature from his deeply held philological convictions and practices is undoubtedly more valuable for getting us to the heart of Tolkien (and Shippey is one of handful of living scholars who could do it, given the scarcity of philologists, while those who could have penned a version of Author are more easily found), but it is also harder insofar as philology is harder. It is a not a common way of thinking and it is a rigorous study. I have almost solely been exposed to it through Tolkien, for which I am immensely grateful to him, but it makes him effectively sui generis among the great authors of fiction in his methods.

[Susan Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enjoyable look at how Tolkien came to create Middle Earth and it's history. The author is a philologist and had some of the same jobs at universities as Tolkien did, so he understands a lot of the thought that went into use of names and language and phrases. Looks at Tolkien's professional history and interests and points out those things which appealed and led him to try to create it. The book was originally written before Christopher Tolkien's publications of his father's Making of Middle Earth books, but has been updated.
Also of interest to me, he has written an appendix of Peter Jackson's film version of the story. He points to the variations from the book and offers ideas as to why that was done. I am one of the those not popular in the theater for going "that's not what happened!" - that's not how it happened" - so I appreciated the viewpoint for the changes. (I still didn't like some of them.)

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very language focused -- which I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at, and I do sometimes enjoy, but in this case it was too much.

Much went over my head. Perhaps it's because I haven't read The Silmarillion? I had to force myself to read at a relatively quick pace, without going back to re-read unfamiliar terms and look things up (if I Googled all the unknown references I'd never finish the book).

Some chapters were easier than others. If you stick with it, eventually Shippey does get into the plot, the characters, the history, the ethos that is Middle Earth. Then he turns right back around and throws more foreign words at you, assuming you know what he's talking about. Shippey is extremely well-informed, and this book is lots of inside baseball for Tolkien fans -- because it's only adjacent to my area, I didn't enjoy it as much. (Though, you can tell he knows what he's doing when he throws around the terms myth and allegory, which I appreciated.)

I don't think I'd ever return back to this one. Though I think I'd still read his Tolkien biography (wait, is it a bio? maybe a literary-focused companion?): J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.

Shippey references Carpenter's work, see: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography which I enjoyed, and see The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends, which is a foundational Inklings book.

[Terry Calafato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un saggio meraviglioso, che ogni appassionato di Tolkien dovrebbe leggere!

Il professor Shippey è uno dei maggiori esperti al mondo dell'opera tolkeniana e questo saggio è fondante per lo studio della materia. La sua analisi spazia dalla formazione di Tolkien come filologo, l'esperienza delle guerra, il metodo compositivo, la creazione del LotR, la genesi dei Silmarillion, le fonti utilizzate dall'autore.
Non è un testo semplice: so già che dovrò rileggerlo per approfondire gli argomenti trattati, ma senza dubbio già la prima lettura è entusiasmante. Shippey ci permette di entrare nella mente geniale dell'autore, ci svela l'uso peculiare che faceva Tolkien del linguaggio, ci mostra aspetti del suo carattere che hanno sicuramente influenzato la sua opera e ci restituisce un quadro generale completo ed estremamente affascinante.
Il capitolo sul Silmarillion mi ha colpito in particolare, in quanto la genesi di quest'opera (che amo profondamente) è veramente peculiare e Shippey tratta l'argomento con grande maestria, riuscendo ad offrire al lettore una panoramica chiara su un'opera complessa quale è il Silmarillion.
Molto interessante anche l'ultima Appendice, che offre un analisi della trasposizione cinematografica di Jackson basandosi sulla diversità dei mezzi espressivi del romanzo e del cinema.

Infine, una nota di merito all'edizione italiana, nata come progetto di un gruppo di traduttori che si sono cimentati in una traduzione collettiva, lavorando anche a distanza.

[Meggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the original 1982 edition, so Shippey doesn't talk about the 12-volume History of Middle-Earth, and instead the only posthumous works mentioned are The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth.

Very dense, and a slow read because this book is the opposite of concise. There are some super interesting points here (I also find etymology interesting so found those parts fascinating: for instance I had no idea that rabbits are not native to the UK and thus there is no word for rabbit in Old English). But I think some judicial editing would have helped a lot.

[Mythlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense but lively, opinionated, and readable, as usual for Shippey.

After reading "The Sweet and the Bitter: Death and Dying in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings" by Amy Amendt-Raduege, I was interested to see Shippey discuss Aragorn's death:

"This is a deathbed strikingly devoid of the sacraments, of Extreme Unction, of 'the consolations of religion'. It is impossible to think of Aragorn as irretrievably damned for his ignorance of Christianity (though it is a view some have tried to foist on Beowulf). Still, he has not fulfilled the requirements for salvation either."

(p. 202)

[Dylan]

This book was interesting, but probably only recommended if you can get excited about things like:

- how close the Rohirrim actually resemble the Anglo-Saxon people
- the academic standoff between literary criticism and philology in the early 1900s
- Boethian vs Manichean views of good and evil
- the etymology of Eärendil

which I can kinda do, but not necessarily for extended periods of time. I would also recommend reading the Silmarillion beforehand, or limiting yourself to the first part of the book, because the chapters on the Silmarillion were (for me, who has not yet read it) terribly dry and borderline unintelligible.

[Renato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cuando me preguntan, como admirador de la obra de J.R.R. Tolkien, qué libro recomiendo para comenzar el viaje por la Tierra Media, irremediablemente menciono este. Tuve la muy gran suerte de hacerme con una copia en físico; y desde entonces, procuro leerlo cada año que pasa. Una cosa bastante anecdótica, tratándose de un libro que habla de cómo se escribió otro (u otros) libro(s). Si empiezas por este libro, sin haber leído siquiera el Hobbit, te aseguro que la curiosidad te empujará a leerlos.

[Mikey McArdle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lord of the Rings will go alongside the Stand as one of my two favorite books of all time. Thus, any books writing about the lord of the rings itself is always going to be popular to me. This is very academic and probably not the most accessible (even though some people say it is accessible!) some bits probably went over my head because I am not familiar with the world that Tolkien lived in and the Anglo Saxon, Old Norse studies and works that were crucial and familiar to him and those who write about him- one day I may be. In spite of this I found it thoroughly enjoyable and especially the analysis of the Ring and the Nature of Evil by Shippey- onto the next book, fiction this time I think.

[Regitze Xenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh, I am going to use this book for my thesis. Shippey shows such interesting insights into Tolkien and his writings and I owe several thoughts for my thesis to him and his appearances on the extended edition Lord of the Rings bonus materials. And this book.

[Anushka · Rating 3 out of 5]

El libro está bien, pero a veces es muy técnico en el sentido de que es más para gente que entienda más del asunto (traductores, filólogos...). Aún así es interesante ver de dónde vienen algunas cosas de la Tierra Media.

[Matthew Richey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explores the shape, construction, and process Tolkien used to create Middle Earth. If you enjoy Tolkien's writings, you'll probably enjoy this.

[J.L. Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

Debo leerlo otra vez.