The Apprenticeship of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Origin of the Second Age

by Simon J. Cook

J.R.R. Tolkien’s most famous lecture, ‘ The Monsters and the Critics (1936), begins with a short story about a man who built a tower from which he could see the sea. The view from the tower is a symbol of the art of the North. Tower and view entered The Lord of the Rings as Tolkien discovered the magic of the Necromancer – Sauron – as a principle of evil in northern traditions that had ever opposed its art. This book identifies the origin of the tower in ‘The Fall of Númenor’, the world-changing story that introduces the Second Age of Middle-earth. The meaning of the view upon the sea is explained as a glimpse of the minds of the dead - a glimpse that is the very opposite of necromancy, and it is shown how the tower of the Beowulf-poet begat the great and terrible towers of The Lord of the Rings, both the Dark Tower and the White.

71 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 29, 2018

About the author

I’m an intellectual historian, writing on late-Victorian and Edwardian scholarship.

I was born in London, England, spent too many years at Cambridge, UK, and taught academic writing at Duke University, North Carolina.

Today I’m an independent scholar, creating intellectual content outside established academic institutions.

I support my scholarly habit with my editing work and live, together with a growing family of children, guinea-pigs and cats, in a small village in Israel situated just left of the end of the world.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon Cook is one of the most thoughtful and perceptive Tolkien scholars of this generation. His insights into Tolkien's relationship with his text, with Beowulf, and with the Beowulf poet inform his understanding of what Tolkien was doing when he set out to write what he at first called 'the new Hobbit', but which we know as The Lord of the Rings. Like most books worth actually reading once, The Apprenticeship of J. R. R. Tolkien is worth reading twice. I thought it terrific when I first read it three years ago. Now after three years spent reading, thinking, and writing about Tolkien myself, I am even more convinced of this work's value than I was then.

[Katherine Sas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-done and thought-provoking deep dive into Tolkien's metaphor of the tower in his essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."