J.R.R. Tolkien's Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life

by Arne Zettersten

A close colleague of Tolkein for many years, Zettersten offers here a personally informed analysis of his fiction. In light of his unusual life experience and enthusiasm for the study of languages, Zettersten finds in Tolkein's fiction the same animating passions that drove that great author as a youth, a soldier, a linguist, and an Oxford Don.

254 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Gergely · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a (pardon my French, but I feel very strongly about this) really fucking terrible book that no self-respecting academic publisher should have published in the 21st century. Its main contribution is Zettersten's personal reminiscences about Tolkien, but that would only have made a small book, much like Kilby's Tolkien and the Silmarillion; the rest is a dashed-together biography which takes you back to the early 2000s with a biography of Tolkien being written by everybody (Michael White or even o my god Joseph Pearce). The biographical material is entirely derivative and tediously reiterates all the compulsory biographical points, quotes all the letters everyone knows by heart, enumerates all the compulsory and well-known details about medieval works, and falls back head on the biographical fallacy of referring constantly to the author's 'intention'. Even in the (otherwise workable) notion that Tolkien's 'double worlds', his research and creative writing, were marked by his ability to code-switch, is rendered quite empty by this, and even the understanding of philology and the 'reconstructive fiction' is seriously simplified--any reader of Shippey should have a much more differentiated view than this, and Zettersten with his own philological knowledge and expertise should certainly (again, I feel very strongly) fucking well know better than this. The result is that this is an entirely pointless book that (especially in its treatment of fiction and myth) is just downright infuriatingly _stupid_. On top of all that, it is also sloppily edited: King Alfred, died in _901_? W._A._ Auden? The Children of _Húron_? _England and Wales_? _Roverandum_? There are also sentences that simply don't make sense, without main clauses or verbs, and a really scandalous use of commas. Don't read this book, read Shippey, Carpenter, the Letters, and literary critics who don't live in the early 20th century, even before New Criticism.