By Christopher Snyder
This is another book I finished reading a
while back – actually several weeks at this point – but am just
now getting around to blogging. It's much more than just a book
about Tolkien himself – that's just the first section. Subsequent
chapters look at each of his three major works – The Hobbit,
The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, in that,
i.e. publication, order – laying great emphasis on the sources and
influences in history, legend, and literature that he drew on in
constructing “a mythology for England.” I found it thoroughly
enthralling. But there is another dimension to this book as well,
examining the enormous influence of Tolkien in many other areas,
including the various media into which his stories have been adapted
and the impact they have had on the whole genre of heroic fantasy.
It truly is a near-comprehensive survey of the entirety of “The
Tolkien Phenomenon.”
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| A sample interior page, which does not do it justice |
All of this is graced with an absolutely
gorgeous presentation: a parchment-like tinting and decorative
embellishment of the pages that almost give them the appearance of a
medieval manuscript, an illusion fostered by frequent quotations
(from the books, the movies, Tolkien's letters and other writings,
and more) in a near-calligraphic faux-Celtic font evoking the
spirit of Tolkien's own Elvish script; a treasure-trove of
photographs and ephemera invoking the early-mid 20th-century bucolic
England that Tolkien loved and drew inspiration from; and frequent
inset illustrations and narrative-boxes expanding on some point
discussed in the text itself. “A Tolkien Timeline” provides a
convenient overview of the author's life and the multimedia
phenomenon to which he gave birth; extensive endnotes point the way
to further exploration of much that Snyder discusses; and what
appears to be (but I suspect is not, given the explosion of Tolkien
scholarship in the last decade and a half or so) a comprehensive bibliography and
list of “Tolkien Resources” of all kinds make me consider this
book to be absolutely invaluable as an overview of all things
Tolkien.
Perhaps this book speaks to me so
directly because it is by a fellow historian of the Middle Ages,
Christopher Snyder of Mississippi State. Despite our geographic
proximity, I've never met or communicated with Prof. Snyder, however,
so there's no bias on that count – before you ask! It looks like,
given the areas in which he has published besides this book
(early British history), he and I have a lot of the same interests.
There is one way in which we differ, though – he begins his
acknowledgments by admitting that, “Unlike most medievalists I
have met, I did not have an appreciation for Tolkien as a young
reader. I fell in love with the Arthurian legends as a teenager,
became a professional historian, and only discovered the genius of
Tolkien later in life. I owe a debt . . . to Peter Jackson for
kindling the flames . . . .” I, on the other hand, did
encounter Tolkien early in life, as a teenager, basically in the
furor of interest surrounding the posthumous publication of The
Silmarillion in 1977 (which included the Rankin-Bass animated
Hobbit, which for all its shortcomings does have a certain
charm), and was at least in part inspired toward ultimately becoming
a medievalist by Tolkien. Unlike the very first reviewer on
Amazon.com, I do not hold Snyder's belated discovery of Tolkien (through the lens of Jackson) against him, and wrote a very early “proto-review” defending
Snyder based only on reading to about a third of the way in [link].
Completing the book over the course of the next few weeks –
slowly, savoring it – did not change my mind in the least, and I
stand by that rebuttal. The Making of Middle-earth is
deservedly placed on the main bookshelf in my living room right
alongside Tolkien's own canon.
Cheers! – and Thanks for reading!
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