Jane Chance

Jane Chance's works are fairly often cited in Tolkien scholarship. Having gotten bogged down in Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England, I wasn't sure what to think -- she had important ideas but expresses them very poorly indeed.

But this lesser work... the level of inaccuracy is so high as to be simply frightening. Taking just the chronology and the first five pages, and listing only the items I remember:

P. x. One of the members of Tolkien's club the T.C.B.S. is listed as "R. Q. Wilson." show more Twice. His name was Robert Quilter Gilson -- a fact which is easily verified, because Gilson's father was one of Tolkien's schoolmasters!

P. 3. He is said to have been successful enough in his studies to win an Oxford scholarship in classics, but changed to medieval languages and comparative philology. This is, at best, a whitewash -- I'd call it deceptive. Tolkien, despite being brilliant, earned only a second-tier scholarship to Oxford (an "Exhibitionship," not a true scholarship, and that only only on his second try). And, at Moderations (sort of mid-terms toward earning a degree), he obtained a second-class, not a first-class, result -- a failure which could have cost him his exhibitionship. He was permitted to go into philology, where he excelled, but that was not what was supposed to have happened. Based on his initial plans, he was an academic failure.

P. 3 again. Tolkien is said to have been "wounded" in the First World War. He was not wounded. He suffered trench fever. This caused him to be invalided home, but it's not a wound.

P. 5. The Lord of the Rings is stated to have been popular "during the Korean and Vietnam wars." The Korean War ended in 1953. And the chronology on p. xiii states (correctly, in this instance) that The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954. (On July 29, to be specific.) Interesting how The Lord of the Rings could be popular a year before anyone outside the publishing house knew it existed.

I suppose one could write this off as just an abominable proofreading job. Still, it's a level of sloppiness that I find hard to endure. And then there are the symbolic equations. "Mordor" must mean "murder," right? Well, Tolkien may have thought of the name by connection with "murder," but in his linguistic context it means the Black Land, just as Moria is the "Black Pit." You can't pick and choose your symbolic equivalents, Dr. Chance. Unless Moria is another word for "muria," anyway.

And the fact that a lot of hippies read The Lord of the Rings doesn't mean that the discovery of LSD has anything to do with Middle-earth, despite its inclusion in the chronology (p. xii). Yes, there were some acid-heads among Tolkien fans. But he surely would not have approved of them if he'd encountered them.

I'm apt to get overly sarcastic. Comes with having an orderly mind, no doubt. But if you're going to read this book, be prepared to check anything you read with a source that has some sort of credibility. show less

This is a dense, academic work and I am not very familiar with The Canterbury Tales or the writings and life of Geoffrey Chaucer. What I did get from this is the many conscious connections to Greek and Roman myths. At the time, such myths were analyzed for commentary on morality -- rather like modern credos taken from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or something. I learned of the Vatican Mythographers who did this analysis for the Catholic faithful.

There is much here about what Chaucer could show more have read as sources for his work, rather like similar things I have read tracing back the source content of Shakespeare. show less

This is a really good anthology of scholarly essays about Tolkien edited by one of my college professors. I've been meaning to read it ever since I took her class on mythology, several years ago now, and I'm really glad I finally got around to it. All of the essays are great, and they generally focus on identifying and exploring particular influences to Tolkien's work, which range through just about every ancient European language and culture you can think of. It's really interesting to see show more how thoroughly "rooted" all of Tolkien's ideas are, and it gives you an impressive sense of the scope of any truly mythic creation. This is a must-read if you're interested in scholarly Tolkien research and it's quite accessible even if you're only casually interested. A very informative look at the immense background of the immense background Tolkien created for his stories. show less

Damn. I read this in 1992-3 and loved it at the time but find that the political symbolism described would have caused the eye of sauron to blink.