Carl F. Hostetter

"Paradoxically, it was Tolkien's very failure to bring his mythos/lengendarium to any kind of ordered completion that resulted in a body of work which, in textual terms, approaches a real mythology: a tangled body of related writings, highly variable in quality and style, sometimes banal, often enchanting, frequently inconsistent or opaque. It is a measure of his work's depth and richness (and a tribute to Christopher Tolkien's editorship) that a volume of essays such as this can not only be show more produced, but achieve a real sense of critical endeavour beyond mere fandom. The detailed textual history can be hard going, but that will hardly deter anyone who has tackled 'The History of Middle Earth' itself. Only rarely did I find myself wondering whether any of it mattered: most of the time I was simply fascinated." amazon.co.uk - MB 16-iii-07 show less