" With New Line Cinema's production of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the popularity of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is unparalleled. Tolkien's books continue to be bestsellers decades after their original publication. An epic in league with those of Spenser and Malory, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, begun during Hitler's rise to power, celebrates the insignificant individual as hero in the modern world. Jane Chance's critical appraisal of Tolkien's heroic masterwork is the first to ex...

This book examines key points of J. R. R. Tolkien’s life and writing career in relation to his views on humanism and feminism, particularly his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, deemed unimportant, or marginalized—namely, the Other. Jane Chance argues such empathy derived from a variety of causes ranging from the loss of his parents during his early life to a consciousness of the injustice and violence in both World Wars. As a result of his obligation to research and ...

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity ...

This revised and updated examination of how J.R.R.Tolkien came to write his original masterpiece The Hobbit includes his complete unpublished draft version of the story, together with notes and illustrations by Tolkien himself.The Hobbit was first published on 21 September 1937. Like its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, it is a story that ‘grew in the telling’, and many characters and plot threads in the published text are quite different f...

Repackaged to feature Tolkien’s own painting of the Tree of Amalion, this collection includes his famous essay, ‘On Fairy-stories’ and the story that exemplifies this, ‘Leaf by Niggle’, together with the poem ‘Mythopoeia’ and the verse drama, ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’, which tells of the events following the disastrous Battle of Maldon.Fairy-stories are not just for children, as anyone who has read Tolkien will know. In his essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien discusses the nature ...

Since the first edition was released in 1937, The Hobbit has become a publishing phenomenon with almost 100 million books in print. The adventures of Bilbo have enthralled readers around the world as they followed the story of the little hobbit caught up an a great adventure that (despite the Tookish side of him) he wished to have no part in.So you think you're a fan of The Hobbit? You've absorbed every detail Bilbo's adventures? You know all about how he, the wizard Gandalf and a ...

The popularity of the His Dark Materials trilogy has generated a major motion picture, a stage play, video games, and a new prequel. The series has also been highly controversial with its use of exciting adventure stories for children to comment on organized religion. These books have piqued the interest of the contributors to this fascinating volume, who use it to probe the philosophical issues that inform them. Could a golden compass, or alethiometer, really work? Can a person's...

Hugo Award Nominee: George R. R. Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, Harry Turtledove, and others reveal how Tolkien inspired and influenced them.When J. R. R. Tolkien created the extraordinary world of Middle-earth and populated it with fantastic, archetypal denizens, reinventing the heroic quest, the world hardly noticed. Sales of The Lord of the Rings languished for the better part of two decades, until the Ballantine editions were published in A...

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. After his father's death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems,...

A philosophical exploration of J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved classic—just in time for the December 2012 release of Peter Jackson's new film adaptation, The Hobbit: An Unexpected JourneyJ.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is one of the best-loved fantasy books of all time and the enchanting "prequel" to The Lord of the Rings. With the help of some of history's great philosophers, this book ponders a host of deep questions raised in this timeless tale, ...

In a review of "The Return of the King" published in the Observer in 1955, Edwin Muir criticizes that "all the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes [...] and will never come to puberty [...]. Hardly one of them knows anything about women," and similar observations have been made by critics over time. Yet can Tolkien's portrayal of masculinity truly be reduced to such a simple formula? Are his men all simply "boys" or, as other critics argue, simplistic good heroes, a romanticiz...

Fantasy is a creation of the Enlightenment, and the recognition that excitement and wonder can be found in imagining impossible things. From the ghost stories of the Gothic to the zombies and vampires of twenty-first-century popular literature, from Mrs Radcliffe to Ms Rowling, the fantastic has been popular with readers. Since Tolkien and his many imitators, however, it has become a major publishing phenomenon. In this volume, critics and authors of fantasy look at its history since the E...