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Nick Groom comments that he had "little sense of plot or character, direction or development, meaning or significance" to guide him through the "long and difficult process". [5] Writing was slow, because Tolkien had a full-time academic position, marked exams to bring in a little extra income, and wrote many drafts. [4] [T 1]
The 1971 A Guide to Middle-earth was the first published encyclopedic reference book for the fictional universe of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, compiled and edited by Robert Foster. [3] The book was published in 1971 by Mirage Press , a specialist science fiction and fantasy publisher, in a limited edition. [ 3 ]
[9] Tolkien handles this by character pairing, such as by providing the heroes with evil counterparts: Gandalf with Sauron and with Saruman, Aragorn with Denethor, Frodo with the Hobbit-turned-monster, Gollum. The rather artificial effect of such a black-and-white structure is enlivened and made more engaging by having the Hobbits as mediators ...
The scholar Brian Rosebury considers Tolkien's narrative portrayal of Gollum (pictured) his most memorable success. [1]The philologist and fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien made use of multiple literary devices in The Lord of the Rings, from its narrative structure and its use of pseudotranslation and editorial framing, to character pairing and the deliberate cultivation of an impression of ...
Tolkien once described Gandalf as an angel incarnate; later, both he and other scholars have likened Gandalf to the Norse god Odin in his "Wanderer" guise. Others have described Gandalf as a guide-figure who assists the protagonists, comparable to the Cumaean Sibyl who assisted Aeneas in Virgil's The Aeneid, or to the figure of Virgil in Dante ...
Literary figures including Michael Moorcock criticized Tolkien's writing style in the 1960s and 1970s. [1]In his lifetime, J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writing, especially The Lord of the Rings, became extremely popular with the public, but was rejected by literary figures such as Burton Raffel, partly on stylistic grounds. [2]
Further, Tolkien was a philologist; Nagy comments that Tolkien may have been intentionally imitating the philological style of Elias Lönnrot, compiler of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala; or of St Jerome, Snorri Sturlusson, Jacob Grimm, or Nikolai Grundtvig, all of whom Tolkien saw as exemplars of a professional and creative philology. [18]
Several scholars have noted that Tolkien makes use of character pairings. Brian Attebery, writing in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, comments in its article on the literary theory of structuralism that while, like other fantasy authors, Tolkien's work "keeps its good and evil pretty much corralled separately", it can be seen "through a Lévi-Straussian lens, as offering multiple ...