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 Discov er ing
the E nch a n t men t of
J. R. R. To l k i e n ’s
M i ddl e-e a r t h

Matthew Dickerson

S
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 © 2012 by Matthew Dickerson

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—
without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in
printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dickerson, Matthew T., 1963–
A Hobbit journey : discovering the enchantment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth
Matthew Dickerson.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of : Following Gandalf, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-58743-300-9
1. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973. Lord of the rings. 2. Epic litera-
ture, English—History and criticism. 3. Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism.
4. Free will and determinism in literature. 5. Middle Earth (Imaginary place). 6. Battles in
literature. 7. Courage in literature. 8. Ethics in literature. I. Dickerson, Matthew T., 1963–
Following Gandalf. II. Title.
PR6039.O32L633345 2012
823 .912—dc23 2012010627

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled JB are from THE JERUSALEM BIBLE, copyright © 1966 by Darton,
Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®.
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All
rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book
are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource.
Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content
or permanence.

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

14 5 20 7 1 12 12 5 25

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 To my wife, Deborah, and my sons, Thomas, Mark, and
Peter, who allowed me to read The Hobbit, The Lord
of the Rings (including some of the appendixes!), and
even The Silmarillion as part of family read-aloud.

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 (Unpublished manuscript—copyright protected Baker Publishing Group)

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 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
References and Conventions x
Abbreviations for Works by J. R. R. Tolkien x
A Note on Capitalization xi

Introduction 1
Finding Meaning in Fantasy 1
Where Is Middle-earth? 2
The Making of Books 5
Allegory and Applicability 11
1. On Hobbits, the Treatment of Prisoners, and the Ethics
of War 19
Principles of Ethics in Warfare 22
Torture by the Enemy 24
The Ethics of the Wise 28
The Complexities of Narratives, and of Life 31
2. Epic Battles 36
The Battle of Five Armies 38
The Black Gate and the Skirmish with Southrons 41
The Rohirrim and the Anglo-Saxons 43
So Fair, So Desperate 48
Hope and Healing 54
The “Contest” at Helm’s Deep 56
War, the Individual, and Fellowship 59

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 Contents

3. Frodo and the Wisdom of the Wise 62

Spotting Wisdom in Middle-earth 64
The Wisdom of Gandalf 65
Military Might and True Hope 69
Faramir 72
The Wisdom of the Bagginses 75
4. Military Victory or Moral Victory? 80
Victory, at What Cost? 81
The Temptation of the Ring: Gandalf and Elrond 86
The Temptation of the Ring: Galadriel and Faramir 91
5. Human Freedom and Creativity 95
The Reality of Choice 98
Aragorn and the Doom of Choice 102
The Prophecies 104
6. The Gift of Ilúvatar and the Power of the Ring 108
The Domination of Wills 109
The Flame Imperishable 114
The Firstborn and the Followers 119
Free Will and Creativity 122
7. Moral Responsibility and Stewardship 126
Objective Morality and Judgment 131
Moral Responsibility 136
Another Word on (or against) Judgment 139
The Steward of Middle-earth 143
8. The Seen and the Unseen: Salvation and Social Justice 148
The Salvation of Boromir 151
The Salvation of Sméagol 155
Saruman, Denethor, and Damnation as Un-Salvation 159
Bilbo and Frodo: Mercy for the Merciful 162
Social Justice and a Rejection of Gnosticism 164
9. A Shift in Tone: Free Will and the Hand of Ilúvatar 170
A Deepening of Voice 171
Attaching a Leaf 179
The Presence of Ilúvatar 182
The Purpose of Ilúvatar 188

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 Contents

The Power of Ilúvatar 191

Free Will and the Hand of Ilúvatar 198
10. Ilúvatar’s Theme and the Real War 203
Not a Christian Myth? 206
The Missing Piece 216
Sorrow and Loss 221
A Christian Myth? 227
The Absence and the Presence of the Incarnation 236
The Theme of Ilúvatar 240
The Real War and the Happy Ending 244

Notes 251
Sources 259

vii

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 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Tom Shippey, who remains at the forefront of Tol-

kien scholarship, for his many years of indispensible scholarly work
that is at once profoundly insightful and very enjoyable to read, and
also for his personal encouragement (and occasional suggestions)
over the past few years; to several other scholars and writers who,
through talks and essays and especially personal conversations, have
contributed to my understanding, including Jonathan Evans, Chris-
topher Vaccaro, Charles Taliaferro, Michael Drout, David Bratman,
Colin Duriez, Peter Kreeft, Thomas Howard, Sandra Miesel, and
Paul Kerry; to literary colleagues at Middlebury College for many
other stimulating conversations about Tolkien and related literary
topics, especially Professors Kathy Skubikowski, John Elder, and
Dan Brayton; to many years of Middlebury College students who
have taken my Tolkien classes and made the effort to write insight-
ful papers and engage in class discussions; to numerous readers as
well as critics of Following Gandalf for their comments; to the late
Professor Marion Singleton (of Dartmouth College), to whom I
am greatly indebted for her teaching on writing, and literature, and
writing about literature, and for investing in me as a person; and
finally to my good friend David O’Hara for his friendship over the
years, not only for the frequent discussions about philosophy, myth,
and literature, but even more for the numerous times when we went
fishing instead of discussing philosophy, myth, or literature.
Matthew Dickerson, September 2011

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 References and Conventions

Citations to works by J. R. R. Tolkien are given parenthetically in

the text, using the conventions and abbreviations described here and
below. Citations from The Lord of the Rings are from the Houghton
Mifflin second edition. Because of the many different editions and
typesettings of this three-volume work (with different page number-
ings), references are by volume number and chapter number (rather
than by page number), in uppercase and lowercase Roman numerals
respectively. Thus the reference “III/iv” refers to volume 3, chapter
4 of The Lord of the Rings, a chapter titled “The Siege of Gondor”
found in The Return of the King. Except where noted, Scripture
citations come from the Douay-Rheims Catholic edition commonly
in use during the lifetime of Tolkien. All other works (authors other
than Tolkien) are cited using endnotes, with a list of sources at the
end of the book.

Abbreviations for Works by J. R. R. Tolkien

“Fairy” “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Monsters and the Critics, and
Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Foreword Foreword to The Lord of the Rings. 2nd ed. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
Hobbit The Annotated Hobbit. Revised and expanded ed., anno-
tated by Douglas A. Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1994.

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 References and Conventions

“Homecoming” “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.”

In The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1966.
Letters The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Selected and edited by
Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher
Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
“Monsters” “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In The Monsters
and the Critics, and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher
Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Morgoth Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One. Vol. 10
of The History of Middle-Earth. Edited by Christopher
Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
“Niggle” “Leaf by Niggle.” In Tree and Leaf, including the poem
“Mythopoeia,” with an introduction by Christopher
Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
Prologue Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. 2nd ed. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
Silm The Silmarillion. 1st American ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1977.
Treason The Treason of Isengard: The History of the Lord of the
Rings, Part Two. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989.

A Note on Capitalization
There does not seem to be any standard and consistently used con-
vention for the capitalization of races. My preferred convention is
to capitalize a race (Dwarf, Hobbit, Elf, etc.) only when it is used
to refer to the race as a whole, or to characteristics of that race,
and to leave the word lowercased when referring to any number
of individuals of that race (for example, “the hobbits Merry and
Pippin” or “the hobbits of the Shire”). This convention, however,
is not universally used in Tolkien scholarship, and there are places
in the text where a distinction is difficult to make. For this reason,
I leave lowercased all the following race names: dwarf/dwarves, elf/
elves, goblin/goblins, hobbit/hobbits, orc/orcs, troll/trolls, wizard/
wizards. Of these, only hobbit is a linguistic creation of Tolkien.
Though his conception of elves, goblins, trolls, and even dwarves is
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 References and Conventions

unique, these names appear in other earlier literature and Tolkien

borrowed something from previous conceptions. As for orcs, they
belong to the same race as goblins, and so do not constitute a new
race (even if Tolkien’s concept of them matured from The Hobbit
to The Lord of the Rings). Likewise, hobbits belong to the race of
men and so do not constitute a new race. Only the Ents—though
the word ent itself, like the word orc, can be traced to Old English
and Old Norse—are a race entirely of Tolkien’s creation. For that
reason, and to keep consistent with Tolkien’s own usage, Ent/Ents
will remain capitalized, along with Entwives and Entings.

xii

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 Introduction

“Middle-earth,” by the way, is not a name of a never-

never land without relation to the world we live in.
J. R. R. Tolkien

Finding Meaning in Fantasy

In October 1958, three years after J. R. R. Tolkien’s long labors writ-
ing and revising The Lord of the Rings had reached fruition with its
third and final volume at last in print,1 the author wrote a long and
interesting letter to a fan named Rhona Beare. Miss Beare had posed
a series of questions about the languages, history, and cultures of
Middle-earth. In his response, Tolkien makes what for some readers
may seem a very curious claim: Middle-earth, he explains, is our
own world, and the tales told in The Lord of the Rings are in some
sense connected to our own history.
Now Tolkien acknowledges in this letter that the geology of Mid-
dle-earth doesn’t match in details with the geology of our world.
As he tells Miss Beare, he considered trying to make these details
fit with greater verisimilitude. Before he thought of attempting this,
however, the story had already progressed too far. It would have
taken too much time and too much work to rewrite his story in order
to make Middle-earth more closely tied physically to our world.
Despite these geological dissimilarities, however, Tolkien goes on
to explain, “I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but
1

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 Intro duction

kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place.” And, dismissing

the idea put forth by many reviewers that Middle-earth was some
other planet, he adds, in clarification of his point, “Middle-earth is
. . . a modernization . . . of an old word for the inhabited world of
Men” (Letters, 283). What we might say, then, is that Tolkien’s great
legendarium—the corpus of all his stories, legends, and histories of
Middle-earth, which many readers and scholars alike consider the
preeminent work of otherworldly literature—was not about another
world at all, but about our world.

Where Is Middle-earth?
This assertion, that Middle-earth is closely connected to our own
world and that its stories are indeed a part of our own history, ap-
pears frequently in Tolkien’s letters. In a letter written in 1955 to
help his publisher Houghton Mifflin with publicity, he explains:

“Middle-earth,” by the way, is not a name of a never-never land

without relation to the world we live in. . . . It is just a use of Middle
English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middan-
geard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men “between the seas.”
And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains
and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the
nearer past, imaginatively this “history” is supposed to take place
in the period of the actual Old World of this planet. (Letters, 220)

In a letter to the publishers Allen & Unwin written later in the same
year, Tolkien is even more specific, relating the Shire explicitly to
England. He claims that the Shire is not based on some place near
Oxford (as had been suggested), but rather that it “is in fact more
or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond
Jubilee” (Letters, 230).2 Again, a year later, he writes (apparently for
his own satisfaction and not as an actual letter to anyone) a rather
long response to a W. H. Auden review of The Return of the King.
In this essay he notes, “I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not
an imaginary world. . . . The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one
in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary” (Letters,
239). Several paragraphs later he repeats the same point: “Mine is
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 Intro duction

not an ‘imaginary’ world, but an imaginary historical moment on

‘Middle-earth’—which is our habitation” (Letters, 244).
These letters are quite clear and direct, and require little com-
ment. It is worth citing one more because of the context, which for
Tolkien was not funny at all, although in hindsight it does have a
certain humor. In a 1956 letter to Rayner Unwin, Tolkien responds to
the decision of a Dutch translator to change the place names in The
Lord of the Rings in order to make them sound more Dutch. Tolkien
objects “in principle . . . as strongly as is possible to the ‘translation’
of the nomenclature at all (even by a competent person)” (Letters,
249–50). The reason he gives for this strong reaction is very interesting.

“The Shire” is based on rural England and not any other country
in the world—least perhaps of any in Europe on Holland, which is
topographically wholly dissimilar. (In fact so different is it, that in
spite of the affinity of its language, and in many respects of its idiom,
which should ease some part of the translator’s labour, its toponymy
is specially unsuitable for the purpose.) The toponymy of The Shire,
to take the first list, is a “parody” of that of rural England, in much
the same sense as are its inhabitants; they go together and are meant
to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and pre-
sumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into
an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he
should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour. (Letters, 250)

Tolkien’s critique of the translator is strong, bordering on scathing.

He seems to be questioning not only the translator’s competence
but even his motives, suggesting that the translator was deliberately
attempting to destroy the sense of the Englishness of the hobbits and
the Shire. The point of citing the passage, though, is the reasoning
behind Tolkien’s critique: that the Shire was meant to portray rural
England and its people.
At this point it is fair to ask just what Tolkien might mean in
suggesting that Middle-earth is really our own world. It is certainly
not our world geographically or geologically. Not exactly anyway,
though neither is it without some relationship. The Shire, like the
England it represents, lies in the northwestern part of the great
continent of Middle-earth and has a landscape and climate similar
to that of England; the coastal kingdom of Gondor sits far to the
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 Intro duction

south and east, past a range of mountains, in geographic relation

to the Shire very much like ancient Rome (on the southern end of
the Alps) sat in distant relation to ancient Briton.3 Still, as Tolkien
notes above, the geologic dissimilarities are difficult to ignore, not
the least of which is that the Shire is not an island.
Neither does Tolkien’s history of Middle-earth correspond in de-
tail with the actual history of Europe (or any other place on earth).
He certainly did not intend his books to be read literally as history
of our world. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings can’t even be said to
take place in any one particular period of our history—not in the
sense that a “realistic” historical novel would. Rohan, at the end of
the Third Age of Middle-earth, is certainly inspired by Anglo-Saxon
England during the second half of the first millennium AD. And
I believe that Gondor is in some way drawn from the late Roman
Empire. If we define “Old World” broadly enough, these two Middle-
earth kingdoms thus might be seen as belonging to the same “Old
World of this planet” as Tolkien noted. But the Shire, coexisting with
these two kingdoms at the end of the Third Age, is drawn from late
nineteenth-century England; to Tolkien it was not in any sense the
“Old World” but rather was very close to his modern day. Thus the
time in which Tolkien’s stories are set really is imaginary.
If we suggest a cultural and especially a literary connection be-
tween Middle-earth and our world, then the relation is much closer.
For example, both the language and literature of the land of Rohan
in Middle-earth are heavily drawn from the Old English language and
literature of Anglo-Saxon England (as we will explore later in this
book). And, at a deeper level, which has been pointed out so carefully
and insightfully by Tom Shippey in both The Road to Middle-earth
and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, so much of Tolkien’s
Middle-earth world was drawn from names, words, hints of words,
and stories found in the medieval literature of the north, including
Icelandic and Finnish literary sources as well as Old English ones.
But perhaps the deepest connection that exists between Tolkien’s
Middle-earth and this world of men in which we live—the most
profound way in which he kept his feet on his own mother-earth,
and in which Middle-earth is not without relation to the world we
live in—is philosophical. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium incar-
nates a particular philosophy or worldview. It is based on implicit
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 Intro duction

answers to certain questions. What is the meaning of life? What

constitutes a good life? How should we act? What is true? How do
we know what is true?
Of course the works rarely preach that philosophy in any direct
way. They are not didactic. Yet Tolkien’s philosophy permeates his
works like the flavor of a stew permeates all its ingredients. Indeed,
this is true not only of Tolkien’s works but of all literature: a work of
literature always reflects the philosophy of its author. As philosopher
Peter Kreeft has noted, “All literature incarnates some philosophy.”4
Kreeft wrote this in a book that was explicitly about the philosophy
of Tolkien—or the “worldview behind The Lord of the Rings,” as
he describes it in the subtitle. And quoting C. S. Lewis, he argues
earlier that fantastic literature may be particularly good at bringing
philosophies to life: “The value of the myth is that it takes all the
things we know and restores to them the rich significance which had
been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ . . . By putting bread, gold,
horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from
reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind,
the real things are more themselves.”5
Which brings us back to the connection between Tolkien’s created
world and the world we live in. The most profound ideas that perme-
ate Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth are drawn from, and are appli-
cable to, our world. The important truths of Middle-earth, Tolkien
believed, are also the important truths of our world. Or to explore
this from another angle, Tolkien’s fictional characters are in some
important way real people, or are drawn from real human nature.
They live out or encounter the profoundest of human experiences
and emotions, choices and challenges. When we read Tolkien’s books,
we look in a mirror. What we see in Tolkien’s characters is ourselves.
What we see in his world is our world. It is not a never-never land.
This is especially true of hobbits, despite their diminutive size.
And that leads me to a central point of this book.

The Making of Books

The author of Ecclesiastes knew of what he spoke when he wrote,
“Of making many books there is no end” (12:12 NIV).6 It is rather
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 Intro duction

stunning to think that he wrote those words well over two millennia
ago, before the existence of the printing press, the big box bookstore,
or the online superstore. Yet to say that the words of Ecclesiastes
are just as true today as when they were written would be a grave
understatement.
The writing of many books is certainly evident in the field of
Tolkien studies and more broadly in the popular culture surround-
ing Tolkien’s works. Concerning Tolkien’s friend and fellow fantasy
writer C. S. Lewis, who for some time was also Tolkien’s fellow
scholar at Oxford, Alan Jacobs laments in his book The Narnian,
“Long ago the writers of books and articles concerning ‘What
C. S. Lewis Thought About X’ ran out of subjects and began to
write books and articles concerning ‘What C. S. Lewis Would Have
Thought About X if He Had Lived Long Enough to See It.’”7 The
situation might not be expected to be quite as bad in Tolkien’s case
because he did not write and publish nearly as much nonfiction as
did Lewis, and the little he did publish was not about philosophy
and theology but was almost exclusively in his academic fields of
philology and Old English language and literature. Unfortunately,
for precisely that same reason,8 and perhaps also because Tolkien’s
fantasy novels have sold more copies and reached an even broader
audience than those of his friend, the situation with Tolkien studies
might actually be worse.
Certainly I bear some guilt in the proliferation of books, though
hopefully not with respect to the specific critique leveled by Jacobs.
This book, which is an expanded and updated edition of my 2003
title, Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in “The
Lord of the Rings,” is now the fourth I have authored or coau-
thored exploring Tolkien’s writing, and I have contributed essays
(or book chapters) about Tolkien’s writing to several other books.9
Nonetheless, I believe there are at least five appealing and important
motivations to continue studying and writing about the works of
the late Oxford professor, and in particular for investing more time
in this book.
The first, and for me the most significant, is in some ways quite
selfish: writing about Tolkien means I can continue to read and enjoy
his writing. The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and many of the
posthumously published tales in his Middle-earth legendarium were
6

(Unpublished manuscript—copyright protected Baker Publishing Group)

Dickerson_HobbitJourney_LC_djm.indd 6 6/12/12 2:06 PM

 Intro duction

written as stories and are intended first and foremost to be enjoyed.

Writing about them in a scholarly way, then, for me always involves
returning to the books and entering into them and enjoying them
as stories—or, rather, as story: as one continuous tale with many
smaller parts, if we follow the thinking of Sam and Frodo in their
dialogue on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol at the end of the Third Age
of Middle-earth, when they connect their part of the tale to that of
Beren, the great hero of the First Age.10 Not that I need any excuse
to return to these great works of literature. But I will take the excuse
offered. I often find that when I turn to some particular passage to
study it and write about it, I once again get caught up in the narrative
and end up reading many pages (or chapters) beyond what I “need”
to read. This is both the delight of the venture and—when I need
to be “productive” or meet some deadline—the danger. It is also a
delight and danger I hope to share, and in that way it is not selfish
at all. I hope that in reading this book my readers will be inspired to
return to Tolkien’s works and delve into them once again, perhaps
with new insights, new questions, or just a deeper appreciation. If I
succeed in this, then I consider the book worthwhile, whatever else
it does or does not accomplish.
A second motivation, or feature, of Tolkien scholarship that makes
the pursuit not only interesting but worthwhile and productive is that
Tolkien himself was a scholar—a scholar, in fact, of the very pieces
of medieval literature that were important sources and inspirations
for his own work and indeed were much the same sort of works
that he was writing, though from an earlier era. Although Tolkien
published only a small number of essays on Old English language
and literature, and one essay on myth and fantasy literature in gen-
eral, those essays were deeply illuminating and influential, especially
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-Stories.”
One might disagree with Tolkien’s observations or conclusions ex-
pressed in those essays—and many scholars have—but these essays
provide valuable insights into what he was seeking to accomplish
in his fiction and how he thought that sort of writing should be ap-
proached. In addition to these essays, he also wrote many letters in
which he discusses his own works. 11
Added to these insightful and polished essays and his personal let-
ters, the numerous posthumously published volumes of the histories
7

(Unpublished manuscript—copyright protected Baker Publishing Group)

Dickerson_HobbitJourney_LC_djm.indd 7 6/12/12 2:06 PM

 Intro duction

of Middle-earth (containing what are sometimes less polished earlier

versions of important stories), edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher,
also provide new and fresh ideas about the development of Tolkien’s
thinking as well as the development of his myths and narratives them-
selves. And the Raynor Memorial Library at Marquette University
houses an extensive collection of early-draft editions of Tolkien’s
works (mostly unpublished) that scholars and interested parties can
mine for further insights—in addition to an extensive collection of
secondary scholarship. So we have a more solid ground not just for
enjoying Tolkien’s works but for trying to understand them in the
light of his own ideas.
A third and related motivation, not only for writing about Tolkien
in general but specifically for revisiting my previous published work
(Following Gandalf ) in order to revise and update it, is that there
continues to be new material to draw on (perhaps prompted by simi-
lar motivations that brought about this book). This includes both
previously unpublished source material from Tolkien himself and
new and perceptive secondary scholarship.12 In terms of the former,
the years since my earlier book’s publication have seen the publication
of both The Children of Húrin (2007), a version of one of the two
longest and most important tales from the First Age of Middle-earth,
and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009), Tolkien’s retelling of
one of the important Norse legends that so inspired him.
Much helpful new secondary scholarship has been recently pub-
lished. Douglas Anderson, who earlier had done a wonderful job
providing insights and information in the annotations of The Anno-
tated Hobbit (2002), has since contributed to and edited the volumes
Tales before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy (2005), which
presents and comments on important source material for Tolkien,
and Tolkien on Fairy-Stories (2008), which presents Tolkien’s own
essay with a scholarly but readable introduction and commentary.
Another Tolkien scholar, Michael Drout, who edited the important
2002 contribution Beowulf and the Critics (bringing into print a
previously unpublished, earlier, longer, and in some ways more read-
able version of Tolkien’s important essay “Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics”), undertook the daunting task of putting together
the seminal and remarkably thorough J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia:
Scholarship and Critical Assessment, which was published in 2006
8

(Unpublished manuscript—copyright protected Baker Publishing Group)

Dickerson_HobbitJourney_LC_djm.indd 8 6/12/12 2:06 PM

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