Tag: Middle-Earth

Tolkien and the Great War

Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

by John Garth (HarperCollins, 2003)

Garth_Tolkien and the Great War

Garth’s knowledge of Tolkien’s writings leads at times to an overwhelming focus on the minutiae of his invented languages and mythology. The strictly biographical aspects are more accessible, giving a good sense of (educated) life pre- and during the First World War.

 

 

The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion

by J. R. R. Tolkien (Allen & Unwin, 1977); audiobook read by Martin Shaw (HarperCollins, 2015)

Tolkien_Silmarillion

A posthumously compiled addendum to Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories, demonstrating the epic imagination that underpinned these works but none of their narrative pull. In essence: a vast and proclamatory, untethered bore, which not even Martin Shaw’s sonorous narration can make worth persisting with.

 

 

Derelict Space Sheep