Master of Middle-earth The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien
During the past twenty-five year the name of J. R. R. Tolkien has become familiar to most of the English-speaking world. His great epic, The lord of the rings, is a classic, revered by scholars and treasured by readers of all ages. Both the lord of the rings and, to a lesser degree, its predecessor The hobbit have been the subject of several scholarly studies but up to now students of Tolkien's work have tended to neglect his other works of fiction. In Master of Middle-earth Paul H. Kocher considers his fiction as a whole and shows the relationship of the short prose and verse narratives to the major works and to the author himself. The knowledge that "Leaf by Niggle" was written at a time when the author was floundering through the early stages of The fellowship of the ring gives an added understanding of the struggle to complete the great epic. The recurrent theme of the inevitable separation between the world of man and the world of faery runs through many of the minor works as well as The lord of the Rings. Master of Middle-earth stresses the moral imperative that dominates Tolkien's writing and the freedom from cant that enables him to make good-humored fun of what is dearest to him. No student of the master's works should be without this book.