Jane Chance

"J. R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy. Yet he did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. The essays collected here examine this paradox and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern. The approach helps to explain the popularity of his works, the way in which they continue to be brought into dialogue with 21st-century issues, and their contested literary significance in the academy."--Jacket.

"As a scholar of medieval literature and a lover of Germanic and Finnish mythologies in particular, J. R. R. Tolkien was "grieved by the poverty" of legend and myth in his own beloved culture. Inspired by works like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tolkien's fiction relied on both pagan epic and Christian legend to create a mythology for England evident in both his major works of fiction like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and his minor stories and critical essays. Revised and expanded, Jane Chance's study examines the sources and influences of Tolkien's works as well as the paradigm of the critic as monster that colors so many of his writings."--BOOK JACKET.

"Tolkien the Medievalist explores how Tolkien's creative worlds were shaped by his own scholarship on medieval literature. In trying to create a "mythology for England" in the space of his fiction, Tolkien inevitably drew upon extant medieval languages and literatures." "This is the first recent collection to examine anew the question of Tolkien's medievalness. Interdisciplinary in approach, the essays explore Tolkien's position within the context of twentieth-century medieval scholarship and religious movements and his use of various works of medieval literature as a palimpsest for the development of his own ideas." "In the first section, essays focus on how Professor Tolkien invested his professional interests in his writing and how those works and the movements of his day may have affected his fiction. The second and third sections focus on specific episodes, characters, concepts, and images and how they correspond to medieval literary antecedents, in Old Norse, Old and Middle English, medieval Latin, and in medieval Catholicism. In the fourth section, essays discuss how mythological retextualization in his fiction assumed a medieval form." "Essential reading for all scholars interested in J.R.R. Tolkien, this work will also be of vital interest to those working in the fields of medieval history and literature, literary history, and literature in the early twentieth century."--Jacket.