This was Tolkien’s major linguistic heresy. He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognize language ‘styles’, could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgments based on phonology. He said the sound of ‘cellar door’ was more beautiful than the sound of ‘beautiful’. He clearly believed that untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I bought Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth. I had read his Tolkien biography, Author of the Century, and generally enjoyed it. When I stopped to see my friend Dale Nelson recently, he praised TRTME as one of his most prized books. So I thought I’d give it a try.

And it is a fine work. A deep-diving overview of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ideas, work life, and achievements. But it may have been more of a book than this reader was qualified to handle.

I was pleased that the author seems to have moderated his comments about Augustinianism and Manicheanism, which (in my opinion) went too far in his Tolkien biography, where he actually labels C. S. Lewis a Manichean. What he’s actually talking about is our conception of evil – is it (as Augustine – and C. S. Lewis, whatever Shippey says – insisted) a lack, a corruption of the good, or does it have existence in itself? He seems to be convinced that if you believe the Augustinian view, you can’t really embody evil in a character. I’ve never accepted that – it’s enough to have a character submit to evil and live out its qualities.

My personal difficulty with the book, I’m afraid, was that I haven’t read enough of the post-Rings Tolkien material. I’ve read the Silmarillion, and several of the books involving single stories, but I couldn’t make it through the books of Lost Tales, and never even tried to read The History of Middle Earth. That means that a lot of the material Shippey deals with in the later chapters of this book was unknown, or only vaguely known, to me.

But if you’re a true Tolkien geek, I would say this is a book you absolutely ought to read. It’s been revised twice, and the author conscientiously corrects previous errors (mostly errors of ignorance).

Highly recommended, for its proper audience.