This work shows that he was not just a mythmaker and writer of escapist fantasy but a man whose relationship to his own century was troubled and critical.
Tolkien made a continuous effort over several years to construct a comprehensive mythology, to include not only the stories themselves but also the storytellers, scribes, and bards who were the offspring of his thought.
Verlyn Flieger's expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien's fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield's linguistic theory of the ...
Like these works, it belongs to a small but important corpus of his ventures into ‘real-world’ mythologies, each of which in its own way would be a formative influence on his own legendarium.
Devoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he called faërie, a world they both create and ...
In her debut novel, Verlyn Flieger weaves elements from Celtic mythology into an unforgettable tale that explores universal truths about the human condition—society’s need for scapegoats, the yearning to belong, and love’s ...
When Mick, a professional folklorist, brings his girlfriend, Kath, on a working vacation to study a seacoast community in the British Isles which maintains an oral tradition of storytelling, Kath has nightmarish visions after listening to ...