Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader

Abstract

Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Edited by Jane Chance. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xx + 340, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth) While it seems that many professional folklorists have had their interest in the field initially sparked by the work of Joseph Campbell, W. B. Yeats, and J.R.R. Tolkien, most tend to deny their initial attraction to these writers, stigmatizing them as popularizers. Recognizing the scholarly problems associated with these writers, I nonetheless unabashedly proclaim my engagement with the works of all three, most especially that of J.R.R. Tolkien, a great source of inspiration to me and, I am sure, to many other young scholars. Of course the personal and emotional impact of Tolkien's work says nothing about its worth as a subject of academic study, and so the question is often posed whether Tolkien's work even deserves to be studied. This question has for years plagued scholars seeking to affirm the merits of the work. There have been fruitless and dull attempts to categorize Tolkien as a writer of children's literature or a producer of anomalously best-selling dime novels. Such attempts, tinged with embarrassment at the overwhelming popular success of Tolkien's fiction, are often accompanied by dismissive remarks made apparently in the hope that wishing will make it so. As recently as 2000, Harold Bloom pronounced The Lord of the Rings "fated to become only an intricate Period Piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as Children's Literature" (Bloom 1-2). When Bloom dispatched this thunderbolt, The Lord of the Rings had been robustly in print for forty-five years, The Hobbit for sixty-two. Despite the disapproval, over the past three decades scholars such as T. A. (Tom) Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and Jane Chance have produced and inspired a growing body of scholarly Tolkien criticism. These three scholars, along with others, have begun to wade through voluminous Tolkien correspondence and scholarly research and writing and to unfold the major goals of Tolkien's work and the sources of his inspiration. In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, the most recent addition to this body of scholarship, Jane Chance compiles eighteen essays that offer analysis of relations between Tolkien's writing and folklore, religion, and a wide range of historical literature. Inasmuch as the contributors are mostly approaching the work from the perspective of literary criticism (though of course most of the sources referred to, such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Kalevala, are literary renderings of what may well have been oral tradition), folklorists can anticipate that the volume contains little actual folklore or reference to folklore scholarship and that the contributors often make imprecise use of the technical terms "myth" and "legend. …