Defending Middle-earth - Tolkien: Myth and Modernity

 

By Patrick Curry
Paperback £7.99
HarperCollins Publishers, London 1997
206 pages including references and index

Starting life as an exploration of the inspiration of The Lord of the Rings within English culture, the natural world and spiritually-inspired ethics, this book grew to encompass in its scope many of the questions raised by The Lord of the Rings, and raised by others about it. Chapters move from 'The Shire: Culture Society and Politics', to considering the true nature of Tolkien's creation in the light of literary and historical tradition, Nature and ecology, and comparing the "essence of Mordor" with modern political and ecological destruction. In 'Fantasy, Literature and the Mythopoeic Imagination', Curry quotes Virginia Luling: "All mythologies are necessarily both universal and local: universal in their scope, because they deal with the nature of things; local in point of view and temper, because they arise out of particular cultures." One of the small handful of serious and intelligent commentaries on The Lord of the Rings currently in print, covering a lot of ground swiftly and readably without short-cutting its points.

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