Review: The Book of Lost Tales, Part One

The Book of Lost Tales, Part One by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

People who have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings often stumble when they turn to The Silmarillion, since the two works are so different in tone and perspective. The books in The History of Middle-Earth series are different again. They contain sixty years of stories we've never seen before because Tolkien abandoned them completely, as well as abandoned, early versions of the stories we have met elsewhere. These books are the archaeology of Tolkien's subcreation of Middle-Earth. Through alternating passages of text, notes, and commentary, Christopher Tolkien lays out how his father developed this world, tale by tale and word by word.

If that sounds interesting to you, then you may well find great pleasure in The Book of Lost Tales and the other books in this series. I know I have. That's not just because I have always been a big fan of Tolkien, but because I have also always been someone who studies books as much as I read books. I found it fascinating to discover how his conceptions of this world and these tales changed over time.

If you do decide to give this book a try, I'd suggest you also lend an ear to the Mythgard Academy's free online course on this book, which is available from Mythgard's website and iTunes, and is terrific. Even for the knowledgeable fan, it's nice to have an expert guide along.

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Review: The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm

The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There's a great deal of very interesting information here, which Nicolson might have used to great effect.

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Review: History of the Rain

History of the Rain by Niall Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a thing of beauty.

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Review: J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology by Simon J. Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In an imaginary world like Middle-Earth, which is 'at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws' (C.S. Lewis), nothing could be easier than for fans and scholars to find some parts of this world far more fascinating than others. Many, for example, devote long study to Tolkien's languages, which are of great importance for his world and are indeed fundamental to its very creation.. Others find questions of the adaptation of the books to film, and of the impact of the books on popular culture (and the reverse), to be irresistible. Still others investigate the spiritual lessons and spiritual foundations of Tolkien's work. The list could go on to cover many more areas, all worthy of detailed study.

Now my own interest generally resides in a very old-fashioned, very detailed literary analysis of the texts themselves as they unfold their tale, and so I have never really paid much heed to Tolkien's famous statement that he felt the lack of a 'mythology for England' and wished to remedy it. But every now and then a work comes along that changes your perspective, that changes your mind about what is interesting. Simon Cook's J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology is just such a work.

At 49 pages, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology is more of a monograph than a book. Yet its brevity makes it only more impressive. With admirable force and economy, Cook analyzes Middle-Earth as 'an exploration of the ancient imagination of the North, forged from profound scholarship as well as literary genius, and situated on the threshold of actual history.' Through investigation of Tolkien's earliest tales, his work on Beowulf, and his response to Hector Munro Chadwick's The Origin of the English Nation, Cook has put together a compelling argument for the origins of Tolkien's 'mythology for England' and for its larger relevance to understanding how Tolkien came in the end to write The Lord of the Rings he wrote.

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Review: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I believe there are two types of people in the world: those for whom the past is like a well remembered movie and the present is all that is real; and those, like me, for whom the past is all that is real and the present is a loosely worn garment soon to be changed for another. That is a perspective I seem to share with Berie, the protagonist of this book. And perhaps that is part of why I like it so much. But that is not all.

Lorrie Moore's prose is fluid, poignant, and funny. More than once she made me laugh out loud, or pause to relish some marvelous description. She will at times suddenly disarm you, leading you somewhere soft and lyrical, only to stop you in your tracks with a surprising turn of phrase.

Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.

Wait. What? Everything was going, dare I say, swimmingly there. At first perhaps I thought the man's momentary gaze was going to be subverted because he would be distracted from his love, have his head turned by a pretty face -- how like a man, eh? -- but to her credit Moore did not shoot for the easy target. And with that menace safely past I was settling in to this rather nice description. For an instant "rainbow" made me cock an eyebrow, which lowered again with "that old trick of the light," but then before I could fully relax again I encountered the pee in the pool.

That stopped me dead. It seemed so out of harmony with everything that went before. But it was no mere gaffe, no sudden loss of touch. The current of love she swims through is a love felt for someone else by someone else. Her own husband does not love her and she knows it. So the love she feels for an instant is false, not for her, a trick of the light, a warmth that can only remind her of all that is rotten in her own life.

But Lorrie Moore's prose is also economical. The amount of story she packs into 125 pages without ever once seeming to rush or cram is astonishing. And after my remarks critical of first person narration in my review of The Goldfinch I feel it is only fair to say that here the choice of the first person is entirely successful.

Nicely done all around. A very good read.



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