J.R.R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was an English philologist who specialized in an academic pursuit of Old English, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian criss-crossings in language — and who conquered the world of popular culture by his creation of the high-fantasy epics of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He would be the first to agree that often the language created in his mind needed a people and their history to make the creation live, and he had the genius to become deeply interested in what happened to his language-speakers.
Tolkien was a veteran of trench warfare in WWI (reflected in his picture of Mordor). In less than six months he participated in many assaults and lost most of his close friends to the war. He was invalided out with trench fever, a wasting and potentially crippling consequence of the plague of lice in the works. He began a life in academia, eventually carving a distinguished career both for his teaching and his scholarship. His entire adult life, however, had an ever-present onging project with Middle-Earth and its peoples. He published The Hobbit in 1937 and finally finished tinkering with The Lord of the Rings after the war, publishing the three volumes in the early 1950s. The many volumes of his drafts and notes published posthumously by his son Christopher attest to his devotion to languages creating the world and fashioning its history.
It is easy to get lost with Tolkien, trying to track what he wrote when and how revising it affected his fantastic universe in a hundred different ways. It may be helpful when first reading him or even when going back to savor him once again to remember he wanted to find that pre-War England, to take journeys with friends, even if the journeys may be hazardous in a great and noble cause, and to return safely back to a comfortable shire.
The Worm Ouroboros
The Worm Ouroboros
"An eccentric masterpiece" — Ursula K. LeGuin
"A new climate of the imagination" — C. S. Lewis
"A masterpiece" — James Stephens
This is the book that shaped the landscape of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. When The Lord of the Rings first appeared, the critics inevitably compared it to this 1922 landmark work. Tolkien himself frankly acknowledged its influence, with warm praise for its imaginative appeal. The story of a remote planet's great war between two kingdoms, it ranks as the Iliad of heroic fantasy.
In the best traditions of Homeric epics, Norse sagas, and Arthurian myths, author E. R. Eddison weaves a compelling adventure, with a majestic, Shakespearean narrative style. His sweeping tale recounts battles between warriors and witches on fog-shrouded mountaintops and in the ocean's depths — along with romantic interludes, backroom intrigues, and episodes of direst treachery. Generations of readers have joyfully lost themselves in the timeless worlds of The Worm Ouroboros. This new edition, magnificently illustrated with the classic original images, continues the enchantment.
Reprint of the Dell Books, New York, 1991 edition.