Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology

by Verlyn Flieger

The content of Tolkien's Mythology, the Silmarillion, has been the subject of considerable exploration and analysis for many years, but the logistics of its development have been mostly ignored and deserve closer investigation. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholars understood the term "mythology" as a gathering of song and story that derived from and described an identifiable world. 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. In Interrupted Music Flieger attempts to illuminate the structure of Tolkien's work, allowing the reader to appreciate its broad, overarching design and its careful, painstaking construction. She endeavors to "follow the music from its beginning as an idea in Tolkien's mind through to his final but never-implemented mechanism for realizing that idea, for bringing the voices of his story to the reading public." In addition, Flieger reviews attempts at myth-making in the history of English literature by Spenser, Milton, and Blake as well as by Joyce and Yeats. She reflects on the important differences between Tolkien and his predecessors and even more between Tolkien and his contemporaries. This in-depth study will fascinate those interested in Tolkien and fantasy literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Mythology, Literary Criticism, Reference, Theology, Essays, Criticism

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2005

About the author

Verlyn Flieger is an author, editor, and professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She teaches courses in comparative mythology, medieval literature and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Flieger holds an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1977) from The Catholic University of America, and has been associated with the University of Maryland since 1976. In 2012, Flieger began teaching Arthurian studies at Signum University.

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interrupted Music is up there with the best Tolkien criticism I've come across. Verlyn Flieger writes clearly and compellingly, and engages with all of Tolkien's work -- I haven't caught her making mistakes, unlike so many others, and she's dug through drafts and all sorts to get at what Tolkien intended. I love the way she points out that Christopher Tolkien has done exactly what J.R.R. Tolkien imagined for his work -- edited it out of disparate manuscripts, reconciling scribal errors, etc. It's true, and it resigns me a little more to Christopher Tolkien as editor -- I don't always agree with his decisions, just as I don't always agree with translators and editors of medieval work. And that'd be just fine in J.R.R.'s view.

[Katherine Sas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flieger sets the “Silmarillion” material within the context of historical mythological cycles and shows how Tolkien drew on them as his models — brainstorming various frame narratives, editorial conceits, and even tracing manuscript histories.

[Andrew Higgins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read work of Tolkienian scholarship. I was especially struck on this re-read with the parallels Flieger makes on Tolkien's thoughts on "the straight road" and voyage to the other world and Celtic myths and legends like the Voyage of St Brendan...
Will be using as a key text for my upcoming paper on the role of portal fantasy in Tolkien's legendarium.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes you read a book and think that this book is written for you and you alone.

Verlyn Flieger's Interrupted Music is such a book.

I add the phrase "and you alone" to my opening because for many years Tolkien was for me a private passion. When I see today how many people love the master of Middle-earth and his many songs (as some might put it), particularly after the release of the Lord of the Rings movies at the dawn of the century, I wonder at my own story--how what was in many ways a defining story, well, series of stories, in my life, a solitary pleasure. Unbeknownst to me for many years, that pleasure was shared by so many.

Now, after that Beowulfian digression, let me return to Flieger's book. What makes it such a delight the thoroughness of Verlyn Flieger's research--and her love for, appreciation of, and familiarity with Tolkien's corpus. She helps us locate the genesis of the cosmology/mythology of the legendarium published as The Silmarillion in the great storyteller's biography, the years just before World War I through his convalescence from trench fever.

Later we learn of the emergence of Númenor just about the time The Hobbit was published in the mid-1930s.

There is so much more to this book than that. And for those trying to understand the roots of a great man's storytelling genius, Flieger's Interrupted Music is a very good start. Very good. Excellent, indeed.

There are many Tolkien geeks, many more than I could even imagine when, as a lad, I found a home in Middle-earth. This book is not for me alone.

[Karen Floyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flieger sets out to explore the creation of Tolkien's world and how it came to be written and then published. Tolkien felt that Anglo-Saxon England had no mythology of its own, and that much more that once existed was driven out with the Norman invasion when England became "Frenchified." (He is apparently not interested in the even smaller and vaguer remains of the Brythonic culture and mythology that was driven out by the Anglo-Saxon invasion.) He wrote and rewrote and rewrote again many stories and poems about his mythical world trying to pin down the best way to tell the stories and to get the stories right. Flieger feels he did this deliberately, trying to accumulate various versions by various ancient sources, to give depth to his stories. He wanted to give his world the layeredness found in the stories of myths and legends that have come down to us from the Greeks and Romans, etc. I find it hard to believe that he deliberately set out to do this in his late teens/early twenties when he began writing the things that would later become "The Silmarilion." It would perhaps become a happy by-product in later years, but I think when he was starting to right he was grasping at the vague stories and ideas in his head. He was also apparently a perfectionist and the constant re-writing was a striving for that.
It was an interesting and enjoyable book, but I think the Flieger's "Splintered Light" is a much better book.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I'd bought and read this book back in 2015 when I was writing a paper for Mythcon on Tolkien's "The Long Road", "The Fall of Arthur","The Notion Club Papers" and the impact these had on C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. This book was amazing! I love how approachable her works are. I want to write scholarship like Verlyn Flieger does. Her writing is never dry, is easy to follow, well researched, , and enjoyable to read. She does a good job of outlining and explaining how Tolkien crafted his mythology, and had some of the best insights on his attempt at science fiction as a way to frame his mythology. I look forward to getting and reading her other books on Tolkien.

[Norman Styers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not what I expected it to be, but still top drawer lit crit.

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flieger makes some interesting points here, but I didn't think there was a strong enough throughline connecting her ideas.

[Laistemoonwhite · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book of Verlyn Flieger I have read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a very insightful study of the way Tolkien created his mythology. I'm already planning to re-read this after I've finished my re-reading of the entire History of Middle-earth.
I will definitely be checking out her other books.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful read that shows a lot about the world behind Tolkien's cosmology. Paved the way several other Tolkien scholars.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting - very readable