The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation

by Michael D.C. Drout

A leading scholar draws on fifty years of reading and studying J.R.R. Tolkien to explain how he created an entire world.

No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth—a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout takes us deep into Tolkien’s genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of not only The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion but also lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as Tolkien’s poetry and innovative scholarship.

Drout, who has spent decades reading, studying, and teaching Tolkien, allows us to understand the author’s methods and to embrace his works as never before. With great erudition and sparkling prose, Drout shows us how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from northern Europe, using the subtle qualities of those famous works as inspiration for his own. We also see the process by which he created the complex form of sorrow that is the primary emotional effect of his mature works, a sadness “blessed without bitterness,” carefully woven through a tapestry of themes that has resonated with generations of readers.

Sweeping and hugely perceptive—and enhanced throughout by Drout’s personal reflections on how Tolkien has shaped his own life and relationships—The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew and will come to be seen as an essential work for anyone who has journeyed to Middle-earth.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Criticism, Books About Books, History, Literary Criticism, Writing

384 pages, Hardcover

First published December 2, 2025

Reviews

[Julie Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I preordered this, such is my love of Michael Drout's work on Tolkien. I was a bit taken aback upon receiving it and finding that it was largely directed toward textual analysis and outside influences upon Tolkien's story telling. That's not usually my sort of thing. However, Drout was straight forward enough that I don't mind it because he's not nitpicking things to death — as Tolkien would have said, he's not tearing the tower apart into a ruin. We're looking at the sea together while admiring the tower that makes it possible. Also, I did my fair share of skimming past the bits I didn't care about. Because there was plenty that I did find appealing.

Eventually, Drout began looking at deeper messages rather than just textual content. I truly loved his examination of The Hobbit through the bourgeois world versus the epic world. Anyone familiar with The Hobbit can quickly see why this works so well, but it takes Drout to look at both sides fairly. Yes, Bilbo learns more about the epic world which we admire. However, his bourgeois side also has benefits that the epic world simply cannot comprehend or adapt to purely because of the code that is followed. This was fascinating. And there's more where that came from.

Also, this is just enough of Drout's own memoir of Tolkien's influence in his own life to draw me along for more. The concluding chapter was enough to break one's heart but it was in a style that Tolkien would have appreciated.

Definitely recommended.

[Diana Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course if it's anything related to Professor Tolkien I just simply can't resist. This is the work of one who has studied Tolkien and is an expert into his writing. Excellent read.

[Laurel]

A deeply personal work of scholarship - I need to take time and approach each chapter as it's own entity to review because this runs a whole gamut of topics (elvish racism, heterotextuality, constructing and interpreting grief, etc - so much!!!).

One thing I do appreciate in *all* the chapters is the footnotes. The footnotes brought humor to the text, and were one of the areas that Drout's passion for teaching had extra time to shine.

The entire book will appeal to Tolkien scholars and to Tolkien readers who love diving into discussions on how the text made you feel. It was more memoir than I anticipated, but it simply added a new dimension to the rigorous scholarship I expect from Drout.

[Andrew Higgins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well Worth The Wait!!!

As with everything Professor Drout has written an incredibly insightful and important work of scholarship. The Tower and the Ruin has given me new insights into works I have read and studied practically my whole life and has made me want to dig back into them. From Drout’s Tower you will see new vistas and perspectives into Tolkien’s legendarium.

[Vaidotas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding blend of original and well-crafted analysis and a touch of sentimental bond with author's works

[Salvatore F · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never expected a scholarly work on Tolkien’s creative masterpiece to leave me sobbing but then I almost could not make it through the last chapter due to my own personal experiences. The weaving of memories into scholastic insight proved to be remarkably impactful and truly highlighted the through theme of experiential storytelling that is Tolkien’s work.

[Lukas Merrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

This ended up being different from what I expected. While Drout is clearly knowledgeable about Tolkien and his literature, this book felt a bit chaotic. The author’s goal was to explore why Tolkien’s stories have the universal impact on people that they anecdotally seem to have. Drout explores a bunch of different categories in order to explain why he thinks this is the case.

This method is all well and good, but the execution was lacking a bit. He would abruptly switch gears from reminiscing on how Tolkien impacted his personal life to then getting deeply in the weeds of some analytical literary minutiae all within a couple of pages. There were also times where I just couldn’t understand why he was spending so much time on a particular theme in Tolkien’s work that seemed not worth exploring (e.g. Elvish racism).

Overall, I learned a lot and there were some brilliant moments contained within Drout’s project, but this book feels like one that I will reference specific sections in rather than rereading or recommending the whole.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy Tolkeins! That said was hot and cold on different aspects of it: as a kid who grew up on the Rankin/Bass movie and double LP abridged audio version (my first audiobook!) of the Hobbit and the Bakshi movie version of LOTR (it seemed completely awesome at 8 years old) and am among the apparently very wide demographic of your-dad-reading-this-book (albeit made it about 20% into the first volume and promptly gave up), I really enjoyed the aspects where the author discusses these aspects (although I heretically found Jackson's trilogy to be kind of cheesy as an adult). As a work of literary criticism the book was maybe too much for a casual reader such as myself? That said, if you love Tolkien's work then this might give you much more mileage. However, the whole section about racism embedded in the work was just tiresome - it seems that this aspect is a must for a large section of modern non-fiction to trawl these themes and find evidence from thin air; whereas it seems that the whole dwarves-are-jews antisemitism claim was too verboten for the author to comment on.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great scholarship in here and some profound insights. He acknowledges but does shy away from Tolkien’s Christianity as an impact on Tolkien’s creative genius.

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Drout has long and precious memories of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is a scholar who has been reading Tolkien like the Bible and for decades, thinking about what he loves, trying to understand better, and gathering from it all a sense of something he puts into this book. This has to be one of the most extraordinary and wonderful books on the significance of Tolkien that exists.

Drout starts out with Tolkien's lineage. Walter Scott was a writer trying to capture a sense of true things that we still remember. William Morris endeavored to translate that sense of the Medieval through his romances. Rider Haggard wrote Eric Brighteyes, endeavoring to transmit to his generation the sense of the world of the Sagas of Icelanders. The very title of Drout's book evokes Tolkien's essay, definitive in Anglo-Saxon studies about Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics, in which a dominant illustration is that of the ruins of a tower, examined in all kinds of foolish ways, but which were made as a tower from which the builder could look out on the sea. Beowulf is poignant because it is obviously written by a Christian remembering and lamenting the passing and loss of a heroic pagan way of life. Drout argues that Tolkien figured out a way to lament something made up in such a way that it powerfully suggests an enduring reality. Aristotle said that fiction is better than history, because fiction can be calibrated and focused on the permanent things. Drout's book is an explanation of how Tolkien did that.

The argument of the second chapter is that in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses frames. The frame of The Hobbit is more obvious: we are being told thing through a narrator who is framing the story with his observations. The frame of The Lord of the Rings is more subtle: it is suggested in the appendices and in allusions to other books. The frame here consists in various different people telling stories which are being transmitted, translated, compiled, and imperfectly collated. That contributes in at least a subliminal way to the sense that we are getting ancient records. These layers in turn suggest historical accuracy, even when there are inconsistencies because historical records always generate these. It gives the whole a feel of real memories of true experiences.

This leads Drout to consider how Tolkien focalizes his narrative through the most ignorant character. It is what keeps him from expositing crucial information tediously. We are watching developments, even when other characters talk, through the eyes of the person who has the most at stake in learning that information. It avoids a notorious pitfall of which imitators are often guilty: awkward, uninteresting information dumps. There is a lot of information one has to gather to make sense of The Lord of the Rings. There are appendices, genealogies, and the detailed maps, all beside a long, intricate story. All these are incorporated in such a way that after the main narrative, you read on, you flip back and study the map, you ponder the relations in the family trees. It is due to that ingenious focalization, with the curious intrusion only once (if I remember correctly) of a narrator who's point of view cannot be explained.

Scholars, among whom Drout is not the least, have figured out that The Lord of the Rings has repeated patterns. If you think of it, any story by Tolkien will have caves, perils, treasures, giants, battles, etc. There is also the pattern of alternating good and bad. Tolkien did not tell The Tale of the Children of Hurin that way, for example. That story is only worse and worse. But in The Lord of the Rings especially, you have the pattern of expecting good to follow bad. As you have episodes repeat, you have the variations in the general pattern that generate experiences and expectations. This is part of the magic: repeated experiences of trouble overcome, which train the reader's soul in hope. The sense of possibilities, for example, is generated thereby, till you have Frodo's amazing possibility when he glimpses a far green shore.

This book is deeply personal. Drout does not apologize for it because he understands that his life has been so intertwined with the experience of reading and rereading Tolkien's works that it is not possible for him to understand his life apart from them, and that he cannot understand Tolkien apart from the important personal experiences Tolkien has shaped through his stories. So that things that are secret, and difficult, and of the most profound sadness are offered up in this public way: there is no other way to demonstrate how real and true the shaping is. It is what Tolkien has most meaningfully given him, as if Drout were the mines of Moria and Tolkien the smith who shaped what can then be brought to the light of day.

The sixth chapter, Threads, was for me the most ambivalent. I read it with a lot of attention, but attention full of misgiving. Drout is arguing about The Silmarillion that the plot is driven in part by the racism of its characters. He is not arguing that Tolkien was writing a racist book. He is arguing that the perceived ontological hierarchies that the characters experience, are abused, sinfully abused, leading to lamentable consequences. Here is where I think I somewhat disagree with Drout: I don't think he understands the hierarchies that obtain between beings to be ontological. That elves are better than men, and men are better than dwarves. Not just superior in some ways, but in an ontological hierarchy. I can affirm unreservedly an analogia entis. I don't think Drout can. He cannot understand that some elves are better than others because some elves are more proximate to grace. Or if he acknowledges that grace (I doubt it though) he cannot acknowledge ontological benefits: that some elves are greater beings than others. I don't think he even believes dwarves are inferior beings – the whole consideration is off the table for him—it seems to me. I can't agree with this. If you put that aside, his argument is good. It is by looking down on others, treating them with contempt, despising and lowering others in sinful and abusive ways drives the conflict in The Silmarillion. Something similar occurs in The Hobbit. There, Drout demonstrates, there is an interesting conflict created by the interaction of the bourgeois world of Bilbo, and the epic world of the dwarves. Neither is dismissed by the narrator, both have their limits, and brought together they enrich and mature the protagonist.

The climax of his argument is chapter seven, Threads. In The Lord of the Rings the epic and the tragic are woven together to great effect. Drout examines two things in detail: the exact power of the ring and the occasion for its beginning to dominate Frodo and the consequences. Here is where Drout's long studies and wide acquaintance with all the scholarship, which are so stupendous all through this book that one is in danger of taking it all for granted in the chapter for which all the book prepares, shine. You have to read how he does this, how he uses it to explain what is happening to Frodo, and why Frodo's triumph is imbued with tragedy, pregnant with intangible realities that fill the reader to brimming.

Drout ends with a very personal conclusion that allows him to show how, despite his knowing that Tolkien's works is all fiction, and despite the fact that he is not a believer, The Lord of the Rings has formed his soul in the virtue of hope. I understand there was a chapter he had to excise. I hope we will eventually get this. Drout can talk as long as he wants to me about Tolkien. I will pay. I will read. I will listen.

Reader, this book is one of the best things to happen ever in the now blossoming field of Tolkien studies. It is technical, intricate, and is best read after good exposure to the works it seeks to illuminate: everything Tolkien ever wrote. But it is worth it. It is a truly astonishing tribute to the greatness of Tolkien's accomplishment.

[Nick H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling and deep analysis of Tolkien’s works. The main concept of the title, asserting that Tolkien creates “textual ruins” is extremely well presented. I had never really thought about it before, but that’s certainly something that plays a major role in my reading the books every year. Aside from Tolkien, my other passion is Homer, whose works I’ve read around 30-40 times in various translations by this point. And Drout’s “tower and ruin” idea certainly draws a new parallel between what I find so fascinating about the provenance of orally transmitted poems. The difference is that Tolkien did this all himself!

Aside from the brilliant main concept, other favorite subjects were the exploration of “Elvish racism” in THE SILMARILLION, the clashing of bourgeois and epic worlds in THE HOBBIT, and the analysis of Gollum’s psychology and speech patterns in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. But there wasn’t a dull chapter - everything in the book was fascinating.

Drout also provides an excellent narration of the material, and it’s a pleasure to hear an expert pronounce Old English passages! The conclusion chapter is heart-rending, and I can’t imagine the anguish it must have taken to not only write, but then have to narrate that chapter.

Overall this is an incredible book, and a very valuable key to understanding Tolkien’s works. It’s also entertainingly written, and is one of the only audiobooks I’ve read that finds a good way to incorporate footnotes! Now I have to go read the remaining 11 HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH volumes, as well as LOTR, THE HOBBIT, THE SILMARILLION and all the other published Tolkien collections! [AUDIBLE]


素晴らしく深いトールキンの分析。「タワーとルイン」って言うのコンセプトが思ったより深いな考え。気づかなかったがそれは本当にトールキンの本の世界と本の大きな魅力。僕はトールキンの隣にホメロスがいつも読んでる、今まで30〜40回ぐらい。ドラウト作家の「文学的なルイン」のコンセプトは絶対同じ、トールキンは僕にとってホメロスの同じ経験。イリアスのような言語とかスタイルとかたまにある(トールキンはギリシャの話そんなに好きじゃなかったのに)だけどその「これは壊れて散ってる、けどできるだけ直したパズル」のことはトールキン1人で作れた。それは本当にすごい。

その後特によかったな話題は、「シルマリルの物語のエルフのレイシズム」、「ホビットの大冒険の普通世界対エピックな世界」、後「ゴクリの心理学と言語の分析」。けど本の全てはすごくよかった！後，作家の自分のナレーションも良かった。本当のプロの自分の古英語の発音聞こえるのが光栄だった。最後の章は感動した、世界一のひどいことについて自分の声で伝えるのが何より難しかったでしょ。

この本は貴重なトールキンの理解の一部。後めっちゃ楽しく書きされた。今まで「中つ国の歴史」の１巻目読んだことあるだけどもっと読みたい、後指輪の物語とホビットの冒険また読もう！

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

J.R.R. Tolkien's book The Lord of the Rings is cited as a favorite by readers all over the world. It is a book we return to over and over again, with many reading it at least once or twice every year. People read it to their children, and often they end up reading it to their own children in turn. While it's common to reread favorites, few books inspire as much love as The Lord of the Rings. It feels different from other fantasy novels, with many finding it inspires a nostalgia for a place that never existed, and a longing for a world that can never be. Though other fantasy writers have attempted to build worlds as complex as Tolkien's Middle-earth, they have all fallen short of the mark (though some like Susan Cooper and Ursula K. Le Guin come close).

So what is it about Tolkien's work that makes it stand head and shoulders above so many others? Why do we return to it seasonally or in times of personal hardship? In his new book, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation, Dr. Michael D.C. Drout sets out to explore potential answers to these questions. Drawing upon a love of Tolkien that goes back to his childhood and his own experience as a professor of English who specializes in medieval literature, Drout discusses the sources of Tolkien's inspirations and how they influenced his work. Drout also builds on the work of other Tolkien scholars such as Verlyn Flieger and Tom Shippey to help explain his ideas and occasionally refuting some of theirs. The textual analysis is straightforward and presented clearly so, even if the reader isn't familiar with Anglo-Saxon poetry, they'll understand what's going on.

What, exactly, is going on with all this textual analysis? Quite a lot. Drout explains how Tolkien built his metaphorical tower using stones from the ruins of medieval literature to give Middle-earth its extraordinary depth of history. When you read The Lord of the Rings, you get glimpses of a deeper history: Elrond mentions heroes such as Húrin and Túrin; Aragorn tells a brief story of Beren and Lúthien though he says there is much more to their story that the hobbits aren't told; Gimli speaks of the wonders of Moria in its glory days, while Legolas tells sad tales of Elves who disappeared from the world an age ago. These 'broken references' or 'pseudo-references' help give Middle-earth a weight of internal history. If you then delve into The Silmarillion, you get a greater sense of that world's history– but even then, it feels as though there are even more stories left untold. The reader gets only hints of certain things: what happens to Beren and Lúthien in the end, for example? Much as we want to know, we never find out. But where other authors would dig down to find some sort of answer, Tolkien left a lot of questions unanswered, which reflects the realities of the medieval texts he studied for most of his life. In our real histories, we don't have all the answers. Someone will be mentioned in an ancient story and the writer will say "everyone knows about this man, so I won't explain it here", but in the intervening years that story was lost. Now, we only have hints and vague suggestions. In his grand histories of the three ages of Middle-earth, Tolkien did the same thing, which gave his stories a feeling of depth and history that has gone unmatched ever since.

The Tower and the Ruin isn't entirely about textual analysis, broken references, and other literary devices, however. Drout continuously returns to the beauty of Middle-earth– to Tolkien's landscapes in The Lord of the Rings, the gorgeous lost Elven cities of The Silmarillion, and the starlight through the cloud wrack that reminds Sam, and us, that there is beauty in the world that no darkness can touch. Despite all the heartbreaking los, there is always beauty to be found. There are many themes to find in Tolkien's work, but this is one of the most important ones to remember.

Though he cannot speak for all readers, Drout can certainly speak for himself as a lifelong Tolkien fan. Throughout the book, he tells deeply personal stories of how Tolkien's stories have helped him find a way through the darkest parts of his life, from his parents' divorce when he was a child to the loss of his own son in 2022. While he admits that The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion has never provided a simple answer to the problems of his life, it has reminded him of a simple truth: that no matter how dark the days seem, and no matter how heavy grief can be, there is always hope.



Thank you to NetGalley and W.W. Norton for the free advance copy for review

[Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars bumped up to 5 stars. As a longtime devotee of all things J.R.R. Tolkien, as soon as I heard about The Tower and Ruin I was intrigued. What Michael D.C. Drout is able to accomplish is something that longtime Tolkien fans are keenly aware of—the worthiness of Tolkien and his Legendarium for scholarly insight and assessment. Here Drout touches on how Tolkien crafted his world and what inspired him to do so, but beyond that, Drout discusses how Tolkien’s work compared to so many others is able to touch on individual’s lives. What makes Tolkien wholly unique? For such a Tolkien nerd as myself, a great deal of the factual knowledge I was already aware of—Tolkien’s influences from Beowulf and Chaucer to the Finnish language—but I was engrossed with the deeper analysis on the themes across Tolkien’s work, the use of meter and rhyme, Tolkien’s own editing process, and Drout’s personal relationship with Tolkien’s work. While I’m generally not the biggest fan of an author intentionally including too much of themselves in a book (it’s part of why I tend to avoid memoirs), Drout managed to thread this needle pretty well throughout, and made the personal inclusions all the more impactful and honest at the end. The Tower and the Ruin offers some of the finest scholarly assessment of Tolkien’s world building to date.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael Drout has set out on a very ambitious goal of describing the methods J.R.R. Tolkien used to create stories that feel qualitatively different than most 20th century literature. I am very happy to report that he has achieved that goal.

This may be the most significant book-length piece of Tolkien criticism in the last decade, if not longer. In fact, it likely deserves a spot among the quintessential tomes of Tolkien scholarship such as Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth and Author of the Century, Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light, and John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War.

Drout’s specific aim, as he describes in the introduction, is “to explain…how Tolkien’s stories work, both in their internal functioning and in the ways they affect their readers” (13). To do this, he relies on the titular metaphor of towers and ruins.

One heuristic on effective scholarship that I’ve developed over the years is when a scholar is able to lead the reader down a path such that it continually clears just a few steps ahead of you. Drout’s arguments in this book are so well done, that I found myself repeatedly forming conclusions a page or two before he led me to them.

Read the full review of The Tower and the Ruin on my website.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tower and the Ruin offers a thoughtful, compact exploration of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creative philosophy, blending literary analysis with reflections on mythology, language, and world-building. Though brief, the book presents an illuminating look into how Tolkien viewed the act of creation—its beauty, its limitations, and its moral weight.

The “tower” symbolizes the imaginative structures writers build, while the “ruin” reflects the inevitable imperfections that accompany human creativity. Drawing on Tolkien’s essays, letters, and sub-creation theory, the text highlights his belief that storytelling is both an act of art and an act of faith. Readers get a deeper understanding of how Middle-earth emerged from meticulous linguistic invention, moral vision, and Tolkien’s conviction that fantasy reveals truth rather than obscuring it.

This graphic-essay-style work is accessible, insightful, and perfect for Tolkien fans who enjoy exploring the intellectual foundations beneath his fiction. It doesn’t require deep scholarly background, making it a welcoming entry point into Tolkien’s creative mind.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and personal study on why Tolkien’s works have proved so potent and beloved.