Tolkien's View: Windows into his World

by J.S. Ryan

Tolkien's Windows into his World contains a number of selected essays by Professor J.S. Ryan, for their most part originally published over three decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, on the theme of J.R.R. Tolkien and his works. Having himself studied under Professor Tolkien at the time of the publication of his masterwork The Lord of the Rings, Professor J.S. Ryan is uniquely well-placed to comment on some aspects of Tolkien's academic environment in Oxford, the subject matters J.R.R. Tolkien studied and brooded upon in his regular professional work and the people he personally knew, cherished and was influenced by as a student and then as a professor of Old and Middle English, a writer and a person.

312 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2009

Reviews

[Simon Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some real nuggets of great value here. Ryan is one of the very few people to approach Tolkien from a perspective that I would call 'intellectual history' - consequently he gives out a lot of suggestions and ideas and concrete facts ignored, passed over or simply missed by everyone else. The one big drawback, at least in my opinion, is that his writing style is just appalling: endless sentences, bad organization, and lack of clear statements of the thesis of any particular argument.