The Road to Middle-Earth Quotes

“The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“Riders were in a sense central. Whether one thinks of them as Anglo-Saxons or as Goths, they represent the bit that Tolkien knew best. Against them Gondor is a kind of Rome, also a kind of mythical Wales of the sort that bred King Coel and King Arthur and King Lear.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth

“words have over the centuries acquired meanings not easily traced in dictionaries, available however to many native speakers, and (this is where many critics part company) at times breaking through the immediate intentions of even poetic users. ‘Loose fit’, in a word, works better in poetry than ‘tight fit’; there are roads to wisdom besides the painstaking perverse originality of twentieth-century writers.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth

“Evil works, we realise, by sapping the will with over-complication.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“The sense that ghosts cluster in old libraries is very strong.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology