Foreword

The love that dare not speak its name.

Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Two Loves’ (1894)

This is a book unlike other books on Tolkien and his visionary creation of Middle-Earth. To begin: I first readThe Lord of the Rings aged thirteen, and was totally enraptured by Middle-Earth. The finest analogy I have found to my experience is in the words of the much-loved and greatly lamented writer Terry Pratchett, who described his first encounter withThe Lord of the Rings in the most reverential terms: he read it as a teenager, babysitting on New Year’s Eve – ‘I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.’1

This book is about being inside the story, a wild story. It is not an (apparently) straightforward introduction to Tolkien’s world – not only are there plenty of such primers, guides, and encyclopedias, but they tend to get rapidly bogged down in the minutiae of Tolkien’s ‘legendarium’ or ‘mythos’ (his complex architecture of gods and goddesses, the intricate lore of the many peoples of Middle-Earth, and their entangled histories and tales across thousands of years). Within a few pages, these books are preaching to the converted and are lost in the arcana of the ‘Ainur’ and ‘Maiar’, and purveying imaginary deities to perplexed readers rather than doing what they should be doing, which is, simply, explaining the value of the writing. Neither is this book an academic study of the challenges that Tolkien’s work poses to his readers in such areas as the twists and turns of invented languages and alphabets, or the workings of Catholic theology. Such extreme erudition stifles the appreciation of the works as literature, and as a wider culture – indeed, this work could be deemed worthy but worthless; of undoubted scholarly significance, but of interest only to the cognoscenti.

In contrast,Twenty-First-Century Tolkien takes as its starting point the Tolkien phenomenon today: a multi-media mix and fix of literature, art, music, radio, cinema, gaming, fandom, and popular culture – a never-ending Middle-Earth. We cannot return to a purely literary Middle-Earth independent of, primarily, Sir Peter Jackson’s extraordinary films. We should therefore accept that any assessment of newly published works drawn from the Tolkien archives – as well as new adaptations of his tales and imagined histories – are inevitably going to be deeply coloured by the multifaceted twenty-first-century Tolkien ‘industry’, for want of a better term.

In that respect at least, Tolkien can be compared with Shakespeare: he is not simply an author and a body of work, but a vast and growing field of cultural activity and products. This ‘discourse’ – and I will try not to use that word again – combines Tolkien’s earliest influences and sources (fromBeowulf toPeter Pan), biographical details (two world wars and half a century of university politics – mainly at Oxford), and an astonishingly rich variety of texts (poetry, drama, fiction, literary criticism, philological scholarship, and so forth) with the dazzling efflorescence of adaptations that began in his lifetime and have since expanded to Himalayan proportions. Even before the publication of the final volume ofThe Lord of the Rings (itself one of the bestselling books of a