Essay on the hobbit by j.j.r. tolkien

Best-selling, award-winning novels and books explore our changing world. Scientist NASA adviser, astrophysicist, futurist, tech-punditforecaster. David Brin home recommended sf books J. Tolkien and the Modern Age J.

Tolkien, Beowulf and the Critics. Previous critics disregarded the monsters, Grendel and his mother and the dragon, because they teach little about history, pagan Teutonic culture, or Nordic religion. But Tolkien taught that the monsters were integral to Beowulf; indeed, he argued, if you discard them and read the poem as a historical epic or tragedy, the remainder appears cheap and disorganized.

Further, Tolkien taught that reading Beowulf as a literary work was immensely rewarding: The previous critics of Beowulf, Tolkien taught us, didn't treat the poem as a poem.

Overall, Drout provides a rich context in which to read Tolkien's work. Drout fully describes Tolkien's manuscripts for the benefit of scholars who will not have direct access to the originals.

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In "Description of the Manuscript," he tells how the manuscript came to the Bodleian Library and describes its present condition, organization, dating, and numbering.

The manuscript is not written on acid-free paper and has already deteriorated significantly. It consists of folios written in Tolkien's hand in pen and pencil. Folios contain version A of the lectures. Folios contain "assorted notes and jottings," not all decipherable but most incorporated into the text in some form.

Folios contain version B of the lectures. The text is mainly written on one side of the page, except for brief notes that served Tolkien as reminders of ideas that he would work into the text.

The verso of folio 95 "is a page of paradigms and exercises in Gothic" xvi.

Drout shares an understanding of Tolkien's motivating devotion to his roots as an Englishman, pointing out that "an English racial identity is made through participation in two related traditions: Drout explains the common tie between the works of Tolkien the philologist and Tolkien the novelist; as both, Tolkien remains connected with a tradition, a history, and a culture tied to England, to his country.

Just as the Beowulf poet synthesized ancient material with Christian teaching, Tolkien forged "a synthetic mythical 'history' to explain certain perceived truths about the ancestry of his people" He sees the rock garden recalling the image of the Englishman as gardener and associated with the middle-class countryman like Tolkien himself.

We can longer attend Tolkien's lectures and most of us cannot take the classes taught by Prof. Drout, but we should be grateful for this fine substitute. The volume preserves the deteriorating manuscript for future study, which would take any lover of Beowulf to his or her histories, glossaries, grammars, and the works of other scholars, and, even more important and rewarding, back to the poem itself.J.

R. R. Tolkien 3 January - 2 September John Ronald Reuel Tolkien () was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English.

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In Tolkien's "The Hobbit" we also Icelandic influence from the myth Edda. Edda is a myth that is mainly about elves and dwarves and we can infer that this is were Tolkien got . One literary work, also helps define my idea of the word Literature, is The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien.

The reason I consider this a piece of “Literature” is because of the amount of imagery Tolkien uses to bring his world to life in the imagination of the reader. As a diversion from these weighty labors, Tolkien composed stories and sketches for his own children.

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About , one of these beginning with the idle sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” became more and more involved as Tolkien defined hobbits and created adventure for . J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is one of the best known and best loved fantasy books. First published by George Allen & Unwin in , The Hobbit has been translated into over 50 different languages and sold well over million copies.

One day, while marking examination papers, Tolkien discovers that a candidate has left one page of an answer-book blank. On it, he writes: "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."