Excellent

Dr. Kreeft does an amazing job bringing together all the different philosophies in the Lord of the Rings, from epistemology to anthropology, etc., and synthesizing it into a fun and informative and practical Christian manual for the Lord of the Rings. This is a book I will re-read many times.

Eye opening, and mind expanding!

For some years now, it has been my intention to introduce myself to Peter Kreeft. Allow this book to be your introduction as well. What a gifted thinker!

Good stuff, 7/10

Een paar interessante stukken, maar het verzandt vooral in de theologie die Kreeft zelf naar voren wil brengen.

Overall, this is a good book if you fit into the fairly narrow intended audience.. I like the idea of giving introductory philosophical concepts in terms of Tolkien because I'm extraordinarily familiar with his work and have never taken an introductory course in this field. I also have to believe that I'm pretty uncommon in that regard. Kreeft is an entertaining writer who obviously knows what he's talking about. He explains the concepts well and reasonably throughly for an introductory text. Kreeft treats Tolkien and Lewis as interchangeable far more than I would like, and he makes some interpretative guesses about unexplained items in Lord of the Rings that I don't find compelling. But overall it's a good discussion of why the story and the characters in Lord of the Rings are the way that they are and the things they teach us about Catholicism and the author's view of it.

Makes a study of philosophy very interesting.

When I was a Christian, I watched a program called Pints with Aquinas. Kreeft was a regular guest. Once, he forcefully asserted that it was proven Aristotle was a Platonist. The host asked him: But what about the forms? For a moment, Kreeft was silent. When he spoke again, he made no attempt to prove his point. Weren’t there articles about this, Kreeft asked.
I think this anecdote perfectly sums up how unimpressive Kreeft is. Kreeft is a man who confidently speaks (and writes) about a variety of subjects. The fact that he doesn’t understand them does not seem to bother him. Instead, he fills in his partial knowledge with confidence and imagination. So too, in this book, he often takes the opinions of C.S. Lewis, or his own, for those of Tolkien’s. And he adds a rather free imagination.
Kreeft skips over whole parts of Tolkien’s philosophy, particularly on art. At no point does he cover Tolkien’s problems with the literally establishment. He skips over Tolkien’s ideas of “sub-creation” in his chapter on aesthetics and doesn’t explain it elsewhere. So the one thing Kreeft ends up ignoring is the actual purpose of Tolkien’s fiction. Tolkien laid such emphasis on the importance of story not as analogy but in itself. Tolkien held views here that were novel and interesting; views on the purpose of story, its relation of culture generally, to nation, to human nature, to virtue, religion and the modernity. But Kreeft only covers its relation to language, then moves on.
As a result, the book is padded with all kinds of nonsense. For example: C.S. Lewis’ hilariously dumb lies about biology. Lewis implies that evolutionists believe rocks spontaneously form into “ordered” animals by replacing “chaos” with “order” over time. He thought it is not species and life as a whole that evolves but individual things. He then explains this absurd view, which he slanderously ascribes to his opponents, by saying this is what we see machines do in industry. In fact, we do not see machines making on their own. Lewis ascribed to non-Christian’s the view that a steam machine left in a hall in 1768 would’ve turning into a 3D printer all on its own by 2024.
Naturally, Kreeft thinks this is the end all and be all refutation of all biological science. Rather ironic that Lewis and Kreeft mock scientists because they (supposedly) believe life is created miraculously. When non-Christians (supposedly) believe in miracles, it suddenly becomes absurd and worthy of mockery. But who else believes in miracles? Could it be Christians?
There are some insights in this book though, simply because Tolkien himself had some. Kreeft, like any journeyman, doesn’t seem to have reached the point where he can form his own view of things. Though he has plenty of creativity, he doesn’t seem to be able to use it for fundamentally new ideas. This book is filled with long quotes, often with no further explanation and skips over much that is not contained in there. And Kreeft is both so dogmatic and so creative that he finds plenty of room to shoehorn in more tangents, all of which reflect his uninteresting religious views.

It is a wonderful book! All of the Tolkien's readers would read it!

The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings is an outstanding philosophical and Christian exposition on The Lord of the Rings. Once I started reading it, I could not put it down, and completed it in two days. There were times when it gave me a laugh, and a few moments when it also made me cry. I have always cried at the end of the story (both in Tolkien's original novel and in the film) when Frodo leaves his friends and boards the boat to leave the Havens...to go with Bilbo, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel and the last of the elves to the Blessed Isles (to heaven). But this book clarified a great deal regarding the plot and the events in the story. What was most signficant, for me, was that Peter Kreeft makes the point that Lord of the Rings is NOT an allegory (which, somehow, I thought it was). He does make a great many connections between Tolkien's classic conflict between ultimate evil and the fate of all living kind in Middle Earth and the Christian Bible's story of Jesus. I was particularly surprised by his assertion that Gandalf, Saruman, and even Sauron - all the Mages in the story are, in fact, angels. I suspected it of Gandalf, particularly after his dramatic death in resurrection after killing the Balrog (who was clearly a powerful demon). All of these angels were Maiar (an order below the Valar, who were "archangels"). Somehow it had not occurred to me that Sauron was a Maiar as well - I thought him to be a particularly evil human, but the powers which he imbued in the Great Ring (well, his soul, actually) were certainly much greater than any powers that any human has, so it made sense. In 13 Chapters and a Conclusion, Kreeft covers every philosophical aspect that one could wish for, and the book is highly readable--neither obstuse nor pedantic. It is an outstanding read!

When I started reading this book, I was expecting a book that tackles philosophical issues within the framework of Tolkien's world. The actual book turned out to be different. I wasn't familiar with Kreeft and only discovered that he wrote Christian philosophy/theology after I started reading this book. In this book, Kreeft interprets the Lord of the Rings from a Christian perspective. Tolkien himself was a devout Catholic, and definitely included Christian symbolism and themes in his books, so I did find it interesting to explore his writings from that perspective. Kreeft uses references to other texts by Tolkien and C.S Lewis to support many of his interpretations. However, while reading this book, I couldn't help but feel that Kreeft was overdoing it sometimes; I felt like he was interpreting pretty much every single aspect in Tolkien's world from a religious perspective. There are places where it feels like he is forcing his own beliefs on the story and finding religious messages where none were actually intended to be found. As I have stated above, I'm sure that Tolkien did include Christianity-inspired elements in his books (and these are very interesting to examine), but the feeling that Kreeft overdoes it is too strong to ignore. I could be wrong about this whole issue, but that is just how it seemed to me while reading the book. If you happen to fall within a specific group of readers (religious readers who are Lord of the Rings lovers), you will probably love this book. As for anyone outside this category, I cannot tell if you'd like it or not. It was interesting and entertaining for me to a certain extent (so you might enjoy it), but make sure not to be misled by the title.

The book started with a great promise to me: A discussion about Tolkien's philosophy, which is certainly not in line with today's popular worldview and values. But the book quickly descended into a Christian and Catholic empty propaganda. The writer apparently wrote this book not in order to discuss and think about Tolkien and his worldview, but rather to proselytize his own Catholic faith. I would have expected a philosophy book to raise more questions than answers; here the exclamation marks rule.

Mid-way the book gets really repetitive with the same themes repeating over and over. In some instances, even the same quotes were quoted again. But yet again, when your goal is to preach, repetition is necessary.

A good guide of dissecting the symbolisms and abstracting underlying principles from LoR book series, especially for someone who has no philosophical background and/or is not very familiar with the general storyline. For an incorrigible Romanist & Romanticist, however, the contents are rather basic. Also, for a book on the worldview of Tolkien, perhaps there are a little too many C. S. Lewis quotes (not that I would complain about it though).