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Finished reading The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? This is the next Tolkien book I'd recommend, a good introduction to Tolkien the essayist and the short-story teller. The short story "Leaf by Niggle" and the essay "On Fairy Stories", alone, are worth the purchase, and the other pieces are pretty good too. (One wishes the poem "mythopoeia" were here too, but alas, it is not.)
The only downside to this book is that it overlaps with quite a few other Tolkien anthologies. But in most cases, that's okay, because the scholarly tone of most of Tolkien's work means only very few people collect all Tolkien the anthologies, anyway.
At any rate, if I were to come up with a list of BASIC Tolkieniana (er... that looks strange. No wonder that term isn't used more often), it would comprise of:
1. The Lord of the Rings;
2. The Hobbit;
3. The Tolkien Reader;
4. The Silmarillion; and
5. Humphrey Carpenter's "Tolkien: A Biography"
And then you can explore the rest of Tolkien's body of work as you see fit, based on what you've sampled. But if you want to get to know Tolkien's work with any degree of credibility, the material you find in "The Tolkien Reader" are must-reads.
RE de Leon
11:20 PM January 5, 2010
Agoo, La Union, Philippines
The only downside to this book is that it overlaps with quite a few other Tolkien anthologies. But in most cases, that's okay, because the scholarly tone of most of Tolkien's work means only very few people collect all Tolkien the anthologies, anyway.
At any rate, if I were to come up with a list of BASIC Tolkieniana (er... that looks strange. No wonder that term isn't used more often), it would comprise of:
1. The Lord of the Rings;
2. The Hobbit;
3. The Tolkien Reader;
4. The Silmarillion; and
5. Humphrey Carpenter's "Tolkien: A Biography"
And then you can explore the rest of Tolkien's body of work as you see fit, based on what you've sampled. But if you want to get to know Tolkien's work with any degree of credibility, the material you find in "The Tolkien Reader" are must-reads.
RE de Leon
11:20 PM January 5, 2010
Agoo, La Union, Philippines
