This one's a lot. Dry, but deep. Bring a dictionary and Google Translate.

The title essay is approaching 90 years old and remains both readable and important.

In a few pages Tolkien elucidates a few principles which are still incompletely grasped.

First, that the art and acts of our ancestors were not crude, quaint and haphazard.

Second, that a thing -- be it poetry or a tree -- should be taken for what it is, and respected by exploring what it is without preconceptions. Let a thing stand on it's own a bit before rushing to prop it up.

Third, upon those themes he guides the reader through an exercise in literary criticism.

What I found interesting when I first read the title essay some 25 years ago, is it's connection to another book on my list "Mark As Story". The critical perspective and techniques that Rhoads and Michie bring to Mark are very similar to what Tolkien was espousing almost 50 years previously.

If all you know about Tolkien is that he wrote some quaint books that they made movies out of I would strongly recommend exploring these essays. His thought and his philosophy ranged much, much more widely than the fantasy of the Lord of the Rings and his academic love of philology.

A final thought ... Tolkien disliked allegory. It was too easy, too insulting to the intelligence of the reader in his mind.

Writing being an intimate task, and that being the case. Given the scope of these essays and what they expose ... it's worth considering how -- biographically metaphorical -- the Lord of the Rings may be. It may have taken a work of that magnitude to express the scope of that quiet man's spirit and thought.

The Monsters & the Critics was a wonderful essay. I want to model my style after his, because he is not only humorous and sarcastic at times, but also very insightful, knowledgeable about Northern mythology, and defends Beowulf, a story he clearly loved.

Brilliant

Un gran libro me llevo mucho tiempo leerlo, lo disfrute cada párrafo es un texto maravilloso que nos muestra el lado de Tolkien como catedrático de Oxford y no solo como el escritor de literatura fantástica. Un libro que nos muestra su manera de ver los textos en ingles antiguo. La verdad lo disfrute mucho.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2154968.html

This is a collection of seven lectures by Tolkien, of which I think I had previously read only "On Fairy Stories" and "A Secret Vice". As always, they are an interesting insight into how his mind worked, or at least how he wanted us to think it worked. The more academic pieces (in particular the second, "On Translating Beowulf") are somewhat moored in academic controversies of their time, which may or may not have subsided by now and which in any case I am not close to. But the title piece rises above that to give an argument for appreciating Beowulf as a real story with serious monsters, rather than just a source for scholarly discussion on vaguely related topics, and that is the point made in the vivid metaphor of the man who built his tower on inherited land.

The other highlight for me, even as a non-Welsh speaker, is the lecture "English and Welsh" urging those with an interest in the history of the English language not to ignore its nearest geographical neighbour. He makes the same general point made much later by McWhorter, that English shares a significant substratum with Welsh (and he is very insistent that it is Welsh/British rather than the Goidelic languages), though interestingly uses a completely different set of linguistic/grammatical clues to McWhorter in making the argument. So there may well be something to it.

"On Fairy Stories" has quite a lot of information about Tolkien's views of other works of fantasy literature, ancient and modern; it is a bit less successful at setting up an analytical framework for looking at fairy stories as a whole (Farah Mendlesohn seems to me to have a more useful and more widely applicable approach), but again he makes a convincing emotional appeal to treat the stories first and foremost as stories for an intended audience, rather than for anything else. His valedictory address, at the end of the book, is an amusing but somewhat rambling justification for wandering off the point for most of his career, but in fact a commitment to an aesthetic of narrative seems to have been precisely the point, one which he successfully communicated through both his fiction and his non-fiction.

The essay on Beowulf was very interesting and worthwhile. I haven't actually read Beowulf, though, so I think I will have to return to this after doing so. (Warning that neither the Latin nor the Old English quotes are footnoted. Being passably fluent in one of the two, I survived.)

I intend to read the essays about language at the end of the book, but I'm skipping the parts about Beowulf (again) and Sir Gawain for now.

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays by J.R.R. Tolkien is an incredible collection of essays/lectures, including his most seminal and famous. Worth the price of admission alone is “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, in which Tolkien defends Beowulf as literature rather than a mere historical curiosity; and “On Fairy Stories”, where Tolkien lays out his theories on the fantasy genre. This collection is an absolute staple to appreciating the creator of Middle-earth.

I can't believe I'm giving Tolkien less than five stars, but it's more a reflection on me than him. There are seven essays in this collection, one of which I've read before ("On Fairy Stories") and while they all demonstrate his wit and depth of knowledge, some of them went over my head. Obviously the intended audience for the essay about translating Beowulf are students of philology and Old English. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the essay on "Welsh and English" even though again it was a little over my head. I ended up googling quite a bit about the history of languages in Britain. My favorite essays were the ones about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--I read Tolkien's version last year and this was a nice refresher of its plot and themes-On Fairy Stories, always a classic, and his "A Secret Vice" where he talks about his love of making up languages and why he thinks that appeals to people. Glad to have this added to my library!

The Master of the Critics

Un ensayo impecable. Lectura obligatoria para los docentes de literatura de todas las edades.

A short read, while I LOVE Tolkien this is like it says essays of his some of them are his teachings, such as Beowulf and On Fairy-tale. More interesting for those interested in his opinion on literature.