It is crazy that this book should be out of print. What are publishers thinking of? The verses are a delight, though they become increasingly tragic as the book progresses - "The Sea Bell" is a devastating account of something like clinical depression, yet like many of the rest it has a strange beauty. On the surface much is easy-to-read verse, but often has subtle allusions to deep matters. Many links with "The Lord of the Rings" for those who know where to look, and, I think, an unusually personal account of Tolkien's own struggles to find beauty, wonder and enchantment in the bleak modern world - it is only coincidence that "The Sea Bell" is the only one of his major works for publication written in the first person?

This book is a much longer, easier to read version of Tolkien's famous 1936
lecture of Beowulf, called "The Monsters and the Critics." I've read
"Monsters and the Critics," and liked it, but Beowulf and the Critics is
much better, not only because it is easier to follow, but because Tolkien
puts in a lot more interesting material, including two very good poems
about dragons. According to the editor, Tolkien started writing this book
for his students at Oxford, and it shows.

Tolkien argues that Beowulf is a great poem and that the monsters in it (a
troll named Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a dragon) are essential to the
poem's theme. I think he makes his case. He also provides a summary of
the study of Beowulf, from the discovery of the manuscript until he wrote
this book in the 1930's, which is actually much more interesting than it
sounds.

The editor has written a good, clear introduction that explains how all
this scholarly material relates to Tolkien's other work in Old English and
to his Middle-earth books. The notes are unbelievably extensive, and while
I didn't read straight through them all, the things I did look up were
explained very clearly.

While there aren't any Hobbits, dwarves or elves, I still strongly
recommend this book to anyone who really wants to know how Tolkien's mind
works.

With all due respect to Carpenter's biographies, Shippey's standard studies, Bliss's edition of Tolkien's notes on the Finnsburgh fragment and Tolkien's own journal articles from the '20s (e.g. "The Devil's Coach-Horses"), this is Tolkien as scholar at his best and most accessibly readable. All but one of these essays were presented as (variously commissioned) lectures over the span of some 35 years; and some of them had appeared in print before their selection for this volume.

The initially hilarious title piece (e.g., "the jabberwocks of antiquarian research burbling in the tulgy wood of conjecture") has been recognized in the '90s as having inaugurated modern Beowulf criticism. The one non-lecture included features 19 lines from Tolkien's unfinished translation of that sternest of works, which remain the only close modern-English analogue of its line-by-line quality. The Gawain lecture provides a vital link between Tolkien & Gordon's revival edition in the '20s and Tolkien's metrical translation posthumously published half a century later. The recondite linguistic technicality of "English and Welsh" is well worth the breathtaking overview of European literary history updated from his Beowulf lecture 20 years earlier. His Valedictory Address confirms in no uncertain terms Carpenter's portrayal of him as a "culture warrior" long before semiotics and deconstruction became buzzwords in literary academia.

Tolkien's legendarium is a repository of his critical framework on medieval literature. His having acceded to professional status precisely concurrent with the arriving maturity of modern comparative philology, Tolkien brought a literary sensibility to the minutiae of lexicography, which resulted in one correction after another of egregious errors committed by relatively underinformed and thus necessarily less imaginative predecessors in the field--including his own errors, as the decades continued. Every hobbit buff should know that Tolkien was a breakthrough scholar of medieval lit, who retaught the experts how to read; because he really wasn't making anything up-all of his fictional narrative materials were rigorously derived from his superencyclopedic knowledge of pre- and early Renaissance writings across the scope of European languages.

Which is as good as to say that the charm, the warmth and the magic are as fully present in his unjustly obscure nonfictions as they are in his justly renowned imaginary sagas. If only there could be an edition that would just collect everything-"Glossary of the Huddersfield District" and all. His largely illegible 1934 Chaucer lecture excluded from this volume is not only a landmark in textual criticism of the Canterbury Tales (keyphrase "dialect humor") but a crucial sidelight on his practice as a calligrapher as well.

This expansion really helps in makeing your gaming quests more exciting, it gives you more options and creatures to fight. If you like lots of big fights and monsters this is a great book for you to use in your games! It gives stats, OB's,DB's, and all kinds of stats and information like where demons,fish,insects,birds,riding animals and mammals come from and a litte history on them also, a great expansion!

When The Hobbit was first published in 1937, it was acclaimed as a good book for children, but did not meet with any serious critical response. After the publication of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), The Hobbit was often regarded as the 'precursor' of the Ring-epic, but in the light of the latter, The Hobbit was bound to run every risk of being misunderstood in its composition as well as in its intention.

To make The Hobbit conform to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's second edition of 1951 had to make some minor modifications, which nevertheless completely changed part of the story (the finding of the ring). Without any doubt, The Hobbit now forms part of the Ring-tale, but our purpose of understanding how the text was created is achieved mainly by setting the trilogy aside. The Hobbit existed for more than fifteen years as an independent book, a tale with a clear beginning and a similarly clear end, demanding no sequel whatsoever. The fact that there is no study yet which discusses the original Hobbit without taking The Lord of the Rings into consideration, inclined the present author to attempt such a survey. This narrowing of the focus leads to results somewhat different from those achieved in former discussions of the text. The interpretation of the text is (for the story-line) based on the first (1937) edition of The Hobbit. The revised version of the third (1966) edition, which is now in print, is also evaluated in detail.

It is difficult to classify the genre of The Hobbit; the book cannot be described as an 'epic', but on the other hand it also seems to resist the label 'Märchen' because of its considerable length. The two-dimensional structure, which Max Lüthi points out as a typical aspect of the 'Märchen', can still be found in The Hobbit ("There and Back Again"). The transition from the realistic to the fantastic has recently been acknowledged by H.W. Pesch as a fundamental notion of fantasy-literature.

To achieve a clearly structured analysis of the creation of the text, the investigation adopts R.Lachmann's three-part model of a "pragmatically orientated theory of texts". The first and second parts of the study apply A.Dundes's distinction between "motif" (etic unit) and "motifeme' (emic unit). The motifs are classified mainly with the help of S.Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature, whereas the structural analysis follows V.Propp's formalistic approach in the second edition of his Morphology of the Folktale, modified and annotated by A.Dundes's commentary. These two parts, summarized as "selection" and "combination", are supplemented by a third, which discusses presentation (the narrator) and style, following for the former C.Kahrmann's textual analysis and for the latter H.Plett's principles.

(1) The main character of The Hobbit, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, represents at first sight the character of the 'unpromising hero', which appears in a great number of fantasy (and other) stories. Tolkien modifies the conventional aspects and throughout the tale builds up an individual, getting very close to Erasmus's concept of the miles Christianus. This development is not obvious from the beginning, and there is evidence that only after some hesitation did Tolkien decide to introduce the stock-figure of the "warrior hero" (impersonated by Bard) to slay the dragon, and to leave to the "hero" Bilbo Baggins the insight that "to conquer oneself is to conquer indeed" (B.W. Wardropper). At the same time, the hobbit exhibits the characteristics of the "heill hugr" or luckwearer (W. Groenbach), a dominant figure of Germanic mythology. All these traits are united in the person of a "hobbit"; it is possible to show that (even if Tolkien himself rejects this idea) his name and to some extent his outer appearance ("furry feet") are based on a blend of HOB and (RAB)BIT. The character of the hero is not as simple as is often assumed; even the name "Baggins" shows an interesting pun on Middle English bagge 'bag' and French bague 'ring', both of which the second edition of the Dictionary of British Surnames notes as possible sources of Bagg, Baggs. The story is peopled with other creatures, most of them non-human, but with sharply defined characteristics. In the person of the wizard Gandalf, one can recognize the traits of the Odinic wanderer and the wise man of the Germanic lore. The dwarves (sic!) and elves (in spite of some particularities) are closely linked with the tradition as registered in the Motif-Index. The choice of the dwarf-names, all taken from the Elder Edda, seems to have been influenced by C.N. Gould's "Dwarf-Names: A Study in Old Icelandic Religion". Tolkien's "goblins", who are twice named "orcs", are "mischievous and ugly sprites" according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Although the name is English, these creatures are only classified as "ogres" in the Motif-Index; these also include "trolls", which in The Hobbit, appear with their habitual characteristics. The dragon is Tolkien's favourite monster. Smaug, whose name is derived from the Germanic root smúgan 'to creep', is (in Tolkien's words) the "personification of malice, greed and destruction", and the resemblance to the dragon in Beowulf need not be elaborated.

(2) The structure of The Hobbit largely follows Propp's classification. Most of the "motifemes" are present. The structure consists of a main story-line with imbedded sub-lines, which are complete stories in the sense of Propp's Morphology. It is only in the end that the main story-line shows a parenthetical structure, which does not find any analogy in Propp's system.

(3) For the presentation of the tale, Tolkien has chosen the role of the obtrusive narrator, well known in medieval literature, who addresses his audience and comments on the story. The situation of "telling the story" is underlined by the numerous intrusions of the narrator on his own story as well as the use of the receiver-including "we".

Tolkien uses a great number of stylistic devices, ranging from the phonological level up to the semantic structure of the tale. Using statistical methods, the study demonstrates that the style of the text rises towards the end. A significant number of archaic words (nearly 70 per cent) can be found on the last 50 of the 285 pages of the book, thus anticipating the "high style" of The Lord of the Rings.

International Tables for Crystallography, Space Group Symmetry

Cuando se entra en el mundo de Tolkien, ya no se quiere salir. Por esto cada uno de los libros de la tierra media es necesario para conocer y vivir aventuras sin limite. Los cuentos perdidos suman gran cantidad de información sobre historias perdidas de la priemra edad en Valinor, ademas fue escrito antes de el Silmarillion.

La edicion de este libro no es Hardcover como lo ofrecen, es Paperback (estoy muy decepcionado).
A pesar de eso el libro es magnifico. Esta es la segunda de tres partes del Señor de los Anillos, luego de la separacion de la comunidad del anillo, Frodo y Sam intentaran llevar el anillo a traves de mordor.

Don't be Fooled! This is not a hardcover!

Farmer Giles of Ham is one of the best short stories I've ever read. It is about Giles, a Farmer from the village of Ham, who aquires Tailbiter, a magic sword, his talking dog (animals had speech way back then, you know), dragons, and giants. The whole thing has a wonderful humorous touch that I love. While this book isn't as monumental as The Lord of the Rings, I'm sure anyone will enjoy this book.

fff

Alan Bliss's Introduction to Old English Metre first appeared in justified 12-pitch Courier back in '76 and remains the standard study on the subject. In Finn and Hengest, Bliss is somewhat more than an editor and Tolkien somewhat less than an author. According to Bliss's preface, his having given a paper on the implications of historical comparison between Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment, he was advised that Tolkien had anticipated his conclusions decades before, and he then proceeded to get permission to edit Tolkien's lecture notes on the topic, which were in various states of development.

What results, though bound to be tough sledding for all but the very most scholarly of readers, is a window on a past that is far more remote from our contemporary situation than imperial Rome or 5th-century Athens, even though less distant in time: namely, the period immediately preceding the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. This was a time of blood feuds between pagan proto-Viking tribes in the wake of the Roman's empire's all-but-forgotten withdrawal from northern Europe, a time when noble ideals could result in bestial atrocities, from which in turn could result tragedies that Aeschylus might have telescoped for the dramatic stage.

Which is not to say that what emerges from a close reading is presented in this way. These are classroom lecture notes, which assume a working knowledge of Old English and a general knowledge of its surviving written records, literary and prosaic (not that this is a hard-and-fast distinction in the surviving Old English documents from our present-day perspective). Nevertheless, what emerges is none the less affecting for the lack of melodramatic treatment, which would only distort and misrepresent the actual lives that were lived and remembered more than a millennium and a half ago, in the northwest corner of the European mainland which now comprises Denmark, Holland, Belgium and parts of Germany and France; nor do the scholarly technicalities detract from realization of the fragility of our links with people whose struggle for gentility in the midst of savagery differed from our own not in kind but only as a matter of degree.

And yet, if we can find our way to a sense of familial kinship with these stiff-necked, fur-clad barbarians, how should we despair of understanding each other?