THE twin works of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (LoTR, 1954-55), rank among the most widely read books of the 20th century in the 57 languages into which they have been translated. In this new book, Matthew Townend performs a valuable service in contextualising both works within Tolkien’s life, his wider oeuvre, and surrounding global events.

Observations about the impact of the Second World War on LoTR are especially interesting. In Chapter 7 (“Middle-earth”), Townend deftly probes tensions between Tolkien’s heartfelt antagonism to Nazi racial theory, on the one hand, and the literary conceit of struggle between the different “races” of his imagined world on the other.

Unfortunately, however, the work has a significant Achilles’ heel: its inability (despite scattered references to Christianity) to deal seriously with the place of faith in Tolkien’s literary imagination.

Chapter 5 (“Language”) discusses philology’s importance to Tolkien personally and his tactical use of invented “Elvish” to achieve emotive effects in LoTR. Sadly, Townend misses important scriptural linkages in the examples he cites.

Frodo’s “Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima!” at the perilous climax of The Two Towers parallels the phonology and metre of Jesus’s Aramaic eruption “Eloi, eloi lama sabachthani?” into the New Testament’s Greek text (Mark 15:34). Meanwhile, Sam Gamgee’s discovery that “his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know” is obviously a nod to Acts 2.4. Chapter 6 (“Sources”) boasts dedicated sections on Tolkien’s debts to Norse mythology, Victorian adventure stories, and Edwardian children’s fiction, but not the Bible or Christian tradition.

Likewise, Tolkien’s relationship with Ancient Greek and Latin literature is referred to, but not explored. This is a serious misstep, given that Tolkien’s undergraduate education was in both Classics and English. The Hobbit’s central conceit is a “ring of invisibility”, whose gift of concealment carries moral dangers. This is clearly a re-working of the Ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic, Book 2, introduced to frame discussion of whether a rational person lacking fear of negative consequences for acting unjustly would, even so, choose to act well.

This Very Short Introduction should, perhaps, have been slightly longer.

The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.

J. R. R. Tolkien: A very short introduction
Matthew Townend
OUP £9.99
(978-0-19-288204-2)
Church Times Bookshop £8.99