Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology (review)

This new collection of essays is gathered from a conference held at the University of St. Andrews on 8 March 2004 to celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of Tolkien's Andrew Lang Lecture, "On Fairy-stories." Comprising seven essays, it is interdisciplinary and focuses upon Tolkien's creative process and its relationship to "On Fairy-stories." A further theme, developed in the later essays, concerns itself with the theological implications of The Lord of the Rings. The initial chapters are broad enough to appeal to a generalist audience, and could be used to introduce undergraduates to some of the major themes in Tolkien scholarship. The later essays are more involved with the recent critical conversations and will appeal to those critics familiar with Tolkien's reception and the study of his writings.

The first chapter, "Tolkien, St. Andrews, and Dragons" by Rachel Hart, is less an essay than it is a presentation. As befits Hart's profession as the muniments archivist for St. Andrew's Special Collections, she illuminates the process by which Tolkien was chosen to deliver the 1939 Lang lecture, the publication history of the lectures, and Lang's influence on Tolkien's imagination. Hart discusses the delays in publishing the lecture, in part because of World War II and Tolkien's revisionist tendencies, but much of the material here is common ground for scholars well-versed in Tolkien's lecture and its relationship to his writing.

Colin Duriez, author of several books on the Inklings, provides the next piece, "The Fairy Story: J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis," which explores Tolkien and Lewis's "focus upon their preoccupation with rehabilitating fantasy and fairy story" (13). This is a fitting subject for a collection inspired by "On Fairy-stories" and Duriez briefly compares the two authors' approaches to fantasy. He first establishes their mutual bond in the September 1931 late night chat about myth that converted Lewis, and then discusses the state of each author's writings in the late 1930s, with a broader inclusion of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. The essay has an interesting thesis, but is limited by its conference paper length and needs expansion, particularly the pointed comparison between "learning" and "a modernist overemphasis on 'training,' " a point that might yield an important insight, but has only a single paragraph dedicated to it (21). Duriez also relies heavily upon Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings (1978) for both historical details and analysis, which suggests a need for more direct engagement with the authors' novels and drafts, rather than relying upon secondary sources.

The third essay, "Tolkien's Mythopoesis" by Kirstin Johnson, deals with Tolkien's poem "Mythopoeia" and "the concept that lies behind the poem and within its title" (26). Johnson does not engage directly with the poem, but instead dwells upon the significance of the mythopoetic as "myth-making" or "literary myth," a definition she rightly judges "not very helpful" (30). She makes use of Owen Barfield's theory of language and myth, and Tolkien's appreciation of it, to leverage a view that "myth has a central place in language, literature and the history of thought" (30). The term mythopoeia becomes connected with Tolkien's concept of sub-creation, at which point Johnson turns to The Lord of the Rings, providing a handful of close readings to support her thesis that Tolkien wrote within a specific theoretical frame based on mythopoeia. Johnson's use of Barfield is an uncommon enough analytic approach in Tolkien studies to make it worthwhile, and an interesting direction to follow.

Chapter four, Trevor Hart's essay "Tolkien, Creation, and Creativity," considers the theological views inherent in Tolkien's creative process. Hart acknowledges that the heart of Tolkien's methods lies in "On Fairy-stories," but "forays into the same territory, bearing weapons and wearing armor of a different sort" in order to argue that "sub-creation . . . [was] already...