Has it all been said?

[Mister Underhill]

Originally Posted by davem

I also own a good 50-60 volumes of secondary literature on Tolkien

Gah! I knew that Tolkien-related books have been steadily proliferating since the movies, but I had no idea there was this much.

Originally Posted by Lal

The whole business of doing a degree in English is designed to make you almost hate literature. I wouldn't recommend the subject to someone who finds a lot of 'magic' in their leisure reading, as you will be required to pull apart and analyse everything you read, and you will also have to read a lot - not just the primary texts (AKA the novel, story, or poem, in human language) but also many critical works and articles. You will be required not just to analyse but to apply types of critical analysis, maybe doing a feminist criticism or a marxist one or a post structuralist one.

Or you may become an ironic trickster, the type who can magically conjure themes, symbols, allusions, and whatnot out of the most innocuous details of a story, all the while laughing up your sleeve while your professor eats it up with a spoon.

Analyses in Books in the far distant past used to treat the texts on their own terms, almost as history rather than literature. Though this still occurs from time to time, nowadays literary-criticism type analysis is the order of the day in the deeper threads. It's interesting how this shift has mirrored the evolution of the secondary literature in a way -- remember back when secondary Tolkien literature meant Foster's Middle-earth companion, Fonstad's Atlas, I.C.E.'s Middle-earth Roleplaying game (MERP), the odd book on learning Elvish? These were all creative responses to Tolkien, however flawed.

Now -- literally dozens of texts analyzing Middle-earth, its meaning, its symbols, its influences and history. Even Christopher went through this arc -- Silmarillion to History of Middle-earth. For my tastes, the analyses are a lesser response. In fact I'm hardly interested in them at all, and don't own a single "analysis of Tolkien" type text.

Learning about sources and inspirations of a favorite author can lead you to many interesting works. But in my opinion, if you read Tolkien's inspirations (or supposed inspirations) primarily with an eye out for how they influenced the professor, you're doing both Tolkien and the original work a disservice.