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A review by lizshayne
Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits by Dimitra Fimi
informative
reflective
medium-paced
The author LIVES. Sorry, Barthes.
Tolkien criticism is so interesting because it so obviously resists an approach that lets the author be dead and that is both to its credit and occasionally its detriment.
Neither of which matters because Fimi tells us precisely what her stance is here. Like biblical criticism, she's untangling the layers of Tolkien's life and how that leads to complexities and contradictions and just the interesting evolutions that happens to Arda as it grows.
My favorite part, by far, was her refusal to take Tolkien at his word on things like his disdain for fairies, his order of operation between the literary and the linguistic.
But it general it was a super interesting portrait of both a man and his texts and how knowing the context for the former can enrich the latter.
Tolkien criticism is so interesting because it so obviously resists an approach that lets the author be dead and that is both to its credit and occasionally its detriment.
Neither of which matters because Fimi tells us precisely what her stance is here. Like biblical criticism, she's untangling the layers of Tolkien's life and how that leads to complexities and contradictions and just the interesting evolutions that happens to Arda as it grows.
My favorite part, by far, was her refusal to take Tolkien at his word on things like his disdain for fairies, his order of operation between the literary and the linguistic.
But it general it was a super interesting portrait of both a man and his texts and how knowing the context for the former can enrich the latter.