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“... It is probable that J.R.R. Tolkien was throughout his life a copious correspondent, but he appears to have been in his midforties before people took to preserving what he had addressed to them. Even so, Humphrey Carpenter has found that ‘an immense number’ of letters survive. In projecting the present selection, he realised that ‘an enormous quantity of material would have to be omitted’ and that ‘only passages of particular interest could be included ...”

“... Among the terms of abuse which J.R.R. Tolkien was accustomed to apply to an Oxford college of which he was (and I am) a member, there is one that makes an odd impression. It is the adjective ‘medieval’, pointedly used in its pejorative sense by this philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon. As Anglo-Saxon scholar and philologist Tolkien is not remembered by the world at large, although this is the aspect of his work that W ...”

“... the publicity department of Voyager (an imprint of HarperCollins and ‘the publishers of J.R.R. Tolkien and David Eddings’) for sending out half a kilo of Dairy Milk with every review copy of David Zindell’s The Lightstone, Book One of the Ea Cycle: ‘The Lord of the Rings meets Le Morte D’Arthur . . . 942 pages to keep you away from work and up ...”

“... Norrington, Lord Hinchinbrooke, Jimmy Edwards, Kenneth Allsop, Tariq Ali, Fenner Brockway, J.R.R. Tolkien, Bill Douglas (who made a film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs in a revamped Tyneham), Mike Leigh (via Nuts in May), Nigel Coates, even David Mellor. The piquant list of names should convey something of the flavour of Wright’s book, and also the flavour of ...”

“... Well-known, too, is the philological background of two writers from Oxford, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (the title of whose Oxford edition in the green cover Cunningham archaises as Sir Gawayne). It might amuse the public who know these men as modern authors in their own right to infer that in their Oxford guise they doubled as curators of a ‘dinosauric ...”

“... flora, fauna, environment and mores. The result recalls Stanley Unwin rather than J.R.R. Tolkien. For instance: ‘Beside the kzahn’s kaidaw stood a creaght, or young male phagor, bearing a towering standard.’ If it’s any help, the kzahn’s name is Hrr-Brahl Yprt, his kaidaw is called Rukk-Ggrl and the standard is, I think, made of stungebag ...”

“... Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English ...”

“... prisons to China and finally the USA, is but one of many other helpers, ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien and Henry Yule of Hobson-Jobson down to the most obscure and unassuming, all valued for their diligence. The last chapter, ‘From Take to Turn-down – and then, Triumphal Valediction’, sees the story through from 1895, when the name Oxford English ...”

“... a formative influence of a different kind on his life, especially his imaginative life. J.R.R. Tolkien was six years older and already the professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He and Lewis shared interests in Norse mythology, Old English literature, religion (Tolkien was a devout Catholic, Lewis at this point a ...”

“... to the levelling technological present. The result was the fiction of the Anglo-Saxonist J.R.R. Tolkien and the medievalist C.S. Lewis, both of whom raided the heroic resources of early literature for contemporary ideological ends. The blend of whimsy, escapism, reaction, regression and erudition was quintessentially Oxfordian.Anglo-Saxon, as Cambridge ...”

“... the status of, if it can be imagined, both the Wesleys, Martin Luther, Jakob Grimm and J.R.R. Tolkien. Would it have made any difference if there had been an English-speaking Grundtvig, or if Grundtvig’s writings had not so often been confined to the limited audience of Danish? If, in fact, the ‘Northern revival’ chronicled by Wawn and his ...”

“... and Anna Kavan, as well as St Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Philip K. Dick, Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her cast of ‘imagined puppets’ ranges from the entertainers in Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair, through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s weird Olympia to Karel Capek’s robots, and such lower forms of life as Pinocchio, Superman, Batman and Spiderman. It’s ...”

“... to realism – the readers who embraced such dissimilar authors as Robert A. Heinlein and J.R.R. Tolkien – discovered Dick too. He lived, conveniently, in the Bay Area, where dropouts, hippies and SF devotees gathered around him: he welcomed them. In 1967 Dick boasted (he was probably lying) that he had composed The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ...”