What can I say about a class that acted out The Silmarillion using nothing more than a handful of green apples and some paperclips? In Spring of 2005, I met with a group of students to read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Letters of Tolkien, and Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter. We laughed at the Hobbit cartoon, we cringed at Rank and Bass, and, yes, we watched Moe try to balance all three apples on his head.
Oh, yeah— and we did a lot of writing. Each student chose a scholarly book and wrote a three-page paper: one page of summary, one page of evaluation, and one page of “here are the most important things I learned from this book.”
The results are posted here. If you have a correction, send it. If you want to write a paper to replace one of these, we’ll consider it. If you can submit a paper on a book we haven’t covered, we’d love it. (Here’s the required warning: All papers submitted to the site become the sole property of this site and will be used, edited, or discarded entirely at our discretion.)
Here we go.-
Allan, Jim (ed). An Introduction to Elvish (Bran’s Head Books 1978) reviewed by Karen Denning.
Chance, Jane (ed). Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader (University Press of Kentucky 2004) reviewed by Matt Parish.
Dickerson, Matt. Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings (Brazos Press 2004) reviewed by Sean Curran.
Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (HiddenSpring 2003) reviewed by Kristin Wing.
Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent State University Press 1997) reviewed by Laura Vincent.
Flieger, Verlyn. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Kent State University Press 2002) reviewed by Cameron Moe.
Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Houghton Mifflin 2003) reviewed by Ashley Migliazzo.
Kilby, Clyde S. Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Harold Shaw 1976) reviewed by Corrie Van Duzer.
Pearce, Joseph (ed). Tolkien: A Celebration – Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy (HarperCollins Publishers 1999) reviewed by Kate Rice.
Petty, Anne C. One Ring to Bind Them All: Tolkien’s Mythology (University of Alabama Press 2002) reviewed by Mallery Kirkpatrick.
