A leading scholar draws on fifty years of reading and studying J.R.R. Tolkien to explain how he created an entire world.
No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth―a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout takes us deep into Tolkien’s genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of not only The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion but also lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as Tolkien’s poetry and innovative scholarship.
