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| | Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century |
 | | Shippey sees Tolkien (who had survived the worst fighting of World War I) as part of a vanguard of "traumatized authors" (George Orwell, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, Joseph Heller, and Ursula K. Le Guin), who had witnessed the twentieth century's greatest horrors, and who tended to write fantasy or fable. |
 | | Shippey's intention in his earlier book on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth, was to set Tolkien's work in a philological context by showing how Tolkien's relationship with ancient works and the ancient world informed his writing. |
 | | It is a huge laundry list of topics, and in tackling it, Shippey displays a formidable knowledge of philology, world mythology, Christian theology, and Old English, Norse and modern English literature and criticism. |
| www.greenmanreview.com /book/book_shippey_tolkien.html (2110 words) |
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