Playing second fiddle works a lot better when there are two violin parts.

To be less cryptic (or is that "quiptic"?), many if most students would agree that Tom Shippey has given more insight into J. R. R. Tolkien's works than any other critic. The main reason for this is that Shippey, like Tolkien, is a philologist -- meaning that he has the special knowledge and insight to know what Tolkien was up to. So when I discovered that another philologist, Mark Atherton, had written a work on Tolkien, I was intrigued. Another scholar's philological findings could illuminate much about the Tolkien universe.

But those insights just don't come through in this book. It includes a lot of detail about Tolkien's "sources" -- but often they aren't sources, they're just influences. Tolkien might have liked the writings of John Masefield, e.g. (since both, unusually, wrote substantial poetry in alliterative verse forms rather than the more common rhymed verse) -- but there is no Masefield in The Hobbit! What makes Tolkien Tolkien is not his occasional similarities to the works of other writers, but his original treatments of ancient mythology and folklore. And Atherton, while he pays some attention to this, wraps it in so much other material that it is too easily lost.

I might be more forgiving of that if the writing were better. But this is not a particularly pleasant read. I don't mean that it contains unpleasant information, or that it is impossible to comprehend, but it is heavy enough that I couldn't read it for fun.

And what's the point of those silly drawings? Since neither I nor Atherton know what Tolkien thought a goblin looked like, why waste a page with the not-very-detailed-or-realistic image on p. 143? And if I don't know what a tree trunk looks like, then I doubt that one photo (p. 163) is going to teach me.

There is good and interesting material in here. But I eventually resorted to flipping around trying to find it. The ratio of dross to gold in this work is simply too high. ( )