Jane Chance's works are fairly often cited in Tolkien scholarship. Having gotten bogged down in Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England, I wasn't sure what to think -- she had important ideas but expresses them very poorly indeed.

But this lesser work... the level of inaccuracy is so high as to be simply frightening. Taking just the chronology and the first five pages, and listing only the items I remember:

P. x. One of the members of Tolkien's club the T.C.B.S. is listed as "R. Q. Wilson." Twice. His name was Robert Quilter Gilson -- a fact which is easily verified, because Gilson's father was one of Tolkien's schoolmasters!

P. 3. He is said to have been successful enough in his studies to win an Oxford scholarship in classics, but changed to medieval languages and comparative philology. This is, at best, a whitewash -- I'd call it deceptive. Tolkien, despite being brilliant, earned only a second-tier scholarship to Oxford (an "Exhibitionship," not a true scholarship, and that only only on his second try). And, at Moderations (sort of mid-terms toward earning a degree), he obtained a second-class, not a first-class, result -- a failure which could have cost him his exhibitionship. He was permitted to go into philology, where he excelled, but that was not what was supposed to have happened. Based on his initial plans, he was an academic failure.

P. 3 again. Tolkien is said to have been "wounded" in the First World War. He was not wounded. He suffered trench fever. This caused him to be invalided home, but it's not a wound.

P. 5. The Lord of the Rings is stated to have been popular "during the Korean and Vietnam wars." The Korean War ended in 1953. And the chronology on p. xiii states (correctly, in this instance) that The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954. (On July 29, to be specific.) Interesting how The Lord of the Rings could be popular a year before anyone outside the publishing house knew it existed.

I suppose one could write this off as just an abominable proofreading job. Still, it's a level of sloppiness that I find hard to endure. And then there are the symbolic equations. "Mordor" must mean "murder," right? Well, Tolkien may have thought of the name by connection with "murder," but in his linguistic context it means the Black Land, just as Moria is the "Black Pit." You can't pick and choose your symbolic equivalents, Dr. Chance. Unless Moria is another word for "muria," anyway.

And the fact that a lot of hippies read The Lord of the Rings doesn't mean that the discovery of LSD has anything to do with Middle-earth, despite its inclusion in the chronology (p. xii). Yes, there were some acid-heads among Tolkien fans. But he surely would not have approved of them if he'd encountered them.

I'm apt to get overly sarcastic. Comes with having an orderly mind, no doubt. But if you're going to read this book, be prepared to check anything you read with a source that has some sort of credibility. ( )

Damn. I read this in 1992-3 and loved it at the time but find that the political symbolism described would have caused the eye of sauron to blink. ( )