"No one knows more than Diana Pavlac Glyer about the internal workings of the Inklings. You'll learn what made these writers tick and more: inspired by their example, you'll discover how collaboration can help your own creative process and lead to genius breakthroughs in whatever work you do.
It shows how encouragement and criticism made all the difference in The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and dozens of other books written by the members of this literary group. How did these conversations shape the books they were writing? How does creative collaboration enhance individual talent? And what can we learn from their example?Ĭomplemented with original illustrations by James Owen, Bandersnatch offers an inside look at the Inklings of Oxford-and a seat at their table at the Eagle and Child pub.
Tolkien, and the other Inklings met each week to read and discuss each other's works-in-progress, offering both encouragement and blistering critique. Ordway’s ground-breaking study reveals that Tolkien brought to the workings of his fantastic imagination a deep knowledge of both the facts and the fictions of the modern world.An inside look at the Inklings and their creative processĬ. For Tolkien’s genius was not simply backward-looking: it was intimately connected with the literature of his own time and concerned with the issues and crises of modernity. Tolkien’s Modern Reading not only enables a clearer understanding of Tolkien’s epic, it also illuminates his views on topics such as technology, women, empire, and race. He even read Americans like Longfellow and Sinclair Lewis, assimilating what he read in characteristically complex ways, both as positive examples and as influence-by-opposition. Shorthouse, who are forgotten now but made a significant impression on Tolkien.
She surveys the work of figures such as S.R.
In fact, as Holly Ordway demonstrates in this major corrective, Tolkien enjoyed a broad range of contemporary works, engaged with them in detail and depth, and even named specific titles as sources for and influences upon his creation of Middle-earth.ĭrawing on meticulous archival research, Ordway shows how Tolkien appreciated authors as diverse as James Joyce and Beatrix Potter, Rider Haggard and Edith Nesbit, William Morris and Kenneth Grahame. Tolkien’s Modern Reading addresses the claim that Tolkien “read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.” This claim, made by one of his first biographers, has led to the widely accepted view that Tolkien was dismissive of modern culture, and that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are fundamentally medieval and nostalgic in their inspiration.
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