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The opening paragraphs of Nelson’s review

“Ancient tales of ruin” in Tolkien’s imagination: A review of A sense of tales untold: Exploring the edges of Tolkien’s literary canvas by Peter Grybauskas

— review by Dale Nelson

10 April 2022 | Beyond Bree, April, 2022, 2

… Grybauskas shows us how Tolkien gives us bits here and there that relate to the War of the Last Alliance, which ended the Second Age.… As we read, the great episodes of the Third Age War of the Ring pass before us as matters of immediate excitement yet as connected with depths of time.

Within the principal story, other stories may be only partially told because only some of the details are known, or may be deliberately suppressed.…

As well as giving short measure on Tolkien, the book must be faulted for its abundance of verbal clichés. Youngish college teachers try to please their students with clever allusions to pop culture. These don’t look good in cold print. Academic books can avoid stuffiness without resorting to them.

The physical book is unimpressive, which is a shame; I’ve reviewed several Kent publications lately and been impressed by their superior manufacture. The present book costs as much as Tolkien’s Cosmology but has half the number of pages, and they are bound to the spine by glue rather than gathered in durable sewn signatures. The cover has some kind of shiny material over boards rather than buckram. It seems shrinkflation” has come to Kent’s book publishing.

Grybauskas seems generally to be well-informed about matters of fact, but he should not state that Tolkien is known” to have admired” the fantasy-world short stories of Lord Dunsany. (5) Grybauskas cites no source for this claim.…

A Sense of Tales Untold is endorsed by outstanding Tolkien scholars Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, but it should have been a better book.…

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date recorded 📅2022-04-10
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