Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works ed. by Leslie A. Donovan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works ed. by Leslie A. Donovan E.L. Risden leslie a. donovan, ed., Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. Approaches to Teaching World Literatures. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2015. Pp. 279. isbn: 978–1–60329–206–1. $24. MLA has produced nearly 140 volumes on teaching classic literary works: indeed a great service to the profession. Including Donovan’s introduction on the value of teaching Tolkien, this affordable volume contains thirty brief essays with many different productive and helpful ideas that scholars will find as interesting and valuable as teachers do. In addition to the essays, the book begins with a general introduction on teaching materials, information on editions, and brief consideration of reference works and resources and multimedia teaching aids, and it concludes with a Works Cited, index, and list of other volumes in the Teaching Approaches Series. The editor has divided the essays into methodological rather than thematic sections: ‘Teaching the Controversies,’ ‘Tolkien’s Other Works as Background,’ ‘Connections to the Past,’ ‘Modern and Contemporary Perspectives,’ ‘Interdisciplinary Contexts,’ ‘Classroom Contexts and Strategies for Teaching.’ The creation of such a volume through the MLA is no small achievement, considering the number of critics who have expressed [End Page 139] and still express disdain for Tolkien and his work. The variety of the essays attests to the aptness of the faith of the publisher, editor, and contributors in assembling it. It should further assist in easing the minds of the ‘haters’ and legitimizing the academic study of Tolkien not just for his own fiction (and scholarship), but also for the capacity of his works to attract readers to other major texts, both medieval and modern. Because of the number of essays, and because each deserves notice, I must comment only briefly on each one. Craig Franson’s ‘The Perils of the Tolkien Course: Reading the Readings’ notes the great variety in the backgrounds of students attracted to Tolkien courses and points to how teachers may draw attention to the great range of media that show his influence, from film to popular music to campy videos. James McNelis uses the debate between the Tolkien ‘lovers’ and ‘haters’ as fodder for students in an argumentative writing course. Verlyn Flieger, in ‘Eucatastrophe and the Battle with the Dark,’ focuses her teaching on ‘what gives the book its extraordinary ability to move its readers’ (50). Jane Chance asks ‘Why Teach The Silmarillion?’ and answers that it illuminates ‘the pattern of magic set against mystery’ (63) and points to the differences between ‘Tolkien’s antiheroes and medieval heroes’ (56). Brian Walter in a Blake-like ‘Child of the Kindly West’ juxtaposes innocence and experience for his course on children’s literature. Yvette Kisor, using the vast, originally unpublished material on the history of Middle-earth, considers details of how Tolkien students can ‘engage in an author’s creative process and trace the development of not only a work of fiction but also a world with its own history and languages’ (75). Robin Chapman Stacey uses Tolkien as a way to ask the question of how an author can use myth ‘as a vehicle through which to explore and reshape the past’ (84)—or at least how we see and process it. Leslie Stratyner, in a course examining sources and analogues, addresses the influence of oral tradition. Liam Felsen shows the value of careful study of both Anglo-Saxon and Boethian sources in understanding Tolkien’s work. Melissa Ridley Elmes, in ‘Tolkien as Nation Builder: Teaching The Lord of the Rings in an Epic Literature Class,’ places LOTR as a center for a matrix of questions about and approaches to epic. Philip Irving Mitchell drops The Fellowship of the Ring neatly in the Pastoral tradition. Christopher Cobb centralizes LOTR in a more general fantasy literature course. Sharin Schroeder, in an upper-level course (‘Tolkien: Medieval or Modern?’), contextualizes Tolkien within the range and varieties of both eras. Thomas L. Martin, in ‘The Tower, the Sausage Maker, and the Soup,’ considers how to create a valuable, informative, and critical experience for reading...