Wholesale Tolkien For Beginners

Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth are what critics, following Tolkien’s lead, refer to collectively as his “legendarium”. J.R.R. Tolkien sweeps us away to distant times and places that are also our time and place. Worlds where difficult choices must be made, where character is defined by those choices, and where redemption is possible though not always embraced. The Lord of the Rings taps a deep root in the human psyche. There is much death, destruction, and defeat, but there is even more friendship, courage, and hope. Author Louis Markos speaks to the full dimensions of the legendarium in two voices: that of the storyteller who loves the stories and that of the critic who seeks to identify and explicate key themes. In his telling analysis, he will treat the legendarium both as a collection of secondary-world myths with their own integrity and as a reflection of Tolkien’s Catholic worldview.