Published as part of Warner Paperback Library’s Writers for the 70’s series, Robley Evans’s study skirt the cult of Tolkien and digs into him as a writer, whose fiction is structurally bound up with myth, language, theology, time and the imaginative traditions he inherited.

Evans looks through The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s critical writing to examine recurring concerns with decline, memory, power, mortality and the persistence of myth in modern literature. Evans’s treatment of Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation” is really beguiling, it says that fantasy not as escape from reality but as the deliberate making of a secondary world through which reality can be encountered differently.

He places Tolkien in relation to Beowulf, fairy tale, medieval literature and Christian cosmology, while also attending to the moral architecture of Middle-earth — its suspicion of domination, its fascination with lost greatness, and its sense that history is always moving away from an inaccessible beginning. A compact early critical study from the first wave of serious Tolkien scholarship.

Warner Paperback Library, New York, 1972. First printing, December 1972. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with edge and corner wear; light age-toning throughout. Binding firm. Good condition.