Tolkien's Lost Chaucer

Name: Tolkien's Lost Chaucer
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: John M. Bowers
ISBN: 9781705207123

Author: John M. Bowers

Narrator: Jennifer M. Dixon

Unabridged: 14 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/31/2020

Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism

Synopsis

Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination.

About John M. Bowers

John M. Bowers is an internationally known scholar of medieval English literature with books on Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet. Educated at Duke, Virginia, and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he taught at Caltech and Princeton before settling at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Great Courses released his lecture series The Western Literary Canon in Context.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on March 13, 2021

This felt like it could have been two, if not three, different books, and as a consequence, it shorts those different components just enough to feel that they might have been left out. These would-be "books" are probably not all quite book-length, though, which was likely a consideration in how this......more

Goodreads review by Brenton on November 19, 2024

See my full review of John M. Bowers' Mythopoeic Award-winning (Inklings Studies) book Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer in this article: "The Doom and Destiny of Tolkien’s Chaucer Research: A Note on John M. Bowers, Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (2019)" [URL not allowed]......more

Goodreads review by Nonethousand on December 23, 2024

The professor’s inspiring career The Inklings publication made clear that professor Tolkien’s career (as well as his colleagues’) echoes in his work, however this essay pushes the point further highlighting the numerous Chaucerian elements in JRRT published works. Dragging the reader in an academ......more

Goodreads review by emma june on March 09, 2023

The most interesting book about Tolkien I’ve read in a long, long time. Covering both Tolkien’s exploration of Chaucer in his academic career as well as the apparent influence of Chaucer on Tolkien’s own writings, it’s incredibly in depth and compelling. While some arguments are quite a stretch, ove......more

Goodreads review by Timbo on February 09, 2023

For many years J.R.R. Tolkien labored on what was intended to be a new student translation of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Thwarted by his own tendency towards procrastination and insistence on needless detail, Tolkien never completed the project. In this well researched examination of extant mat......more