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Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages Hardcover – January 15, 2021

by Holly Ordway (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 127 ratings
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Tolkien’s Modern Reading addresses the claim that Tolkien “read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.” This claim, made by one of his first biographers, has led to the widely accepted view that Tolkien was dismissive of modern culture, and that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are fundamentally medieval and nostalgic in their inspiration.
In fact, as Holly Ordway demonstrates in this major corrective, Tolkien enjoyed a broad range of contemporary works, engaged with them in detail and depth, and even named specific titles as sources for and influences upon his creation of Middle-earth.

Drawing on meticulous archival research, Ordway shows how Tolkien appreciated authors as diverse as James Joyce and Beatrix Potter, Rider Haggard and Edith Nesbit, William Morris and Kenneth Grahame. She surveys the work of figures such as S.R. Crockett and J.H. Shorthouse, who are forgotten now but made a significant impression on Tolkien. He even read Americans like Longfellow and Sinclair Lewis, assimilating what he read in characteristically complex ways, both as positive examples and as influence-by-opposition.

Tolkien’s Modern Reading not only enables a clearer understanding of Tolkien’s epic, it also illuminates his views on topics such as technology, women, empire, and race. For Tolkien’s genius was not simply backward-looking: it was intimately connected with the literature of his own time and concerned with the issues and crises of modernity. Ordway’s ground-breaking study reveals that Tolkien brought to the workings of his fantastic imagination a deep knowledge of both the facts and the fictions of the modern world.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    392 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Word on Fire Academic
  4. Publication date
    January 15, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    6.1 x 1.5 x 9.1 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1943243727
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1943243723
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is a work of the first importance. Holly Ordway’s painstaking scholarship, her close reading of primary sources in their proper context, challenges, and thoroughly revises, the image of Tolkien as someone who took no interest in contemporary culture. Ordway also offers a fine critical understanding of why and how Tolkien drew on those sources, an understanding that will enrich anyone’s experience in re-reading the legendarium. Her book is itself highly readable, devoid of jargon and presented with real elegance and wit, a delight for the general reader, but also a groundwork for future Tolkien studies.”
— Malcolm Guite, Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and author of Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination



“A distinguished work of detailed literary scholarship that is enjoyable and accessible for all readers. Ordway has undertaken a careful, sometimes combative, psycho-bibliography that shatters any sense that Tolkien was simply a clueless and nostalgic curmudgeon. Rather, she gives us a portrait of a nuanced thinker and reader who was generous and aware, Catholic and conscientious, creatively engaged with, but not bound by, his own culture.”
— Michael Tomko, Professor of Humanities at Villanova University and author of Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien



“In this important book, Ordway enhances our notions of influence and enriches our understanding of Tolkien’s life and work. Supple prose; a strong, clear voice; inspiring breadth; genuine insight. Tolkien’s Modern Reading addresses and corrects a multitude of misguided and outdated notions. It is a welcome, even remarkable, achievement.”
— Diana Pavlac Glyer, Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University and author of The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community

About the Author

Holly Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies. Her book Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages received the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Word on Fire Academic; First Edition (January 15, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 392 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1943243727
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1943243723
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1.5 x 9.1 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 127 ratings

About the author

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Holly Ordway

Holly Ordway

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Holly Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies. She is the author of Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages, which received the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies. Her book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography is being released in time for the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death. Her website is hollyordway.com.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
127 global ratings
Modern literary influences on J.R.R. Tolkein
5 Stars
Modern literary influences on J.R.R. Tolkein
As a Tolkien fan, I'm loving this book! It's a fascinating and meticulous work of scholarship. Thank you, Holly Ordway.
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Top reviews from the United States

Joe Keenan
5.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Groundbreaking Work
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2021
Verified Purchase
This book is simultaneously a great example of what real scholarship looks like, and an epic exposure of how orthodoxy is often just agreed upon error.
Agreed upon lies.
Humphrey Carpenter long ago established in the "Tolkien Community" the idea that Tolkien was an isolated academic lost in the past, all his works, all his inspiration, springing from the past (the Oxford Don not reading contemporary literature).
Later scholars, under the thrall of Carpenters authoritative voice, simply re-iterated Carpenter's disinformation.
No one seemed to confirm Carpenter's judgement, they just assumed it to be correct and started from there.
Well, it turns out it was not true.
Not even close.
Instead, author shows Tolkien was widely read in and influenced by, contemporary literature.
Furthermore, Tolkien used insights (both positive and negative) gained from that literature (and his Catholicism) to inform and improve classic tales.
A truly amazing book, wish I could give it six stars.
8 people found this helpful
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Glynn Young
5.0 out of 5 stars Was Tolkien Only Influenced by the Middle Ages? Holly Ordway Says No.
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2021
Holly Ordway takes issue with some of the received wisdom about J.R.R. Tolkien. Specifically, she rejects the notion that Tolkien saw nothing of merit of anything written after the Middle Ages, that his Middle-earth saga was influenced only by literature and history prior to Chaucer. In “Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-Earth Beyond the Middle Ages,” Ordway respectfully disagrees, and makes her case. And a compelling case it is.

The Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture for the Word on Fire Institute and a visiting professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Ordway received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a subject editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies. She’s published two previous books, “Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith” (2017) and “Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms” (2014). She’s written numerous articles and chapters of anthologies on Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, literature, philosophy, the Inklings, and related subjects.

In studying Tolkien and his writings, Ordway discovered that the author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” read deeply and widely, and not only about the Middle Ages. She looked at his letters, writings, lectures and speeches, and journals, and she learned that, like most academics of the time, Tolkien was more than familiar with contemporary authors, writers and thinkers in other fields, writers of the Victorian period, as well as contemporary poets.

She considers a number of writers as more-than-theoretical influences on Tolkien and his own writings. These include George MacDonald, William Morris, Rider Haggard, C.S. Lewis, and several others. Tolkien read works of science fiction by authors like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, among many others; ghost stories; children’s stories like “Peter Pan” and the works of Beatrix Potter; and detective stories by such writers as Agatha Christie, John Buchan, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He read “The Wind in the Willows” and “The Lord of the Flies.” He read poets like Robert Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Masefield. In an appendix, Ordway includes a comprehensive list of Tolkien’s modern readings, and it goes on for 10 full pages.

But Ordway goes beyond simply providing a catalogue of what Tolkien read. She shows how specific contemporary works likely influenced almost all his Middle-earth writings. She doesn’t dispute that the Middle Ages heavily influenced Tolkien’s writings. But she demonstrates that to attribute the literary influences on Tolkien only to the Middle Ages results in a limited and flawed understanding.

Where did this “Tolkien read nothing created after 1100 A.D.” idea come from? Ordway points to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s first official biographer, who first approached the job of writing the biography in what he later admitted was a rather slap-dash manner, an effort decidedly rejected by Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien. The final manuscript was extensively rewritten and edited, but it still contained a number of flaws. One of those flaws was the idea of Tolkien only reading works from the Middle Ages. And the idea took root and flourished. What didn’t help clarification was that the Carpenter biography remains the only one authorized by the family.

Ordway makes her case. She’s an academic, but she writes in a highly accessible style. “Tolkien’s Modern Reading” is not only a welcome addition to the Tolkien literary universe; it also greatly enlarges our understanding of the writer and the influences on his work.
9 people found this helpful
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Jason Monroe
5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Contribution to the Tolkien Studies field
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2021
I would like to complement this work’s clarity. I place Ordway among the best when it comes to Tolkien scholarship. Those can relate who resonate with C.S. Lewis's words in Till We Have Faces: “to say the very thing you mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words”. In Tolkien’s Modern Reading, Holly Ordway does this very thing – says what she means in a lucid, always comprehensible way.

Ordway’s method is rational and carried out consistently. We can appreciate her work which always rests on the foundation of solid research in Tolkien Studies and in writings of Tolkien himself. She sticks close to her program of carefully considering “all that we know Tolkien to have read, of post-1850 English-language literature in poetry and prose” (TMR, 274). She veers from the tempting paths of guesswork and speculation and stays the course of assessing and analyzing Tolkien’s literary diet and tastes.

This study is needed because there has been cataracts of scholarship on Tolkien ancient and medieval influences, but not as much on his modern sources. So along with being first rate, this study is an important piece in the overall puzzle of Tolkien (and Inklings) Studies.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Aurifex
5.0 out of 5 stars Knowing what Tolkien read helps understand his work a little more.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 16, 2021
Verified Purchase
When I was a teenager, the Lord of the Rings was the yardstick I measured everything against. The search for a place like Middle Earth led me to Mexico, with its canyons, caves and volcanoes. Eventually, I found my way back again to the Shire. I’d never worried much about what the author was like, as what he had created seemed good enough to me. However, having read this book I feel I know Tolkien much better, and it has helped cast light on why I and so many others have found his work so pivotal in our lives.
2 people found this helpful
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