Tolkien

The forest and the city

Helen Conrad-O'Briain & Gerard Hynes editors

Despite the association of J.R.R. Tolkien with the natural world, Middle-earth as landscape and built environment has been relatively neglected. Tolkien: the forest and the city presents new work by some of the finest scholars in Tolkien studies, as well as research from a number of emerging scholars, addressing this neglect. Drawing on a wide variety of critical approaches, from philology to ecocriticism, in a clear, approachable style, this collection explores the interaction of culture and nature that imbues Tolkien’s secondary world with the immediacy of our own.

Helen Conrad-O’Briain lectures in Old English, Old Norse, palaeography and Tolkien at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. She has co-edited The ghost story from the middle ages to the twentieth century (Dublin, 2010) and has published on M.R. James, Virgil incunabulae and early insular Latin. Gerard Hynes recently completed a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. He has taught on the Tolkien course offered as part of Trinity College’s M.Phil. in popular literature and children’s literature and has published on Tolkien and geology in Tolkien Studies (2012).