A Tolkien Compass

• 1. Introduction

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  A Tolkien Compass arrived in 1975, when the world of professional literary study had little patience for J. R. R. Tolkien. Tom Shippey later recalled the climate plainly. In the United Kingdom, 'professing an interest in Tolkien was almost certain death for any hopeful candidate seeking entrance to a department of English.' Open Court published the collection that year, edited by Jared Lobdell. Its essays came primarily from fan-organised conferences, though most contributors were working academics. None had yet read The Silmarillion; Tolkien would not publish it until 1977. What could close readers uncover about Middle-earth before the full mythology was available? And could their early conclusions hold up once scholarship turned professional?

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• 2. The Hobbit Under the Microscope

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  Bonniejean Christensen found Gollum 'immediately interesting' even before accounting for the most significant changes Tolkien made to The Hobbit. Her essay focuses on chapter 5, 'Riddles in the Dark,' where the revisions bite hardest. In the original version, the riddle contest is a game; in the revised version, it is mortal. Bilbo will be eaten if he loses. Gollum, once merely strange, becomes in Tolkien's rewrite a creature of genuine menace. Christensen reads him as a 'fallen hobbit,' a figure whose darkness is inseparable from his kinship with Bilbo. The revision also served a structural purpose. It aligned The Hobbit's account of the Ring with what The Lord of the Rings demanded.

  Dorothy Matthews brought a different framework, reading Bilbo's adventure through Carl Jung. Gandalf, in her reading, fits the archetype of the Wise Old Man. Gollum, in a striking alignment, becomes the Devouring Mother. Bilbo himself sets out 'out of balance and far from integrated,' making his quest a psychological journey toward wholeness. Matthews was offering one of the first Jungian readings of Tolkien's work. Her essay drew criticism. The librarian Jean MacIntyre noted it has remained frequently consulted, though a scholar named Randel Helms publicly mocked its approach.

  The two essays make A Tolkien Compass the book where The Hobbit first attracted sustained critical attention. Richard C. West's essay turned that same scrutiny on The Lord of the Rings and proved equally durable.

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• 3. The Architecture of Middle-earth

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  Richard C. West's essay argued that The Lord of the Rings is organised according to medieval principles of interlacing. Multiple story threads run simultaneously, rather than following a single plot line. West described this as mirroring 'the perception of the flux of events in the world around us, where everything is happening at once.' The same events, seen through different perspectives, accumulate meaning that a linear telling could not provide. West noted that the technique is not exclusively medieval; writers like James Joyce and Marcel Proust had also returned to it. The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft later called West's essay the piece with 'particularly long-lasting impact' on the field.

  David Miller looked at a different kind of structure. Reading both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as picaresque narratives, he focused on the road as a defining setting. The Fellowship of the Ring, in Miller's reading, follows nine repeating cycles. Each cycle moves from a period of rest through a blundering journey, into danger, and finally toward unexpected rescue. The party's time in the Old Forest, where Old Man Willow traps them and Tom Bombadil arrives to save them, is one such cycle. Miller identified nine of these sequences in the first volume alone. The essays on structure mapped how Tolkien built his world; other contributors to A Tolkien Compass were asking what that world believes.

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• 4. Power, Morality, Myth

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  Walter Scheps argued in his essay that Tolkien's morality is 'radically different from our own.' He traced it to the conventions of fairy tales rather than modern ethics. In fairy-tale terms, it is not troubling that Tolkien's orcs are black or that his trolls are working class. Nor is it troubling that danger comes from the south and east. In that moral system, Scheps wrote, 'nobility is inherited rather than acquired.'

  Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill focused on the One Ring. Their answer to what power does to those who hold it was, in their words, 'unequivocal: the desire for power corrupts.' Gandalf and Galadriel each face the temptation and reject it. Saruman falls. Among the men of Gondor, Boromir moves to seize the Ring while Faramir 'understands the danger.' Deborah Rogers shifted the question from power to personhood, asking what image of humanity Tolkien was actually proposing. She drew on a letter Tolkien sent her in 1958, in which he wrote 'I am in fact a hobbit.' Hobbits in her reading are 'small, provincial, and comfort-loving,' not heroic but human in a different way. Aragorn supplies the heroic dimension. Together, Rogers argued, they form a composite picture: the clod and the hero as one.

  Robert Plank examined a single chapter, Book 6, Chapter 8, in which the hobbits return home victorious only to find their Shire occupied. He noted the chapter differs from the rest of the novel. 'Miracles do not happen,' Plank wrote; 'the laws of nature are in full and undisputed force.' The chapter is, by his account, 'not fantasy.' He also expressed surprise that Tolkien treats the overthrow of a tyrannical government as 'a quick and easy job.' Charles Huttar read Mordor and Moria as versions of the Christian Hell. The journey through Moria is a descent into the underworld; Gandalf's battle with the Balrog is a hero confronting 'a monster of the deep.' Tolkien's great towers and cities have all become hellish, save for Minas Tirith. It is described as 'a great city' with seven walls and seven levels, but it 'is dying.' Huttar ended on that note: 'Tolkien sees hope.' The collection also carried a document from Tolkien's own hand, written not for critics but for translators, and its fate inside the book would become a controversy of its own.

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• 5. Tolkien's Own Voice

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  Tolkien's 'Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings' was not written for scholars. It was a working document, produced to help translators navigate the novel's names. Personal names like 'Treebeard' should be translated by sense; placenames like 'Bag End' likewise. All other names, Tolkien specified, should be left untranslated. A Tolkien Compass was the first book to make this document widely available to general readers. Tom Shippey called it 'immensely valuable.' He also deplored what happened next: the Tolkien Estate demanded that it be omitted from later editions. The second edition of A Tolkien Compass, published by Open Court in 2003, did not include it. What had been an accessible resource for readers and translators alike was quietly removed from the one place most people could find it. That removal became one thread in a larger reckoning with the collection's standing.

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• 6. An Age of Innocence

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  Tom Shippey wrote the foreword to the second edition of A Tolkien Compass, published in 2003, more than a generation after the first. His judgment was that the collection had 'stood up well.' He framed the original essays as the product of an 'Age of Innocence' before Tolkien studies became professionalised. That era, he wrote, gave the essays 'freshness, candor, and a sense of historical depth' that could never be reproduced. But freshness has a cost. Some of the early predictions turned out to be wrong. The essays were written without key documents that emerged later, including The History of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1988-1992. One prediction proved wrong: the essays assumed Tolkien had written much of The Lord of the Rings before the Second World War. He had not. Richard C. West's reading of the novel's medieval interlace structure, however, has been substantiated by later scholarship. The medievalist Gergely Nagy called A Tolkien Compass 'a significant early collection.' The book has been translated into French, Swedish, and Turkish. The 'Age of Innocence' did not guarantee accuracy. But it produced a quality of attention that more professionalised study has not fully replaced. In his introduction, Jared Lobdell noted that none of the essays attempt Quellenforschung. That is the search for Tolkien's sources; Lobdell called it 'worthy of study.' That search has since become one of the largest and most contested areas in Tolkien scholarship.

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