Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity by Carl Phelpstead (14.01.11 by Pieter Collier) - Comments

Tolkien once wrote: 'I love Wales - and especially the Welsh language'. Some even go as far as to say 'If JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth has a home on our earth, that home is surely Wales.'

Tolkien loved Wales, and he drew extensively on both the country and its language in creating his fantasty world.

On the first of April there will be published a book called Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity. This book explores how that love influenced tolkien's ideas about language, many aspects of his creative writing, and his sense of an English identity.

It describes more fully than before the extent and depth of tolkien's debt to Welsh language and literature, and argues that tolkien's love of Wales and Welsh is inseparable from his love of, and sense of belonging to, England.

The book gives detailed attention to both JRR tolkien's fiction and his scholarly writings, including some relatively neglected texts. Wales and Welsh were seminal influences on the writings of the twentieth century's most popular writer and this book reveals the range and depth of these influences.

Since the book is published by a univeristy press it is quit expensive, luckily there will also be printed a paperback - but only 30 days after the hardcover.
Tolkien Landscape in Wales


About the Author

Carl Phelpstead was educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford and is now a Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University. He is the editor of History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Olafr (Viking Society for Northern Research text series - 2001), author of Holy Vikings: Saints' Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings' Sagas (2007) and co-editor, with David Clark (Leicester), of Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (2007). He has also published articles on Old Icelandic sagas, medieval hagiography, medieval masculinities and sexualities, and twentieth-century medievalism (including the work of JRR Tolkien). He has contributed to The J.R.R.Tolkien Encyclopaedia and Tolkien Studies. He is an editor of the journal Saga-book and co-editor of the Viking Society’s Text Series.

Title: Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity
Author: Carl Phelpstead
Publisher: University of Wales Press

Publication Date:
1 April 2011

Type: hardcover, 224 pages

ISBN-10: 0708323723
ISBN-13: 978-0708323724
Publication Date:
30 April 2011

Type: hardcover, 224 pages

ISBN-10: 070832391X
ISBN-13: 978-0708323915


Enjoyed this post? Click to get the RSS feed.


Spread the news about this J.R.R. Tolkien article: