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This book is one which, in its sensitive style of publication and in its nuanced mediaeval series, gives its writer enormous pleasure for a number of reasons, for it is a gathering up, a clustering and the clarifying in 2013 of a number of my earlier research essays concerned with the life, purposes and achievements of one of my own early academic mentors, the late Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. And much like my earlier collection 'Tolkien's View: Windows into his World' (2009) - one also selected and published in the Cormarë Series - this volume offers a number of research and reflective pieces, very largely more evolved versions and modifications of items issued variously and much earlier. Although confident in their several stances and conclusions, these essays are still very much text based, and often contain - or are, to some degree, shaped by - a measure of personal knowledge derived from my close acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien when I was a student very close to him in the School of English within the University of Oxford. These several pieces are now developed further in various ways, not least in appreciative response to the interest expressed in their now being re-issued together, and in Europe, by the Editors of the Walking Tree Publishers. In each instance, these leading Tolkien scholars have advised perceptively on first the selection of items, and then on their clustering, and as to clarifications deemed appropriate in view of the passage of time since first issue, or from the further development of my cultural appraisals. While each individual essay has had its earlier appearance, and so its first readership indicated more clearly - for they have been published by differing research series and varied readers' interests, as in the United States of America, Australia, Norway, Germany, England and Scotland - most have now been adapted and/or expanded in various ways that should make them more accessible, and, certainly, more relevant to current scholarship. |
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