Mediations On Middle-Earth: New Writings On The Worlds Of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Karen Haber
01/06/2002 . Source: Katie McGivern 

pub: Earthlight/Simon and Schuster. 235 page enlarged illustrated paperback. Price: £10.00 (UK). ISBN: 0-7432-3100-7.

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This was an interesting angle to me as I had always assumed that Tolkien was akin to Shakespeare or Dickens - in that they had been around for so long that their ideas and styles of writing had permeated their genre.

To the authors featured in ‘Meditations On Middle Earth’, however, Tolkien was new and fresh. Writers attempt to explain why, without Tolkien, their own creations would never have happened.

It charts the evolution from reader to writer and how, as Raymond Feist puts it, Tolkien is the grandfather of Fantasy.

This book has some fantastic authors writing about a fantastic book. They are not Tolkien scholars and so this is not some dry dusty text but each essay shines with the knowledge and love that each author has about ‘Lord Of The Rings’. Yet the book fails to captivate and I found it hard to pick this book up and read it.

Many of the authors had had similar experiences and while each was skillfully told the tale itself became repetitive.

Terry Prachett and Harry Turtledove did stand out and were worth reading but I couldn't help wondering while reading it,'What was the point?' There wasn't anything that I got out of this text that I hadn't already got out of ‘Lord Of The Rings’. This book is like listening to one of today's Top 40 songs.

The song itself is good with a skilled team behind it and the original ideal, on paper sounds like a winner, and yet somehow it fails and while reading it you wish for something with a little more soul, like the ‘Lord Of the Rings’ itself.

Katie McGivern