Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a ‘poem to fire [Tolkien’s] imagination: the medieval tale of an Arthurian knight and his search for the mysterious giant who is to deal him a terrible axe-blow. Tolkien was delighted by the poem and also by its language, for he realised that its dialect was approximately that which had been spoken by his mother’s West Midland ancestors’.
Humphrey Carpenter. Tolkien: A Biography (London, 1977), p. 35.
While J.R.R. Tolkien is best known today for his genre-defining novel The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955), his literary imagination was first sparked by the history of the English language. This short list presents 6 works by Tolkien that chronicle his explorations in Middle English and beyond.
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J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar
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