 First paperback edition | |
| Author | Jane Chance |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Genre | Tolkien studies |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1979 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Hardcover (paperback, 1980) |
| Pages | 164 |
| ISBN | 978-0-333-29034-7 |
Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' is a 1979 book of Tolkien scholarship by Jane Chance, writing then as Jane Chance Nitzsche. The book looks in turn at Tolkien's essays "On Fairy-Stories" and "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"; The Hobbit; the fairy-stories "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major"; the minor works "Lay of Autrou and Itroun", "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth", "Imram", and Farmer Giles of Ham; The Lord of the Rings; and very briefly in the concluding section, The Silmarillion. In 2001, a second edition extended all the chapters but still treated The Silmarillion, that Tolkien worked on throughout his life, as a sort of coda.
Tolkien scholars including Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger, while noting some good points in the book, roundly criticised Chance's approach as seeking to fit his writings into an allegorical pattern which in their view did not exist, and disagreeing with points of detail. They noted that Bilbo Baggins, for instance, is nothing like a king. Others commented that the second edition had failed to keep up with advances in Tolkien scholarship. The scholar Michael Drout has praised the appropriateness of the subtitle's description of Tolkien's legendarium, "A mythology for England", though it seems that Tolkien never used that exact phrase.