Is that a faint whiff of desperation in the air?

This isn't the earliest work of J. R. R. Tolkien criticism -- not by many years. Had the editors desired, there was a rich wealth of articles available. But the essays come from a specialized source: the first two "Conferences on Middle-Earth." This rather restricted the available materials. Like most scholarly conferences, the number of presentations was relatively restricted and the quality of the results highly variable.

Some of the pieces here are of great value. Bonniejean Christensen's "Gollum's Character Transformation in The Hobbit," which compares Gollum's behavior in Tolkien's first and final editions of the book, is a great resource for any Tolkien scholar; it shows how Tolkien adapted Gollum from a minor character to one of the key elements of the Lord of the Rings mythology. Richard West's "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings" makes a crucial point about the way Tolkien organizes his plots.

But there are some weak essays, too. I won't pick on them in particular; it's not really fair to expect a paper that was probably designed for a particular specialized audience to stand up in print forty years-odd years later. (The conferences were in 1969 and 1971; the collection itself is copyrighted 1975.) Especially since the papers were obviously presented before the publication of The Silmarillion and all the other posthumous Tolkien works. There is much that we now know that the authors of the time could not have known. But it's best to be forewarned: This book breaks very little new ground, and it is dated. There is much that is useful here. But don't expect every essay to be equally valuable. ( )