List of Contents (p. v).
Acknowledgments (p. vi).
"Foreword: Author of the Century" (pp. vii-xxxv).
Chapter I: "The Hobbit [1937]: Re-Inventing Middle-Earth" (pp. 1-49).
Chapter II: "The Lord of the Rings (1) [1954]: Mapping Out a Plot" (pp. 50-111).
Chapter III: "The Lord of the Rings (2) [1954]: Concepts of Evil" (pp. 112-160).
Chapter IV: "The Lord of the Rings (3) [1955]: The Mythic Dimension" (pp. 161-225).
Chapter V: "The Silmarillion [19??]: The Work of the Heart" (pp. 226-263).
Chapter VI: "Shorter Works: Doubts, Fears, Autobiographies" (pp. 264-304).
"Afterword: The Followers and the Critics" (pp. 305-328).
"List of References" (pp. 329-336).
"Index" (pp. 337-347).
For my purposes in the present essay, I am most interested in Shippey's "Foreword: Author of the Century" and his "Afterword: The Followers and the Critics." But I also want to commend Shippey for his discussion (A) of contrasts and parallels in Chapter II: "The Lord of the Rings (1)," and (B) of concepts of evil in Chapter III, and (C) of heroic fantasy in Chapter IV: "The Lord of the Rings (3)" (esp. pp. 221-225).
In Shippey's "Foreword: Author of the Century," after the subheading "Fantasy and the fantastic" (p. vii), he says, "However, when it comes time to look back at the [twentieth] century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of the present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle, Ursala Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity's Rainbow. The list could readily be extended" (p. vii).
Subsequently, Shippey says that "many of the originators of the late twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell)" (p. viii). Subsequently, Shippey says that "it is possible to see Tolkien as one of a group of 'traumatized authors'" (pp. xxix-xxx; also see p. xxxi).
By constructing this list of traumatized authors, Shippey seems to imply that Tolkien is also a traumatized author who is attempting to work through his traumatization in World War I through writing his three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
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