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‘Meditations On Middle Earth’ aims to
understand the initial impact that JRR Tolkien had on writers and
the fantasy genre.
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
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