Tolkien, Race and Cultural History

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions and Abbreviations

1. Introduction
2. — His 'private and beloved nonsense': The Silmarillion and the 'Silmarillion'
3. — A Victorian beginning and a modern end
4. — 'I hold the key': constructing a 'biographical legend'

Part I. How It All Began...

1. In the Beginning Were the Fairies...

• Fairy-things and fairylands
• The creation of a saga
• Fairies and elves in Tolkien's children's literature

1. 'Fluttering Sprites with Antennae': Victorian and Edwardian Fancies
2. — 'Flower-and-Butterfly Minuteness': the fairy painting imagery
3. — Peter Pan and the Cottage of Lost Play
4. — Fading, passing, departing: the fairies' farewell
5. The Fairies, Faith and Folklore
6. — 'Natural' fairies and romantic religion
7. — Brownies, nymphs, mermaids and the 'elementals'
8. — Fairies, folklore and the 'mythology for England'

Part II. Ideal Beings, Ideal Languages

1. The Cat and the Whiskers: Tolkien's Linguistic Creation

• A multi-lingual novel
• Examining the corpus

1. 'Linguistic Aesthetic': Sounds, Meaning and the Pursuit of Beauty
2. — Theorizing language invention: A Secret Vice
3. — The theory of 'inherent linguistic predilections': English and Welsh
4. — Language attitudes
5. — Sound symbolism and sound experiments
6. Ideal Language and Phonetic Spelling
7. — The myth of an universal language
8. — Aspects of linguistic creativity: language change and language decay
9. — Invented alphabets, universal alphabets and phonetic spelling

Part III. From Myth to History

1. The Claim to History

• A changing cosmology: from a flat to a round world
• Reconsidering the 'framework' of the mythology

1. A Hierarchical World
2. — 'Race' and racial anthropology
3. — Tolkien's views on Nazi Germany, race and language
4. — Focusing on Middle-earth: constructing new hierarchies
5. — Racial mixture: the problem of the Half-Elven
6. — The face of evil: the origin and appearance of the Orcs
7. — Tolkien and the charge of racism
8. Visualising Middle-earth: Real and Imagined Material Cultures
9. — The idea of European prehistory and historical 'cultures'
10. — The culture of Gondor: ship burials and winged helmets
11. — 'Chambers', 'Windows' and the Anglo-Saxons
12. — Victorian countryside and relics of the industrial revolution: the material culture of the Shire
13. — Romancing archaelogy
14. Epilogue: From Fairies to Hobbits
15. — Mistakes and inconsistencies
16. — The rise of the hobbits and the fairies' fate

• Appendix: 'And the Wither Then?': Stepping into the Road
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

1. Esta ficha se ha importado inicialmente de TolkienGateway.net el día 31/05/2026.