Tolkien and his World
Tolkien and his world J. ... Tolkien has been called one of the century’s best writers by many critics. With a simple statement such as that, a lot of questions come to mind of why Tolkien is one of the best writers. ... Tolkien’s unique ability derives from a basic motive; the struggle between good and evil. This universal struggle is embraced beautifully in Tolkien’s work. ... Each little part of these intense situations was thought over carefully by Tolkien. Each aspect contributes to the balance of heroism, or the struggle for all of mankind to hold out against the onslaught of darkness, which is the main striving point of Tolkien’s literature. (Petty 80) Middle Earth as created by Tolkien is a complex set of themes, ideas, characters, languages, and geography. So complex and so well-developed that a person would walk away from reading Tolkien’s works feeling completely engulfed into his world. Tolkien’s geography of Middle Earth has both physical and moral characteristics. ... (Stanton 11) The name Middle Earth is somewhat confusing, because Tolkien never discusses what surrounds Middle Earth to make it the actual middle, so where does the term middle come from? Tolkien’s literature background mainly lies in Old English poetry and old Teutonic cosmogonies, and the term Middle Earth, or “middan-geard” was the name for Earth itself, imagined as suspended between the sky above and the void below, or as poised spiritually between Heaven and Hell.