Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and insightful
Review: This is an interesting and insightful book on Tolkien's attitude to war, valour and heroism, and to the sacrifices and hardness war demands. However I suggest that Hal GP Colebatch's "Return of the Heroes" covers the same ground better and more learnedly. Read the two together, and you will see a lot of bad criticisms of Tolkien expertly shredded.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting and insightful
Review: This is an interesting and insightful book on Tolkien's attitude to war, valour and heroism, and to the sacrifices and hardness war demands. However I suggest that Hal GP Colebatch's "Return of the Heroes" covers the same ground better and more learnedly. Read the two together, and you will see a lot of bad criticisms of Tolkien expertly shredded.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent and insightful, with a few major flaws...
Review: _Following Gandalf_ is a thoughtful book that, somehow, doesn't quite follow Gandalf. Dickerson's main topic is the treatment of war in Tolkien's Middle-Earth - specifically in the LOTR trilogy, with references to _The Hobbit_ and _The Silmarillion._ The book asks whether Tolkien's works glorify war and violence, and Dickerson spends a lot of time wandering around this question. Which is okay - that deceptively simple question, after all, encompasses a childhood classic, a popular trilogy, and a pseudo Old-English saga... three very different forms that require different methods of literary analysis. Dickerson draws some fascinating, well-defended conclusions in this book. He creates a convincing argument for the existence of an absolute set of morals within Middle-Earth (granted, Tolkien establishes this in _The Silmarillion,_ but it's nice to see a critic do his homework and "prove" his thesis through analyzing the other novels); and his study of "the one ring" is quite good. I don't want to spoil the book for you, so I'll just say that Dickerson provides an excellent case for the ring's corruptive properties - there are intrinsic and extrinsic forces at work, and if you think about how the ring was brought into being in the first place, it seems rather obvious... However, I found two things distracting or unnecessary, which prevented me from giving this book five stars. First, Dickerson relies rather heavily on Peter Jackson's film versions - only two of which had been released with the publication of the novel. His scholarly analysis is interspersed with scenes from the films, which I feel is inappropriate since Jackson's films are NOT Tolkien's books. (Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Jackson's films, but they are only "based" on LOTR, and cannot be considered the same as the source material. They are visions and revisions by someone other than the author, in a different era, for a different audience, all of which is compounded by being in a totally different medium. Sorry, but Jackson's LOTR is not Tolkien's LOTR, even if the plot and characters are the same...) I suppose if Dickerson had written a separate chapter that compared Jackson's LOTR with Tolkien's LOTR I would not feel this way; however, a discussion of Tolkien's work should not include Jackson's work. The two works are not the same. One-half point removed for inappropriate source material. My second quibble is that the book closes with an argument about whether or not the LOTR is a Christian myth. In his introduction, Dickerson says, "In the final chapters, I return to the question of war and put much of the rest of this book, and thereby much of Tolkien's writing, into the context and perspective given to us by the [...] opening part of Tolkien's book _The Silmarillion_" (17). Dickerson does this very thing, only in the larger context and perspective of the Christian Bible - a perspective that Dickerson admits Tolkien neither wanted nor intended. Dickerson's Christian-myth analysis is insightful, to be sure. My complaint is twofold: (1) the book is about the question of war and violence in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, not about the Christian allegories to be found in those writings; (2) the Christian-myth section is out of place in the book - it feels tacked on, as if Dickerson had written this section years before and decided it just might "fit" in this book. It does, but badly. One half-point removed for losing sight of the "point" of the book. The book is otherwise an excellent resource for critical study of the LOTR, though I was irritated at the lack of an index. No points lost for that omission, though it might deserve it. Also, the title is somewhat deceptive in that Gandalf is not the primary character being studied. Last word: Good, with flaws. Grade: B-
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