One Ring to Bind Them All: Tolkien's Mythology

Rating:
Summary: Doctoral dissertation, with all that implies
Review: A reprint from 1979 of a doctoral dissertation, with the problems of that breed. Petty uses the terminology of Vladimir Propp to perform a folklore motivic analysis of LotR, and at times it's pretty hard going, though the attempt to fit Tolkien into Propp's theories requires less grunting and squeezing than many such efforts. Petty has updated her bibliography, and provided a new introduction discussing the place of mythological studies of Tolkien.

Rating:
Summary: Doctoral dissertation, with all that implies
Review: A reprint from 1979 of a doctoral dissertation, with the problems of that breed. Petty uses the terminology of Vladimir Propp to perform a folklore motivic analysis of LotR, and at times it's pretty hard going, though the attempt to fit Tolkien into Propp's theories requires less grunting and squeezing than many such efforts. Petty has updated her bibliography, and provided a new introduction discussing the place of mythological studies of Tolkien.

Rating:
Summary: good cross-disciplinary analysis
Review: Dissertationeez doesn't bother me (reads like a lot of papers I've written as an English grad student). What I'm looking for is original thinking and competent scholarship. Petty delivers on both counts. Her newer book is more fun to read if you don't want to concern yourself too much with sources and references, but this early study of Petty's lays a lot of the groundwork for myth-based studies of Tolkien in general. I didn't read it for fun. I read it for ideas and information; well worth the price of admission.

Rating:
Summary: real scholarship
Review: I've seen this book around and finally decided to take a chance on it. I was not disappointed. There's so much garbage being published about Tolkien now because of the high popularity from the films, but thank Valinor, this book is one of the real ones. Very clear organization, hard evidence directly from the Tolkien writings, a specific topic successfully argued in terms appropriate to the fields of comparative mythology and sociology.

Rating:
Summary: a welcome find
Review: So glad to see this classic study back in circulation. Also liked the new and improved introduction that talks about how much Tolkien research has changed since the book first came out. The much bigger bibliography is also very useful, which also shows how much more has been written about Tolkien in the past decade. Belongs on any Tolkien scholar's bookshelf.