Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination.

Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination.

"The Old English Exodus is based on full notes for a series of lectures delivered to a special class in Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s; the notes were retouched in the following decade. It was never intended to be an edition, although the lecturer scrupulously drew up and edited text as basis of his commentary. It is an interpretation of the poem, designed to reconstruct the original (as far as that is possible), and to place it in the context of Old English poetry"--Publisher's description

The first form of the myths and legends in Tolkien's conception of the Middle Kingdom features the adventures of Eriol, and the tales of Beren and Luthien, Turin and the dragon, the necklace of the dwarves, and the fall of Gondolin.

'The Return of the Shadow' is the story of the first part of 'The History of The Lord of the Rings', from its inception to the end of the first volume, 'The Fellowship of the Ring'.

"End of Story" could be described as a sequel to E. M. Forster's "Maurice." But it is more than that. The saga begins on the eve of the First World War in 1914 and ends in New York during the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Many themes emerge: New York during the sexual revolution of the 1970s and AIDS, Princeton and Cambridge, Santa Fe and Brooklyn, plus a rich cast of Cuban and Hispanic characters, all woven together to form what might be called a history of emotional expression and social change. But most of all it becomes a happy-ending version of Edmund White's "Farewell Symphony," the story of intimacy and devotion tested over time. John M. Bowers is an internationally known scholar of medieval English literature with books on Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet. Educated at Duke, Virginia and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he taught at Caltech and Princeton before settling at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and his lecture series "The Western Literary Canon in Context" was released by The Teaching Company. "End of Story" is his first novel.

A collection of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour.