Beowulf and the Critics

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,... Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature there from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After his death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
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Michael D. C. Drout is the Prentice Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Wheaton College and an author and editor specializing in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, science fiction and fantasy, especially the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin. Drout holds... a Ph.D. in English from Loyola University Chicago , an M.A. in English from the University of Missouri , and an M.A. in Communication from Stanford University . He is best known for his studies of Tolkien's scholarly work on Beowulf and the precursors and textual evolution of the essay Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, published as Beowulf and the Critics by J. R. R. Tolkien , which won the Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship in Inklings Studies, 2003. He is the editor of the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment , a one-volume reference on Tolkien's works and their contexts. With Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger, he is co-editor of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, .
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