"J. R. R. Tolkien is often celebrated as a preeminent world-builder, renowned for his dedication to detailing seemingly every corner of Middle-earth. Yet the tales that are untold--those that are casually implied of referenced in the text--are essential to Tolkien's achievement in world-building, Peter Grybauskas argues. A Sense of Tales Untold counters the common but largely spurious image of Tolkien as a writer of bloated prose by examining the delicate work at the margins of his tales: the frames, edges, allusions, and ...
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"J. R. R. Tolkien is often celebrated as a preeminent world-builder, renowned for his dedication to detailing seemingly every corner of Middle-earth. Yet the tales that are untold--those that are casually implied of referenced in the text--are essential to Tolkien's achievement in world-building, Peter Grybauskas argues. A Sense of Tales Untold counters the common but largely spurious image of Tolkien as a writer of bloated prose by examining the delicate work at the margins of his tales: the frames, edges, allusions, and borders between story and un-story. 'A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving,' wrote Tolkien to his son during the composition of the Lord of the Rings, cutting straight to the heart of the tension between storytelling and world-building that animates his work. Grybauskas identifies some of Tolkien's principal sources of inspiration and his contemporaries and summarizes theories and practices of the literary impression of depth. He offers close readings of key untold tales in context, ranging from the shadowy legends at the margins of The Lord of the Rings to the nexus of tales concerning T???urin Turambar, the great tragic hero of the Elder Days. In Tolkien's frequent retellings of the T???urin legend, he found a lifelong playground for experimentation with untold stories. A Sense of Tales Untold engages with urgent questions about interpretation, adaptation, and authorial control, giving both general readers and specialists alike a fresh look at the source material of the ongoing 'Tolkien phenomenon'" --|cBack cove
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