A leading scholar draws on fifty years of reading and studying J.R.R. Tolkien to explain how he created an entire world.

No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his world of Middle-earth—a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that anyone could have created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout explores Tolkien's genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of every work from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion to lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as his poetry. We see how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how, early on, Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from Northern Europe, and how he later developed the complex form of sorrow that is the primary theme of his mature works. Sweeping and hugely perceptive—and enhanced throughout by Drout's personal reflections as a dedicated reader of Tolkien since childhood—The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew.