Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal. Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt. Today my guest is T.A. Shippy,

Tom Shippey, author of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the century, which has been published by

Houghton Mifflin Company. It seemed to me that it would be a good idea,

an interesting idea on Bookworm.

Now that I'm sure everyone I know is going to be picking up

at least the Lord of the Rings to reread it in the wake

or advent of the movie depending,

I thought it would be interesting to talk to a literary critic whose background is very

similar to Tolkien's. They taught at the same college. They taught the same curriculum. They were

involved with the same medieval and old English texts. And Shippey has written a very lively book on the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion,

especially locating it within the context that Tolkien imagined in, which is to say the context of philology. Now, let's give a basic definition of

philology. Well, you get different definitions from different dictionaries, but I would say that

philology is the study of early literature and the linguistic forms in which that literature is

preserved. And the important thing where Tolkien, I'm sure, would absolutely agree with me

is that you can't do the literature without the language

and you shouldn't do the language without the literature.

The two things go together and should not be separated.

Now, what you thrillingly suggest

is that Tolkien, in a sense, is not inventing, but on the basis of

...