The Science of Middle-earth

Only hard-core Tolkien fans will enjoy this book in its entirety, but it nevertheless offers useful insights into Tolkien's writing and the factors that influenced it. Gee, a senior editor of Nature, rejects the notion that Tolkien was a Luddite. He says Tolkien distinguished between benign science and science put to perverse uses, i.e. to achieve power over others. In his view, Tolkien's academic discipline, philology,was as rigorous as the sciences. Gee demonstrates that Tolkien was conversant with contemporary scientific thought and was a reader of early science fiction writers like H G Wells and John Wyndham. Gee devotes most of the book to looking at possible scientific explanations for phenomena like the source of a dragon's fire, the composition of mithril, the propagation of orcs, etc. This may be an entertaining parlor game for the initiates, but it is heavy going for the casual reader of Tolkien. I think Gee's most valuable contribution to our understanding of Tolkien is a literary observation he offers, almost as an afterthought, near the end of the book. He writes about the over-arching "sense of loss" that pervades all of Tolkien's fiction, even in its most triumphal moments. For Tolkien there was no "final" victory, just a series of rearguard struggles that exact a cost on the winners as well as the losers. It is this melancholy leitmotif that elevates Lord of the Rings out of the sword and sorcery genre into the realm of literature.