I mentioned a book a few weeks ago, one about Tolkien, what influenced him, and how he achieved what he did.

Drout, Michael D. C. The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2025)

Short version: a magnificent overview of works the influenced Tolkien, and how he shaped the world of his novels and stories, and the themes that run through those novels.

Long version: I will be chewing on what I learned from this book for a very long time. Drout teaches a college course on Tolkien, and has for decades. At last he decided to write about Tolkien’s major works. The title comes from the concept that Tolkien built both a tower and a ruin. He created a finished world, bright and shining and beautiful, but the sense of Lord of the Rings is that of looking at a ruin, something once grand and magnificent, but now part crumbled. Yet in that ruin you can build in your own mind a wonder, something perhaps even sublime.

To do this, Tolkien drew on the overall sense of Beowulf, The Wanderer, “Deor’s Lament,” and other great Anglo-Saxon and Old English works, along with other, later tales. Drout goes into some detail as to how Tolkien uses language, not mimicking the older works, but catching the sense of them, the feeling of looking back to a heroic age now passed, or passing. The epic world is fading, will go away with the last of the elves and the last of the blood of the men of Numenor, yet hints of that glory remain. Tolkien does it so smoothly that the reader doesn’t really notice, although the general sense permeates Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien also uses language and poetry to differentiate all the characters, cultures, and stories within the books. Drout believes that Lord of the Rings is probably the single most read-aloud book for older children. Usually a quarter of his classes or more have had a parent read it, or listened to it on audio book. It is very easy to “read right” because each character has such a distinct voice. Like the Old English and Anglo-Saxon poems, it is an aural story as well as printed one.

One thing I had never caught was how Tolkien uses point-of-view. In every chapter, the PoV character is the one who knows the least about what is going on in that chapter. It might be Frodo, or Sam, or Pippin, or even Aragorn or Gimli, depending on events. By doing that, the reader learns as the character does, without obvious info-dumps or sudden editorial inserts. It is so smooth that I never noticed.

Drout’s book is somewhat academic. It helps a great deal if you are familiar with the other works he cites, especially Beowulf et al, but is not needed. It is also a painfully personal story of how Lord of the Rings is intwined in Drout’s personal life. Drout manages to do it well, but if you are reading to learn Tolkien’s technique, you might want to skip over those sections.

I will be referring to Drout’s book a lot in the future. His study of the differences in theme between LotR, The Silmarillion, and The Hobbit is fascinating, and I’m going to be rereading the chapter about PoV characters for future works. I already went through the draft of the book I just finished and tightened up a lot of PoV slips. Will I try my hand at epic fantasy? I don’t know, although probably not. For one, I’m not Tolkien. Two, that is a market that has a lot of writers, and particular readers who know exactly what they want.

I first read Lord of the Rings in one sitting, on an overnight, trans-oceanic flight. When I finished, I felt bitter disappointment. The ending was realistic. I didn’t want realistic. I wanted a glowing happily-ever-after, with Frodo being properly rewarded and living at home happy and content. Keep in mind, I read a lot of military history as a teen. Frodo suffering chronic pain from his injuries, and feeling constant discontent, plus the Scouring of the Shire, were NOT what teenaged Alma wanted from her fantasy novels. Drout’s book, and maturity, shows why the story needed to end that way. Tolkien wrote an epic, not a 1980s fantasy novel.

I’d recommend the book to Tolkien fans who want to go deeper into how Tolkien achieved the tone and power that he did in his stories. It is also very good for writers, especially those of us in genre fiction, to see how he uses the tools of theme, PoV, mood, language, characterization, setting, and so on to build a world that remains as popular now as when it first appeared. More popular, in some cases. Tolkien built a world that still shapes modern fantasy. Drout shows some of the ways Tolkien did that, in a single readable volume.

FTC Disclaimer: I purchased this book with my own money, and received no consideration or remuneration for this review.