With the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and forthcoming film version of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s popularity has never been higher. In Green Suns and Faërie, author Verlyn Flieger, one of world’s foremost Tolkien scholars, presents a selection of her best articles—some never before published—on a range of Tolkien topics. The essays are divided into three distinct sections. The first explores Tolkien’s ideas of sub-creation–the making of a Secondary World and its relation to the real world, the second looks at Tolkien’s reconfiguration of the medieval story tradition, and the third places his work firmly within the context of the twentieth century and “modernist” literature.

Although C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) achieved a level of popularity as a fiction writer, literary scholars have tended to view him as a minor figure working in an insignificant genre-science fiction-or have pigeonholed him as a Christian apologist and moralist. In C. S. Lewis in Context, Doris T. Myers places his work in the literary milieu of his times and the public context of language rather than in the private realm of personal habits or relationships.

In C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse Don W. King contends that Lewis’s poetic aspirations enhanced his prose and helped make him the master stylist so revered by the literary world. With its careful examination of early diaries and letters, and the inclusion of four of Lewis’s previously unpublished narrative poems and eleven of his previously unpublished short poems, this important book explains the man through his writing and considers how Lewis’s lifelong devotion to poetry is best realized in his works of prose. Readers and admirers of Lewis will certainly find their understanding of his writing greatly enhanced by this perceptive book.

The Plants of Middle-earth draws on biography, literary sources, and cultural history and is unique in using botany as the focal point for examining the complex network of elements that comprise Tolkien’s creation. Each chapter includes the plants’ description, uses, history, and lore, which frequently lead to their thematic and interpretive implications. The book will appeal to general readers, students, and teachers of Tolkien as well as to those with an interest in plant lore and botanical illustration.

This important study challenges the standard interpretation that Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and the other Inklings had little influence on one another’s work, drawing on the latest research in composition studies and the sociology of the creative process. Diana Glyer invites readers into the heart of the group, examining diary entries and personal letters and carefully comparing the rough drafts of their manuscripts with their final, published work.

In Interrupted Music Flieger attempts to illuminate the structure of Tolkien’s work, allowing the reader to appreciate its broad, overarching design and its careful, painstaking construction. She endeavors to “follow the music from its beginning as an idea in Tolkien’s mind through to his final but never-implemented mechanism for realizing that idea, for bringing the voices of his story to the reading public.” In addition, Flieger reviews attempts at mythmaking in the history of English literature by Spenser, Milton, and Blake as well as by Joyce and Yeats. She reflects on the important differences between Tolkien and his predecessors and even more between Tolkien and his contemporaries.

Verlyn Flieger’s expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien’s fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield’s linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien’s use of Barfield’s concept throughout his fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphor for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s concern with time—past and present, real and “faerie”—captures the wonder and peril of travel into other worlds, other times, other modes of consciousness. Reading his work, we “fall wide asleep” into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience, and emerge with a new perception of the waking world. Flieger explores Tolkien’s use of dream as time-travel in his unfinished stories The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers as well as in The Lord of the Rings and his shorter fiction and poetry.

In Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration, Gavin Ashenden explores both the history behind the myths and metaphysics Williams was to make his own and the hermetic culture that influenced him. He examines and interprets its expressions in Williams’s novels, poetry, and the development of his ideas and relates these elements to Williams’s unpublished letters to his platonic lover, Celia, written toward the end of his life. Since one of the foremost ideas in Williams’s work is the interdependence or coinherence of both our humanity and the creation, understanding the extent to which he lived and achieved this in his own life is important. Williams’s private correspondence with Celia is of particular interest both for its own sake, since it was previously unknown, and for the insight it offers into his personality and muse.