Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work? | Literary Hub

Already by 1932 he admitted to Chapman the weight of the Chaucerian incubus upon his conscience. His Gawain edition, Chaucer as a Philologist, and The Monsters and the Critics had all appeared before the Second World War. Set against this relatively slender résumé were undelivered assignments such as his Pearl edition, the book-length Beowulf  and the Critics, and his EETS edition of Ancrene Wisse. If his own harsh remarks about George Gordon holding up their Chaucer edition did not quite qualify him as a slanderer, these complaints did de ect blame from his role as an idler who failed to reduce his annotations to a publishable length. He would confess during a newspaper interview in 1968, I have always been incapable of doing the job at hand.

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