Una obra de investigación literaria sobre los cuentos y leyendas que inspiraron a J.R.R. Tolkien.

David Day muestra que El Señor de los Anillos continúa una larga tradición que nació junto con las civilizaciones y que J.R.R. Tolkien creó una nueva mitología para los lectores del siglo veinte inspirándose en leyendas y mitos de la antigüedad.
Se acompaña con doce ilustraciones en color de Alan Lee, artista y ilustrador de El Señor de los Anillos.

"In The Lord of the Ring, in Prince Aragorn 's kiss which awakens the sleeping Princess Éowyn, we are meant to see the 'origin' of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty"
LOL

The images by Alan Lee are great

The text is worthless ( )

This is an extremely terrible book. The author has trawled the folklore of the world for stories involving magic rings. The relevance of all this material to The Lord of the Rings is impossible to check, as no sources are provided. Day gets many things wrong about Tolkien, so I would not place any reliance on anything he says about anything else. This opinion is widely shared among serious Tolkienists -- whom Day, I understand, has called "the Tolkien Taliban." The illustrations by Alan Lee -- who I hope was well paid for his participation -- are very nice, as one would expect. Four stars for Lee, zero stars for Day.

While not the authoritative resource with evidence to uphold claims, this was still quite an entertaining read and should be held as just that. Entertainment. That said, the book was very well written. I found myself pausing several times to browse the Internet for more reading on certain topics instead of keeping to the book. ( )

Much retelling of ring legends from around the world, "in search of Tolkien's sources" (introduction), and some analysis and comparison of themes and characters between these legends and Tolkien's work. Some of the retelling is mere padding: Tolkien was not an Orientalist and one can be quite sure that Chinese and Tibetan legend were not among his sources. And speaking of sources, I wondered where Day got his Chinese legend; the transliterations of the Chinese names are quite odd, not used in any system of romanization known to me (for perspective, in the course of pursuing a degree in Classical Chinese Linguistics and studying more than one dialect of Chinese I became acquainted with quite a few and devised two or three as well). Perhaps he cribbed from a translation of a translation, but the complete lack of both endnotes and bibliography mean we'll never know. Absent a bibliography, I'm not sure whether this book is intended to be a serious work of literary criticism, but if not that, what is it?

Alan Lee's exquisite illustrations are definitely the best part of the book. Fortunately, there are a great many of them. ( )