Tom Shippey’s book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century has long been on my reading back catalog, but I had never gotten around to actually reading it. There was always something slightly higher on the shelf. This past week, though, I was in want of something a little lighter than Alastair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (which I have almost finished), and decided it was time to read Shippey’s book at last. It did not disappoint.

Published 25 years ago as it was, Author of the Century does not cover everything we now know about Tolkien’s writing process and works. Some of those particular details his son Christopher Tolkien only worked out in the final years of his own life; the 2010s saw a number of works dealing with key parts of Tolkien’s myth. But even so, Shippey’s book covers most of what was to be known and it does so in a thoroughly readable fashion.

Author of the Century does two big things. First, it situates and contextualizes Tolkien’s work against the backdrop of the field of philology as it was in the early 20th century, adding color and detail to the sorts of things that many readers would miss. I learned a bunch of interesting bits and bobs about the linguistic backdrop of Tolkien’s choices, right down to the play on words that is “Bag End” (the direct English way of naming what French names cul de sac) and “Sackville-Baggins” (ville as a Frenchified town sticking the end of, well, a sack!). Shippey’s own deep knowledge of philology shines here: he can offer elaboration and explanation that most other readers and commentators simply cannot, lacking as we do the relevant knowledge.

Second, it also pushes back rather hard against the frankly poor criticism leveled at Tolkien’s work over the years. Shippey has little time for the dismissiveness so often leveled at Tolkien’s work, and particularly so for the ways critics have missed just how thoroughly modern an author Tolkien was. He shows, for example, how what some critics have taken as needless archaism is actually Tolkien at play with both register and linguistic temporal shifts precisely in service of the story he is telling. In Shippey’s telling, Tolkien’s work deserves to be read alongside Orwell’s 1984 and other works of mid-century modernity. Indeed, it is a specifically post-war literary endeavor straining at the boundaries of what we understand a novel to be — comparable even to Joyce’s Ulysses in the way it pushes the form well beyond its normal range.

I don’t know whether Shippey persuaded many of those critics. As a longtime appreciator of Tolkien’s contributions, though, this work certainly spoke to me. If you want to understand Tolkien better, this is a book well worth your time, even if you’re not as deep a fan as I am.