“Tolkien knows more about Chaucer than any living man.” — John Masefield, Poet Laureate (1930-67)
John M. Bowers’ book Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (Oxford 2019) finally puts paid to the recently concocted mythology propagated in spurious articles like The Telegraph’s September 2009 piece “J.R.R. Tolkien Trained as a British Spy” and Elansea’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Codemaker, Spy-Master, Hero: An Un-Authorized Biography (2015), that the creator of Middle-Earth was some kind of tweed-jacketed Indiana Jones, (more…)