Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Book Review)

Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. Dimitra Fimi. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xvi + 240pp. Hardcover: ISBN 978-0230219519, $90.00 (50.00[pounds sterling]); softcover: ISBN 9780230272842, $28.95 (16.99 [pounds sterling]). In The spring of 2008, Tom Shippey wrote a quest editorial for Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, in which he discussed several areas of Tolkien studies which he felt had not yet been adequately explored. In one of these areas, "the influences on [Tolkien] of writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so often now deeply unfashionable, forgotten and out of print" (3), Shippey gratefully acknowledged Dimitra Fimi's "articles on the Victorian fairy tradition" (4) as one more step in the right direction. He also called for more extended studies of this kind, wondering (for example) whether the fraud of the "Cottingley fairies" in 1917 might have played some part in Tolkien's abandonment of the diminutive fairies in his earliest works (loc. cit.). Dimitra Fimi's full-length study, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, answers Shippey's call and attempts to answer questions of the kind he raised in his editorial.