Select Bibliography for J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis
Biographies and Biographical Materials
Reference Guides
Literary Criticism on the Works of Tolkien and Lewis
- Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays, The Gallant Edith Bratt: J. R. R. Tolkien's Inspiration (Walking Tree Publishers, 2021)
- Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (Harper Collins, 1978)
- Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1977)
- John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (HarperCollins, 2004)
- Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (HarperCollins, 1974)
- Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (HarperOne, 2008)
- C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, 3 vol., ed. Walter Hooper (HarperCollins, 2000-2007)
- C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Geoffrey Bles, 1955)
- Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis — A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Tyndale House Publishers, 2013)
- Abigail Santamaria, Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 1980)
- A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Harper Perennial, 2013)
- Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2015)
Reference Guides
- Michael D. C. Drout, J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (Routledge, 2006)
- Colin Duriez, The Inklings Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to the Lives, Thought, and Writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends (Chalice Press, 2001)
- Paul F. Ford, A Companion to Narnia, rev. ed. (HarperCollins, 2005)
- Robert Foster, Tolkien's World from A to Z: The Complete Guide to Middle-earth (Del Rey, 2001)
- Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)
- Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (HarperCollins, 1996)
- Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, 2 vol. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006)
Literary Criticism on the Works of Tolkien and Lewis
- Carla Arnell, “On Beauty, Justice, and the Sublime in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces," Christianity and Literature 52 (2002): 23-33
- Robert Boenig, C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (Kent State University Press, 2012)
- P. H. Brazier, "Why Father Christmas Appears in Narnia," Sehnsucht 3 (2009): 61-78
- Jane Chance, Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
- Jane Chance, ed., Tolkien the Medievalist (Routledge, 2008)
- Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers, eds., Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
- Joe R. Christopher, "Mount Purgatory Arises Near Narnia," Mythlore 23 (2001): 65-90
- Janet Brennan Croft, ed., Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien (Mythopoeic Press, 2015)
- Patrick Curry, Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien (Walking Tree Publishers, 2014)
- Marsha Daigle-Williamson, Reflecting the Eternal: Dante's Divine Comedy in the Novels of C. S. Lewis (Hendrickson Academic, 2015)
- Matthew Dickerson, Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis (University Press of Kentucky, 2009)
- Mara E. Donaldson, "Baptizing the Imagination: The Fantastic as the Subversion of Fundamentalism," Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 8 (1997): 185-197
- Mara E. Donaldson, Holy Places Are Dark Places: C. S. Lewis and Paul Ricoeur on Narrative Transformation (University Press of America, 1988)
- David Doughan, "Women, Oxford and Tolkien," Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 45 (2008): 15-20
- David Downing, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992)
- Robert Eaglestone, ed., Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic (Continuum, 2005)
- Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
- Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faerie (Kent State University Press, 2011)
- Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, rev. ed. (Kent State University Press, 2002)
- Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, eds., Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-Earth (Praeger, 2000)
- Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride, Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams (Praeger, 2001)
- Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent State University Press, 2007)
- Randel Helms, Tolkien and the Silmarils: Imagination and Myth in The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
- Monika Hilder, The Feminine Ethos in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (Peter Lang, 2012)
- Monika Hilder, Surprised by the Feminine: A Re-reading of C. S. Lewis and Gender (Peter Lang, 2013)
- Monika Hilder, Sarah L. Pearson, and Laura N. Van Dyke, eds., The Inklings and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020)
- Sørina Higgins, The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R., Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain (Apocryphile Press, 2017)
- Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons: The Origin, Interpretation, and Appreciation of the Chronicles of Narnia (Wipf & Stock, 2007)
- Neil Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo, eds., Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968)
- Alan Jacobs, "Fantasy and the Buffered Self," in New Atlantis 41 (Winter 2014): 3-18
- Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Karla Faust Jones, "Girls in Narnia: Hindered or Human?" Mythlore 13 (1987): 15-19
- Paul Kocher, Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 1972)
- Jolanta N. Komornicka (Reed ’04), “The Ugly Elf: Orc Bodies, Perversion, and Redemption in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings,” in The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, ed. Christopher Vaccaro (McFarland, 2013)
- Ursula Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” in The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Wood (Perigee Books, 1979)
- Sam Leith, “CS Lewis’s Literary Legacy: ‘dodgy and unpleasant’ or exceptionally good’?” The Guardian, 19 Nov 2013
- Ann Loades, “On Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, eds. Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Josh B. Long, "Disparaging Narnia: Reconsidering Tolkien's View of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," Mythlore 31 (2013): 31-46
- Louis Markos, "Sacramental Magic in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings," The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 38 (2020): 18-38
- Stephen Medcalf, “The Coincidence of Myth and Fact,” in The Spirit of England: Selected Essays of Stephen Medcalf, eds. Brian Cummings and Gabriel Josipovici (Legenda, 2010)
- Meilaender, Gilbert, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis (Eerdmans, 1978)
- Jennifer L. Miller, "No Sex in Narnia? How Hans Christan Andersen's Snow Queen Problematizes The Chronicles of Narnia," Mythlore 28 (2009): 113-130
- Laura Miller, “Far From Narnia: Philip Pullman’s Secular Fantasy for Children,” The New Yorker, 26 Dec 2005
- Doris T. Myers, Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel (University of Missouri Press, 2004)
- Brooke Pearson, "Ethnocentricity in the Chronicles of Narnia," Chronicle of the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society 3 (2006): 9-10
- Carl Phelpstead, Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (University of Wales Press, 2011)
- Robert Plank, “’The Scouring of the Shire’: Tolkien’s Views of Fascism,” in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell (Open Court Press, 1975)
- James Prothero and Donald T. Williams, Gaining a Face: The Romanticism of C. S. Lewis (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013)
- Philip Pullman, “The Dark Side of Narnia,” The Guardian, 1 Oct 1998
- Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (InterVarsity Press, 2003)
- Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. Goodnight, eds., Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference: Keble College, Oxford, 1992 (Mythopoeic Press, 1995)
- Adam Roberts, The Riddles of The Hobbit (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings (Eerdmans, 2004)
- Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces (Eerdmans, 1984)
- Sanford Schwartz, C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy (Oxford University Press, 2009)
- Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
- Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)
- Tom Shippey, Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (Walking Tree Publishers, 2007)
- Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cornell University Press, 1973)
- Christopher Vaccaro, ed., The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality (McFarland, 2013)
- Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor, eds., Tolkien and Alterity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
- Steve Walker, The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-Earth’s Magical Style (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
- Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (Word on Fire Academic, 2021)
- Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008)
- Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia (Oxford University Press, 2013)
- Judith Wolfe and Brendan Wolfe, eds., C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos (Kent State University Press, 2013)