Eirikr, is it possible that you have read "Tolkien: Author of the Century" by Tom Shippey? I have that too, but it disappointed me a little, because it looks to me like a shortened version of "The Road to Middle Earth". I think it is a more accessible version of the earlier work. Now, I admit that "Road" is very complex. Shippey seems to ramble, following lots of threads and very specialized themes. I read it 3 times before I began to understand the book as a whole. But it was worth the time, at least for me: one of the very esoteric topics he touches is philology, and I'm a philologist in real life (which means I am usually flat broke, LOL). Incidentally, as an example of the lost literature which philology can help imagine, if not restore, he quotes the Gothic sagas which are another of my interests. Furthermore, "Road" expresses in a much fuller way the concept of courage for Tolkien. Shippey is undoubtedly THE authority on Tolkien. When he talks, he does not sound like a "critic", someone who keeps his distance from the matter he studies: he really sounds like he has absorbed Tolkien's ideas, doubts and all. To read him is almost like reading again the dear old Professor in his essays. And the Anglo-Saxons are woven in and out of both books, whether it's their language, their literature or their way of thinking.