In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews John M. Bowers’ fascinating book about Tolkien’s Chaucerian links
If we think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s associations with medieval poetry, it tends to be the great Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, or perhaps the Middle English narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that spring to mind. Both, after all, are what we might now call ‘fantasy literature’. Despite his attachment to the Worcestershire dialect (growing up in the West Midlands as he did), Tolkien never undertook scholarly work on William Langland’s Piers Plowman, most likely because of his dislike of straight allegory. But what about Geoffrey Chaucer?