Richard C. West

Richard Carroll West (August 13, 1944 – November 29, 2020) was an American librarian and one of the first Tolkien scholars.

[1] He is best known for his 1975 essay on the interlace structure of The Lord of the Rings, for which he won the 1976 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies.

[1][4][5] He worked for many years as serials and technical services librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, alongside his Tolkien studies.

He noted that at the time West was studying under "the expert in entrelacement", Eugène Vinaver.

Lobdell describes the essay as scholarly form-criticism, so useful that it does not belong to the category of [negative] "criticism" as commonly understood.