Holly Ordway

[4] In 2022, Ordway won a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies for her book Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.

[6] Hannah Bitner, for The Christian Librarian, writes that as a child, Ordway longed to immerse herself in the imagined worlds of Anne McCaffrey and Gene Roddenberry.

Mann was surprised in particular by the "polemical style of rhetoric", including an "extended diatribe" against Tolkien's official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter.

She wonders what Tolkien's "nod" to Beatrix Potter's "dark and ruthless animal fantasy" might mean, mere homage not being the only possibility.

On authors of adult fiction mentioned later in the book, Mann writes that many are merely listed, and that Ordway does not attempt to show that they influenced "the Middle-earth works or Tolkien's creative imagination" in any way.

Swank observes however that John Garth has shown its close resemblance to Shell Oil's 1936 advertisement which depicts Faringdon Folly.

He writes that the biography provides "a holistic view of the man behind Middle-earth", incorporating evidence from Tolkien's letters, unpublished documents, and "the socioreligious context of his time".

In Umbrello's view, the book "neither critiques nor endorses Tolkien's religious beliefs but presents them with an academic rigor that allows readers to form their [own] interpretations.

Emanuel writes that Ordway's intention already "expresses a particular perspective", assuming there is "only one kind of Catholicism", and opposing a major theme of both Carpenter and Verlyn Flieger: " that even as he was a staunch Roman Catholic, Tolkien was also [a] man of paradoxes, and it is his dynamic tensions which power his literary art.

He expresses "enormous sympathy" for Ordway and her feeling that The Lord of the Rings was for her "the Roman Catholic work of imaginative apologetics par excellence".

[12] The Catholic priest Juan R. Vélez, in The Downside Review, writes that Ordway proposes numerous possible sources for events in The Lord of the Rings from Tolkien's personal experiences, giving as an example the way that the protagonist Frodo Baggins's act of mercy to the monster Gollum "is repaid":[16] Gollum turns out to be essential to the destruction of the One Ring.

In Maureen Mann's view, Ordway notes that Tolkien gave a "nod" to Beatrix Potter 's "dark and ruthless animal fantasy", without explaining what effect it might have had on Tolkien. [ 7 ] Painting by Potter in The Tale of Mr. Tod , 1912.
Ordway suggests that Tolkien's painting of the Shire , The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water , derives from The Fir-Topped Hurst by William Russell Flint , 1910 (pictured). However, Tolkien's painting closely resembles a 1936 advertisement. [ 8 ]
In Tom Emanuel's view, Tolkien's attitude to race reflected the great chain of being , a medieval Christian view with fixed categories of "higher" and "lower" beings, but Ordway had ignored this. [ 12 ]