In his view, McLellan asserted "without really justifying it" that the work "demands comparison with Hesiod and The Iliad, Paradise Lost and Genesis", while on the other hand Adams, "more convincingly" saw nothing in it but "an empty and pompous bore".

[5] In Christianity and Literature, Janice G. Neuleib wrote that the volume must have been carefully prepared, as it covered a wide range of viewpoints incorporating "the best of earlier works" alongside new essays, forming "as good an overview of Tolkien scholarship as one can find".

[6] David M. Miller, reviewing the book in Modern Fiction Studies, calls Adams one of "the old guard", who "laments that The Silmarillion is not 'Son-of-Ring' and who wonders why people don't read the real stuff, rather than Tolkien's fakes."

Broadly welcoming the book, Miller comments that Timothy O'Neill's Jungian The Individuated Hobbit should have been mentioned; and if "the Procrustean Christians are invited, Jane Nitzsche's Tolkien's Art should be called.

He comments that the dislike of figures like Edmund Wilson and Germaine Greer for The Lord of the Rings is well known, but that the "excellent essays" in its defence by C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden are less familiar, and very welcome in the collection.