It’s not by chance that John Ron­ald Reuel Tolki­en’s was the set­ting that would become the default tem­plate for the pop­u­lar notion of high-fantasy; no arbit­rary cir­cum­stance that led to Tolki­en’s intric­ately-craf­ted argot becom­ing the lin­gua franca of the sword-and-sor­cery genre as it’s com­monly under­stood today. Tolki­en, with his fel­low Ink­ling and under­study in Chris­tian­ity CS Lewis, doubt­less would have agreed with the lat­ter that In the Begin­ning was the Word; but he’d also have respon­ded favour­ably to the work of the archeo-lin­guist Owen Bar­field, anoth­er Ink­ling, who saw in lan­guage a win­dow into the his­tory of human per­cep­tion itself.

Tolki­en’s Middle-Earth – the set­ting for the work of artists as diverse as Gary Gygax, Robert Plant and lat­terly Miramar’s own cine­aste laur­eate, Mr Peter Jack­son (aaaand there’s your Wel­ling­ton link) – is a world pre­dic­ated by its lan­guage. Indeed, while many authors will drag out the umlauts ‘n’ glot­tal-stops when it’s time for their char­ac­ters to talk, Tolki­en’s entire Middle-Earth oeuvre – Fel­low­ship, Twin Towers, King Kong, the lot – was dreamed up so his lov­ingly-con­struc­ted lan­guages would have some char­ac­ters to speak them and some things for them to talk about.

In turn, the cot­tage industry devoted to schol­arly ana­lys­is of Tolki­en’s work may be rivalled only by Dylan­o­logy in its obsess­ive depth of exeges­is. Cana­dian Dav­id Day, for his part, has con­trib­uted six books to the col­lect­ive body of human know­ledge as to where orcs come from, among them the 1997 Hob­bit Com­pan­ion – here for­tu­it­ously rereleased shortly before a movie comes out about same.

Day’s book has held up well in the ensu­ing years: a col­our­ful, vibrant cof­fee-table tome boast­ing a wealth of illus­tra­tions that set the con­tents apart from the Lee/Howe graph­ics which, by the time of Jack­son’s films, have become all but can­on­ised as the look of Middle-Earth. Lidia Post­ma’s pen­cils and water­col­ors, brightly-colored and sat­is­fy­ingly messy, carry more than a whiff of the anthro­po­lo­gist’s field sketches, fit­tingly for this exped­i­tion into murky tex­tu­al ter­rit­ory.

And murky it is. Like Owen Bar­field, our author – a pub­lished poet – is eager to start unpack­ing lan­guage and wax­ing hom­onym­ous. Bar­field’s was the task of tra­cing Eng­lish words and gram­mar back to their source: an up-river jour­ney through the his­tory of lan­guage in order to map out the world cre­ated in its image. Begin­ning with the word “Hob­bit” itself, Day under­takes a sim­il­ar excav­a­tion of Tolki­en’s own ety­mo­lo­gic­al inspir­a­tions, show­ing how the author’s stor­ies unfol­ded through play­ful lin­guist­ic asso­ci­ation.

In pay­ing trib­ute to JRR’s geni­us, though, Day can get a little car­ried away: many’s the para­graph that unwinds through a dizzy­ing chain of asso­ci­ations, only for Day to arrive back at the start with a sat­is­fied flour­ish; read­ers may won­der more what exactly the point was of going all the way there and back again only to become, like poor class-whipped Sam­wise Gamgee, a pawn in someone else’s lin­guist­ic games­man­ship. Day is right to identi­fy Tolki­en not just as an author of prose but as a poet and magic­al word­smith; but many of the mas­ter­’s spells, as recited by this par­tic­u­lar appren­tice, give rise not to won­der so much as self-reflex­ive tau­to­lo­gic­al naus­ea. And these are the 2010s, so we have plenty of that to go around already!

For a “com­pan­ion” to The Hob­bit as a whole, the book also suf­fers from an uneven interest in its sub­ject mat­ter. Hav­ing devoted no short­age of ink to hob­bits (gen­er­al), (tri­bal his­tory of), (soci­et­al organ­isa­tion of), (dwell­ings of), (Bag­gins in; SEE ALSO Took, Brandy­buck et al), (Gol­lum as); we’re more than halfway through before Day even arrives at the nov­el’s incit­ing incid­ent. From there, it’s a curs­ory rush to the end-point, before a pre­ma­ture depar­ture into the post-Hob­bit for­tunes of the prot­ag­on­ists. It’s a shame Day’s schol­arly engage­ment did­n’t stretch to a little more com­ment­ary on the jour­ney itself.

Cer­tainly there’s plenty early on which could’ve been trimmed to make space: the dis­course on hob­bits, which com­prises the bulk of the text, is laden with repe­ti­tion and redund­ancy. Many’s the eru­dite para­graph bookended by clunky, incon­sist­ent sum­mar­ising text which reeks ana­chron­ist­ic­ally of Power­Point and tends to obscure, rather than crys­tal­lise, Day’s point. Would that we might wade through a few less restate­ments of the sim­il­ar­it­ies between the words “Bag­gins” and “Bag-Man,” and in turn spend longer at some of the many cel­eb­rated waystops left by Tolki­en through­out his nov­el.

Still, the book comes into a hyper­text cul­ture of mak­ings-of and behinds-the-scene which scarcely exis­ted on its first pub­lic­a­tion: by the time the sixth and final Hob­bit film (at time of writ­ing) is released, fans will be por­ing over col­lect­ive dec­ades of sup­ple­ment­ary fea­tures detail­ing every last loc­a­tion, prop and cos­tum­ing choice that went into Jack­son’s Middle-Earth. It’s to be hoped that work like Day’s finds a new audi­ence along­side these, as a remind­er that before slo-mo and chor­al accom­pani­ment were inven­ted, fantasy was once built out of words.