"Why bring together Tolkein and Shakespeare?  At first glance they would seem to have little in common- one a prolific popular dramatist and poet of the Elizabethan era, the other a twentieth-century scholar of Old English and the 'great but dilatory and unmethodical' author of a much smaller body of finished narrative and poetic work (C.S. Lewis, qtd. in Carpenter, Tolkein 199-200).  Both have been condemned as superficial or hack writers with a shaky or undeserved spot in the canon, and both have also been nearly deified as among the greatest who ever wrote.  Both also appeal equally strongly to a general audience and to amateur and professional scholars, and inspire creative works in many other fields.

But more intriguing are the parallels to be found in their bodies of work.  What particularly interests us in this collection of essays is uncovering Shakespeare's influence on Tolkein through echoes of the playwright's themes, motifs, and even word choices, and discovering how Tolkein used, revised, updated, "corrected," and otherwise held an ongoing dialogue with Shakespeare's works."