What a brilliant teaching technique, think of how many people studied his work for bounties that they would never cash.
SFAIK, only Findlay/Watt duo have offered such a guarantee of correctness.
It kills me that I was rebuffed when I asked for copyright permission to reprint the Tolkien text _The Old English Exodus_ on the grounds that I was a "Tolkien Nut" and not an academic, then, then I bought a boxed set (which contained 4 other books which I already owned), reading the book revealed 20 typos in the 22 pages comprised of the Select Bibliography and poem (they really should've just used a scan of those twain as was done in other similar texts).
Similarly, it's hard to take current discussion of _Dune_ seriously when the word "pogrom" is set as "program" in the e-book (and yes, I have reported this as a typo, and no, it hasn't been fixed, even though the publisher did "update" the book to change the cover).
Tolkien was a memorable read. I read it when I was experiencing Covid-caused depression in 2021.
It's interesting how different folks approach his oeuvre --- I have a fairly extensive collection:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienbooks/comments/1oa01zr/four_...
and as implied in that link, have been reading his work since I was quite young, and dipped into the scholarship and linguistic angle when I picked up the paperback edition of _A Tolkien Compass_ in the early 80s.
I am now on a Trollope binge. That man distilled all of his hard life experiences as musings interspersed between the social dilemmas his characters were facing.
Recommend you start with either the "Eustace Diamonds" or "The small house at Allington".
_Tolkien's Modern Reading_ has the following on Trollope which seems pertinent:
"His (JRRT's) appreciation of (realistic fiction) is underscored by his knowledge of that keen-eyed observer of contemporaneous political and ecclesiastical culture, Anthony Trollope."
I am currently trying to patch up my rather spotty education by listening to books on Librivox, trying for chronological order, so as to build a solid foundation and understanding thereby.
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1. The OED gives him first prose² usage credit for the word which later appeared in Russian in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina which, I discussed over email with the translator of the edition I read and he said that Tolstoy was a big Trollope fan and likely picked up the word from him.
2. The first recorded usage was in a poem, whose name and author I forget and I’m too lazy to bother going through the steps to access the OED online via the Chicago Public Library to look it up now.
By the by, for a Russian writer of Trollope caliber, I recommend M. Lermontov.
Wow, I didn't know Wertherian was an adjective! To be sure, Trollope himself or someone he knew may have experienced these feelings which show themselves in many different archetypes and due to different causes: in Mr. Gibson, in John Eames, in Adolphus Crosbie, etc. Sometimes it also appears in women characters.
I’m reading a novel at the moment which aggravated me when in the first chapter the narrator talked about knowing when another character had after-school activities and then two pages later talked about how that character had no after-school activities. It made me much less forgiving about “AP Geometry” and “dual” for “duel.” Overall, the book is ok, but not great.