MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien is a study by Paul H. Kocher, who had taught English at Stanford University until 1970. It was published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in October 1972, then by Thames and Hudson in London in 1973 and later in paperback. It is one of the few critical books on Tolkien that appeared in his lifetime.
Kocher looks at how Middle-earth is built, at The Hobbit, at the cosmic order behind the stories, at Sauron and the nature of evil, at the Free Peoples and at Aragorn, and ends with Tolkien's shorter works. It won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in 1973, and many of its guesses were later confirmed by The Silmarillion.
One of the first full studies of Tolkien's fiction, written while Tolkien was still alive and winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award.