The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse, and genuinely thought the difference didn’t matter. If he got past that, he would have discovered writers contentedly using those cribs and ‘substitutes for proper food’ he had excoriated in his 1940 ‘Preface’, tracing his thoughts through flattening, second-hand, language-less and usually wildly incorrect ‘Encylopaedias of Mythology’. The end produce of book after book, meanwhile, is a scheme: The Lord of the Rings reduced to ‘archetypes’, related to solemn trudging plots of ‘departure and return’, ‘initiation, donor and trial’ hutching over banalities like ‘for every good… there is a corresponding evil’.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 381

Tolkein would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot or as Roman Catholic

[Spenser’s] first poem, The Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, was ornamented by the most offensive gloss that Tolkein probably ever encountered. In quick succession this declared that for all its age ‘that rancke opinion of Elfes’ [sic] should be rooted ‘oute of mens hearts’ as being a mistaken form of the Italian faction the ‘Guelfes’, and was in any case a Papistical notion spread by ‘bald Friers and knauish shauelings.’ Tolkein would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot or as Roman Catholic.

 T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 64

You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words

You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words; like place-names or Roman roads or Gothic vowels, they carried quite enough information all by themselves.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 52

The whole structure indeed of the Silmarillion lost their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance

The reader who has forgotten his genealogies, or forgotten the original embassy to Valinor, or never realised the equation of ‘Dark Elves’ and ‘Moriquendi’ is left at a loss. The tension of the moment, the skewed relation between truth and whole truth, pass him by. And once the thread is lost, the bitter resentment of Angrod seventeen pages later, the cold mood in which Nargothrond is founded by Angrod’s bother Finrod, the whole structure indeed of the Silmarillion lost their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 284