Tolkien expert at University of Oklahoma reflects on films, books

Croft, 51, is head of access services at the University of Oklahoma's Bizzell Memorial Library. She is also an associate professor who has researched Tolkien and his work extensively over the past decade.

When Croft was growing up in Pennsylvania, Tolkien books captured her imagination in part because of the detail in the writing. Tolkien died in 1973, but not before writing books that are as popular now as ever, with the release of the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy and most recently, “The Hobbit.”

“It's a whole world that has a great deal of depth,” Croft said. “The characters may seem very simple on the surface, but as you get to know them, you see more scale. He was a fascinating person. Not just as an author and a scholar, but also his service in World War I, and his family and friendships with other authors of his time.”

Croft edited “Tolkien on Film,” a collection of essays about how his work has been portrayed in film through the years. She also has a credit in “The Hobbit” as a script consultant. She lectures about Tolkien, most recently for the Metropolitan Library System serving Oklahoma County.

But the study of Tolkien's work has not always been taken seriously by her colleagues in the academic world.

“There was a long-standing ambivalence in academia as far as Tolkien as the subject of serious research,” she said. “When ‘Lord of the Rings' came out in the 1960s, it was something that wasn't taken seriously because teenagers read it. Any scholar doing serious research was looked down on. It has become more respectable in recent years.”