About a year ago, I ran across Mark Shea's The Lord of the Rings: A Source-Criticism Analysis. A friend reminded me of this by asking me if I still had the URL.

I did an URL search of Google and didn't see that any bibliobloggers had linked to it, so I figured I had to do my duty and post a link. Here's an excerpt:

Because The Lord of the Rings is a composite of sources, we may be quite certain that "Tolkien" (if he ever existed) did not "write" this work in the conventional sense, but that it was assembled over a long period of time by someone else of the same name. We know this because a work of the range, depth, and detail of The Lord of the Rings is far beyond the capacity of any modern expert in source-criticism to ever imagine creating themselves.

It's a quick read — it'll take 5 minutes or so. Enjoy!

Update: Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica picks up the ball and runs with it.