John M. Bowers is an internationally known scholar of medieval English literature with books on Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet. Educated at Duke, Virginia, and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he taught at Caltech and Princeton before settling at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Great Courses released his lecture series The Western Literary Canon in Context.

• 1: Prologue: Concerning Chaucer 2: Unexpected Journeys 3: Four Chaucerians: Walter W. Skeat, Kenneth Sisam, George Gordon, and C.S. Lewis 4: Tolkien as Editor: Text and Glossary 5: The Chaucerian Incubus: The Notes 6: Tolkien as Chaucerian: The Reeve's Tale 7: Chaucer in Middle-Earth Appendices Works Cited

This book admirably fills in one of the last remaining gaps in our understanding of Tolkien's life and work that we are likely ever to be able to fill.