When I understood Chance to be a lifelong writer and teacher on Tolkien and one who based her studies on the works of Michel Foucault, I admit I slathered at the mouth a bit. But who knew how quickly that excitement might run dry?

"Dry" is the first word I might offer to describe Chance's approach. For the better part of this work (which feels much longer than it is), she ploddingly assembles her points around the role of "power" in Middle-Earth. She rightly places it mostly in the realms of language and difference, of epistemology and politics--and I would not therefore oppose her approach or even most conclusions--but the results of her inquiry largely fall into territories obvious to lay-readers without the Foucault background: Bombadil's joyous language to banish the lifeless barrow wights, the illusory power of "sight" with the One Ring, etc. Chance has the language, but too often her jargon only obscures what must be otherwise apparent.

For me, what truly bothered me about her scholarship was the limited reading of power as she approaches LotR: for Foucault there is an ever-dynamic flow of power which itself is not inherently destructive. We cannot/must not fool ourselves to naming a condition as static but recognize that it is the arresting or creative energy to power which alters conditions, which moves us to change inside its workings. For Chance, little is made of this and we are left to see particular characters and incidents as ever-wicked or heroic. What of Bilbo across the epic? What of the biography of Galadriel?  Yes, duplicity is a destructive strategy, but does Gandalf never use it?

Certainly much might have been made from Chance's approach; but she treated her analysis as yeoman's work rather than an opening for usefulness.