"THE LORD OF THE RINGS: A Source-Critical Analysis," is a fairly weak attempt at parody by someone named Mark P. Shea (via ricoblog). Weak because it isn't source-critical at at all. It's a kind of Frazerian analysis of the LOTR using Victorian, by-the-seat-of-the-pants anthropology to find "sources" used differently in the "T" ("Tolkien") redaction and the "PJ" ("Peter Jackson") redaction. Source criticism is certainly fair game for a send-up - especially some of the sillier multisources-in-a-verse applications to the Pentateuch - but this attempt is disappointing. The concept is good and the LOTR is fertile ground, but the execution needs work.

That said, it's a shock to many doctoral students in biblical studies when they have the epiphany that basic source-critical methods actually work pretty well. (See Jeffrey Tigay's [ed.] Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism for some classic treatments of the issue.) I was one of them.

Incidentally, if you want to do source criticism of Tolkien, have a look at "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age," published in The Silmarillion. Clearly it is by a different hand than the writer of the LOTR, since it says:

For Frodo the Halfling, it is said, at the bidding of Mithrandir took on himself the burden, and alone with his servant he passed through peril and darkness and came at last in Sauron's despite even to Mount Doom; and there into the Fire where it was wrought he cast the Great Ring of Power, and so at last it was unmade and its evil consumed.

My emphasis. This account of the destruction of the Ring leaves out a central character (Gollum) and presents Frodo's action in a rather more glorious light than the LOTR, which has the Ring destroyed essentially by a clumsy accident. I don't know whether the version quoted above is an "H" ("Hobbit") source that eliminates Gollum's part in order to make the achievement of Frodo look better, or whether the LOTR has added anti-Hobbit legendary accretions to the original story, but that they are by two different authors can scarcely be doubted.

UPDATE (11 January): That was a joke, folks! There seems to be some confusion on this point. I know that Tolkien wrote both. My serious point is that a single author can be self-contradictory, especially in a large work or corpus. Contradictions are not in themselves proof of multiple authorship. You need a consistent pattern of contradictions, different viewpoints, different styles, etc., to establish sources, and even then the results usually are fuzzy and can't be pushed very far. For example, I have a hard time denying that the Pentateuch contains sources conventionally called P and D, along with a lot of other sticky goo whose origins can't be reconstructed, at least by me.

Also, reader Jon Mackenzie points to another, more entertaining and better executed parody of source criticism and other biblical-critical methods:

New Directions in Pooh Studies:
�berlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch

UPDATE: Jan-Wim Wesselius e-mails:

In several recent articles I tried to explain why, as you put it in a recent post, "basic source-critical methods actually work pretty well", proposing that they give a diachronical explanation of some synchronic literary features of Genesis and the entire Primary History. Most readily available is my "Towards a New History of Israel", JHS (www.jhsonline.org) 3 (2000-2001), see for example paragraph 3.5: "We suddenly realize that what once used to be taken for proof of the Documentary Hypothesis is in reality the literary expression of two versions of the description of God himself. Both the supposed Elohist and the supposed Jahwist are literary personae in the text." The striking duplications in Genesis are, in my opinion, mainly meant to draw the readers' attention to this dual characterization. And of course, as long as one does not recognize this, ascription to different sources is a reasonable approach.