J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings had an initial mixed literary reception. Despite some enthusiastic early reviews from supporters such as W. H. Auden, Iris Murdoch, and C. S. Lewis, scholars noted a measure of literary hostility to Tolkien, which continued until the start of the 21st century. From 1982, Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger began to roll back the hostility, defending Tolkien, rebutting the critics' attacks and analysing what they saw as good qualities in Tolkien's writing.
From 2003, scholars such as Brian Rosebury began to consider why Tolkien had attracted such hostility. Rosebury stated that Tolkien avoided calling The Lord of the Rings a novel, and that in Shippey's view Tolkien had been aiming to create a medieval-style heroic romance, despite modern scepticism about that literary mode. In 2014, Patrick Curry analysed the reasons for the hostility, finding it both visceral and full of evident mistakes, and suggesting that the issue was that the critics felt that Tolkien threatened their dominant ideology, modernism.
Interpretations of The Lord of the Rings have included Marxist criticism, sometimes at odds with Tolkien's social conservatism; the psychological reading of heroes, their partners, and their opponents as Jungian archetypes; and comparison of Tolkien with modernist writers.
Context
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English Roman Catholic writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
In 1954–55, The Lord of the Rings was published. In 1957, it was awarded the International Fantasy Award. The publication of the Ace Books and Ballantine paperbacks in the United States helped it to become immensely popular with a new generation in the 1960s. The book has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's best-loved book." In similar 2004 polls both Germany and Australia also found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite book. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium." The popularity of The Lord of the Rings increased further when Peter Jackson's film trilogy came out in 2001–2003.
Tolkien's own commentary
Daniel Timmons writes that Tolkien launched a thread of commentary of his own on The Lord of the Rings with his own remarks, both in his two forewords (in the first and second editions) to the novel, and in his letters and essays. In the first foreword, having stated that "This tale ... is drawn ... from the memoirs of the renowned Hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo, as they are preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch" (i.e. the book is a translation), he comments that the book is "not yet universally recognized as an important branch of study". This could be a whimsical allusion to the lack of analysis of the novel by historians, but Timmons states that there is "no clear hint of irony or whimsy". Instead, Timmons writes, it could be "wryly indicating" that reception by critics might turn out to be hostile. Whatever the case, he comments, Tolkien hovers between writing as author and as a fictionalised narrator. Further, Timmons states, Tolkien's other writings either reflect changes in his opinions over time, or border on the "disingenuous" to make an immediate point. For instance, Tolkien states firmly in Letter 26 (1937) that "Celtic" things are "mad" and that the names and tales in The Silmarillion are not Celtic, when it was well known that he loved the Welsh language, and indeed mentioned "the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic" in Letter 144 (1954). Timmons concludes that Tolkien could "[play] up to his audience" with a variety of "rhetorical techniques" when commenting on his own work.
The second edition foreword has been taken seriously by critics, but it too, Timmons writes, must be treated carefully. He notes that Tolkien's letters show that he began to write The Lord of the Rings in December 1937, three months after The Hobbit was published, shortly after several letters to and from his publisher. The foreword however claims that The Lord of the Rings was started before The Hobbit appeared. Further inaccuracies about dates and other details follow; Timmons remarks that these throw into question his denial of the Second World War's influence on his book, and any intention to create an allegory. Tolkien admits that "a story-germ uses the soil of experience" but decries scholarly attempts to explore that process as "at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous". All the same, Timmons writes, Tolkien made exactly that kind of best guess in his own analyses of Beowulf, Maldon, and Sir Gawain. Tolkien is equally dismissive of the search for parallels in his own life with anything in the story, leading him into further contradictions in his 1966 piece in Diplomat, "Tolkien on Tolkien". He objects, too, to the accusations that the book contains "no religion" and "no women", and to the suggestion that Middle-earth has nothing to do with planet Earth. Timmons concludes that Tolkien seems to view "any piece of criticism as an unwelcome treatment of his work", and that critics need to remain objective, judging Tolkien's claims against his books, rather than assuming that his claims are necessarily true.
Enthusiastic early support
Early reviews of The Lord of the Rings were sharply divided between enthusiastic support and outright rejection. Some literary figures immediately welcomed the book's publication. The poet W. H. Auden, a former pupil of Tolkien's and an admirer of his writings, regarded The Lord of the Rings as a "masterpiece", further stating that in some cases it outdid the achievement of John Milton's 1667–1674 Paradise Lost. Kenneth F. Slater wrote in Nebula Science Fiction, April 1955, "... if you don't read it, you have missed one of the finest books of its type ever to appear". Michael Straight described it in The New Republic as "... one of the few works of genius in modern literature.""The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien", Michael Straight, January 17, 1956, New republic The novelist Iris Murdoch mentioned Middle-earth characters in her novels, and wrote to Tolkien saying she had been "utterly ... delighted, carried away, absorbed by The Lord of the Rings ... I wish I could say it in the fair Elven tongue." The poet and novelist Richard Hughes wrote that nothing like it had been attempted in English literature since Edmund Spenser's 1590–1596 Faerie Queene, making it hard to compare, but that "For width of imagination it almost beggars parallel, and it is nearly as remarkable for its vividness and the narrative skill which carries the reader on, enthralled, for page after page." In 1967, the scholar of literature George H. Thomson admired Tolkien's ability to bring many aspects of a chivalric romance, complete with complex interlacing of the narrative, into a modern work. The Scottish novelist Naomi Mitchison, too, was a strong and long-time supporter, corresponding with Tolkien about Lord of the Rings both before and after publication. Tolkien's friend and fellow member of the literary group The Inklings, C. S. Lewis, wrote "here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron." The fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin had a close relationship with Tolkien's writings, and reflected on issues such as whether fantasy is escapist, the subtlety of the character portraits in The Lord of the Rings, its narrative structure, and its handling of the nature of evil in her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night. cited in
Literary hostility
20th century
Some literary figures rejected Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings outright. One member of the Inklings, Hugo Dyson, complained loudly at readings of the book; Christopher Tolkien records Dyson as "lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, 'Oh God, no more Elves.
In 1956, the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a review entitled "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!", calling Tolkien's work "juvenile trash", and saying "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form."
It was however not the case that early reviews were overwhelmingly negative. An early reply to Wilson was the classicist Douglass Parker's 1957 review "" which stood up for The Lord of the Rings as a worldbuilding fantasy. Parker wrote that the "one serious attack" on the novel was "a rather nasty hatchet-job", which "appears to have resulted from Wilson's ineluctable conviction that all fantasy is trash, The Lord of the Rings is fantasy, ergo [the book was trash.]" Parker argued that the book was in fact "probably the most original and varied creation ever seen in the genre, and certainly the most self-consistent; yet it is tied up with and bridged to reality as is no other fantasy." He noted that the book is far from a "piddling" good-defeats-evil allegory, not least because the characters on the good side "are not abstractions, nor are they wholly good, nor are they [all] alike".
In 1954, the Scottish poet Edwin Muir wrote in The Observer that "however one may look at it, The Fellowship of the Ring is an extraordinary book", but that although Tolkien "describes a tremendous conflict between good and evil ... his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil". In 1955, Muir attacked The Return of the King, writing that "All the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes ... and will never come to puberty ... Hardly one of them knows anything about women", causing Tolkien to complain angrily to his publisher.
In 1969, the feminist scholar Catherine R. Stimpson published a book-length attack on Tolkien, describing him as "an incorrigible nationalist", peopling his writing with "irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine" one-dimensional characters who live out a "bourgeois pastoral idyll". This set the tone for other hostile critics. Hal Colebatch and Patrick Curry have rebutted these charges. Bibliography