Literary reception of The Lord of the Rings

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.

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.

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.

[6] 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.

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".

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.

[10] 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".

"[12] 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 ...

"[15] 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.

[23] An early reply to Wilson was the classicist Douglass Parker's 1957 review "Hwaet We Holbytla ..."[a] which stood up for The Lord of the Rings as a worldbuilding fantasy.

[25] 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,[28][6] describing him as "an incorrigible nationalist", peopling his writing with "irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine" one-dimensional characters who live out a "bourgeois pastoral idyll".

He asserted, citing the third chapter of The Lord of the Rings, that its "predominant tone" was "the prose of the nursery-room ... a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console.

"[35] She cited the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey's observation ("The hobbits ... have to be dug out ... of no fewer than five Homely Houses"[36]) that the quest repeats itself, the chase in the Shire ending with dinner at Farmer Maggot's, the trouble with Old Man Willow ending with hot baths and comfort at Tom Bombadil's, and again safety after adventures in Bree, Rivendell, and Lothlórien.

As well as its being "a great tale", Brin saw good points in the work; Tolkien was, he wrote, self-critical, for example blaming the elves for trying to halt time by forging their Rings, while the Ringwraiths could be seen as cautionary figures of Greek hubris, men who reached too high, and fell.

[42][43] In 1973, Patrick Grant, a scholar of Renaissance literature, offered a psychological interpretation of The Lord of the Rings, identifying similarities between the interactions of the characters and Jungian archetypes.

[41] In 1998, Daniel Timmons wrote in a dedicated issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts that scholars still disagreed about Tolkien's place in literature, but that those critical of it were a minority.

Starting with his 1982 book The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey pointed out that Muir's assertion that Tolkien's writing was non-adult, as the protagonists end with no pain, is not true of Frodo, who is permanently scarred and can no longer enjoy life in the Shire.

[49] As a final example, he replies to the critic Mark Roberts's 1956 statement that The Lord of the Rings "is not moulded by some vision of things which is at the same time its raison d'etre";[50] he calls this one of the least perceptive comments ever made on Tolkien, stating that on the contrary the work "fits together ... on almost every level", with complex interlacing, a consistent ambiguity about the Ring and the nature of evil, and a consistent theory of the role of "chance" or "luck", all of which he explains in detail.

[60] Rosebury noted that much of the work, especially Book 1, is largely descriptive rather than plot-based; it focuses mainly on Middle-earth itself, taking a journey through a series of tableaux – in the Shire, in the Old Forest, with Tom Bombadil, and so on.

The work builds up Middle-earth as a place that readers come to love, shows that it is under dire threat, and – with the destruction of the Ring – provides the "eucatastrophe" for a happy ending.

That makes the work "comedic" rather than "tragic", in classical terms; but it also embodies the inevitability of loss, like the elves, hobbits, and the rest decline and fade.

She recorded that in 1991 she had said of The Lord of the Rings that it was worth "intelligent reading but not passionate attention",[63] and accepted that she had "underestimated the extent to which it would gain added popularity and cultural lustre from Peter Jackson's film adaptations".

[63] As Pratchett had done, she used a mountain metaphor, alluding to Basil Bunting's poem about Ezra Pound's Cantos,[64] with the words "Tolkien's books have become Alps and we will wait in vain for them to crumble.

She accepted that he was a complicated figure, a scholar, a war survivor, a skilful writer of "light verse", a literary theorist, and a member of "a coterie of other influential thinkers".

[63] Andrew Higgins, reviewing the 2014 volume A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, welcomed the "eminent line-up" of the authors of its 36 articles (naming in particular Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, Dimitra Fimi, John D. Rateliff and Gergely Nagy).

[65] Curry, writing in the Companion, stated that attempts at a balanced response, finding a positive critic for each negative one, as Daniel Timmons had done,[41] was "admirably irenic [peaceful] but misleading"[6] as this failed to address the reasons for the hostility.

[6] Summing up the history of attacks, Curry identified two consistent features: "a visceral hostility and emotional animus, and a plethora of mistakes showing that the books had not been read closely".

Curry concluded by noting that newer authors including China Miéville, Junot Diaz, and Michael Chabon, and the critics Anthony Lane in The New Yorker and Andrew O'Hehir in Salon were taking a more open attitude, and cited the work's first publisher, Rayner Unwin's "pithy and accurate" assessment of it: "a very great book in its own curious way".