J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has
had a bumpy ride through critical circles, so much so that its
critical reception is almost as important as the work itself.
When The Lord of the Rings was first published in the 1950s
it was panned by most critics, whose taste was founded on high
modernism (Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Beckett, and the like). The
Lord of the Rings seemed to them profoundly different from
those works which were canonised as the great novels of modern
literature, that it was dismissed as puerile and irrelevant to
the history of the great tradition. Nothing could be further from
the case. The critics failed to realise that their modernist tastes
were themselves determined by a reaction against Victorian literary
conventions, and that Tolkien's work, begun almost half a century
earlier, owed much to these conventions. They also failed to account
for the fact that Tolkien was Oxford scholar of philology -- medieval
language and literature -- and that the literary context against
which The Lord of the Rings was composed was that of the
Middle Ages, a period whose literature they had little time for.
The lack of attentiveness to the literary qualities of Tolkien's
writing manifested most obviously in the continual misspellings
of the names of his characters, as well as of the author's own
name.
But by the 1960s The Lord of the Rings had
become a phenomenon, embraced by the Counter-Culture, especially
in America. Sales sky-rocketed, and Tolkien fandom reached proportions
which anticipated today's fans of Star Trek. This, of course,
merely added to the critics' dislike (and envy) of Tolkien. It
made not a jot of difference that Tolkien himself disapproved
of such extreme fandom, or that some critics began to defend The
Lord of the Rings by arguing that it was also a product of
modernism. Academics continued to spurn Tolkien and (probably
aided by the length of the work) denied him a place in the university
curriculum. Regardless, Tolkien's popularity continued to grow,
and publishers began accepting manuscripts which were obviously
derivative of The Lord of the Rings from other writers.
By the seventies an entire genre of 'fantasy' literature existed
in bookstores. That a new genre should have grown out of the Tolkien
phenomenon was surely an argument for the literary significance
of The Lord of the Rings.
Slowly academics began to look at The Lord of
the Rings as something other than a modernist novel (failed
or otherwise). This was a time when academics were heavily influenced
by works like Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, and
they equated Tolkien's creation of his own world with the world
of mythology. They began to examine Tolkien's writing as myth,
subjecting it to Jungian interpretations or similar analyses which
draw on the interplay between psychology and story-telling. This
critical fashion began to fade in the late 1980s, and the last
decades of the twentieth century saw critics focusing on Tolkien
as a scholar, asking how Tolkien's interest in languages and medieval
literature shed light on the art and meaning of The Lord of
the Rings. Polls of readers in the 1990s consistently showed
that the popular readership judges The Lord of the Rings
to be the best book of the twentieth century, and the release
of a film version in 2001, suggests that this strange work strikes
a cord with the world of today. Perhaps that is why T.A. Shippey
declares Tolkien to be the author of the twenty-first century.
Reading The Lord of the Rings therefore prompts
us to ask not only what the meaning of the work is, but also what
it tells us about how we have read literature during the past
century. The Lord of the Rings blends the ancient with
the modern and the scholarly with the popular. It asks us to determine
what kind of a work it actually is, and in doing so asks us to
define what makes good literature and how our attitudes to literature
have changed in the past hundred years.
