Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon

• 1. Introduction

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  Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, Brian Rosebury's 2003 study of J. R. R. Tolkien, opens with a provocation. As Rosebury writes, "the reader must be delighted in Middle-earth in order to care that Sauron does not lay it desolate." That claim asks whether literary criticism can explain why a fictional world moves people deeply enough to matter. Rosebury, a lecturer in the humanities at the University of Central Lancashire, had first made this argument in 1992. That earlier version appeared as Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, a four-chapter paperback of 167 pages, published by Macmillan. By 2003, the argument had grown into a 246-page, six-chapter study from Palgrave Macmillan. It has been translated into Italian. The book asks how Tolkien imagined Middle-earth and where he sits among twentieth-century writers. It also asks what happened when his creation passed into the hands of filmmakers and imitators. Tolkien himself had declared The Lord of the Rings "quite unsuitable for dramatization." How Peter Jackson's film adaptation measures against that judgment is one of the questions Rosebury sets out to answer. When Tom Shippey and Jane Chance later reviewed the book, one question surfaced. Had Rosebury finally raised the standard of Tolkien criticism, or merely defended an author who needed no defense?

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• 2. Tableaux and the Quest

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  Across a sequence of tableaux, Tolkien builds Middle-earth into a place that feels real. Rosebury calls this a dual structure. The tableaux create places detailed enough for readers to love. The quest moves to save the very world being built. The two strands cannot be separated. The tableaux give meaning to the quest; the quest gives stakes to the tableaux.

  Christopher Garbowski, in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, focuses on how Rosebury handles the concept of eucatastrophe. Tolkien coined this term for the sudden turning from darkness to joy at a story's darkest moment. Rosebury argues this works in The Lord of the Rings for a precise reason. In his words, its "optimism is emotionally consonant with the work's pervasive sense of a universe hospitable to the humane." The joy of the ending grows naturally from the warmth already built into the world.

  Nancy-Lou Patterson, reviewing the 1992 version in Mythlore, brought her own test to Rosebury's argument. She agreed that The Lord of the Rings works not because of its Christian foundations but because of its emotional pull. A powerfully imagined world that treats evil as the absence of good can hold a reader without requiring theological conviction. Patterson also praised Rosebury's description of Tolkien's prose as possessing "a certain sensuous precision, distinctive of Tolkien."

  That precision in describing what prose achieves, not just what it says, connects directly to Rosebury's earlier work. His 1988 book, Art and Desire: A Study in the Aesthetics of Fiction, had developed the tools he would now apply to Tolkien.

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• 3. Against Modernism

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  Rosebury traces Tolkien's long career as a writer from 1914, the year the First World War began, to his death in 1973. Over that span, Tolkien worked in both prose and poetry. The fourth chapter of the book then places Tolkien within the twentieth-century literary scene. The finding is pointed: Tolkien's work was not ignorant of Modernism. It was actually antagonistic to it.

  Tom Shippey's scholarship had compared Tolkien to writers including George Orwell, William Golding, T. H. White, and C. S. Lewis. Rosebury reaches instead for Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. Jane Chance, reviewing the book, marks this difference as the key to understanding what Rosebury is attempting. Shippey's comparison locates Tolkien in one tradition; Rosebury's asks how his prose holds up against the writers the twentieth century chose to canonize.

  Claire Buck, in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, adds a complication. Placing Tolkien alongside the Modernists forces the question of what "modern" even means. That definition belonged to the same critics who had called Tolkien "a peripheral figure," and it cannot be applied without tension.

  Allan Turner, in the same encyclopedia, records Rosebury's defense of Tolkien's prose style. Critics like Catharine Stimpson had charged Tolkien with archaising and "wrenched syntax." Rosebury's response was specific: Tolkien deliberately chose the familiar phrasal verbs "have on" and "get off" over the slightly more literary "wear" and "dismount."

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• 4. Middle-earth After Tolkien

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  The chapter that gives the 2003 book its title tracks the "afterlife" of Tolkien's work. Thousands of other authors have imitated his fiction, Rosebury notes. The work has been absorbed into various genres. It has been retold in film and other media. A separate chapter, also new to the 2003 edition, examines Tolkien as a thinker within the history of ideas. Rosebury considers how Tolkien's writing relates to the times in which he lived and how his work has been used to support various ideologies. A coherent underlying vision, Rosebury argues, runs throughout.

  The film adaptation by Peter Jackson receives the most sustained attention. Rosebury examines how far the films succeed in conveying the message of the books. Tom Shippey considered this the best available analysis of the Jackson adaptation at that time.

  Douglas A. Anderson, reviewing for the literary magazine VII, admired the two new chapters on Tolkien's relationship with the modern world. Those chapters address Tolkien's views on religion, politics, and the environment. Anderson's reservations, however, pointed toward a long-standing debate about The Hobbit's standing in Tolkien's career.

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• 5. The Critical Debate

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  Jane Chance writes that critics' refusal to accept Tolkien as a major writer had "consistently annoyed Tolkien readers" for twenty-five years. Tom Shippey and Rosebury, she argues, were both attempting to persuade the "nay-sayers." Chance notes that Rosebury strategically opens his book with Shippey, praising his work. Rosebury argues, however, that Shippey does not clinch the case that Tolkien's writings are "of high quality." Rosebury then applies his own aesthetic expertise to make that demonstration.

  Tom Shippey calls the book a compelling analysis. He finds especially convincing Rosebury's explanation of how Tolkien wove free will, moral choice, and creativity into Middle-earth. Shippey also admired the account of Tolkien's narrative and descriptive skill.

  Douglas A. Anderson found the analysis of Tolkien's style in the book's first three chapters especially valuable. He was disappointed by Rosebury's treatment of The Hobbit as merely "a dry run for The Lord of the Rings." His reservations notwithstanding, Anderson calls the book "a shrewd and engaging academic study." He describes its prose as "clear and direct..., without jargon." Rosebury builds, Anderson writes, a cogent case for Tolkien as "a significant, though flawed, twentieth century writer."

  Nancy-Lou Patterson, reviewing the 1992 edition in Mythlore, found that Tolkien criticism had been "uneven" at best. British critics like Rosebury, she noted, were raising the standard. She agreed that Rosebury had successfully defended The Lord of the Rings. She resisted, however, the implication that The Hobbit was merely a minor work. Anderson observed that Rosebury's traditional literary approach usefully complements what he called Tom Shippey's "excellent" philological approach to the same body of work.

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