Understanding The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

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  Understanding The Lord of the Rings brought together the scholarly conversation that Tolkien's fantasy epic had been generating since the mid-1950s. W. H. Auden was "unlike literary figures at the time" in his public praise for Tolkien's book. He treated it as a serious quest narrative worthy of analysis. In the 1960s, paperback editions from Ace Books and Ballantine introduced The Lord of the Rings to American readers. The book became immensely popular with a new generation. Yet formal academic recognition moved more slowly than popular enthusiasm.

  Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs edited three related collections of scholarly essays on Tolkien's work, published in 1968, 1981, and 2004. Burton Raffel, contributing to the first volume, argued that The Lord of the Rings is great storytelling but is not, by his measure, literature. C. S. Lewis had already argued the opposite, finding moral subtlety and realism where other critics saw simple good-versus-evil fable. What exactly divided these readers? And what did it take for serious literary scholarship to engage with a fantasy novel? The 1968 collection, Tolkien and the Critics, would become what scholars later called a milestone in Tolkien studies.

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• 2. A Milestone in 1968

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  Richard C. West, writing in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, identified a central problem with Tolkien scholarship in the 1960s. Much of the best critical work appeared in essays scattered across numerous journals, difficult to gather and read together. West found in Tolkien and the Critics a solution to that problem. He called it "a milestone" in Tolkien studies. West singled out essays by Auden, Bradley, and Lewis as among the most significant pieces it gathered.

  The volume was published by the University of Notre Dame Press with a cover illustration by Rainey Bennett. It also commissioned several essays that had not appeared elsewhere. Mary Quella Kelly wrote a new essay on Tolkien's poetry. The verses range from simple Hobbit poetry to the cheerful singing of Tom Bombadil and the musical Elvish poems. Kelly showed how they support the prose narrative and help sustain what Tolkien called "Secondary Belief".

  John Tinkler contributed a new study of Tolkien's use of Old English for the Riders of Rohan. He explained that names like Théoden mean "King" in Old English, and that Éowyn means "Delight in horses". C. S. Lewis's essay "The Dethronement of Power" first appeared in Time and Tide in 1955. West named it among the most important pieces the collection contained.

  W. H. Auden's contribution had first appeared in Texas Quarterly in 1961. It represented the view that The Lord of the Rings deserves reading as a serious quest narrative. Not everyone agreed.

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• 3. Competing Critical Visions

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  Patricia Meyer Spacks, in an essay first published in Critique in 1959, placed The Lord of the Rings in an unexpected context. She contrasted Tolkien with two fellow Inklings, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Unlike their work, she argued, Tolkien's world carries a pagan Anglo-Saxon ethos rather than a Christian one.

  Rose Zimbardo read the book as a medieval-style romance. In her analysis, each race has a distinct moral purpose. Men are defined by heroic action, dwarves by the making of precious objects, and elves by singing.

  Marion Zimmer Bradley's essay examined hero worship within the story itself. She traced how Éomer of Rohan and Faramir of Gondor look to Aragorn with admiration. She also explored the bond between Frodo and Sam, describing what she called their "strong love". In her reading, this relationship eventually becomes a classical "idealized friendship".

  Roger Sale proposed that Frodo Baggins is the real hero of the book. Sale described Frodo as behaving "like any modern alienated man" among the larger heroic figures around him. At the same time, Sale argued, Frodo represents "Tolkien's affirmation of possibility".

  Paul H. Kocher's essay, "Middle-earth: An Imaginary World?", had first appeared in his 1972 book Master of Middle-Earth. It addressed the question of why Middle-earth feels so convincing. Kocher argued that Tolkien combined the familiar with the fantastic and framed the story as if he had discovered ancient manuscripts. He also drew on Celtic and Norse mythology. The result, Kocher proposed, is that Middle-earth reads like a version of Earth in the distant past.

  Patrick Grant, whose essay first appeared in CrossCurrents in 1973, brought a Jungian lens to the book. He read The Lord of the Rings as a psychological journey toward individuation, and his essay was held for the 1981 collection.

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• 4. The 1981 Debate

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  Robert M. Adams, writing in The New York Review of Books, delivered a stark verdict on The Silmarillion. He saw nothing in it but "an empty and pompous bore", nothing like The Lord of the Rings. The 1981 collection, Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, published by the University Press of Kentucky, placed Adams's review alongside a very different reading.

  Joseph McLellan had written in The Washington Post that The Silmarillion demands comparison with Hesiod, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, and Genesis. Reviewing the volume, M. Chassagnol noted that the two essays took opposing sides on the book's merits. He found McLellan's claim made "without really justifying it", while viewing Adams as "more convincingly" dismissive.

  David M. Miller, reviewing in Modern Fiction Studies, called Adams one of "the old guard". Miller respected Verlyn Flieger and Lois K. Kuznets for essays that "make modest claims for clear theses and keep the text firmly in mind". Miller objected to critics who assumed The Lord of the Rings is a Christian allegory. He quoted Frodo's declaration at the Crack of Doom: "I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!" Miller found Zimbardo's psychological rewriting of that scene unconvincing. He also noted that Timothy O'Neill's The Individuated Hobbit should have been mentioned in the volume.

  Janice G. Neuleib, writing in Christianity and Literature, offered a more positive verdict. She called the 1981 volume "as good an overview of Tolkien scholarship as one can find". The 2004 volume would add two essays that neither previous collection had included. One explored Tolkien's medieval epic traditions; the other examined Peter Jackson's film adaptation.

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• 5. The 2004 Collection

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  Houghton Mifflin published the 2004 collection with a jacket designed by Martha Kennedy. The design drew on Figures and Foliage by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Ron Ratliff, reviewing the volume for Library Journal, called it a "splendid anthology". He pointed out that the hostility of critics like Edmund Wilson and Germaine Greer toward The Lord of the Rings was already well known. Less well known, Ratliff wrote, were the defence essays by C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden. He found them "excellent" and welcomed their inclusion.

  Jane Chance contributed one of the two new essays written specifically for the 2004 volume. Her piece had also appeared in her 2001 book Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England'. It analyzed The Lord of the Rings as a contrast between two medieval epic traditions: the Christian and the heroic Germanic.

  Tom Shippey wrote the second new essay, examining how Peter Jackson transformed the book into a film trilogy. Shippey showed how Jackson, like Tolkien, connected individual characters' choices to universal themes. Each used quite different media and techniques to reach the same effect.

  Mariana Rios Maldonado, writing in Journal of Tolkien Research, assessed both the 1968 collection and the 2004 volume. She wrote that their importance "to the history of Tolkien studies is beyond doubt".

  J. S. Ryan's essay, included in both the 1981 and 2004 volumes, draws on Tolkien's own critical works. These include "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", "On Fairy-Stories", and "Leaf by Niggle". Ryan's piece suggests that the fiction Tolkien wrote and the scholarly criticism he authored were always part of the same larger effort.

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