The Book of the Century

A classic of our times or an escapist yarn? Although its popularity is unparalleled, some intellectuals dismiss The Lord of the Rings as boyish fantasy. Andrew O’Hehir defends Tolkien’s ‘true myth’ as a modern masterpiece, and attempts to dicover the secret of its success.

In January 1997, reporter Susan Jeffreys of the London Sunday Times informed a colleague that J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings had been voted the greatest book of the 20^th century in a readers’ poll conducted by Britain’s Channel 4 and the Waterstone’s bookstore chain. Her colleague responded: “What? Has it? Oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear”.

Attitudes in America are arguably more relaxed about this kind of thing. No one from the American educated classes expressed much dismay when a 1999 poll of American on-line bookshop Amazon.com chose The Lord of the Rings as the greatest book not merely of the century but of the millennium. Tolkien’s book is so deeply ingrained in popular culture, after all, that a great many of today’s American academics and journalists probably still have those dog-eared paperbacks they read avidly in the eighth grade with their hallucinatory mid-1970s cover art, stashed somewhere in the attic.

Furthermore, members of the U.S. intelligentsia fully expect to have their tastes ignored, if not openly derided, by the public at large. To some American intellectuals it seems gratifying, even touching, that so many millions of readers will happily devour a work as complicated as The Lord of the Rings. Whatever one may make of it, it’s more challenging read than Gone with the Wind (runner-up in the Amazon survey), not to mention Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (fifth place).

Hugely ambitious in scope, The Lord of the Rings occupies an uncomfortable position in the 20^th century literature. Tolkien’s epic poses a stern challenge to modern literature and its defenders. (Tolkien on his critics: “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. Yet The Lord of the Rings has enjoyed massive and enduring popularity. It would seem that Tolkien’s work supplied something that was missing among the formal innovations of the 20^th century fiction, something for which readers were ravenous. But what was it, and why was it important?

Answering this question properly will probably require a book rather than an article. But it seems that the crux of the matter lies in Tolkien’s wholehearted rejection of modernity and modernism. This is what so powerfully attracts some readers, and just as powerfully repels others. In his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, T.A. Shippey expands on this notion by arguing that Tolkien saw its realm of Middle-earth not as fiction or invention, but as the recovery of something genuine that had become buried beneath fragments of fairy tale and nursery rhyme.

“However fanciful Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth was,” Shippey writes, “he did not think that he was entirely making it up.” He was ‘reconstructing’, he was harmonizing contradictions in his source-texts, sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits), but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination”.

The book is also deeply grounded in Tolkien’s linguistic expertise – he invented whole languages for his characters. Sometimes he became so absorbed in the creation of languages, in fact, that he put the story itself aside for months or years at a time, believing he could not continue until some quandary or inconsistency in his invented realm had been resolved. But Tolkien’s immense intellect and erudition is not the source of his success; without his storytelling gift, The Lord of the Rings would be little more than a curiosity. And this gift seems to stem straight from his refusal to break from classical and traditional forms.

Tolkien himself often spoke of his work as something ‘found’ or ‘discovered’, something whose existence was independent of him. It’s wise to tread lightly in this sort of interpretation, but it seems clear that he believed his work to be something given, something revealed, which contained a kind of truth beyond measure. As a result, his details have the weight of reality, linguistic and otherwise, and because of this his great sweep of story feels real as well; you might say that his imaginary castles are built with a certain amount of genuine stone. Other writers’ fantasy worlds are made up. Tolkien’s is inherited.