Understanding the Lord of the Rings The Best of Tolkien Criticism

Neil D. Isaacs On the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing)Tolkien Criticism It is almost forty-three years since Rose Zimbardo pointed me toward Middle-earth. I was a relatively late arrival, the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings having already been well established -to the dismay of some establishment defenders of the traditional canon. Throughout the sixties, three aspects of that phenomenon seemed to dominate perceptions of the value of the book. One was the persistent resistance by the arbiters of literary taste to afford critical recognition to a work that had proven its abundant appeal to a wide popular and, worse, youthful audience. Another was the fact that the book"s commercial success was not the product of hype: the early popularity of The Lord of the Rings was produced by a word-ofmouth groundswell that preceded the reactive attention of the mass media. It was a matter of reporting the phenomenon rather than precipitating it, though the reportage added fuel to the Fire. The third was that some of the features and attractions of the book and its created world inevitably elicited an infectious outbreak of "faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism," as I called it in "On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism." In that introduction to our First collection of critical essays I was lamenting that these factors, particularly "the feverish activity of the fanzines," were counterpro- ductive to the development of a climate for serious critical attention to Tolkien"s masterpiece. More than a decade after the novel"s appearance, as an example if not a proof of the shocked attention still being paid to a literary phenomenon by an uncomprehending coterie of critics (including EdmundWilson, Germaine Greer, and Philip Toynbee), the New York Herald Tribune"s Book Week published on its front page (February 26, 1967), beginning in large type and accompanied by a cartoon, what amounted to a confession of ignorance by a prominent critic, Paul West. Part of my response in "On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism" neatly summarizes, I think, the nature of the problem: On what bases does West attack The Lord of the Rings? 1. He is bafed by it, bafed into numbness. I cannot argue with this; he demonstrates both bafement and numbness throughout. 2. With a nostalgia for the last century"s discarded theories, he laments that Tolkien created his world and its creatures alone, without some folksy community origin. But if Tolkien is sole owner and proprietor of Middle-earth, I would prefer to give him all my admiration than to betray any envy for his creative imagination. 3. The Lord of the Rings is a game, only a game, and has no bearing on humanity. Now this is a serious objection, to which I would offer a pair of categorical adversatives: First, without the sense of play as an essential element in literature, we would have to do without much of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Proust, Nabokov -for in a sense all art is a game, the game of putting form to matter; second, the game of The Lord of the Rings is miraculously designed to be played and won by anyone who takes part, but the reader who doesn"t see the signiFicance of its urgent bearing on humanity will always be a loser. 4. The society from which people must escape into Tolkien"s world is very bad indeed. I offer no comment on this argument, but I wonder if West hasn"t simply used Tolkien"s popularity as a way to make this last general point; it has no direct (or logical) bearing on the relative excellence of the book. It may be unfair to hold West up as epitomizing the negative attituIsaacs, Neil D. is the author of 'Understanding the Lord of the Rings The Best of Tolkien Criticism', published 2004 under ISBN 9780618422517 and ISBN 061842251X.