In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik considers how J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” set the template for the fantasy genre, creating what Gopnik calls “one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses.” Gopnik goes on to define that blueprint:
A vaguely medieval world populated by dwarfs, elves, trolls; an evil lord out to enslave the good creatures; and, almost always, a weird magic thing that will let him do it, if the hero doesn’t find or destroy it first—that is the Tolkien formula…. Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.
Though “The Lord of the Rings” has spawned Harry Potter, the Eragon books, and any number of other imitations aimed at young adults, Tolkien’s trilogy was written with an older audience in mind. When the first volume, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” was reviewed in our Briefly Noted section in 1954, our unnamed critic called it, “a whimsical and sententious fairy story, which is intended for grownups.” While praising the novel’s “majestic and gleeful” language, the reviewer observed that “The Fellowship of the Ring”
has the air of having been written as a hobby by a man with a ferreting imagination and a capacity for industry that will not allow him to stop inventing long after all the acts are down and the picture is clear…. Perhaps this is a book that should be read as it was presumably written—a little at a time.
When the second volume of the trilogy, “The Two Towers,” was released six months later, it also received a brief, unsigned review in the magazine. This time our reviewer showed less forbearance:
Mr. Tolkien writes with love and precision, but his intoxication with the world he has created and with the message he is conveying, and his apparent conviction that what is imaginative is necessarily beguiling, blind him to the danger of becoming tedious, and so he is tedious a good deal of the time.
Fear of further tedium may have influenced the decision not to review the third volume of “The Lord of the Rings,” when it was released in 1955. In fact, it was not until Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the trilogy, that Tolkien’s epic received a critical reassessment in the pages of The New Yorker. In 2001, Anthony Lane began his celebration of the book by looking back to his own adolescence:
I first took on the “The Lord of the Rings” at the age of eleven or twelve; to be precise, I began at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. It was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.
While acknowledging the book’s flaws, Lane made an argument for its special appeal to younger readers:
What the explorer of “The Lord of the Rings” soon comes to understand as he launches himself into the text, and what puffs him with pride as, weeks or months later, he reviews his completed task, is the fact that this book about a quest is itself a quest. You battle through it, against the odds; you fend off the blizzards of bewildering mythology; you stand firm as the reams of dodgy dialogue try to suck you into the mire; and you come through. If you encounter it as a child, it will be the longest book that you have ever mastered, and, for many adults, it will retain that talismanic status…. The reader grows in the reading; such is the source of Tolkien’s power, and it is weirder and more far-reaching than even he could have foretold.
Tolkien’s publisher, Allen & Unwin, initially printed fewer than four thousand copies of each of the volumes of “The Lord of the Rings.” Sales were modest until the release in the mid-sixties of a one-volume paperback. By the end of 1968, as Lane notes, “total readership of the trilogy was thought to stand at around fifty million.”
And counting…
_The article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.
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