Understanding the Lord of the Rings

The Best of Tolkien CriticismBy Rose A. Zimbardo

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2005 Rose A. Zimbardo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618422531
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 ?re.

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 ?rst 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 baf?ed by it, baf?ed into numbness. I cannot argue with
this; he demonstrates both baf?ement 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: ?rst, 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 signi?cance 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 attitudes
toward Tolkien. After all, few attentive readers had actually
been driven to the simplistic notions that the book features "a virtue
that triumphs untested," an "evil that dies uninvestigated," and one
protagonist, Frodo, who is "the goodie hobbit." But even West acknowledged
that the cultism and clubbism were irrelevant to—indeed
barriers to—considerations of literature, that is, serious criticism.

In such a climate, Rose Zimbardo and I designed Tolkien and
the Critics as a small contribution toward a major project, saving
what we believed was a great novel from the "faddists and button
makers" whose enthusiasm contributed to clouding some critical
judgment.

An obligatory if presumptuous request to Professor Tolkien to
consider supplying a brief foreword for the collection brought a gentle
but ?rm response:

I am very grateful for your attention and interest. But I am
wholly occupied, or should be, with new work of my own, and I
am obliged to say "no" to all requests for articles in reviews,
opinions, forewords, or anything of the kind. I think it is essential
to a writer who is still writing to avoid the distraction of external
criticism, however sensitive or well-informed.

That the contributions to our book were to varying degrees
"sensitive and well-informed" may be attested to by the warm welcome
it received from reviewers. The fourteen essays, about equally
divided between original pieces and reprints of the best available material,
formed what one review (perhaps the least ?attering of all)
called "largely an unstructured dialectic on the meaning and value of
the whole trilogy." What was most gratifying to us about its success
(as measured within the limited aspirations of academic, university
press publication) was its threefold accomplishment: its samples of
general appreciations by prestigious writers, its examples of illuminations
of speci?c aspects of the novel by critics with focused interests,
and its anticipations of an abundance of critical attention yet to
come. In a way, the collection was an announcement of assurance
that, in due course, The Lord of the Rings would have to be given its
rightful place among the major ?ctional works of our time.

Within the following decade an astonishing amount of critical
work on Tolkien appeared. The variety of critical approaches that
Middle-earth had spawned was as great as that of the imagined species
in Tolkien"s world, a kind of secondary "sub-creation." There
were doctoral dissertations and papers at professional meetings,
guides for innocent readers, collections of learned essays, memoirs,
bibliographies, explorations of source material, and contextualizings
fromone perspective or another. The enormous appeal of The Lord of
the Rings had spread to include not only its increasing mass audience
but also a cottage industry of scholarly study. Medievalists and philologists
had a ?eld day mining the rich veins of their disciplines" ore
with tools both venerable and au courant. Allegorists of many persuasions,
especially of the Christian and historical orientations, had
their innings. And the psychological, the archetypal, and the structuralist
schools were staking their claims.

Into this thick growth Zimbardo and Isaacs ventured once more,
proposing a second collection. Dissuaded from calling it "Tolkien
and the Critics II" or some variation of "The Second Generation," we
settled for Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives. If we had been motivated
the ?rst time around by the...