In its first ten years, Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings sold remarkably well for a long and expensive book with multiple appendices; in the 51 years since it was pirated in paperback it has averaged an astounding sale of c.8,500 copies per day, and spawned a distinctive, extremely popular genre.
This course begins with a long look at Tolkien’s masterpiece, asking how and why it has achieved so much. Besides the intrinsic appeal of the story and the remarkable world-building, Tolkien’s devout Catholicism and painful refraction of his experiences during both World Wars have played their parts, and religious interest has formed a consistent thread in responses to the book. But the countercultures of the 1960s and later decades have also been influential, with Tolkien’s strongly ecological concerns, the overt multiculturalism of his Fellowship, the gaming industry that exploded with ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, and the enormous success of Jackson’s film adaptations, released just as the Web was really taking off. All will be considered over the first week, with the place of The Lord of the Rings in Tolkien’s wider legendarium.
In the second week attention turns to the genre Tolkien created, and his influence on his successors. The initial response was largely imitative, but two writers stand out in very different ways – the British Alan Garner, with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), and the American Ursula K Le Guin, with the Earthsea Trilogy (1968-72). Both borrowed from Tolkien yet added a great deal of their own; but Le Guin later redeveloped Earthsea in ways reacting against Tolkien’s influence, especially with regard to gender. And Le Guin’s critique has been superbly extended by Lois McMaster Bujold in The Sharing Knife (2006-09), embodying 40 years of admiring if sometimes exasperated engagement with Tolkien’s great work.
As The Lord of the Rings begins its seventh decade, the course ends with a wider assessment of its enormous popular successes, strengths, and weaknesses, and the persistent inability of the literary academy to appreciate or understand it.
Please note that watching Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings cannot substitute for reading Tolkien’s book, which the films repeatedly and significantly alter.
