Remembering the second best-selling novel in English
By
Gregory McNamee
on
January 2, 2015
Tolkien, a veteran of the western front, began LOTR in the
interstices between the world wars, having enjoyed unexpected success
with a juvenile novel called The Hobbit, published in 1937. As publishers will, his asked for a sequel. It took him nearly two
decades to produce it. Tolkien, a scholar of Germanic and Celtic
languages and medieval literature, had been assembling great mounds of
work notes for an epic cycle, and he brought that considerable research
to bear on what emerged—an amalgam of Icelandic sagas and Persian
monster tales, wedding the Welsh Mabinogion to the Wagnerian Ring Cycle and the Kalevala and Beowulf, with dashes of Old Norse, Catholicism and William Morris–style fairy tales thrown in for leavening.
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien’s great work of
modern mythology, was forged by three wars. The first began 100 years
ago, a hell of mud and fire. The second was its successor, a time of
contending totalitarian visions. The third has in some respects never
ended, pitting East against West, religion against religion.
As truly as it did George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the
Cold War most fully shaped Tolkien’s vision. But Tolkien also opposed
two larger worlds that were not coextensive with the empires on either
side of the meaningfully named Iron Curtain: the green agrarian world of
the English countryside—the Shire—against the dark, satanic mills that
lay always just over the horizon. It is clear which Tolkien preferred;
his villains are the trolls and goblins who clear-cut forests and reduce
mountains to deep holes in the ground, his heroes, the steady country
people who stand firm against the dark overseers of mines and vast
cities.
LOTR is famously a book of books, drawing on a vast library for
background and inspiration; Tolkien even borrowed from his philological
work for the Oxford English Dictionary to add details to the story, a compliment repaid when his coined word mithril
entered the dictionary in 1976. But LOTR is also a book of friendship,
and more particularly, the friendship—the fellowship—that evolves from
service in war. The primary virtues are constancy and loyalty; it is
always the dark armies that break and run, always the little men of the
Shire who forget that they are afraid long enough to do the impossible,
which is the very definition of heroism, and a particularly English view
of it at that.
Tolkien stole time for the book whenever he could over the next two
decades, and the result was massive: a manuscript of nearly 10,000 pages
in several variations. Tolkien never intended it as a trilogy, but The
Lord of the Rings was published in three parts all the same, broken down
in order to keep the size and price manageable; the three parts were
released in 1954 and 1955 in Britain and in the latter year in the
United States. Taken together, it has gone on to be the second
best-selling novel in English—not bad for a medieval allegory brought
into our own time, and it’s one that, in book and film forms alike,
continues to inspire.
Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews.
Used with permission from Kirkus Reviews Online
