Some Social History

The Age of the "Rings" and Their Influence

We have been working our way through David Kynaston's magisterial Family Britain, 1951--1957 (New York: Walker and Co, 2009.)  On page 404, dealing with events in the summer of 1954, we came across the following curio:

George Allen & Unwin published The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Naomi Mitchison, along with Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis, had already contributed praise to the dust jacket, and now they wrote appropriately laudatory reviews.  "Like lighting from a clear sky," declared Lewis in Time & Tide, while Mitchison in the New Statesman called it "a story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and graveness."

Most reviews were positive, though not uncritically so.  "Whimsical drivel with a message?" asked J. "W. Lambert in the Sunday Times.  "No," he answered.  "It sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above that level."  He did, however, note that it had "no religious spirit of any kind, and to all intents and purposes, no women".  The Daily Telegraph's Peter Green claimed that the prose style "veers from pre-Raphaelite to Boy's Own Paper", albeit conceding that the novel had "an undeniable fascination".  And in Punch, where under Anthony Powell's literary editorship it received the briefest of reviews, Peter Dickinson frankly stated: "I can think of nothing in the book to account for the fact that I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, despite some of the most infuriating writing."

The most heavyweight critique came from a major literary figure, the Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir.  "To read it is to be thrown in astonishment," he gladly conceded in the Observer, but insisted that in terms of "human discrimination and depth" there was a fatal shortfall: "Mr Tolkien describes a tremendous conflict between good and evil, on which hangs the future of life upon earth.  But his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immutably evil; and he has no room in his world for a Satan both evil and tragic."

Commercially, the book flourished, being reprinted after six weeks, ahead of the publication in mid-November of The Two Towers, second in the sequence.  It was not yet a cult, though, nor--away from the public prints--was it everyone's cup of tea.  "Don's whimsy" was the private verdict of Angus Wilson, to whom in his own mind the future belonged.  [Op cit, p. 404f.]

It is interesting to look back after over half a century of the trilogy being in print and see the enormous impact it has had on millions of millions of readers (and, latterly, movie goers).
 What is also singular is to recall the long struggle Tolkien went through to find a publisher willing to undertake the risk of publishing a work that had no specific recognisable genre, and to that extent was sui generis.  The commercial risks the publisher was undertaking were deemed considerable.  But Tolkien was proved right: every age needed its peculiar, special myths that enabled it to see itself in the light of eternity.  The rising tide of atheism and secularism was gnawing out a chasm in the human heart and Western culture bigger than what lay beneath Isengard.  The hunger for Middle Earth and all that has subsequently swirled around it was clearly not anticipated by the critics, generally positive though their remarks had been.

In Tolkien Christians had found a literary voice that was truly revolutionary in its own way.  In an age of ignorance in which so many houses no longer have books on shelves, or available to be communally read, we were gratified to meet a year ten student recently whose face glowed as she described her excitement and pleasure at reading The Lord of the Rings.  She was interested to know how many times we had read the trilogy.  She had already consumed it twice, and was anticipating her  third reading.