Eglerio! Praise them! I want to type fast and congratulate American Youth on the (J.R.R.) Tolkien Cult before it is over. Perhaps it ends today and thousands of people, shutting Volume I or II or III of The Lord of the Rings, are now never to know if Gollum came back or Frodo came to. Still, I would hope that no one, even on the West Coast where the time lags, missed the Door Scene in which two necromancers exert two separate spells, one to open a door and the other to shut it. The molecules of the door, flustered by these opposing influences, lose their grip on each other and go off every which way. The door achieves absolute Doorlessness.
The addiction of young people to scenes like that is unrivaled in its purity. In late and jaded adolescence, they have demanded their right to live innocuously…. [All] sorts of Tolkien readers grow innocent by association. Most of them, sick of being analyzed, are sick of analysis in fiction too. They could of course find book Be-Ins like Alice in Wonderland or Finnegans Wake in which there is no comprehensible motivation. But they prefer Tolkien in whom motivation is so comprehensible as to be less than none; at ones so limpid and yet so emphatic as to establish the only ambiguity that still pleases. Even the East Coast enthusiasts aren't quite sure whether their enthusiasm is epic or parodic, inspired by Tolkien real or Tolkien camp. The swollen smallness of the Rings, the swarming details of its self-evident circumstances, its colossal freedom from embarrassment create in the end a breathtaking puerility. It is a book like climbing to the top of Mount Everest to keep an appointment with one's sixth-grade teacher.
This is a free excerpt of 291 words. There are 1,355 words (approx.
5 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) 1892–1973: Critical Essay by Mary Ellmann Access Pass.
