The Lord of the Rings is one of the most surprising products of British literature since 1945, and one of the most serious. Edmund Wilson's attack on the book [see CLC, Vol. 1], though it hearteningly insisted on the obvious—for instance, that Tolkien's prose is as undistinguished as his verse (someone ought to point out, for example, how much mileage he gets out of the one word "great")—quite fails to account for the seriousness of the undertaking, for the pressure that drove the author through these thousand or more pages, as it has driven many readers (this reader among them) to follow through the same pages eagerly. The avidity with which The Lord of the Rings is read, the appeal of it and the loyalty it evokes among admirers—these are self-evident facts which can't be explained convincingly by talk of frivolity and escapism. The fantasy which the narrative promotes and exploits and nourishes has to be something which answers to a specific need. And as to this, Edmund Wilson has nothing to say.
At first sight there seems an obvious solution: the book answers to a hunger for the heroic. And to some degree this must be true; The Lord of the Rings is a grown-up's Superman. But the driving force of the book is unheroic, even anti-heroic. The logic of the plot (which is very logical and tidy, not at all like medieval romance) is quite unequivocal; heroes are not to be trusted, only anti-heroes…. Indeed the point of leverage for the whole of Tolkien's creation is an assumption the sourness of which is surprisingly little noticed, still less resented—the assumption that the hobbits, who are less than human, are the only beings in Tolkien's world that a human reader can, as we say, "identify with." We are forced to go along with this assumption because of the language that is put in the mouths of the hobbits, as contrasted with the more elevated and literary language that is spoken by everyone else. Though the language that the hobbits speak is not convincingly the language which the common Englishman does use …, it is plainly meant to be so, and we register it as at least nearer to live spoken English than the archaic and rhetorical language given to all others.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) 1892–1973: Critical Essay by Donald Davie Access Pass.
